Week 9: Book Trailers and Training Wrap Up

Assignment 1 and 2: Articles on Book Trailers and My Opinions

I appreciate that the Chicago Tribune article acknowledges that book trailers are not exactly taking off, and a lot of that could be because they are called "book trailers". By calling something a book trailer, you are mixing two mediums--advertising for print by using video. Even though it's possible to advertise for video using print (movie posters), the opposite just seems weird. Movie posters at least give you a snapshot of what to expect for the actual movie. Book trailers don't give you a realistic expectation of what's to come because the actors and sets you see in a book trailer are not part of a final product. I think it makes sense that the trailers that the New York Times are writing about, where the author is actually featured in the trailer, are more popular. The author is the voice for the book so it makes sense that people are interested in hearing the author speak. I don't think they are particularly useful for readers' advisory because the best readers' advisory seems to happen between people, as opposed to through a specific company marketing. Many people come to the library asking for books that they read good reviews on or that their friends recommended for them. I think that's what makes reading and books in general such a special and unique medium that cannot be replaced by newer technology. Books are about communicating ideas, and the best way to share these ideas is to talk about them.


Week 9 Assignment 3: Summarizing Thoughts

There were a lot of aspects of this training that I really liked. I liked the focus on appeal factors because to me that is a crucial part of readers' advisory and recommending books to people. Knowing appeal factors for different genres helps me feel more confident in recommending books to readers who might not necessarily like the same things I like.

One thing I think this training could have used more of is resources that feature popular books/authors from the past 5 or so years. There were a few assignments that had us look on the Amazon Bestseller List or other literary blogs, but I think it would have been helpful to have some more communication on this blog about what's circulating heavily in the BCPL community. We have the Between the Covers blog, which is helpful for identifying newly published books. However, I think it would be great to have an ongoing blog about what's popular at our individual branches at the moment, and to share what sort of reader's advisory we've been giving. This was a great introduction to some genres and book lists I had never heard of, and overall I leave here feeling more confident about my knowledge of reader's advisory!