BookCrossing

I feel like every reader should be familiar with BookCrossing.com. However, I’ve been an avid reader for years and have just come upon this great website myself in just the past few months. Basically, its a website where you register your books, put an identifying label on them, and give them to other people or “release them in the wild” so you can keep track of where they go and others can get enjoyment out of the book.

Here is a great article from The Boston Globe about this addicting site:

GLOBE EDITORIAL

Book drop

February 7, 2005

RON HORNBAKER is the Johnny Appleseed of books. Four years ago he started BookCrossing, an organization dedicated to spreading the joy of reading by dropping volumes at random on lunch counters, park benches, subway cars, in doctors’ waiting rooms, and anyplace else where strangers might pick them up.

Today 326,000 members around the world are doing the same thing — 4,485 of them in the Boston area — and it’s good to know they are out there.

Quiet little acts of kindness do not flood the news. Surprises in public places are not often sweet. Giving away a book without knowing to whom it will go is a love note of sorts, a way to send a silent message of serendipitous generosity through the noise and crush of airports, train stations, and malls.

The custom of leaving books is not new, but no one turned it into an international club before — or gave it a website to track the journeys of volumes that, in BookCrossing parlance, have been “released into the wild.”

“I think there’s something hard-wired in people urging them to try to connect through random action,” Hornbaker said in a phone interview from his home in Lake Winnebago, Mo. “They send up notes in helium balloons or toss notes into the sea in bottles and let fate decide how a connection will happen.”

Amy Battisti-Ashe of Somerville left her copy of Orson Scott Card’s “Shadow of the Hegemon” on the porch of the old visitor’s center on Peddock’s Island. Like all diligent BookCrossers, she taped an explanation of the organization inside the cover along with the website address and an invitation to tell when and where the book was “caught.”

Card’s work was discovered, released, and discovered by a second person on the island. Both finders told their stories on bookcrossing.com — something that doesn’t always happen, for books can travel continents before showing up on the site.

“Releasing books is exciting,” said Battisti-Ashe, “but you feel a little worried about them, too.” That protective feeling is one all book lovers understand — and why some BookCrossers buy two, or more, copies of their favorites.

This community of bibliophiles has a sense of humor as well as mission. Elizabeth Rust of Nashua, N.H., put Mark Kurlansky’s “Cod” on the dried salt version of the fish in a Shaw’s Supermarket. Eric Schlossers’ book “Fast Food Nation” has been dropped at McDonald’s, and Rebecca Wells’s “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” left in women’s dressing rooms.

When Emily Dickinson wrote “There is no frigate like a book,” she envisioned the reader transported by words. But books can travel, too, transported by imaginative hearts — and the journeys can be as entertaining as fiction.

All I can say is go to the site and look around. If you don’t get captivated by the concept, then something is seriously wrong with you!