Recent studies have shown that New Zealand is becoming a nation of workaholics, with a record one in five people now working 49 hours or more a week. As a result our leisure time is diminishing and we are increasingly reading less and less for pleasure these days.Not-for-profit organization New Zealand Book Council challenged us to find a new way to encourage people to fall in love with reading again; From existing book lovers to those who were less likely to pick up a book.

We disguised everything from classics by Virginia Wolfe through to short stories by local New Zealand authors. To the untrained eye, and sometimes even the trained eye, these books looked like your run-of-the-mill PowerPoint presentation. But the operator always knew what they were reading.To keep up ‘underground’ appearances, these books were housed at an equally masqueraded online library, which looked identical to a Windows desktop. On this desktop were folders named after different book genres with the corresponding PowerPoint book files inside.This link was sent out to Book Council members via email and from there it spread via emails, websites, chat rooms and blogs. Soon enough these books were infiltrating offices all over the world.

At the time of entry this site had just gone live. The initial reaction and response has been overwhelming. More books are being uploaded by the day, and many authors have expressed interest in donating their books to help the cause of encouraging reading nation and worldwide. As word of this site spreads, no doubt these books will soon be infiltrating an office computer near you. Not that you’d ever know, unless of course you are the one reading it. No data or statistics are available at present.