BookCrossing in Japan

BookCrossing has come to Japan! The picture may not look like much, but last night one of the first open parties was held to let people interested in BookCrossing in Japan meet one another and discuss next steps.

BookCrossing is one of those great, obvious ideas. Basically, it means leaving a book in a public place to be taken and read by another person, who then does the same thing.

At the moment, more than 600,000 people around the world are registered with BookCrossing.com, the website that got the idea rolling. You can join for free, register books online, print out and affix a sticker explaining how it works, and then “release” the book. As the book travels from one reader to the next, you can track it on the website. Until, of course, someone becomes too attached to the book to let it go again.

Originally, the idea was just to drop the book on a park bench or leave it on the train for the next person to find it. Increasingly, though, people have begun to use BookCrossing Zones, a bookshelf in a coffee shop or other place where people can go to pick up and drop off books. There’s a map of world BookCrossing Zones here, though many zones haven’t been put on the map yet. Zones allow book crossers a greater choice of books, and also do away with the awkwardness some people feel in picking up something that isn’t theirs, even if it has a large yellow sticker saying “Free Book.”

In Hiroshima, there are already eight BookCrossing Zones, and the goal is to expand to fifty. If you read Japanese and you’re interested, the BookCrossing Japan website is here. To do my bit, I’ll try to bring a few books into Mac and either leave them near the end of the bar or over on a shelf under the speakers.