After almost four years in Perth, Australia, my stay was nearing its end and I had a problem. Being an avid second-hand book shopper, my collection was fairly impressive and I was well aware that exorbitant shipping costs were going to restrict the number of parcels I could send home.
One night over dinner, a friend told me how she had registered a book on BookCrossing.com and had freed the book “into the wild” by leaving it in a backpacker’s hostel in Alice Springs. I was intrigued: How does this site work?
Days later I divided my book collection into two piles, the essentials and the soon-to-be free.
The concept is to turn the entire world into one giant library where books are not owned but shared, a brilliant example of the Internet functioning as a community builder.
The bookcrosser registers the book on its cyber bookshelf and it is assigned a unique identity number.
The member downloads a bookcrosser bookmark and pastes it into the inside cover of the book.The bookmark also briefly explains the bookcrosser concept and directs readers to the website so they can trace the travels of their recent find.
Readers are encouraged to record their impressions of the book on the site before once again freeing the book into the wild.
Soon enough I was registered and having great fun thinking up new places to leave my treasured books, hoping that they would find both a temporary home and a receptive mind.
Since the website’s inception on April 17 2001, more than 2,7-million books have been released by almost 450 000 registered bookcrossers in 150 countries.
Conceived by Ron Hornbaker of United States software and Internet development company Humankind Systems, the site showed slow growth at first, signing up about 100 members a month.
Then in March 2002 a Book Magazine profile brought the website to global attention, resulting in an avalanche of new members.
Currently, the site is signing up an average of 350 new members each day without any advertising. It hopes to reach the three million-member mark by 2009.
The Mail & Guardian recently joined the global library by releasing four novels in Johannesburg. Nick Stone’s Mr Clarinet was freed on a table outside Fego Café on Jan Smuts Avenue, Rosebank. Ben Elton’s The First Casualty was freed next to the Standard Bank ATM on the corner of Jan Smuts Avenue and Seventh Avenue, Rosebank. Andrea Camilleri’s Excursion to Tindari was freed on the Mugg & Bean’s bookstand, on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Fourth Avenue, Parkhurst. Jo Nesbo’s The Devil’s Star was freed at a public payphone on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Fourth Avenue, Parkhurst.
The M&G was notified by BookCrossing.com that Mr Clarinet had been picked up by a new reader who posted the following message. “This is absolutely amazing! I got the book from Fego, Rosebank today February 14 2006. Not planned! I will read the book, then forward it to my brother in Melbourne, Australia! This is a great idea! Thanks to whoever thought about this! You made my Valentine’s Day unforgettable!”
A bookcrosser known as Gild, who has released 21 books and found five, e-mailed me to congratulate the M&G on freeing review copies and directed me to a Yahoo! group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BookCrossingJohannesburg/), which he has set up to facilitate bookcrossing in Johannesburg.
Gild is trying to set up a venue for regular book deposits.
A second e-mail, from NRRDGRRL, who has released 534 books and found 264, says he/she has been trying to set up a bookcrossing forum in Gauteng and is especially keen to find a public bookshelf where crossers can leave their books.
My own efforts were less successful. I released 10 or so books into the wild on Perth’s buses and park benches, at coffee shops, ATMs and payphones, but alas, a visit to the site shows none have been recorded as found on the site.
Either they were found by philistines who could not see beauty in a global library or they are still endlessly travelling the buses and trains of Perth.
SA books doing the rounds
Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom appears to be the most-freed South African book with a whopping 84 copies in the global library. Other non-fiction titles dealing with South Africa’s history include Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s No future without Forgiveness (three copies); Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva’s The Bang Bang Club (five) and Steve Biko’s books I Write What I Like (four) and The Testimony of Steve Biko (three).
The most prominent South African novelist is Nadine Gordimer, who has a massive 434 books in circulation. Fellow novelist André Brink has 92 books out there, while JM Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winner for literature, has only 10 freed books, six of which are his novel Disgrace. Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog currently has five books listed, while Zakes Mda has 14. — Lloyd Gedye