Cracking the BookCrossing Enigma
A Newbie's Initiation into the Strange World of BookCrossing
by MyopicMeringueJune 15, 2004
I confess I joined BookCrossing with not the slightest idea what it was about. Well, I guessed it was about books, but I imagined it must simply be a big online book club, where everyone chats about the books they’ve read.
In fact, even as I registered my first book, I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was simply writing a book review.
Then I found the forums, and discovered everyone was talking about 'releasing' their books.
My first reaction was confusion, which quickly changed to horror as I realised what they were doing.
Passing one’s books on to friends and family I could understand. Similarly, giving one’s books to charity shops had always been something I liked to do. But just abandoning a precious book on, say, a park bench where it could be picked up by anyone, and may very well end up being ripped up or thrown into the river or chucked in the bin or left to rot or … well, it seemed like a dreadful wasteful thing to do.
And yet, here were thousands of people doing it on a regular basis and loving it. I just didn’t get it.
And then there were the bookrays and bookrings. They seemed like a saner idea at first - very economical to share the same book amongst several people who all wanted to read it. But then I thought about the postage costs, especially for people posting internationally, and began to wonder why all these daft people didn’t just go to their public library where they could read books for free.
In fact, so utterly confused was I at this strange BookCrossing phenomenon that I started to wonder whether I would be able to deregister my book and quietly cancel my membership.
But I hung around the forums for a bit, partly out of curiosity and partly because everyone was so friendly that I enjoyed talking to them.
Then, after a couple of days, a very strange thing happened.
I had an inexplicable desire to release a book.
And to join a book ray.
And to start my own book ray.
Surely this was madness! But as I questioned my sudden burst of madness, I realised that BookCrossing was no longer something odd that I didn‘t get.
Somehow along the way, without even noticing, I’d got it.
Quite how to define what I got about it is a different matter entirely. Something along these lines: that BookCrossing is taking the concept of book groups a step further. Instead of a group of people reading copies of the same book and chatting about it, BookCrossing involves groups of people actually reading the same copy of a book, and so the experience of shared reading is taken onto a different level.
There is somehow something exciting about knowing that the book I hold in my hand has passed or will pass (or both) through the hands of many different people of different ages, different backgrounds, sometimes in different countries - people whom I’ll probably never meet, and who, even if I did meet them, might have so little in common with me that we’d find nothing to talk about. People whose different life experiences will mean that their experience of reading this book I hold in my hands will be utterly different from mine. And yet somehow I am part of their experience of reading it, and they of mine, simply because we have all held in our hands the same book, and cast our eyes on the same pages.
I realise I am now sounding completely barmy. As I said, trying to define the point of BookCrossing is quite different from getting it.
But I am happy to say that, despite my ineloquence, I get it.
And I’m hooked.
In fact, even as I registered my first book, I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was simply writing a book review.
Then I found the forums, and discovered everyone was talking about 'releasing' their books.
My first reaction was confusion, which quickly changed to horror as I realised what they were doing.
Passing one’s books on to friends and family I could understand. Similarly, giving one’s books to charity shops had always been something I liked to do. But just abandoning a precious book on, say, a park bench where it could be picked up by anyone, and may very well end up being ripped up or thrown into the river or chucked in the bin or left to rot or … well, it seemed like a dreadful wasteful thing to do.
And yet, here were thousands of people doing it on a regular basis and loving it. I just didn’t get it.
And then there were the bookrays and bookrings. They seemed like a saner idea at first - very economical to share the same book amongst several people who all wanted to read it. But then I thought about the postage costs, especially for people posting internationally, and began to wonder why all these daft people didn’t just go to their public library where they could read books for free.
In fact, so utterly confused was I at this strange BookCrossing phenomenon that I started to wonder whether I would be able to deregister my book and quietly cancel my membership.
But I hung around the forums for a bit, partly out of curiosity and partly because everyone was so friendly that I enjoyed talking to them.
Then, after a couple of days, a very strange thing happened.
I had an inexplicable desire to release a book.
And to join a book ray.
And to start my own book ray.
Surely this was madness! But as I questioned my sudden burst of madness, I realised that BookCrossing was no longer something odd that I didn‘t get.
Somehow along the way, without even noticing, I’d got it.
Quite how to define what I got about it is a different matter entirely. Something along these lines: that BookCrossing is taking the concept of book groups a step further. Instead of a group of people reading copies of the same book and chatting about it, BookCrossing involves groups of people actually reading the same copy of a book, and so the experience of shared reading is taken onto a different level.
There is somehow something exciting about knowing that the book I hold in my hand has passed or will pass (or both) through the hands of many different people of different ages, different backgrounds, sometimes in different countries - people whom I’ll probably never meet, and who, even if I did meet them, might have so little in common with me that we’d find nothing to talk about. People whose different life experiences will mean that their experience of reading this book I hold in my hands will be utterly different from mine. And yet somehow I am part of their experience of reading it, and they of mine, simply because we have all held in our hands the same book, and cast our eyes on the same pages.
I realise I am now sounding completely barmy. As I said, trying to define the point of BookCrossing is quite different from getting it.
But I am happy to say that, despite my ineloquence, I get it.
And I’m hooked.
