Ah! Someone has finally taken the Where's George? idea (interesting philosophically but not otherwise) and made something useful out of it. BookCrossing.com encourages you to take a book, slap a label on it, and send it out into the world (leave it somewhere, send it to someone, etc.). This is exciting to me as a person who a) likes lots of books, b) reads a good number of books, and c) doesn't want to sink a lot of money into books.

Alternatives exist. The library is an obvious one, but my mileage has definitely varied in that department. Someone turned me onto this idea: Just buy it, and if you don't need to keep it, resell it online for 50–75% of the cost. The theory here is that time is valuable and it takes time to sample a book at a bookstore, or tromp down to the library. But his numbers worked out better than mine, and I can't afford the regained time.

So in my quest to create a revolving door for those books that I won't mark up or fetishize, BookCrossing.com is the way to keep them moving, bringing the word samizdat into the modern capitalist era, and bringing capitalism into the commie-pinko era.