Book for Book
- Year: 2013
- Award: WSA Young Innovators
- Category: Young Innovators
- Producer: Ms. Kassie Papasotiriou
- Country: Greece
- URL: www.book4book.gr/en/
The Book for Book website provides high school students with the possibility of matching requests and exchanging books of particular interest. In the spirit of solidarity and environmental awareness, the platform aspires to host young students and parents who wish to find books online for free, quickly and easily. Platform users can offer or search for specific textbooks that other users living close to them may have already offered. A meeting can easily be arranged for the book exchange to take place. School principals or even students within a specific neighbourhood can organize a meeting for a large-scale exchange of books between classes within a school or in a public place. Book for Book aims to eventually establish a social network, connecting students and schools to recycle used books of different school grades on a large scale and from a single access point.
“According to official statistics, every year in Greece 45 million new school books are printed, costing about 26 million euros and resulting into 270,000 trees cut! However, at the end of each school year, most of the books end up useless on students’ shelves or even discarded. Our main goal was to create a tool facilitating the exchange of books. Books do not have an expiration date, so it is a pity printing so many of them every year instead of passing existing ones to the next generation.” (Kassie Papasotiriou)