Hotel Offers Guests the Bible - on Kindle
It has long been a tradition for hotels around the world to offer travellers a copy of the Gideons bible. Some 80 million free bibles were distributed by the Gideons International group last year alone.
A hotel in Newcastle is moving with the times however. Rather than offering a paper based edition of the book, they are providing a Kindle e-reader in each room, with the bible preloaded onto each device.
The Hotel Indigo in Newcastle, England, will be offering the service in each of its 148 rooms from this week. It's claiming to be the first in Britain to offer such a service, and possibly even the world.
To be as inclusive as possible, if guests wish to have a religious text from a non-Christian religion they can download this to the Kindle for free, providing the cost does not exceed £5.
Of course other books can also be downloaded to the Kindle, with the cost of each purchase added to the guests bill. It's not clear yet whether guests will be able to enjoy the purchases of previous users or whether the purchases is more akin to a short-term loan from a library.
The hotel has announced that the move is a trial running until July 16, after which a decision will be made on whether to continue offering the service at both the Newcastle hotel and the groups 44 other hotels around the world.
Adam Munday, the hotel’s general manager said the idea was inspired by Newcastle’s literary heritage. The city was once a publishing hotspot, and the hotel is found in near the Literary and Philosophical Society – the largest independent library outside London, which houses more than 150,000 books.
“In the 18th Century, Newcastle was one of the largest print centres in Britain and we’re in Grainger Town, close to the Literary and Philosophical Society,” he said. “We wanted to reflect this literary history in a very contemporary way, so are offering guests the use of cutting-edge Kindles pre-loaded with The Bible, instead of the more traditional hardcopy Gideon’s Bible that they would expect to find in a hotel.”
Do you think this is a good idea? Would you make use of a Kindle in your hotel room?
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