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calling librarians and web-heads

From the advance readings of Cory Doctorow's upcoming book, Little Brother, it promises to be an important and timely book

While I love reading Cory's work, I prefer to read it digitally on my PDA. But I'd like to get as many paper-versions (dead-tree, FTL) into the hands of impressionable young readers as possible. Ideally this would help Cory set up a service on the page to enable library donations. It seems like this would be easy enough to pull off, if there is a publicly available list of libraries, and then a connection to a web-enabled bookstore that would execute the order. As a book is ordered for a particular library, it could be removed from the list.

However, I don't know if such a list exists, and I've got no programming ability at all. So I have two questions:
  1. Is this the best way to execute this plan, or are there ways to improve it?
  2. Does anybody want to help with it?
Please respond in Comments, or mail me directly through the address in my blogger profile.

Comments

  1. mckenzee5/28/2007 2:47 AM

    Personally, I'll commit to donating my copy to the local library after I read it.

    It's the lazy man's activisism.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous5/28/2007 5:26 AM

    My concern would be libraries being given donations when they were no longer taking them for reasons of space, or getting duplicate titles or getting old/beaten up titles that require special processing. Also keep in mind that libraries may choose to sell donated books to raise funds or discard them.

    What might work somewhat better is a two-part process.

    1) You search Worldcat.org to see if a library near you has the title (don't forget about interlibrary loan!).

    2) If not, then you can donate your book.

    http://www.albany.edu/~dlafonde/Global/bookdonation.htm lists varios book donation programs, as does http://www.ala.org/ala/alalibrary/libraryfactsheet/alalibraryfactsheet12.cfm. Alibris lets schools, libraries and nonprofits set up wishlists: http://www.alibris.com/wish/dab_about.cfm but just within the U.S..

    ReplyDelete
  3. bwana5/28/2007 8:16 AM

    Thanks, Steven. I'll scope those out this week, and see if there's not some way to tie in a simple web interface. ...And then try to locate a web programmer. ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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