The Planet's Greatest Bookclub

www.BookCrossing.com

You've just got to check this site out! Here's what they do (quoted directly from the site):

You've come to a friendly place, and we welcome you to our book-lovers' community. Our members love books enough to let them go — into the wild — to be found by others. Sharing your used books has never been more exciting, more serendipitous, than with BookCrossing. Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library.

So here's what you do. Got a book you want to send out into the wild and see where it lands up?First you register it with Bookcrossing and get it's own unique bookcrossing ID number (BCID). Then you fill the BCID on the sticker on the right =>
and stick it on the inside of the front cover.

Then you put a sticky yellow note on the cover of the book like the one here. (you can buy these stickers from the website and any number of variations, or you can simply make your own).

And then comes the exciting part - you go out, find a suitable "book release" spot and, yeah... release the book.

Then you watch your book's travels on the bookcrossing site, as anyone who "finds" your book will read it and then (hopefully) go to the site, enter it's unique BCID and make a note before releasing it again.

Way cool! Me, I've released 2 books so far, one at a monthly holistic fair, and one in the Sociology department of the University of Cape Town. Neither have been caught yet (I know this because I check my bookcrossing account every 6 hours :)

This whole thing works perfect for me cos I've still got about 30 copies of the book I wrote "A Branch of Wisdom", sitting in a box. I've been trying to figure out a way to get them read rather than collect dust. They say you gotta have a name to be read. Well, I've got another spin on that one: You gotta be read to get a name.

I'll be releasing about another 12 books over the coming months. Will keep you posted.

(the amazing run of In-the-Pinks continues. What did I do to deserve this??)