This; another issue is that in some places, books don't arrive even when sent. Post is often unreliable.

I'm wondering if we could do a Book Exchange setup, not just monetary, but to connect people who own books (and wouldn't mind to give them away or to loan them out) with reviewers who need them.

It won't solve the postage problem, but it might help people in the US who want to vote for Hugos but cannot due to money issues.

Yes! prezzey has told me about books that never even arrived! >_<

A book exchange would be great. Who knows how to set up a website to do that? (We could do it over LJ I suppose.)

LJ would be too bulky. There are a few ways this can go: a wordpress blog (better than LJ for categorizing and accessible archivng), a forum, something else I am not thinking about.

I would take this on (website), but between the job, disability/health issues, advocacy for my son, writing, ST, MoC and other projects I am stretched impossibly thin and cannot commit to anything else.

(speaking of, not sure if Shweta even has the spoons to read this... :P

But it could be done, and shouldn't even be that hard. At the same time we could also set up a recommendation depository for the Hugos and Nebulas for people who can vote and are interested in diversity and social justice. I suspect this would greatly help both the voters and the diversity-oriented nominees, and could be done in the same space.

Another thing I thought about are e-readers. Provided post issues do not exist (hah!), we could potentially fundraise to purchase 3 e-readers (such as the nook), and loan them out to current sponsored people, who would then pass them on to next year's sponsored people (provided this continues into next year, but I don't see why not, provided we can fundraise). How to fill up the e-readers is another question.

Perhaps this discussion should move away from Shweta's blog onto some other space, as I am, again, concerned about clogging Shweta's spoons.

Edited at 2011-08-31 04:24 pm (UTC)

Really glad this discussion is happening! And it's fine for it to continue here, but yeah I have no spoons to deal with this level of organizing, so it might be more *useful* to have it continue elsewhere...

Done #1
Done #2

Everyone, feel free to continue over at my blog! (Wow, I rushed so much to put this up that I managed to break my comments field, but it should be OK now... let me know if you can't comment.)

I can definitely do the recommendations / lists / etc. on my blog, I love to make lists of everything and I've been thinking of doing this myself anyway (because I don't want to miss anything - I read fast, so that's not an issue once I actually HAVE the stuff I want to read). I can set up a database too if the lists grow really big, and I can host it unless the traffic grows too extreme for my provider - I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon though.

I can also set up a forum, phpbb is very easy to set up and maintain - but in my experience, forums are not a really good idea unless things really get rolling. Even with about, say, 20 people, a forum looks sufficiently deserted that it actually scares away potential contributors.

I think Pocketbook has the most versatile e-readers (I have a hardware reviews column at a Hungarian magazine and I've tried out quite a few e-readers, unfortunately I can't keep them LOL!), but they can get quite pricey. (Also, their Android tablets are crap.) I don't think I really need an ereader, because I have a tablet PC. (It's quite bulky and dates back to the times when tablet PCs were hopelessly niche items, but I like it a lot!) Sure, an e-ink device is better in some respects than something with a LCD screen, but it's not an indispensable thing for me. Not speaking for the others though - I've read lots of books on an old CRT monitor back in the day, so I'm hardly representative ;]

scamis mentioned Angry Robot had ARCs for reviewers, I didn't know that - we should take a look at other publishers too.

I can make a list of things to do later today (G-d willing), and then we can decide who wants to do what, and how, etc. I'm totally OK with lots of traffic to me re this, I'm really enthused about the project and right now I also have the time to spare.