A while ago a friend and I had the idea of taking a big stack of books we’d read and handing them out to total strangers. And then of setting up some kind of web thingy where people who found our books could write us nice messages. Well, thanks to the invisible hand, if you sit around long enough, someone will actually implement your idea. All things being conserved, however, they never do get it right.

Courtesy of the Morning News, I discovered BookCrossing today, which claims almost a million registered books, all of which contain a little stamp or scribble with an ID that you can type into their tracking software.

Now that I see the whole thing implemented, I’m not sure I like it at all. Never mind the cheesy crap (“giving is a good thing”, “please release me”, “good karma: priceless”) and the useless meta-activities that seem to accompany everything that goes online these days (the ratings, the cachet points, the schwag, and contentless comments). One learns to ignore all psychopomps. But I’m not certain why we should be so anxious to implement in hardware and software what has always worked perfectly well in reality. Want to give a book away? Just walk up to someone. Want to talk to someone about books? Start talking about books.

I like the Internet as well as anyone, I like cell phones, I like clever gadgets: I’m not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination. But I begin to suspect that the world shares my interest in these toys because they act as a sort of risk market. What did you do before phones, sitting in a cafe, walking down the street, browsing for books? Talked to people around you, I would imagine. But this implies a certain amount of risk, and isn’t it far more comfortable to talk to people you already know? So you pay Sprint fifty bucks a month to absorb that risk of being with people you don’t like or don’t know or can’t understand.

So no, I’m not going to give away any of my books, except to people with whom I’ve actually connected in some substantial way. Or if I do give anything to a stranger, it will be because I want to talk to them.