Testing the market

A few weeks ago the little brother, Dato, of a friend of ours was over at our house. We have a small collection of Indonesian novels so we offered him a pile of them. Our collection is pretty meager, a little bit of literature (Ayu Utami, Remy Sylado), some poetry, a couple of teen novels and a dodgy horror book. Being a teenage boy, when it was time to go Dato was completely engrossed in Kuntilanak; a novelisation of a pretty bad Indonesian horror movie about kuntilanaks (Shelley bought it because she was interested in Indonesian monsters and wanted to know more; unfortunately for her Indonesian horror movies don't make any sense). Dato asked to borrow the book and, of course, we were very happy to hand it over. I ran into his older brother a week or so later and he said he had started reading it too.

So we decided to lend out a few more of our books and, so far, the response has been really positive. To add a bit of flavour to the blog, from now on we're planning on interviewing all of the people we lend books to to see what sort of things they read, what they like, what they do and so on.

Stay tuned for the first update.