This Summer while lolling away hours at the pool, or driving or flying to your annual vacation spot, why not catch up on all the reading you've put off? It's easier than ever to do thanks to today's Kindle technology, which is accessible from any laptop, iPad or smart phone. Available in any smart phone's app store, electronic readers can be found, allowing you to buy and read books and other media no matter where you are.
There's also some new online sources that act like half-book club and half-social network for readers who want to engage with others about what they've read.
Goodreads.com is an online log of everything you read. Like a social network, you create a profile and then start your virtual bookshelf, searching for and notating the books you are currently reading. Once finished, you change the status of the book to completed and write a mini review of the work.
You can befriend other readers and see what they are reading as well and send recommendations back and forth.
Once you've logged enough books of your own, the site starts to intuitively send you recommendations of other books it thinks you might like.
Another site, Byliner.com is an online archive of the best non-fiction articles ever published in subjects like art, sports, politics, business and more. This covers alot of ground and goes back to the 1920s. I discovered a piece from a 1938 Esquire called "The Crack Up," written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as a 1996 piece called "Blow Up," by Malcolm Gladwell about the Challenger Explosion. The database is searchable by title, magazine or author.
Byliner.com also works like a social network of sorts. Once you register as a member, you can follow friends or other members to keep tabs on the articles they find most interesting, as well as tag your own favorite piece and start an online dialogue about it. You can also submit links to other articles that you find interesting for possible inclusion on the site.
