Brotherhood Books Launches - Giving Books a Second Chance
In late 2008 I worked on building an online second hand bookstore for the Brotherhood of St Laurence. Today Brotherhood Books was launched by comedian and writer Corinne Grant, at the Sacred Heart Primary School in Fitzroy. I’m hanging out for Corinne to publish her short story about the snot eating witch.
Brotherhood Books is a really exciting project, it allows people who can’t access bricks and mortar second hand book stores to access quality second hand books at good prices. All of the profits from the service flow directly back to Brotherhood programs and services. Before this project I thought the Brotherhood ran a few big Opys and gave out some food vouchers. They do a lot more than that.
I have been to the East Brunswick warehouse a few times to meet with the workers to discuss how the platform is working and what can be done to improve it. Most of the Brotherhood Books workers are volunteers, who are trying to get some experience so they can enter or return to the workforce. They all seem to really love their books.
The identity, webdesign and initial marketing material was done by imageffect. The platform is built using Zend Framework, where possible we used off the shelf libraries, but there is a large amount of original work. The cataloguing functionality is pretty slick, almost all of the books are catalogued by volunteers scanning a barcode, entering a condition and adjusting the system recommended price and it is done. Yahoo’s YUI Toolkit provides most of the AJAX yummy-ness for the volunteers, while most of the data is pulled from Bowker’s web services.
Brotherhood Books has over 30,000 items for sale, and growing every day. So far over 45 tonnes of books have been saved from going to landfill!
If you have some spare books to donate to the Brotherhood, they have many ways of accepting donations.
At the launch today there was some media present, and someone from the BSL was interviewed by Red Symonds on 774 ABC Melbourne.
Many of computer books are dated, but they still make for fun reading, These days I have several titles from the Brotherhood on my bookshelf - including a mid 90s guide to cracking.
Go check it out and buy a book so you can claim you were there at the start.
Yes I am doing the hard sell on it, but I have been waiting since the soft launch earlier this year to be able to promote it widely.