The Butt Ugly Weblog

No, this is not the newest martial art craze. I just grew tired of the likes of Bookcrossing and Bookmooch, which require you to tiresomely and lovingly handcraft the data of each book onto a website separately, or put labels on them or track points or mail them or other things that people with a lot of time in their hands do.

It was all just too much work for me, so I'm introducing bookboxing!

Rules are simple:

1. Get a box
2. Put all books you want to recycle in the box
3. Give the entire box to a friend
4. Friend takes out books he wants, puts in books he wants to recycle
5. Friend gives the entire box to someone else.

That's it. ;-)

(Optionally, you can introduce book expiry by using some mechanism you can think of so that people can get rid of the book once it's obvious nobody wants it. And yeah, there's nothing stopping people from selling those books. Think of this as the Creative Commons Attribution version of Bookcrossing ;-)

Update: Mikko S mentioned to me at Ropecon that they figured out a way to do book expiry: just put a piece of paper between the pages of every book in the box. When you see a book with three or more pieces of paper sticking out of it, you know that it's ripe for recycling via other means.

Ever since I got the Kindle, I've started reading a lot more books. The Kindle store is just too handy, and the fact that you can just send yourself ten samples, read them through, and then just pick the one that looks most interesting, is really, really useful. However, there are still just too many books to read (and time is scarce), so I've started to simply go through all the Hugo/Nebula nominees of the years past. (I liked Ian McDonald's River of Gods, though it was a hard read.)

I just finished reading Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, a story of a sexbot designed to entertain humans, living in an universe where all the humans have died. It gets a lot weirder than that, but what I find really interesting is how the book is one of those rare books that really reads like an action movie. It's a pageturner in the Dan Brown sense, and even though it's a most unfashionable thing to say, I think that's a good thing.

I'm so expecting a summer movie out of this one. Robots, sex and conspiracies, with none of your average scifi philosophy about humanity and their relationships in the stars - how's that not interesting? We're all dead, we did it to ourselves, but we forgot to turn off the robots when we left. It's the summer action film of the scifi book variety :-)