Send it Into the Unknown?

There are many people who love books. But there are even more copies of good books than people who read them. Recently I spoke to a friend who enjoys reading and has accumulated a small library. He told me about his plan to reduce its size since most of the books he enjoyed reading are now sitting in the shelf and collecting dust. They are to be given away to friends and strangers so that others can share his joy in reading these titles.

I like this plan a lot since this act of sharing opens up so many possibilities for human interaction and a feeling of connectedness. Knowing that the recipient may themselves pass the book on to someone else, what kinds of discussions between successive readers of the same copy of a book could come from such exchanges? What would be the farthest a book could go? Could it by great and unforgettable coincidence and unbeknownst to the previous reader even reach the original owner again?

Sometimes when buying a used book from the internet, you might find a hand-written dedication in the cover written by the previous owner that shared a few thoughts about the book and what things they wished the recipient to experience during their read-through. Or other times there might be margin notes, doodles, and anecdotes written in the book. All written by people unknown to you that spent several hours on reading through the same book that they and you liked enough to pass on to someone else. Who were these mysterious other people? Hearing what they have to say about this book all of you have read would definitely make for some awesome discussions.

I also set a goal for myself to give one of my favorite books away and have it go on as far as possible a journey. And for that, the idea of passing it on and on should be codified in the book, or be incentivized in some way. For example by reading with the idea in mind that by owning this book for a while you are creating something special together with strangers. And by leaving doodles and comments in the book, and, if it could somehow be realized, the ability of hearing back from future readers what their thoughts were while reading this book..

Tracking a book and gamifying its journey is a task that can be efficiently solved by technology. There could be a web app that does just this, acting as some kind of time-delayed book club on the same copy of a book.

BookVoyage

The website to send a book on its journey and then follow the path it takes needs to have two main features. To add one of your books initially, register it and receive a #BOOK code that you write into the book cover for others to find. Also add a short explanation on how to use that code on the BookVoyage website and maybe some personal message to the future readers.

On the other hand you might find a book marked in this way in a public book shelf or a friend might gift you one. You can then visit the BookVoyage website and enter the code there to get to this book’s public page where the path that the book took so far is logged along with the previous readers’ thoughts about the book. After your read-through you are welcome to also add your personal thoughts. The book’s code – which itself is not public and only found in the book – enables you to add a comment and log its most recent position on the world map for others to see.

Next Steps

This was just an overview over the most basic features of the system. This has to be implemented now. It will be open source, so feel free to help and provide suggestions!

Many other feature ideas come to mind:

• World map of all the current positions of books.
• Notifications when someone logged a comment on a book you owned before.
• Ad-hoc book club: schedule a live video chat with other readers of your copy of the book.
• Blind-date-with-a-book section: A list of books near your location that are ready to be passed on, containing a short and vague description of the contents each but not the titles.