Bookcrossing
1.5 out of 5 stars (based on 2 reviews)
about:
It’s the World’s Library. It’s a smart social networking site. It’s a celebration of literature and a place where books get new life. BookCrossing is the act of giving a book a unique identity so, as the book is passed from reader to reader, it can be tracked and thus connecting its readers. There are currently 1,966,802 BookCrossers and 14,124,476 books travelling throughout 132 countries. Our community is changing the world and touching lives one book at a time.
offers:
27/04/2023
Review of Bookcrossing
I would say that what they do is encourage a trade-free sharing of physical books. The issue is that their main tools that they use for this are trade-based as mentioned in a previous review. And since that’s their main interface between people and them getting those books, then it should “barely” be included in this directory. They should use trade-free tools, else the people who use their website have to trade their data to Google and the like, in order to provide these books as trade-free.
27/04/2023
Review of Bookcrossing
It is such a shame that google analytics is being used on that website. Google is the biggest data collection machine in the world that then sells that data to advertisers. We don’t know if that’s intentionally or not, but it could be changed to Matomo for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matomo_(software)).
Plus, they are using google maps for their bookmap: https://www.bookcrossing.com/bookmap – that could be changed to openstreetmap for example.
These are 2 red flags and that makes it difficult to decide whether to include this service into the trade-free directory or not. Since trade-free means being void of any sorts of trade, this service might be put into the rejected category for now. If the trackers will be removed, it might be listed here.