How to use BookCrossing, and mix your love of books and travel

Just me with my second copy of
Game of Thrones... airport
purchases bring out the weird
in all of us.

I know book swapping in various forms has been around for a number of years now, including pop up libraries in cities all over the world. I've nerded out on here before about my love of books, and while I don't often love reading travel books, I've just discovered a new way to merge travel and reading, which I'm pretty psyched about.

BookCrossing is a website where you can register any book you'd like to give away, and in return receive an ID code. Add a label to your book with its unique code, and then you are free to give away your book however you'd like. You can loan it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, or attach it to a bunch of helium balloons so it can peacefully drift off to a better life. Whenever you get curious about your book's whereabouts, you can log on to the BookCrossing website and punch in the code to see what your book's been up to.

I like this way more than the other book swaps I've seen - for one thing, it's free. Other sites charge you for membership, or you at least have to pay for shipping, because the point is to do a direct swap of books in order to keep them. But with BookCrossing, the point is simply to put more books out into the universe and see what happens. You may never receive a book back, but that's okay because the fun is in the giving away, not the receiving.

This reminds me of Where's George?, a US-based project to track the flow of $1 bills. Except, let's be serious, books are way more fun.