BookCrossing and Project Gutenberg

Today's post is actually about cool book websites, it really has nothing to do with the photo.

Clark's Nutcracker - Nucifraga columbiana

This is an old photo from our trip to Crater Lake (22 Jun 06), but I don't think I've ever posted it.

I've added Birds of Oregon to my Christmas Wish List at Powells.

There's a new book club in town that I was thinking of attending. The first book on their list is My Antonia by Willa Cather. I read the book several years ago when Athena left a copy at our place in Illinois. I vaguely remembered not liking it very much, but I figured it's a classic so maybe I should give it another chance. I looked around on our bookshelves with the other novels and realized it wasn't there.

Then I remembered that Sami and I had left it in a geocache more than a year ago. This particular geocache was a BookCrossing cache. It's a cool idea. You take the books you no longer want, put a BookCrossing sticker with a registration number on it, and release it into the "wild" so someone else can enjoy it. People who find and read the books can go online to review the books or to report that they've picked up or released them in a new location.

As I work in a library, getting my hands on a copy of My Antonia would be very easy. But I was curious if there might be an online version. I googled it and dicovered that yes, there is a copyright free version on Project Gutenberg. I can't say for sure that I'll use the ebook for the PDA (in fact I've never read an ebook), but it's nice to know such things are available. There are even quite a few books in Finnish if Sami suddenly got the urge to read a novel in his native language.