Books have always had a place in the pages of their comrades in print, newspapers and magazines, and reading book reviews and author interviews has always been one of the many pleasures of the reading life, but now readers are being urged to seek out book news on the World Wide Web, and you have to wonder, is it worth it? Why should readers eager to get cozy with a book spend precious time on-line? What will a novice Webcrawler find in the way of literary enlightenment?
The first thing an explorer will discover is that the Web is a complex and confounding medium that requires a great deal of time and patience to navigate. Depending on the on-line service being used, traffic volume and the user’s ability to invent fruitful search strategies, the Web can either remain nothing more than a tease or live up to its reputation as a font of information. With a combination of perseverance and improvisation, neophytes will eventually make their way to book sites that fall into three broad categories: easy-to-navigate sites with a strong editorial presence that report on a great number of books; more intense, often eccentric sites dedicated to individual authors or to genres such as mysteries and science fiction; and various book-oriented newsgroups and chat rooms, in which visitors can either participate or lurk, the Web version of eavesdropping.
The best-known of the commercial book sites is Amazon’s (www.amazon.com), and for AOL users it is the easiest to access: Its icon appears as soon as browsers log on. Touted as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” its multilayered book and author archives are designed to persuade visitors to let their mouses do the shopping, and each time a browser clicks on a book title, this message appears: “Add to Your Shopping Cart, You can always remove it later.” Sales pitches aside, curious visitors can conduct complex and rewarding searches of their own devising that access reviews from such sources as The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and Scientific American. The “just looking” visitor can enjoy other breezy features, including the writers’ almanac (writers born on this day), author interviews (some even disclose the author’s e-mail address), and an open invitation to submit your own reviews.
The Book Report (BookPage@AOL.com, or www.bookpage.com) is another ideal site for readers new to the Web. Although visitors can order titles through a Barnes & Noble on-line outlet at this site, TBR is not merely a commercial vehicle but rather an open forum for enthusiastic and intelligent book discussion. Edited by Jesse Kornbluth, formerly an editor at Vanity Fair, TBR is an exuberant and well-designed resource, providing timely book news; editorials; author interviews; previews and reviews; reader reviews and polls; a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week book chat room; areas for young readers; and exclusive chapter excerpts from forthcoming books. TBR boasts of having 51,000 subscribers, but when it previewed John Grisham’s new novel, it received as many as 500,000 visits in one day. This site possesses a unique joie de vivre, an energy generated by the editors’ eclectic love of books, respect for the reading public and sense of mission.
The strongly promoted Booknotes (www.booknotes.org) site shares TBR’s convictions regarding the value of books, but it takes a far more focused approach. An offshoot of the Sunday night C-SPAN program of the same name and host Brian Lamb’s book, “Booknotes: America’s Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas,” the site exemplifies the concept of multimedia in its presentation of information about nonfiction books, authors and the publishing industry, offering text (including transcripts of the C-SPAN shows) and, for those who have the right computer equipment, narrated slide shows and video clips.
Cahners Publishing’s Bookwire (www.bookwire.com) is another excellent site free of sales pressure and rich in thoughtful book discussion, good writing and news about the publishing industry. A compendium of review sources–including the Hungry Mind Review, the Boston Book Review, Publishers Weekly and the Quarterly Black Review of Books–Bookwire also provides a nationwide listing of author readings and events, areas focusing on poetry and mystery writers, and hundreds of publisher links. And the American Library Association’s Booklist (www.ala.org/booklist) offers timely and concise reviews.
If book-loving browsers want to go straight to the source, they can visit the home pages of major publishers and small presses. And, with a bit of luck and perseverance, they can discover sites for children’s books and books in languages other than English; author bibliographies; databases for genre fiction; Dial A Book’s Download Bookstore; cyberbooks (books available only on the Internet); and Netzines with irreverent book reviews and other trenchant literary offerings, most notably Slate (www.slate.com), and the Borders affiliate Salon (www.salonmagazine.com). Newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, are putting book reviews, author interviews and other features on-line, another boon to readers hungry for recommendations, overviews of the publishing industry and coverage of literary events.
Readers who gamely search the Web by author name will find sites as erratic in size and shape as the pieces in a crazy quilt. All kinds of writers are profiled and tracked on the Web, and some, like Anne Rice, inspire cybercults. The “Queen of Gothic Horror” is enshrined in a stylishly vampiresque home page that sports a graphic that counts the number of “mortal souls” who have accessed the page since 1-15-96 (I was number 0000022149).
