Back in September I wrote a post called, “English Books for Thai School – Can You Help?” and was so pleased people jumped in to help. We collected well over 250 books for the school and delivered them when the students and teachers arrived at the Mall of America at the outset of their time here in Minnesota.
I cannot express enough my thanks for all who helped out:
Lerner Publishing: Kathleen Clarke responded to a blind email request of mine and she put together a big box of brand new, amazingly high quality books, perfect for the English program at Strisuksa school
Meg Knodl
Meg Knodl: As senior librarian in Communications and Community Engagement with Hennepin County (Minn.) Library, Meg had great suggestions on buying surplus books from the library system (a sale was just ending and she connected me with the right folks).
Paul Schroeder
To show the power of social media, I’d placed a plea and link to that Minnov8 post mentioned above on my Facebook wall. Two people responded immediately with a third who joined in:
Paul Schroeder: A fraternity brother of mine who read about my plea on Facebook responded by collecting several dozen books and even cajoled a friend of his in participating with some novels. These novels, while not perfectly targeted to the students, surprisingly were very welcomed by the teachers!
Sherry Collins: She had several ideas I took advantage of and then recommended a site I’d never heard of, FreeCycle, a kind of “Craigslist for free stuff” and I placed a post in the Minneapolis Group
The very generous donation by Beth Sullivan, volunteer for The Women's Prison Book Project
Beth Sullivan: She responded with 75 classic (and new!) books that were extras from a non-profit she volunteers for, The Women’s Prison Book Project.
As these great volunteers were putting forth such kind efforts to gather books, I’d been interacting with my contact at the school, Lynn Brown. Mentioning the phenomenal work of Project Gutenberg, I asked her to go through the books there and make recommendations and we’d download the books for her (since their internet connections are pretty minimal at the school).
What happened next surprised even me and set me on a course I hadn’t expected.
Ms. Brown and her colleague in the English department chose 108 Project Gutenberg books. Discovering that the Project Gutenberg books are available in a variety of formats — and offers over 36,000 free ebooks in ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats — I decided to download all of them in these formats as well as two potentially useful for a country in Asia (i.e., Plucker and QiOO Mobile).
After downloading and organizing them in folders I thought, “Hmm…this is going to be tough for the students to find, and download, the books of their choice in their chosen format” so I did what any geek would do: I built an HTML website “front end” for the files.
An (AJAX) dropdown for each book reveals its formats (click for larger view)
Website "front end" for ebooks (click for larger view)
Realizing that the directories with the ebooks in them totaled over 8GBs — and now knowing exactly what technologies they had at their disposal in Thailand — I wasn’t certain if they could read DVD-Rs, would appreciate a bunch of CDs (which, of course, would possibly break the links in the mini website front-end) so I bought a couple of 16GB thumb drives so they would have two copies.
Ms. Brown and her colleagues were quite enthused about receiving this and she then exclaimed, “Oh my gosh…we can put this on the “school” server (vs. just the English department server) and make it available to all students!”
Wish we could have done more for them. Also wished there was a way to get tablets in to the hands of students (or even cheap Kindles) if there was a reliable way for them to download ebooks. Got to think more about this and possible solutions.
So again, thank you to those who helped out and I’ll follow up when I hear how the kids are doing with what you donated!