Web of literature

Published 5:00 am Saturday, March 15, 2008

LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding started his site in 2005 as a personal project to catalog his book collection. It quickly mushroomed and today has nine employees.

It used to be that an avid reader had to leave the house once in a while, to pick up a new book or commune with those similarly inclined.

Thanks to Web 2.0 — a vogue term describing the new generation of user-friendly social networking sites, blogs, RSS feeds, Google’s permutations, etc. — you need only leave your books behind to venture out for food and, possibly, a new eyeglass prescription.

And if you’re a self-respecting bibliophile who still paddles up and down Amazon.com, it’s time to hop out and explore the surroundings.

Consider this a quick primer as you make your way through the jungle. Some literary sites serve utilitarian purposes; others are just a fun diversion from your other source of eyestrain.

There are scads of “litblogs” to keep you distracted and up to date with links to author interviews, publishing industry news — and its flip side, good old Algonquin Round Table-style gossip — and related ephemera.

Some popular blogs include Elegant Variation (http://marksarvas.blogs.com), The Millions (http://themillions blog.com), Baby Got Books (www.babygotbooks.com) and the venerable Bookslut (http://bookslut.com/blog — and don’t complain to us about the name, blame editor-in-chief Jessa Crispin).

If ever a segment of the population seemed ready-made to do its socializing indoors, it would be bookworms. Fortunately, there are social networking providers like Goodreads (www.goodreads.com), which allows you to track what your friends are reading and get book recommendations.

Oregon State University-Cascades Campus librarian and assistant professor Kate Gronemyer, 30, is a fan of Goodreads. She’s been on it for just under a year and joined it because people she knows on Facebook, a popular social networking site, “and it’s kind of fun to see what other people I know are reading.”

Gronemyer chose it over LibraryThing, another popular site, with virtual bookshelves on which to catalog your personal collection, because, Gronemyer says, “I don’t buy a lot of books, for obvious reasons.” (Hint: She’s a librarian.)

There is some overlap among these sites, says LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding.

“The contrast with Goodreads is that LibraryThing is a little less overtly social,” he says. “On LibraryThing, we have a friend feature, but the way people mostly relate is through shared books.”

“The great problem with LibraryThing is we do so much more than people see at first,” he adds. One interesting feature on his site is the effort to catalog the book collections of, well, “dead people,” says Spalding.

“We’ve got Thomas Jefferson, Tupac Shakur, Marie Antoinette. I mean, there’s a lot of weird ones. We just added John Adams, which was foisted on us by HBO, because they have a miniseries coming up.”

If you’re more about reading, trading or collecting books than connecting with fellow fans, there are several online book-swapping sites, including BookMooch (www.bookmooch .com) and PaperBackSwap (www .paperbackswap.com), which cut out the middleman, although you still have to pay postage.

Atlanta-based Richard Pickering started PaperBackSwap three and a half years ago after amassing several boxes full of “gently used books” and taking them to a bookstore.

“I thought, ‘They’re going to love these,’ because I took very good care of them,” he says. “The owner proceeded to go through them, and took four or five copies out and said, ‘OK, this is all I need.’

“I looked at her, I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’”

But he understood. She was in the business to make money.

Eventually, he decided he wanted to be able to share books with other people who love them, he says, and figured there ought to be a way to trade them. Members list titles they’re willing to part with and earn credits when they send books. Pickering is particularly proud of the printable mailing wrapper.

“When you get a request for a book, you just hit the print button on your printer and it spits out two pieces of paper. It has the mailing address, your return address and it even calculates the postage for you. … We even now have printable postage, so you don’t even have to go to the post office.”

That’s a plus for people such as Bend resident Cheryl Morgen, a married mother of two young children, who says browsing at used bookstores “just doesn’t work too well.” Morgen has mailed 31 books and received 25 through the PaperBackSwap program.

Morgen says, “I’m trying to be frugal, so I get most of my books from the library. But if there’s something I really want to have, I look for it on PaperBackSwap before I go to a used bookstore.”

And if you just want to rent a book — there’s Bookswim.com, which has some 200,000 titles and is often called the literary equivalent of Netflix. There are no late fees in case it takes you a long time to read, say, “The Audacity of Hope” or “Dreams From My Father,” by Sen. Barack Obama, which earlier this month made him Bookswim’s most-rented author, beating out “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert, according to the site’s blog. Prices start at $14.99 a month for two books at a time.

There’s an effort afoot to make books available digitally, most prominently Google’s long-term project to scan vast piles of books. But Digital Book Index (www.digitalbookindex.org) forages through Google, the Library of Congress and scores of university libraries around the U.S. and world to find what you’re looking for.

Depending on what you search for — we tried Jules Verne — you’ll get results in a variety of formats ready to read on your computer. Meaning you don’t need something like Amazon’s Kindle, a newish wireless reading gadget.

Which brings to mind audible.com, which has audio books available for download, but that’s a whole different ball of earwax.

If you prefer the smell of bookstores and libraries to virtual experiences, you still may want recommendations, and if you don’t feel like joining one of the social networking sites mentioned above in order to get them, there’s Metacritic (www.metacritic.com), which compiles reviews of books, games, music and movies.

Search for, say, Richard Ford’s “Lay of the Land,” and you can see the “metascore,” an average, in this case, taken from 32 reviews from such sources as Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Chicago Tribune, Library Journal and The New York Times. On the whole, Ford’s third Frank Bascombe novel rated a 74. The site also lets users rate books, and in this case, they were a little more generous, giving it a 9.5 out of a possible 10.

Of course, that’s based on just four votes as of this writing. So if you want to rate Ford’s book, or that of another contemporary author, go ahead and “turn on the Internet,” as we recently overheard a woman shouting into her cell phone, and give it your own score.

And if all this seems like too much to take in, there’s always the safe, sure waters of your local library.

Useful book Web sites

The Book Barn: www.bendbookbarn.com

Books Well Read: www.bookswellread.com

Camalli Book Company: http://camallibook company.blogspot.com

Deschutes Public Library System: www.dpls.us

Largehearted Boy: www.largeheartedboy .com/blog/archive/book_notes

Best Minimum Wage Job a Middle Aged Guy Ever Had (Pegasus Books): http://pegasus-dunc .blogspot.com

Powell’s Books: www.powells.com

Shelfari: www.shelfari.com

Elegant Variation: http://marksarvas.blogs.com

The Millions: http://themillionsblog.com

Baby Got Books: www.babygotbooks.com

Bookslut:

http://bookslut.com/ blog

BookMooch:

www.bookmooch.com

PaperBackSwap: www.paperbackswap.com

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