Daily Thoughts 7/27/2009 ( Books On The Air )

"Haiti. A drama of the black Napoleon by William Du Bois : With the New York cast." Poster for Federal Theatre Project presentation of "Haiti" at the Copley Theatre, 463 Stuart St., Boston, Mass., showing bust portrait of Toussaint Louverture. From Wikimedia. I liked the image.

Daily Thoughts 7/27/2009

I have been thinking about books in the media. We get a lot of requests for material which people have heard about on the radio, television, and the internet. I think I'm going to have to pay more attention to this. We have been aiming to boost our circulation a lot. These are some places to look for media tie ins.

Books In The Media
http://news.bookweb.org/mediaguide/

NYPL Books On The Air
http://www.booksite.com/texis/scripts/bookletter/showfab.html?sid=5796&qlname=NLAIR

There is also ICV2's movies and television section if you want to know which comics are going to be turned into films. http://www.icv2.com/search/index.php?q=movies/+tv

This is a video of China Mieville talking about The City and The City.

Today has been a quiet day. I have been watching things happen slowly. They have been moving ahead with the shifting project in the 700s. I showed someone how to do weeding with the laptop. I talked about creating a section for genre fiction-- mysteries and science fiction in the "New Arrivals" area who was returning from vacation.

I am thinking of merchandising the graphic novels. It should happen fairly soon.

I checked out Xenopath A Bengal Station Novel by Eric Brown. It is a science fiction novel. I also read the latest copy of the New York Times Book Review. I am also looking at a copy of How The Mighty Fall And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins. Very every day stuff.

Book Review Sites

I have a large amount of money to order books now. The new director decided to restructure how collection development was being done. It is a bit overwhelming to walk in and find you have an email requesting you to order social science, graphic novels, manga, business, and job information center books in one step.


Right now, I am going to start looking for review sites for books in a number of categories. Can anyone suggest a good place to find good specialty book review sites. I am going to be adding to my list of book review sites. A decent place for business book reviews is http://www.800ceoreads.com/ . I am also going to look at the suggested book review sites from the library cooperative.

Suggesting practical book review sites for subjects like computers, business, management, investing, law, and other subjects would be quite helpful at this point.

I have been looking around again for some more practical book reviews. I found one other site--
http://www.smartbooks.com/ . I have asked in a variety of places for sites.

I took some time to look at various library sites around the United States. Most are focused on fiction, not nonfiction titles. I did find somthing rather interesting. New York Public Library lists books as they appeared on air. This covers both books on television and books on national public radio. http://www.booksite.com/texis/scripts/bookletter/showfab.html?sid=5796&qlname=NLAIR

Today was rather long. It was not particularly eventful. I am glad that Saturday will be over soon and I can focus on getting home.

I continued digging around for book review sites and found a few more interesting if small sites for nonfiction reviews focused on the social sciences. Scott London Book Reviews, it appears to focus on media and politics.
http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/sort/index_subject.html

Findlaw also has a number of book reviews focusing on legal issues and legal literature. http://writ.news.findlaw.com/books/

The last site which looked interesting was the Internet Review of Books
http://internetreviewofbooks.com/archives.html

I can also choose books by quality publishers, but even then you can't know if what you are getting is truly quality material. For law what first comes to mind for law in a public library setting are Nolo books, Nutshell books, and Sphinx Legal Publishing. For business, I will probably take a look at the American Management Association publishing site, the Wiley Investment Classics series, and a few other things.

Right now, I am just thinking about how I will do this properly. I'll probably have to go through the Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Times Book Review again to catch what was missed.

On the way home on the subway, I read a bit of Hot Text Web Writing That Works by Jonathan and Lisa Price. It admonishes the writer on the web to write short paragraphs with short words. People read much more slowly on the web about 25% slower, and the resolution of web sites is much less clear than the resolution of images on paper. People seem to want to go in scan quickly, then read the short bit that interests them. It gives numerous examples of how to cut wordiness and increase clarity for writing on websites.