bookcrossing.com

Jeff and I are at the cottage right now (photo above was taken a few minutes ago). The air was chill enough to warrant a fire this morning, yay! I love it when it gets colder like this. The lake water is cold enough to turn the surface of my skin numb as soon as I jumped in last night, and this was after a lengthy bake in the sauna.

Real estate update: Jeff and I are continuing to check out places in Toronto. After wandering into a few open houses at random over the past couple of weeks, we've been discouraged, so finally decided to start talking to real estate agents. We've found one we really like: Kathy Gordon, Parki's agent. In addition to being really nice and good at what she does, she's also Internet-savvy.

Thanks to Chris Conway for mentioning Bookcrossing.com in Blatherchat earlier this week. What a wonderful idea for sharing books! The basic idea is that people take a book and "release it into the wild". The site provides you with a label or bookmark you can stick in the front of the book which has a unique Bookcrossing ID and a message that encourages the person who finds it to check the site. Bookcrossing logs any journal entries for the book, tracking the path of ownership as it passes from one person to another.

I immediately felt compelled to try it out of course. My Bookcrossing id is "inkygrrl", and I registered and released three books in my neighbourhood. We'll see what happens; I'll check on their progress from time to time, and probably release more over time. You can find out more information at the Bookcrossing.com site as well as this SeattlePI.com article. And you can see my "bookshelf" here.

I left one on a newspaper stand, one on a restaurant table, and one on bench. What's also great is that if I wanted to, I could also go hunting for recently-released books in my area. Reminds me somewhat of the whole Geocaching trend.

Anyway, I think this Bookcrossing.com is a wonderful idea, but I have to wonder how long they'll survive since their database is likely to grow exponentially over the next while (they're getting a huge amount of press). Hopefully they've found a sound financial model which will keep up <fingers crossed>.

Meanwhile, I'll keep releasing books into the wild...