Cyber-Monday charity idea.

So here's an idea for you.

While you're sitting at your desk, browsing the lightning-fast Internet on your state-of-the-art computer in your climate-controlled office on cyber-Monday ... consider taking a break from purchasing an extra tie (that you know your dad will not wear anyway), and donate a box of books to the Bethania library!

Amazon.com has great specials this week. You can just add another box to what you're already purchasing or use your amazon credit to make your donation. Plus, once you buy $25 worth of merchandise, amazon will ship for free!!! So think about a $25 donation. It's not too much to give up, right? Twenty-five dollars is like a trip to the movie theater for two. One dinner at a chain-restaurant. Three venti cappa-frappa-froo-froo drinks at Starbucks. Less than a mani-pedi.

Plus, you can make it your Christmas charity donation for the season and check "goodwill towards men" off your to-do list. Done and done.

For about $25.00 ....

• Many, many, many of the books on our "wishlist" are Christian romances and Christian mysteries. They run about $3 per book. That means that for about $27 you can send us NINE new books, and since you went over the $25-mark, you just saved yourself $10 in shipping and sent it for FREE. And by the way the girls LOVE those "love inspired" books from Steeple Hill publishers. I don't even have a space on the selves for them because they're never in the library long enough for me to re-shelf them.
• Also, you can sort the wishlist by price and you'll see that a bunch of the non-fiction science books come up with really good used-book prices. So you could fill up a box pretty quickly with really good non-fiction too -- and the collection REALLY needs that.
• Use the wishlist as a guide. Feel free to just get the flavor of what we want and what we need and find books locally or check your own shelves or take up a book collection in your office, with your book club, or at your church, etc. You can spread the word by forwarding a link to all my blog posts about the library project. And if you're going to do the shipping yourself, all the information is listed on the left navigation of the amazon wishlist page, and also detailed in The Great Book Search post.

For about $30 ...

• Or less, if you buy used ... you could purchase all three volumes of the Sierra Jensen series, by Robin Jones Gunn and you would be the forever immortalized book hero of every girl at the school. The books are by far the most checked-out books. The paperbacks that we have are taped together. The sets are incomplete. There are pages missing. Three complete hardback volumes will make these girls go nuts. And I promise to take video of the whole thing, because watching them go crazy for books is pretty much my favorite thing ever.
• Alternatively, you could buy the other Christy Miller books (Sierra Jensen's older sister, for those in the know). Or anything else by Robin Jones Gunn.
• You can also view our wishlist "by priority" to see what I've labeled as the girls' favorite books and other series that we have that are incomplete.

For less than $40 ...

• You could buy a Marshallese-English dictionary. We don't have a single one on campus. I have never seen a student who owns one. And our Marshallese students are the ones who struggle the most.
• You could buy an English Grammar textbook by Betty Schrampfar Azar. Used as a supplement to the textbooks we already have on campus, these exercises dramatically improve the English levels of the students. I only have one very old copy and I can't photocopy it because someone wrote all the answers in the blanks in ink. :(