Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Bitchery reader Elinyx gave me a heads up about a neat-o offer from a new site called ”BookRabbit." In what appears to be a merging of Flickr-style photo labeling and Shelfari or Library Thing book-based social networking, BookRabbit is building their site community by giving away 1000 free books. Open to UK folks only, the setup is simple. Upload and tag five books, and they’ll hand pick a free title for you. Elinyx tried it, and she says that their choices are based on what you’ve uploaded already, so you’re going to get an autobiography when your tastes run to science fiction. BookRabbit sent her a copy of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, and while it’s not romance, Elinyx says it is similar to her uploaded selection of books.

Elinyx pointed out that a lot of the Free Kindle books are not available to the UK segment of our readership - which sucks, I agree - so if you’ve got a hankering for free books, you’re in the UK, and you want to upload and tag a picture of your bookshelf, have at it and let me know how it works for you.

But I have to say, if I had to pick 5 books that represented my bookshelf, I don’t know what I’d pick. 

Attention! The following link will suck up an hour of your day. If you don’t have an hour to spend, maybe this isn’t the link you ought to be clicking on.

From Bitchery reader Robin comes the Time Suck of the Week: FictionDB.com. Robin was in the process of restocking her library with Nora Roberts books. The FictionDB “has become invaluable in this task because it takes a book like “Courting Catherine” which is long out of print, and lists ever ISBN associated with it (including audio) and where it can now be found.”

Robin likes to use it for research, especially when hunting down the backlist of a favorite author, for work or for her own beleaguered bookshelves. Well, I don’t know for sure that Robin’s shelves are beleaguered or just a little weary, but I presume her shelves are like mine.

You can subscribe to the DB for about $3 a month and access all the free features plus a few extras: you can keep track of wishlists, TBRs, ratings, and notes, and sell your books through the site.

But even the free version is a book nerd’s paradise, especially the romance section. Enjoy.

Just remember. You’re not going to get that hour back.

Sam Hain, distant cousin of Sam Bucca, has announced a Discover New Authors program, in which four eBooks have been made available on their website “for FREE!” as they say.

Visit their site and you can download My Fair Captain by JL Langley, The Bounty by Beth Williamson, Don’t Let Go by Sydney Somers and Winter’s Daughter by J.C. Wilder. In 2009, they promise one new title every Wednesday from a new author. FREE!

Well, sort of. As I pointed out in my reply, it’s not really “FREE!” because it’s only half the book. There’s a link to buy the rest if you like it, and surely half of a book is more than enough to decide if you want to keep going or stop, with nothing lost but a little bit of time. So you’ll read the first half and wonder what happens next while evaluating whether you like it enough to buy the finale.

So it’s not really “Free.” Or even “discounted.” It’s half a book. It’s more than “sample chapters” but not entirely a “Free book.” So what to call it? I mean, not that I’m in charge of marketing decisions but I’m totally pondering this like it’s my business. Hm. A Big Fat sample? More than your standard free sample? Tapas: somewhere between a free sample and a whole entree?

Then it came to me: Francium.