I finally got on the Bookcrossing bandwagon and "released" my first book "into the wild." For a biologist this is especially fun as it resembles the mark-recapture method of determining the size of an animal population. If you watch nature shows, you've probably seen it done. Well-meaning biologists go into the wild and capture a number (determined statistically) of unfortunate individuals of the species in question, subject them to the trauma of being trapped and handled by humans, encumber, perforate, or inject them with some kind of marker, and then let them stagger off into the wilderness with stories of alien abduction and experimentation. The unlucky ones get knocked unconscious and the lucky ones get the animal equivalent of a bag of peanuts (actually they often get peanut butter, the same thing that got them into the trap in the first place). Those who haven't learned their lesson (or are simply now addicted to peanut butter) risk getting captured again, counted, and let off with a warning. Of course the slaves students who perform the more mundane tasks and crunch the numbers afterwards aren't much better off.
Bookcrossing is a much simpler experiment to participate in. It involves registering the book online, labelling it with its Bookcrossing number, and "forgetting" it somewhere. Hopefully another web-head will pick it up, register the "recapture," and repeat the process. I wondered for a while where to leave my first Bookcrossing book. Between the irrepressible helpfulness of Canadians ("Oh! You forgot your _____! Let me pick it up an dust it off for you!") and (shoot me now for using this term) post-9/11 paranoia about unattended packages (especially considering my swarthy looks), I wondered if I would get away with it. Then I recalled that I would be in an elevator today. Perfect! Well, as long as I was in there alone, which I was. The book was still there on the way down, but I suppose it's a bit much to expect a book to be snapped up in a half hour. Like a biologist waiting for the trap to trip, I'll have to wait for an e-mail telling me the book has fallen into human hands again, which for books at least, is as it should be.
