iHCPL Books, Readers and Beyond: #53 Finding Books Online Exercise 2

Search for one of the books you selected in the previous post. Is it available from a bookstore? Which one, and at what price? (In dollars or in other books.) Can you find an eBook or Audio version online? On which site did your find it? (If you can’t find it online, please list in your blog the sites you searched.)

From Post 52 exercise 1 I picked Behind the scenes at the museum by Kate Atkinson. I started my searching at Brazos Bookstore and found a copy, at least a mail-order copy, right away.

Encouraged, I scrolled down to see if there was an audio or eBook edition. Not seeing, one I went up to the top of the screen and clicked on eBook Help. There was lots of helpful information about eBooks in general there, but no convenient link for a search.

I tried Bartleby next, but no luck there. There was considerable information on getting rid of stomach fat, but that was off the topic. Since the title is still under copyright I skipped 20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books. I thriftily tried the Public Library next, but there was no electronic version at the eBranch. I tried ManyBooks.net from the list Best Places to Get Free Books - The Ultimate Guide. Browsing titles I did find Behind the Scenes or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House, a memoir by Elizabeth Keckley, published in 1868. An appropriate choice for Black History Month, but once again off the topic of my current search. I next searched the long tail of Amazon, beyond the home page ad for the new Kindle 2, I entered the title, and got the same trade paper edition displayed by Brazos (although at a discounted price) and a link to the Audio Download from their “trusted partner,” Audible.com, once again, at a discounted price.

I believe that this completely answers the question.

iHCPL Books, Readers and Beyond: #53 Finding Books Online Exercise 1

Find and report on your blog the three booksellers that are closest to your branch or facility. Do they have an online presence? If they do, please describe it in twenty-five words or less on your blog.

I first went to my LibraryThing local feature and entered the ZIP code for the Administrative Offices. Here's the listing I got:
Plenty of libraries and bookstore in the neighborhood, but the only one with a picture on the LibraryThing site was the West University Branch of the Harris County Public Library. On the Upcoming events column only Murder By The Book and the Brazos Bookstore listed their events.
I looked for a websites for the three closest stores using Google. Half Price Books had a generic site for the chain with a mashup Google map and a Search Books feature that's a click through to Amazon.

Half Price Books- Rice Village 2537 University Blvd. (listed variously as 2.1 and 2.2 miles from 77054), 2537 University Blvd., Houston, TX 77005

Brazos Bookstore (2.9 miles), 2421 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005 had a site with recommendations by their staff and by their customers. Each customer had a short biographical profile along with a link to the recommended title, an excellent 2.0 marketing technique. There was also a search feature for particular titles, however, it did not appear to interface with the stock at the local store.

It was much the same for the Murder By The Book (2.9 miles), 2342 Bissonnet St., Houston, TX 77005. Customer recommendations (but not last names) were given prominent placement on the site.

iHCPL Books, Readers and Beyond: #52 What to Read Exercise 4

A customer has read Alanna: the First Adventure by Tamora Pierce. She would like to read the other books in the series in order. Using one of the above resources, post the series title, the order of the books in the series, and the resource you used.

For this one I first went to Mid-Continent Public Library's juvenile series search and entered Alanna as a title search, and found it right away.


So, the series title is Song of the Lioness and clicking the hyperlink on the series title gave me the whole series and sequence:

iHCPL Books, Readers and Beyond: #52 What to Read Exercise 3

A customer tells you that he's read every book written by Dean Koontz and asks you to find an author who writes similar books. Using two of the sites listed above, find three new authors to recommend to your customer. Post the sites you used and the results in your blog.

From NoveList Plus Author Read-alikes I went to Joyce Saricks’s bibliographic essay on Dean R. Koontz. Among the authors she lists as read-alikes are:

Dan Simmons
John Saul
Charles Grant




I went to Library Booklists and Bibliographies and used its search feature. I entered the search term , "Dean Koontz," which directed me to a list of read-alikes including the Wake County Public Libraries, which had one entitled If You Like Dean Koontz, which listed these authors:

Greg Bear
Stephen King
Peter Straub

A bonus of the Wake County List was that it included annotations of specific titles by the authors.

iHCPL Books, Readers and Beyond: #52 What to Read Exercise 2

Using one of the resources listed above find two books suitable for a fourth grade girl interested in animals and another two books for her thirteen year old brother who is interested in ghost stories. Post which resource you used and the books you located.

I started with NoveList Plus, and drilled down from:
Browse to
Older Kids (9-12) to
Recommended Reads to
Animal Stories to
Horses

To come up with the first title: The black stallion / Walter Farley, Lexile: 680, Popularity: 4 Stars

Then I decided to use Morton Grove Public Library’s Kids’ Webrary® to choose: Actual size / Steve Jenkins.

I went to the book finder using first the first the subject “Animals – Fact” and then limiting that to grade “3”

The result popped up on the bottom of the screen.

