Green Read Share: Guildford's Community Library
Borrow or share books you love in our community library to save money whilst improving your mind...
What Is Green Read Share?
Read Share is a community library focused on economic, geography, environmental, and social themed books - basically, all the things we need to bring together in a joined-up solution to create a great future for local residents and humanity.
The scheme allows you to borrow books for free (it's a library after all) which means you can save money on books you might not find in the library, without having to buy them - in turn cutting resource use and consumption. Pulp & Paper is the 4th most energy intensive industry in the EU, so community share schemes - coupled with efficiency improvements in the industry - can help to lower production and manufacturing emissions.
Green Read Share aims to spark conversation and inspiration around ways we can come together as a community to tackle the challenges ahead of us, including our high local air pollution levels, poor river water quality, thermally inefficient homes, and the wider issues these contribute to such as nature loss and climate change. So you can also share the books you love in the Read Share.
You can browse Green Read Share’s book collection and reserve books here. If you have similar books you’d like us to ‘host’ in the community library, we’d love to hear from you – more info on that below.
Libraries are more than just a collection of books. They are a great way to build community cohesion, offer services to residents and relieve isolation. As with other community ‘share schemes’, a community library can help us cut down on resource use, manufacturing, and waste.
The books in a community library are donated and managed by community members, allowing people to spread their love of reading whilst offering educational tools which can help to counter the spread of disinformation in a world of social media and billionaire-funded news cycles.
They are not intended to compete with existing library services – rather, they are a great tool to support public libraries, whilst tailoring their content to the requirements of a particular community. Our community library is community-led and independent, as it is not part of the public library network and does not receive support from the council.
