The Book Crossing and Why are Books So Good to Share
Not quite a week ago, I was referred by a friend to The Book Crossing, which seems to be the great new social media scene for book types.
The concept of the site is a simple one: you create a profile first and then register one, some or all of your books onto the site which generates a unique code for each book. This can be inserted into the book using free book labels, printable from the site OR by designing your own, with your own message and image. These are priced at $7.95 for 12 copies. You can, of course, design your own.
Once you have done this, you can create a journal entry for the book telling others whatever you want about the book (why you have it, what you thought of it) and then release it 'into the wild' for somebody else to pick up.
This can be done in a variety of imaginative ways and there are plenty of forum entries to keep you creative. I have released 5 so far myself in local coffee shops on the Isle of Man and managed to pick one up myself from one of the coffee shops.
The other joy of the site is finding a book. If you are lucky enough to come across one, you can enter the reference into the site and it will immediately take you to the journal for the book, showing you where the book has been and what those people thought of it. Many of them travel the globe over many years.
These books are out there; I discovered mine after picking it up at random. I happened to open the front cover and found a Book Crossing label, so make sure you check the inside cover of random books you may come across. At the time of writing this article, there is somewhere in the region of 30 thousand books in the wild. Of these, 13 are currently in the Isle of Man, 5 of which are mine.
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