Books are the most personal of objects; we choose a book and we silently read, letting the author create a new world inside our minds. But books are the most social objects as well; we communicate all our important ideas in books and we’ve been doing that for almost 700 years; not all our culture has been in books, but a lot of it. And like gossip, books make for great talk.
Books make for great web too. You can find books; you can find out about books; you can get books – downloaded or delivered; you can trade books; you can even email books. And, as I suggested last week, we are only at the very beginning; soon, every book that ever was written and published will be available in some form online and there will be people in a chatroom talking about it.
Here are some sites that satisfy the old book itch with a new way to scratch:
Aside from having the best name and a truly fantastic illustration to welcome you to their site (the same graphic that you see at the top of this post), BookMooch does a couple things very well. Their book-trading service enables you to turn your staid, old, wallpaper-style library into an active social resource. The concept is simple: you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. Here’s how BookMooch describes it:
Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish. No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.
Here’s the bigger thing I like about BookMooch: your collection of books shouldn’t be a dumb dust-collector; it should be as alive and interesting as the books themselves. BookMooch makes that possible. For all those readers that still crave the heft and scent of good reading, BookMooch is brilliant!
BookGlutton has designed a great way to read books online; if you can skip the ritual of holding a book in your hands, this is the way to go. You can do it as privately as trad reading and conveniently take notes in a side bar or you can chat with other readers while you read. It’s a book club built into a social network. Nice.
The best way to find a good book is, of course, a recommendation from a friend. (Whenever I can, I tell someone that if they haven’t read John Berger’s To The Wedding, they should!) Goodreads puts the power of the web behind the process of recommending reading. In one visit, you can see who’s reading what and what they think of it. Simple and useful. Expand your mind.
Children’s Books Online - the Rosetta Project:
The Rosetta Project is proof that angels are at work somewhere on the web. Tons of old and wonderful children’s book, illustrated, some with audio, and available for free perusal and very inexpensive download. The stories are often familiar and, just as often, strange and new. They are a delight! And, as if the words alone were not enough, there are illustrations! If you like kids’ books, don’t go here unless you have the rest of the day free. A dream – but real, and here’s a pic to prove it:
You may be the kind of person who has no time for kids’ stuff and wants more stimulating stuff. OK. And what if you’re too busy to dig for the good dirt? Well, DailyLit can put tasty portions of Madame Bovary in your email’s inbox every day for 145 days in a row. If that doesn’t satisfy your cravings, perhaps books are just not your thing.
DailyLit has a huge range of books to choose from – new as well as old, fiction and non, completely free and for a very modest fee – and they will send you a chunk of the book everyday so that you actually read it! The folks who started DailyLit make their confession for all to read:
We created DailyLit because we spent hours each day on email but could not find the time to read a book. Now the books come to us by email. Problem solved.
Agreed. Now send me that carriage with Bovary in it.
Real books require real readers and we are all very fortunate that some real readers have found their way to the web and ignored the anti-tech bullshit that many book reviewers waste their time on. Mark Thwaite and Maud Newton are the real thing: genuine, long-time readers and book-lovers who bring passion and knowledge to their sites. Anybody who loves to read will love these sites; they are filled everyday with gossip and outrage and insight and suggestions. Keep reading alive!
The Big Kahuna. Always go here first – because many other booksites do exactly that. Eventually they will have it all, in my opinion, and I’m fine with that as long as they hire Mark Thwaite and Maud Newton to run the new book world they are creating. Here’s how they describe themselves:
Search
Book Search works just like web search. Try a search on Google Book Search. When we find a book with content that contains a match for your search terms, we’ll link to it in your search results.Browse books online
If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you’ll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it’s in the public domain, you’re free to download a PDF copy.
I tried an off-beat search: Michel Tournier’s Gemini. Here’s the link. Very impressive: an overview, a number of pages and links to his other stuff, including The Ogre, which is a much better read.
Book Search also has user-generated stuff such as MyLibrary. Users list books that they find interesting and possibly related to a theme. Some of the books are fully available from Book Search and you can download them immediately, others are still under copyright. Check out Magdelena’s list.
Sometimes you want or need to go deeper and get medieval, or, at least, scholarly. The people at universities have had the benefit of our tax dollars but they have closed off their libraries to the great unwashed (you and me). Google Scholar is turning that world upside-down. But are they doing a good job?
A recent University of Toronto study compared Google Scholar with a number of established university library systems; they measured authority, objectivity, rigour, and transparency of each resource, with the judges being unaware of the source. The conclusion?
“for all practical purposes, Google Scholar equaled library e-searches in its capacity to yield high-quality sources in response to queries made by relatively inexperienced writers in an introductory EAP course”.