What's New for Book-Lovers | Authors | Publishers | Booksellers | Libraries | Readers | The Commonplace Book | Rare Books | Online Books and Magazines | Poetry | Web Review Databases
last revised April 27, 1996
If you look at Yahoo for information about a particular author but find nothing, I suggest that you try a Lycos or InfoSeek search. Another worthwhile alternative is to post a query to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.books or the relevant topical newsgroups related to books. You can also search past Usenet discussions by searching the DejaNews archive. See also my discussion of Internet mailing lists (below). You may be pleasantly surprised at the speed with which your question is answered by the global consciousness.
Speaking of global consciousness, I want to emphasize that I am well aware that the Net and the Web are global resources shared by people of all nations. If you maintain an online resource devoted to non-English literature, please let me know, subject line "add World-Lit." The hypermail archive for World Literature will also point to the old IBIC World Literature page. Aspiring and actual authors may wish to check out the outstandingWWW-VL Writer's Resources On The Web; The Internet Writers Resource Guide residing at bricolage--a monthly publication which tracks writing-related information and developments on the Internet; INKSPOT: Children's Writer's Resource; and Books for Children .. and More. The newsgroup misc.writing has a lot of supportive and informative postings and is not a bad place to go for a "virtual kaffee klatsch."
As you explore the world of booksellers on the Internet, I suggest you begin with the American Booksellers Association and Yahoo's list of booksellers for laundry lists of relevant sites.
In my opinion, the most sophisticated bookselling site is Amazon.com. The catalog at Amazon.com claims to carry 1.1 million titles out of 1.4 million in Books in Print and offers a number of useful features, including cross-linking to (some) descriptive text, cover art, suggested cross-indices and (some) reader-submitted reviews, plus free persistent application of the query by the Amazon personal notification service, which will send you e-mail when new books related to your interests come in. Also well worth checking out are Book Stacks Unlimited, which has been around since 1991 (in Net terms, that makes it a great-grand-daddy!) and has both a large online ordering catalog and a nice "frosting" of discussion group and Intertain.com, which offers a large catalog of books actually in stock and speedy service (they say "95% of our orders are shipped within 48 hours"). I'm impressed by the international service of Bookserve, which supports German, Spanish, and Dutch language. And The Internet Bookshop, a UK-based service that offers a searchable catalog of 780,000 titles, offers an intriguing service in The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, a series of essays providing reading lists for 90 genres and essays describing the works of 350 popular authors and related titles, with links to the Bookshop's ordering service. A great idea. I am coming to believe that content--qualitative information that helps an individual decide to a purchase a book--is the killer app for Internet book retailing.
What you might call the inverse approach to book retailing via the Internet is Salon, an impressively professional online magazine of books, arts, and ideas, which supports e-mail ordering of a small number of featured titles via Borders Books & Music stores. But they almost actively discourage you from requesting delivery via mail! What they really seem to want you to do is go to the nearest Borders store and pick up the book.
Finally, don't forget that your favorite local bookseller should be also happy to help you find a particular title, whether you make contact by phone, by e-mail, or by good old fried shoe leather.
I cannot leave this space without thanking the excellent people at the Ann Arbor Public Library, who have supported my love of books over many, many years.
Many of us like to know whether a book has received good reviews.
The megasite BookWire contains reviews from Publishers Weekly, The Boston Book Review, The Hungry Mind Review, Computer Book Review, and The Quarterly Black Review of Books.
Books Unbound is the literary section of News. Corp's iGUIDE. It's an impressively polished site with stunning graphics (in fact, they're almost too distracting); rotating feature stories related to books; a Book News section; and a review bank.
Pathfinder includes book review coverage drawn from the Time Inc. empire but, frankly, I never look there, because it's just too hard navigating the enormous site.
Mr. Showbiz has regular book review features but it looks to me as if their heart really isn't in it. They're strongly focused on entertainment news, especially movies and TV; kind of an "Entertainment Tonight" for the Web.
The database at Amazon.com cleverly enables readers to submit their own reviews, complete with rating from 1-10; although I must note that there do seem to be an awful lot of 9s and 10s submitted so far, I think the review database is an enormously promising idea that could, for the first time, reify the most powerful force in book-selling: word of mouth.
I formerly maintained The IBIC Virtual Review of Books, a collection of pointers to book review resources around the Internet.
Some of us put a lot of stock in awards and other meritocratic honors. If you're short on reading time, awards are certainly an efficient way of eliminating "false positives"--most books that win awards really are pretty good. I recommend you begin with Jack Siler's Literary Lists; Laurie Mann's AwardWeb,which is especially strong on science fiction; the Children's Book Awards at David Brown's wonderful Children's Literature Web Guide; and the Book Stacks Hall of Fame. Be warned, however, these lists are not always as up to date as they could be; for example, in late November 1995 I found 5 or 6 places that purported to list Booker Prize winners, but only one--Jack Siler's Literary Lists--that had the 1995 nominees and winners, announced in early November.
I gave out a couple of awards in 1994--the 1994 Ibbies (Internet Book Information Center Awards) and it was fun; I will probably do it again in 1996.
Some of us are even crass or unjudgmental enough to think that a book that sells a lot of copies must have some value in it. (I'm being sarcastic; in fact, I do believe exactly that.) Check out the Publishers' Weekly Best-Seller Lists at Bookwire; a nifty feature is that many identified books are hotlinked to recent PW reviews.
Stephanie da Silva and NeoSoft.com maintain a huge, but still incomplete, list of publicly accessible mailing lists. That's a good place to start. But you really need to keep your eye open. Watch relevant Usenet newsgroups and don't hesitate to post a query asking if there is a mailing list devoted to your favorite author. That may be enough to get one started!
If you are interested in locating a particular rare or used book, I suggest you post to the newsgroup rec.arts.books.marketplace, or to the relevant topical newsgroups related to books.
As you might expect, I think online magazines are a promising genre. In fact, you could easily consider IBIC a magazine, except that at the outset I consciously decided to call IBIC an "Information Center" rather than a magazine because the information is updated whenever the inclination strikes me--as opposed to a regular frequency--but that's really the only difference. I even offer the opportunity to sponsor this page now, just like a magazine.
In any event, if you are interested in online magazines, I recommend that you begin with the WWW Virtual Library on Electronic Journals.
Reviewing websites sounds like a good idea, but my judgment is that it's a profession which hasn't yet really hit its stride. Websites are difficult to review: they're often large, subjective, complex, and dynamic. It's hard to be fair, timely, and authoritative in reviewing them, especially in the limited space that most of the review databases provide. For what it's worth, I've found that the most accurate, thoughtful reviews seem to come from Excite.The McKinley Internet Directory is pretty good, too. But Point Communications is so subjective and unedited as to be misleading. A lot of their reviews seem to be written by the Webmaster's mom.
News Corp.'s iGUIDE includes inSites, a searchable database of web site reviews. Their reviews are often quite discerning.
Editor's Recommendations, Summer 1996In this inaugural edition of IBIC's Featured Books, I'd like to draw your attention to several titles which have helped to shape my life and thinking.
|
Comprehensive Table of Contents | Help
Copyright © 1996 Internet Book Information Center, Inc.
Send a Letter to the Editor