Sometimes work can be a bit overwhelming and you just need to take a break. But in some offices you're watched like a hawk and if your boss catches you doing something other than work, it could mean trouble.

Maybe that's why the New Zealand Book Council developed the readatwork website. Designed to simulate a typical XP desktop, you won't find flash games here. You will find short stories, poems, originals from New Zealand authors and some familiar classics.

What makes things interesting is the layout of the stories are entirely in the "Power Point " style, complete with animations that's sure not to arouse suspicion at work. That is, of course, if your position doesn't require the use of Power Point.

We must admit that while the layout was fun, it did make it hard to read the stories easily, as you had to try to hunt for the next sentence.

If you're looking to catch up on your reading at work, you might as well look like you're reviewing last Monday's sales presentation.

Goodreads is a social networking site dedicated to book lovers everywhere. Here you can post up books you've read or are planning to read on your virtual book shelves and get book suggestions based on what others have reviewed.

Like any good social networking site, your experience here is only as good as the number of friends in your network. If you don't currently have any friends (on the site that is) try searching for a book that you like and see whose reviewed the book and what else they've reviewed. If you find their taste similar to yours, ask them to add you as their friend.

In additional to book recommendations, Goodreads also offers links to purchase books from sites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble and offers discussion areas where you can interact with other members.

So if you're looking to expand your reading library, you might want to give Goodreads a try.

While Borders may be one of the most recognizable bricks and mortar book sellers in the US, the company has been nearly invisible online. For the last seven years, Borders has basically relied on Amazon for its online presence. But now Borders is relaunching its website with a heavy focus on recommendations and recreating the experience of browsing in a book store

While you can certainly use the site to search for books, the most prominent features of the new site are recommendations for books, music, and movies. There are "staff picks," new fiction and non-fiction, and customized suggestions based on your tastes in media.

One area where Borders has the advantage over Amazon is that the company does have bricks and mortar stores throughout the country. That means you can place an order online and have it shipped for free to your neighborhood store where you can pick it up. If you don't have a safe, secure spot for receiving deliveries at your home, this could be an attractive feature.

[via AP]

If you've ever thought it would be nice to take some time out from writing your personal blog to write the great American novel, it turns out your blog could be the next big thing in the book world.

Blurb is a website that lets you publish all sorts of content as a paperback or hardcover book. While there are plenty of other services out there that let you self-publish photo albums and cookbooks, Blurb offers some nice features for converting your blog into a book.

For example, Blurb can import data from Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress blogs. You can customize the look and feel of your book online before ordering a printed copy. Prices start at $12.95 for a 40 page paperback book at $22.95 for a 40 page hardcover. Of course, if you're like most bloggers we know, 40 pages will only cover a couple of weeks worth of posts at best. Fortunately you can order books up to 440 pages. But that will set you back a bit more money, with prices for 400+ page books starting at $65.95 and going well over $150 if you want each page to be larger than 7 inches by 7 inches.

[via Solsie]

Bookseller Barnes & Noble has updates its website, adding a bit of Web 2.0 goodness including podcasts, a tag cloud, and multimedia.

According to the Associated Pres, Barnes & Noble makes about 10% of its sales through the web. Probably the most noticeable (and most distracting) change is a huge section at the top of the page where new releases scroll past. You can hover your mouse over each book for more information.

While we're glad to see sites take advantage of new technologies to improve the shopping experience, we're not quite convinced Barnes & Noble's redesign fits the bill. The tag cloud might be useful if it weren't all the way at the bottom of the page where you'll only find it if you're looking for it. And as Read/WriteWeb points out, there are a few really useful features that are missing like recommendations and RSS feeds, both things that Amazon offers.

Like downloading audiobooks, but don't like being told how to listen to them? Up until now, the biggest names in downloadable audiobooks have been Audible and iTunes. Now online music site eMusic has announced it will get into the game.

Unlike books purchased from Audible/iTunes, anything you buy from eMusic will be DRM-free. Want to listen to it on any computer or portable media player? No problem. All you need is a player that can handle MP3s. And a lot more media players can handle MP3 than AAC files with DRM.

And why should you care if you have an iPod? Because there are still limitations on how you can use Audible/iTunes audiobooks. Want to burn your book to several CDs so you can listen at home and in the car? No deal. You can only burn an iTunes audioboook to CD once.

eMusic also hopes to undercut Audible and iTunes on price. The New York Times reports that one launch title will be The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. On iTunes, the audiobook will cost you $18.95. eMusic will sell it for $9.99. On the other hand, Audible and iTunes have about 15,000 titles to choose from, while eMusic will have only about 1,000 when the service goes live.

