Book communities are growing virtually by the minute on the internet, says June Lee 

Readers who grew up with a book in hand may not realise how the internet is helping the publishing industry. Many traditionalists bemoan falling book sales and the pervasiveness of multimedia replacing old reading habits. Yet a new breed of technoreaders insist traditional paperbacks aren’t under attack, but actually complemented by the broad range of online tools and community sites. 

Agnes Tan, a regional e-business and CRM executive at Club Med, is one such supporter. She says that community sites gather book lovers in one location, allowing them to discuss their common interest. There are also other benefi ts: ‘There’s a whole long-tail practice here in that we’re able to seek out like-minded people based on subgenres, tags and keywords that help you zero in on those whom you’d like to share your views with, worldwide,’ she says. 

And we’re not talking simple blogs, either. Hundreds, if not thousands, of reader-fueled blogs actively discuss books and authors. If you’re curious and looking for a starting point, visit professional lit-blog sites such as www.bookslut.com and www.themillionsblog.com. ‘Lit-blogs’, or blogs that cover literary topics, have become legitimate power players in the publishing industry, generating the sort of priceless word-of-mouth marketing and buzz that send readers to bookstores in droves. Even better, lit-blogs create discussion and analysis, and sometimes even gossip and speculation. Dare to land at Litblog Co-op (www.lbc.typepad.com), and you won’t find a spare hour for the next few months. 

The best reader-generated sites, however, are social-networking websites. These sites go a huge step further to provide an interactive social media space for you, your friends and complete strangers to talk lit. (Think Facebook.com, with an emphasis on ‘book’.) Recently, newbies www.shelfari.com and www.goodreads.com have been catching up to the pioneering www.librarything.com. The three sites score full marks for looks, features, usability, data control, and avenues for community and social networking. Sign up and you can consider yourself a member in a global library – everyone has a personal profile and a display case (‘bookshelves’, geddit?). You decide how involved you want to be, whether you’ve read 1,000 or 10,000 books; simply identify them by listing and catalog them on your profile. You can tag your books, browse members with the same or different books and tags, and discover an endless world of literature read by others before you. For example, on Librarything.com, a member muses that ‘I don’t know why incest keeps coming up in books I read; I really don’t intend for that to happen’ in one of the 140 reviews for Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. A total 6,802 members have propelled the book to 53rd most-read, collectively rated it 4.18 out of 5, and conducted 102 conversations around it. The more discussion revolving around books and the more books that have been reviewed means a lively and busy community. 

Goodreads.com steps it up a notch with an interesting feature – published authors join in to share their bookmarks and add you as friends. Warning: Social-networking sites are sticky and addictive, and work best by recruiting more members and friends into their fold. Most of these bookish ones are already compatible with MySpace and Facebook, meaning you can pull your entire collection from Shelfari.com and show it on your Facebook. 

If social-networking sites for books sound overly complicated, let others do the work while you browse the results. At www.whatshouldireadnext.com, you can fill in an author or title and voilà – the site suggests further readings based on the taste of a collective reader base. Simply put, the site represents mass opinion about items – the items readers add to their favourites list will become associated with each other. This makes for an incredibly interesting thought experiment, where typing in ‘Lee Kuan Yew’ leads you to Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat and Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. As more people share their favourites list, the database improves. The system is similar to the one at Amazon.com, but the latter builds its recommendations electronically based on past buying patterns and those of other users, who may not be buying strictly out of personal interest. Yet www.whatshouldireadnext.com removes the commercial agenda and is pretty random, which is always fun. 

Speaking of Amazon, www.lazylibrary.com is a book resource that launched in September promising to shorten your searches – literally. It looks for books that are 200 pages or less, to help you ‘read less, get more’ (as the site’s tagline states). The site is lazy in other ways, too – all customer reviews, prices and purchasing are linked directly to affiliate Amazon.com. 

That’s all fine and good for readers, but what about writers? Those looking for a wider audience have a promising match in www.bookspoke.com. The social-networking site doesn’t stop at recommendations and bookshelf facilities – it also offers a turn-key homepage and book-selling services for writers. Admittedly, this works best for readers who are also aspiring writers, but may not appeal to all. This site isn’t to be mistaken for a fan-lit (creative fan literature) site, so fan-litters should look elsewhere – like at avon.fanlit.com. An increasing number of corporations have united their contributors, such as romance book publisher Avon, a subsidiary of HarperCollins, which hosted a collaborative writing event online in the US, which drew thousands of fans to put together an e-novella chapter by chapter. 

Unfortunately, no such initiative exists locally. ‘I see a niche where local publishers like Popular can fill,’ Tan says. ‘They’ve done poetry submissions and similar activities offline through schools, so why not carry this online? The National Library Board could pick this up, too. Even TheatreWorks could find a new lease of life for their 24-hour playwriting competition through this new media. The possibilities are only limited by our imagination.’