Releasing Books into the Wild: Communal Gift-Giving at Bookcrossing.com

Abstract

The essence of Bookcrossing (BC) is releasing books into the wild. BC members leave their books at a railway station, in a pub, or even on a park bench, as a gift for someone they do not know. In this sense, BC is an alternative system of book exchange, based on gift-giving, which parallels and partly challenges the traditional market exchange system. But this is not the only way that BC members exchange books: more mundane and even superficial tasks are accomplished in order to achieve satisfactory exchanges, with no reference to higher order objectives, such as emancipation and resistance. Sometimes gift-giving communities (open source or peer-to-peer) are considered metaphors of collective solidarity, but they present elements of opportunism and selfishness: many subjects receive and do not give anything. Even those who give, as in the case of BC, do it for very practical and sometimes selfish reasons. BC is a good setting for confronting different theoretical perspectives on gift-giving: in order to explain how BC works as a system, it is necessary to integrate various gift-giving theories. Considered from this perspective, gift-giving communities like BC are fragmented and highly differentiated entities, sometimes working for a better and more acceptable market.