Why Buy When You Can Share? Exchange Books For Food at This Cafe

In India post demonetisation, the Xco cafe is taking a step towards building a ‘sharing economy’.

The Xco cafe lets you share books in exchange of a meal. (Photo: The Quint)

Imagine reading your favourite book (which you did not buy) as you enjoy your coffee and burger (which you did not even pay for). Sounds impossible? Well, not so much at the Xco cafe.

Exchange over coffee (Xco) is a small shack in Delhi University North Campus that lets you share your books in exchange for a free meal. How cool is that?

The shack. (Photo: The Quint)

Why Buy When You Can Share?

In the world post demonetisation, where everyone has started thinking twice before shelling out even a Rs 10 note, Shivam Dewan and Paras Arya are asking why buy anything when you can share?

With their cafe, Xco, the duo is trying to take a step in the direction of a shared economy.

Shivam Dewan and Paras Arya, founders of Xco. (Photo: The Quint)

How Does It Work?

Have you ever exchanged your book or shared your favourite things with someone you know? Xco works exactly in this way, except that you will share and exchange with strangers.

Barter/ Exchange / Share your books (Photo: The Quint)

Xco gives you three options, to barter, exchange or share. You can physically go to their shack and keep your books there or register the same on their website. But how exactly do barter, exchange and sharing work?

Barter- Suppose you have a book that you have read multiple times and do not want to keep anymore, you can keep that in barter and take a book of your choice forever.

Exchange- Suppose you have a book that you have read multiple times but are still very attached to, you can put it in for an exchange and take a book of your choice for a while.

Share- Suppose you have a book that you want to give to others without taking any other book in return, you put it in share.

Sharing is uniting. (Photo: The Quint)

And the cherry on top in this situation is that if you use their platform to barter/exchange/share your books, they give you a food coupon that lets you have a free meal at their shack.

The food coupon. (Photo: Shivam Dewan)

A World Without Money

From 8 November, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his demonetisation policy, all we have been hearing about is a cashless economy.

A world without money is very difficult to achieve but not impossible. Money is one end and barter is another, and in-between is the sharing economy, and that is what we are aiming for.

Paras Arya 

Why buy when you can share. (Photo: The Quint)

Although at present Xco lets its users share and exchange only books, in future they plan to expand it to skills. They aim to make learning so easy that even if someone doesn’t have enough money, they can learn.

Say someone doesn’t have enough money to learn German from a big institution like Max Muller, he/she has the option to learn it at a lower cost from someone who is studying in Max Muller. It will make learning easy and accessible to everyone.

Lets’s share. (Photo: The Quint)

People are shifting their trust from authorities to strangers and something like this will give people a platform to shun big institutions and authorities and survive in a world without them. In a sharing economy we aim to create a world where people learn from each other rather than big institutions.

Shivam Dewan

Is Sharing All Easy?

The concept of a sharing economy sounds extremely plausible and easy, but it is not so.

Set your own rules. (Photo: The Quint)

Making people trust a stranger with something is very difficult. But after people overcome their initial reluctance and try it once, they are comfortable.

Shivam Dewan

With not much support from their families and society, Shivam and Paras had to struggle a lot to get the Xco cafe up and running the way it is today.

We quit our jobs to do something meaningful and this is what we decided to do. Although our parents did not support us, there was a Buddhist monastery where we stayed and worked.

Paras Arya

Creative, much. (Photo: The Quint)

Without any prior knowledge of food and recipes, Xco makes delicious coffee, shakes and burgers. All this with the help of YouTube.

Learning should be easy. It should not be in the hands of the institutions and some powerful people. We had no experience in making food, but YouTube has made it easy for us. That is our aim. We want to make learning as easy as searching something on the web is.

Paras Arya

The delicious coffee shake (Photo: The Quint)

The road ahead might be hard, but the venture sounds amazing!