The domain bookorner.com, built in 2012, was associated with the project “Bookorner Hong Kong,” which was dedicated to visually mapping the locations and profiles of the city’s independent bookstores. My goal was to spotlight these shops and celebrate their unique role in Hong Kong’s cultural landscape. Ultimately, I hoped to grow Bookorner into a Hong Kong-based nonprofit organization that preserves, promotes, and shares the world’s small bookstores and the enduring joy of printed books.

During my time as a research assistant for Dr. Jingyan Lu at The University of Hong Kong, I launched a volunteer initiative with friends. In its earliest stages, our core group were devout Christians, so the project brimmed with genuine goodwill and shared purpose.

On March 18, 2012—right after we got started—I emailed the team:

“Brothers and sisters, today I visited a family-run shop in Hung Hom that has sold both manga and novels for sixty years. Three generations have kept it going, and today Mr. Chung (the founder’s grandson) enthusiastically completed our questionnaire. Praise God—Bookorner has secured its first partner bookstore!”

Two days later, the project’s one earliest volunteer, Huang, scoured the side streets around HKU after dinner and reported back:

“I found two second-hand bookshops, one stocks new and used textbooks, and another specializes in comics and novels. The owner of first bookshop barely listened when I pitched Bookorner, insisting, ‘We don’t need it.’ In the second bookshop I approached the owner as a customer first, then pitched Bookorner successfully. Both shops gave me business cards and flyers. Recommendation: Let’s collect addresses or cards first; hold off on pitching Bookorner until we know what we’re doing. We risk looking unprofessional otherwise.”

I particularly mentioned Huang here because her dedication was unmistakable—and still evident when I dug through old emails thirteen years later.

Though the project had at least four tech volunteers, the only people actually writing code were Yu and me. I experimented with WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, learning web-development from scratch. Yu published our first interactive map of Hong Kong Independent Bookstores.

Using Bookorner project, I applied to Cyberport’s Creative Micro Fund (now the Greater Bay Area Young Entrepreneurship Programme). Only three of our ten volunteers—including myself—met the eligibility criteria, and two of those three were full-time workers unable to attend the training scheduled by the Fund. So we eventually couldn’t continue with this direction.

Bookorner started in March 2012 and ended around May the same year. Not long after the core team members formed, I started welcoming anyone who expressed interest, the roster soon grew tangled: HKU alumni, middle-school classmate, family members, friends of friends… you name it. By April, the team had ten members—and I could already see the cracks forming. Blindly recruiting everyone who showed interest only diluted the core contributors (Huang, Gang, Yu, and myself), and a flurry of conflicting ideas stalled the progress.

In one telling email, Gang wrote:

“Hello everyone, it’s been nearly three months since Bookorner began. Thank you for your contributions and cooperation. To recap our original vision: we wanted a simple site to map independent bookstores, let readers search by store or title, and highlight each shop’s featured picks. Over time we drifted into e-commerce, online communities, and debates over whether to register as a business or a nonprofit. We need to refocus considering: 1) Feasibility. With our current tech skills and time constraints, we can’t build a full e-commerce system—and that wasn’t our initial goal. 2) Phased growth. Let’s start small, achieve one milestone, then expand. Forming a company sounds attractive, but we’d face audits, taxes, and local-hiring requirements. Before we register anything, we must decide: What exactly are we selling? Only once we have a flagship product does incorporating become sensible. No work is wasted—even if our expectations shift, we’ve all learned. As the saying goes, don’t wait for ‘the perfect moment’ to start working hard. Let’s discuss this Saturday. ”

Shortly after, the project quietly dissolved—without so much as a farewell email from me. In the years that followed, Huang went to the U.S. for her PhD, Gang joined a company, and I lost track of the rest of the team entirely.

I, meanwhile, shelved Bookorner and turned my attention to helping my younger sister with her graduate program’s applications to Hong Kong universities. That brief, whirlwind venture now lives only in archived emails—and in the bittersweet memories of the friends who helped build it.