Friday, January 13th, 2006

New feature: BookCrossing ID

Update: I changed something so you can now use Universal Import to import BookCrossing books more easily. See the BookCrossing forum.

Quite a few LibraryThing users are also users of the innovative and long-running site BookCrossing. As the site puts it:

“BookCrossing lets you share your books with the world, and track their individual journeys forever more. Our members have registered 2,657,603 books so far, and a good number of these are “in the wild” at any one time.”

To make the system work, people give their books a “BookCrossing ID” (BCID), composed of three digits, a dash and nine digits. The first digits are secret—available only to people with their hands on the book. You need this part to log where the book has gone and make journal entries for it. The second set are public. Some BookCrossers enter all their books, even if they haven’t given them away.
I’ve added the BCID to the edit screen (the pencil, ). And you can add the field to your catalog screen (use the “change fields” feature). In your catalog you can click on the BCID to go to the journaling page. Needless to say, it only shows the secret part when you’re looking at your own catalog.

So that’s what it does now. I’m all ears. I don’t use BookCrossing, so I don’t know what other features would be helpful. Oh, and does anyone want to post about it there. I feel a little chintzy doing it myself. 🙂

Note:
If you see the BCID you’ll also bought, started and read dates. I’m still adding support for this, but feel free to leave comments about how you want it to work or what data should be presented.

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2 Comments:

  1. Help,I’m already registered as a bookcrosser but have forgotten my details and have changed my email address. Please how can I re-register

  2. originalslicey says:

    I know this is an ancient thread, but the only reason I found LibraryThing was through bookcrossing.

    I love the integrated BookSwap feature on this site, but wonder why BookCrossing isn’t one of the sites that has been integrated with this LT feature.

    BC has a wishlist, so you can see who is wishing for a book you own. Since most of the books in my library are registered with BC, I’d love to see BookSwap integration with them.

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