Combining Books, Big Data & Street Art
#booksonwalls
The Part About Books
Thousands of people saw the books, and talked about them the whole day.
There were 60 of them, in different sizes: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many more.
They weren’t real books. Just pieces of paper that we sprayed red and wrote the titles on with a white marker.
But they got people talking.
Just like the saying ‘’Don’t judge a book by it’s cover’’, people that we could never guess liked reading pointed out their favorite books to strangers next to them. Faces smiled when they saw their own loved books on the walls, a high school student counted the 51/60 she’d read.
At night, the bars started playing music. The wall was in Asmalı Mescit — the entertainment district of İstanbul — and the streets were filled with locals and tourists.
The book lover that grabbed the first book of the wall: We also love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Nice choice! Soon another book was taken to carry back home, and then the next, and the next and the next.
By the next day, all the books were gone, scattered throughout 60 book lovers in İstanbul who were guests in our neighborhood, to keep as sweet surprises.
But the data remained.
The Part About (Big) Data
Imagine how much different your life will be when you get a whole neighborhood talking about the books they love. A book tells much more about us then a like or a share, about who we are and who we want to be.
And the great thing is that books may be paths to our souls, but they are solid objects, that can be tagged and stored in a database to be analyzed. Lot’s of companies already are using data to give us better book recommendations, and tell us when our favorite authors are in town for a book signing.
But those are big publishers and book sellers, and until recently only they could afford know how to collect and gather great amounts of data. Fortunately, recent advances in technology have made it possible for even us — a not-so-much $$$ book sharing start-up — to be on (almost) the same level as them.
So we asked BookSerf’s followers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter:
What are 3 of your favorite books?
This is also the same question we are asking you now. What are 3 of your favorite books? You still have time to think about them until the end of the article, no pressure by the way.
To explain what we are going to do with your answers, let’s get to…
The Part About Street Art
Our philosophy (or motto, or whatever) at Bitti Gitti is to bridge the gap between the virtual and the physical. (Bitti Gitti is our workshop, where we also manage BookSerf.)
So naturally we love street art, because you can paint a wall and influence your local neighborhood and also share it with the world. We made a street art app to find on a map of Istanbul all the cool street art pieces, and you can also submit new pieces that you like.
Of course, we can’t stop ourselves from making street art related to books. Mostly book recommendations of the week and tagging local book stores with our slogan Read More.
But we wanted more then to promote local book stores or recommend certain books, we wanted to make the whole world a place you talk about books, and the whole world is made up of walls.
So we are officially starting #booksonwalls.
#booksonwalls of where you live, done by cool people like you. (If you’ve read this far, wherever you live, you are sure to be cool!)
You saw that we also have a location field, so when a certain city gets to a 1000 book lovers we will be able to know. And then we’ll send an e-mail to all of you in the same city, so that any adventurer will be able to find a wall and together with a few friends to do the #booksonwalls.
All you have to do is cut out some paper, spray it BookSerf Red, make black outlines with a black marker and write the title with a white one. Here’s the video, you’re instantly going to get it:
The Part About Keeping In Touch
We are determined to spread #booksonwalls all over the world. Especially after seeing how happy the wall in Istanbul made the whole neighborhood, and how cool it is to play around with the data.
We can’t do this alone. It’s too big of an adventure. So feel free to send an e-mail to info@bookserf.com if you want to be involved somehow in your city. Or also to give us book recommendations, tell us about the street art where you live, anything you want!
If you liked what you saw, please hit the “recommend” button below so more people can tell us about the books they love. Thanks!
