Book Clubs

Having a virtual book club has never been easier thanks to new tools from Facebook, Skype and Google.

Today Facebook announced new updates that make it easier to chat with multiple people and to hold one-on-one video calls. Facebook’s new ad hoc group chat lets Facebook users create group chats without first creating a group, so you can easily invite your Facebook friends to your book club meetupsand host the party on group chat. The new design also improves the look of chats on wide screens, making it easier to view. Facebook users can also video chat thanks to a new partnership with Skype, but this feature isn’t as ideal for book clubs, since it doesn’t support group chat. Hopefully they’ll add a multi-calling feature soon.

You can also host your book club parties with a new group calling feature on Skype. The new feature lets you chat with up to ten different people at once. Or you can use Google+ Hangouts, which is part of Google’s new social toolset called Google+. The feature is a “live multi-person video” chatroom that lets you have conversations with your online friends.

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Have you ever wanted to stalk your favorite authors and pester them about how their latest book is coming along? Thanks to Wattpad, you won’t have to hide in the bushes anymore.

The world’s largest eBook community has just finished beta testing the Wattpad News Feed. This feature is somewhat like Twitter, and it lets Wattpad users follow the postings of writers, readers, and other users. But the Wattpad News Feed has one features that twitter lacks: it probably won’t crash as often.

Besides connecting writers with fans, it will also let users follow the comments and discussion about particular novels as well as tell you when a writer you’re following adds a new story or updates an older work. Writers will know when someone becomes a fan of their novel and when a user adds the writer’s novel to the user’s library.

Yesterday the online book community Goodreads bought the book discovery site Discovereads for an undisclosed sum.

The 2 sites obviously share a number of interests. Otis Chandler, CEO of GoodReads, writes in the annnouncement that “Many of you have given us feedback that you’d like to see book recommendations on Goodreads from a Netflix-style algorithm. We’ve always agreed, but good recommendation algorithms are really (really!) difficult to do right. … To tackle this highly complex challenge, Goodreads has acquired a company by the name of Discovereads.com. With their deep algorithmic book recommendation technology, we’re going to be able plumb our database of 100 million book ratings from 4.6 million users to find general patterns of the kinds of books people read and to generate high-quality personalized recommendations.

The 2 sites are working to integrate Discovereads servers with that of Goodreads, and once this is complete the Discovereads website will be shut down, and all of Discovereads future development work will be found only on  Goodreads.

The online book community BookRix announced today that SocialBook is now in beta testing. SocialBook allows writers anywhere in the world to work together to build an eBook. They can contribute from either their Facebook, Twitter or BookRix profiles, simply by connecting their accounts and including a specified #hashtag.

SocialBook is free for all BookRix members, and they can use it for just about any group project. For example, it could be used as a platform for schools projects, or several users could collaborate on a cookbook.

Home decorating expert Martha Stewart has launched a new feature on her blog, highlighting the books she’s been reading on her Sony Reader. This week, she’s reading Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places by Bill Streever.

We uncovered the post while exploring our Best eReader Companies on Twitter directory. The book is part of Sony’s new What I’m Reading series, an interactive eBook club. Will you be reading along?

Here’s an excerpt: “It’s a captivating account of the life, history, and ecology of extreme and inhospitably cold climates.  The author, Bill Streever, a research biologist, passes along a vast amount of scientific facts and brings them all to life through an engaging narrative that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. The book begins with a 5-minute plunge into the 35-degree water of Prudhoe Bay about 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, so vividly written that I found myself shivering.”

Dzanc Books has launched a digital book club called Dzanc Books eBook Club. To help promote the launch, Dzanc is offering a deal, in which you get 11 eBooks for $50, in exchange for signing up.

Five of the titles will be available to the member immediately and the other six will include a book-a-month over the following six months. Beginning on December 1st titles will be delivered on the first of each month. After the sixth month, members will be billed $5 per month to continue the subscription.

The first five eBooks include: Laura van den Berg‘s short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us; Terese Svoboda‘s novel, Pirate Talk or Mermalade; Steven Gillis‘ novel, The Consequence of Skating; Dawn Raffel‘s short story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe; and Jeff Parker‘s short story collection, The Taste of Penny.

The eBooks will be delivered via e-mail announcement with a links to download.

