Book Reviews


In the questionnaire I recently distributed, I had lots of respondents say they wanted to see book reviews. I decided that I'd hit a few search engines and see what they produced. I was rather surprized to see how easily I got reviews. My question would be why don't you all use the search engines to get reviews? It's a simple process! Anyway, I'll let you in on my findings.

I picked my four favorite search engines for a search of "book+reviews". The search engines are Altavista, Mamma.com, Google and Yahoo!.

The Altavista.com search gave me lots of hits featuring review topics such as on-line bookstores, past-bedtime books, inner-self books, critical literary reviews, and even book reviews by teenage girls. All the listings looked good.

The Mamma.com search gave 97 hits. They were about the same sort that Altavista gave.

The Google search gave me 3,370,000 hits. I didn't look at all of them --actually, I only looked at one which caught my eye. I'll be telling you more about that one later.

Yahoo! gave me a nice-looking list of 2,023 sites. It seems to have sorted the query more effectively than the others. Maybe it was only in the presentation, but the list looked great.

I'm gonna let you all form your own opinions of these Book-Review searches. The above links should give you more book-reviews than you'd possibly ever have time to research. Click on any of them, and browse happily.

One website particularly caught my eye. I'm not sure why. I didn't even find the title particularly appealing, but it's the site I decided to look at (or "...at which I decided to look."). ACQWEB's Directory of Book Reviews on the Web looked great!

The left column gives a table of contents and the right has the URL listings. The General Review Sites are: Library, Popular Press, Scholarly and Electronic. The site also features review-links to music, audio/visual, sci-fi, reference, computer, law and lots more. To test the site, I'm gonna see if I can find reviews for Christian rock music. (time passes) The music reviews didn't yield anything I found useable, but I did get to a "CD Hotlist: New Releases for Libraries" for 1999 through May, 2000. The site also geve me a link to Gramophone: the Classical Music Website. I don't think that'll help me, but it's nice to know it's there. I suppose, now, I'll try to find a book review on the topic.

The copyright of the article Book Reviews in Bibliophile is owned by Paul Landkamer. Permission to republish Book Reviews in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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