World Book Night

I have been selected as a ‘giver’ on the forthcoming World Book Night on 5th March 2011. This is a fantastic initiative instigated by book publisher, Jamie Byng, to give away a million books. Yes–a million–completely free.

My choice is David Nicholls’ brilliant novel ‘One Day’, which has already sold over a million copies, and is currently being made into a film, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. I will have forty-eight special copies to give to anyone I like, and maybe to some I don’t like, but you can’t discriminate! I’m going to try to generate some publicity for the event locally to where I live, to try and get other selected givers to combine together and create a mass book-giveaway event, maybe in the local library. There are twenty different titles on offer (they can be found here: http://www.worldbooknight.org), and the ideal result would be to find at least one giver of each of the twenty titles. Whether I achieve that remains to be seen, but I’ll do my damnedest.

Success would be magnificent. Imagine, almost a thousand brand new, first rate books, completely free. All you need to do is show up and take one, or two. There may be the opportunity to generate a little charity from the event, too, but the main objective is to get people reading–proper books. And good books, too. Once again, I’ll be providing updates in due course. Check out my Twitter page if you’re interested.

Ian