Bookcrossing.com is one of those great ideas that was started with a true passion to make life more interesting. This unique online community was started by Humankind Systems Inc., a software/internet development company based out of the Midwest. Bookcrossing came about thanks to Ron Hornbaker, a partner at Humankind, who was looking to create an innovative, groundbreaking community website in an effort to escape the day to day toils of constructing e-commerce sites and email server applications. The idea for Bookcrossing officially materialized in 2001 after Ron and his wife, Kaori, began paying attention to sites like PhotoTag.org and WheresGeorge.com. Sites like these exist with the sole purpose of tracking items that people set free for others to use. Ron realized that books were a potential market for a similar application, and was surprised to see that nothing else like Bookcrossing already existed. Later that night Ron and Kaori made their plan official by buying and registering the bookcrossing.com domain name and set to work sketching logo ideas. Upon approval of the idea from his business partners, Ron programmed the site, a process that took about four weeks to complete. BookCrossing.com was launched with $500 (for a press release), the only money to date that's been needed to promote this site. About a year after the official launch Book Magazine ran an article on BookCrossing, acting as a catalyst for countless attention from TV, radio, and newspapers across the globe. BookCrossing reports about 300 new members each day, a category in the Google Directory, and it's even been added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as a new word â€" not bad for a company that started for just for the fun of it!

So what does BookCrossing do? BookCrossing lets you share books with people around the world; you can also track their travels through assigned serial numbers given to each book. Almost 3 million books have been registered by nearly 500,000 BookCrossing members. And while BookCrossing may seem to be largely about the books, their real purpose is to connect people. BookCrossers are generally thought to be well-traveled, adventurous, literate, and fun loving (not to mention generous). On the BookCrossing website you can look at archives of previously released books, or track a book that's currently in the wild. If you're a releasee, you can choose to make Release Notes that specify exactly where your book was left. BookCrossing is reconnecting those of us exhausted by technology through an age-old medium of communication: written literature. Kudos to BookCrossing for proving that curiosity and adventure never have to be replaced by cubicles and timecards.