A postcard trader who visited my original website once left a guestbook entry introducing me to Bookcrossing.com after she read about how I loved to read. This was years ago and finally, here I am preparing to release my first book into the wild.
Touted as the World’s Biggest Book Club, their welcome page states:
“You’ve come to a friendly place, and we welcome you to our book-lovers’ community. Our members love books enough to let them go — into the wild — to be found by others. Sharing your used books has never been more exciting, more serendipitous, than with BookCrossing. Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library. BookCrossing is a free online book club of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind. Inside, you’ll find millions of book reviews and hundreds of thousands of passionate readers just like you.
Let’s get right down to it. You know the feeling you get after reading a book that speaks to you, that touches your life, a feeling that you want to share it with someone else? BookCrossing.com gives you a simple way to share books with the world, and follow their paths forever!”
The mechanics are simple. You register a book you are going to release, get a unique BCID (Book Crossing Identification) Number for the book, put a bookplate or label on the book with the number, with the simple instruction for the finder to go to bookcrossing.com and register the fact that the book has been “found”, leave comments on the book or its “discovery”, and then release the book back into the wild for others to find.
I was thinking of releasing my first book into the wild in Paris, but then, New York is my home, so here I am getting ready to release one of my For One More Day books (I had bought several) into the wild before the week is out.
Bookcrossing members can likewise “Go Hunting” by searching for recent book releases in particular venues. Yes, there are books being released in Manila, believe it or not! I’d love to snag a book released via bookcrossing.com myself.. one of these days. New York is one of the main avenues for bookcrossing.com and there are thousands of books out there, with a release happening at least every other day it seems.
Happy book hunting!
Pinay New Yorker 