Those who are bored with run-of-the-mill book clubs may want to check out Oprah Scmoprah:

Why Listen to Oprah, When a Dozen Other Women Could Tell You What to Read?

Originally an online book club, we found that our tastes were beginning to diverge so much that instead we started this blog to recommend books to each other, and to discuss books that more than one of us had read. Come on in, read the discussions, and post your own recommendations!

Lots of people have been talking about eco-libris since yesterday. The gist of the project is to counter the effect of book production on deforestation by asking people to donate $1 for every book they buy. The money then goes to tree-planting initiatives.

At first glance, it seems sensible. But there's a serious problem here with the message it sends. The implicit message here is that buying a book is somehow really bad for the environment, but that's not true. A bought book lives a very long life. When people buy books, they usually keep them around for a while. And then they pass them on or sell them. It's not buying books that's the problem, any more than buying a house is a problem; the problem is at the production end.

The problem is the grotesque way in which publishers over-print on a regular basis. The mass-market industry is particularly horrible in this respect. What really needs to happen is for some forward thinking publisher to rethink the way it handles the manufacturing end of their business. It would be fabulous if they reclaimed unsold books, pulp them and reuse the paper.

A small group from the Internet Archive has started a (for me, anyway) drool-worthy undertaking- the Open Library Project:

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

I've been looking for something like this for a long time, and it looks like they're doing it right.

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In an attempt to make information easier to find, Canadian SF promoter Marcel Gagne and author Robert J. Sawyer have created a collaborative SF Database in the form of a Wiki at: Canadian SF Works Database.

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