If you love travel and love books, you are a wander-reader!
There are more of us than I ever imagined. There are so many of us, that web designers, content creators have catered to our unique perspective on books and travel. Here are a few of my favorites.
The concept is simple. Make the world a library. Sure, many of us have embraced the e-reader and take whole libraries with us when we travel. But what do you do with all those print books left behind? Try sending your print books out into the world for adventures of their own! Book Crossing is like Where’s George only instead of tracking the path of a particular dollar bill, you can release books into the wild and track their journey on the website. First, sign up on Book Crossing so you have a platform for launching books into the world. Then you go through your bookshelves selecting the books ready for travel. Label each one with it’s unique number assigned by Book Crossing. You can download and print your own for free or order customized book plates from Book Crossing.
Next, release your book into the wild! You can network with other book crossers to find someone looking for your specific book and send it to them (called a “controlled release”) or just abandon the book at a train station, airport, coffee shop, or doctor’s office. You can leave it anywhere it is likely to fall into the hands of a reader. The book label includes instructions for logging into book crossing to see where the book has been and post where the book is now. Once the reader is done reading, s/he can give it a permanent home in their own book shelf, or re-release it to touch another reader’s life.
Now for the fun part! You can track your book’s journey through the website. See who found it, where it goes, and how many lives it touches the way it touched yours in the first place. You can also find other book crosses with books you want to read in their collections and request a controlled release or just exchange a note with the person who read your book. According the Book Crossing website, there are over seven million Book Crossing books in 130 countries. These books really do have a life of their own!
Many beloved novels have real-life settings. Wander-readers are often inspired to visit a city or even a country because of something they have read. Placing Literature is “where your book meets the map.” You can either use the map to find the real-life locations of books mapped by other wander-readers or you can map a book yourself for others. Either way, the app lets you register your visit to places of literary significance. Here’s how it works: Say you really loved by John Green. You can go to the Placing Literature interactive map and see that a previous reader tagged Indianapolis on June 26, 2012. You can visit Indianapolis and use the Placing Literature app to check in displaying that another wander-reader loved that book and visited that place.
Another way to use the site it to map a new book. For example, I could go to the Chicago Public Library and Check in. Then I would add by Audrey Niffenegger and indicate this is where the character Henry De Tamble worked. I might go so far as to find the place in the emergency stairwell where he “got stuck” in one scene.
In many cases, the actual location of a fictional scene has great significance or impact. This website and app helps capture that and share it among wander readers.
Are you a wander-reader with a favorite website or app for literary travel? Please share in the comments below!
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie
(Bookcrossing logo from Bookcrossing website and Placing Literature map taken as a screenshot of current literature loged as of 7/23/12)