Community Library

The growing youth population of Bangladesh represents the potential for the growth of readership in Bangladesh. A hurdle to increasing the readership in Bangladesh is providing access to books at a low cost. 

Sharing books among friends and family is a common practice to read more books at a low cost. This process can be scaled and made more convenient. Imagine being part of a community of thousands of members who you can borrow books from with the convenience of an app. Meeting up with fellow bookworms to collect the book adds to the experience. “Community Library” makes all of this possible. This platform can also be used to sell secondhand books. 

Reading books increases self-awareness, empathy, and critical thinking. All rare qualities in a society increasingly addicted to social media. A youth population with these virtues will be empowered to create a better tomorrow.

For the majority of young people from Bangladesh, a barrier to reading books is the cost associated with buying books. Building a library and managing it is costly. But the members of a community together can make a “virtual library”. Different people buy different types of books. If the books of a community are put together, a repository of diverse books can be created in a local area. 

After reading the books people buy, they mostly remain unused in bookshelves, layers of dust accumulating on the cover. But some book worms may be searching for this book. It may happen that someone near them has the exact book they’re searching for but lack of information has created a barrier, we aim to break this barrier. 

This problem affects all the book readers of Bangladesh since there’s no exact data on them, we can’t specify the number. But there are around 29% people in Bangladesh who are literate. We’re focusing on the younger generations’ but people of all ages can use it and benefit from it.

Our main target is people interested in reading books. This platform will be useful for any literate people. From school level children to professionals, people from rural or urban areas; all will be able to use this app. Our platform aims to give people a convenient and easy way to share their books among a particular community. It can be used for any kind of book transaction, from textbooks to novels, etc. We want to bring all the book readers' groups in Bangladesh in one place.

Many institutions for example universities have book reader groups where they operate manually which is a cumbersome process. Maintaining track of the books is tiresome. In the age of digitalization, it's unsuitable and unsustainable.  As our book readers are evolving in their behavior and the way technology is being intertwined with their lifestyle, libraries have to match that. It is our humble approach to bring the convenience of information technology to book sharing and community learning.

Community library a book sharing platform. We aim to provide easy access to books by this free platform. We have already built our prototype Android application and in the next phase, we will build a web-based application. As book sharing will be done locally, a user has to enroll in his/her local community. 

There are three types of community in the app

1. Where only the community admin can add books

2. Every member can add books

3. A few members selected by the admin can add book

In cases where a sole person is responsible for maintaining a mini-library of sorts or wants to sell books, the community type where a single person alone provides books will be useful. 

For privacy, each community has a unique secret code. Users can enroll in a community with this secret code. In the community, the users with permission will add books they want to share with others. For each book, a cover photo is required. After the books have been added to a particular community all members can request their desired book. The book owner is notified using FCM(Firebase Cloud Messaging). Then the owner can decide with whom he will share this book. The borrower will disclose the number of days he/she wants to borrow the book. When a book request is accepted no other user can request that particular book. But after the borrower has returned his books, the owner can accept from other requests in the queue. We also kept an option for reviewing books, book owners, and book borrowers.

For finding trending books we kept count how many times the books are requested. Each community has a wall where they can post for any books or discuss. We also built a chat module where owners and borrowers can talk about their book transactions. We have not kept any payment policy for borrowing any books. But if any borrower doesn't return books timely, he can’t request for any other books. As our platform is community-based, it’s built on trust and the rating/reviews each member receive by the parties involved in the transaction are useful in maintaining that trust.

Our solution upscales the traditional process of book sharing and makes it more convenient and far-reaching than possible before with the help of information technology. This provides easy access to books without any cost and reusing books that were otherwise just lying idle. The use of our solution ensures maximized use of a community’s books, a valuable resource. In addition, as this is helping to increase active readership, the culture of reading books will be expanded. So there’ll be more deamands for books which will create opportunities for authors and publishers.

In terms of competition, we don’t have any competitors at all. We have a platform like “GoodReads” and “Any books” which provides us a review of those books. But there is no platform for sharing hardcopy of books. 

We have found that each university has some book reader community who share their books. For sharing, they use facebook, where they face lots of problems keeping track of the books, as facebook is not built for such purposes. Streamlining and digitizing their operations will be a great benefit for those communities. Making all those platforms online will be a step towards “Digital Bangladesh”.

Community Library will give an opportunity for the people who cannot afford to buy books all the time to get access to books free of cost. As our online platform will keep track of which community is reading books, it’ll be effective to find any donor who will donate books to people who actually read books.

The development of technology and the growing popularity of the Internet have resulted in learners increasingly acquiring new knowledge and skills via the Internet. Using such internet-based media for reading has particularly attracted the attention of book lovers, given that such non-traditional methods have been suggested to increase students’ motivation to read.

 Through Community Library any reader can have all the privilege of an offline library along with some additional features that book lovers require. It handles all sort of book sharing among users and provides a platform having huge number of books with diversity. 

