I got tired of using Wikipedia to track releases of sci-fi book cycles I read (sci-fi writers are hardly organized bunch in keeping their sites in order). Practice shows that scraping Wikipedia pages generates too much noise from minor edits.
So I googled for something to keep me properly informed (people still read books after all) and NewBookAlerts came up.
What it does
NewBookAlerts is online service that offers to sign up for account and add authors to track. When new book by author gets released – you get notification email.
Case study
I had added some authors for test while back (don’t even remember exactly). This week I got email with two books by Peter Watts (awesome once for writing great books, awesome twice for releasing texts for free online to those half globe far from USA).
I could be happy… if one book didn’t turn out to be written by Peter Watts Jones and another edited by Peter G. Watts. Wrong flavor of Peter Watts. Bummer.
Overall
While site seems to have all parts of tracking covered and viable to stay afloat (probably on behalf of those Amazon affiliate links for everything) it is seriously undermined by poor job distinguishing authors.
With online services it is all about details and this one seems to spent little time on those.
Link http://www.newbookalerts.com/
So. What do you use to track books releases? :)
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