They say print is a dying industry—but not if the creators of the Bookselves app have anything to do with it.
When bookstores in Berkeley began shutting down a few years ago, principal co-founders Tanuja Mishra and Yash Mahendra—both of whom have backgrounds in technology and design—lamented about the shortage of meeting places to share their love of literature and discover new authors.
“We were feeling really bad because bookstores are a beautiful place to be,” Mishra says. “To be around others who love books—even though I also love technology—this loss was something I really felt.”
And she wasn’t alone. She and Mahendra began brainstorming ways to use their knowledge of technology to bring back their beloved books.
“There is no way you can stop the progress of technology,” Mishra says, “but you can use it in a way to preserve. We should use technology to connect people, but the face-to-face interaction, sharing books, organizing book clubs—those things we need to get back.”
Mishra and Mahendra set about developing an app that would bridge the gap between technology and real-life interactions. Along the way, three more people joined their team, two of which are former interns. Together, the WeWork Berkeley members created Bookselves, released in November 2015, to bring back the social aspect of in-person meetings and discussions among book lovers.
“We are a group of people who love to read, especially from a physical book (over an ebook),” Mishra says. “We love to hold a book in our hands, feel its weight, its texture, its smell. We felt that we should create a mobile app that would encourage reading from real books.”
Here’s how it works: Download the app and share the names of whichever physical books you are willing to part with. Other users in your area do the same. Search for books you’d like to read by name or genre, then request a swap from your neighbor.
This is where it gets really cool: Bookselves has an in-app scheduler that coordinates your meetup based on user inputs and mutual availability. It’s powered by Google Maps, so users can suggest and designate specific public locations where they meet in person to make the trade. Ideally, these meetings will lead to lively discussions with other book lovers in your community.
Mishra says another reason the app makes sense is because as Americans embrace a simpler and sometimes nomadic lifestyle, they are moving more.
“People don’t want to carry around a lot of books,” she says. “We realized technology does help in expanding the scope of books and learning, but the experience of smelling paper, the intimacy of focusing on one thing, was lost. Bookselves is great because you don’t have to have a huge inventory of books, as long as people in your community have the books you like to read.”
Photos: Pretty Instant