What To Do With Old Books
I happened upon this totally unexpected, very creative service at my local coffee shop the other day.
Sitting on the coffee table was a novel with this note on the front.
Bookcrossing? Let me flip through. I quickly found a bookmark and a bookcrossing sticker on the inside front cover:
What a great idea! I have lots of old books, but I prefer a lighter lifestyle. Less baggage, it's good to be mobile. This is a new found desire, so coincidentally; I just dropped off a couple of boxes of books to the local library as a donation. I could take the rest of them there, but I like the idea of the low overhead distribution of bookcrossing. Plus, with this method I can follow the path of each book as it makes its way into the hands of new owners. Evidently, they've been around for a while with half a million books in 120 countries, but I've never run into them.
Let the journey begin. After signing up with bookcrossing, the first step is to "Register" your book. This is where each book gets its own book crossing id (or BCID) and is added to the bookcrossing database. You enter author, title and category info (there is a box to enter ISBN and have the book info looked up on Amazon.com, but this didn't work for me). You can also rate the book and add comments or a review if you like.
Now you need to label the book with the BCID. You can print labels and stickers, or buy them from the bookcrossing supply store. I did the latter, as I want to support the concept. I bought a 25 pack (25 each of a bookmark, a sticker for the inside front cover, and a sticky note for the outside). They arrived 3 or 4 days later.
Next step is to "Release" the book. This simply means to drop it in some public space where it can be found by an unsuspecting stranger. At the web site you mark the book as released and make a journal entry of where you released it. If you want, you can receive email whenever someone else catches your book or makes a journal entry about it.
I've released my first book at another coffee shop. It's a fantasy novel I read years ago. I'll release the others at different locations around New York City, and maybe some in other cities I visit.
The one oddity is the "Tell-a-Friend" service. There are links for common mail clients (online and offline) to help automatically load friend's email addresses, such as Gmail and Outlook. If you click Gmail, it requests a username and password with assurances that they don't save this information. This is probably true, but it's a terrible practice. Web sites should not be encouraging the casual disclosure of personal data. Thankfully, you can bypass the email clients and just type in email addresses directly.