Today walking by a book stand my eye was arrested by a book called “Canadian Criminal Law.” I was momentarily perplexed by the words “every child” that were simultaneously trying to enter my brain. I stopped and scanned the book, to be confronted by the sticker of a multi-pronged book drive called “A book for Every Child”.
I’ve seen the donation boxes for this drive in my school, they collect old books that we don’t want to send to children in Africa. I don’t know if the fact that it’s in a book stand—for sale—means that it was rejected by the drive, but it does strike me that there is very little use that your average child in Ghana has for a first year text book on Canadian criminal law. Who donated this book, and what good did they think it would do? Did it make them feel good to “help” some child in Africa? It’ a little mindboggling to me.
Filed under: Africa
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I think it’s because they can’t sell them to used bookstores here, and they don’t want to throw them out, so they’re giving them away. Doesn’t matter to who, but by golly, it’s not in a landfill!
Do you think they might want some of my old Applied Math textbooks?
Hypothesis #1: Someone interpreted “child” loosely enough to encompass high-school students who might be thinking of a career in criminal law… in Canada…? Because everyone wants to be a criminal lawyer in Canada.
Hypothesis #2: “Someone’s taking books? I’ve got a tonne of books I don’t want anymore!”
Hypothesis #2a: Like the above, but with some creative accounting to claim this as a tax write-off. (Or maybe not so creative; I actually have no idea how/if one can claim non-monetary charitable gifts on one’s taxes.)
Hypothesis #3: Deeply misguided sense of how one learns English from books. The fact that the book ended up in a former British colony (rather than a country where English-speakers are thinner on the ground) is clearly a clerical error of some sort.
I’m with Dr Hatter’s #1, here. I recall dialogue around many book drives intended for “the less advantaged” and a common notion is that text books are expensive and as such could be useful for poor, struggling students.
Whether that’s really true, people do have an aversion for throwing out their school texts (because it is, essentially, throwing out part of their youth, I imagine) so it feels better to donate them. We don’t know where these books end up, though, so you get ridiculous situations like this. At least donated clothes with statements and logos that only make sense elsewhere can be repurposed. I’m with E here when I say that there is little value to even the most clever and aspiring lawyer in Ghana for Canadian criminal law texts.
Clearly, such books would be sorted and routed to the most appropriate place, where they are sure to be put to good use, right?
The problem is that these books are shipped around as cargo, passed through many hands. Some sorting is certainly done, and part of the sorting is tossing out the stuff that no one wants, which eventually end up being sold by street vendors. In some ways these books were thrown out several times, over and over!
As to how much value such texts really have? Well, I just consider how many of us go shopping for the latest edition of a text when starting a class. There is that little back-and-forth as you try to convince yourself that the previous edition you can get used for cheap is good enough. But there is the shiny new edition for only 3-4 times the price.
In a more perfect world, we would hook up specific schools with specific donors who would simply provide the capital necessary to get the books into the right hands.
Heck, this is the very promise of print-on-demand that the notion of copyright and publishing is resistant to, but is an ideal way to disseminate information in the manner we think we ought to.
I’ll go with the Doc’s 2a.
Here in the states, you can write of non-monetary charitable gifts.
Here’s what happened:
Someone from the U.S. bought the book to find loopholes in Canadian tax laws (wanted to create a ‘shell’ corporation for illegal purposes). Being the rocket scientist, he, of course, purchased the criminal law book instead of the tax law book.
I’d go into detail, but I’m off to Montreal. There’s this book store I heard about…