I’m not in the USA, but since this project hasn’t reached its goals yet I figured I might reach some people who are.
Kirrily Robert is currently staying in Vanuatu. Her friend who lives there is heavily involved in local IT and community iniatives.
Vanuatu is short on books and specifically short on technical books. They have terrible internet connections and many people do not have a computer at home, let alone a net connection for it (see Kirrily’s blog post about Vanuatu home life). So geeking out the old way at TLDP or whatever isn’t an option. It’s also a pain in the neck to ship anything there, as it’s expensive and takes forever (sounds like the shipments wait in Brisbane until the winds are right, the stars are aligned and the containers are overflowing).
So. Kirrily will be picking up technical books for Vanuatu in San Francisco in about a week’s time (all shipments must arrive there by the 30th) and flying back to Vanuatu with them. You can send your good condition second hand books or drop them off there if you happen to be in the area. They’re after books on a bunch of programming languages, web technologies, networking and Free Software. At the moment they seem short on anything in that list that isn’t Perl or Python and are particularly short on HTML and Javascript. If you don’t have books or can’t get them to San Francisco there’s an option to buy them from Amazon if they have a shortfall.
Find out more at Books for Vanuatu and sign up at the tracking page.
Please check with Kirrily before re-posting this somewhere with a huge number of eager readers: she wants a box or two of books, not a shipping container of them.