Four for Booklovers

Montesquieu said, "I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve." Being in the digital age, I'll shorten that hour to 15 minutes, but you get the idea. Those of us who love the smell of ink on the page and reach for the New York Times literary supplement before the real estate section will get a kick out of these four sites. They expand the value of your world in print.

Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac is a shot of literary stability in an unstable world. Each day you get a poetry selection and a few paragraphs that begin with "It is the birthday of… (Today, for example, I got to know Matt Groening, Art Spiegelman, and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and learn a bit about their works.)

Shelfari is a new social network for book-lovers. You post a profile of yourself that's a virtual tour of your own bookshelf. Meet other Mark Twain lovers, find out about new titles, and connect with others who share similar tastes. The opinions on this site are very much in the spirit of Amazon's customer reviews, but you see a panoramic sweep of a reviewer's literary tastes. Interesting potential for online book clubs.

PaperBackSwap.com is the world's largest paperback lending library. List your paperbacks and you'll get credits to borrow others from the site. Everyone is in it for the postage, but that's the only cost. According to recent new coverage, the site has 900,000 books, and its users trade about 30,000 books a month.

DailyLit.com delivers a piece of one of the classics in literature to your email daily. I'm reading Plato's Republic (delivered in 151 parts), in five-minute stints on the subway. DailyLit lets you sign up to receive one of the classics in digestible chunks via your email. Currently they've got 50 public domain titles that can be subscribed to and read for free. Now if only they had the accompanying CliffsNotes.