I first heard about Book Crossing back in May via Neil Gaiman's journal and thought it was a neat idea, though I wasn't ready to give up any of my books to the cause.

The idea is this: you take a book that you like and are willing to part with, register it on the BC site, put a sticker on the inside of it to indicate its ID number, then "release it into the wild" by giving it to a friend, leaving it on a park bench, donating it to charity, or "forgetting" it in a coffee shop. The ultimate goal in this is to make the entire world a public library, and get people to read something they normally wouldn't pay for. Literacy ho!

A few weeks ago, I printed out Cory Doctorow's story "Truncat" from Salon.com, since, unlike Cory, I still prefer to read hardcopy if I can. I read the story on the bus one night going to class, and really enjoyed it. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, it's sort of a sequel to his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, although it only shares the setting, not the characters. It takes place in the posthuman future where Whuffie is currency of choice in the Bitchun Society, and file sharing is taken to extreme proportions. Nearly everyone on the planet is integrated into a vast network, with computer implants that work seamlessly with their normal brain functions. Every once in a while, they make a backup of themselves, a copy of all their experiences up to that moment, so that if they inadvertantly die, or just don't like how their lives have turned out, they can restore their backup into a cloned body and begin again. In essence, death is no more. But the problem the story posits, something Doctorow does as excellently as Bruce Sterling, is what happens to the backups? They're supposed to be purged when a new backup is made, but there's an underground group that has funneled them into secure locations, and are flash-baking the backups, instantly experiencing everything the person has ever experienced. They are file-sharing someone's consciousness.

I thought this was a fantastic extrapolation of all the peer-to-peer (P2P) controversy going on with Napster and Kazaa and the mighty and suppressive arm of the RIAA right now, and decided, in the file-sharing spirit of the story, to leave the printed-out story in the lounge of the English building for someone else to find. I placed it on a table, and walked to class. The next morning, the story was gone. I'm hoping that somebody decided to read it and become exposed to Doctorow's writing, instead of some random cleaning lady tossing it into the trash, but I guess I'll never know. I like to think of it passing from hand to hand, becoming tattered and dog-eared from use, sporting coffee stains and chocolate fingerprints as badges of honor.

I emailed Cory about this yesterday, and he replied that I'd absolutely made his day.

So I'm going to join the Book Crossing tribe and see what else I can release into the wild. I'll start small, and see how it goes. Y'all are welcome to join me.

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Now Reading:
Little Gods by Tim Pratt

Stories Out to Publishers:
5

Books Read This Year:
40

Zines/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
35