The next time I get the question "What can our book club read next?" I can go to Reading Group Choices (in addition to suggesting my library's Book Club in a Bag). The Top Book Club Favorites has titles for 2002-2008. Featured Books has summaries and reviews of titles published in 2009.
I tried watching three of the video interviews in BooksVideos.tv, but they kept starting and stopping, so I gave up.
I don't have an iPod or MP3 player so I didn't spend a lot of time on Audio Books. I did find an interesting article in Open Culture called "10 unexpected uses of the Pod." One professor has used his iPod for storing the entire 3 human genome (3 billion chemical letters).
I looked at a few of the video reviews in One Minute Critic. I was surprised by how much could be said in one minute. I didn't find a way to search books by title or author.
Lookybook sounded promising but is gone because of the economy. I looked at Storyline from the Screen Actors' Guild foundation. Busy parents can park their kids in front of a computer screen while actors read books to them. The list of stories available is buried in the FAQs. I watched Me and my cat by Satoshi Kitamura, read by Elijah Wood. Pictures from the book are displayed with shots of Wood every now and then.
BookCrossing sounds like fun-- but also a time waster.
What's the future of reading? Judging by the traffic in the library, the popularity of book clubs, the summer reading program, and the rise of Amazon, books and reading are still here. The article "Literacy Debate: Online R U Really Reading?" discusses how many teenagers spend more time reading online than reading print. Is the Internet the enemy of reading or has it created a new kind of reading? What I wonder is what happens when these teenagers grow older and they take on more responsibilities-- family, job, a home. Will they spend as much time on the web? Will they get tired of the web? Will they look elsewhere to spend their time? In 10 or 20 years will they join books clubs? Will book clubs even exist? Will the Internet be vastly different?
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