Below, you’ll find a list of 20 fine lit­er­ary blogs. Like our pod­cast col­lec­tions, this list will grow over time. In fact, it will become part of a larg­er list of great cul­ture blogs. Over the com­ing weeks, we’ll roll out new install­ments and then mash them togeth­er into one larg­er list. Stay tuned for more.

If you feel that we’re miss­ing some extra­or­di­nary blogs, please feel free to **@******re.com/”>email us.

• Blog of a Book Slut: Book­slut’s edi­tor-in-chief, Jes­sa Crispin, pro­vides links and com­men­tary for those who love to read. The pop­u­lar relat­ed web­site includes fea­ture sto­ries, author inter­views, reviews, columns about book-relat­ed con­tent, etc.
• Book­Dad­dy: It’s your source for intel­li­gent book blath­er. The stat­ed mis­sion of the site is to “pon­der print media, lit­er­a­cy & pub­lish­ing. Any­thing on wood pulp, pix­els or stone is up for dis­cus­sion.”
• Books, Inq: This blog offers a behind-the-scenes look at a book-review edi­tor’s world. In this case, the book review edi­tor is Frank Wil­son, of the Philadel­phia Inquir­er.
• Book World: What you get here is one wom­an’s attempt to read what’s worth read­ing and say some­thing about it along the way.
• Chekhov’s Mis­tress: An oft-cit­ed lit­er­a­ture blog writ­ten by Bud Parr, a book lover who also runs a net­work of lit­er­ary blogs called Metax­u­Cafe.
• Con­fes­sions of an Idio­syn­crat­ic Mind: Sarah Wein­man puts togeth­er here “a respect­ed resource for com­men­tary on crime and mys­tery fic­tion.”
• Crit­i­cal Mass: Offer­ing com­men­tary on lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, pub­lish­ing, and writ­ing, this blog is writ­ten by the Board of Direc­tors of the non-prof­it that issues the year­ly Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Awards.
• Eve’s Alexan­dria: A nice­ly bal­anced mul­ti-per­son lit­er­ary blog com­ing out of the UK.
• Lau­rable’s Poet­ry Weblog: A poet­ry weblog that spe­cial­izes in con­nect­ing read­ers with audio of poets read­ing their work.
• Maud New­ton: A wide­ly-read blog that spe­cial­izes in pub­lish­ing & writ­ing indus­try news, plus occa­sion­al lit­er­ary links, amuse­ments, pol­i­tics, and rants.
• Moor­ish Girl: A well regard­ed book and lit­er­a­ture blog writ­ten by Laila Lala­mi, author of Hope and Oth­er Dan­ger­ous Pur­suits.
• Rake’s Progress: Named by The Guardian as one of the 10 best book blogs.
• ReadyS­teady­Blog: Run by Mark Thwaite, this is an “inde­pen­dent book review web­site … devot­ed to review­ing the very best books in lit­er­ary fic­tion, poet­ry, his­to­ry and phi­los­o­phy.”
• Slate Books: Even though tech­ni­cal­ly not a blog, it should be on your read­ing list.
• So Many Books: Giv­en the tagline ‘the agony and the ecsta­sy of a read­ing life”, here’s a laud­ed blog that takes you into the read­ing world of Stephanie Hollmichel.
• The Ele­gant Vari­a­tion: A well-reviewed and respect­ed book blog that tends to give spe­cial atten­tion to the LA lit­er­ary scene. Fea­tures a real­ly exten­sive blogroll that’s worth pick­ing through.
• The Guardian Book Blog: It’s not exact­ly your aver­age inde­pen­dent book blog, but it’s got valu­able con­tent and it’s worth your time.
• The Keny­on Review Blog: If you’re a writer, you sure­ly know The Keny­on Review, and you should also get to know their blog.
• The Lit­blog Co-Op: A use­ful blog that unites the “lead­ing lit­er­ary
  weblogs for the pur­pose of draw­ing atten­tion to the best of
  con­tem­po­rary fic­tion, authors and press­es, strug­gling to be noticed in
  a flood­ed mar­ket­place.”
• This Space: A lit­er­ary blog writ­ten by Stephen Mitchel­more, a blog­ger who Ready Steady Book deems “the finest writer we have in the lit­er­ary blo­gos­phere.”
• Vulpes Lib­ris: “Vulpes Lib­ris: A mul­ti-nation­al pack of book­fox­es blog­ging, review­ing and chat­ting about books and book mat­ters. Par­tic­i­pa­tion wel­come.”
• Words With­out Bor­ders Blog — This weblog is the online com­ple­ment to Words With­out Bor­ders: The Online Mag­a­zine for Inter­na­tion­al Lit­er­a­ture. And, yes, as you’d expect, it’s a lit­er­a­ture blog with an inter­na­tion­al focus.

