Transported ... an underground passenger gets away from his surroundings with a good read. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty
It's been a long day and you're facing a nightmarish train journey home with nothing to read. But as the carriage doors open, your eyes alight on a well-thumbed classic lying abandoned on a seat. Saved from boredom, you bury yourself in great literature and, days later, you put the book back (roughly) where it lay, warm in the knowledge that it might just help someone else escape the monotony of their trudge to work.
That - multiplied by a thousand - is the vision laid out by the people behind the London Book Project. With "scrap the freesheets!" as their rallying cry, they want to turn the capital's underground network into "a free book exchange on a massive scale" by distributing thousands of secondhand novels in a bid to "bring real literature to London's commuters".
The books - which come mainly from charity shops or donations - will each carry a unique ID number so that readers can go online, rate their free read and track its progress around the Tube - as long as commuters join in the spirit of the venture and don't claim the free books as booty. "It'll be much better than reading those rubbishy free papers," Jo Barrett, one of the brains behind the scheme, said when interviewed on LBC Radio. But, addressing the possible weakness of the honesty system behind the scheme, she added: "We really hope people don't just take [the books] home."
It's too early to tell whether the scheme will be a success - there seems to be a risk that many of the free tomes will get swept up with other detritus or end up in lost property - but the verdict so far online seems to have been positive. Sam Ewen, writing on YouVert, rated the idea as "awesome", Michael Lieberman on Book Patrol called it a "brilliant endeavour" and the people at boingboing.net made the scheme one of their picks of the day.
But could the literary pioneers face competition in their ambition to single-handedly revolutionise the reading habits of Londoners? If they ever make it across the Atlantic in pursuit of their aim of "making the whole world a library", they'll have to see off American free-book big boys Book Crossing, while Britain's resurgent traditional libraries could also give a sucker punch to the project.
Maybe the London schemers should restrict themselves to the modest aims of improving the city's mental health through their promotion of relaxed reading, or even see their free giveaways as handy fans, reducing the need for expensive solutions to soaring heat problems on the Tube. That would really help the long journeys fly by.
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