Books For London

Books for London (September 2012)

If you're reading this, it's probably a foregone conclusion that you're pretty keen on reading. Do you like to swap and share books as well? Well, at Books for London, we've started a campaign to bring together both of those great things – swapping books on London's tube and train network!

We're very excited that CollectConnect is going to use our growing network of book swaps in London to distribute their FreedBook – it's exactly the kind of thing that we're trying to encourage at Books for London!

Why book swapping in London?

By some estimates, up to 13 million books are sent to the UK’s landfills every year. Given current resource and landfill constraints, this just isn’t sustainable. In order to keep books in circulation, we want to combine people power with something that most people do in London every day – use the train and tube. We've already helped local volunteers and voluntary groups around London with six book swap shelves in their local stations so that people can grab new book to read for free (beats the Metro, we tell you!). People can also give their old books a new lease on life by dropping them off at their local stations. Who knows where they end up? We've had reports of our book swap books heading out to Heathrow airport and beyond...We've given away thousands of books already, but there are so many more out there, and lots more eager readers!

We're making it our mission to try and get as many book swap shelves in London's train and tube stations, but to do this we need people's help.

We need you!
We want to establish train and tube stations as the heart of a capital wide scheme for book swapping, with permanent shelves in as many stations as possible. We need local volunteers to run these station swaps!

Do you think that the station near your home or work could do with a book swap shelf? We can help local community groups or several dedicated individuals to set up a shelf in their station, and then we'd like you to help keep the new swap tidy and have a small store of books that you can get from Streetbank, Freecycle or Books for London and can use to top it up when needed.
If you’re interested in running a book swaps as a volunteer, or just want to know more:
·         Check out our website: www.booksforlondon.org.uk
·         Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/BooksforLondon
·         Follow us on Twitter: @booksforlondon
·         Drop us a line at: londonbookswap@gmail.com.


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