Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Releasing Books into the Wild: Communal Gift-Giving at Bookcrossing.com

2008; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.1292852

1556-5068

Daniele Dalli, Matteo Corciolani,

Digital Marketing and Social Media

The essence of Bookcrossing (BC) is releasing books into the wild. BC members leave their books at a railway station, in a pub, or even on a park bench, as a gift for someone they do not know. In this sense, BC is an alternative system of book exchange, based on gift-giving, which parallels and partly challenges the traditional market exchange system. But this is not the only way that BC members exchange books: more mundane and even superficial tasks are accomplished in order to achieve satisfactory exchanges, with no reference to higher order objectives, such as emancipation and resistance.