As printed pieces slowly seem to be getting phased out of our lives, eBooks are shifting to the digital lifestyle many of us crave.

So the screens are smaller, and the cravings of the printed page aren't there, but HarperCollins believes that devices like the iPhone are where the future of where books lie. The publisher has announced that they have launched a special eBook service that will work with Apple's new iPhone. The service is called Browse Inside, and will allow users to take a peek at the first 10 pages of upcoming publications. If users like what they see, they can then pre order the title from their device.

The Browse Inside platform will also work with other devices that are Flash enabled, but given the all the iPhone hype they have to pump up the whole iPhone compatibility thing.

Books are so, old school. Face it though, if you're a true geek you wear your bookshelf like a badge of honor. Shelfari makes it possible to wear that badge online as well; No inviting people over to your house just to impress them with your selection of Chaucer.

Shelfari lets you create a virtual library that you can share with friends. You can see what your friends are reading, find books read by others with similar tastes, and even get recommendations. Think of it as Last.fm for dead tree media.

Google products are no strangers to mashups from all forms of enthusiastic users and 3rd parties, but you know something cool is brewing when Google mashes up two of their most visionary services: Maps and Book Search. Recently on the Google Book Search blog, David Petrou announced this cool new feature, which they've added to the "About this Book" section of books you find in Google Book Search. Now, not all books will that have text about a location or two will get a map link (at least for now), but the ones that do will also include links to the actual pages of the book where a mapped location is mentioned.

If you want to see how cool this all is, the announcement post includes links to quite a few examples of books they've already mapped, such as Around the World in Eighty Days, Illustrated New York (1888) and The Travels of Marco Polo.

Considering the backlash from publishers Google has received for its book search offering--despite the fact that it's publishers whom it benefits most--one wouldn't think Microsoft would touch book search with a ten-foot pole. But here we are two years after Google launched what was then called Google Print, and Microsoft is set to launch its own book search offering in beta today. Windows Live Books will initially be available as a separate search engine that can be accessed from the Windows Live Search home page, but once the service is out of beta Microsoft says it will integrate its book search database with its main web search index. Unlike Google's book search, Windows Live Books will initially include only public domain works, to be followed by books whose publishers have given Microsoft permission to scan, and all books scanned will have their full text available through the site.

[Via Techmeme; image via CNet]

Google has tuned up the way you will search for books from now on with a slick new Ajax interface. Google has developed what it believes to be a better way to browse Google's digitized books on your computer screen. The new interface allows users who are reading books to use the scroll bar or arrow keys to navigate around the book. Users can also now zoom in and out and jump to a full screen view of a book. Navigating through the book is easier with a right side framed table of contents that does not refresh when pages are clicked on, thus creating faster viewing without any reloads and a two page spread view. Google did a great job with the new Book Search site. Fine tuning it like they did will surely attract a lot more users.

Looking for some great free books, or some stored knowledge in the form of e-books, lecture notes, programming texts? FreeTechBooks.com has you covered. All books are legally free and available for online viewing or download. There is a lot of great stuff here, and the only "catch" is that the texts are bound by their own terms, which isn't a problem in my book. Most of the titles are in the computer science or related areas like operating systems, programming, logic and systems analysis and design. There is enough stuff here to keep you busy for a weekend, or several weekends depending on how many programming languages and texts you are interested in.

BookRevyoo is a social book review community where books can be added and reviewed by members, and also rated. Books that users enter into the system are tagged with keywords relevant to the book, allowing easy categorization, and browsing. The built in RSS feature lets you keep track of user's comments on the book you might be thinking about reading. I look forward to watching this online social book review site develop, since they are currently in beta, I expect there will be a few more features added.

FreeComputerBooks.com has many free resources clumped into compact pages, so you so whiz through them quickly to find what you want. The site is ad supported but most of the content I found actually was free. There are links to many tutorials, books, articles, and other resources online that may be of use to programmers, database developers and such. I found a good article on AJAX that contained some info I needed for a project I am working, so my visit to the site proved useful. Only one link I clicked on went somewhere to buy a book, but the rest I clicked on were free resources, FYI.

Not enough time for reading? Want to catch up on the classics? DailyLit might be just what you've been looking for. It's a simple service that will email you classic literature a few pages at a time, so you can split up your reading over the course of a few weeks or months. How long it will take you depends on how long the work is and how often you receive it. You can set the delivery frequency to every day, every weekday, or every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can also tell DailyLit it to send you the next part as soon as you've finished the previous. There's dozens of novels of various lengths available, most of them by familiar authors ranging from Homer to Lewis Carroll, plus nonfiction works by Marx, Descartes, and many others. If you're looking for a little culture, delivered daily, DailyLit is definitely worth checking out.