Be More Bookish - Week 1 Assignment 3 & 4

The third assignment I'm faced with is looking at a 101 for Reader's Advisory skills in a list format. However as with any skills list, I usually find they are like a table of contents, without the rest of a book. In my experience while lists may have good ideas one is usually left to hunt down more information to assess the subjective ideas it provides. While most people within a profession can agree that a list of their job skills can provide a good sample description of what they do. That's usually more to the experience that a list will not provide details too.

In my opinion job skill lists should provide follow up info. It would be nice if further references were provided to context, frequency, or management of skills regarding readers advisory. Even if the references were just sources for further reading that would be good.

The fourth assignment is to pick one of the following Recommended book links below:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/books.html
http://www.earlyword.com/
http://www.goodreads.com/
http://www.npr.org/books/
http://www.salon.com/topic/what_to_read/

And one of the following Book link Genres:
http://www.mysteryreaders.org/
http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/
http://www.rtbookreviews.com/
http://www.usatoday.com/blog/happyeverafter/
http://www.heroesandheartbreakers.com/
http://www.locusmag.com/
https://www.sfsite.com/
http://www.tor.com/tags/fiction-affliction/
http://streetfiction.org/
http://www.urbanreviewsonline.com/

So for book recommendation sites I would say that these would be my 3 picks out of the 5 available.
1. earlyword.com - This website seems to make the most sense for staying on top of new reads that seem to be the most in demand from patrons. It makes sense to have an insider perspective from the publisher which books are hitting the new material sections of our branches. I would think from a costumer service perspective this would be a good tool to have in the tool box.
2. Goodreads.com - The feature on this website is it's social media connectivity. What are you reading, what's you coworker reading, and what are patrons reading.
3. NPRbooks.com - This is my last pic from two fronts. First I'm an NPR fan and secondly I like the intuitive and general recommendations on the site. Dailybeast and Solan book recommendation sites have their own feel to it. But I like how NPR usually plays their recommendations straight down the middle to what seems like a broader audience than the other two sites.

Now for the Genres recommendation sites. My criticism is more about the selection of the websites that Be More Bookish has presented participants with. For example while there are 10 genre sites to choose from if you break it down the initial offerings, 2 genre sites were mystery books, 3 science fiction/fantasy, and 5 urban/erotica/romance sites. While these genre web site reflects adult fiction collections of most libraries, I would suggest having other genre selection websites such as Teens, Graphic Novels, and Children's books just to kind of round out the options.

But since I have to pick one to display I'm going to have to choose Tor.com. By default genre science fiction is my go to book genre, so my second pick for a book genre is RTbookreviews.com. After looking up their website (it's a romance site) their web design is simple and offered immediately to break up their recommendations into different sub-categories offering teens, paranormal, sci-fi, inspirational, and so on. It seems to accessible to a variety of experienced internet users and offers a wide audience appeal which I'm a big fan of. The other sites didn't seem to have either of those offerings as RTbookreviews.com has.