Books for free in public places. Would u read free books or ignore them?
By Zempnsazza
@Zempnsazza (59)
Australia
January 20, 2007 10:51pm CST
A trend that has recently taken off around the area I live in is called Bookcrossing, a practise where people who have published books (either on their own, or through a vanity-publisher or even through a consumer publisher) leave them at specially mapped out spots in public. Such places in our city include underneath a big noticeboard in the arts district and a woodebox next to the newsstand in the main bus station. A couple of coffee shops and record shops have tables as does the writers centre.
Generally, people leave books in places where you might usually expect to find assorted free press, streetpapers, zines and comics, flyers about local theatre or live music events, or maybe tourist or government information.
The sort of books people leave is varied, from the self-published books mentioned above, sometimes printed at home using a computer or sometimes professionally published with four-colour hardcover and ISBN, to graphic novels hand-produced in a limited series by local artists. Many have began using bookcrossing points as places to leave used books which they have enjoyed and want to pass on to a discerning reader who may enjoy it as mush as they did. So at a bookcrossing point, you may be able to pick up a wide variety of free literature, from original graphic novels from the hand of an aspiring Stephen King or Mark Ryden, to a beaten up copy of Vanity Fair, to a collection of poetry from the local Returned Serviceman's League.
My question is, would you pick up and read a book at a free point like this by a novelist you had never heard of, even if it had a blank cover and had obviously been printed off a consumer printer? Would you give a graphic novel the time of day if it didn't have a glossy cover? Many free books in the past have been religious texts so people tend to thing they are being sold something in a free book, which is no longer really the case.
I guess it boils down to this. If you were given a novel (by an unknown writer) from Barnes and Noble and at the same time picked up a free, similiarly sized and presented novel from a bookcrossing point, which one would you read first?
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