Book Crossing

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Projects
Bookcrossing-techinc.svg
Participants Becha, Narya
Skills Community building, Sharing datalove, Coding
Status Finished
Niche Community
Purpose World domination

Book Crossing is for the exchange of books, for free, and for tracking the books as they travel the world around.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/

We have a bookshelf on the same floor as the Hackerspace, where people can bring their books & have them marked; or pick up the book from the bookshelf.

There are ways to make this easier or harder. One of the ways involves child labor ;-)

How to

  • Either create an account yourself on the bookcrossing website, or use the "techinc" account. Having your own account is fun, because you can follow your own books. Ask Narya for the techinc password if you want to use that account
  • Register a book: You can type the ISBN or search for title or author. If your book has a barcode you can use a barcode scanner and use this as search term. There is one at the space
  • Jot down the BCID code that you get back for your book and copy/paste the code(s) in a text file
  • You can use this script to print labels for all the BCID codes
  • The repository also contains a postscript file to print labels with little bookcrossing/techinc logos that you can stick on the cover
  • Release the book(s) "into the wild". Our crossing zone is filed under "Amsterdam" > "Technologia Incognita"

In the background

Done

  • Several books were donated to the space, and new ones are coming in regularly \o/
  • Remko has installed a bookcase for us \o/
  • An account has been created for TechInc - http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/techinc/ (Narya has the password)
  • Eventually we could make it an official book crossing site, if we want to
  • Wrote a latex generator to create and print bookcrossing labels. Download here
  • Registered almost all the books and labelled them (ongoing process)
  • Ordered "wings" membership for the techinc account for one year ($29.95)
  • Ordered extra labels for this project
    • Dk-11202 Brother Compatible Labels 62mm x 100mm - Costs 23 euro for 300 labels = 7.5ct per book

Plans to automate scanning, registering and releasing a book

  • We have a barcode scanner
  • To do: write something to pass on the barcode to bookcrossing.com, register book, fetch BCID, and release the book
  • The bookcrossing website doesn't have an API
  • Perhaps this can be used? http://www.goodreads.com/api