On more solid literary terrain, the writings of William Faulkner have given rise to a constellation of intelligent, even scholarly sites that are particularly active now because this year is the centennial of his birth. Faulkner enthusiasts can call up an entire photo archive, in-depth biographical and bibliographical information, a Yoknapatawpa County site, exhaustive amounts of critical studies and recordings of Faulkner reading from his books. Other modern masters celebrated on the Web include James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges and Jack Kerouac.
A select group of living novelists–J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut–arouse the same level of critical scrutiny and passion Faulkner does, and each has a new book (or in Salinger’s case, a reissue) that has either just been released or will be published soon. Salinger’s famous solitude and silence, as well as the unmatched poignancy of his work, make him an irresistible subject for Web users, while Pynchon’s penchant for privacy, as well as the metaphysical intricacy of his novels, have made him a minor deity in cyberspace. Web-happy Pynchonites speculate about his life, personality and all the symbolism and philosophy in his books at sites that range from fan-club giddiness to high-brow discussions. DeLillo, every bit as brilliant and complex as Pynchon yet as tender and spiritual as Salinger, is accorded much respect in his classy Web sites, while Vonnegut attracts everyone from goofballs to the most erudite of science-fiction fanatics and literary mavens, not to mention the 12-year-old-girl who reported on her awe at discovering that her pediatrician was Vonnegut’s son.
Many author sites have chat-room links, but visitors may have to download additional software to enter them. Chat rooms often convene at specific times, so they require a bit of forethought. Newsgroups, or discussion groups, are easier to access because participants post comments, which can range from book recommendations to requests for information, author gossip and babble, the latter being the bane of Newsgroups. Newsgroups can also be plagued by weird cybersex junk mail and other annoying or dismaying forms of interference, but some sites are carefully tended and do achieve worthwhile levels of discourse and a sense of community.
If Web users take the most basic approach and simply type “books” as a keyword in their search construction, they will eventually work their way to an annotated list of literary sites with curiously defensive descriptions. Take the entry for alt.books.reviews: CRITIQUES, for example: “Here’s proof that electronic communications won’t kill books.” Or rec.arts.books: Great Reading: “This is living proof that the computer hasn’t killed the printed word.” No kidding. PCs have opened the floodgates of written discourse, enabling professionals and amateurs alike to enjoy an unprecedented degree of spontaneity in the exchange of ideas. The great tradition of literature is, in essence, one long, involved conversation, and the Web is just its latest venue, but it is also the most fatiguing and frustrating.
When all systems are go, the Web is only mildly irritating, but it can take so long to contact sites and transfer data, and they can be so ornery and sluggish even after they have been reached, the would-be browser feels trapped and a bit desperate: All the things you could be doing, or should be doing, flash before your glazed eyes as you fidget and wait, often for nothing. The Web needs to function more like a TV set and the mouse like a remote control so we can surf, not crawl. Surely this gawky, adolescent grab-bag technology–full, as it is, of potential and confusion, treasures and trash–will be fine-tuned to meet our insatiable hunger for convenience and efficiency. But even if accessing the Web was as effortless as watching TV, it would still be a restless medium. It is almost impossible to read long passages on a screen, and the Web traveler’s hand is always twitching, compulsively scrolling and clicking. This hyperkinesis is tolerable during quick research sessions but makes using any sites requiring sustained attention impossible, so many Web cruisers just hit “print.”
The overwhelming amount of data on the Web raises a variation on the old chicken-or-egg question: Would such massive quantities of information even exist without machines to store, organize and display them? It seems certain that if civilization as we know it hadn’t invented computers, it would have invented some other method of preserving the fruits of the rampant gardens of our imagination, our literature and history, art and science. We have been keeping track of our thoughts, dreams and discoveries ever since someone pressed a sharpened stick into soft clay, and the evolution of our perception of the universe and of ourselves is inseparable from the dazzling evolution of our technology, which now enables us to extend our senses and intelligence to the deepest depths of the ocean and all the way to Mars–and beyond. The Web is more than worldwide: it’s cosmic.
As charged as our atmosphere is with messages and signals–a frenzied buzz sent and received by machines that few of us can fathom but that all of us depend on for communication, information and entertainment–we still need and cherish the magic found in the pages of a book. When we read books, those beautifully self-contained creations that exist outside of time and without a power source, we proceed at our own natural, dreamy pace, free for a while from all the flickering and beeping, the bits and bytes, sites and links, and advertising and hype of the ever-expanding electronic plexus. And no matter how sophisticated our machines are, there is no finer virtual reality than literature.
