by Michael Skubal - Daily News Staff - mskubal@rhinelanderdailynews.com

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Students set books free in effort to share them with public

Cool and offbeat writing related Web sites are available to everyone and teachers and students at James Williams Middle School are taking advantage of them.

Students in Amy Johnson's English class are giving the gift of words to book lovers citywide by working with Bookcrossing, a free online book club. With more than 260,000 members, Bookcrossing's sole goal is to “make the whole world a library.”

After signing up, users register books (with unique ID numbers) and print out labels to put inside.

They then release the books “into the wild” by leaving them on a park bench, “forgetting” them at a local McDonald's, or dropping them at a dentist's office for others to find. Those who “catch a release” go on to register the book on the site, write an online review, and re-release the book.

Members can easily track the journey their books are taking. With 1.1 million registered books in the wild, there's no knowing how far a word can travel. Check out this great idea by going to the Web site, www.bookcrossing.com.

On the penultimate day of school, members of Johnson's eighth grade English class were freeing books at dentist's and doctor's offices around town.

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Comments »

Scott Sorochak wrote on Jun 6, 2007 10:48 PM: " What a great article and I applaud the efforts of Ms. Johnson and her class for helping to participate in the BookCrossing movement. A couple points of clarification...as our website mentions, we now have about 560,000 members worldwide in over 120 countries and this includes nearly 4,000,000 books that have been released "into the wild". I'm personally traveling about 50% of the time spending time with students just like Ms. Johnsons to help bring awareness to this movement in support of literacy. Great work Tyler, Ashley, Haley, Lauren and Ben!! Best Regards, Scott Sorochak CEO BookCrossing scott@bookcrossing.com " The comments above are from readers. In no way do they represent the views of the Rhinelander Daily News.

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