Central
Booking The Reader's
Resource By Tamar
Love
Kevin Smokler is reading like crazy,
and he hopes you will, too.
Founder and publisher of the ultimate reader's resource,
Central Booking, Smokler operates under the premise that his site's
visitors share a "nagging deference to the idea that reading, the
world's most private act, matters so much more when celebrated in
public." To that end, he has created a community not for literary
hermits, but for readers who want to share the ideas books have
fostered within them.
Central
Booking's goal is not to pump up the latest indie and
alternative releases, but to share wonderful books the site's
volunteers love. "'Alternative' books have their own audience and
resources," Smokler says, "We love all books, and we love
talking about them."
The site's forum is testament to this love -- registered
members can hop online and voice their opinions not only on books,
authors and the publishing industry, but also on the physical
challenges of being book lover: one recent discussion focused on how
to store and shelve books when you have just too
many of them.
Central Booking's forum also hosts live author chats and
sponsors events at local bookstores, including San Francisco's
esteemed A Clean Well-Lighted
Place for Books, where Smokler recently emceed luminaries such
as Jonathan Safran Foer and George P. Pelecanos. Other community
efforts include working with The Grotto (of which
Smokler is a member) to produce Grotto
Nights at the Main, the writing collective's literature, film
and art series at the San Francisco
Public Library's Main Branch.
In existence since 1998, Central Booking operates solely on
grant funds and volunteer labor. When pressed for revenue-making
ideas to sustain the site after the grant funds run out, Smokler
seems stumped. "I guess we'll have to look into that," he says, a
refreshing change from money-grubbing dot-com sensibility of recent
times.
The site does not reflect this lack of hard-business savvy:
simply designed with a professional, yet accessible, veneer, Central
Booking's reader-friendly graphics, tagline ("Read Like Crazy...")
and navigation bars invite visitors to browse through book reviews
and excerpts, author interviews and profiles, essays, biographies,
resources and publishing news.
"We want to make buying a book as easy as buying a quart of
milk," Smokler says. "Our goal is to give readers a list of great
books, so that whenever they walk into a bookstore, they don't think
'what am I going to buy?,' but 'what am I going to buy
first?'"