mei 30, 2010
Yesterday Jay and i went to the “Fries Straatfestival” in Leeuwarden. I brought 6 bookcrossing books with me for release.
The first one i released almost immediately when we got off the bus at the “vrouwenpoortsbrug“. There’s some steps to the water and Jay pointed those out to me. When i saw them i grabbed the first book and left them at the bottom of the stairs. The second one i released somewhere on the “Oldehoofsterkerkhof“. The third book we left at one of the entrances to the “Prinsentuin“. The fourth one i left in a planter, right on the edge of a restaurants terrace.
The fifth bookrelease was a little more daring, but not too much. Jay and i done this before. We were sitting in a tearoom with my dad and stepmom, who we found in this huge crowd. When we prepared to leav i slipped Jay the fifth book. He left it on his chair, but we weren’t even ten meters away from the tearoom when one of the girls who work there came running after Jay and handed him the book. “Sir, you forgot your book.” Jay couldn’t do anything but give it back to me. My stepmom saw it happen and she and i laughed out loud. My dad was pretty confused as he hadn’t seen us leaving the book. After i told him what happened he thought it was pretty funny.
I looked around as we walked up to the “Oldehoofsterkerkhof” again. That’s when i saw a bike with a child seat on the back. Hoping the lady who owns the bike has children a bit bigger too i left the book in the childs seat. After that i had only 1 book left and it burned in my hands to release it somwhere really good. I had thought about slipping it into a childs hands, but i have no idea how big a child is when it can read this particular book. So i ditched that idea pretty quick.
We were walking through i huge crowd when i noticed a mom with a stroller. She turned her back to the stroller and was talking to a woman, without paying any attention to her child, who looked pretty bored. I then got another great idea (at least, i think it was a great idea). I bent down towards the kiddo and slipped the book under his/her legs. The kid looked at me for a sec and then looked away.
I would have loved to see the mothers face when she discovered the book under the kid. She must have been pretty confused. Haven’t had a journal entry for the book yet, but i really hope i’ll get one.
maart 10, 2010
Today was my interview with the local newspaper. The journalist was very interested in BookCrossing and loves to read, so we talked about books for a while before getting to the BookCrossing bit.
I told her about how i came into contact with BX (thanks Aaltsje) and told her about a few really nice catches i remembered from the top of my head. Including the book ‘found’ by our Queen and my moms book which traveled from Groningen to Bahrein. I alos told her a lot about OBCZ, releasing, themed releases and all kinds of stuff. I threw in a few numbers about how many books were registered, how many members there are worldwide, in the Netherlands and in Fryslân. She absolutely loved that i new that. We talked for more then an hour and she told me that she wanted to place the piece in next weeks paper. The internet edition of the piece will be up as soon as possible.
I’ll link to it when it’s up, but it’ll be in dutch, so you might not be able to read it. But then, there’s a picture of me included, so you can just admire me 
maart 1, 2010
A few weeks ago i wanted to bring the subject of BookCrossing to the attention of the local newspaper. I emailed them, told them a bit about BookCrossing and asked them if they wanted to do an article about it. Today i got an email back saying they wanted a full interview with pics and all.
I am so thrilled about it. I never expected them to even concider an interview about it. So next week i’ll be giving an interview and doing a wild release in front of the camera. I hope more people will get interested and register with BookCrossing. It would be fun to have a few more Crossers nearby.
november 28, 2009
Three weeks ago i released 7 books on a special release challenge i set myself. The nursinghome where i work is building a whole new building (well, actually 3 new buildings) and we had a party for that. I thought it was a good idea to release a few books about islands and asked Aaltsje for a few books as i don’t have anything about islands myself. She was very excited about it and i picked up a few books. I randomly placed them all through the building and hoped for some Journal Entries.
I was a little disappointed when nobody reported any of the books. Although i saw one client with one of the books. I know she won’t report it as found, but it made me happy.
But today, i wasn’t even checking it, my eye fell on the sidebar with recently caught books. I was a bit astonished to see a familiar title there. The first book of my release challenge has been found. It traveled from Terschelling to Veenhuizen in two and a half weeks. I know this because the last time i saw the book was 4 days after i placed it on a windowseal. I wonder how it got from the island to the main land, but i guess i’ll never find out. I’m glad someone is going to enjoy this book.
september 29, 2009
Today i finally put up my bcrelease bot. It automatically RT’s any tweets that include
#Bookcrossing release or #bcrelease
Of course, there were a few bugs, so we updated it twice now.
Update 1 was: added the words releases, releasing and released to the search function.
Update 2 was: to stop the bot from Rt’ing himself and end up in an invinite loop.
Let’s hope this all works like it should now. If you want to follow the bot, click this link.
