Patricia Smith is a teacher of visually impaired students in Detroit’s public school system. She mailed me a copy of my YA novel Little Brother that she had run off her school’s Braille embosser and supplied to her students. She reports, “What I could not enclose is the gratitude from my Braille reading students. For various reasons, most books in Braille are aimed at younger children. My students are all between the ages of 12 and 15 and have no real interest in reading a Kindergarten level book. I was finally able to give them something interesting, compelling, and, most importantly at their grade level.” Patricia notes that she was able to do this only because the text of the novel is available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download (though US copyright law grants her the right to prepare a Braille edition of any book, the cost of doing so from a traditional printed book is prohibitive, and converting from a DRM-crippled ebook is technically difficult).

Braille Little Brother, courtesy of Patricia Smith of the Detroit public school system, the office, Clerkenwell, London, UK

@Halvais, a fan of my novel Little Brother, has set up a wiki-style site with the full text of the book for group annotation with links and commentary. Sweet!

W1N5T0N

In Canada, the US and the UK, kids will be going back to school in a short while, so now’s a good time to remind you of the donation program for my books. Here’s how it works: teachers, librarians (and others, like people who work in family shelters, halfway houses, prisons, etc) indicate that they’d like copies of my books for their classes or collections. Then, people like you order copies and have them sent straight to the teachers. I pay someone who checks out each donation solicitation to make sure that it’s legit.

I do this in lieu of cash donations, because this has so many beneficial side effects: it registers as a sale, which means my publisher is happy; it supports booksellers (you can donate a copy from any bookseller that has a mail-order business), who are firmly on the side of the angels; it gets me a royalty and keeps my rapidly growing toddler in shoes and sailor suits; and, of course, it gets books into the hands of teachers, librarians, care-givers, case workers, and the kids, clients, and patrons they serve. It’s a win all the way around (and yes, I’m thinking of ways to automate and expand this program to include other authors, possibly through a charity that can issue tax-receipts to donors, which would be just so kick-ass).

We’ve given hundreds of books to schools, libraries and other worthy institutions this way. For years, readers have asked me if they can donate cash to me because they’ve downloaded my books and don’t need the physical objects. I’m really happy with this solution, even though to date it has made a small loss (it’s not cheap to pay someone a fair wage to hand-write all the web-pages, and vet all the solicitation).

Donate Little Brother

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