This was originally a post from last year from another blog that I no longer keep. I figured I would post it on here since it was fairly popular and wasn’t available online.

Social Networking for Book Lovers

1. LibraryThing is probably my favorite book-related resource on the web. I use it to catalog my personal library, as well as discover new books, find people with similar reading interests, discuss books, and more. Membership is free for a library of up to 200 books, and they offer annual memberships as well as a lifetime membership for a mere $25 (I’m a life member). A paying member can have an unlimited number of books in their library and full functionality of the site. If you are a book lover it is a must. You can visit my LibraryThing profile here.

2. What’s On My Bookshelf is also a book trading site that works on a point system.

3. Listal is a social network based on the things you like, including books, movies, music, etc.

4. Shelfari let’s you create a virtual shelf to share with friends, get recommendations, and all the stuff you expect a book-centric social network to do.

5. Good Reads is another social network for sharing book recommendations with friends.

E-books

6. WikiBooks has open-source/open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. The have over 25,000 modules in their variety of textbooks and serves as a great companion piece to Wikipedia.

7. The Rare Book Room contains photographs and scans of some great and rare books from libraries around the world. Currently there are about 400 complete scans on a variety of subjects, but the Rare Book Room is focused on quality over quantity, so the material they do have is superb.

8. The Poetry Archive is an online collection of recordings of poets reading their own poetry. Listening to the recordings is free of charge.

9. ManyBooks.net contains about 17,000 ebooks for your PDA, iPod, or ebook reader. All of the ebooks are free of cost. They also show PSP and cell-phone friendly ebooks.

10. Project Gutenberg is the founding father of public-domain ebooks online. There is a large number of ebooks available through the site that is operated on voluntary donations. You can also volunteer to help the project by proofing captured text from books to ensure accuracy as well as greater roles once you have established yourself as a reliable contributor to the project.

11. Google Book Search allows you to search the full text of books online using the Google search algorithms. It can be a useful research tool.

12. Bartleby is another large resource for free public domain electronic books and resources.

13. Bookrags has over 5.7 million pages of literature summaries, biographies, literary criticism, essays, encyclopedias, and eBooks sourced from over 100 respected education databases.

14. E-Book Searchr is a Google powered search for e-books.

15. Bookyards has a total of 14,550 books, 38,945 external web links, 4,197 news & blogs links, 384 videos and access to hundreds of online libraries (800,000 eBooks) for your reading pleasure.

16. Memoware has a lot of free e-books in a number of different genres.

17. Just Free Books allows you to search for free e-books.

18. Rackhub Books has free e-books on computers and IT.

19. Classic Bookshelf has free e-books of classic literature.

20. Athena has a large selection of links to e-books.

21. Yale Avalon Project has e-books and documents on law and history.

22. Bibliomania has more than 2000 classic e-books as well as study guides and summaries.

23. Christian Classics Ethereal Library is a collection of classic Christian writings.

24. Diesel E-Books has free e-books formatted for Microsoft Reader. The Diesel Gratis Collection includes classic American and British fiction, American history, children’s literature, Shakespeare, African-American documents, and more.

25. Digital Book Index provides links to more than 134,000 title records from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. About 94,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at very modest cost.

26. UVA Electronic Text Center has a large selection of e-books from the University’s library.

27. Eserver is an e-publishing co-op based at Iowa State University where hundreds of writers, editors and scholars gather to publish over 35,000 works free of charge.The site is dedicated to clear, accessible writing in the humanities.

28. Famous Poets and Poems has a large
collection of poems and quotes from over 627 poets.

29. FreeBooks.org has free e-books and audio books.

30. Free Science has a collection of science e-books.

31. Great Books and Classics has a large collection of classic literature, especially Latin.

32. Sacred Texts has religion and spirituality e-books.

33. Knowledge Rush has e-books and poems, as well as user submitted writing.

34. Perseus Digital Library is the digital library of Tufts University with a number of free e-books.

35. FlazX has computer and IT e-books and textbooks.

36. Baen Free Library has a selection of e-books sorted by author and title.

37. Penn Digital Library is the digital library of U Penn.

38. Wowio has a large collection of free e-books.

39. CHM PDF E-books is a directory of computer and programming e-books.

40. BooksDB has mostly computer e-books.

41. Free Tech Books features computer and technology e-books.

42. Daily Lit has email and RSS feeds that sends you chunks of a book each day until you finish it.

Online Bookstores

43. Amazon.com is the biggest online bookstore there is.

44. Alibris is my favorite online bookstore for finding out-of-print books. I discovered them a few years ago after I purchased some books from them on ebay, and I have been coming back ever since.

