Books are treasure troves of knowledge which stand the test of time. Yet, a book’s utility is often limited by the number of people who read it.
Sadly, after buying and reading books, many people leave them on their shelves to collect dust, effectively ending their useful lifespan.
Shalibeth Tiffany, 17, decided to tackle this challenge by creating innovative community book-sharing platforms for schools and the wider community across Singapore.
She launched a trio of websites – middletonreads.com, schoolreads.com and sgreads.com – in January this year. Through these platforms, students and the general public can give away their books while requesting books that they would like to get their hands on.
She is officially launching the initiative in her school, Middleton International School, for over 400 secondary school students during its book week in April themed “Sustainability in Literature”.
Shalibeth owes the idea to her upbringing. Since the age of two, she has been surrounded by books thanks to the bookshelf that her parents Suresh and Viji set up for her.
That seeded her love for books so much so that at the ages of six and 10, she even wrote and published two children’s books of a series named Shalibeth Stories.
Her father Suresh Devadoss, 45, said: “She would spend most of her time reading books. Because of that, at one point, I was even planning to shift our home next to a library.”
Yet, that passion also resulted in disappointment when she could not get her hand on popular series like Percy Jackson and Thea Stilton despite her frequent trips to community libraries. “I would be lucky if even one of the books in those series were on the shelf,” she said.
As she grew older, she moved on from children’s fiction to political history and economics books, the experience of which unearthed one more pain point – the fines.
Shalibeth recalls: “Those thick books laden with jargon would take me time to read and often I would not be able to finish them within the borrowing period and had to pay fines.”
That sparked the idea for Middleton Reads. “What if I create a system where students can get books that they so badly want to read, from their fellow students? And what if it was done on a giveaway basis without a loan period attached?” These were the questions on Shalibeth’s mind.
She also realised that many of her own books were also collecting dust on the shelf. She will never forget the sheer joy on her classmate’s face when she lent her a book that the latter had been searching for long. “At that moment, I knew that this idea could benefit so many people and that I had to get started on it.”
Shalibeth planned the layouts of each website. While web programming was an entirely different ball game, her dad’s friend who works in the IT sector, gave expert guidance in converting Shalibeth’s idea from paper to web. Her dad also took great interest in refining the idea and the end product.
With the first version of the website in hand, Shalibeth approached her teachers in Middleton International.
Ms Susan Sawarkar, Head of Secondary Pastoral Care at Middleton, said: “The sustainability aspect of the idea drew us. We did previously have book donation drives but Shalibeth’s idea makes book-sharing more accessible rather than stopping as a one-time event.”
The idea is sustainable in multiple ways. Even when Shalibeth, currently a Grade 12 student, graduates, Middleton Reads will continue to operate.
Ms Nadia Feroze, head of Secondary English at Middleton, said: “The lower secondary students whom she has been guiding will take over and manage it.”
Shalibeth is now planning to go to schools and community clubs to get their buy-in for School Reads and SG Reads respectively.
If that works, SG Reads could soon be a neighborhood book-sharing service that could unite book enthusiasts all over the country, while School Reads could become a customised book-sharing service that schools in Singapore adopt for their own students.
