HarperOne (a book imprint of HarperCollins) has announced that the Little Black Book, which heretofore has been available in an annual print edition, is now available in a free online database.

The Little Black Book is a list of expert authors in the fields of self-help, spirituality, personal growth, and religion. (At least that’s how HarperOne described it in the announcement. The Web site looks like it contains many more subjects than that.) The database is available at http://www.ltlblackbook.com. You can do a search by author or by book title, or browse through a list of categories on the front that ranges from American/Pop Culture to Heath/Wellness to HarperOne Fiction.

I picked the “Relationships / Life Coaching” category and got a page of over two dozen book covers. Picking one at random I expected to see maybe some sample questions or some archived news about the author/book (this is designed to be a resource for media.) All I saw was a very brief “talking points” paragraph and a description of the book. The announcement for this site said that there would be links to author blogs, video, photo albums, Q&A, etc. but I’m not seeing it.

I went and looked at several books and it was the same — some author information, talking points, and book description. But nothing else. For the most part I could get more information about the book from Amazon, especially if there was an author blog there. In fact there was so little information here I became suspicious — was I actually in the right place? Maybe I missed it… after looking around some more I did discover that with some books you could click on an explore button, which would take you to a different site, which would provide you with some author links. Whew!

At any rate, the site DOES have PR contacts for all hours — even after hours — and does point to some additional information, including the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau, a Blog about CS Lewis, and a YouTube channel, which DOES have author information.

Did I miss the Black Book? Is it because it’s Saturday?…