Four Great Websites Every Book Lover Should Know
Four useful and interesting websites every reader should know about.
There has been some discussion on whether the digitalization will be the death of literature or not. It may be the death of books, but I think these four websites will prove that the internet, if anything can be a good boost to literature.
Project Gutenburg is so important to any reader of literature because it has the largest collection of free e-books online, with 27,000 books, the majority of which are in the public domain. Their mission statement is “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-Books.” It’s such an easy website to use, most e-books are in plain text and should work on any computer, but other formats (HTML or PDF for example) are used too. You can find almost anything here, from Aesop’s fables to the work of T. S. Eliot.
Similar to Project Gutenburg, LibriVox is an archive of free public domain audio books. The audio books are recorded by LibriVox volunteers with an average of 60 to 100 new audio books being produced each month. Currently there are over 2000 audio books available in MP3, Ogg Vorbis and can be found on the website it self or on Itunes. They have a wide range of genres and have recordings of novels, poetry, drama and non-fiction pieces.
This is a brilliant website that suggests books for you to read next based on the book you’re currently reading. You can use it without registering, however I really do recommend you register (all you need to do is provide an email address and it’s done). If you register it keeps a record of what books you have read, which can be sorted by how much you enjoyed each book and then the website uses this information and information from its database of 65,000 readers to give an even more accurate suggestion.
Read at Work is a brilliant website produced by the New Zealand Book Council. It is basically a fake computer desktop with a small collection of short stories and poetry done as fake power point document. The idea is simply to read at work, without being caught out. It is a small collection, but it ranges from Oscar Wilde to Emily Dickinson. If you’re not familiar with New Zealand writers, it has a folder devoted to them which is a brilliant starting point.
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