Where to Buy Big Books

Just a note to self on some online seller's of "big books," those large display (like 3'x1 1/2 ') picture books for storytime. Probably book vendors have these, but I don't know that I'll have access to them.

Scholastic Big Books
BookSource - not very many
Kaplan Big Books - bundled sets
Lakeshore - 3 bundled sets as of 07/2014, or buy individually
a helpful guide to other sources by TeacherBigBooks.com, including amazon and ebay lists.

Book Trailers

[A few weeks ago] on my LinkedIn updates there was a comment in the ALA forum about Cinematic Book Trailers. Having no idea what the commenter was talking about I checked them out and they were awesome! Two of them totally got me interested in looking up the book.

Many of the book "trailers" I've seen are actually book reviews (guilty here) a la Reading Rainbow. (And who didn't love RR's "but you don't have to take my word for it!" section?) But who says we can't push the envelope a little? I like the idea of snagging a reader through a sort of visual book jacket blurb, especially as the summer reading program is starting up. What better way to market a One Book, One City Reads campaign than a highly visual trailer? This one produced by Red14Films totally made me believe that a movie was due out for the book.


Okay, so the envelope is being pushed a lot. This has great production value and after I realized there isn't a movie due out, I said to myself, well, I gotta read the book! Which is the point, right? I was speaking with a co-worker who used to run a GameStop store and he told me he instituted a similar strategy to increase pre-order sales. He loaded the video trailers of the upcoming games on a laptop computer and had it running on loop and bam! Pre-orders rose from nineteen a week to nineteen a day.

Now, I've got all kinds of opposing thoughts as well. As much as I enjoy the production quality of the book trailer example above, I wonder to myself about... Update: 7/17/2014 I must have forgotten my opposing thoughts because I can't remember one. If you have an opposing thought, please list it in the comments section and we can have a conversation. Oh! Wait, maybe one of the opposing thoughts is that the production quality of these book trailers is so high that it feels impossible to "compete" with them if you are a small community group looking to have some video fun with a group of kids making a scene from a book. But, who cares? Kids aren't in it to compete, just to have some fun expressing their favorite parts of a book and for every book with a professional trailer, there's gotta be awesome books without... right. **end stream of consciousness argument**

Other book trailers to get ideas on making one.
http://reederama.blogspot.com/2014/01/award-winning-book-trailers.html
(Check out the Mr. Wuffles trailer)

A very cool reader's map guide to How to Make a Book Trailer
http://www.booktrailersforreaders.com/Prezi+On+How+To+Make+A+Book+Trailer


Using a mix of live action and pages from the book. This sample brings up questions about fair use of books when making a trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2gN_8P9yts

Notes from a Wired Magazine

This is more of an observe than an analyze post...

I'd like to able to say that I get all the information I need to be a good digital librarian from the professional sources. And I do get a fair amount, especially the tech as relates to library policy, or the research into user behavior. However, I love Wired for the trends and new commercial resources.

Here's one: Please Press 1. currently a UK based site, but there's to be a US based one. It gives you a visual of the phone tree of customer service lines so you don't waste time sitting and listening. Wonder of wonders; you'd think that the individual companies could post on their websites the phone tree like a site map.

Fits.me is a web service that has dress form dummies made out of robots. You enter your personal dimensions and the robot morphs into the appropriate shape. THEN the cool thing, you can overlay any clothes you're shopping for and see what it would like on your shape. Great for clothing designers end producers too b/c they'll build a database of body types and then see which sizes are trending in aggregate and be able to sew clothes appropriately for those types. One of my co-workers says that it'll never work b/c she doesn't want to see what clothes look like on her, it's depressing enough to wear clothes, much less look at a representation of her body type in the clothes.

There was a question about whether a person has the right to delete offensive posts/comments/replies on their social media accounts. I liked the response:"If someone spray-painted a nasty comment on your house, you would get rid of it. Our virtual space may just be rentals, but that doesn't mean what happens there doesn't matter." Sort of a you are free to speak as you like, and I am free not to listen to it.

Notes from a review of Google plus's photo organizing service vs. the awesome settings one gets on an Apple camera: Google+ has excellent photo organization, but the quality of Android cameras is poor in comparison to Apple cameras. G+ organizational features use algorithms to compare images to its database of images, selects the best lighting, tags faces, all without the user having to do it. "But who wants a bunch of well organized photos that aren't very pretty?" (I beg to differ, the camera on the iPad that my job gave me isn't good at all (in my kid's school auditorium.) I'm the type that if I had enough time, I'd take the picture via the good camera and then upload to the G+ cataloging service, but who has the time? And no matter the quality of the camera, you can't get a good shot if there's another person in front of you.

Advertisement: Nextissue.com magazine service like audible.com. Pay one monthly rate, read as much as you want online. "No clutter." I'd be interested to see if the service allows you to bookmark and take notes, like Zenio. (the website doesn't address that issue.) And is the content available offline?

Graphic Novels and Apps

Totally unrelated to each other, I wanted to note that I am working my way through a reader's advisory book and discovered a mobile app creator for non-fiction interactive books.

GN Scavenger Hunt
The reader's advisory book is Read On-- Graphic Novels: Reading Lists for Every Taste by Abby Alpert. I'm having fun identifying books that we don't have in my current institution's collection (hey, the selector said I could make a list!) and books that I want to read (sometimes these lists correspond, sometimes they don't). The fun thing about this is the process:

1. I read an entry and identify a title that I think should be in the collection like Chuckling Whatsit
2. then I check the catalog to see if we have or ever had it
3. I go to our vendor (bibz) and look to see if they have it, 
• if they do, I add it to the recommend list, 
• if they don't, I look to see if Amazon has it or if it is available as an ebook in Overdrive

It's like a scavenger hunt. Sometimes the graphic novels in the reader's advisory book are out of print, such as True Story, Swear to God by Tom Beland and I have to track down used copies. (For myself, b/c my system doesn't buy from anyone other than our one vendor and before you get all up in arms, many library systems do it that way b/c they just don't have the man power to catalog and sticker everything. It's a trade off. I.L.L. it, if you want it.) This is the fun part of learning a collection and assisting in collection development, well, I guess if you really like the genre you are researching.

Book App
While reading the Dec 16, 2013 edition of Publisher's Weekly I came across the article "Mobifusion: Making Apps Make Money" [article not available online from what I can tell]. The company builds book apps for various publishers, kinda like my favorite app developer for children Loud Crow Interactive, only this one is for adults. I'd love to get more info on what tech they can support. It is just an interactive book, like search, bookmark, highlight, or can it do more, like if they have a cookbook, can I build menus and add up ingredients? I'm excited about this, but I'm wondering also what are the costs and are they on the scale that only established publishers will want to purchase their services?