Book Bites, our staff recommendations series, featured each Wednesday as posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, has been running since September 2020!
Please follow us on social media if you would like to see more staff reviews and recommendations!
The Library subscribes to the print edition of BookPage, a monthly publication of book reviews, author interviews, and articles of interest to avid readers. Pick up your free copy while supplies last each month. You can also visit BookPage.com to read some of their reviews and features!
Subscribe to our weekly e-Newsletter from Wowbrary featuring our newest materials, occasional book reviews, and links directly to request the items in our catalog!
Our database, NoveList Plus, contains reviews, descriptions, and recommendations for both fiction and narrative nonfiction titles, as well as book discussion guides, thematic book lists, and articles.
Please consider requesting a Mystery Grab Bag if you would like us to do the browsing for you!
Reference eBooks:
OpenLibrary.org: A digital library offering materials that are no longer under copyright. These freely available ebooks can be read right away in your browser. Search the collection by clicking here.
Books to Borrow: A digital library undertaken by the OpenLibraries initiative of the Internet Archive, which offers digitized ebook versions of books which are still protected by copyright. These ebooks are available to anyone with an Internet Archive library card, which you can sign up for using an email address. The digital library is protected by CDL (Controlled Digital Lending), a legal standard that provides for compliance with copyright law by ensuring that one physical copy is owned for every copy that is available on the digital library. The digitized books have the possibility to reach people who cannot visit a physical library to access those collections, and have features that make using the digitized copy much better for research, like the OCR (optical character recognition) process used while scanning the book to make the text searchable. This function is available in the streaming browser reader, which makes it greatly helpful to someone using the book as a source for an assignment.
To use the items in Books to Borrow which are still under copyright, sign up for an Internet Archive library card (all that is required is an email address) here, then use that library card to check out any of the digital materials available! Just like reading an ebook from our other services, you can read in the browser or download as a PDF or ePub.
Best seller lists:
Many other online resources are available for readers and book discussion groups. Here are a few:
- FictFact "Keep Track of Your Book Series."
- FictionDB "Your Guide to Authors & Books."
- Goodreads "Meet your next favorite book."
- The Guardian "Books"
- Internet Public Library "Love to Read: Finding Books & Book Clubs."
- Library Thing "A home for your books. A community of 1,800,000 book lovers."
- LitLovers "A Well-Read Online Community."
- National Public Radio "Books"
- OrderOfBooks.com "Complete List of All Book Series in Order."
- Pinterest Use search terms like "book discussion," "favorite books," etc., then click on "Boards." The Nesmith Library has a Pinterest page with a "Recommended for Discussion Groups" board.
- Today in Literature "Great Books. Good Stories. Every Day."
- What's Next™: Books in Series database "helps you search series fiction."
- Whichbook "A New Way to Choose What to Read."
- The Writer's Almanac® with Garrison Keillor "Poems, prose, and literary history every morning."