New services offer books rental by mail.

What Netflix has done with online movies rental sent through the mail, is now being applied to books.
Quoting the Wall Street Journal, new services from companies like Paperspine.com offer the option of renting classics or new releases for a monthly fee starting at $14.95 for up to three books at a time shipped free to and from you with no late fees.
Paperspine is said to have stocked more than 200, 000 fiction and non fiction titles searchable by genre or categories like "bestsellers" or "at the movies." etc.
With their membership, users have over 400,000 unused titles that they can buy at discounts of up to 50%. That option is also available to non members for a $19.95 a year fee.
Another rental service is Bookswim.com which focuses more on newly released best-selling paperbacks and hardcovers. With their monthly starter plan of $19.98, users, can rent three books at a time shipped free both ways and without late fees.
Bookswim.com is not for casual readers only; students can use it to rent books by the semester and have them delivered through third parties like Chegg.com.
For digital book versions, Booksfree.com rents paperbacks and audiobooks in CD or MP3 formats, with plans starting at $10.99 a month. Audible.com, owned by Amazon.com, has more than 60,000 audiobooks, podcasts and audible magazines, which can be downloaded to most digital players or streamed to a computer.