BookCrossing: Statistics

Spirit and purpose of these pages.

what is BookCrossing?

BookCrossing is the act of releasing books "into the wild" and then following their journeys and the lives they touch. BookCrossing.com is the website that makes it all possible.

More informations about BookCrossing.com can be found on the Support Sites, which are listed in a box on the right column.

what is BookCrossing: Statistics?

It is an effort to collect certain data of BookCrossing.com. At BookCrossing.com you only get the information about the total registered BookCrossers and books, as also the actual number of BookCrossers in each country.

"BookCrossing: Statistics" goes one step further: certain data will be statistically evaluated per country and region, so you get a detailled overview of the activity in the corresponding countries and regions.

who maintain BookCrossing: Statistics?

An affected BookCrosser named Wyando. He also is the webmaster of the German Support Site.

which data of BookCrossing.com is evaluated?

Solely the visual data as shown by the member search-function at BookCrossing.com, namely:

· screenname
· home (country + region + city)
· age
· books (number)
· released books (number)
· referrals (number)

The number of books and the number of books released are only shown on BookCrossing.com for the winged BookCrossers.

how is this data evaluated?

Important: There is no direct access to the servers of BookCrossing.com!!

The data is read by a program. This program acts like a BookCrosser, who uses a browser in which he manually calls the member search-function at BookCrossing.com and then starts counting and writing down the data. :)

which countries are evaluated?

Finally, this is in decision of Wyando, because the evaluation has to start manually each time, due of technical reasons.

You find a list of countries, which are evaluated, in the left column (countries).

The first countries, which were evaluated, are Germany (since mean 2003), Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands and Belgium (all since beginning 2004); all countries in which Wyando has contacts somehow.

From now on, bit by bit, new countries will be added, whereby this will be concentrated to Europe first. I'm sorry for the USA, but this also has technical reasons:

The more BookCrossers a country has, the longer the evaluation executes. For comparison: The evaluation of Germany with about 21.000 BookCrossers takes about 80min. So, evaluating the USA with about 160.000 BookCrossers would take to much time... (as of Februar 2005)

how often are the listed countries evaluated?

As a general rule: 2x per month, each 1st as each 15th. Variations to this dates are possible, because the evaluation is always started manually. It is quite possible, that BookCrossing.com is slow for whatever reason, so starting a evaluation would make no sence.

It is always possible, that there exists more evaluations for the actual month. (due of all kinds of reasons, f.e. a demand from the press) But only the first evaluations of each month are collected.