Upcoming selections in the eBook Club include Robert Lopez‘s short story collection Asunder and short story collections by Roy Kesey, Matt Bell, Pamela Ryder, Sean McGrady, and David Galef, as well as two anthologies, Best of the Web 2011 and No Near Exit: a Post Road Anthology.

Talk show host and book club tastemaker Oprah Winfrey named her favorite iPad apps at the American Magazine Conference this week in Chicago.

Ad Age has more details. We’ve inserted links to her favorite apps: “she praised the device for helping her stay up on more breaking news, for which she favors the CNN app and the ABC News app (she loves the globe design). And she’s a big fan of Brushes and Sketchbook for her creative outlook. But the one that she said “changed her workouts”? Scrabble. “It keeps my mind off the treadmill … I can play Scrabble and listen to Bruce Springsteen all at once,” she effused.

Could Oprah’s App Club be far behind? We hope so…

Attention New York book fans, there are still open spots for tonight’s Mediabistro Book Club. The evening of literary entertainment includes a lineup of five authors, some who have eBooks out in varying genres.

GalleyCat reports: “A real-world extension of GalleyCat Reviews, the after-work book party will feature a memoir about race, a dessert cookbook, a Wall Street expose, a foodie/blogger novel, and a hotel novel. We will host a brief reading and Q&A session, but most of the party will be dedicated to mingling with the GalleyCat community.”

Authors include: Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture; Abigail Johnson Dodge, author of Desserts 4 Today–Desserts Made with Just FOUR Ingredients; Melissa Ford, author of Life From Scratch; Suzanne McGee author of Chasing Goldman Sachs: How the Masters of the Universe Melted Wall Street Down . . . And Why They’ll Take Us to the Brink Again; and Alix Strauss, author of Based Upon Availability.

We will be giving away more than 100 free books to lucky attendees. Follow this link to RSVP.

The Internet really does change everything, doesn’t it. eBookNewser has been following the online Roberto Bolano reading group that began making its way through 2666 last week. Earlier, Matt Bucher, the founder of the reading group, told eBookNewser about the various ways readers were communicating about the book.

He also said, “We really are interested in the quality rather than quantity,” in terms of readers. Well, the Website that’s the group’s hub is of a very high quality indeed. It’s just added a cool new feature: an interactive Google map that charts the locations mentioned in the novel.

Here’s what Bucher told eBookNewser about other Internet features he hopes to add to the blog in the future:

We do have more ideas about how to gather together all of this in stuff more ways. For example, we will likely turn the running list of characters into a wiki that anyone can add to or edit. Also, for the later sections of the novel, I’ve invited a couple of my friends who are history PhDs to write longer, more academic pieces about the Mexican border and Sonoran murders. I had thought that when we got to the end of the project, we’d have have a nice reader’s guide already written and we might pitch that to publishers. However, I feel that with a print edition the blog comments would be lost, the forum postings wouldn’t fit in, and all the interactivity would be gone. So I kind of feel like, purely from a reader’s perspective, that the online materials make for a richer experience than the static book. And you will not meet a bigger book lover than me.

Part of the fun of this is also just adding things as we go, so I can’t say for certain what else we will add. I’m open to suggestions!

As you can see on the map above, there’s a cluster of little blue flags in the European countries where much of the novel takes place, and one in South America. One commentator on the blog asks a good question: how will the Google map represent the fictional Ciudad Juarez around which the novel centers?

Perhaps Google needs to start indexing imaginary places and creating a hybrid between Google Maps and Google Books?

Earlier this month, eBookNewser reported on the formation of an online Roberto Bolano reading group eMeeting at bolanobolano.com. The group formed to read the Chilean author’s door stopper masterpiece 2666, and the group begins today.

Here’s what the group’s founder, Matt Bucher, told eBookNewser in an email exchange about his sense of how many people are participating in the group read:

The numbers are hard to gauge because many people just say they are participating without really registering anywhere. We have about 250 people on bolano-l (a Google group), another 150 in the Facebook group, several dozen others scattered throughout (the forums, Twitter only, Goodreads only, Tumblr only, etc.). I would put it in the hundreds right now, but today is just the first day of the group read. I expect participation might increase as we post more articles that engage more readers.

Of course, you can’t read Bolano as an eBook, because the Wiley Agency is apparently holding on to the right for now, but at least you can talk about Bolano’s biggest book online.