Welcome to BookCrossing!

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What makes BookCrossing
the World's Biggest Book Club?

bookcrossing
n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

(added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

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. BookCrossing is a free online book club of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind. Inside, you'll find millions of book reviews and hundreds of thousands of passionate readers just like you.

Let's get right down to it. You know the feeling you get after reading a book that speaks to you, that touches your life, a feeling that you want to share it with someone else? BookCrossing.com gives you a simple way to share books with the world, and follow their paths forever!

The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing...

Read a good book (you already know how to do that)
Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book
Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records a journal entry for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!

Sounds easy, right? Well it is. It's also a fascinating exercise in fate, karma, or whatever you want to call the chain of events that can occur between two or more lives and one piece of literature. Oh, and we should mention, it's absolutely free and absolutely private, too.

So go grab a book or two from your shelves now (they're not doing anyone any good there, are they?), register them here, jot down our URL and the BCID we'll give you inside the covers, and then give them away or leave them where someone will find them.

If you like what you've heard about BookCrossing so far, and want to share some of your books with the world and track where they go forever, please take a quick minute and Join BookCrossing NOW - it's FREE and ALWAYS WILL BE!

Learn More

Still unclear about BookCrossing? Learn more by reading our FAQs, or some of the great Press Articles written about us, or by asking questions in our Newbies Forum.

Publishers and authors: listen up! We know you may be concerned about all this book-sharing talk, and what it might do to your book store sales. You may be surprised to know that many, many publishers and authors are big BookCrossing fans. They've seen the paradoxical value in encouraging the sharing of books. In fact, if one were to compare the number of people who buy books based on seeing book reviews here as the books change hands, to the number of people who actually find free books, we can assure you there are far more buyers than finders. This site is not about saving people money. Many of our members, in fact, purchase two copies of every book they like, so they can keep one and release the other into the wild! Here's a good forum discussion re: authors, book sales, and bookcrossing that should alleviate any concerns about lost sales.