I had never seen this before (probably many of you have), but it was first brought to my attention by science fiction writer and all-around great guy, Robert Sawyer. The Kitchener Public Library has started offering book clubs in a bag, where you get a set of ten copies of the same book, plus a book-club discussion guide and everything checks out as one item.
When I read Robert's post, I thought that's a great idea! Then, when I finally got a library card at my local library, guess what they have? Yep! DIBs or Discussions In Boxes. From their website:
A selection of challenging and entertaining discussion books plus a binder full of reviews and information about the authors is available for a checkout period of 6 weeks.And here's a PDF explaining the service at Bettendorf.
How cool is that? Is this something your library could do?
(cross-posted at Pop Goes the Library)
1 comment:
Hey Editor,
My library system has this service, also. We call it book club kits. We also have the kits for kids books. It is very popular. The biggest problem I have with it is that we designated certain books as book club kits. The reason we made them kits as we had lots of copies of them. They are kept in storage so that when someone wants this book kit for their book club, the copies are all ready to go. There is also a book discussion guide ready to print out on a pdf file. But, of course, people come in all the time and want other titles that were not made kits. Then it becomes a chore. I wish our system would stick with the original list of books they created as book kits. There is a great selection, but there is always someone who comes along and wants to make the newest bestseller their book club kit. ARGH!
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