Our Novel Story
How we started
As a tech company, DCKAP always strives to learn and grow alongside the ecosystem where we thrive. To that effect, one such initiative we organized is Lit’s Meet.
We undertook this initiative to collaborate with fellow readers, encourage them, and impart the importance of reading in order to make a positive impact.
Lit's Meet
We brainstormed and came up with a community name, Lit’s Meet (The Literature’s Meet) with taglines “Readers are Leaders” and “Vanga Padikalam” (Let’s Read). Our motto was to provide a physical space where readers can flock together, communicate and grow together. We wanted to keep it really simple and strong, as a place where our culture of reading is easily communicated.
Many people named our booth the book sharing/swapping booth for our unique initiative. We value reading, not the price of the book. We started our little library with 10 books (a meagre bag full of books) which were displayed on our very first day.
Keeping in mind the purpose of our initiative, we decided that the Chennai Book Fair would be the right platform to begin this positive venture to create a footprint the very first year.
The BAPASI administrative team were both eager and happy to have us there, being the very first technology company to opt for a stall at the Chennai Book Fair.
Starting off on such a unique note, we were lucky enough to get our booth at a prime location at the fair. We were the proud inhabitants of Stall #160 at the intersection of entrances into the book fair.
Initially, we had planned to be active participants on prime days and holidays, but our love for promoting the event and the wonderful response from the public lead us to be an active part of the entire event – all thirteen days of the 43rd Chennai Book Fair from January 9th to January 21st, 2020.
Many people were constantly enquiring about our next event, which gave us all the more motivation and spirit to continue our reading initiative.
It’s amazing to know that we had over 300 books swapped. We were even given over 40 books from a single reader with only one book swap.
A reader purchased a book out of his pocket and shared with us to support our cause. Whoever listened to us about our initiative, they appreciated what we were doing and shared the message with their friends and family.
Many visited back again for more book sharing.
There were regular readers to our stall that visited every day to see our collections and to support us.
There were authors who left their books for promotion and took ours to promote sharing in return. Co stall members visited our booth and donated some books.
We had at least 5 members waiting before 11 AM in front of our booth to share books. Even the BAPASI admin told us that people were waiting outside our booth every day, and a lot of enquiries had been made on book sharing.
It has been a challenge, but we love to see how much our initiative has grown in such a short period
In retrospect, every day we had 200+ visitors at our stall, a minimum of 15 readers that swapped their books, and 25 + books that got swapped each day. 25 children took advantage of the free children’s books, and we had over 100 enquiries about our initiative and any future events.
Keeping this wonderful response in mind, the success of our Little Free Library at the Chennai Book Fair, and our thirst to spread the cause of reading to everyone, we launched Novel Nation
Our Novel Nation Initiative
“Take a Book” is a book sharing movement, which inspires and motivates reading and aims to build a continuing reading community in our neighborhood by exchange of books through Novel Nation's Libraries.
A Novel Nation Library is a free book-sharing spot, with a small shelf/library where anyone may take a book , share a book or leave their old books. You do not need to leave a book in order to take one, as our aim is to help promoting reading.
Our Novel Nation Libraries are unique because they are each customized to where they are placed, and they allow readers to connect at a common point.
Our aim is to connect people of different areas through books.