New Developments

Just a quick post to give you a short inspirational update. The Year of Readers has now been mentioned at quite a few great places like A Novel Challenge, Estellas Revenge and Blog of a Bookslut , as well as at many independent reader blogs. Checking my site results today I see we've had a few mentions on French blogs so Bonjour! I'm in the process of getting some more exposure for the event at the moment as well as submitting the blog address to search engines and trying to get small presses involved.

I've heard from three of my favourite book bloggers that they will be selecting charities and joining up to raise funds in 2009. Those e-mails were really exciting because I love their blogs and I know big readers means lots of money for worthy causes.

I've picked my charity! I'll be reading for Room to Read, which works on two continents and believes reading is key to breaking the cycle of poverty. I've also started getting my friends to sponsor me and the pennies are rolling in.

Speaking of pennies I've made a (possibly financially ruinous) decision that for every book read by a Year of Reading participant I will personally donate a penny to EcoLibris (donation to be made January 2010). I know environmental 'offsetting' can be a bit tenuous. Readers should focus their efforts on reading secondhand books, borrowed books etc but there's just no use pretending that the trade in virgin paper books is going to disappear. Surely it's better to help plant new trees than to sit around and tut. As the EcoLibris website says:

'Eventually (and hopefully sooner then later), books will be made from recycled paper or other eco-friendly materials. But till then, we can still do something to make the world greener.'

So I'll be asking for book totals at the end of 2009 and each book read will earn an extra penny for EcoLibris, which go towards planting trees. Whatever total we reach I'll round it up to a tree planting amount of dollars.

Finally I'm happy to announce that every month in 2009 I'll be holding a little motivational prize draw for readers here at the blog. All prizes will be designed to enable your reading obsession. Look out for some cool reading paraphenalia.

That's it for now. I hope everyone who has signed up so far has received their sposnorship form (contact me at bakerjodie at googlemail dot com if you haven't). Thanks for spreading the word.