Just so you guys know, I'm a huge dork. I love books. I love the smooth covers, the weight of them in my hands, the smell of the pages — oh yeah, and the material inside. I like libraries and used bookstores, where every book has a history. I like the names written inside the front covers, the scrawled margin notes.
I'm just the kind of girl that Ron Hornbaker had in mind when he came up with Book Crossing. This site posits that all the world's a library, and encourages its members to liberate the written word. The concept is painfully simple, and familiar to people used to similar, message-in-a-bottle tracking systems like the U.S. currency tracker, "Where's George?"
1. Take a book you like, want to share or just get rid of. 2. Register it, free, on Book Crossing's Web site. They assign your book a special ID number, provide you with cool, Book Crossing logos to stick on the cover and tips on how to give your book a good chance for survival "in the wild". 3. Go and release it: on a park bench (don't forget the Ziploc bag for protection against the elements), in a waiting room or even in the seat pocket of a commercial airplane.
It's addictive, it's bohemian … it's missing a major step. Capturing them again. The most "found" entries of a liberated book is five. Tracking released titles is almost more important than letting them go. Currently, there are 209 books running wild in the Tampa Bay area. Book Crossing tells you exactly where they were released in its "Go Hunting" section. Now, even supposing that a bunch of these have been tossed by non-literary boors or have succumbed to the torrential downpours of a Florida summer, there are a significant number of orphaned reads out there. We can't start the revolution if you don't pick up a gun … er, book.
It's summertime. Go beach combing for a novel. Go sit in a cafe and celebrate our nation's freedom of the press and (theoretically) universal literacy. Leave the book there when you go. Viva la biblioteca!
—Diana Peterfreund
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2002.