meish dot org: life, unfolding

I was having a conversation the other day with some friends about what you do with books once you’ve finished reading them.

This is a pertinent and passionate subject for me, because I’ve got a lot of books – a LOT – and while I plan on keeping most of them, there’s a whole subset which is relatively disposable – or rather, which don’t need keeping for a long time, really.

My books fall into three main categories:

1. Books which I’ve read and enjoyed, but which I might re-read again, or otherwise want to keep (to lend to others, or because they were hard to get hold of or are now out of print)
2. Books which I haven’t read (or haven’t finished) but fully intend to at some point
3. Books which I’ve read (or not) and may well have enjoyed (or not), but don’t want any more

So I have to find methods of getting rid of unwanted books. Some reasonable solutions:

1. Take them to charity shops
2. Take them to Notting Hill Book Exchange and try to get some money for them (frustrating because they pay a pittance, a fraction of the value) and besides, the counter staff are horribly arrogant (and WAY cooler than you, in case you were in any doubt)
3. Sell them on Amazon marketplace (possible, but a total pain in the arse when it comes to dealing with post office queues)
4. Auction them on eBay (see above, plus chances are your listing will lapse before anyone buys)
5. Take them to one of multitude of charity shops
6. Give them to friends
7. Leave them scattered around town in a Bookcrossing style

There is another option, and that is to stick them in a Book Exchange.

I set up a book exchange at work last year – it was something I remembered being very handy when I worked in a youth hostel, and although people aren’t backpacking around Scotland, it’s a similar sort of environment – people of a roughly similar (broad) age and education, most with commutes, most sick of metro and its ilk.

I stuck a bookshelf in the shared kitchen with a sign on it, with a seed stock of my own old stuff, and people leave books and take other ones. They’re mostly relatively low-impact paperback commute-type reads, as well as travelogues and some classics, but it seems to work out well. There’s a few new books added every week. Some get borrowed and returned for someone else to take out, others disappear completely.

The only rule we started out with was that books always get added to the right (whether new stock or being returned). That means all the books on the left aren’t getting any attention, so every couple of months we can take a big armful from the left end down to one of the charity shops in Hammersmith, and because of the self-sorting that goes on, the books that don’t get attention tend to be the ones which the charity shops aren’t already saturated with (which stay in circulation in the exchange).

A few months ago, I left a pad of post-its and a pencil taped to the shelf, and was pleased and encouraged to see a few people starting to add mini anonymous reviews to books – “good for beach”, “tedious, don’t bother” etc. Cool!

So anyway, that got me thinking about book exchanges and unwanted books, and I had this idea. It might be really interesting for a charity like Oxfam (who I did some consulting work with last year – hello!) to set up a stall/shop for a limited period in few big stations – Paddington, Waterloo, Victoria, Manchester Piccadilly, Brighton, Watford, and so on – operating a sort of book exchange of commuter-friendly paperbacks only.

They’d have to offer to take old, read books off commuters. Let them browse for a new one and take it away for an (optional) donation of £1 or £2 – it would have to be low, but I think people would bear a cost like that. My guess is, you’d end up with multiple copies of The Book Everyone’s Reading On The Train This Month (see above), which others would be happy to pick up for a small amount, and would probably return anyway. It would also be a good way of cycling through some of the back stock in the shops, too, and a way to get people involved who wouldn’t otherwise go into charity shops.

It works because people don’t really value commuter-type books, but they need to have one anyway, or be at the mercy of one of those free papers made by people who hate London. They might buy their own book, but chances are they’ll be happy to read pretty much anything. Even better if they don’t pay much more than a paper for it.

It works because station time is dead time – people aren’t doing anything else except waiting, which means they’ve got time to kill, browsing, and the pain point isn’t reached by shelling out a couple of quid.

It works because it’s in a location which people are passing through regularly, which would remind them to donate – it’s not out of their way, and they’ve probably got the duff old book in their briefcase anyway, so why not?

It also works because charity shops tend to have several copies of the book du jour, and not enough footfall to get rid of them. It might not be a huge revenue-generator, but I’ll bet it would see good usage, especially if it was done as part of a promotion – say, for a month or so.

Anyway, just thinking….