The era of reading is changing.
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Electronic books, or ebooks, are more portable than their paper siblings, and capable of being carried in hundreds on a single electronic device. Thousands more are just a click away. It can be debated that ebooks are more robust than paper books: an ebook reader can be stolen or dropped in the bath, but the books in it are stored safely in the Cloud, waiting to be downloaded onto a new device, just like our thousand of contacts in mobile phone. Who else remembers the good old days of writing down phone numbers in a little book, to be referenced daily, flipping through the pages? Just us?
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The smell of a new book cannot be replaced, as is the joy of flipping through pages of words and placing a collected bookmark from one of your travel adventures. Books transport us to another place, where your imagination can run wild, where in such place wizards and unicorns exist!
We have a tendency to put emphasis on things that we love, hence we came up with an idea to collect preloved books to be sold at Living Hope’s Charity carnival at The School, Jaya One in July recently. The response was overwhelming! We have customers coming in just dropping of loads of books in cartons, some are even new! It was a triple win actually: customers get to declutter their home, we get to raise funds and awareness for charity and the poor children in Malaysia (aged 6-12) get to have simple food, crucial to keep them focused in schools. These are the children that are not supported by any Welfare Homes, in fact some of their school principals are not even aware of their critical situation.
At the end of the carnival we had 12 cartons of books left each weighing 15kg and above. It was not easy to store at all! Thankfully, the Management of Jaya One was gracious enough to let us “park” the books in their storeroom until we found more charity homes that will benefit from it. Through a talented crafter-lawyer friend whom we have connected through Instagram (DIYKL co-founder), we managed to get a list of Refugee organisations and Tamil Forum Malaysia that would love the English reading books for their community/students/children.
So in the end all the books were distributed to these communities and we hope we have done our bit to instill the reading habit in these young individuals, who will grow up to be avid readers.
We strongly believe with a strong command of any universal language, it can be a leap forward towards options in life.
Have you read a book lately?