How You Can Help Donate Books To People In Need

You know that books aren't dangerous — but are you ready to prove it? Well, go grab your camera, because there are three days left in the #BooksArentDangerous campaign on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. The creators of the campaign, bestselling authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, are asking readers to post photos of personally life-changing books with the hashtag, because, as Stohl wrote at The Nook Blog, "For every book that gets challenged in a school, there’s a kid being challenged who just might need to read it."

Although, yes, they're promoting their new book Dangerous Deception with the hashtag, the campaign isn't entirely self-serving: for every photo posted — up to 5,000 of them — one book will be donated to an underserved school or library. Little, Brown Books For Young Readers will be making the donations through their young readers site The NOVL and a partnership with First Book, an organization that promotes literacy for children from low-income families by providing new books and educational resources. That's awesome.

The idea actually came straight from the authors themselves. Stohl wrote that they asked their publishers to "take the budget they had set aside for our marketing campaign and donate it to books for children who didn’t have them, because that was more important to us than running a magazine ad. To our publisher’s credit, they were instantly onboard."

"We wanted to celebrate the Dangerous Deception release by letting everyone experience the thrill of sharing a book with a reader who wouldn’t otherwise have one. It’s my favorite kind of campaign — stone soup, where we all kick something in!" wrote Stohl.

Somewhere around 2,000 readers have joined in so far, sharing stories about their favorite books, why they love books generally, or even about the good kind of dangers of certain books.

And, of course, it’s the Internet, so folk are getting creative with the selfies.

The campaign kicked off on May 12, and you have until May 26 to get in on the action. So, do some good, and snap a pic.

Images: florian b/Flickr; BooksArentDangerous, kamigarcia/Instagram