The other day the wife and I went to the library in our city centre. She signed up for a library card (had to use my address, but they didn’t mind that she wasn’t a UK citizen), and as we were looking around upstairs, we came across a rather eclectic collection of books upon a shelf marked “BookCrossing”.
Neither of us had heard of BookCrossing before, despite later finding out it’s a somewhat international thing. It works like this:
You find a BookCrossing book. A BookCrossing book is a book, any book, that a person has registered on the BookCrossing.com website, pasted a book ID number inside the cover, and has “released” into the wild. This could mean many things, from donating to a library’s BookCrossing (I’m going to just call this BC for the rest of the article, okay?) shelf, to “accidentally” leaving it in an airport, to donating it to a charity shop, to leaving it in the park. The idea is that the next person finds it, notices it’s a BC book (most of them have a big sticker on the front explaining the site) registers it on the BC website, reads it, then releases it into the wild.
You find a BookCrossing book. A BookCrossing book is a book, any book, that a person has registered on the BookCrossing.com website, pasted a book ID number inside the cover, and has “released” into the wild. This could mean many things, from donating to a library’s BookCrossing (I’m going to just call this BC for the rest of the article, okay?) shelf, to “accidentally” leaving it in an airport, to donating it to a charity shop, to leaving it in the park. The idea is that the next person finds it, notices it’s a BC book (most of them have a big sticker on the front explaining the site) registers it on the BC website, reads it, then releases it into the wild.
This way, a book builds up a little backstory for you to read on the website. The book I got, which I’m reviewing in a separate article, had never been read before, and therefore it only had two journal entries on the website: one saying it was being donated to the BC cause, the other saying it was being left at the library. Lucky me for accidentally finding it!
The BC shelf at Milton Keynes library is free to use, I don’t even have a library card (shame on me!) and they didn’t mind me just picking up a book and carrying it out of the library. I’ve already read it, and need to decide where I’m going to leave it. I might give this one back to the library when we return, just to make sure it isn’t accidentally thrown away. That’s the risk when you’re a BC book!
So visit their site, http://www.bookcrossing.com, to learn more. My username there is FungusTrooper, check back later to hopefully see more books that I’ve found!
So visit their site, http://www.bookcrossing.com, to learn more. My username there is FungusTrooper, check back later to hopefully see more books that I’ve found!
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