Do you regularly do web searches for the topics you are interested in or do you hang out at the same places all the time?  There is no deliberate or implied criticism in that question as we all do the things we feel the most comfortable with and spent the available time getting the most from out time online.

I do regular searches and rarely hang out on a single or small group of sites.  I do read a number of blogs semi-regularly and I get hundreds of emails daily.

Yesterday I found a website which is quite different.  It is based on books and reading but they have a different take on how you should handle books you really liked.

The site is called Book Crossing and it is, what they call, a read and release site.

The concept is that once you have read a book you should release it into the wild and share it with whoever picks it up.  Hopefully they come back to the Book Crossing web site and report that they caught the wild book.

Many don’t but many do.  The website has over 800,000 members and over 1.6 million books registered.  There are members in almost every country and most cities but there is still room for you.

Now this isn’t for you to sell your books or talk about your writing, that’s what Bearly Books is for, it is about reading and sharing what you have read with the community.

I wasn’t aware that there was a website based on this concept.  I had heard of leaving books in public places to share with others and have done that before, not always deliberately, but this is different.

This is like geo-caching but with a better prize at the end of it.  A good book to read.

I have joined up and added some content to the site already.  Now I need to go through all my books and check out which ones I think should be shared.  It’s a bit of a challenge though as I love to read and re-read my favourite books.  I might just have to trawl the second-hand bookshops for my favourites so I can share them and still keep them.

How great is that?  A great excuse to hang out amongst dusty tomes in darkened rooms searching for diamonds.  Life doesn’t get much better than that does it?