Seth Godin Donates His Books

 

We’re on a roll, and we hope it doesn’t end any time soon.

On Friday, after reading about our iREAD pilot program in a GigaOm article by Laura Hazard Owen, best-selling author Seth Godin threw his support behind us, commenting on GigaOm’s wall in a way only Seth could:

 

“When the marginal cost of a new book is zero and when the audience for these books does nothing to hurt the ability to sell books to more affluent readers, there’s no reason in the world it shouldn’t all be free. 

Shame on us if we don’t figure out how to make this happen.”

 

Seth even wrote about us on one of his blogs, and made a strong case for donating all 12 titles from The Domino Project to Worldreader. He also challenged publishers to take a similar step:

“Tell me again why a publisher in the privileged world is charging Worldreader for these books… the incremental cost is zero, and the opportunity cost is vanishingly small. What a great opportunity to seed the market, to encourage literacy at no cost to the publishers and to bring education and books to places where they are scarce. What happens to book publishing and to the authors involved if a million or ten million kids grow up reading their books? (Not to mention the impact on the kids and our world…)

Now the real question: what publishers are going to step up and say yes with their entire catalog? If you’re an author, ask your publisher. And if you’re a publisher (even a big New York City one–especially a big New York City one) then this is a great chance to say yes, go!”

We’re wondering the same thing: Who will follow Seth’s lead? We hope it’s you! Come on, jump in…

More Books For Our Collection

Coincidentally, Seth’s donation comes on the heels of news last week that Ripley’s Believe of Not! would donate many of its fun titles to our kids in Africa. We’re proud to add The Domino Project books to our collection. They include:

 

• Poke the Box
• Do The Work
• Self-Reliance
• Anything You Want
• Read This Before Our Next Meeting
• Pick Four
• Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness
• End Malaria
• Death and Taxes
• We Are All Weird
• B–If I should have a daughter
• Tales of the Revolution: True Stories of People who are Poking the Box and Making a Difference