CellStories – Mobile Short Story Of The Day

CellStories is a new mobile service offering a different short story every day. The stories, which average 1500 to 2000 words or about a 10 minute read, are free. They supplied by budding or established authors looking to increase their exposure. CellStories doesn’t pay for content but will link back to the author’s (hopefully mobile optimized) site or Amazon.com or other bookstore sales page. The design of CellStories is attractive but functional. I particularly like that the site opens directly … Continue reading

LibraryThing – A Social Network For Book Lovers

A social network for book lovers. LibraryThing lets you build an online catalog of your books, rate them and write reviews. It gives you recommendations of new books you may like based on the likes of other members with similar tastes. There are links to Amazon and other online booksellers. A basic membership, allowing you to catalog 200 books, is free. Unlimited cataloging is $10/year or $25 “for life”. Social networking features include a profile page for each member, groups, … Continue reading

Salon.com’s New Mobile Site

Salon.com is a long running (since 1995) and popular online magazine.  It covers music, books, music, technology, trends, sports and politics with lengthy, well-written articles. Mobile is nothing new to Salon which launched an Avantgo “feed” in 2001 that’s also available on the open mobile web at http://www.salon.com/partner/avantgo/.  That text-only site is still active, unchanged in format in eight years. It  carries a selection of about ten recent articles from Salon.  It’s an interesting read but probably a bit limiting … Continue reading

Compare Book Prices With Your Phone

Here’s a new mobile site that helps you find the lowest price for any book. It’s a mobile friendly version of bestbookbuys.com. Visit m.bestbookbuys.com and enter the 10 or 13 digit ISBN code found on the back cover of most books and the site will return a list of retailers and prices. BestBookBuys gets several things right that other mobile price comparison sites seem to stumble with. Prices are prominently displayed in the initial results listing, not buried several clicks … Continue reading