Two years ago next month my friend Alissa posted a 3-star review of Crossing Paths on goodreads.com. She wrote, in part:
I had never heard of BookCrossing when I signed up to win a free copy of this on goodreads. I was just interested in the description of the plot. After receiving my book I was a little worried I might have to become a BookCrosser to understand what was going on, but happily that wasn't the case.
BookCrossing? BookCrosser? Intrigued, I wondered about the who, what, where, when, why and how of "bookcrossing"?
BookCrossing (also BC, BCing or BXing) is defined as "the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise." The term is derived from bookcrossing.com, a free online book club which was founded to encourage the practice, aiming to "make the whole world a library."
The 'crossing' or exchanging of books may take any of a number of forms, including wild-releasing books in public, direct swaps with other members of the websites, or "book rings" in which books travel in a set order to participants who want to read a certain book. The community aspect of BookCrossing.com has grown and expanded in ways that were not expected at the outset, in the form of blog or forum discussions, mailing lists and annual conventions throughout the world.
"Hmm... Ok, that's sort of interesting...."
At the end of the Wikipedia article there was a see also link to an article on Postcrossing. "Another nouncrossing" I thought as I clicked through...
Postcrossing is an online project that allows its members to send and receive real postcards from all over the world. The project's tag line is "send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!” Its members, also known as Postcrossers, send postcards to other members and receive postcards back from other random Postcrossers. Where the postcards come from is always a surprise.
After reading just this first paragraph I already knew I was going to be hooked and that I'd be joining postcrossing.com and become a postcrosser myself.
I signed up on November 22, 2010 and wrote my first five postcards to Zane in Latvia, Victoria in Russia, Naomi in the United Kingdom, Juraj in the Czech Republic, and Miaow in China.
On December 18, 2010 I received my first postcards back from other [random] postcrossers: Hel in the United Kingdom and Andriy in the Ukraine.
Once I mentioned on my profile that my hobbies included reading I started to get suggestions from other postcrossers who wrote me. I began asking, on postcards I sent, what genre and authors people liked (when the recipient listed reading as an interest).
In September of 2011 I decided to commemorate my upcoming first anniversary of postcrossing by buying copies of some of the books that had been recommended to me. In the year since I've read twenty-five books by Indonesian, Polish, Czech, Kiwi, German, Ecuadorean, Dutch, Finnish, Russian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Romanian and South African authors, most of whom I'd likely never have discovered if I hadn't learned of them from fellow postcrossers the world over. I have another half dozen in my to read pile and look forward to discovering even more.
Hence this blog: Books via Postcards to share the books I discover via exchanging postcards with new friends from around the world.
