Happy Halloween! Raising money for UNICEF has been a traditional part of trick-or-treating over the last few decades, and Diane Duane is marking its 60th anniversary by offering e-reading access to “Not On My Patch,” a new novelette in the Young Wizards universe, as a reward to anyone who contributes more than $5 through UNICEF’s website before the end of Halloween in the USA (at 12:01 a.m. Hawaiian time November 1st). Donors forward a copy of their donation confirmation e-mail to youngwizards4unicef@gmail.com and will get a link to where they can read the work. Through the month of November,...

Here’s an e-book project to raise money for a cause local to me. GalleyCat reports on a digital anthology project featuring essays by a number of authors discussing how movies have influenced their work. Editor Cynthia Hawkins explains: [Proceeds] will go to the Joplin Eagles Television 14 Program through the Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund. The JET 14 Program instructs 160 students each school year in the fundamentals of film production and broadcasting. […] The JET 14 Program lost everything on May 22, their technology center and studio, studio...

O'Reilly Media is experimenting with a new publishing model for Todd Sattersten's book "Every Book Is a Startup," releasing it now as an ebook even though it's not complete. Right now the book is $5 for the first two chapters, with all future chapters promised as free updates, and as the book grows in length the price will go up. When finished, it will also be released in print for $25. The idea, writes Joe Wilkert on his blog, is to use the agile model of software startups—"release early and release often"—both to encourage purchases and to collect useful feedback on...

Shifti.org, the on-line transformation story writing site I’ve written about and whose sysadmin I have interviewed, is currently down with a hard drive failure. As it is run largely as a personal project of its sysadmin, Daniel Hazelton, he depends on donations to keep the site running, and he had already been running a donation drive to pay the Internet bill. He’s going to need more money to fund a new hard drive, and there is currently a PayPal donation button on the site itself. I realize not many of TeleRead’s readers are necessarily fans or even readers of...

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...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting story about a book assembled to raise money for Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake. The idea behind 100 Stories for Haiti was to assemble 100 stories from all over the Internet, and then publish them as a book and e-book. Author Greg McQueen says that the book would not have been possible five years ago, before the dawn of social networking: As it happened, I posted [to social networks] an appeal for stories on the morning of Tuesday, January, 19. Just one week after the earthquake...

I received the following email today from LibriVox.org, a site where people upload their own audiobook recordings of public-domain books. These recordings are themselves put into the public domain, so they can be used for any purpose just as the original texts can. I have used a couple of them myself in my podcast The Biblio File. Dearest LibriVox listeners, volunteers, & supporters: For four-and-a-half years, LibriVox volunteers have been making audiobooks for the world to enjoy, and giving them away for free. We’ve made thousands of free audiobooks that have been...

I’m at Springfield, MO gaming con VisionCon helping staff the booth for the other Springfield con, SpringfieldGAME. This seems like an appropriate time and place to reflect further upon the DriveThruRPG Doctors Without Borders charity drive that I covered a few days ago. According to the site, gamers have donated over $117,000 so far. DriveThruRPG will accept donations until further notice, but the bundle will only be given out through the end of January (though the downloads will remain accessible afterward to those who have already purchased it). For those curious about where their donations are going, BoingBoing has...