I wish that book resources on the internet were as easy to find as film and music resources. Now, maybe I’m just better at looking for film and music information than book information, but I find it odd that for each type of book-related website I’d like to find, I can name an exact equivalent for the film world. For a long time I’ve wished that there were a book database as extensive and dominant as IMDb is for films (there are some vying in the area, like Internet Book List, Internet Book Database and a few others, but most of them are gearing more and more to social networking and message boards, it seems, than to straight information–compare to IMDb, which has a message board, but it’s peripheral). I gave up on that.

Now I just want a site that does for books what Cinematical does for movies–news about upcoming books, rumors, reviews, tidbits about what bigwigs in the blogosphere and media are talking about, that sort of thing. I found a lot of litblogs by poking around various blogrolls, but they all seem to be either personal/review sites (some of which look very good, don’t get me wrong–just not what I’m looking for) or too closely tied to either a specific publisher or a specific genre of book. Now in this case it may just be that there isn’t much information about books before they come out as there is about movies, simply because writing tend to involve only one person rather than cast, crew, studio, and who know who all else–you don’t have “oh, this film is being made” and “oh, here’s the director”, and “oh, here’s the cast,” and “oh, here’s the poster,” and “oh, here’s the problem they’re having with the MPAA,” etc. with books. But still. There would seem to me to be room for a professional-level group blog not associated with a particular publisher or interest group with writers who could each focus on whatever they wanted to in the bookworld (enough writers with different interests that everything would get covered) with news about which writers are currently working on what, reviews of what’s just come out, and features on earlier books perhaps or just general bookworld stuff.

As a side wish, I wanted to find a site that would list the release dates of upcoming books–not just a selection of potential bestsellers (which I can get off Barnes & Noble or Amazon), but of ALL the books coming out. This, again, is ridiculously easy with movies. IMDb has a very nice list of upcoming theatrical releases, and when I wanted to see upcoming DVD releases, a Google search for “upcoming DVD releases” gave me a dozen sites that listed every upcoming release for the next several months. A Google search for “upcoming book releases” or “book publishing dates” or variants brought me to a Barnes & Noble “notable releases”-type page and a lot of individual publisher sites. Is it really true that I’d have to look at each publisher’s list of upcoming titles to get a full picture of what’s being published soon?

What is this? Is it just that there are too many books published in too many different areas by too many different publishers for one site to keep track of it all? Are book publishing dates not as firm as film and DVD release dates? Are books just so completely uninteresting to most of the internet world that nobody cares about book information? In other words, is it a question of lack of coherence in the book publishing world that makes it difficult to produce such an triumverate of book information (database, Cinematical-esque blog, release date list), or is it a question of a lack of audience to make such a venture worthwhile? Related to the worthwhileness, perhaps, is my other petpeeve about book sites in general: Movie sites are pretty, by and large. Compare IMDb to the book databases listed above. IMDB, though not in my top ten of pretty websites, is a lot prettier than they are. Some of the bookshelf collection-tracking sites are pretty, like Shelfari, but I don’t think they’re quite what I want at the moment.

Finally, if anyone knows of such sites as I have outlined here, please PLEASE direct me to them. I would be forever grateful.