Wooo! Early this morning our Unshelved Goes Digital Kickstarter passed $20k, unlocking our THIRD stretch goal. We will therefore release the ebooks of Library Mascot Cage Match and Book Club to libraries, making a total of four Unshelved ebooks they can circulate for free. Hooray! Thanks to everyone who has pledged to make this possible.

The next stretch goal, at $25k, is a big deal. As you probably know, once a week Unshelved the library comic strip turns into the Unshelved Book Club, a full page, full color comic strip recommending a real book. Over the years we have featured over 400 books, new and old, fiction and nonfiction, major media and self-published. And while we make most of them ourselves, we’ve also been lucky enough to attract occasional guest strips from some of the best cartoonists out there, featuring the books they love. With our permission, libraries, schools, and booksellers print our book club strips out and use them for book displays, with great results.

For the first time we are going to assemble almost* all of the Unshelved Book Club strips into one volume, remastering the art into high resolution. We stopped putting these strips into our printed books when we moved to a smaller format several years ago, so many have never before been collected. Since the ebook will be available in PDF they’ll be easier to print out than ever, and in much higher quality. And since there are so many of them, we’re going to index this ebook by author and title.

This is one of those things we’ve talked about doing for years, but it will be a lot of work. We’re excited that this Kickstarter is on the verge of making it real!

— Gene & Bill, the Unshelved guys

* Occasionally we use art from a book in the strip. We always do so with permission, but in a few cases the rights holders have declined to allow additional use of said art