''Goe, little booke," wrote the English poet Edmund Spenser when he sent his "Shepheard's Calender" out into the world back in 1579 and inspired a flurry of contemporary authors to adopt the metaphor of books as children sent to seek their fortune. In a modern twist on an old idea, some enthusiastic and evidently underemployed people have started an Internet-based venture in which readers, not authors, send books out "into the wild" to try their luck.
Although it's not an idea that will appeal to everyone, BookCrossing.com, which began in April 2001, has grown by leaps and bounds in the months since. It may never rival Xbox or the Segway as popular entertainment, but in its eccentric, '60s-ish way it does remind us that innocence, whimsy and antimaterialism do survive in some pockets of our depraved, oversolemn and materialistic world.
How does it work? Inspired by Web sites such as Where's George, which tracks U.S. currency by serial number, and PhotoTag.org, which leaves disposable cameras about then tracks them and displays the pictures taken on them, the BookCrossing founders say they asked themselves, "Okay, what's something else that people would have fun releasing and then tracking?" They came up with the idea of books, on the grounds that books are something "almost everybody" loves. Fired by visions of the world as a giant library, they encourage members to label books with a BookCrossing sticker and leave them about in public places -- on a park bench, in a cafe, on a plane or train or bus -- for other people to find and read for free.