A librarian in Indonesia's Java island is lending books to children in exchange for trash to clean up the environment and get the kids to read more.

Each weekday Raden Roro Hendarti rides her three wheeler with books stacked up at the back for children in Muntang village to exchange for plastic cups, bags and other waste that she carries back.

She told Reuters the is helping promote reading in the kids as well make them aware of the environment. As soon as she shows up, little children, many accompanied by their mothers, surround her “Trash Library” and shout for the books. They are all carrying trash bags and Raden's three-wheeler quickly fills up with them as the books fly out. She's happy the kids are going to spend less time on online games as a result.

“Let us build a culture of literacy from young age to lessen the harm of the online world,” Raden said. “We should also take care of our waste in order to fight climate change and to save the earth from trash,” Raden said. She collects about 100 kg of waste each week, which is then sorted out by her colleagues and sent for recycling or sold. She has a stock of 6,000 books to lend and wants to take the mobile service to neighboring areas as well.

Kevin Alamsyah, an 11-year-old book lover, search for waste lying in the village. “When there is too much trash, our environment will become dirty and it's not healthy. That's why I look for trash to borrow a book,” he says.

Jiah Palupi, the head of the main public library in the area, said Raden's work strengthened their efforts in a novel way to battle online gaming addiction among the youth and promote reading.

The literacy rate for above-15-year-olds in Indonesia is around 96 percent, but a September report by the World Bank warned that the pandemic will leave more than 80% of 15-year-olds below the minimum reading proficiency (阅读水平) level identified by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

For all those who agree with Neil Gaiman’s motto in American Gods that “a town isn’t a town without a bookstore,” what might be the perfect holiday choice has just been listed on Airbnb: the chance to become a bookseller for a week or two.

For the total cost of ￡150 a week, guests at The Open Book in Wigtown, Scotland’s national book town, will be expected to sell books for 40 hours a week while living in the flat above the shop. Given training in bookselling from Wigtown’s community of booksellers, they will also have the chance to put their “own stamp” on the store while they’re there. “The Open Book’s aim is to celebrate bookshops, encourage education in running independent bookshops and welcome people around the world to Scotland’s national book town,” says the Airbnb listing.

The Open Book is leased (出租) by the Wigtown Book Festival from a local family. Organisers have been letting paying volunteers run the shop for a week or two at a time, and opened the experience up to the world at large.

“I wouldn’t call it a working holiday,” said Adrian Turpin, director of the Wigtown Book Festival. “It’s not about cheap labour (体力劳动) — it’s about offering people an experience.” The money is “just necessary to cover our costs,” said Turpin,admitting that “it can be a hard life, selling books in a small town, so it’s not a holiday for everybody.”

“I think the shop would have closed,without this,” he said. “So part of the idea was to get new people in — people who would hopefully end up having a good time and a long-standing relationship with the town.”

The idea comes at a difficult moment for independent booksellers. In 2005, there were 1,535 independent bookshops in the UK, with the number dropping to 939 by 2014.

So far, The Open Book has been leased around 10 times, with guests including those from The Bookshop Band, a librarian from Portland, a Dutch government employee, and an 80-year-old couple.

An idea that started in Seattle’s public library has spread throughout America and beyond. The concept is simple: help to build a sense of community in a city by getting everyone to read the same book at the same time.

In addition to encouraging reading as a pursuit (追求) to be enjoyed by all, the program allows strangers to communicate by discussing the book on the bus, as well as promoting reading as an experience to be shared in families and schools. The idea came from Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl who launched the “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” project in 1998. Her original program used author visits, study guides and book discussion groups to bring people together with a book, but the idea has expanded to many other American cities, and even to Hong Kong.

In Chicago, the mayor (市长) appeared on television to announce the choice of To Kill a Mockingbird as the first book in the “One Book, One Chicago” program. As a result, reading clubs and neighborhood groups sprang up around the city. Across the US, it appeared that parents and children read to each other at night and strangers chatted away on the bus about the stories and character.

The only problem arose in New York, where local readers could not decide on one book to represent the huge and diverse (多样的) population. This may show that the idea works best in medium-sized cities or large towns, where a greater sense of unity can be achieved or it may show that New Yorkers rather missed the point, putting all their energy and passion into the choice of the book rather than discussion about a book itself.

Finally, as Nancy points out, the level of success is not judged by how many people read a book, but by how many people are benefited by the process, or have enjoyed speaking to someone with whom they would not have shared a word.