Bookcrossing!

[Vel]

Quite a few of you may know what bookcrossing is - basically, it's leaving a book in a public place for someone else to read it. Each book has its own unique id so that the one who finds it may go to the bookcrossing website and write his impressions about it. After that he himself 'sets the book free', etc etc etc.
It's an amazing initiative, and I've released a few books (I didn't need anyway) already. Sadly, only one has been journaled so far, but you can always hope.
So do you like the idea? Have you done that already? Or you think it doesn't have potential? Share your thoughts.

[Radiant]

It's cool. Yes, I found a book once and passed it on. That was fun. I wanted to "launch" some books of my own but it was too much of a hassle to get the stickers because I don't have a color printer. So I brought them to a local charity instead.

[Janik]

Hmm, interesting - reminds me of geocaching somehow, but with books! I do have books I could get rid of this way... this idea might need kind of a 'critical mass' to work though, if only one guy drops books in a city it would take forever to catch on...

[Babar]

Give books...away? How could you do that?! BOOKS! Away? Next you gonna leave your blood in a public place for someone who needs it?

I couldn't see myself doing this. Either I love my books too much, or I'd be embarrassed that someone would see that someone reads that sort of book.

My sister had a Geography teddy for a while. You're supposed to keep sending it to random places and add a tag of where it's been. Seemed like a waste of time to me.

[Radiant]

How about if you accidentally bought the same book twice? Happened to me a bunch of times.

[Nikolas]

Give books...away? How could you do that?! BOOKS! Away? Next you gonna leave your blood in a public place for someone who needs it?

Now that you mention it... I'm a blood donor. You're not? hehe...

I'm not a book worm... actually far from it, so the 20-30 books I have (all music related), are most important to me (and the 500+ scores I got, there's no way to give any away... ).

There is one istance years ago (could be 9 years ago... maybe even more), when unix was still in the univeristies (yes, I know unix...) and amazon was text based... (from unix based systems... ). anyway, my first order through amazon.com seemed problematic, so I redid it to be sure. 3 times! so I ended up with 4 same books, and my mother yelling at me for charging her credit card. But I gave the books away to people I know would be interested. Either way it was a rather sophisticated and difficult subject about silence by John Cage... for a rather difficult audience... Not many people would enjoy reading it... :-/

Good idea though. I like these kind of ideas... In the Uk (London, don't know abou tthe rest), this is already happening years now with the Sun! someone buys it and leaves it in the tube for the next to read it... and so on...

[ManicMatt]

Wow, I remember book crossing! I forgot people would do that.

But I don't read books anymore. Oh well. When I was at school I read ALL of the books in the somewhat small book collection. (However no one else had read that many)

Although if you asked Mrs White my teacher, a hag and a bitch, she'd say I didn't read one certain book, but I did. I couldn't understand it though, and just because I didn't understand it she'd acuse my of lying and make me read it again thinking I'd never bothered. The bitch.

[EagerMind]

This sounds kind of similar to those travel libraries (not sure if this is the correct name) that you sometimes see in hotels, train stations, airports, etc. Basically it's just a bookshelf with some books that you can grab for your travel, or you can leave one that you've finished yourself. I guess a lot of people buy pulp novels just to keep them occupied on a flight (or train ride, whatever). This seems like a better alternative than just pitching it when you're done, or letting it collect dust on your bookshelf at home.

[Vel]

Yeah, it's something like that except that you can see what the previous people who read the book think and respectively, write your own thoughts.
I release books which I won't ever read again - sure, a pulp thriller novel is OK to read once, but hardly interesting the second time.

[MashPotato]

I'm a complete bookworm and I think the idea is nice, but I don't think I would be a good participant in this... on one hand, the only books I would be willing to part with are terrible ones that I wouldn't want to inflict on anyone else, and on the other hand, I would never pick up an abandoned book as I would assume someone just forgot it and would come back for it later ^_^

[Vel]

That's why they usually have 'free book' stickers on the front cover.

[Janik]

Yeah I guess the problem is that if a book is really good, then you wouldn't want to give it away... therefore instead of the best books circulating this way, well, the worst ones do. Or at least the kind of average ones.

[Vel]

Well different people consider different books to be really good, and I guess that's why pretty much every book has been released - just search the books on the site.