My first thought was that loaning books would be a better idea than giving them as it would put some pressure on the recipient to take the offer seriously, with the goal of minimizing frivilous applications, and being able to recycle the material further (e.g. the recipient gets a great COBOL job and doesn't need the book, so he/she sends it back to the master librarian). Of course this would require an infrastructure that was growing out of control in my head, then I realized that we already have an appropriate infrastructure: existing libraries. All the contributors need do is maintain an on-line list of what books went where, so that a new monk could see if there were suitable resources near their location. If not, the eager reader could apply to the contributors to have a new location added to the list, and the next donated book would go there.

Basic outline:

• each donation would still be done entirely by the individual who would purchase and ship the book
  
• the list (which would include verified shipping addresses and contact names) would help to direct donations to sites where at least one interested monk expressed interest in using them, but not to the exclusion of all others
  
• the receiving library would take care of the books with no additional administration required of the contributors
  
• contributors could donate books anywhere (including the library|college|community centre down the street), then add them to the list
  
• monks could ask for new locations to be added to the list for their own benefit
  
• each book could have a gift plate of some type in the cover mentioning the donor and perhaps the "Perl Monks Donate-a-Book Registry" (?)

After thinking about it, this should obviously be much bigger than Perl, and could apply to any technical books. I wonder if ACM or IEEE or similar have book programmes already?

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser