If you are not familiar with the phenomena, the premise is fairly straightforward. Person A registers a copy of a book with the BookCrossing website, scribbles the registration number on the inside jacket, and leaves the book in a public place. Person B finds the book, reads it, visits the bookcrossing website to enter the registration number and jots down a journal entry of their experience (eg. where they found it, if they liked it, where they left it). Person B then leaves the book in a public place, Person C finds it and the cycle of sharing continues.
The website was started in 2001 and was inspired by similar initiatives like phototag.org with disposable cameras (Squid goes around the world in 99 days ... view Squid's pictures), and where's willy or george tracking small currency movements. The idea is to release objects into the "wild" like tracking tagged animals or birds and follow movements and associated narratives through the Internet.
Quite sad to see that the book business is as scared as the music industry of change. According to Caroline Michel, publisher of HarperPress: "book publishing as a whole has its very own potential Napster crisis in the growing practice of book crossing". This approach seems especially absurd in the week that pop history is made by the first single to achieve number one on the UK singles chart based solely on computer downloads. It's just another case of a business model coming under threat, not a business.
Fortune and friends of similar literary taste brought me two copies of Tom Robbins' debut Another Roadside Attraction over the past couple years so it seems like a good place to start. It is already registered with a BookCrossing ID so now I just need to decide the best place to introduce one of my favorite texts into the wild Londinium streets. Maybe on one of those benches in the courtyard of St Paul's Cathedral, or on a bar stool in a ragged southeast London pub, in a capsule of the London Eye, or dropped off the Hammersmith Bridge onto a passing fishing trawler. If you happen to stumble upon it, soak up every word of a cracking read, and release it to the wild once more. Abraham Lincoln could just as well have been describing BookCrossing as books when he said: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".
Labels: internet, literature
