BookCrossing.com

I heard about bookcrossing.com years ago from my friend Alex.

The idea, as I understand it, is that you register a book, get a unique ID from the site, write that ID on the book, release the book "into the wild", and then (if you're lucky) you get to track that book as it moves from person to person.

A a lover of books this seems like a great idea to me!

I guess this would work best with a book you bring on holiday and leave in a hotel/resort: that would give the best change of the book ending up somewhere interesting/exotic.

Anyway today I registered 11 books which I will be releasing (to my local St Vincent de Paul shop) at the weekend.

I'll post if I ever hear about them again!

Blocking websites

I happened to try to access the Pirate Bay website the other day and I got the following message from my ISP here in Ireland:

This happened on foot of a High Court order in June to 6 ISPs ordering them to block access to the Pirate Bay. The action was taken by EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal.

I think this is very foolish for a number of reasons:

1) As I pointed out in a previous post, downloading is dying. People can get music and movies on demand from services such as Grooveshark and Netflix.

2) The Pirate Bay is just one Torrent site. There are many others.

3) Anyone who wishes to access the Pirate Bay can do a simple web search for a "pirate bay proxy" and can access it that way.

Starting to feel a bit like China around here.

And as usual the lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank.