Thing 35: Books 2.0

I warn you in advance. I really liked this Thing and looked at almost everything. This post is going to be long and rambling.

I haven't really seen a large change in our library regarding electronic books. We have e-audio books available for download through our library system, but no book books. I would be really excited to have a kindle for myself, but they're really expensive, so I don't see it happening anytime in the future. If anyone wants to buy me a present, I definitely wouldn't turn one down. I don't know of anyone who has a kindle, but a few of the people I follow on Twitter have them and really like them. They haven't caught on in this part of the country, but we're normally a little behind the times :)

I don't want to put anything on my phone. I have a cheapo phone without Internet capabilities. If I had an iPhone though...... too bad iPhones don't work in North Dakota. TwitterLit is a cool idea and you don't have to involve your phone. I signed up to follow them on Twitter, we'll have to wait and see if it pans out to anything fun.

The Reader's Advisory sites would be really useful in the library. We use the What's Next Database all the time when people can remember an author, but not the order of the books - or if they have 5 books checked out by they're all in different series. Our catalogue doesn't have an easy way to print out a list of the books in a certain series in order, either, so it helps. What should I read Next could be really helpful for Reader's Advisory as well, especially if it's a genre you personally don't read much. I also visited BookLamp. It's similar to Pandora (which I love and am listening to while typing this). I really hope it gets developed into something real.

For Online Book Communities, my favorite was Reader2. I read way too much and I'd like to have a record of it. I tried to register, but it was disabled because of spammers. I'm going to have to try to remember to go back and sign up at a later date.

I don't do much with Book Groups, but I liked the Reader Group Choices site. It would give your group a good jumping off point. The music aspect is interesting, this week it's for the book "The Soloist" which was a really good book even though the movie is horrible mis-cast, but I love Classical music and it had good suggestions to get you in the mood for the book. I wish they had an archive of searchable Music by the Book segments rather than just the feature of the month. It surprised me that they didn't, but if it was on the site anywhere, I couldn't find it.

Like I said earlier, our library does subscribe to Netlibrary for audiobooks. I personally don't like people reading to me, so unless it's Neil Gaiman - I don't listen to audio books (I can't help but listen to him) but I really liked the idea of Podiobooks. I hate that name. It's all free, which is good, and there was a wide range of books. It gives participants an opportunity to listen/read things that they otherwise may not see in the audio book collection in their library.

I had iRead on Facebook, but I had a hard time keeping it up to date. Plus I usually had too many books at once. Never mind, I just checked and I had the plain books application because I had looked at iRead and didn't like the setup. I like a little more anonymity with the books I read and with Facebook it would pop up on everyone's Newsfeed whenever I started a new book. I still think I'm going to try Reader2.

When I looked through the Book Review websites, the only one that seemed like it would be better than the reviews that pop up on Novelist was Book Browse. You have to subscribe to it, and it's not cheap which pretty much puts it out of my mind.