Stay tuned for more to come!

See Open Cul­ture’s col­lec­tion of Audio Book Pod­casts.

Let us quick­ly excerpt from the lat­est blog entry by Chris Ander­son, the author of the best-sell­ing
busi­ness book (and now over-used expres­sion), The Long Tail. This is Chris speak­ing:

“I know I should­n’t say this, but I’m frankly delight­ed to see that my book has been pirat­ed and is avail­able on Bit­tor­rent. (Pre­sum­ably this is the audio book ver­sion, even though it claims to be an “ebook”, which I was­n’t aware exist­ed).

My pub­lish­ers want to make mon­ey, and I like them so I usu­al­ly do what it
takes to keep them hap­py, but in truth I just want to be read/listened
to by the largest num­ber of peo­ple. Leave it to me to fig­ure out how to
con­vert that rep­u­ta­tion­al cur­ren­cy into cash –just get me in front of the biggest audi­ence and I’ll do the rest…

As Tim O’Reil­ly puts it, “Obscu­ri­ty is a far greater threat to authors and cre­ative artists than pira­cy”.

Of the near­ly 200,000 books pub­lished last year, only about 2,000 (1%)
made any mon­ey for any­one. The rest of them were pub­lished for oth­er
rea­sons, which range from mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing ser­vices to sim­ple
expres­sion. Out­side of a rel­a­tive hand­ful of celebri­ty authors and
self-help ped­dlers, almost nobody writes books for a liv­ing.

As for my own book, I imag­ine that approx­i­mate­ly zero (give or take a few dozen) peo­ple who would have oth­er­wise bought the prop­er audio book ver­sion will put up with the incred­i­bly slow down­load required to pirate it (cur­rent­ly five days, accord­ing to my Bit­tor­rent client)…

But all that said, I have mixed feel­ing about pur­pose­ly dis­trib­ut­ing a free
audio­book in its cur­rent incar­na­tion (the pirat­ed ver­sion on Bit­torent
isn’t going to mat­ter one way or anoth­er). On one hand, I think that
zero-mar­gin­al costs ought to result in zero price. On the oth­er, this
is not an infe­ri­or ver­sion serv­ing as mar­ket­ing for a supe­ri­or
experience–for peo­ple who like audio­books, it is the expe­ri­ence. As such it real­ly does appear to be a replace­ment for the CD/Audible.com ver­sion. Hype­r­i­on put a lot of mon­ey into pro­duc­ing that audio­book and they deserve a return. I’m con­fi­dent that a free ebook would sell more of the print ver­sions, but I’m less sure that peo­ple would buy a dig­i­tal audio­book if there was a free ver­sion cir­cu­lat­ing wide­ly online.

Any for­ward-think­ing book indus­try folks out there who want to explore the eco­nom­ics of this a bit fur­ther with me?”

In read­ing his post, sev­er­al ques­tions came to mind. Who knew that writ­ing books had become such a depress­ing propo­si­tion, an exer­cise in cre­at­ing loss lead­ers? And how hard did some VP at Hype­r­i­on (the pub­lish­er of Ander­son­’s audio book) swal­low when see­ing Chris pub­li­cize, even take some delight in dis­cov­er­ing, a pirat­ed ver­sion of their audio book prod­uct?

Ander­son­’s com­men­tary under­scores an impor­tant prob­lem in the audio book mar­ket. Where­as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doc­torow have demon­strat­ed that tra­di­tion­al book sales can be stim­u­lat­ed by mak­ing avail­able free dig­i­tal copies of the work (read: e‑books), there’s no par­al­lel in the audio book mar­ket. Dig­i­tal copies of audio books, pirat­ed ver­sions or oth­er­wise, pret­ty much only lead to can­ni­bal­iza­tion of the orig­i­nal audio books. Pira­cy presents a prob­lem for the indus­try. And it’s all exac­er­bat­ed by the fact that audio book prices are almost illog­i­cal­ly high. Con­sid­er this: Although the main virtue of the inter­net is that it low­ers the cost of deliv­er­ing infor­ma­tion-based goods, and allows for prices to come down in kind, the audio book ver­sion of the Long Tail runs $31.95 on iTunes and $27.99 on Audi­ble, which com­pares very poor­ly to the $16.47 that you pay for the paper copy on Ama­zon. This skewed pric­ing struc­ture not only sti­fles demand, but also cre­ates an incen­tive for knock-offs, leav­ing the audio book world in a bind. At this point, the audio book indus­try should have every incen­tive to do some­thing cre­ative with the dig­i­tal tools avail­able to it, much as the music indus­try has done over the past sev­er­al years. We’ll keep an eye on whether any for­ward-think­ing pub­lish­ers take up Ander­son­’s invi­ta­tion to sort this one out.