Lawrence Clark Powell - “Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.” (thanks, gmail quote of the day)
Currently Reading:
I suppose my love of books was more or less inevitable. My mother became a librarian when I was 6, bringing home stacks of colorful stories to be trapped in tug of wars (as far as was allowed) between my twin and me. We fought and bonded over the Baby-Sitters Club, Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, books by Lois Lowry, Ann Rinaldi, Louisa May Alcott and the Brontes. We, maybe slightly embarrassingly, even were student counselors at reading camp, encouraging reading and playing games about books with dozens of little kids (it was fun!)
Emerging into the real world of book-acquisitions unaided by a librarian, however, it’s hard not to be shocked by the price of books and the nagging sense of being wasteful when amassing large personal collections of books (tricky question of whether or not non-textbook books are, for practical and relative purposes, a luxury). Finding myself frequently in other countries without the benefits of amazon.com, it’s even more challenging to find books I would both like to read and can reasonably afford. So…. you can imagine my excitement at finding an organization that addresses just about all of these concerns: www.betterworld.com. I first heard about this organization at AMSA convention when students were collecting medical texts to be sent to sites in Africa, and recently again from an expat friend who received books this way. Their website does a far better job of explaining their mission and successes, but I’ll sum it up here:
(1) The Practical Stuff: They sell used (mostly) and new books at reasonable prices. Shipping is free in the U.S. and $2.97 to the rest of the world. To buy books, click here. To find more information on their work and to donate, click here.
(2) From the Times:
However, Better World Books (www.betterworld.com) offers a different option. Started by some freshly minted Notre Dame graduates in 2002, it collects used books and textbooks from about 1,000 campuses and 700 libraries nationwide.
As an individual, you can donate if you pay for shipping yourself; but you can buy anything off its Web site and shipping is free anywhere in the country.
“It’s like 1,000 sidewalk sales rolled into one,” said a co-founder, Xavier Helgesen. He estimates that his organization receives about 15,000 used books a day and sells about 5,000 daily.
Some of the unusable books are recycled, many of the textbooks are sent to universities in Africa and of all the books that are sold, a certain percentage of each sale — it varies but ranges around 15 percent — goes to nonprofit partners promoting global literacy.
(3) From the website (and thus unmeasured and unconfirmed by me):
Social Impact
* Collected over 10 million books through active book drives at over 1200 colleges and universities and collections from over 750 libraries
* Raised over $2.3 million for over 80 literacy and education non-profit organizations (check website for list of orgs)
* Raised over $75,000 for the New Orleans Public Library Foundation
* Raised more than $1.2 million for libraries and thrift stores nationwide
* Contributed more than $850,000 to college service clubs who have run book drives
* Directly sent more than 570,500 books to Books for Africa, the National Center for Family Literacy, and Feed the Children
* Established Better World Books Fund to finance specific shipments through Books for Africa – more information coming soon!Environmental Impact
* Saved over 5,250 tons of books from landfills
* Reclaimed more than 680,000 pounds of metal shelving from libraries across the United States
* 775 tons of carbon offset on Betterworld.com sales
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