jon's bookshelf

...And there are a few drops to drink around here, too.

It seems that everywhere I look these days are book and reading related sites and activities.

Karen recently pointed me to Library Thing, a lovely location to wallow in your books virtually.  It provides convenient tools for cataloging your own collection and points out overlap and common interest with the other members.  It also provides a suggestion engine--though truth be told, that's just mean for a bunch of people who will probably never get through their own "to be read" lists.

Looking over the last year of my reading in the forum, it becomes clear that most of it--maybe 70%--is from audio books.  It makes sense given the amount of travelling and driving I had to do for work in the last year.  So, since I listen almost exclusively to unabridged recordings, I count them as reading.

It does mean I only read with my eyes maybe 30-40 books last year, which would make it probably an all time low since I learned to read.  Not doing a lot better this year...not gonna sweat it though.  Listening to another 90 should keep me out of trouble.

AND from a note in one of the forums at Library Thing, I found LibriVox, an on-line community of folks working together to produce audio-books of public domain works.  That's been fun.  I'm putting my recordings at http://goodbooksyoushouldread.net/jklns/librivox and enabling directory browsing.  Feel free to listen.  (If I get ambitious I'll find a more sophisticated way of organizing them.)

Finally, all year I've been working on and of with Distribute Proofreaders, which is a community of folk preparing public domain works for posting at Project Gutenberg.  There's something satisfying about moving words from scans to text and cleanly.

I suspect that all three sites have a fair sized over-lap of participants.

Of course, there's never enough time for it all.  Kind of like there is never enough bookshelf space in any reasonable home.