Fwd: Free Books from Sams Publishing for your User Group

[Tom Phoenix]

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Ovid wrote:

> 2.  If we don't establish a library (I don't see how it would be
> feasible), who gets the books?

We could raffle them off or whatever, then use the resulting funds to pay
for refreshments^Wmeeting supplies.

> 5.  Legal question:  is this income?  Do we have to declare it or
> anything like that?

Well, you said they were from SAMS... So let's just say that they're
worthless. :-)

To me, it seems no different than other in-kind donations that the group
has (tacitly) accepted: the meeting space and refreshments from onsite,
the waived presentation fees, web hosting and web page maintenance, and
anything else I can't think of right now. If you're worried, we could draw
up a charter as a non-profit. (pm.org should give user groups a sample
charter; maybe we should suggest that to them.)

It sure sounds as if SAMS is fishing for reviews. Not that there's
anything wrong with that. But if (_if_) somebody wants to review these and
post the review on the website, then (A) the reviewer should get to keep
the reviewed book and (B) we should get at least one other publisher to
contribute books. I'm pretty sure that we could get at least two
publishers from the set { O'Reilly, Manning, Addison Wesley } to match the
contribution. But it sounds like more trouble than it's worth, unless
somebody out there really wants some free books.

--Tom

TIMTOWTDI