(About 620 words)
Random acts of literacy
by Sherry Zorzi, APCUG Advisor
Director, Cajun Clickers Computer Club
You may find one in your doctor’s waiting room or at the hairdresser’s. You may spot one in a shopping cart in the parking lot at Winn Dixie or on a chair at Starbucks. You may come upon one in the break room at work or even on a bench in the park.
A book. It could be paperback or hardback. It could be well-thumbed or brand-new. It sports a stick-on label with a cartoon of a jaunty running book with stick-figure arms and legs. “I’m not lost; I’m traveling. Take me home,“ the label reads.
Welcome to the BookCrossing phenomenon. It’s operating quietly here in the Baton Rouge area, it’s free, it’s as anonymous as you want it to be, and it’s great fun.
Thanks to a unique website started in April 2001, the invented term “bookcrossing” has become so mainstream that it made it into the Concise Oxford English Dictionary by August 2004. “Bookcrossing, n., the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.”
Avid reader Ron Hornbaker, a web designer in Kansas City, was intrigued by websites like Where’s George, which tracks U.S. currency by serial number, and wondered what else would be fun to track. Thus was born BookCrossing.com and the rest is rapidly becoming history.
The basics of bookcrossing are, appropriately, the “3 R’s.” Read, register and release. Read a good book. Register it at BookCrossing.com. When you register the book, you’ll get a unique ID number for the book. You can write an online journal entry for the book, a review, if you like. Stick a label on the book with the ID number and the address of the website. Release the book for someone else to find and read. You can give it directly to a friend, mail it to another bookcrosser who has expressed interest in that book, or (my favorite!) just leave it in a public place for someone else to find.
When you find a released book, visit the website and enter the ID number of the book. You can do this anonymously if you wish. You’ll have an opportunity to make your own journal entry, in which you can describe where you found it and even review the book yourself. If you log the book, the releaser will know when and where the book was found and you’ll both be able to track future finds as well.
More than 300,000 bookcrossers worldwide have registered almost two million books! Bookcrossers live in 150 different countries. There are almost 500 bookcrossers in the Baton Rouge area, so you just might happen upon one of our releases in a neighborhood near you.
At the BookCrossing.com website, you can click a link to “go hunting” for books released in your area within the last 30 days which have not yet been reported found. As of this writing, there are 39 books in Baton Rouge waiting to be found.!
There is also an online community at the website, with discussion forums ranging from general chit-chat to serious talk about books.
Do you really think you’ll ever reread your collection of paperback James Lee Burke mysteries? Or all those diet books you’ve collected? What are you hoarding them for? Why not make someone else’s day? If you love your books, set them free!
Sherry Zorzi is a Director of Cajun Clickers Computer Club and host of “The Cajun Clickers Computer Show” heard every Saturday morning at 9 a.m. on WJBO Radio.
There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author. The Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group is a member, brings this article to you.