a book swap can run a bunch of different ways... the easiest on you all would be for kids to bring in and swap... vouchering is too labor intensive. you might also want to talk to you teachers and have it organized by grade level. you could even run it over the lunch period.
Your Scholastic rep should be able to tell you where your local warehouse is; it looks like they're all over the country. Our Scholastic office is pretty far away, but the warehouse is only about 2 towns from us. It's huge (but really hot-no a/c)and almost everything displayed is marked down. There are whole sections of books marked to 99 cents. I spent several hours there last year, and am looking forward to going again this year. The funny thing is, no matter how much I promote it to the teachers the only one who goes is the librarian, who is, of course, a fellow bookaholic. The sale usually runs for a week.
We do a book drive every two years. It's for a different purpose, but it might work. We make it a community-wide event and call it the ton-of-books book drive. We literally try to get a ton of book donates. The first year we weighed in almost 9,000 pounds!
We "advertise" throughout all the schools (elementary, middle and high), at the senior center, put flyers in all the local businesses, etc... ask parents to save all their kids' books and clean our their shelves every couple years, older books (teen/adult) welcome too.
Maybe it's a big success given the cause. We box up these books (we get the boxes donated along with a truck from one of the local car dealers) and take them to a couple (two or three) schools in the inner city. They set up tables in their gym, and we lay out the books (we try to lay them out by reading/age level) and let the kids come (families invited too) and help themselves to a few books to take home, to keep. The outpouring of givers is tremendous and the response we get from these kids, their families and the teachers is overwhelming.
One thing you might consider is have a book swap instead of a book sale. We've done this before for the express purpose of letting kids get to trade their books for books they haven't read. If you're not intent in making money off the effort, this is a pretty easy effort, as the kids are the ones who actually end up running it.
Hi! This bookaholic has found several ways to get books for cheap-if you hold a Scholastic book fair, take the profits in vouchers instead of cash and use them to buy the "bruised book packs" in their catalog. You have no control over which titles you'll receive, but you order by grade level and none of the books we got were damaged at all. (Plus you double your profit doing it this way.) Also, go to the Scholastic Warehouse sale if you can-Dec. and May, usually. I spent $90 last year for personal use and bought books as Christmas gifts for almost every child on my list.
Another option is shopping at thrift stores and garage sales. I find a lot of books this way, sometimes brand new.
Libraries will also have sales on books they don't need anymore; around here they are advertised in the newspaper, although some libraries have the sale on all the time.
Plus, it doesn't hurt to just ask. Send home a flyer, write letters to businesses, contact local bookstores and explain what you're doing and what kind of help you need. The worst they can say is no. :cool:
