Bring books and magazines...
For those of you visiting Armenia this year, with some extra space in your luggage, or thinking of what would make good gifts for people in Armenia - bring something that will help them learn English! Grab your old books, go to the Salvation Army or other thrift stores and buy good books for a dollar or less, save good magazines for people just learning (National Geographic, Readers Digest, etc), get books for younger readers (Hardy Boys, Disney, whatever), and give them out in Armenia. Give them to children, the young, give them to taxi drivers or waiters trying out a few words of English on you, give it to a school for their library, hell, just leave it out on a street somewhere. There really is precious little access to this type of material in Armenia and I think having more of these materials around will help both satisfy a need that is there, and create more interest and demand. There is no good place to go for cheap English books and magazines.
If you feel up for it, go to bookcrossing.com and print out some tags to attach to the books which tell people who pick them up to read them, then leave them out again somewhere for another person to read. The theory is that each person who picks it up will log in an share where they found it, what they thought of it, and where they released it. If that's too much trouble, write "FREE BOOK - PASS ALONG" or something like that all over the outside to encourage people both to take it (if you're just leaving it in say, Ijevan town square), and to give it to someone when they're done. If you're leaving it somewhere where expats hang out, you might include a note asking people to not take the book out of Armenia...
Anyway, just a thought. I'm shipping a few hundred books, most of them slated for "release" into the wild...
If you feel up for it, go to bookcrossing.com and print out some tags to attach to the books which tell people who pick them up to read them, then leave them out again somewhere for another person to read. The theory is that each person who picks it up will log in an share where they found it, what they thought of it, and where they released it. If that's too much trouble, write "FREE BOOK - PASS ALONG" or something like that all over the outside to encourage people both to take it (if you're just leaving it in say, Ijevan town square), and to give it to someone when they're done. If you're leaving it somewhere where expats hang out, you might include a note asking people to not take the book out of Armenia...
Anyway, just a thought. I'm shipping a few hundred books, most of them slated for "release" into the wild...
posted by Raffi K. at 10:07 PM
7 Comments:
Great idea! Please do this everyone! If everyone brings even one book...Armenia will be flooded with English books - the international language...
i'll start looking for books on the streets and squares, but i hope someone will eventually open a real big and nice bookstore in yerevan...
Hayk - if you contact me (my email address is on this page if you look closely), I will let you choose a couple of books when they arrive :-)
A great idea indeed! Though I am not so sure that the labels will work. In Armenia people have very strong possessive attitude towards "written word", be it in the form of ancient manuscripts, printed books or periodical press. (Some would speculate that this was cultivated during centuries of foreign domination, when Armenian written word was a path to the nation's salvation). I remember once how at an informational fair in an international organization's office in Yerevan people stacked up their shopping style sacks with brochures that they would probably never even use.
But ideas need to be put to practice, in spite of what pragmatics may say ;)
Loved the post!
v - I'm hoping that writing "FREE BOOK" and pass along all over the book will encourage people not to keep it on their shelves too long... since they might be embarrassed to have such a thing on their books :-)
I thought about the factor of the book being "spoiled" by the label, thus not worth keeping, but there are (self made) book jackets (dust covers) for a reason. ;) Still don't think the idea will fly with the books, but the magazines may start changing hands. A parallel idea may be to convince popular cafe owners to allow stands with such magazines, and possibly even small format books, the public nature of such places will definitely discourage the inherent acquisitiveness. Though the reading materials may slow the customer turnover, hence make the owners uncooperative, but may actually add to the customer base as well (not that the cafes in Yerevan are short of customers).
Bookstore... my very first (and still favorite) idea of a business I'd like to start in Armenia. Only, I'd make it like how they rent DVD's. Leave 400 drams, and depending on how long you keep it, you'll pay maybe 400 more upon return. Something like that.
Geez... with just my own library, there would be over 300 "best sellers" and oprah's bookclub books!
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