Alan Brown, a retired Canadian school librarian, updates this site every day with posts from kids about their favorite books. In addition to the book reviews, kids between eight and fourteen can submit short stories, favorite quotes, and comments about their favorite books. Although many of the kids respond to posts written by others, the messages are not threaded (forum-style) so it can be a bit hard to follow conversations. Brown also lists resources for finding author sites and lists of book awards.
Discover books, authors, and illustrators through games, videos and contests at the kids portal of publisher HarperCollins Children’s. My favorite click is Browse Inside, where you can preview over 10,500 books such as “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman or “The Composer is Dead” by Lemony Snicket. Browse Inside also allows you to embed these previews on your MySpace profile or website. Very cool! The browseable books are organized into lists of Bestsellers, Most Emailed and Most Viewed, or you can search them by keyword.
The official site for kids books at Random House is a collection of mini-sites for treasured book characters such as Thomas & Friends, Junie B, Berenstain Bears and hundreds of others from the likes of Disney, Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street. Visit to keep up with your favorite book series, and to interact with your favorite characters at their websites. The Magic Tree House site, for example, has printable activities, online games, and a Readers & Writers Club with tips for budding writers.
In addition to their book reviews, regular features at Kidsreads.com include New in Paperback, Great Books for Boys, and Books into Movies (which currently include the holiday season releases of Disney’s “A Christmas Carol” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” based on the book by Roald Dahl. ) Other reasons to visit include the author interviews, author contact info, book trivia quizzes, word scrambles, polls and contests.
This new site from Scholastic is a social network for kids who love books. It is still being tested, and is only a preview of the final site, but so far, it looks wonderful! Sign up with a made-up screen name, build an avatar, shout out to your friends, and hang out on the message boards. Just like MySpace or Facebook, you can collect friends, and add fun widgets to your profile page. Widgets include Get into Harry Potter, which merges your avatar onto the book cover of your favorite Harry Potter book, or Word of the Day which offers daily definitions. Remember to never post personally identifiable information online, such as your school or address.
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or try a FREE trial of the Printables ClubThe following links are either new discoveries or sites that didn't make it into my newspaper column because of space constraints. Enjoy!
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