Skip to main content

Top Ten Bookish Websites/Organizations/Apps, etc. (aside from book blogs)

The Top Ten Tuesdays is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. To see more lists of useful and fun bookish resources, please visit the hosting site and click on any or all of the links to the participating blogs.

Here are the 10 bookish places/resources I use the most, that are not blogs:

  • Project Gutenberg: Thousands upon thousands of free e-books. Read them online or download them and read them on your computer or your e-reader. All books are in the public domain. If you want to read a classic and you don’t mind e-books, why buy them from Amazon when you can have them for free from Project Gutenberg?
  • BookMooch. Actually I don’t go there so much nowadays, because there are very few Icelanders active on BM and fewer people abroad are sending books outside their country or continent because postal charges seem to have gone up everywhere (here too), plus customs regulations have changed here and I now have to pay customs for every book I receive. When people forget to mark a book as second hand with a low price on the customs declaration, I get to pay a 24% VAT and 10% import duty on the combined postage and suggested retail price printed on the books, plus a handling fee, so I have stopped mooching as much as I used to and now only mooch hard-to-get books or several books from the same person in one go, with strict instructions to the moochee on how to mark the customs declaration.
  • The Guardian book website. Besides reading the blog, I go there for reviews and articles on book-related matters. Try as I may, I just haven’t been able to find another newspaper book page that I like enough to check daily, although I must make an honourable mention of The New York Times book site, which occasionally has interesting reviews and articles.
  • Fantastic Fiction is a site where you can look up author bibliographies. If it’s been published in English and it’s fiction, it will probably be there (although I have found some authors who are not represented).
  • Stop, you’re killing me. Another bibliography site, but this one is dedicated to mysteries and detective fiction. Apart from author bibliographies you can also search for characters by name, ethnicity and occupation and books by genre, location or time period. There is also a section on read-alikes, reference works and book awards, and new releases. It’s pretty complete (but like FF dedicated to books in English only), but you may not find some authors represented.
  • I recently discovered The Millions and haven’t even finished exploring the back issues yet, but I already think it’s awesome. This is an online magazine that covers books, arts, and culture.
  • The Book Depository is a great site to shop for books, and they ship for free, which is a consideration when you have to pay VAT and customs on not just the price of the book but on the postage as well. The only drawback is that they send each individual book in a multi-book order as a separate package so I pay a customs handling fee for each one, but it’s still cheaper than buying from Amazon, even if they do ship the whole order all in one package.
  • The Reykjavík City Library. If I wasn’t concentrating on reading my own books right now, I’d be in there a couple of times a week. There are several branches and I visit at least four of them on a regular basis.
  • The book-shop Iða. In my opinion currently the best indie bookshop in Iceland. Situated in Lækjargata in the heart of Reykjavík, it’s just the right distance from my place of work for a good work-out walk during my lunch break.
  • The second-hand bookshop Bókin. Situated in down-town Reykjavík, I visit it often. It’s so full of books that they overflow along the floor and are sometimes stacked up to the ceiling in a tottering tower that I am sure has collapsed more than once.


Honorable mentions:
  • All About Romance, for back issues of At the Back Fence. Technical problems prevented me from being able to register on the discussion forums after they changed the format, so I rarely go there any more unless I remember something I want to reread in the (now defunct) column.
  • Heroes and Heartbreakers. Macmillan’s romance website is chock full of recommendations, news, excerpts from new romances and original short stories.
  • The book and game shop Nexus. Located near where I work, it’s THE place to go for a fix of comics, manga, fantasy and science-fiction and all their sub-genres, DVDs of the same, as well as role-playing games and board games.

Comments

I love visiting the library websites. So much useful info there.

Thanks for you list. I didn't really think about it, but those who live outside the US have differnt favorites than those who live inside. The mailing costs are important, I think. Wish we still had Slow Boat Mailing...slow, but very cheap. Now it is terribly expensive to mail outside the US...it's almost cheaper to just buy the book! (I have not tried Book Depository, though. That might be a good option....)

Here's my list of favorite bookish spots: Top Ten Bookish Websites.
Unknown said…
Those custom costs sound horrible! I don't know what I'd have to do if I had to pay fees like that when I ordered my books from Book Dep!? Eep
Bibliophile said…
Deb, sometimes it is cheaper to just buy the book, which is why I mostly only Mooch OOP books these days and have stopped offering books for mooching. I'm just spending my accumulated mooch points and when they are all gone I will probably close the account.

Kayleigh, they are very bad indeed. A year ago, before they clarified and tightened the rather fuzzy customs rules on gifts, I was usually able to argue my way out of paying for BookMooch books, but not any more. I will probably bite the bullet and buy an e-reader soon and stop ordering physical books from abroad. There are no customs charges or taxes on e-books, so I would probably save money on the purchase in the long run.
I love 'Fantastic Fiction'! Great list. =)

Man, paying all those taxes and customs charges must be so annoying. Not cool at all.

( My Top Ten )
Anonymous said…
I knew most of these sites, but I have added "Stop, you´re killing me" to my list.

Sadly, bookmooch has always been out of the question for me (because I am really beginning to need somewhere to send my read books). But it costs me more to send a second-hand book even to a Danish reader than to buy it from e.g. Awesomebooks. So it would be much cheaper to burn them in the backyard.
Hi. Nice to "see" you again. I think this is a fun and useful assignment and I'm taking full advantage of creating a list of sites I'd never heard of before like book Mooch.
Lucy said…
I was trying to remember the name of the Fantastic Fiction site when I was writing my list. Great choice!
I feel for you with those customs costs. Thanks goodness for libraries! Thanks for sharing your list.
Professor Batty said…
I love Bókin! Last time I was there I found Laxness' Happy Wariors (English translation of Gerpla) - with a little help from Svietakall.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme