Best Book Ad?
BoingBoing calls it “possibly the greatest ad for books, ever.” I don’t know about that, but it is pretty cool.
(click through for the full image)
Dracula Dissected
I learned about this site from Twitter, specifically from @ljndawson and @ChrisKubica. Chris Hughes (@ChristofHughes) created a website that
breaks down the novel ‘Dracula’ into dozens of tiny pieces, and then strings them together again over a map, connected with the story’s internal timeline. . . . you can watch Dracula gradually move towards England, just as Mina is wondering what has happened to her husband-to-be. Which is fun.
Bookish
The tagline reads “search. discover. read. share.” I’m a sucker for book recommendation sites. However, I’m very lazy and I’m not going to enter all of the books I’ve ever read in order to get a recommendation. It’s one of the reasons I’d be interested in a service that could mine all of my online activity in order to recommend books (as I mentioned in a previous post).
Bookish was founded by Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group (USA) and Simon & Schuster. One thing I like is that you can browse the site without creating an account. Obviously if you want to save lists of books you’ve read or quotations you’ll have to create one.
I tried out their recommendation feature and I think the results were pretty good. I’d use it again. One disappointment was that one of my favorite books, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, isn’t on the site at all (there are currently just over 250,000 books listed). I was surprised the number was so small given the quality of the results.
Here is an example of the results. I used the book A Sandhills Ballad by Ladette Randolph:
Not bad. As you can see, you have the option to click “more like this” under each suggestion to refine your results.
Books on Pinterest
Do you browse books on Pinterest (or pin them)? I didn’t at first but a while ago I added a Books board. It’s currently a mishmash of bookshelf/library pictures, books I like, and quotes. I should probably split them up into separate boards.
The University or Nebraska Press has a Pinterest account and my coworker pointed out a while back that looking through our books on there is a really nice browsing experience. Maybe it’s the nice, big covers. I like browsing by season but there are boards organized by subject as well. Formidable Females is another favorite.
UNP blog 