Welcome to Thames Valley, where everyone is reading 'Three Men in a Boat'

Blackswell's Bookshop in Oxford is generally more concerned with stocking Alexander McCall Smith and John Grisham than 19th-century comic novels. So this week's preoccupation with Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat has proved puzzling.

The shop took possession of 100 copies of the novel yesterday and indicated that it is keeping its supply options open. "This is just an initial subscription," the manager, Owen Dobbs, said. "We'll get more when we need to." The sudden interest has nothing to do with a revival of interest in Jerome but everything to do with a reading phenomenon from the United States.

The "community read-in", which mobilises book clubs, public libraries and local bookstores to get entire cities and regions reading the same book and talking about it, appears to be catching on just as quickly in the UK as book clubs did when they hit these shores in earnest five years ago.

The concept has the potential to interest thousands of people who may be intimidated by a book club. They can buy the book at their local shop for a reduced price, triggered by the mass sales of the title, or borrow it from the library, which will stocks dozens for the period it is being read. Book clubs in towns, cities or regions also have the opportunity to interact and share reactions to the title.

The read-in concept was first tried in Seattle in 1998, and was an even bigger hit in 2001 when Chicago made the collective decision to read To Kill a Mockingbird, turning Harper Lee's 40-year-old classic into an overnight best-seller.

Now Britain is cottoning on. Prototype read-ins have been held in Leeds, covering Patrick Susskind's Perfume and Bristol, Robert Louis Stephenson's Treasure Island and John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids. And next Thursday, World Book Day, the Thames region, from Oxford to the outskirts of London, will get to grips with Jerome.

Bristol's libraries lent 1,000 copes of Triffids in three weeks this year and there are already signs of a similar interest in the Thames event. When the actor Rodney Bewes resurrected his one-man show Three Men in a Boat to coincide with it, a theatre in Newbury sold out for all three nights within 48 hours.

"It's wonderfully refreshing to be able to promote the backlist, not the books the media is promoting all the time," said Louisa Symington of Penguin Books, which is helping to run the Thames event. "This book club idea is great. Everybody seems to think reading is a solitary pleasure but it can be more than that. The trick seems to be choosing a book accessible to men and women of all ages, across the socio-economic spectrum."

Three Men in a Boat, which has not been out of print since it was published in 1889, and "still reads as if it were written yesterday", Ms Symington said, was selected after a librarian in Reading casually suggested its aquatic theme fitted with the Thames area.

But regions of the US would not have got away with such unscientific selection processes. In New York, all hell let loose last year when an ad-hoc committee of worthies charged with choosing the book came up with The Color of Water, a memoir about growing up in Brooklyn with a black father and Jewish mother, by James McBride, and Native Speaker, a literary first novel by Chang-rae Lee about a Korean-American immigrant spying on a corrupt Korean-American councillor from Queens. Both were considered too controversial and the Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, intervened before Native Speaker was finally recommended.

Andrew Kelly, director of last year's first Bristol event the Great Reading Adventure, said the phenomenon proved that book clubs need not be the preserve of a well-read middle class intelligentsia. "I was amazed to see Treasure Island went to the top of the Bristol Blackwell's best-sellers list," he said. "It outsold Michael Moore and Jamie Oliver, which I think surprised them as much as it surprised us. It was a book that was related to Bristol and its history. We had a massive response. Library borrowings went up to 16,000."

Two years ago, Manchester tried "bookcrossing", leaving books by writers including Martin Amis and Alex Garland in taxis, buses and on park benches, marked with messages like "Read me" and "Take me home". The phenomenon, which dates to April 2001, labels books with a unique number, registered on a website, which enables readers to track their progress and deliver a verdict. At the last count, almost 500,000 books had been "released" and there were more than 146,000 members worldwide.

In Oxford, Waterstones is also gearing up for the read-in. "We're also getting 100 copies of the book, essentially treating it like a best-seller," said the manager, Colin Shone, who expects it to be in the top 10 selling books at least. But the least Blackwell's expect to see is Jerome replacing Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves at the top of the best-sellers list.

"There's also Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Francis Wheen's How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, which are doing well," Mr Dobbs said. "If Three Men in a Boat can outsell those three, it would be great accomplishment."