[josette at oreilly.co.uk: O'Reilly UK User Group Programme]

[Adrian Wontroba]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2002 at 12:07:21PM +0000, Nik Clayton wrote:
> At BSDCon Europe I was talking with Josette Garcia, who's the marketing
> manager for O'Reilly UK.  Turns out that they have a 'user group
> programme' for supporting user groups.  More details in the forwarded
> letter below.
> 
> Assuming no one has any objections to the occasional e-mail from
> O'Reilly to this list (see my next message, which shows an example) I'll
> follow this up with Josette.
> 
> Comments?

Excellent idea.

As for the review copies:

It might be an idea to take a leaf out of ACCU's book and:

* Seek a volunteer coordinator to receive the books for review, pass
them out to the review applicants, beat them up to provide good (honest)
timely reviews, retrieve the book if an adequate review is not supplied,
etc.

* Put the completed reviews somewhere accessible.

* Charge reviewers a small fee for the onwards postage.

Don't under-estimate the time involved involved in administering this,
especially for a distributed organisation.  You have to be in a position
where you can accept bulky packages during the day, and be able to post
them.

Reviewers shouldn't underestimate the time it takes to review a book
either.  Back when I had the time I did quite a few.  It actually works
out as quite an expensive way of buying books, but is very satisfying.

-- 
Adrian Wontroba