Here’s a service for avid readers who might be traveling in the United States for a while and who don’t want to lug a bunch of hardcover books on multiple plane trips and back home again: BookSwim, a book-rental-by-mail program.

Modeled after Netflix DVDs you rent by mail, with your BookSwim membership, you browse an online catalog and create a “pool” of books you want to receive (get it – pool, swim). Rank your books according to the ones you want to receive first. The number of books you’ll receive at once depends on the plan you have (ranging from 3 books at time for $23.95/month to 11 for $59.95/month).

Return books at your leisure, with no late fees and no due dates. And you’re never without books. For example, with the 3-books-at-a-time plan I’m sampling, I can return two books while I’m reading the third, so a couple more will be on their way in the interim.

Here’s how it might be helpful for long-term travelers: it’s easy to change the shipping address for your next batch of books. If you know you’re spending a week at Aunt Mary’s lake cabin in August, have books sent there; if you read a couple and are ready for new books for your next vacation stop at a friend’s house in the mountains, change the shipping address to theirs. I’m thinking that RV road-trippers who might be taking an entire summer to explore the United States could use BookSwim to read and return books for several months (if they do have a general agenda and far-flung friends and relatives throughout the country; currently books are only shipped to U.S. addresses).

Sure, e-readers might be most ideal for travelers — given that devices like the Kindle or the Nook mean you only have to carry around one light item, as opposed to multiple books. But, for now, I’m still old-fashioned. I like flipping paper pages.

What I like most about my temporary BookSwim membership: no long wait for the hottest bestsellers. Currently, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help has a whopping 78 “hold requests” on 8 different copies of the book that my local library owns. If it weren’t for BookSwim, I’d still be waiting to read the (excellent, excellent) book. But instead, I put it on the top of my “pool” a couple weeks ago, and had it (and two other books) in my mailbox six days later (via a UPS/USPS hybrid UPS Mail Innovations I’ve never heard of).

I shouldn’t complain about the short wait to receive books, but once I signed on for my membership and made my list of what I wanted to read, I wanted them now. Alas, I’m used to speedy Netflix mailing — seems to me I put a movie in the mail Monday, and I’ve got a new one on Wednesday — but that’s because Netflix has regional supply centers throughout the U.S. BookSwim rentals are all sent from the Pennsylvania warehouse. (Hmmm. Given my impatience, I wonder if I really would be happiest with an e-reader, where I can download books within minutes!)

But back to BookSwim… besides New York Times fiction bestsellers, there are children’s books (listed by age group), and all sorts of non-fiction categories, from cookbooks to self-help, business to sports. Basically, much of what you’d find in a library — minus audiobooks, reference books and foreign-language titles — is available through BookSwim.

For more details on how the service works — including what happens if you damage a book — read the BookSwim FAQ.