I’ve been a redditor (don’t do it!) for awhile now. For a long time, I enjoyed the site for its endless cat pictures, silly memes, and sometimes-funny comment threads. About a year ago, I did a massive overhaul of my frontpage to include subreddits that directly applied to my meatworld interests. Gone were r/pics, r/funny, and r/adviceanimals. (I admit I still frequent r/videos even though it’s not on my frontpage). I replaced it with subreddits like r/teaching, r/rhetcomp (and r/comprhet), r/steelers, r/daddit, and so on.

Recently, my brother-in-law suggested r/bookexchange. The concept is simple. You post a list of titles that you’re willing to exchange, as well as a list of titles that you’re seeking out.  If anyone sees a title they like, they can offer you something you’re looking for, or show you their list of titles-to-exchange, you swap meatworld addresses and you send the books on their way. This was something I could do, something I’d enjoy doing. I am a bibliophile (aren’t we all). So, I joined the subreddit, but remained inactive until very recently.

See, we moved into our house right around the time our son was born, so my books have remained in piles in my office for the past nine months. Several of you have helped me gather various furnitures with which I might shelve these books, but it wasn’t until recently that I came across a massive teak desk/shelving unit that I was finally able to give all my books a home. And with that, I was finally able to exchange some books!

It started with my titles. Rather than limit them, I decided to list everything and engage in negotiations in the moment. If it was a title I couldn’t part with, I’d be honest about that. If it wasn’t, awesome. And rather than list them, I took panoramas of each shelf. This was a satisfying procedure, and I ended up with an imgur album that I get a lot of pleasure looking at.

I got some bites, and they were for books I was comfortable parting with and for titles I was excited to receive (even though some of them weren’t titles I was looking for): Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test & Doors of Perception for The Power and the Glory and Baron Von Steuben’s Revolutionary War Drill Manual; Flowers for Algernon for Pearls of Lutra; A History of God for Watchmen; Brave New World for Game of Thrones.

Some of these books had been with me for awhile, so I decided to write a little note inside them to the person with whom I was exchanging the book. I wasn’t sure about the etiquette (or redditquette) of this. r/bookexchange suggests putting your username in the book, as well as the date when you exchanged it, and then “paying it forward” by offering the book up to be exchanged again. But that seemed insubstantial, plus I had this signment to take care of….

So, I wrote some notes in some of the books I sent out:

Some observations about this writing: I did not know this people to whom I was exchanging books; I didn’t even know their names. Hence “MsAdler” and “szhamilton,” our usernames. There was some trepidation in sharing my meataddress with digital folks, but then….why? Part of my email footer is “search szhamilton,” as “szhamilton” is my handle for a great number of services, from reddit to stumbleupon to twitter to gmail. I guess what I’m thinking is: if someone wanted to kill me, they could’ve figured out how to a long time ago. But, if I’m not in class in a week, then I have been murdered by MsAdler, who has been a redditor for about one year and was a member of Team Periwinkle.

The writing (a short note) I put into these books needed to highlight the books (the material), because that was the only thing that I had in common with the recipient of this writing. Interestingly, though, my writing didn’t highlight the materiality of the book itself, but rather the contents of the book. These contents would seem to be transferrable, existing as they could in my trade copy edition of A History of God, or in a subsequent paperback edition.

But! my writing also mentions (and apologizes for) the underlining and marginalia in this copy of the book, which is a material aspect of this particular book. And now, so too is the short note, written as it is on one of the early pages of this and the other books I’m exchanging through r/exchange.

I don’t rightly know what (if anything) to make of any or all of this, other than to say I have some questions following my participation in this signment:

1. Is the content of a book a material aspect of a book? (If a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around to hear it…if a book goes unread….)

2. Is the digital world (cyberspace) a mere facilitator for material exchange, exemplified by my participation in r/bookexchange? What is the materiality of a site like reddit above and beyond the actual material things that can be exchanged through its various subreddits?

3. Exchange, as conducted through a site such as r/bookexchange or as conducted in any bookstore, relies on materiality. I give you a thing of an agreed upon value, you give me different thing of similarly agreed upon value. Here’s $5, I would like that sandwich. If this was r/ebookexchange, would the exchange be the same as the exchange that takes place through r/bookexchange? Are the rules and mechanisms of material exchange transferrable to the rules and mechanisms of virtual exchange?