There's no need to worry about the future of print in the age of digital media. Books and authors figure both prominently and incidentally at all kinds of Web sites. Fast approaching its first anniversary, Salon, a literary, political and cultural events Web journal launched in late 1995, is a veritable 24-hours-a-day digital book festival. Political coauthors James Carville and Mary Matalin have recently been added as monthly columnists. Anne Rice now has a salon within Salon, answering her fans' queries, providing a running account of her ongoing bus tour and extolling her love of Tab, Howard Stern and Canadians in general. Salon also features Sneak Peeks, weekly short reviews (last week it was Michael Lind's novel Powertown); an impressive archive of interviews with everyone from Richard Ford to A.S. Byatt to Grace Paley; author features (most recently Paul Theroux); a searchable database of reviews and a number of online comics.
Hotwired has added "Unspeakable Thoughts," a new book column by John Alderman, the Web magazine's Pop section editor, that will, he said, "roam widely over the old-fashioned medium." Most recently he's examined Christopher Seymour's Yakusa Diary and interviewed SF author Steve Ericson. Hotwired also maintains an archive of its extensive book reviews.Also check out Mr. Showbiz, a breezy entertainment-industry Web site with a comprehensive archive of short book reviews. The site's Fiction Festival is featuring reviews of Walter Mosley's Little Yellow Dog, Patricia Cornwell's Cause of Death and Peter Mayle's Anything Considered.
The Green Eggs Report is a daily listing of URLs mentioned in usenet groups, the Internet's vast array of subject-specific online discussions. That's how Web Watch found the Islamic Bookstore. Visit this site and scroll down to alt.books for a delightfully random selection of book-oriented Web sites.In addition to the reviews in its Book World section, the Washington Post's Web edition makes available more than 170 first chapters of recent books through Dial-A-Book'sChapter One service. The Post buys rights to the chapters through Dial-A-Book and posts about four new ones every week.
