Is bookcrossing still a thing? (yes apparently)
Since doing an awful lot of thinking about the value of books my brain has gone down some weird rabbit holes.
20 odd years ago, in a different life when I was a different person, I very briefly worked for a company involved in book data. At the time, as now, I had a deep love of books, but the company and life moved in other directions and I was only there for about 9 months. In the same period I spent a lot of time on sites like LibraryThing and Bookcrossing.
My use of the later especially lasted a while, as I moved first to London and then eventually back to the Midlands and would periodically 'release' books into the wild in coffee shops and public transport, but it hasn’t crossed (pun intended) my mind for over a decade.
This afternoon some weird neuron fired in my brain, and I wondered if the site and the activity was still active.
Apparently the answer is yes. As I still own the domain I registered with, I was able to reset my email and login to the site. My last entry is me leaving ('releasing') a book whilst travelling in the Philippines in early 2015. Prior to that, I'd released about 20 books over a period of 10 years (earliest was 2005 on public transport in Birmingham which must have been around the time I moved to London).
Remarkably the site still has my user account (I'll ignore the data protection issues there) and still has all the data. It appears as if non of my books have been found or recorded since 2015, when one was found and noted as been picked up in a Birmingham coffee shop. So in 11+ years you have to wonder where all those books have ended up. Is one still sat on a salty sun-drenched shelf in a divers (not dive, there is a difference) bar in the far east? I rather doubt it. The Birmingham coffee houses I'd left books at are both closed... one rather spectacularly going out of business. I imagine those books got added to a skip somewhere. The few left on public transport may live on in someone’s collection if they're like me and never throw books away. Perhaps some of the others made it to good homes too or at least I'd like to hope so.
Despite my reluctance these days to ever let a book out of my sight, I'm sort of tempted to find some old paperback, register and release it in the hope it will travel the world and update me of its adventures. Likely however...it won't.