This is a great idea. There are many categories of books on Leanpub which work well as conference giveaways. For example, we have a lot of Agile and Lean books on Leanpub:
https://leanpub.com/bookstore/book?search=agile
https://leanpub.com/bookstore/book?search=lean
We don't have gift cards yet, but there are a few different ways we can go about this. In all three cases, we would also let you just post the URLs to the downloadable files, for those attendees which do not want to bother getting Leanpub accounts. (All our books are DRM-free. The reason attendees may want to get accounts and use tokens is to get free updates to the books if and when they occur.)
Anyway, here are the choices:
- You can buy and give away multiple copies of a single book.
The way this would work is you would purchase the appropriate number
of copies of a book, and then distribute tokens (as well as including
the free download URL in handout material or something).
If you let us know what book you're interested in and how many copies,
we can contact the author and ask them if they'll offer a bulk
discount.
There's more info here:
http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/2029047-how-do-i-buy-multiple-copies-of-a-book
http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/2009418-i-m-a-materials-buyer-for-a-college-and-we-have-an-instructor-who-wants-to-use-a-leanpub-book-as-a-textbook-how-do-i-buy-it-to-sell-in-our-bookstore
- You can buy and give away multiple copies of multiple books, and
let your attendees get all of them (as well as including the free
download URLs in handout material or something)
This would be similar to #1, but for multiple books. Again, if you
let us know which books and how many, we can ask those authors if
there's a multiple-copy discount available.
- You can buy and give away multiple copies of multiple books, and
ask your attendees to pick one of them (honour system, and you'd
include all the free download URLs in handout material or something)
In this case, you could hand out tokens, just like 1 and 2. The
difference is that if there are, say, 300 attendees and you want 3
books, then we can just assume that they'll be evenly-distributed and
ask the authors for a price for 100 copies. Then you'd just say
"choose one".
If you are interested or if you have any questions, just email hello@leanpub.com and we'll help you out. If you know which book(s) you want, and how many you'd be interested in, we will contact the author(s) to ask about bulk discounts.
You can also contact the authors of other books besides the ones you'd be giving away, to ask them if they want to offer coupon codes for their books for conference attendees. Most authors have "Email the Author" forms on their book landing pages, or you can let us know which books you're interested in, and we'll send out a mass email to all the authors of those books...
Finally, please read this article on our thoughts about the Conference Purchase Program, and whether we think it's a gamble...