The cover is creased and the edges slightly curling, but otherwise The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is in surprisingly good condition for a book that has traveled more than 1,609km and been through seven pairs of hands.
“I don’t bother about creases on the cover or the spine,” says Wendy Evans, 48, the seventh and current owner of Kim Edwards’ novel, which has traveled from the length and breadth of the UK before landing on her doorstep in Sheffield in the north of England.
“I do object to food residue, but this one’s in pretty good [condition],” she said.
Evans has exchanged 135 books through ReadItSwapIt.co.uk since last August.
“It’s addictive,” she said. “I can try out authors I wouldn’t normally read and I don’t feel guilty if I give up halfway. I’m not paying for the book, and I’m not throwing it away after I’ve read it or leaving it to gather dust on a shelf.”
For eco-aware readers, the environmental benefits of swapping rather than buying are clear.
In 2003, Greenpeace launched its book campaign, producing evidence that the UK publishing industry was inadvertently fuelling the destruction of ancient forests in Finland and Canada. It found that one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year. (In the same year, Greenpeace persuaded Raincoat Books to produce the Canadian edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on recycled paper, saving an estimated 39,000 trees.)
But despite the campaign, only 40 percent of the UK book industry has introduced paper with a high level of recycled content, largely choosing to use paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council instead.
Beyond using the country’s dwindling network of libraries, until recently the opportunities for exchanging paperbacks have been limited to friends, community schemes and book groups. But in the past two years, a spate of online book-swapping sites has emerged. Inspired by the goodwill schemes operated by hostels around the world, whereby travelers can leave behind books they have read and pick up something new, these sites generate little profit for their founders. The books are swapped directly between users, who pay the postage; the sites simply facilitate the meeting and identifying of potential exchanges.
On BookMooch.com, a site run from California, users enter the titles they want to give away and earn credit that enables them to borrow each time they swap a book.
“I was inspired by a community center I saw on holiday,” founder John Buckman said. “It had a bookshelf outside with a sign saying, ‘Leave a book, take a book’. I liked the idea of them circulating around the world.”
What sets BookMooch apart from sites such as WhatsOnMyBookshelf, PaperBackSwap and Bookins, is its international scale. It has 68,930 users in 91 countries. Since its launch in 2006, nearly 700,000 books have been swapped; The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, the most exchanged — or “mooched” — book, has been swapped 755 times.
Edwards’ tale is something of an online sleeper hit, beating bestsellers such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach to the top spot on both BookMooch and ReadItSwapIt.
Earlier this year, Philip Felstead, 57, from Dorset, southwest England, was the fifth person to read the well-thumbed copy that now sits on Evans’s bedside table.
“It’s not a book I would have bought,” said Felstead, whose job involves publishing of a different kind: monographs by retired diplomats. “But I read two or three books a week in the evenings, and I was looking for something fun.”
Felstead, who has been using the site for 18 months, passed the book on to Teresa in Leicester, who in return sent him Engleby by Sebastian Faulks.
“Extremely interesting,” is his verdict. “I’ve been introduced to many authors I’d never have tried.”
Some readers include a note — just a friendly hello, or a recommendation — creating a sense of community and continuity. Some even meet up to swap books and discuss them in person, said Andrew Bathgate, founder of ReadItSwapIt.co.uk.
“Our forum is a great social tool. People who like books tend to like each other,” he said.
Evans also welcomes the social aspect of book-swapping. An administrator at the church army training college in Sheffield, she used to rely on church book sales or the local library, “but they didn’t always have the most recent books. Getting hold of new novels and talking to people about them makes a real difference.”
Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors.
“In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called ‘file sharing,’ and technically illegal,” the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently.
“Of course I want people to read my books, but I also want people to buy my books,” she wrote.
But Buckman and Bathgate argue that the sites function alongside libraries and bookshops to provide access to a wider range of titles, encouraging readers to encounter new authors and keeping older titles in print.
“People who use the site become fans of books and end up buying more,” Buckman said. “One in 20 of the books exchanged is also purchased.”
Despite working in publishing himself, Felstead is philosophical about the impact on the industry.
“I suppose one doesn’t worry so much about the bookshops these days, because they’re all large chains that make most of their money selling coffee. And authors should be pleased that their work is being disseminated around the world,” he said.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, meanwhile, is about to go to its next home.
At first, Evans says, she felt uncomfortable about sending her books to strangers.
“I was brought up to take care of my books,” she said. “But at least I know it’s going to a good home, to someone who wants it, not to sit on a shelf or be thrown away.”
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs