San Diego Mom - Carmel Valley/Del Mar

This is a fun concept.  The author emails you a section of the mystery at a time.  (Several emails a day over the course of the weeks it takes to complete the novel.  Or, pay a higher fee to get it at once.)  Talk about suspense.

http://emailmystery.com/ 

I haven’t read the books, but I like the idea of email delivery.  (DailyLit.com does this method of delivery too, though for public domain or free publications)  I worked with the author at Email Mystery for a discount for San Diego Mom visitors.  You are entitled to a 20% discount of the books, lowering the price from $4.99 to $3.99.

To get the discount, email michaelb@emailmystery.com when you make your purchase (reference this San Diego Mom post) and he will issue a one dollar credit which will show up on your credit card statement.
 

I ran across Daily Lit yesterday and just tried it out.  They have books online that they offer to send you pieces of on a daily, weekly, etc. basis by email.  Originally I thought this was an absurd way to read a book.  But, I admit, with young children I find it hard to sit down and read a book comfortably. 

I am on email though a few times a day for short spurts, so I figured I’d give it a try.  Their selection is as you would expect, a little strange as publishers/writers have to agree to this kind of distribution.  Categories range from comedy, to women’s fiction (classics like Jane Eyre, Little Women) and more. They even have a few options in foreign languages like French and Spanish.

Give it a try!   http://www.dailylit.com/home 

This was sent to me by the Founder, a mom working part-time from home.  She’s put together this service to find the cheapest way to buy a book, CD or DVD online. It takes into consideration both the price of the item and the shipping costs and presents you with the cheapest option at the top.  Most major vendors such as Walmart, Amazon, etc. are included.

If you’re like me and you favor shopping online to dragging your young kids into a store…this is a nice service to avoid unnecessarily high shipping fees, etc.

Check it out: http://www.booksprice.com/ 

Ok, this is my new favorite web site.  If you have a hard time finding new books to read this web site will blow your mind.  They have over 12 million books catalogued by members who visited the site and uploaded the lists of books in their collections, wrote reviews about them, rated them, etc.

The LibraryThing folks then used all that data, Amazon recommendations, and a bunch of cool algorithms behind the scenes to give you recommendations based on what other people are reading (not buying) and they present them all neatly on a single page.

Also pretty cool, they tell you what other members read similar books, so you can go check out other stuff in their collections, you can converse with them if you want in discussions on books you’ve entered and even find people who like similar authors.  

I was amazed how helpful this was for finding new books for my book club.  And I still find new things on this site every day.  Check it out if you love to read. 

http://www.librarything.com  

I just ran across this site and thought it might grow to be an even more useful resource.  The Reader’s Circle is a directory of book clubs.  Enter 92130 and you get a couple of local book clubs and a contact to express interest in joining them. 

http://www.readerscircle.org/search.html 

They are working to put together author contact info as well so you can use the site to invite an author to join you for a book club meeting.  Kind of an interesting idea.

I stumbled upon this recently and fell in love with it as a way to quickly find new book ideas.  Type in a favorite book of yours and get a list of other books with ratings.  I like the fact that they have a age range recommendation for the book as well. 

http://www.storycode.com/

The idea is that visitors profile the stories they read and insert them into their database.  Then they use those profiles to compare stories to each other and give you recommendations.  For me, it worked really well.  Give it a try next time you don’t have more than a moment to pick out a new book for the next book club meeting or vacation!