Al Ain: Two expatriate women have pooled their efforts to promote the reading habit, offering hundreds of books to readers through an online booking reading club.
The free-of-charge book lending service has attracted dozens of people in the city with some of them now also willing to share their personal libraries for the community service.
Stephanie Shimko, an American teacher, and Humairah Irfan, a Pakistani IT professional, are even spending money from their own pockets on taxi fares to reach a book dispensing point. "This is our way of returning something we can to the society," said Shimko and Humairah.
Many people think that reading is a dying habit as modern communications and gamming tools have been consuming most of peoples' time and attraction. "A book is still the best friend of a person, but maintaining this relationship has become a costly affair," said Shimko.
She said book prices are very high and many people cannot afford them. Expatriates are also always on the move in the UAE and avoid buying and pilling up book at their homes. "They have interest in book reading but the resources are limited here," she added.
It is strange that the oasis city, which has a population of more than 400,000 people, has no public library. The civic administration, though spending much of its resources on developing modern infrastructure, has not yet think of setting up a public library.
"Since moving to Al Ain in 2007, I found that I was spending more per month on books and magazines than I was on taxis," she Shimko. This led her to start Al Ain Book Sharing Club. "I was tired of looking at my stack of previously-read books gathering dust," she said.
The situation in Al Ain, she said, was similar when she used to live in Daejeon, South Korea. "It was a modern city, but you had to go to Seoul to find any books in English." She started a similar initiative in Daejeon that was much appreciated by the community.
Search for shelves
"I found it to be very fulfilling and it definitely made me feel like I was part of a community. In a society where the foreign community feels like a permanent outsider, this is something very important," said Shimko.
Shimko has been looking for a place to shelve her books for lending and borrowing as she had got some pubs and a community centre in Daejeon. "I have talked to several people and establishments but have not yet succeeded," she said.
"I would sometimes hear people talk when I went out socially about how 'someone should do something' about the books situation. I never heard anyone say 'I will do something about it'. That's when the Socius creed of 'take what you need, give what you can' rang in my ears and I decided to give what I could: my books," she said.
She has, however, made a website based library posting all of her books. People interested in any book can send a message to her and she makes the requested book available to them.
Shimko also invited others to contribute their books to the library. "I was delighted when Humairah contacted me and contributed her library. In addition, two weeks ago I was approached with a donation of 120 books to be posted and sold for charity. We now have an inventory of about 230 books, including those which are loaned from individuals and those to be sold for charity," she added.
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