Can You Be A Generous Reader ?
29 Jun 2008 by Annie Porthouse
Would you call yourself a bibliophile, a philobiblist… or perhaps just a common garden ‘bookworm’? Welcome to the club! And now you’re initiated, how about this for starters. Did you know that Cinderella’s slippers were originally made out of fur but the story was changed in the 1600s by a translator. Or that Dr. Seuss wrote “Green Eggs and Ham” after his editor dared him to write a book using fewer than 50 different words.
Maybe you’re too busy absorbing the latest Jodi Picoult, Martin Amis or Ben Elton to to acquire such knowledge. Either way, like me, you’re addicted … and you love it.
But my approach to purchasing my beloved books has altered in recent years. It occured to me that there are people who are suffering in this world because of the forests being stripped of trees that are vital to their way of life and vital to the way of life for our whole planet. And perhaps I was wasting my money on a book I might only read once… maybe I could throw the money in the direction of someone more needy?
So, these days I find myself:
- Borrowing from the library (you can borrow up to sixteen at a time from my local!)
- Buying second hand (Ebay, or Amazon marketplace).
- Buying new (if I really HAVE to have the book in question, and can’t get it second hand. I’ll try to order via my local independent bookshop if at all possible).
So take a leaf out of my borrowed/second-hand book and when you go on holiday, amaze your poolside companions with my Dr Seuss trivian. Go on, I dare you…!
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London, GB , 30 Jun 2008
We’ve used the site http://bookmooch.com quite a bit. It lets you build lists of books you’d like to read (you can import a wishlist from amazon, or add the books individually), and those you would be willing to give away.
Members’ lists are then matched up and you receive points for those books you give which can then be exchanged for other peoples’ books.
It worked particularly well for us when we were moving and so had a lot of books to give away, but seems to also work on a more casual scale.
30 Jun 2008
As I find bookshops induce in me a trance-like religious state in which my credit card whirls dervish-like into action, i try to modify my indiscipline and curb the shelf-space by regularly using green metropolis. It’s a great second-hand book shop where you post details of books you want to sell (all you do is input the isdn detail and they automatically add the cover/blurb etc) and each time you sell a title they contribute to planting a tree.I’ve sold about fifty to date. http://www.greenmetropolis.com
Luton, GB , 15 Jul 2008
One of our local village Methodist churches has a permament array of secondhand books on shelves in the back room – so it’s easy to buy, read and then give them back to help them make some more money! And for a small church they donate loads of money to charity! And they have an allotment – in fact now I think about are really a ‘Generous Community’. Maybe we should encourage the growth of more ‘Generous Communities’.