45. AbeBooks has new, used, and rare books as well as some great features and newsletters.

46. BookSense is a family of independent booksellers online in case you don’t want to give your money to the big corporate bookstores.

Find the Best Prices for Books

47. ISBN Spy lets you enter an ISBN for a book and find the cheapest place to purchase it.

48. Book Burro is another book price comparison site.

49. BookFinder also offers a similar service.

Audiobooks

50. LibriVox is a resource for public domain audio books. You can listen to the audio books from the site or you can volunteer to record your own audio book for the site.

51. Ejunto is a collection of free audio books on the subjects of history and philosophy. There is only a small catalog of audiobooks currently but the titles are very good.

52. Podiobooks has podcasts of audiobooks.

53. Well Told Tales is a collection of audiobooks of pop fiction.

Study Guides and Summaries

54. Pink Monkey is a place where you can download summaries of literature or get study guides.

55. Litsum is an alternative to Pink Monkey.

Library Resources

56. Library Elf lets you keep track of the books that you have checked out of the library and when they are due.

57. WorldCat lets you search libraries near you to find the books that you want to check out and read.

Bibliography and Research

58. BibMe is a free online bibliography creator that is extremely useful is you are writing research. It is extremely easy to use an works with books, journals, websites, magazines, films, newspapers, etc.

59. Zotero is an online research tool with a bookmarklet for keeping track of your research.

60. Wikindx is a free bibliographic and quotations/notes management and article authoring system

61. Snipitron keeps track of your online research and lets you display it as a web page or work on it in a group setting.

Book Exchanges/Swapping

62. BookCrossing is something I haven’t personally used (I never get rid of my books) but a lot of people really like it. Once you read a book you mark it yourself or with BookCrossing’s bookplates that you can buy in their online store and place it out in the public somewhere. When someone finds the book they see the bookplate and do the same thing. This is essentially a Where’s George? for your books but more robust.

63. Bookins is a general book-swapping site.

64. Title Trader is a swapping site for books, cds, and dvds.

65. Zunafish allows you to swap books, movies, music, and video games.

66. Swap Simple is similar to Zunafish.

67. Swapthing is more designed for swapping general items but people do use it for book-swapping.

68. The Book Cart is bookswapping for paperbacks.

69. SF Books is bookswapping for readers of Science Fiction.

70. Paperback Swap is for swapping any books, not just paperbacks.

71. Frugal Reader is another bookswapping site.

72. Book Mooch is too.

Online Documents

73. Scribd allows you to upload your own documents for anyone to read as well as view the documents of other users. It keeps track of how many views your documents have, how many people marked that they liked it, and allows commenting on documents. You can view my Scribd profile here.

74. FreeIQ is similar to Scribd though it also lets you sell your content as well as submit free content. My work on Youth Targeted Voter Mobilization is available on FreeIQ.

What to Read

75. WhichBook.net is another resource to help you decide what to read next, but with a very different approach. The site features a number of slider bars like “happy <-> sad” and “funny <-> serious.” Based on where you place the slider for each of these ranges will give you a list of books that fulfill that criteria.

76. What Should I Read Next? allows you to enter a book that you enjoyed and gives you recommendations for the book that you should read next based on the book lists of its users.

77. BookBrowse is a fairly comprehensive website for readers. You can browse the site for free but their are a number of features that are only available to paid members.

Miscellaneous

78. Bookslut is an online magazine published monthly on the subject of books, reading, and literature. There is also a blog that is updated more frequently. It is one of the most popular book-related sites on the web.

79. ROMAN Reading by Nick Senger is an ebook that helps readers get more out of their reading. I found this book really useful in helping me improve my style of annotating. The book is free to read and share.

80. Library Books is a Mac OS X application that tracks the library books you have borrowed.