No crossing zone

I think BookCrossing is broken.

Either that, or no one that has ever found one of my books has bothered to log on.

I joined BookCrossing last year. I vowed to buy cheap books at the Augustana Book Sale and then release them. My page is here. It lists the books I’ve released. It was supposed to be a fun little project.

The concept is easy – you log books, assign them a number, and give them away. And I did – I gave away a whole crap load of books. A year ago, I gave away tons of them on a rummage sale, with only the instructions to log on to BookCrossing.com and chronicle the book’s travels. I dropped some off at coffee shops. I finished it off a few months ago by dumping the rest of my books at a Dunn Brothers here in Sioux Falls.

Each book has a large sticker on the inside front cover that explains Bookcrossing.com. It gives explicit instructions – step by step, from finding the site to finding the book.

And though I have 27 books on the loose – released into the wild for some unsuspecting reader to find and enjoy – none of them have been “retrieved.”

I know they have been physically retrieved. I saw people take them. But no one wants to log in and let me know where the books have gone.

BookCrossing seems like a great idea. The only problem is getting other people to buy into it.

So if you’re out there and have found one of my books (and this isn’t a stretch – I also placed a sticker that let the book finder know that it was “lost by Black Marks on Wood Pulp”) let me know. I’d hate to think all the time I spent logging and releasing books was all for naught.

Thanks.