On the first point—at least in the US, there are rules about organizations engaging in transactions where a trustee/director has a financial interest. Generally, the involved trustee/director needs to recuse, and the remainder of the board needs to make certain findings. Not sure how this works when the decision to make a purchase is delegated to staff. There’s nothing in the first point that makes me concerned.
However, there have been shady book purchases by other (non-EA) non-profits—so it’s not an unreasonable thing to ask questions about book purchasing (although making accusations out of the gate is too strong). For instance, I’ve heard of US churches buying up a ton of their lead pastor’s book in the first week of release to make it hit the US best-seller lists for a week; the specific way in which the books were purchased was inefficient/costly and designed to evade rules on bulk purchases not unduly affecting the best-seller lists. In that case, the church’s action created an improper private benefit in my opinion (with a possible exception if the royalties for the book went to the church rather than the pastor). Again, I don’t see any reason to think EVF or anyone else in EA has engaged in this sort of behavior.
On the first point—at least in the US, there are rules about organizations engaging in transactions where a trustee/director has a financial interest. Generally, the involved trustee/director needs to recuse, and the remainder of the board needs to make certain findings. Not sure how this works when the decision to make a purchase is delegated to staff. There’s nothing in the first point that makes me concerned.
However, there have been shady book purchases by other (non-EA) non-profits—so it’s not an unreasonable thing to ask questions about book purchasing (although making accusations out of the gate is too strong). For instance, I’ve heard of US churches buying up a ton of their lead pastor’s book in the first week of release to make it hit the US best-seller lists for a week; the specific way in which the books were purchased was inefficient/costly and designed to evade rules on bulk purchases not unduly affecting the best-seller lists. In that case, the church’s action created an improper private benefit in my opinion (with a possible exception if the royalties for the book went to the church rather than the pastor). Again, I don’t see any reason to think EVF or anyone else in EA has engaged in this sort of behavior.