? Victims of our own intelligence | Main | Purpose ?
October 20, 2004
BookCrossing.com
Today I received a free book from BOOKCROSSING.COM. It’s title is “Somebodies and Nobodies,” and talks about Rankism as one of the big ism’s right along with sexism and racism. I’ll talk more about the book later as I read it. For tonight though, I just wanted to highlight the cool service at Bookcrossing.com. This is a very interesting concept. It’s a floating library. With this system a book may be on loan indefinitely. Each book has a special identification number inside of the front cover. When one person finishes reading the book they pass it on to someone else, then they are supposed to go online, log in (anonymously) and post a few comments on the book, where they left it or about the person they gave it to.
You can also donate a book to this free-floating library. They call it “releasing a book into the wild” haha. You can download and print a label for the front jacket, register and get an ID number from their website and send the book on it’s way. You log the book in first as the person who acquired the book for the library, then you can track it and read other peoples comments on the book as it finds it’s way from one person to another. Cool concept isn’t it?
On top of that, they also have meetings on Tuesday nights all over the world to talk about books and exchange them. It’s a great way to meet people and find new reading material. Also, the bookcrossing.com website has a search by city so you can hunt down a newly released book. For instance, today I saw that just hours before I came online someone had left a children’s book in a bus shelter in St. Paul. The exact street intersection was listed, so I could have gone over there to try to retrieve that book if I was really interested. But at a bus stop, I’m thinking the book was gone within a half hour.
As I am cataloging and putting together my own library at home, I will surely be on the lookout for books that I have enjoyed that I can release into the wild. What a great way to bring people together.
Posted by carl1236 at October 20, 2004 09:34 PM | Love your Neighbor