I was reading this article about bookcrossing.com .
A Global Book Club's Traveling Titles by Ethan Gilsdorf: After finishing 'About a Boy' by Nick Hornby, a reader in New York City left it on a Starbucks magazine rack with hopes that someone would pick up the novel and read it. Two days later a reader from Delta, British Columbia, found the book, took it back to Canada, read it, and left it in the waiting room of a dentist's office, where it found its way into the hands of another local reader.
The tracking of such a literary journey is made possible by a unique online book club called BookCrossing.com.
"It's like a reading group that knows no geographical boundaries," says cofounder Ron Hornbaker, the president and CTO of Humankind Systems, Inc., a software and Internet development company with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, and Sandpoint, Idaho. "The books our members leave in the wild are free, but it's the act of freeing books that points to the heart of BookCrossing."
Over 49,000 members have registered more than 116,000 books, and both figures grow by about 600 per day. Over 20,000 different Web sites link to BookCrossing.com, which receives over 2,000 new visitors each day.
2 comments:
I registered ages ago, left books all over the place. I didn't get one single response. I get the feeling it doesn't work in non-Anglo-Saxon countries. I think there's a difference in book culture. In Belgium people just keep what they find.
Lol, I never realised. I was kind of hopeful about it all.
Maybe they have to be left in places where travellers are ... backpacking hostels, train stations and airports?
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