Last week I went to my regular monthly meeting of the book club I belong to. Okay, we have only been meeting for the past 2 months and it is just a group of friends who meet in a pub that must serve food, but that is quite a big commitment for me! As was that fact that for this meeting, I read the Cider House Rules by John Irving which is over 700 pages long – phew!

So first slip up I guess, I didn’t have a look online to see if I could get the Cider House Rules as a freebie ebook (legitimately of course). Instead I placed a reservation on a copy at my local library and waited for that to arrive. And sighed when I dragged the heavy tome all the way to Italy on my holidays and all the way back again. I don’t have an ebook reader or even a laptop, so this may have been the only eventuality for me, but I should have looked! Curses!

However, I have also begun to think about virtual book groups and whether these exist for ebooks only (and maybe free ebooks only). When one Google’s “ebook clubs” for example, the first few hits are for sites where you can sign up to access to ebooks by becoming a member of that “club”. I would be interested to know if anyone is involved in such a bunch of people.

In addition, with virtual book groups, who decides what to read next? My group have a “discussion” and we try to reach a democratic agreement. Do groups use some sort of voting system? Would groups split into “subsections” – sci-fi, romance, graphic novels etc, if the original numbers swelled too a great number? Is there too great a number in the virtual world? Getting very librarian-y, who does the organisation? Who is in charge?!

I suppose my real question is, is a virtual book group able to satisfy the questions and come to the conclusions that a face to face one can? Please get in touch if you belong to a virtual group and help my organising neuroses! This could be a growing trend and one which might help to promote ebooks as well as literacy.