Customized Romance Novel

Getting their fair share: The rise of the barter market [VIDEO]

Barter markets -- where people bring stuff they don't want and exchange it for stuff that other people don't want -- are like urban sustainability Swiss Army knives. It's amazing how many things they can do.

They reduce the amount of expensive new crap people buy. They help folks clean out unwanted junk from their homes and keep it out of the waste stream. They create a lively public space. And they build community.

The only barter market I know of in the United States, the Really Really Free Market in the East Village (now defunct), was organized by anarchists, and had a political agenda that might have been off-putting to some.

But in Spain, at least, the custom is becoming more mainstream. That's according to Kristen Dirksen of faircompanies , who made this nice little video about a Barcelona market. You can see that there's a festival atmosphere as people of all ages gather to swap goods (wind chimes! romance novels! stuffed animals!) on a crowded street.

"You don't need to shop," explains one woman. "The only thing you have to do is look at home for things you don't use at all. Online, you look up ‘exchange market' and you'll find every week an exchange market in every neighborhood."

"It could be easier," says a teenage girl.  "But it's more fun this way, and that's the great part of it. It's the joy of it."

I first saw the video on The Pop-Up City , an online blog run by an Amsterdam-based design agency. Athina Arampatzi writes that the movement is spreading in Europe. She puts it in a global economic context:

As rapid globalization processes have set in motion a series of scalar transformations in economy, barter markets and swapping activities seem to provide alternate ways for local economies to maintain their balance. Most of the people involved in bartering highlight the major contribution of the ‘exchange-act' in raising awareness over our normal consumption habits and the value of things. At the same time, the main idea behind swapping is the contribution of goods, or even people's skills and services. Through the exchange part, people are presented with the opportunity to put back into circulation unused items, but also their own personal resources and assert, in this way, a certain degree of control over their personal economies.

Dave Roberts wrote a great piece about the exciting economic implications of the "sharing economy ," a broad category that includes carshare and bikeshare systems. There's a huge spectrum here, although the internet frequently plays a role (that's one way people organize the Barcelona markets).

gay.com Daily Entertainment: Personalized Same-Sex Romance Novels

Is the romantic tale of two women competing for a million dollar prize on a reality game show. The heroines must battle one another to win challenges, but fail to battle the desire they feel for each other.

Book By You founder, Mike Pocock was concerned with realism when it came to the romantic angle of the company’s new personalized same-sex novels. He wanted to make sure that the stories being told were “not gimmicks that could be used for laughs,” but stories that would resonate with gays and lesbians. Pocock made it a point to “reach out to authors who had written gay and lesbian fiction in the past so the stories would be meaningful for the readers.”

The effort to create authentic tales of queer romance has not gone unnoticed and seems to have piqued the interest of many gay and lesbian readers. The two new novels have become “very popular” for the publisher and Pocock promises more “will be on the way very soon.”

The personalized novels are priced at $39.95 for paperback and $59.95 for hardback copies.

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