A social entrepreneurship company based in Australia, Mailbooks for Good, has recently launched a literary-minded project that combines good design and a simple but strong idea with the joy of philanthropy. The company's tagline, "Re-gift the gift of reading," does a decent job of explaining the concept. But here's the general idea, direct from the MFG website: Mailbooks For Good is an innovation in book publishing, which allows you to donate books directly to those who need it. When the books are finished, readers simply turn the covers inside out and the books become pre-paid and pre-addressed packages. Once posted they are...

Two stories crossed my inbox this morning on the rise of the fudnraiser book. The first was a review about an anthology called Orange Karen that was conceived as a fundraiser for author Karen DeLabar, who is recovering from a battle with toxic shock syndrome. Fellow authors, both amateur and professional, contributed to the book, with the proceeds going to fund her medical expenses and recovery efforts. Meanwhile, numerous sites (including MediaBistro, where I read the news) are reporting about sci-fi author Dave Wolverton (aka Dave Farland) whose teenage son has been injured in a sports accident. There is no specific fundraiser...

I vaguely remember seeing a few blog posts and photo-heavy features here and there in months past about tiny, DIY libraries. It always seemed to me like the sort of thing you might expect to see in one of those weird BuzzFeed roundups: 12 Oddball Book Lovers Who've Built Tiny Libraries On the Side of the Road, or something like that. But according to the last edition of O'Reilly Media's TOC Today newsletter (which you really, really should subscribe to if you don't already get it), tiny libraries are now a 'thing.' That is, a trend—or to be more specific, a quickly growing...

I was the recipient of a half-depressing, half-uplifting email a couple of weeks back from a woman who represents the parent-teacher organization of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa), located in Hoboken, N.J. HoLa, she tells me, is holding its annual fundraiser this coming April. And because the city of Hoboken was absolutely pummeled by Hurricane Sandy this past October, proceeds raised through the school's fundraiser will help with hurricane loss and cleanup efforts. Funds will also be used to furnish and equip the school's classrooms, enhance its art and music programs, and more. Specially, HoLa is looking for children's book donations...

The Humble Indie E-Book Bundle’s sale period is over. It raised over $1.2 million on over 84,000 sales, with an average purchase price of $14.28—an altogether impressive amount. Participating author John Scalzi has a couple of post-mortem posts on his blog looking at the reasons for it. Scalzi sees the keys to the Humble E-Book Bundle’s success as being the Humble Bundle brand reputation based on past success, a well-curated bundle featuring titles with mass geek appeal, the absence of DRM, the charity involvement, its overall uniqueness, and the pay-what-you-want and limited-time-offer gimmicks. All these factors combined to make the bundle...

Publisher Bryce Milligan of Wings Press, one of the Independent Publishers Group publishers being hit hard by Amazon’s e-book delisting, has posted an op-ed on Publishing Perspectives looking at the philanthropic giving that Amazon has been doing since 2009. (Milligan previously wrote the piece about "Amazon’s Assault on Intellectual Freedom" reposted here by Rich Adin.) Milligan calls Amazon’s charity program a potential “Trojan horse,” pointing out that Amazon does not exactly have a history of philanthropy, there is no specific application process, and its qualifications include being able to work with Amazon toward the organization’s goals including public outreach....

Remember the Humble Indie Bundle, the Humble Indie Bundle 2, and various successors? They applied the pay-what-you-want model to selling sets of popular independently-developed computer games, and have reportedly made a lot of money for the developers, as well as for the charities that they also support. Now a new site, StoryBundle.com, has sprung up that promises to do for e-books what the Humble Bundle does for games: select a few quality independent e-books and allow people to set their own price for the DRM-free bundle. It still seems to be in the planning stages—the site is taking the...

I mentioned last week that the UK government had eliminated its funding for literacy charity Booktrust with the new budget that takes effect in April. In response to public outrage at this decision, The Bookseller reports that the government and Booktrust have released a joint statement saying that the government will “continue to fund Booktrust book-gifting programmes in the future.” However, critics are still skeptical. Labour leader Ed Miliband calls it only a “partial U-turn” (isn’t that kind of like being “a little bit pregnant”? A “partial U-turn” is just a turn!) and points out that the announcement is...

The Bookseller is reporting that Lee Harris, editor of Angry Robot, and steampunk author Scott Harrison have set up H&H Books as a non-profit publishers. Their first title will be Voices From the Past and will be an anthology of flash fiction with over 20 authors including Jasper Fforde. The title will sell for 59p/$0.99 and all proceeds will go to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. The book will be published in April, 2011. Scott Harrison said: "Flash fiction is ideally suited to the electronic format, and with over 20 stories for less than the cost of a can...

An email from reader David Cassel: A team of seven people just began delivering Kindles filled with ebooks to students in a village in Ghana! It's the pilot program for a new charity hoping to improve third world education using ebooks, using digital readers in remote villages to "put a library of books within reach of every family on the planet." The organizers are maintaining an inspiring blog, saying that each delivery "was as if we were handing someone raw power," and noting that it seems to be having a positive impact on the rest of the community. And Amazon even...

In January, we covered a fundraising drive that DriveThruRPG put on to assist Doctors Without Borders’s relief efforts in Haiti, selling a $1480 bundle of RPG e-books for the budget-friendly price of $20. It ended up earning over $160,000—not exactly pocket change—and showed that gamers are willing to step up to help out in time of crisis (or, at least, are willing to take advantage of a great deal on gaming e-books even if they would otherwise have been opposed to donating). Now DriveThruRPG has another charity bundle available, to help Doctors Without Borders’s relief efforts in the...

Taking advantage of the zero-marginal-cost nature of electronic media distribution, a group of independent computer game developers has teamed up to offer the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a bundle of five games (including the award-winning World of Goo) for Windows, Macintosh, or Linux as a set-your-own-price download. Purchasers can choose how much of their purchase contribution they want to go to the games’ developers and how much to go to the non-profits Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The default is to split it fifty-fifty, but if purchasers want it all to go to the developers, or...