 In an offline library, no members are allowed to have knowledge about the current reader of any book. Whereas, through the internet, one user can navigate who is currently using any specific book. It also adds more features for book readers like book reviews, book descriptions that are lacking in traditional libraries.

 Community Library also allows users to contact with the book owner and specifically bidirectional reviews from the owner about the borrower and from the borrower about the owner. Thus it communicates between borrower and owner of books and handles all sorts of comments through a two-sided review process.

Currently, our app is in the prototype phase. 

1. Current number of people serving - 0

2. The number we’ll be serving in one month - 10,000

3. The number we’ll be serving in one year - 5,00,000

4. The number we’ll be serving in five years - 50,00,000

Considering that the youth population is at ease with technology in their daily life, there is a place for an app that streamlines and expands the process of sharing books targeted at the youth population. We believe our product can play that role. Our goal within next year is to reach around half a million readers in Bangladesh who’ll use our service and five million readers in the next five years. We believe that this will transform our society by empowering our youth population and changing their minds. And our app will help them achieve this by giving them convenient access to books. We hope they’ll learn to be empathetic, self-aware, and critical thinkers as they’ll read more books. And they will change our society for the better.

We have built our app, but we understand it’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have to reach out to specific people and groups and encourage our targets to use our digital solution. Some may be reluctant to use digital tools or install a specific app for book sharing. We also need to create materials for communicating with potential users and persuade them to use our service. 

We need to do initial marketing that’ll get it to reach people whose experiences with the app will build its reputation. We need skilled people who can maintain and develop the app for the foreseeable future. We also need marketing professionals who’ll help it reach millions of people.  For all this, we need mostly part-time and some full-time employees who’ll manage the operations of our app.

 We are using Firebase database for our app which costs approximately 50$ per month. As it’s not free we have to run it at our own cost. As the users will increase, so will the costs of maintaining the database. We need sponsorship for making this project fully functional.

We are trying to reach people who love books. We have discussed our app with various book readers community. We got positive responses. They are eagerly awaiting the app launch. We are expecting to get 10 thousand downloads in one month. For managing our maintenance cost we will show ads with google Admob 

We have fourteen members in our team.

Full time members

• Shahrear Bin Amin
• Shahin Alom Shuvo
• Hasibul Haque Moon
• Tanima Sultana

Part time members

• Abu Nasim Haider
• Shanto Ghosh
• Sojol Kumar Das
• SM Rasel
• Seum Sarker
• Lipton Mondol
• Md Sharif Hossain Afridi
• Shams Sahela
• Forkan Hossain

Members for the technical side:

1. Shahrear Bin Amin - CSE, University of Dhaka. Have Android, Web development experience.
2. Shahin Alom Shuvo - CSE, University of Dhaka.
3. Hasibul Haque Moon - CSE, University of Dhaka.Have good organizing skills, president of CSEDU student club.
4. Tanima Sultana - CSE, University of Dhaka. Experienced web developer.

Other members:

1. Abu Nasim Haider - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, DU.  Ex-Secretary of DUSS
2. Sojol Kumar Das - Bangla, DU. Founder of Boier Feriwala
3. Shanto Ghosh - Philosophy, DU. Activist
4. S.M. Rasel - Political Science, Jagannath University
5. Rabi Us Sany - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, DU. Designer
6. Lipton Mondol- Management Information System, DU. Activist
7. Md Sharif Hossain Afridi- Psychology, DU. Activist
8. Shams Sahela- Bengal, DU. Activist
9. Forkan Hossain- Statistics, DU. Activist
10. Seum Sarker - Zoology, DU

We discussed with “Boier Feriwala” having 500 active readers in the University of Dhaka, they also have several branches in other universities. “Sopno Shiri” same kind of book readers group at  Jagannath University. Also Dhaka University Science Society (DUSS) planned to build a library of science books, but this library couldn’t be built for lack of space in TSC and maintanence hassles. For solving this problem our proposed solution is in the first place. Currently, our partners are,

1. Dhaka University Science Society

2. Boier Feriwala

3. Shopno Siri

Currently, our app is free for both borrowers and donors. 

But we have plan to add pricing policy, like if the reader want’s to read more than one book in one month using our platform then he or she have to pay us a small amount of money according to the book price. Pricing would be determined by the time he requested the book. Large portions of that money would be added to the owner accounts and a small amount of money would be kept for using the system.

Using our system book owner will be benefited, reusing their idle book.

Currently, our system depends on sustained donations and grants.

But we have a plan to get profits by showing ads and book transactions

We are applying for Tiger It challenges mainly for funding, we also want technical support from renowned software industry like Tiger IT. Thus we have a good partnership opportunity. We want to spread our product across the whole country. For this, we need a good marketing campaign and media coverage. We think winning here will give us a great opportunity for reaching people. As Tiger, IT is operating alongside MIT, it’s quite prestigious.. We also want to be mentored by resourceful and experienced persons.

We want the following partnerships

1. All book readers community
2. Publishers
3. Bangla Academy (Ekushe Boimela)
4. School, College, Universities
5. Literature Society