If you really love a book, set it free

By Paul McNamara
Network World, 04/22/02

There was a time not long ago that venture capitalists would have been queued up outside Ron Hornbaker's Kansas City, Mo., office waving multimillion-dollar checks for "the eyeballs" being drawn to his year-old Web site: www.bookcrossing.com.

The fact that no one's lined up today doesn't make Hornbaker's baby any less cool.

BookCrossing.com is an online community for people who love books and would rather hand their dog-eared favorites to a total stranger - for free - than see those books collect dust on a shelf, or worse, wind up in a landfill. You don't need the Web to avoid these fates, of course, so what's interesting here is that there's also a "message in a bottle" twist to the site that pays the participant an intangible return no used bookstore could match.

In a nutshell, BookCrossing members "release" their books "into the wild" - they leave them in a public place - after having registered the titles on the site and affixed provided stickers that explain the purpose of BookCrossing. The stickers include a unique, randomly generated identification number.

In theory, the person who stumbles across the book is supposed to note the sticker, be intrigued, visit www.bookcrossing.com, report the ID number and log a journal entry about the find. They're also supposed to read the book, of course, and offer a review of its merits.

The kick comes from learning the book you released has found a good home and continues to make the rounds. The kicker, sadly, is that only about 10% of the books are heard from again . . . although that doesn't seem to discourage the participants.

"When they do make a journal entry saying 'Hey, I found this book at such and such a cafe,' [an application on the site] e-mails all the previous owners - including the original registrant and anyone along the chain who has made a journal entry on that book - to let them know," Hornbaker says.

Hornbaker was moved to launch BookCrossing after visiting www.wheresgeorge.com - a popular yet puzzling site that lets members register and track the circulation of dollar bills - and www.phototag.org, one of a number of sites that apply the pass-it-along theme to disposable cameras. (Buzz can only imagine the outtakes.)

BookCrossing has 3,400 members and is adding about 80 per day, says Hornbaker, whose real job is being president and CTO at Humankind Systems, a software development company.

The BookCrossing site is certainly slick - as opposed to those from which it drew inspiration - and if nothing else stands as a compelling advertisement for Humankind. But might it ever stand on its own as a business?

"Someday, when we have critical mass, having this many book lovers under our control will be a powerful thing," Hornbaker says. "When we get serious numbers, we'll be able to feature new books [for a fee] . . . and promote them in a viral way."

In the meantime, the site will go on making a whole lot of book lovers happy.

It's much bigger than a breadbox

Most public relations stunts stink because they insult the intelligence of the public and the press.

But, I like this "contest" question from Lumeta, a network management and security vendor: "How big is 2 to the 104th?"

The idea is to describe in mere words the vastness of that number, which is "more than 20 million trillion trillion," according to Lumeta. (The number matters to Lumeta because its firewall reportedly simulates that many types of packets in generating its reports.) Here's an example of what they're looking for:

"Did you know that 2 to the 104th atoms of lead make a sphere almost 35 feet in diameter? It would weigh 15.5 million pounds."

Got a good one? Enter at www.lumeta.com.

Don't get too excited, though: The prizes are nowhere near as impressive as that number.

Contacting the column is easier. The address is buzz@nww.com.