#20: Books 2.0

For me, you can't discuss Books 2.0 without talking about electronic books. Books are one thing I am convinced will never go away. Electronic texts can't beat curling up under the covers with a good paperback, and they can't be as satisfying as a good beach read (especially important in Florida!). But I am willing to concede that e-books do have a place in this new technologically advanced time of ours, and that they can co-exist with paper books.

The e-books that we have in our catalog through LINCC are a real life-saver. At my college, we have one main campus and one library. This library contains probably about 99% of our holdings, and 100% of our library staff. The college also has several centers in different areas and towns (never more than about 45 minutes away). These cater to students that can't make it in to our main campus. We do travel to give library instruction sessions whenever they are requested by the faculty, but there aren't enough students to justify having a full-time librarian at any of the centers. Since many of these students can't make it to our main campus, the electronic resources are a real lifesaver. We show the students how to limit to just e-books, and how to access our databases. We have two reference book collections online (Credo and Oxford Reference) that provide them with most of the reference materials they need. Of course, we will send any print book from our circulating collection to the students that require it also, but since it can take a few days, electronic resources are more heavily used. If we didn't have these collections, many of them would be without easy access to the resources they needed for their research.

I have recently discovered eReader from Microsoft, and downloaded a few free e-books. There are quite a few websites offering these free books, including Project Gutenberg, the International Children's Digital Library, Bartleby, Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, and the Internet Archive Text Archive. I've collected more than 150 links to collections of e-books and specific book available online; here is a sampling:



Now, one of the more famous e-book sites is, of course, Google Books. I am a huge fan of it. Even though not many books can be read in their entirety, I find it enormously useful for reference work. When I have someone searching on an obscure topic that could be buried in a broader book, I like to use Google Books to see which books contain a mention of that phrase. Then I can check to see whether we have those books in our library, or place an ILL for them. Sometimes if a student desperately needs a specific title two minutes ago because the paper is due the next day, but we don't own it (which, of course, never happens!), I will take a look to see how much is indexed on Google Books; sometimes there is more than 80% of the book available, and that can be sufficient for the student. It's not something that I necessarily endorse, but since our job is to help the patron to the best of our abilities and resources, I will use it as a last resort.

Here is my exploration on the Books 2.0 sites mentioned in the NEFLIN posting:

Books On Your Phone: Twitterlit
Alas, I have no texting or Internet on my phone. It's very old-school: just calls. I'm musing getting my own plan (I'm currently still on a family plan because it's only $10/month to have my line) in order to get a local area code, and I'm finding some pretty good texting plans for about $5/month. I find Twitterlit quite fun, though, and I can get it outside of my phone (whoo hoo!). I think it would be fantastic to embed on a library website to whet the appetite of patrons and spark some excitement--but of course, one would have to have a well-rounded fiction collection and be prepared to order some of the Twittered books.

Readers' Advisory: ReadingTrails / BookLamp
I've played around superficially with ReadingTrails before, and I think it's fun, but a little limited. Most of the trails I found only have a few items in them, which limits their usefulness. I do love that you can create an embeddable widget of any trail you'd like; here's a good one:




BookLamp really sounded fun because of the mention of how it works similar to Pandora. I love the discovery process of Pandora, and I thought it would be fun to explore. Unfortunately, this site needs a lot of work to make it viable. Of the few listed books, I had only really read one (1984 by George Orwell). The vast majority appeared to be science fiction/fantasy. When I picked it, the closest book match is the USA Patriot Act! That is a very weird thing to come up. While I can see how many people might say that the oppressive environment in 1984 is starting to be replicated with the passage of the Patriot Act, that is a very political and personal connection that I don't believe is appropriate at all, especially since they say they connect books using "pacing, density, description, dialog, and action graphs." How on earth are the two connected using those parameters? Connecting 1984 with Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451 would be a no-brainer, but neither are listed here. I would never say to a patron who wants to read something similar to 1984 to check out the Patriot Act, regardless of my personal political beliefs. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially with the description for the Patriot Act being "A bad idea." I think I'll come back in a year or so to see how this site has developed, but for now it's nowhere near comprehensive enough to be used.

Online Book Communities: Living Social
Living Social is a neat little site, where you can keep track of your book collection, review books, discuss titles, and connect with other readers. In other words, it's just like GoodReads, which I already use extensively. I do like certain things about Living Social a little bit better than GoodReads (like the separate ownership area), but I thought it was too much of a clone to be worth sinking any real time into.

Book Group Resources: LitLovers
I'm not really going to say too much about this one, but I thought it would be a neat resource for those that do book clubs. I passed it along to a fellow librarian who organizes our reading group at our library.

AudioBooks: LibriVox
I think this a fantastic resource! I am the library liaison for our college's Disabilities Resource Center and I am always looking for resources for patrons with disabilities. I think that these audiobooks are great for students who are visually impaired or blind, especially since our audiobook collection is very tiny. So to have these books at our fingertips (and for free!) is wonderful.

Book Reviews: BookBrowse / MetaCritic
BookBrowse looked very promising, but unfortunately most of the best stuff is for 'members only' and membership costs $29.95 for a year. As I've already made abundantly clear, a site better be darn impressive for me to pay to use it, and I really dislike yearly fees. I also didn't like how member-only features are 'hidden' with other features. You're just merrily clicking along when BAM you have to pay for this portion. Tricky tricky, and not a site I want to bother with.

I've shown MetaCritic to certain classes before that had an assignment to find reviews on movies and music, but I hadn't actually taken a look at the book portion. The fact that it hasn't been updated since 2006 is obviously a bit of a minus, but it seemed to be a very straightforward site aggregating multiple sources for book reviews.