“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.” – Jerry Seinfeld
Regular bookstores have fallen on tough times. The American Booksellers Association is a national, not for profit trade association for independently owned bookstores, large and small, with storefront locations in towns and cities nationwide. They have been around since 1900.
We all know that reading is changing. Print is changing. The economy is crashing. It’s a perfect storm of disaster for bookstores, especially the smaller ones.
My favorite bookstores have always been used bookstores. It’s not just cheaper books. There is something about going through all the loosely organized books that I love. I rarely ever go into a used bookstore looking for a particular book.
Maybe that was part of the appeal of BookCrossing.com. It’s a community site that organizes people who love books to share them.
The word bookcrossing was added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2004 as a noun – “the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.”
I like this idea about treating the world as a free public library. I joined Bookcrossing a back in 2003 and have been releasing books “into the wild” for others to find. You can visit my Bookcrossing bookshelf to take a look without having to register. I am one of about 783,000 members worldwide who have put more almost 7 million books into circulation.
It’s not hard to do. You read a book. Decide you want to share it with others by giving it away. You go to bookcrossings.com (free accounts) and register the book and add a little comment about it.
You’ll get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number) to put on the book. Most people print out the labels that the site offers and put them on their book. The label says that this is a free book and explains how they can report that they picked up the book and journal it online.
Then you release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, “forget” it in a coffee shop, etc.), and you’ll get notified by email each time someone goes to the site and records journal entries for that book.
Serendipity takes over. A person who loves to read discovers your book and makes a journal entry. Sometimes, people take them and never make journal entries – that sucks – but at least your book found a reader.
I suspect there are plenty of books that you have at home that they could send into the wild. You hate to throw them out, but even charities sometimes don’t want them. I try to use hardcover books when I can so they travel better, but I’ve done paperbacks too. Think of it as being green and recycling if nothing else.
The part of it that is most interesting is when someone picks up a book and actually goes online to journal about the where and when of the find and about the book itself.
For example, I registered a copy of The Virgin Suicides and released it in 2004 at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Somerville, New Jersey USA.
Then I put my own journal note about it. Someone found it and was good enough to go online and add an entry:
“The book lay on the folding chair for quite some time, unclaimed. People glanced at it, but skirted it, as if they were respecting that it might be someone’s property. The poetry reading began, the chairs filled, and I wanted a place to sit down. I hesitated, because I thought it might be “saving” the seat. But then I sat down, holding the book on my lap, in case the owner came to claim it. No one did. I enjoyed the poetry reading a great deal. Then opened the book, as I was about to leave, because of the note taped to the cover. I saw that, strangely enough, the book was meant to be taken, and so I carried along with me.”
I guess anonymous didn’t get to read it for a while…
“October 02, 2005 – I’m sorry I waited a whole year to read this book. This is one of the best “first books” I’ve read in a while. About the Lisbons, a troubled family of five sisters in a Detroit suburb. The first thing that struck me, aside from the wonderful writing, is the voice. This book is told in first-person plural (as “we”), in the collective voices of the boys who were watching the Lisbon sisters growing up. First time I’ve seen this since Faulkner’s story, “A Rose for Emily,” which is also told by a sort of Greek chorus of townspeople, witnessing death, sex and tragedy from the outside. I am going to pass this on through PaperBackSwap.com. There’s a waiting list for the book, so I’m sure it will be out traveling into the world again in just a few days.”
So it was sent from Mount Vernon, NY to New Hampshire using paperbackswap.com yet. That site the mail to exchange, so there’s some mailing cost, but you get the book you want.
I need to go through the book shelves and select some new books to set free. Maybe you’ll find one of them, respond and this big circle will come around.
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” – Ray Bradbury
