Today's BBYA Meeting Madness--ARC Giveaway Day!

Cindy: Santa came early to our BBYA teens today--it was ARC-giveaway day! More popular than the snacks, is the opportunity to snag a few free books that are being purged from our temporary BBYA collection. Earlier this week we showed one of our teens reading the advanced reader copy of Gone by Grant and an astute blog reader with much better eyesight than I have remaining sent a question about seeing a barcode and spine label on the book. Lynn sent her an explanation for our process, which we feel falls within the guidelines the publishers allow:
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Lynn: It is a good question and I hope I can reassure you! We assign a temporary bar code and place all our arcs in a temporary collection called BBYA that is accessible to our book club members as well as all our students for just one year. We have already pulled out the books that didn't make BBYA nominations for this year and will give them away this week. In January after Midwinter, we will pull all the 2008 BBYA nominated arcs and give them away to our students. We have over 5,000 students so we needed to be able to identify and locate the arcs during the discussion season.

This bookclub came into being when Cindy and I were serving on BBYA. The kids loved it so much that we have kept it going. We do NOT put arcs in our permanent collections. We do buy lots of copies of the titles that the teens report as favorites during and after the BBYA year. We have one galley of Hunger Games, for instance, but Cindy purchased ten copies for the two middle schools and will probably need more after booktalking it on the weekly video announcements this week.
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Cindy: As you can see, we have some enthusiastic readers in our after school club--who don't mind mugging for the camera, either. :) They helped restore order after the photo shoot and then helped themselves to more books. We also gave away some publisher book-related bling that we had picked up at conferences. The sturdy Penguin and HarperCollins book bags with book covers on them were a big hit. The Twilight canvas bag was used as a major prize LONG AGO and makes a daily appearance in the high school halls. We do have a fair number of boys in the club but they left before the final photo shoot but not before they snagged a few rounds of free books. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to the generous publishers for making these galleys available to teens and their librarians in addition to the bookstore buyers! We all enjoy the early peek at what you're up to next!