09th Aug 2010
TravellingBooks.net
He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. (Arabic Proverb)
Last year I wanted several colleagues of mine to read The Little Prince. I didn’t want to buy it for each of them and got the idea of Travelling Books. One will read the book and pass it on to another person. I thought it would be nice to capture the jurney of the book and so I asked the readers to write a comment or note into the book about how they liked the book, what were they thinking after reading or a short story (e.g. about reading the book in a bath and drowning it completely 
).
Then I realised that I would lose all the fun from the comments and being selfish I asked the readers to send the book back to me once there is no more space for comments. And that was the awakening of Travelling Books.
Fairly soon after that I was told that a similar project already exists – BookCrossing.com (it’s so hard to come up with something completely unique these days – it’s a weird feeling when you think you got onto something awesome and new just to find out you are not the only one nor the first one. It’s not necessarily bad feeling, just weird).
After finding out about BookCrossing I lost interest in Travelling Books little bit but then I read Linchpin from Seth Godin and realised that if I don’t ship now with Travelling Books I will always struggle to ship anything in the future.
So here they are: TravellingBooks.net. Any feedback welcome. Feel free to send your own travelling books or go on the bookcrossing and try to find one of their books but do read it’s worth that.
PS: Finally, I shipped – awesome feeling.
He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. (Arabic Proverb)
Last year I wanted several colleagues of mine to read The Little Prince. I didn’t want to buy it for each of them and got the idea of Travelling Books. One will read the book and pass it on to another person. I thought it would be nice to capture the jurney of the book and so I asked the readers to write a comment or note into the book about how they liked the book, what were they thinking after reading or a short story (e.g. about reading the book in a bath and drowning it completely ).
Then I realised that I would lose all the fun from the comments and being selfish I asked the readers to send the book back to me once there is no more space for comments. And that was the awakening of Travelling Books.
Fairly soon after that I was told that a similar project already exists – BookCrossing.com (it’s so hard to come up with something completely unique these days – it’s a weird feeling when you think you got onto something awesome and new just to find out you are not the only one nor the first one. It’s not necessarily bad feeling, just weird).
After finding out about BookCrossing I lost interest in Travelling Books little bit but then I read Linchpin from Seth Godin and realised that if I don’t ship now with Travelling Books I will always struggle to ship anything in the future.
So here they are: TravellingBooks.net. Any feedback welcome. Feel free to send your own travelling books or go on the bookcrossing and try to find one of their books but do read it’s worth that.
PS: Finally, I shipped – awesome feeling.
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