Friday, August 10, 2007

releasing books at BookCrossing.com

BookCrossing.com is a great way to exchange books - it's creative, fun and eco-friendly.

It is the world's biggest free book club and more than that, it's a community of book lovers who are willing to share with others great books after they have read them, instead of just putting them back on their shelves. The goal of BookCrossing as they write it on their site is to make the whole world a library". Well, they already have 577,368 members and 4,122,405 registered books, so they're on the right way!

So how it works? they have 3 simple steps:

1. Read a good book

2. Register it on their website (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book.

3. Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records a journal entry for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it.

We, at Eco-Libris love the concept of BookCrossing. We think that it's a great way to maximize the usage of books that are already printed and hence decrease the need in more printing. Therefore, more people using BookCrossing means less trees will be cut down and we're definably for it!

We try to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, so we joined BookCrossing, with a unique promise: we will balance out every book we release and put our sticker on the sleeves of each one them! So far, we released 7 books to the wild (well, actually in NYC). It was really fun and I felt great putting the books in the subway or in a phone booth hoping that someone will find and enjoy them. And actually someone did! I was very excited to hear that one of them ('We were the Mulvaneys' by Joice Carol Oates) was already been hunted.

We'll continue to release more books this weekend. The books are by the way second hand books and we try to choose interesting ones.. so, this weekend, again in NYC, there will be 3 books that will be released by me - check out this link for more details on them.

I am not sure yet where I'll release them, but open your eyes and if you see a book sitting by itself with a note saying 'I'm not lost' and a sticker of Eco-Libris - that's one of our boys!

I'll keep you posted after I'll release them and of course, don't forget to check out and join BookCrossing.

have a great weekend,
Raz

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