Virtual LibraryThe World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Literature

aka The IBIC Guide to Book-Related Resources on the Internet

(For other subjects in the WWW Virtual Library, see the Subject Index at w3.org.)


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Table of Contents

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

Authors

The world of books begins with authors. The friendly folks at Yahoo maintain a comprehensive laundry list of authors, including separate pages on Children, Literary Fiction, Mystery, Non-fiction Playwrights, Poets, and SF/Fantasy/Horror. I formerly maintained an IBIC list of authors, and it still lists some sites that are not listed at Yahoo.

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."

Publishers

Publishers bring authors to the world. They also bring a lot of useful information to the Internet, although, as with everything else on the Web, the quality and depth vary considerably. I suggest you begin with the Yahoo Business:Companies:Publishing page and with the Virtual Library on Publishers (unfortunately, the VL Publishers site is in the UK, so the link may be a bit slow for transAtlantic users). For the scholarly and comprehensive interests of acquisitions librarians, there is a very strong list at AcqWeb. And I formerly maintained a list of miscellaneous IBIC publisher pointers.

Booksellers

Once a book is published, booksellers put it in the public's hands. I must say that for all that I love the Internet, and for all the time I've spent developing this resource, I still get a visceral thrill when I walk into a bookstore that I have never felt on the Internet. There are a lot of people trying to figure out how to sell books on the Internet; but, frankly, I don't think anyone has figured out how to match the experience you get when you browse at a good full-service bookstore. (As an Ann Arbor native, I have to tip my hat to the Borders Books & Music on Maynard, one of my all-time favorite physical places.)

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.

Books on Tape

For those road warriors who like to listen to books on cassette (I know I do!), I strongly recommend Terry's Audiobooks, an excellent index of resources, including a list of 800 numbers for most of the major audiobook publishers.

Libraries

Libraries have contributed greatly to my life and prosperity (and I to theirs, especially the library at Swarthmore College; I nearly did not graduate with my class because I owed $144 in overdue fines ;-) and I am glad to honor libraries and librarians in this space. I recommend the Library of Congress World Wide Web Home Page and the Internet Public Library as starting points. I also suggest you take a look at the Literature Webliography, a well organized guide to scholarly library resources maintained by Stephen R. Harris at Lousiana State University. There is also an old page of miscellaneous IBIC library pointers, but remember--I'm no librarian!

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.

Readers

It is once readers begin to love a book that it really begins to live. It is in this grass roots spirit that I applaud Homespun's Book Recommendations of Real People; Tristram Cooke's Internet Top 100 SF & Fantasy Books, and the One-Book List by Paul Phillips.

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.

Mailing Lists

One of the surest signs that readers love an author or a genre is the existence of a dedicated Internet mailing list on the subject. If you are interested in finding like-minded souls, I strongly recommend that you look for related mailing lists. Some authors even participate in their own mailing lists! Being in regular communication with one of your favorite authors is an incredible demonstration of the transforming power of the Internet.

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!

The Commonplace Book

Books have an impact on their readers. [Bonk!] That's the idea behind The Commonplace Book (n.): an edited collection of striking passages noted in a single place for future reference. The goal of the experimental Commonplace Book hypermail archive (which contains all submissions received after 10/1/95) is to test the concept of an Internet Commonplace Book built by and available to a wide variety of users. This is a good place to start if you are looking for books that have really energized their readers.

Rare Books

Some books are so well loved that they live on long after those who first read them. For those who love rare books, I recommend the Antiquarian Booksellers of America Web Site and the Bibliophile home page and mailing list. To subscribe to the Bibliophile Mailing List, send email to biblio-request@smartdocs.com and put "subscribe" (without the quotes) in the body of your letter. Rookies may also enjoy thenice glossary of book collecting terms at the Great Northwest Multnomah Bookstore.

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.

Online Books and Magazines

Now that the Net is here, a lot of people claim they like to read books online. I personally don't find it enjoyable--I love the tactile experience of a book, and I don't like peering at the computer screen to read a classic novel--but my user stats and e-mail show that there are a lot of people who do enjoy it. If you are interested in online books, I suggest you start with the definitive CMU On-Line Books Page, which has lists by author and title, as well as pointers to all the major on-line repositories. I also provide an old IBIC list of online Books and Magazines, from which you can navigate to most of the books that are available online in the public domain. (Some of the links are out of date.)

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.

Poetry

Not all poetry is found in books, and not all books are poetry; but the love of poetry is closely related to the love of books. I suggest you start with the CMU poetry archive, The Internet Poetry Archive, Yahoo's Poetry page, and LitWeb's Poetry page, which has a laudable focus on "classic poetic works and the study of the poetic form."

Short Stories

Web del Sol is a funky, comprehensive guide to short fiction resources on the Net.

Web Guides and Review Databases

The InfoSeek Net Guide seems to be off to a promising start. The Entertainment section related to books and writing provides a reasonable selection of 6-10 resources each on topics such as Authors, Book reviews, Bookstores, Children's books, Copyright issues, Cyberbooks, Genres Multimedia resources, Publishers, and Writers' resources. The user is offered the option to search for "similar pages" to a given page, which is a nice feature, in theory, because it ties the Guide to the InfoSeek Web search engine. But I was a bit disappointed when I asked to find pages similar to "BookWire" and was given a long list of subpages in the BookWire web area, rather than pointers to resources with similar purposes, like IBIC. It might make more sense if they called the feature "search for similar URLs".

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 1996

In 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.

  • When I was around fifteen, I came across Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's science fiction novel, INFERNO. This '70s remake of Dante's classic describes science fiction writer Allen Carpentier's descent into Hell. It's still a very fresh, accessible take on the classic. What a great movie it would make!
  • The Niven/Pournelle INFERNO immediately inspired me to read the original Divine Comedy. I've read a number of translations over the years, but my favorite is the one by Dorothy Sayers (INFERNO; PURGATORY; PARADISE). The notes are excellent, and Sayers had such a knowledgeable and witty mind that reading her prose is a pleasure in itself. (For those interested in a more contemporary translation, I should mention that Robert Pinsky received excellent notices for his 1995 THE INFERNO OF DANTE : A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION; it's a very handsome book.)
  • I also want to tell you about the late Henry Fairlie's THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS TODAY, which probably did more than any other single book to galvanize me into a lifetime interest in Christianity that led me, eventually, to faith. Ironic, because Fairlie was a self-proclaimed agnostic socialist! But reading between the lines of this insightful and deeply feeling book, one realizes that the love of God cannot have been far from Fairlie's heart.
  • Finally, I should draw to your attention a more recent acquisition, the very handsome NIV STUDY BIBLE (10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) from Zondervan, indexed and bonded in leather in IBIC's theme color, burgundy (black and brown are also available). The notes to this Bible are amazing. They appear to provide you with a very substantial portion of what you need to know to have an intelligent layman's appreciation of the linguistic and historical issues involved in understanding Scripture.

IBIC now provides seamless links to the on-line ordering system at Amazon.com Books. To order a book, just click on an underlined title. As a default, we link to paperback rather than hardcover editions of a particular title (although we may modify this rule if a hardcover edition looks to be a particularly good deal). Our editorial philosophy is to put your interests first.

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