Be More Bookish - Week 5

Assignment 1:

For this week we have been instructed to blog about the web resource that we mentioned within the first's assignment of Be More Bookish. However I'm going to to have to pedal backwards and explain why I'm not going to be reporting on any of those. Firstly, when I started blogging for be more bookish I wanted to seek out some other media avenues that weren't mentioned by the advice of the training assignments. And while I would like to say that the three that I mentioned as online resources Earlyword, GoodReads, and NPRBooks have been helpful. I haven't spent anytime on either of those three much at all (aside from the Goodreads site). Instead at various times I've been visiting the Books subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/books/. Wow and what a dynamic place it is. It has all the pros of the reddit community (along with all of it's misses).

If you don't already know r/books (reddit lingo for their subreddit forums) was recently revamped. Though it still features it regular Reddit forums, r/books has become a hub of sorts to seek out all things book related it's moderators want to draw attention to. For example within the first week of reopening r/books sponsored an Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussion with Ernest Cline, who wrote Ready Player One, which is becoming a major motion picture. It was pretty cool reading what the author's currently working on and his responses to questions that he had time to answer. Due to Reddit's comments voting system most of the popular responses are already waiting for people to read at the top of the screen of that AMA.

What makes the r/books so facinating is that it's forums are trending to what's the most popular topic at the moment with the community structuring it by voting on the threads in the forum. Things that the forum moderator wants to bring to user's attention are posted at the top of the page, usually items like book discussion that are going to take place in the near future, weekly recommendation threads, and "what are you reading" weekly forum. Other than those few topics the rest of the structure is determined by the voting system of the community and a few community rules. Now I understand how vastly different r/books is than say EarlyWord and Goodreads which are structured to an overreaching coherent theme. That kinda structure makes those website really useful for reference material. However you just won't see as a socially dynamic user base as what you'll get in just even a few minutes spent at r/books. I highly recommend it.


Assignment 2:

So right now the hot titles at our library are new adult fiction and teens who waited to the last minute to complete their school's summer reading lists.

So what is there to like about early word and our hot items at our library branch. First the patrons that want the new hot titles are usually walking around with lists of books. They usually have it scrawled onto a loose sheet of paper, sometimes they try to memorize the book or name of the author. Sometimes they just bring along the entire article that they saw the name of the title that interested them in the first place. It doesn't really matter what they are using to remember what titles they are looking for it usually has originated from a best seller's list usually from the newspaper. These lists are haunt us because it seems a third of patrons usually try to memorize what they thought they were interested in but can no longer remember what it was they wanted. This is were EarlyWord.com has us covered. They have links to what seems like is most of the major bestsellers lists links in one nice column such as New York Times, USA Today, NPR, etc. This is a great tool to use to jump start someone's memory and ultimately saves time to keep them from stammering through their self-dialogue of having to try to remember what they wanted.

EarlyWord also features hold alerts. This is a nice feature that takes the burden of proof off of the librarian for the person that wants to take home that new book from Janet Evanovich "...but the branch must not have anticipated enough copies for everyone?" you know who I mean. So to spare insulting the patrons' intelligence to explain that there's a concept in capitalism called supply and demand and that sometimes publishers cannot always anticipate how popular something will be. We have hold alerts to use as a soft sell of sorts to explain gently that while "...we're glad you want the latest Janet Evanovich novel, there also seems to be a lot of other people waiting for it as well according to hold alerts from publishing reports. Our supply is on order for 200 copies at all branches, would you like us to place you in the hold que for that title?" If they still don't believe you show them the screen for the hold alert from EarlyWord. Doubly, print it out so they have something to take along home while they wait. Those kinda people tend to like trophies, certificates and rain checks.

For the kids that waited to long to read their school's summer reading list. I'm sorry they are just not going to get it done in time. However instead of their parents becoming steamed saying they are going to have to purchase the book from Barnes and Nobles, we could offer them EarlyWord's feature movies based on books links. If they didn't read Les Miserable for that AP english class during the summer guess what. There's a movie they can watch in few short hours to make up for it. Need to read Life of Pi, guess what EarlyWord has that title linked as a movie tie-in as well. Well this last Paragraph is a little are sarcastic, but the point is that a lot of people like to read the book a movie coming out is based on. And for a short time period that book that was ignored on the shelf for a while will become super popular for a bit. If you can use this tool to give patrons a glimps at what titles will soon be in short supply because of movie releases because they wanted to read it too, you will look like superstar librarian to those patrons.


Assignment 3:


Brothers can have strong words to share with each other which sometimes escalate into rivalries. Sometimes those rivalries soothe over and other times they continue as festering resentment into adulthood. As old as Cain and Able, sibling conflicts need no introduction and are fantastically explosive. However what occurs when one brother tragically passes away before a hatchet can be buried by the other. The brother that witnessed the car accident while unscathed feels and unexpected hollowness. What memories will prevail that form the narrative a surviving family has in remembering their loved one? In grieving will they move on or will the surviving child start seeing flaws in their aging parents that could have precipitated an unnecessary brotherhood feud?

Be More Bookish - Week 4

In my opinion, the strongest feature of the large book reading community at Goodreads are the book reviews and friends’ book lists. There are other places on the Internet where one may find a large offering of book reviews, like Amazon. However it's really easy to become distracted in those websites due to advertising and products. So it's nice to have a website like Goodreads for its singular purpose to cultivate a book reading community.

Goodreads' meat and potatoes is centered around readers interacting with each other similarly to way people do on Facebook. In fact, to me, the user interface at Goodreads looks very much like Facebook. And like Facebook, Goodreads initially makes all privacy settings turned off by default to get new accounts to start sharing books lists right away (I would highly recommend turning privacy settings on when you get around to it). You get started pretty quickly and find out what other Goodread users thought of a title. The Goodreads community seems pretty straightforward in their book reviews. If a title delighted them they'll probably recommend it was worth reading. If a title deterred them they will often mention that they wouldn’t recommend it and why. As a highlighted feature of the website readers also share their books lists. Finally the socialization side of Goodreads encourages initiating friend requests, it's interesting to see what other friends have read in the past. Friends can send each other recommendations of titles one may not have considered before or what they may want to consider reading in the future.

On the other side of that same issues Goodreads offers automated book recommendations that come from the site (not the reading community) and while it's interesting the recommendations are not great from my experience. The site generated book recommendations usually at stays within the genre of other books one already read. But the recommendations don’t really appeal to me more than the genre type. From my understanding, the automated book recommendations are compiled from an algorithm that computes the chance of someone’s interest level from their account's metadata, personal information, and who knows whatever information Goodreads monitors from account activity (probably information that the readers themselves may not be aware is collected on them). While this approach is economical for running a website, the algorithm only infers recommendations from someone's list of things they may have liked in the past. It's more effective for a human to give another person a book recommendation. Humans communicate in real-time and any ambiguities about what a person wants in the moment are clearer. For example I consider myself to be a sci-fi fan and I have my particular favorite reads. I tend to read Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke type stuff. From knowing that in a conversation a person might recommend to me to check out Stephen Baxter, who writes in a similar scope as the two previous authors. The first Goodreads recommendation to me after I entered in my previously read book list was, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Uhh...no thanks? The nice thing that since Goodreads is just a website, it can never balk at one's indecisiveness to its crappy recommendations.

All in all, I think that the Goodreads website is a good tool to keep in the shed. It's nice to access their genre lists and book reviews. However like all tools that are multifaceted: Goodreads is only good for really one or two things and after that, you'll never use the rest of it's features.