Thing 20

Books 2.0

Reading in my library appears to be on the rise, and with series books especially, children read the first book (oftentimes, their school librarians are great at promoting first books to them), they get hooked and they come to us for additional series titles. Digital books are very popular among adults, but not so much among the children, although we recently saw a surge in our Playaway circulation stats because of a promotional bulletin board and display that we created in October (Playaways were very popular with the patrons once they saw them and we had a chance to promote them).

Some of the online resources listed in this Thing look and sound quite appealing. Of the Books on Your Phone section, the one I would be interested in is DailyLit. I do have an internet-enabled phone but would rather not eat up data time by reading books on it, plus the screen isn't *that* big. :)

In the Readers Advisory section, I have heard of What Should I Read Next? And What's Next? (and if not those two sites, then sites with very similar names). Isn't there a print reference material with the title What Should I Read Next? broken down by genre? In our children's department, some of us use the MCPL Series & Sequels site regularly. While it's not completely up-to-date, it is oftentimes VERY handy for looking up books within a series. I would be interested in trying out most of those Readers Advisory sites listed.

The Book Group & Book Review resources also seem like they would be useful, partly for work and partly for personal interest reading. I will have to explore them more in depth when free time allows. I read the description of the LibraVox site under the Audio Books section, and that sounds intriguing! What a cool idea -- to convert public domain works to audio book format and use volunteers as readers. While I'm not an audio book believer, I may just have to check out that site anyway.