Any of you favor a book release site or reviews?

[brewerjamie15]

I was just surfing around the internet for a decent book release web site and am not impressed with what I have found. I'm mostly in interested in fiction bit I don't want to favor any particular author. I would like to know if any of you avid readers out there may favor a particular book release site. I'm interested in obtaining information that allows me as much advance notice as possible and not just the next month's releases.

It's preferable that I could find out the next three months of releases and be able to see a list that is not just 9 or 10 books long and limited to only best selling authors.

I'd also be interested in seeing if any of you enjoy book reviews and where those sites are. I'd like to open up some options to browse besides the NY Times. I don't really make my purchases based on reviews, but I'd like to see some.

 

 

(added tag --1992)

[RU Rah Rah]

(Hey, an opportunity to spout off about myself! Hooray!)

 

I give this quite a bit of professional thought, since I'm an academic/author and I sort of have to be a de facto self-promoter for my books. From what I know of that realm, your options include:

 

1.) More high-brow newspaper book review sections, such as The NY Times Book Review (the big Sunday version) and The Washington Post. They usually carry a mix of popular fiction, general nonfiction, how-to, and everything else. The Village Voice (weekly) also has cool stuff.

 

2.) Publisher's Weekly. This might be your best bet, although I'm not sure if you need to buy a subscription for the on-line version. Pretty much everything passes through here, except for the obscure academic titles, which you can find in . . .

 

3.) Academic journals, most of which have book review sections. This is probably way too dull.

 

4.) The New York Review of Books (not to be confused with The NYT Book Review) is pretty high-brow (you won't find Larry the Cable Guy's books reviewed here), but you can find interesting stuff.

 

5.) On-line resources, like Metacritic (http://www.metacritic.com/books/). I haven't used this for books, but it looks like a good site for this kind of thing. (If nothing else, it can point you elsewhere.)

[tyguy20204]

I haven't really found a good website either. I read the NY Times reviews, etc., but they only review the bigger releases. Also, I find their book review search engine to be simply atrocious.

 

Really, I always wind up going to Amazon.Com and browsing through their book selection. To start, the books are given a brief review by Amazon.Com staff members and then a summary from Publisher's Weekly is supplied. The reviews by the staff member are usually poorly done, but they do give a gist of what the book's about. The real value comes in the form of the user reviews. Of course, there are juvenile and generally ignorant reviews from some users, but these are easily distinguished from others. Many of the reviews are insightful, written with thought and care, coming from the mind of real book readers. If you find a review that you really like, you can click on the user profile and find all of that user's reviews. The great part is if you find a user that has comparable opinions to you, and then you can really find some new literature - literature that won't be found in the NY Times or other mainstream publications. These people have real passion for books, and some of the best books I've read I probably never would have heard of if not for their recommendations.

 

Amazon.Com also provides User Lists and comparable purchase options. The Pre-Order section is vast, so I'm sure you could find a schedule of new releases through that section, although I haven't tried.

 

Also, you can't beat the website as far as prices go. No need to go to bookstores anymore. I usually browse on Amazon and then go to the library to actually get the books though. (Free!).