Image: Trevor Nichols
A newly launched Kelowna startup hopes to harness the power of the web to transform the way people in the community buy and sell used books.
Local Reads is the brainchild of book-lover Camille Jensen, who says she started the online service to fix what she saw as “problems” with the book market.
Often, she explains, people buy a book, use it once, and never think about it again. After the first readthrough, those books gather dust on a shelf, or worse, end up in a landfill (because of the glue in them, books generally can’t be recycled).
More industrious readers might schlep their old books to a used book store to offload them, but Jensen argues that can be a time-consuming process.
On the flip side, she says, because most used book stores have little or no online presence, finding a book you want can also be annoying.
Of course, used books abound on the internet, but ordering from a big online retailer can come with its own set of issues for local-minded consumers.
Jensen explains that shipping books in Canada is quite expensive, so almost any used book you buy here will come from quite far away.
“I really started to realize how difficult it is to buy used books in your local community,” Jensen explains.
She believed she could fix that problem, so she brought on co-founder Dan Arbeau to build a platform that would allow local people to quickly and easily sell their used books to other readers in their community.
“In some ways our whole market never went online, so we thought, OK, there’s an opportunity here for a local response using big technology,” Jensen says.
Essentially, Local Reads is a classifieds section for used books. Users list the books they have for sale on the site (descriptions and pictures are automatically generated for users by the site), and other users can browse the selection.
All the payments are handled online, and after buying a book users can pick it up from the nearby seller.
“There’s a lot of books out there, and this is a way to not only help get some value out of them, but also have a little bit of a green aspect as well,” Arbeau says.
“If it was easier to buy used, I think people would,” Jensen added.
With that philosophy in mind, Jensen and Arbeau officially launched Local Reads in September, and now say they have well over 500 books listed on the site.
They’ve also made an agreement with High Browse 2nd Hand Books, which is the first used book store in Kelowna to use the Local reads, listing several of its titles online.
Arbeau points out that Local Reads has the potential not only to make it easier for individuals to sell books to each other, but help historically technophobic used book stores create a better online presence.
“Books, and people who love books, are a community of their own, and we’re kind of excited about that element with Local Reads, and where that could go,” Jensen says.
For more information, check out Local Reads online.
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