When I went home last weekend, I took a few of my old books with me. A lot of them were ones I had used for my college English classes, but were ineligible for the Bookstore Buy-back program (gosh, what a surprise!). While I have read these books, and enjoyed many of them, I don’t necessarily deem them worthy of taking up shelf space in my cramped bedroom.

As a result, I’ve decided to release them into the wild, a la BookCrossing. The concept of this is pretty cool—you put an ID number on the book, register it, and set it free somewhere. Hopefully someone comes along, picks it up, reads it, and signs on to document their experience with the book before releasing it for someone else to find.

So far I’ve only released 4 books. The 2 I followed up on have since disappeared from their spots, which perhaps means someone took them home. I hope they didn’t get thrown away. I also hope that whoever took them signs on and lets me know that they have the books, so that this will be a more interesting endeavor.

I have 11 more books to release, and I’m trying to think of good places to release them. I think this method is much more fun than giving them away, as it provides an adventure, and perhaps introduces a particular book into someone’s life that they wouldn’t have read otherwise.

Posted at 1:43 PM |