Catch and Release Books

Reading the amazing Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, I find BookCrossing.com in the chapter about global culture.

BookCrossing's goal "is to make the whole world a library."

It's the upside of globalization: sharing something inherently good and watching how others have taken pleasure in it (or not).

The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing are:

(1) Read a good book .

(2) Register it here.

(3) Release it (for free!) for someone else to read and get notified by email each time someone records a journal entry for that book.

So you share your book and then are able to track what happens to it: where it travels, who reads it, what others think of it, etc.

And then there's bookhunting--the optional, interactive, task-oriented element:

After registering and releasing a book, members have the option of making Release Notes, specifying where exactly (or approximately) they left a book. You can browse through these active releases here, by Country, State, City, and Crossing Zone. When someone finds a book listed here, and makes a journal entry, it will come off this list.

There's also a special Earth Day project.

I think I'll have to add this to my Seven Things Project routine.