Lincoln Mullen, of the Backward Glance blog, writes:

Before I read a book, I usually read a review of it. There are several places to find book reviews. If you have access to a good library, then Book Review Index or Book Review Digest will list reviews in many publications, which you can then find in the library’s holdings. Gale offers a database called Book Review Index Online Plus, but it is poorly done. For academic books, a better option is to use a subject specific database, such as America: History and Life or MLA International Bibliography. What’s missing, though, is a tool to search for book reviews online.

I’ve created my own search engine to find book reviews on the websites of newspapers and magazines with good book review sections. Google lets you create custom search engines that return results from specific websites, or even specific parts of a website. I will add more websites, but for now the search engine checks the book review sections of the following:

• New York Times
• Washington Post
• Los Angeles Times
• Times Literary Supplement
  
• The Telegraph
• The Guardian
• The Atlantic
• The Economist
  
• New York Review of Books
• The New Yorker
• Slate
• The New Republic
• Book List
• Books and Culture
  

You can use the search engine by going to its homepage. Leave a comment if you have any problems, or if there are any publications you would like to have added.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.