I am not actually looking for German books, I have enough to read at the moment. BUT, I do have quite a few German books that I have read and enjoyed - well, most of them at least - and as I am not planning to keep all the books I wouldn’t mind giving them to other people to read.
I am not planning to give them away just like that though. I want to make this a ‘Tauschbörse’ or an open book pool, or - to be honest - I am not sure yet what it is going to be. The initial idea is/was that I publish a list of the books that I don’t want to keep and then invite others to do the same thing.
Whoever is interested in reading any of these books must also put at least one book into the pool. If somebody wants one or more of my books, I would probably send the books per mail (unless somebody wants to make a trip to Art Street in Taichung… ) and I would expect the other book offerers to do the same thing.
The whole point of it is that you don’t actually exchange books, but rather get a “new” book by making another one available, whether anyone wants it or not. We will end up with a pile of books nobody wants and can meet somewhere to have a book fire grill fest with sausages and Kartoffelsalat.
If somebody comes up with a better idea how everything can be organised, please let me/everybody know. I am sure there are better ways to do this. However, I am not going to post my list of books before there are at least two people who think it is a good idea and want to join. And finally, I am sometimes quite busy, so if I don’t reply for a few days, that is normal.
Hört sich echt gut an. I’d be interested in such an exchange, rice_t. Unfortunately most of my library is back in England, but I have a couple of German novels on the shelf here.
Do you know of anywhere to buy German novels in Taipei?
Die Frage ist, ob ich als Oesterreicher da dann ueberhaupt in Frage komme.
Die Idee klingt interessant, einziges Problem ist fuer mich, dass ich kein einziges meiner Buecher mit hier her uebersiedelt habe. Somit muesst ich erst mal ein deutsches Buch auftreiben, welches ich dann “in den Pool” schmeissen kann.
Wenn Engländer wie ich teilnehmen dürfen, kommt alles in Frage.
Haben Sie vielleicht Interesse im Bereich Französischen Schriftsteller? Ich bin jetzt nicht zu Hause, aber Morgen werden ich hier mitteilen, welche Bücher ich dort habe.
I got my hands on the book “Scheisse: The Real German You Were Never Taught in School” (by Gertrude Besserwisser). Of course it’s full of bad words, but it also has many sentences / slang of how you can express a multitude of emotions the way Germans do in everyday life. If you want to learn more German (and I don’t mean just the bad words), you could try to get this book (it’s also available on Amazon and has a high rating). I might just scan this book, because I’m borrowing it from someone…
I had hoped that some more people would be interested, or that the few that find it a good idea would have had some ideas how to make it work.
E.g. should I now add Andre Gide in French into the list?
Hannes, which audio books do you have? Do you want to make them available?
Taffy, did you find anything?
Should the books become “public property” so that I just make a note in the list who “owns” them at the moment? Or do the books disappear from the list as soon as somebody wants them? E.g. Miso is interested in some books (at least some one who is intested, thanks Miso), I can just send them to Miso and then remove them, or leave them in the list and add an owners column which would then say Miso and whenever Miso is finished with one of the books, s/he could make it available again.
I think that sounds very good. Question is, is this going to be a “German book pool” or a “book pool”. If the former, then I wouldn’t add Gide to list, since it’s in French.
I like the idea of “public property”, this would give me pressure to actually read the books, cause someone else might want them soon.
The reason behind making it a German book “pool” was that there are English book stores and even Taichung has a French book store, but I don’t know of any German book stores.
However, I don’t mind adding French or other language books to the “pool”, even English or Chinese. Originally, I was also a bit a afraid that too many people would be interested and actively using the “pool” and I would have to maintain the list on a regular basis. At the moment I don’t regard this as a problem anymore …
Maybe we can even say, anybody can “borrow” the books, anybody can contribute, too, but there is no rule that says that you can only borrow a book if you contribute one. Except, when you actually want to keep the book. Then you have to put in something else. Even if it is not a German book, or not even a book…
So Miso, if you pm me an address, then I can send you the books.
Germans have BOOKS? I thought they all just went around saying “hande hoch!” and “achtung!” and “banzai!” and stuff like that. At least that’s all they ever seemed to say in the books I had with Germans in them when I was a kid.
Also, how come they always went “Aiieeeee!” when they got shot, when the Brits and Yanks said a much more manly “Argh!”
I was busy with the family over the long weekend so had not much time for here, sorry. The idea with the public book pool sounds good, and makes stuff more available to others again after someone finished reading. Hard enought to get the stuff here.
I can’t give much in there yet but will try to get some books together too (besides someone would be interested in the chronicle of the village I was born, not sure if “1200 Jahre Hof bei Salzburg” would be a to read for someone else… :-).
I will PM you for some books I am interested. Not too much at once, don’t have that much time at the moment.
Last summer when we were trading some books in the Forumosa Entrepreneurship Group, I set up my list on librarything.com. You can register something like 200 books with a free account and they have a ton of data sources for automatically entering books. Not sure how good they are about German books though. They don’t have a lending feature, but I just use the comments column for tracking that. I also set up a Forumosa group on librarything.com at the time but nobody ever joined it. Anyways, it may be a good way to manage this sort of thing.
