Books We Like, And So Might You

Books have always been my favorite gifts, both to give and to receive. Matching book and gift-recipient, when it works out right, is like introducing two good friends and watching them fall in love. It's coming around to the gift-giving season, although of course I know not everyone plays the game. If you do, and if you too love to give books to friends and family, do I have the web site for you! I discovered it when it first started up, and enjoyed it quite a lot - then it kind of got lost in the shuffle of starting this blog and other stuff. I have recently most happily rediscovered it.

See, this is a progressive book site, a community of liberal whack jobs like all of us here at TBV (and hopefully many of our readers). Called Books We Like, they call themselves "activist e-commerce and collective intelligence." It's a non-profit service for book (and music and film) lovers, for promoting and discovering great stuff, and for supporting social-change non-profits through your online purchases. You can create your own page, where you make book recommendations, keep a list of books you've discovered and hope to live long enough to read. The fun part is reading through other members' pages, seeing what they recommend, seeing who else has recommended the same books that you have, getting to know people through books they love.

One of the "progressive" things about this site is that they are also a conduit to book purchasing at the regular online places: Powell's, Amazon, or the independent booksellers at BookSense. When you purchase a book, CD, DVD, or anything else, 7.5% of the purchase will go to the organization you choose from their list: Alternet - Books We Like - Chaordic Alliance - Code Pink - Coopamerica - Free Speech TV - Green Map System - Green Museum - Interra Project - In These Times - Organic Consumers Association - Our Media - Public News Service - Witness.

This offers a unique opportunity for the progressive community to use its massive purchasing power to support the organizations it cares about. Last year $69 billion was spent online (imagine that!), and probably 10% or more of it came from supporters of progressive causes. A piece of all that action can go to help support whichever of the great Books We Like partnering groups. You can support the priceless news and commentary on Alternet if you choose to make them the beneficiary of your commission, keep Code Pink out there protesting the Iraq war, help BWL itself continue. And your purchases won't cost YOU anything extra!

My BWL name is Gypsymoth. You can find my page of books by clicking on "people," then "recommenders," and following down through the alphabet to G! If you have a BWL account, or decide to start one, please leave a comment telling the name you use there. We can all see what others have been reading. I have to get busy and update my recommendations over there! I'm sadly behind - Thom Hartmann's Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight was the last one I posted, and it's been at least a year since I read it. Books We Like, click it now!

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