By Kristen Sekella
Student writer
Now in its fourth year, Wired for Books, Ohio University Telecommunications Center's online literary resource, receives hundreds of thousands of hits per year from countries throughout the world.
Visitors to the site, wiredforbooks.org, can hear local authors read their own works, listen to interviews with acclaimed writers such as Amy Tan and Isaac Asimov and observe discussions and scholarly debates on other published pieces.
Wired for Books livens up literature through dynamic audio and video readings of titles ranging from "Macbeth" to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." It also features archived interviews with legendary authors such as Maya Angelou, Tom Clancy and Anne Rice from Don Swaim's CBS radio show. Hosting hundreds of audio and video files, the site converges the Internet and the radio to bring literature to life. It is one of Harvard University's "Great Links on the Web" for literature and literary criticism.
Both celebrities and locals alike perform on Wired for Books, where Martin Sheen reads "My Country Awake" by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and Athens-area writer Terry Anderson shares his poetry penned while a hostage in Lebanon. The most frequently visited feature is located in the site's Kids Corner: an animated slide show retelling Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
"One of the important things about Wired for Books is it allows visitors to listen to people reading poetry and books," said David Kurz, senior Web developer for the Telecommunications Center and the creator and producer of the site. "There's something special about the human voice."
Wired for Books, created in 1997 and modeled after library programs fostering communication between authors and scholars, originally hit the AM radio airways before converging to an online database. The Telecommunications Center is also responsible for managing public broadcasts and distance-learning facilities to promote Ohio University to a greater public.
