Book Crossing www.bookcrossing.com Article by Sue I read about Book Crossing in a newspaper about a year ago. The idea behind it is that you register a book at the Book Crossing web site, then leave it somewhere - on a park bench or in a caf‚ perhaps. Then settle back and see who picks it up and reads it. You don't have to sit and watch, though some people do. You can track the book's progress on the website as members, known as journalers, write in and say where they found it, what they thought of it and where it is now. Some books have travelled across continents. What I found great fun was that you can look for your area on the web site and see how many books are currently travelling in a particular area and when they were 'released into the wild'. Sadly there weren't any in Sidcup but there are currently 13 on the underground system, mostly on the Central Line. I found myself looking up places I know to see if books had been left there and not caught. At the time of writing five were at William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent. One had been left on the back seat of the 11:10am 729 bus from Bromley to Bluewater last Saturday. One had been left on a bench outside Ernest Jones, the jewellers in Bexleyheath and 1 in the Barclay's Bank nearby. One had been left the day before at Caf‚ Nero, Bromley and 1 on the 227 bus. Starbucks in Cardiff seems to be a popular place to leave books. An amazing 218 had been left in Norwich! The next busiest place was Nottingham with 134. I wonder why those cities have had so many books left and not caught? If you get into Book Crossing, meets are held every four weeks in cities all over the world - on the second Tuesday of the month at 7pm. Here are some press releases and other info from the official site at www.bookcrossing.com BookCrossing.com is a labor of love that was conceived and is maintained by Humankind Systems, Inc., a software and internet development company with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, and Sandpoint, Idaho. Looking for a break from the doldrums of creating yet another e-commerce website (that's just what the world needs), or email server application (oooh, those are doubly exciting), Humankind partner Ron Hornbaker sought to create a community site that would be the first of its kind, that would give back to the world at large, and that would provide warm fuzzy feelings whenever he worked on it. BookCrossing.com was the result. The idea came to Ron back in March of 2001, as he and his wife Kaori were admiring the PhotoTag.org site, which tracks disposable cameras loosed into the wild. He already knew about the popularity of WheresGeorge.com (which tracks U.S. currency by serial number), and that got him thinking: what other physical object might people enjoy tracking? A few minutes later, after a glance at his full bookshelf, the idea of Books came to mind. And he knew it was a good one. After getting increasingly excited during two hours of research on the internet, Ron realized that nothing like BookCrossing had been done. And since it centered around and celebrated books, it would reward his lifelong love of reading. By 3 A.M. that night, he had decided on the name, registered the domain, and Kaori had sketched the running book logo on a crossing sign. The rest was merely execution. After getting the green light from his partners in the software company, Ron went to work programming the site from scratch the next day, and about four mostly sleepless weeks later, on April 17, 2001, BookCrossing.com was launched with a simple $500 press release, the last time money has been spent promoting the site. Members trickled in at the rate of 100 or so per month, by word of mouth, until March of 2002 when the Book magazine article was published. Since then, the BookCrossing phenomenon has been the focus of countless TV, radio, and newspaper features, between 200 and 500 new members from around the world join every day, and BookCrossing has its own category the human-edited Google Directory. The fact that it has captured the passion and imagination of around 217,460 people worldwide, so quickly, has both surprised and deeply gratified BookCrossing's founders. BOOKCROSSING.COM ENCOURAGES BOOKLOVERS EVERYWHERE TO "READ AND RELEASE" "I guess you could say it's the Karma of literature," explains BookCrossing.com's co-founder, Ron Hornbaker. "Releasing your books 'into the wild' and tracking their progress and the lives they touch is just more fascinating, and more fulfilling, than hoarding them on a shelf somewhere." URL: http://www.BookCrossing.com/ KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, USA --(April 17, 2001)-- /URLwire/ Humankind Systems, Inc. announces the launch of BookCrossing.com, a fun, free, and first-of-its-kind book tracking website for booklovers everywhere. "We teach BookCrossers, our members, the '3 Rs' of BookCrossing: to Read, Register, and Release their books for others to enjoy," says Ron Hornbaker, President and CTO of BookCrossing.com's parent company, Humankind Systems. "Sharing books with your friends and neighbors is a natural instinct... what we've done is created a tracking database so that you can see where your books are, and read the journal entries along the way." BookCrossers register a book by going to the website at www.BookCrossing.com, entering the ISBN number of the book, and getting a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number) that is then written inside the cover (or on a bookmark) along with the website address. Convenient and eye-catching BookCrossing bookmarks can be printed from the website, making the registration process quick and easy. "It's really quite simple," Hornbaker continues. "And even if you don't want to give your books away, you can register them at BookCrossing.com to have your very own free, virtual bookshelf, complete with your personal reviews, to show the world the books you've read." Adventurous BookCrossers release their books "into the wild" on park benches, in coffee shops, in phone booths... wherever the interplay of distance and chance can make things interesting. They're fascinated with the fate, karma, or whatever you want to call the chain of events that can occur between two or more lives and one piece of literature. More conservative BookCrossers give their books to friends, relatives, or charities, and enjoy reading the resulting journal entries from person to person. "Just think!" exclaims Hornbaker. "Books are forever... people don't throw them away. A hundred years from now, your great- great-grandchild might open a book, find a website address with a BookCrossing ID number, and go read a journal entry that YOU wrote. How cool is that?" - o -