Electronic Highways

Bytes for Bookworms

Looking for a good read? Despite dire warnings that the Internet heralds the death of books and reading, the Net contains a plethora of sites dedicated to books-book reviews, lists of book awards, online bookstores and reading-group discussion guides:

The New York Times Books (http://www.nytimes.com/books/home/) has quickly become an indispensable resource for readers on the Net. This site not only gives you the complete Sunday book review section, but also daily book reviews, first chapters, specialized bibliographies, audio clips, book-industry news and links to online discussion groups. The site is searchable by author or title, and maintains an archive of more than 50,000 reviews back to 1980. While first-time users of the site do have to create a log-in name and password, the site is free. Other online newspaper book reviews include: The Los Angeles Times Books (http://www.latimes.com/HOME/ENT/BOOKS/) and The Washington Post Book World (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/m-bookworld.html).

Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com), which bills itself as "earth's biggest bookstore," is also a great resource for those who are "just looking." You can search its list of more than 2.5 million titles or browse 22 subject areas. Amazon frequently provides a plot synopsis, excerpts from print reviews and editors' essays, as well as readers' comments. Other features of the site include Amazon's free "eyes" service, which informs you (via e-mail) whenever a new book appears by an author or on a topic you have selected. Amazon's "reviewed in the media" category indicates titles that have been reviewed in such sources as The New Yorker or National Public Radio, and is very useful for locating that title that you heard about on "Fresh Air," but can't quite remember. Other large online booksellers include Barnes and Noble (http://www.barnesandnoble.com) and Blackwells Online Bookshop (http://www.blackwell.co.uk./bookshops).

Bookwire (http://www.bookwire.com), the metasite for the book industry, provides links to full-text reviews from Publishers Weekly, Boston Book Review, Hungry Mind Review and Quarterly Black Review of Books. It also includes more than 7,000 links to publishers, booksellers, libraries, book-award lists, announcements of upcoming authors' tours and links to online reading groups. Publishers also are joining the reading-group phenomenon by offering reading-group guides for selected titles-some of the largest of these include Simon & Schuster's Simonsays (http://www.simonsays.com/reading/) and Random House's Books@Random (http://www.randomhouse.com/library/#RGG).

For more review sites, check Yahoo's listing of book reviews at (http://www.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/Literature/Reviews/)

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Austin Booth and Nina Cascio, University Libraries