Sam Harris Needs You!

Sam Harris, author of such works as: The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation, is preparing to run an fMRI study of belief and disbelief and he needs research volunteers to help him refine his experimental stimuli. All you have to do is take some surveys! Sam will post the survey results on his website when the research is completed. Go to www.samharris.org to participate.

Library Thing

I just discovered my new favorite website. Its called Library Thing, and it is a virtual catalog of your own library that is shared with the other members of the site and it is used for networking purposes as well as logging all of your books. This is exactly what I have been looking for but never knew existed until now. I got the tip from Neil Gaiman's blog. I was so immediately taken with it that I actually purchased a lifetime membership so that I could log my hundreds of books. Memberships are free for the first two hundred books you log into your library, and if you want to log more than that you can purchase a yearly membership for $10 or a lifetime membership for $25.

To log your books you just type in the title, author, or ISBN number into their search box. But if you are like me and have literally hundreds of books to log, you can purchase a cue cat from them for $15 which will scan the bar-codes and load the info into your library.
One of my favorite aspects of this website is the community it brings to you. You can immediately see other people who have the same taste in books as you! You can join online book and discussion groups, and you can get personalized recommendations based on the content of your virtual library. They even have an "advanced reader program" where you can sign up to receive advanced reader copies of the latest books for free as long as you provide a review of the book in a timely fashion.

If you are a bibliophile like me, then you have got to check it out. Go to: http://www.librarything.com/. You'll feel like you have finally found your community of book lovers.