BibMe, despite its unfortunate name, may be the easiest bibliography maker available. The site allows you to construct a bibliography in MLA, APA, or Chicago style and download it or save it to the site. You enter an ISBN, author, or title and BibMe does the rest. In addition to books, BibMe can handle websites, journals, videos, newspapers, and “other” (whatever that includes). The service is free.

I tried it with my “books for writers” list at Powell’s (that meant only testing books, so I threw in this blog to see how it would handle a website). I chose Chicago style. BibMe produced the following results.

Unsurprisingly, I found that entering ISBNs worked best; otherwise too many editions of the same text were offered. There were a few glitches. it couldn’t determine the publication date of ABC of Reading or Steering the Craft, and it would not save those entries until I filled the dates in manually. It appeared to alphabetize the Manual of Style under “The,” but maybe it just put all the citations with authors before the ones without authors. That would explain why it put blog.rightreading.com above that entry and under “Pound.” (is the intial lowercase correct?)

On the whole, the program worked so well it felt like cheating. Here’s the result:

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley And Marks Publishers, 2004.

Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Chandler, Raymond. Raymond Chandler Speaking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston & London: Shambhala, 2005.

Guin, Ursula K. Le. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. Portland, Oregon: Eighth Mountain Press, 1998.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995.

Lukeman, Noah. The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile. New York: Fireside, 2005.

Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1934.

“blog.rightreading.com.” blog.rightreading.com. http://blog.rightreading.com/ (accessed August 3, 2008).

The Chicago Manual of Style. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2003.

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Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Testing BibMe

The PW article tries to make distinctions between the three services (the unfortunately named LibraryThing has by far the most members) but for me largely fails to do so at the user level. Below are screen shots of the sites’ intro pages.

>> A previous post on LibraryThing

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Social Book Cataloguing Sites

The interesting aspect of this is that it is truest of the authors with the most prestigious affiliations. Such authors do not need the validation of print. In this context, the trend is for print publication to function increasingly as a farm system for the second-tier authors.

Are we seeing a similar phenomenon in the literary world?

IN RELATED NEWS: Academic book publishing on the decline.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Academic Journals Endangered?

I’ve mentioned the website Strange Maps before. Here it is back again, with a map showing U.S. states renamed for countries with approximately equivalent gross domestic products. My state is France, evidement.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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GDP Map

NewsMap lets you get the news from any country by clicking its location on a map. It’s basically a mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News.

Kind of cool but you could get the same information without going through the map.

Via Book of Joe.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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NewsMap

WorldCat provides standard bibliographic information. It will show a list of libraries within a range of a specified zip codes. It will allow e-mail follow-ups to searches. Users can post reviews of titles. Unfortunately its only prominent link for purchasing titles is Amazon, although other options may appear in search results.

Here is what a search for Julio Cortazar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds turns up.

When I mentioned it to a librarian friend, he wrote the following:

Yes, it is a very useful tool produced by OCLC, which, however, is taking over the (library) world like Starbuck’s or McDonald’s. Though it is extremely helpful, and wonderful in concept, it is also insidious, and I am very wary of it. It is controlling and unifying all library cataloging and in some places outside of the US and replacing wonderfully enlightening and useful cataloging with bland, uniform, insufficient and extremely conformist cataloging. OCLC is forcing old school and creative catalogers and librarians out of jobs as it grows ever larger. Use it at your own risk & only if necessary. KILL it if you can.

So I guess this is another of those modern dilemmas that seem to be springing up more and more frequently. Good resource, soulless librarian killer, or both?

Opinions?

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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WorldCat Library Search