“Book Lovers Unite: Gift a book. I need six (may exceed) people, of any age or nationality, to participate in a book exchange. You only have to buy ONE book and send it to one person and you’ll receive 36 in return! Comment if you’re interested and I will inbox you the details. Also, please do it only if you will actually buy a book. This is not a prank.”
December 2020, Chinchpur: The popular book exchange scheme has been around for a few years now but it is still going strong, as witnessed by our editors who’ve since had to block a lot of people from their social media accounts. The “internet challenge” asks people to send one book, of their choice, to an address provided and promises 36 books in return.
Jan Jung, a German baker, participated in the virtual book exchange last summer hoping to collect a few new and varied titles for his personal library. This week he received the last of his 36 copies of Mein Kampf. “It’s all a big practical joke,” he said. “Most of them are in scripts that I cannot read either. I’m not even sure if it is safe to donate them to the public library.”
Jan has become the butt of most jokes in his local pub this year. Although he presents a cool exterior, happy to be providing a good laugh to his mates, his wife agrees that this might have been a mistake. Pranks like this have been coming to the fore a lot more often now.
Sangeetha, a sociologist from Shiroda, Goa, participated in the internet book exchange while she was studying in university. Over the year, she received books like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, S. K. Datta-Rey’s Smash and Grab, and several others which hold the distinction of being banned in India. Sangeetha has loved the collective idea all her book donors had and has made this the basis of her sociology thesis.
Bharat, a rural school teacher from Chinchpur, Maharashtra, spent his school’s entire (albeit small) budget on this book exchange, hoping that this scheme will enable him to build a library for his village. But in five months, he has received a meagre 5 books, that too in Tamil and Malayalam, which no one in his village understands.
Popular investor and myth-buster, Mr. Bhaskar had very harsh words regarding the book exchange scheme. “This just exemplifies that not everyone who reads a lot of books is not utterly dumb,” he said. “People willingly participating in pyramid schemes masquerading as social experiments or online challenges epitomize the stupidity of human existence.”