DAWN book club - need help with answers

DC Anti-War Network's (DAWN’s) new book club –

DAWN is going to start a new book club, and I’ve agreed to bottomline it. However, I have never been in a book club, and right off the bat, I can see some challenges, not the first of which is determining what we should be reading.

I wonder how it is we get the books we need to be reading. I want this to be affordable for people, but at the same time, it’s not possible to print out a million copies of a book. Does anyone have knowledge of how to deal with dilemmas like this?

Secondly, it would be fantastic to meet at different locations, especially homes, or small intimate locations. If not there, a place like Alfishawy that’s large enough and open to activists, or Provisions Library, or some place like that.

I have read a lot of fascinating books in the last year about movement history, from several books by or about Gandhi, about MLK, about woman suffrage, and am currently reading a book edited by our friend Jo Freeman on social movements of the 60s and 70s (though that book is out of print – not to mention expensive). It’s too bad, though, because that book has some fantastic case studies that sound awfully familiar. I think it would be great to talk about the history of social movements.

My biggest concern is affordability and accessibility, but I’m also not eager to get into a copyright fight with somebody and am not sure about the fair use laws as they apply to informal book clubs. In education, we could reprint things more liberally; I don’t know how this works.

So, do people have answers? I’m eager to get moving on this.

Jim