Web Sites Worth Visiting - September 2008

Compiled by Barbara Meyers Ford, SSP News Editor in Chief

Less than a year ago, in November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released its newest study on America’s reading habits: "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence." Visiting the NEA Web site, one finds this brief description.

"This report is a new and comprehensive analysis of reading patterns of children, teenagers, and adults in the United States. To Read or Not To Read assembled data on reading trends from more than 40 sources, including federal agencies, universities, foundations, and associations. The compendium expands the investigation of the NEA's landmark 2004 report, Reading at Risk, and reveals recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society. November 2007." The Executive Summary (20 pp.) is also available in hard copy or can be downloaded in PDF.

Taking the NEA’s lead, the Web sites selected for this issue of SSP News are all about books . . . buying, selling, researching . . . and reading. They were chosen for doing something a bit special either in terms of the books offered or the technology related to the site (or perhaps both). We hope you find something of interest as you browse through these Web sites worth visiting. [Editor’s note: Descriptions of the sites are from Wikipedia.com, with minor edits.]

Biblio.com is an online marketplace for booksellers specializing in rare and out-of-print titles. Several thousand individual booksellers subscribe. They upload their book lists along with prices and descriptions. Member booksellers pay a percentage of the sale price to the firm. Biblio.com is probably the third largest books-only Web site.

BookCrossing (also BC, BCing or BXing) is defined as "the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise." The term is derived from bookcrossing.com, a free online book club that encourages the practice and aims to "make the whole world a library." The "crossing," or exchanging, of books may take any number of forms, including releasing books in public, direct swaps with other members of the Web sites, or "book rings" in which books travel in a set order to participants who want to read a certain book. The site’s community aspect has grown and expanded in ways that were not expected at the outset and includes forum discussions, mailing lists, and annual conventions throughout the world.

Booksfree is an online book rental company, the first to offer flat-rate rental by mail to customers in the United States. Established in 2000 and headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, it boasts an inventory of more than 100,000 titles and 13,000+ subscribers.

CheapBooks.com is a book price comparison Web site founded in 1997 by David Tiberio. CheapBooks compares prices on new and used books, as well as textbook rentals and buybacks. CheapBooks also offers a book search service that groups books by title and author. Book news and reviews are aggregated daily from major news sources. CheapBooks is developing its support backend from a flash media card and DVD, allowing the site to operate from a WiFi-enabled laptop. This allows one programmer the ability to maintain and operate the site worldwide.

Goodreads is a privately run "social cataloging" Web site started in December 2006 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer and entrepreneur. The site permits individuals to sign up and register books to create their library catalogs and reading lists. As of December 2007, the site had more than 650,000 members and 10,000,000 books added. The first year of the company was run without any formal funding.

Project Gutenberg (or PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works. Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in the collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. Project Gutenberg is affiliated with many projects that are independent organizations that share the same ideals and have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark. Most releases are in the English language, but many non-English works are also available. PG had 24,000 titles at the end of 2007.

Rare Book Room is an educational Web site for the repository of digitally scanned rare books made freely available to the public. Starting around 1996, California-based company Octavo began scanning rare and important books from libraries around the world. These scans were done at extremely high resolution using high-quality equipment. They were sold by Octavo as commercial products on CD-ROM. In 2006, the Rare Book Room site was created, which contains the complete collection in medium to medium-high resolution freely available to the public through a Web browser or as a PDF file. Some As of 2007, more than 400 books had been scanned.

Shelfari is a social cataloging Web site. Shelfari users build virtual bookshelves of the titles they own or have read and can rate, review, and discuss their books. Shelfari was launched on October 11, 2006. In February 2007, Amazon.com invested $1 million in Shelfari and moved to acquire it in August 2008.

TomFolio.com is the Web site of a cooperative book-trading database owned by bookstores through the organization A Book CoOp, founded in 1999 in Wisconsin with members worldwide. The name "Tom Folio" is taken from Joseph Addison's The Tatler. According to the Penkapog Papers by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the character Tom Folio is based on caricaturist and illustrator Thomas Rawlinson (1681-1725), nicknamed Tom Folio, the bibliomaniac.

Wired for Books is an online educational project of the WOUB Center for Public Media at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. The Web site features author interviews, dramatic audio productions of classic literature, poetry readings, short stories, lectures, essays, and children's literature. Nearly 700 uncut audio author interviews conducted by Don Swaim for his "Book Beat" show on CBS Radio are available in their entirety. Original unabridged audio productions of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol, and The Tragedy of Macbeth can be found Books in streaming media. Poets, essayists, and fiction writers read their works, often with commentary. Wired for Books was chosen in 2006 by the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of the best online sites for education in the humanities. Created and produced by David Kurz, Wired for Books was launched on May 25, 1997.