Bookcrossing : A Global Library
September 17th 2006 02:55
If you love books and are a mad reader (which you probably are if you’re reading this blog), go and have a look at bookcrossing .com. This is basically a global book club that shares books by ‘releasing them into the wild’ for other readers to find. (Wild constitutes as waiting rooms, airports, cafes, park benches etc.) It was the brain storm of Ron Hornbaker, a partner of software development company Humankind Systems Inc. He was looking for something completely new and untried in the area of physical objects that can be tracked via the internet. Unbelievably, by 2001, no one had thought of tracking one of the most attainable and popular items we have. Books. In five years Bookcrossing has grown to a membership of 496,680 worldwide, with approximately 300 new members each day! Not bad eh? So why is bookcrossing so popular? Well, my guess is … it’s a community, and people love to belong to a community. There have been studies on this, and it shows people are happier and healthier, so predictably live longer, if they belong to some form of close knit community. (Actually, you’re in a blog community right now.) So it’s no real surprise that people who love reading and books will join a community of likewise people.
I stumbled across Bookcrossing a few years ago when someone left a Bookcrossing book in our library chute. You can recognise one of these books by its unique bookcrossing label usually pasted on the front cover or first page. Each book has its own BCID number which it is tracked by. It also has the web address so, being curious – as I tend to be – I looked up the site and found out just how huge this is. There are about 10 countries actively bookcrossing with USA leading the pack with 44% of crosses, followed by UK and Canada. Australia comes a modest 6th with only 4%, but it seems to be spreading with a convention being planned for October in Adelaide and a mass release of 150 books by the Kalamunda Council.
The site is very comprehensive with plenty of articles, reviews, stories, links, products and forums. It is just one huge book club! So of course I had to try it. Signed up, registered my catch and released my first book. I actually had a friend leave it in Nandi airport. Kept checking up on it and it finally resurfaced in Paris about 8 months later. Seems to have gone underground again, but I’m sure it will appear (somewhere) one day. Some books disappear for 2-3 years before they are found and circulated again. Thankfully there are no overdue fees with this library!
You can get very involved with this, or just occasionally play around with it like I do, but it is fun and a great way to share and discover books. Schools and libraries get a lot out of it as it’s a fantastic promotional exercise, and a great way to recycle. It cost nothing to join and you can buy fancy plate labels or download a series of free labels to print off and use for releasing your books. So if you have a lot of books just sitting on your shelf that you want to share, this is a great way of doing it. Give it a go and let me know what you think.
Postscript: Bookcrossing was added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2004.
bookcrossingn. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.
Image: Bookcrossing.com
I stumbled across Bookcrossing a few years ago when someone left a Bookcrossing book in our library chute. You can recognise one of these books by its unique bookcrossing label usually pasted on the front cover or first page. Each book has its own BCID number which it is tracked by. It also has the web address so, being curious – as I tend to be – I looked up the site and found out just how huge this is. There are about 10 countries actively bookcrossing with USA leading the pack with 44% of crosses, followed by UK and Canada. Australia comes a modest 6th with only 4%, but it seems to be spreading with a convention being planned for October in Adelaide and a mass release of 150 books by the Kalamunda Council.
You can get very involved with this, or just occasionally play around with it like I do, but it is fun and a great way to share and discover books. Schools and libraries get a lot out of it as it’s a fantastic promotional exercise, and a great way to recycle. It cost nothing to join and you can buy fancy plate labels or download a series of free labels to print off and use for releasing your books. So if you have a lot of books just sitting on your shelf that you want to share, this is a great way of doing it. Give it a go and let me know what you think.
Postscript: Bookcrossing was added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2004.
bookcrossingn. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.
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