Book Drum & the World’s First Literary Map

Book Drum is a web community for book lovers, which combining images, background information, maps, videos and music to bring alive the books we love. It calls itself the ‘the perfect companion to book, bringing them to life with immersive pictures, videos, maps and music.’ Anyone can join to build a profile on a book they know well. All you need is spare time, some enthusiasm, reasonable writing skills and an internet connection. While a book is being profiled, it cannot be worked on by anyone else. Once the profile is complete, other registered contributors will be able to add to it.

According to author Hector Macdonald who is Editor at Book Drum, what makes the site special is that people all over the world can contribute to explain and illustrate their favourite books for others. No other site has that functionality. When I asked how they planned to make Book Drum more interactive, he replied:

I’m not sure how we can make it more interactive than it already is, but we are always welcome to suggestions. Our future plans involve embedding the content directly into e-books.

Book Drum unveiled a new feature recently calling it the world’s first crowd-sourced literary map. The map uses a Google plug-in which tags the latitude and longitude coordinates of a book setting to plot them on a single world map. The map is an addictive and instructive tool. To quote the Book Drum:

So now you can spin the globe and click on a red pin to see what the Strait of Gibraltar looks like (The Alchemist), or Tierra del Fuego (In Patagonia), or the Chatham Islands (Cloud Atlas). You’ll find curious linkages: The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Persuasion in Lyme Regis; Brideshead Revisited and Miss Garnet’s Angel in Venice. And it might surprise you to discover the geographical reality of Catch-22‘s Pianosa or Northern Lights‘ Svalbard.