Bitchery reader Elinyx gave me a heads up about a neat-o offer from a new site called “BookRabbit.” In what appears to be a merging of Flickr-style photo labeling and Shelfari or Library Thing book-based social networking, BookRabbit is building their site community by giving away 1000 free books. Open to UK folks only, the setup is simple. Upload and tag five books, and they’ll hand pick a free title for you. Elinyx tried it, and she says that their choices are based on what you’ve uploaded already, so you’re going to get an autobiography when your tastes run to science fiction. BookRabbit sent her a copy of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, and while it’s not romance, Elinyx says it is similar to her uploaded selection of books.
Elinyx pointed out that a lot of the Free Kindle books are not available to the UK segment of our readership – which sucks, I agree – so if you’ve got a hankering for free books, you’re in the UK, and you want to upload and tag a picture of your bookshelf, have at it and let me know how it works for you.
But I have to say, if I had to pick 5 books that represented my bookshelf, I don’t know what I’d pick.
I signed up—it’s a little confusing, but a nice idea. I put a selection of my favourite books on a shelf, took a picture, and uploaded that (because otherwise, what with the shelves being boringly alphabetised, any given shelf would be full of the same author).
Mildly frustrating uploader: you upload a photo of your bookshelf, ‘draw’ a shape around each book, then type in a search term and pick what fits. I was surprised to find my own Samhain title in their catalogue, but not Joanna Bourne’s The Spymaster’s Lady or Linnea Sinclair’s Finders Keepers (it had some of her others though). I did add the JB title to the catalogue, but still couldn’t seem to get the bookshelf application to attach it to my picture.
Possibly the free books have already been allocated, but since my collection included Janet Evanovich, Charlaine Harris, Jennifer Crusie and Terry Pratchett, I’d be interested to see what title they pick for me!
I was thinking ‘finally, free books for meeeeeeee!’ but it had to happen when my freaking camera isn’t working.
Do you think they’d let me upload someone else’s book-shelf? They’d never know.
Oh, and the set up is really cofnusing!
Cat,
When you get your free book, be sure to tell us what you got! Your shelf sounds a lot like mine would be, were mine in the UK, and I’m horribly curious.
Come to think of it, I do have a shelf in the house in Scotland; maybe I will join using that address, even though it will probably be a year before I’m over there next.
It sounds like rather too much trouble for one measly free book that one can’t even choose oneself!
And – the point that Cat made – anyone with more than a dozen or so books must have them organised to some extent, so surely everyone would have to set up a special group of books to photograph. A section of, say, two feet of shelving is the section of one’s library devoted to fiction is more than likely to have books all by the same author, or at least by authors in the same genre whose surnames start with the same letter.
Okay, my free book arrived yesterday, and it was Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good. With a rather handsome ‘Classic Penguin’ cover. An interesting choice, since only two of the ten authors on my uploaded list were male, and they were Jim Butcher and Terry Pratchett, neither of them very Hornby-esque. My contemporary choices were Jennifer Crusie, myself (ahem), Beth Kendrick and Janet Evanovich.
I actually do read Nick Hornby, so perhaps it’s an astute choice. But here’s the rub with such choices: I already have How To Be Good!
3 Aces by Richard Ide