I always want to read books, almost all types: stories, novels, fictions, non-fictions, inspirational, biographies, etc., but no textbooks. I want to read all good books in Oriya, English and translated books of all other languages. I found few in the old trunks of my father containing his old stuffs, bought few, and few gifted by friends. But I able to complete only very few of them – one or two of them. I read few chapters from others. I guess there are one or two books, which I have not yet started reading. As I remember, the last book I have completed is Lajja by Taslima Nasreen (translated to Oriya by Nandini Satpathy.
Most of the time, I find myself staying glued to a computer. Whenever I get a leisure time at home, I watch TV. So, I can have an excuse, that I am not getting time to read books. There was a time, when we were having 2 hours of scheduled power cut everyday. I was using this time to read something, but once I setup UPS for my home-office, it became very easy to stay glued to the computer during that time. I have downloaded few eBooks, but when I am trying to read those, I hardly able to concentrate. Even I have installed Amazon Kindle applications on my chrome browser, my android phone. I have downloaded many classics (because they are free), but don’t read these.
Whether I read books or not, no one is going to bother. There are many people who love to read books and they read books by anyhow. Some of them buy the books they want to read, some read at libraries, some read books by borrowing etc. But I think many people don’t read as much they want, because they need to spend their money on other stuff than the books. Also, those people who buy and read must be not reading those books again and again after they finish. So the books may keep collecting the dust lying on the bookshelf. It’s not possible for everyone to go to the library and read books. Even there are not wide coverage of libraries having all the books at places allover the world. Even there are very few lending libraries. So here comes a solution – book rental services. The problem with these services are: some of them does not cover all places in India (or World), according to me they are costly and there may not be few title people looking for. What could be a better solution?
A long time ago, I was thinking about an idea. (Perhaps, in the toilet. That’s the best place to think about any idea.) The idea is to create a web platform, so that book lovers can share their books with other members after they complete it. You have to spend money on buying few books (if you don’t have any, at least you need one book to contribute) and on couriers to send/share the books, after you complete them. With this nominal contribution, you can read many books as per your interest. It will work much better than the book suggestion services. If you like any book and want to keep a copy for yourself as a collection, then you can keep the same book or you can buy that book.
The idea came to my mind since more than a year ago. But all ideas are stupid, unless they are not properly executed. The power of the ideas lies in the execution. Now I found another service, which is quite similar to my idea. It’s BookCrossing. Interestingly their idea is quite old – it launched on April 17, 2001 (when I was in my +2 first year and hating text books, but loving to read a text book, Galpa Swalpa (part 1) by Fakir Mohan Senapati). (Interestingly, I just searched for Galpa Swalpa and found the eBooks of this. Great, I can read the part 2 now.) Anyways, the concept of BookCrossing is great and you should check this out.
BookCrossing is there, still should I work on my idea? I think yes, I should. BookCrossing is really interesting. But my idea is little different. I think the platform, I will build have more controls on it. Whatever it be, I should try and let’s see whether it’s going to be a successful project or not. I need help of avid book lovers to bring this idea to execution. So, if you are a book lover and think there is a possibility in my idea and want to contribute to the project, then please fill in the following form. Your suggestions, ideas and contributions will help this project to be successful.
What do you think about this idea? Please share your views with me. This will help me a lot.
Leave a Reply