Thursday, August 21, 2008

Vote to Give Books to Kids

First Book is having a vote in their What Book Got You Hooked? campaign, and will be donating fifty thousand books to kids in the winning US state.

Go here to vote. All you have to do is vote for your state (or whichever state you want the books to go to), but you can also tell them what your earliest favorite book was and why if you want to. Name and e-mail are also optional.

You can vote once a day between now and 15 September. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. :D

By the way, my favorite book when I was little was The Gingerbread Man. Hey, it's about someone who runs around having fun and causing trouble, and that's pretty cool when you're four or five. ;)

Thanks to Kerry Allen, one of my fellow Romancing the Blog columnists, for posting about this.

Angie

6 comments:

Steve Malley said...

Cool, thanks for that link!!

Charles Gramlich said...

Cool. My vote is in.

laughingwolf said...

while it's PARTLY a good idea and a good step, i resent the fact the winner will be ONE state... what about the millions of other needy kids???

Angie said...

Steve and Charles -- great! Remember you can vote once a day. :D

Laughingwolf -- you know, I thought about that too, but it looks like just a matter of scarce resources. They're not asking for money, after all, so they have some fixed amount they can spend. Fifty thousand books given to needy kids in one state can make a significant impact in that limited area. Depending on how they're distributing, they might even end up being able to give more than one book to each kid, especially if one of the smaller states wins. If they donated a thousand books to each of the fifty states, though, the impact would be so small in each state that it'd vanish. Better than nothing, certainly, but it'd make much less of a difference.

Sure, there are millions of needy kids. But if they only have enough money to buy 50K books... there you go. I think this is a pretty cool program, even with its limitations.

Angie

writtenwyrdd said...

I'm thinking that if libraries who sell off their stacks instead donated them to other libraries and the shipping was paid for by donations it might be even more effective. An old book is still a book--anda lot cheaper than a new one, both in resources and expense.

Angie said...

WW -- sure, that's another good idea. [nod] Assuming whoever owns the books (City Council, etc.) could be persuaded to let the potential income go.

Or increased donations remaining libraries in the area could let them send reps to the sale to snag items.

Angie