Web 2.0 Asia

Korea's leading internet portal Naver is undertaking a great non-profit project, in partnership with local Starbucks.

The program is called Knowledge iN's Bookshelf (link in Korean). "Knowledge iN", which also happens to be the name for the hugely successful Q&A service, means "guru" in Korean. ("지식인", "知識人")

Under this program, Naver asks gurus from various fields to pick up the best books off their own personal bookshelves. We all know great people are great readers, and peeking into their favorite book collections would certainly be intellectually intriguing.

Then, those books hand-picked by the gurus appear physically in select Starbucks coffeeshops for free reading. (See the top left picture.) The Knowledge iN's Bookshelf website provides links to let the users know which Starbucks coffeeshops have those books.

Despite its huge success and obvious contribution to the Korean web industry in many ways, Naver has been called "an evil company" on, well, more than one occasion - probably due to the company's alledged closedness. But a project like this is something even Amazon isn't known to be doing (Come on, you guys even have Starbucks HQ in town!) and can help enhance Naver's corporate image. Below is a screen shot of Knowledge iN's Bookshelf - these are the books hand-picked by Chan-Wook Park, a prominent Korean movie director. (Seen the Oldboy?)