This Malaysian Startup Allows Book Lovers to Rent Books at SUPER Low Prices

Who would have ever thought we could easily rent books these days and at such low prices too?

Well, with Booku‘s services, it is now possible and completely accessible for any Malaysian to do so!

Booku is a small company built by 4 co-founders in 2016, Vulcan Post reported. It all started with Sivanathan Subramaniam’s brilliant idea while he was on a trip to Kota Kinabalu.

source: vulcan post

“Whenever I travel, I always carry a book with me and it was during one of my travels to KK that I got the idea to develop this business.”

“I wanted to buy another book from the bookstore at the airport but I thought how nice it would be if I could just share this book with someone at the airport who would be interested and I could get the book shipped to me later.”

Five months later, Booku was officially launched.

source: vulcan post

The company’s main aim is to allow book lovers to enjoy reading at a cheaper rate. On top of that, they also want book owners to generate income and share their stories with other people.

For readers to enjoy these books, you merely need to pay a daily rental rate set by the book owners themselves. You don’t have to put in a deposit either! How cool is that?

In fact, to ensure that the community stays responsible in this book exchange, Booku implemented a two-way rating system so that loaners and borrowers don’t abuse the books.

Booku will also take action against people who misuse the books or system.

Siva told the press that the company is definitely heading towards a bright future.

“The Booku team is very optimistic and confident that we will be able to make a positive social impact.”

“We aspire to bring back the good old book-reading habit and at the same time enable readers to save big bucks on their books.”

Aside from just the usual novels for light reading, Siva and his team are trying to add more academic books to their platform too!

“We have already built a list of 2,000 textbooks and reference books based on Malaysian public universities.”

Where was Booku when I was in uni?!

Besides creating a platform for book lovers, Booku also aims to work with writers in becoming a publishing house.

“We are also going to engage with local authors to come on board to promote their books to our users.”

“Maybe in the future authors can publish their books on our platform rather than relying on publishers.”

In fact, they want to broaden their selection by collaborating with local libraries too!

“Local libraries are cash-strapped and lack funding from the government. With this, they could probably generate some income to sustain their operations and buy new books.”

The team doesn’t plan on stopping just there. They want to expand their reach further into all genres of books as well as to penetrate into other countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

If you’re interested in listing your books up for rental, there are just two simple steps you need to follow:

1. Register on their website. You don’t even have to go through a tedious registration because you can  easily sign in with Facebook.
2. Then, just click the ‘Add New Book‘ button on the top and fill in details about your book!

source: booku

Easy, right? And if you’re planning to rent a book, you can expect it to be delivered to you in 2 to 3 working days from your selected pick-up date! For more info, you can visit their FAQ page.

Now, when was the last time you read a physical book? 

Also read: This 95-Year-Old from Penang Raised RM53,000 for Charity by Making Paper Flowers