Amid the plethora of publishers and booksellers at the Delhi Book Fair at Pragati Maidan, 30-somethings Arti Jain and Manish Kumar are busy setting up an information kiosk for their new venture, www.friendsofbooks.com, an online library, launched just a week ago.

Negotiating www.friendsofbooks.com is simple. Once you have created an account, you can log in and browse the catalogue, adding your favourite titles to a virtual bookshelf. Within the next couple of days, two books from the list will be delivered at your doorstep. Once you have read them, you can log in and let them know and someone will come and collect the books, and give you two other titles from the bookshelf.

There are a variety of subscription plans — from a basic Rs 150 for two books a month to a yearly package of Rs 4,750 for 12 books per month. As of now, the library is functional only in the NCR.

“There’s a perception that people don’t read much, but then the prices of books have gone up and people don’t have time to go to libraries,” says Kumar, an IIT-Roorkee alumnus. He says they were inspired by the various online libraries they came across during their study in the US. “We are both avid readers but we could not afford the expensive books. Then we discovered online libraries and they did make life simpler,” agrees Jain, a documentary filmmaker and media professional, who is in charge of creating an exhaustive catalogue. “As of now, we have over 3,000 titles and we are getting more,” she says. “If a reader wants a particular book which is not in the catalogue we get it within a week.”