Bernd Mohr's Oregon Picture Album

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Terry McQuilkin
Hilary Hart
Jennifer Rowan
Lonni Sexton
Harriett Smith

 

LSA News

No. 59, November 2004

BookCrossing

(story continued)

BookCrossing.com is the brainchild of Ron Hornbaker, a partner in a software and internet development company called Humankind Systems, Inc. Ron and his wife conceived of a project that would let people track the movement of physical objects - in this case, books - on the internet. The pilot project was launched by Humankind in April, 2001 and now attracts between 200 and 500 new members daily from around the world. The concept is simple as is its execution. The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing.com are:

  1. Read a good book.
  2. Register and review the book online, get a unique BookCrossing ID (accession) number, and label the book with the ID and BookCrossing URL.
  3. Release the book for someone else to find and read; you will be notified by email each time someone records a journal entry for that book as it continues on each subsequent stage of its journey.

Labels can be printed off the BookCrossing.com website, singly or in sequentially numbered batches for large scale releases (designed for Avery label sheets) or can be purchased in the form of kits from the company. You must join to log-in and register books and to generate and print labels, but as the website states - it's FREE and ALWAYS WILL BE!

My friend checked the website for her Mount Pisgah "catch", a 1990 Puffin publication called Going Green: a Kid's Handbook to Saving the Planet by Elkington, Hailes, Hill and Makower (ISBN: 0-14-034597-3). The June 29 journal entry begins the book's travelogue in Coburg, Oregon, and this is followed by her own entry of July 9. She handed off the book to her visiting sister-in-law from Los Angeles who recorded the third entry. Finally, a fourth report was filed on September 29 by an anonymous finder in Whittier, California who notes she'll be using it as a resource for organizing a recycled art show for Earth Week at her children's school. What infinite possibilities exist beyond exile on a dusty shelf! I think of many of my own volumes that, having been read once are now left to molder wastefully when they could be released into the wild to find new readers for themselves and create travel stories of their own. In fact, I might even have an extra copy of Cancer Ward I'd be willing to liberate.

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