Thursday, January 7, 2010

Buy Local Book Club

As some of you already know, some of us Athenians are working together to create an Athens Buy Local initiative.  Our Facebook page already has well over one thousand fans, which bodes very well for our city's future. There will be a formal launch of the program this year.  As a new small business owner (and child of parents who've had a small business for over 30 years), it's both invigorating and heartwarming to see so much support for our independent-minded, eclectic community.

Recently I posted a link (on Facebook) to the American Booksellers Association's Indie Local First Reading List, a collection of books about "making and keeping local communities vibrant." I asked fans of Avid Bookshop and fans of Buy Local Athens if they'd be interested in participating in a book club focused on buying and sourcing locally.  The response was immediate and strong, so here I am to share with you a few books for us to choose from.   Vote below in the comments section or via email. (I'm sure there'll be some debate and discussion on the Buy Local Facebook page and the Avid Bookshop Facebook page as well.  Worry not--I'll find a way to combine all this feedback in order to pick the book most people wanted to read.)

We'll plan to meet in mid-March to discuss the book together at some locally-owned, independent business (to be chosen later).




Here are three books to choose from.  Click on the titles for more information, courtesy of Indiebound.org. Let me know which one you're most interested in! Voting deadline is Friday, January 15th.

1. The Better World Handbook (2007 edition) by Ellis Jones, Ross Haenfler, and Brett Johnson
2. The Great Neighborhood Book by Jay Walljasper and Benjamin Fried
3. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Economies and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben 

3 comments:

Bobby Nash said...

There are several local writers (including me) so I think there are plenty to choose from. Athens also has an annual writers conference held at UGA that brings in a lot of authors for a booksigning.

Bobby

Avid Bookshop said...

As I mentioned to Bobby on Twitter (he's @bobbynash), this book club is more about buying locally and using local products when possible, not necessarily about local authors. That being said, a local author book club sounds like a superb idea, one we'll develop more once Avid is open.

Avid Bookshop said...

The results are in! For our first-ever Buy Local Athens book club, we'll be reading THE GREAT NEIGHBORHOOD BOOK by Jay Walljasper. Put a copy on hold using Athens-Clarke County Library's website, or use Indiebound.org to find an independent bookstore to buy it from. We'll meet in mid-March 2010--details on when and where exactly will be forthcoming.
LIBRARY: http://gapines.org/opac/en-US/skin/default/xml/rdetail.xml?r=4450165&t=great%20neighborhood%20book&tp=keyword&d=0&hc=24&rt=keyword

INDIEBOUND: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780865715813
http://imanavidreader.blogspot.com/2010/01/buy-local-book-club.html
imanavidreader.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-09
69413
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:O4Z36GND43XX73IG3QQN3ZT2KDQGEJ7N
<urn:uuid:7ccf2996-1cd0-4c78-bdcc-6c4a128869af>
2019-02-17T02:44:50Z
172.217.7.129
text/html
sha1:WKZ366V5VWHSB6QG4B6SXF757KI26D6M
<urn:uuid:755325cc-572b-406d-9605-1c6cf413571c>
http://imanavidreader.blogspot.com/2010/01/buy-local-book-club.html
response
<urn:uuid:3d884ffa-ca80-46c5-a080-c66f0929408e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-09
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-29-113-152.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/