I've been going through my personal library of books and pulling all of the old ones I'm no longer going to read or those which are out of date and turning them around on Amazon.com for a little bit of a profit. Because of that, I've put a system in place to crank out professional invoices and packing and labeling of each of them. Right now, there are manual steps, but its pretty easy to do. So I had an idea... Why not start a collection of old/unused books in usable condition from everyone in the group, turn those over on Amazon.com and use the monies as a means of bringing in some speakers, paying for events (such as Cogan Fairs table space, distributions, magazine subscriptions for the group or similar) and so on. The funds would be directly deposited into the ECLUG bank account which our treasurer Jack maintains. Not only will this help ECLUG's membership by helping bring in quality speakers, materials and put on some good community events and exposure, it will help to: - Unclutter your own personal bookshelves of old books you're not reading (and not just computer books, ANY books that Amazon.com lists, you can sell back to their readers). - Put some useful books into the hands of others seeking those books across the world - Provide a small bit of funding for ECLUG for future fun projects I'm not sure how we could go about doing this as a tax-deductable donation (probably requires us being an "official" 501(c)3, but that was in the mid to long term plans anyway). Jack, any ideas on that? Another option is for everyone to just sell them on Amazon.com directly, and take some of the profit and donate it to ECLUG directly. Just sign up, list your books and their condition, put a fair price on it (taking into account your own costs for labelling and shipping envelopes/boxes) and away you go! I've been doing this for a grand total of 1 week so far, and have sold 20 books from my collection so far. That's almost an average of 3 books per-day every day. Not too shabby (and it makes the wife happy to see me losing the bookshelf space =) What do you all think? Doable? -- David A. Desrosiers desrod gnu-designs com http://gnu-designs.com
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