System requirements: Recommended: RealPlayer for audio and video material, Pentium 120 MHz or higher with 16 MB of RAM, Netscape 2.0 or higher or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher
Designed primarily as a companion to the book Booknotes: America’s Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas by Brian Lamb (Times Books, 1997), this Website may also serve as a companion for the C‐SPAN cable television program, Booknotes, hosted by Lamb. The site is updated regularly to provide links to the current month’s programming on Booknotes. Basic information about the book and the program Booknotes and its companion program About Books is included.
The site is full of audio and video material which require RealPlayer to access. The RealPlayer plugin is available free; and there are many links to the download site for this product throughout the Booknotes Website.
The book Booknotes features 120 of the over 400 authors who have appeared on the program Booknotes since its inception in 1989. Of these 120 authors, 116 are featured on the Booknotes companion Website. Each author is featured on an individual page which includes an author photo, links to audio and video clips from the program, and a link to the complete transcript of the program. A link is also provided to the Amazon.com page featuring the book, if available. Each author page and transcript is clearly identified as to author, book discussed, and program air date. Several authors are also featured in “slide shows”, groups of photos with captions and accompanying narration from Lamb. These slide shows were created during Lamb’s visits to the authors in their homes and writing venues.
Author pages may be accessed via a drop‐down menu on the main page of the site or via a text only list of featured authors. The drop‐down menu is divided into the three categories of storytellers, reporters, and public figures. The text‐only list uses the term “leaders” instead of “public figures”. A big drawback to these lists is that neither seems to be arranged in any particular order within each category. The authors do not appear in alphabetical order or in order of appearance on the television program.
Complete transcripts are available for all Booknotes shows from April 1989 to current programs posted 45 days after they air. Complete audio recordings of the programs are also available for shows from April 1997 forward. These transcripts and recordings are available via browsable lists of the programs. The lists are grouped by year and shows are listed in chronological order. There is a search engine available which should allow searching for transcripts by author, book title, or topic. However, the reviewer was unable to perform a successful search, always receiving an “incorrect parameter” error message.
Other information included in the Website includes information about the publishing industry itself. This information includes basic statistics about the publishing and bookselling industry; lists of Pulitzer Prize winners for history, nonfiction, and biography or autobiography; a list of the National Book Award winners; a brief discussion about bookstores, how books are priced, and how books are identified; a glossary of terms from the American Booksellers Association; and a list of links to book publishers, distributors, and their associations.
The site has a few technical problems. It uses frames, mostly successfully; but there are a few links back to the main page from sub‐pages which result in double‐framing. Also, links to external sites often appear within the Booknotes frame as well. A large number of the external links in the publishing industry section do not function properly. The addresses for the sites are listed, however, and are correct when typed into the browser navigation system directly.
Suitably enough, as the book and the site are so closely linked to the television program, there are many links to C‐SPAN’s Booknotes Websites. The lists of study questions for each episode of the program will be of particular interest to educators. A direct link to these guides is provided from the main page of the Booknotes Website. There is also a link to a book message board (empty at the time of review) and to the C‐SPAN online “bookstore”. The bookstore is actually a group of links to various commercial bookstores present on the Web, although only Amazon.com has a specific site for books recently featured on Booknotes and direct links to book pages from within the Booknotes: A Cyber Companion Website.
This site will be of interest to anyone interested in books and their writing and publishing. Most of the books discussed on the program Booknotes relate to history, public affairs, and biography. Therefore, this site may be of more interest to persons interested in those topics. However, much of the discussion is about the methods the authors used to research and write their books, as well as some discussion of the publication process. This site would, therefore, also be of interest to anyone interested in the writing and/or publishing of books in general. The site is not likely to be useful to researchers, however, or for younger individuals doing class work unless they are looking for general information on a featured author. Suitable for casual browsing, the technical problems with the search engine may make this site frustrating to those looking for transcripts for a specific author if they do not know when the author appeared on the program.