I clicked on “Full Details” to get:

I used the same book finder using the Subject “Ghosts and Horror” to and grade “8” to select Dark Thirty by Patricia C. McKissack. It came with a “video review” of an animated dragon reading the annotation, “A collection of ghost stories with African American themes, designed to be told during the Dark Thirty--the half hour before sunset--when ghosts seem all too believable.” The dragon, which moved only its mouth, was interesting, but not very spooky for a thirteen-year-old.

From the same list I also picked:

The 13th floor: a ghost story / by Sid Fleischman

So my final lists are:

Fourth-grade girl
The black stallion / Walter Farley
Actual size / Steve Jenkins

Thirteen-year-old brother
Dark Thirty / Patricia McKissack
The 13th floor: a ghost story / Sid Fleischman

iHCPL Books, Readers and Beyond: #52 What to Read Exercise 1

How do you find a read-alike? Pick a title by one of your favorite authors. Search Novelist Plus to find a read-alike. Now perform the same search using two of the other sites listed above. Were the results the same? Compare the two searches and the results in your blog post.

I decided to find a read-alike for Margaret Drabble’s 1996 novel The witch of Exmoor. I went to the NoveList Plus database and started with a Browse search under · Adults · Author Read-alikes, then to the Authors C-D category. Alas, Drabble was not one of the profiled authors. So I went back to the home page Search function and entered the book title. This took me to a review of the book.

The reviews from Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus gave good summaries of the novel and the link to the First Chapter gave a good sample of the author’s style. But, obviously, I would need to go to another source for read-alikes.

I next tried What Should I Read Next? I entered author and title in the search boxes, and got a somewhat curious result. The database picked up the author’s first husband (they were divorced in 1975) as a co-author.

Nevertheless, I clicked ahead. The result was a very curious list.

Last on the list was the author’s own novel, The radiant way, an obvious read-alike, but one that did not fulfill the requirements of the exercise, and not one that a person would need to consult a database to find. At the top of the list was a most interesting recommendation. The Pine Barrens by John McPhee, a non-fiction profile of the Pine Barrens wilderness area in New Jersey first published in 1968. Did the database connect term: Sparsely Populated Wilderness Area (United State : coastal area : New Jersey) = Sparsely Populated Wilderness Area (United Kingdom : coastal area : Exmoor)? I don’t think so. I believe that they are associated on the list because, as I was working on this exercise, I also used The Pine Barrens as a non-fiction text to see how the various sources would work on a non-fiction title. And I expect that a few other fans of Ms. Drabble had also done searches for titles like Celt And Saxon and How to Read a Church: A Guide to Symbols and Images in Churches and Cathedrals coincidentally with their search for a read like The witch of Exmoor. It’s the downside of crowd-sourcing. When your crowd is very small peculiar tastes lead to peculiar results.The list was interesting, but not one I would feel good about handing over to a customer.

I next tried a site from The Librarian in Black’s list, Gnooks because it followed by the intriguing annotation, “My students either love this or hate it.” I went to the Map of literature and entered “Margaret Drabble.” The result was a very twitchy graphic. I say twitchy, because the names kept twitching around like a swarm of nervous insects. The static screen capture below does not do it justice.

Margaret Drabble is center screen. Penelope Lively and Kate Atkinson are closest to her on the screen. Kate Atkinson looks very promising. A quick peek at some sample pages from Behind the scenes at the museum on Amazon confirms that she could indeed be a Drabble read-alike, with her rapid fire details of domestic life from an unorthodox metafictional point of view, in this case a freshly formed zygote within her mother's womb.

Penelope Lively also appears to be a good fit. Once again the subject headings in our catalog confirm that her method for her adult titles is psychological fiction and her settings domestic. Once again the first six pages of The Photograph courtesy of Mr. Bezos’s online reading emporium and Kindle store confirms a similar style.

I was also interested to see Richard Price on the screen, since I’m currently listening to an audio version of Lush Life, and my family is a big fan of the television series, “The Wire.” Price is a writer for the series. "The Wire" is a gritty cops and robbers, actually, cops and drug dealers drama set in Baltimore. Price has a very rich and detailed prose style and a sense of how a person’s social class and economic circumstances greatly affect his or her life. These could also characterize Drabble’s work, but his American urban police procedurals are not read-alikes for her English domestic fiction.

Interestingly, Margaret Drabble’s sister A.S. Byatt who appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the screen when I first entered Drabble’s name had twitched off the display when I clicked back returned from investigating Price.

It’s too soon to count myself as one of Gnooks lovers, but, as of this posting, I am infatuated.

The war that made America

The war that made America: a short history of the French and Indian War / Fred Anderson ; illustrations chosen and captioned by R. Scott Stephenson.— New York : Penguin, 2006.
xxv, 293 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 22 cm.
Bibliographic note: p. [267] – 275
Includes index.
ISBN: 0143038044

1. United States – History – French and Indian War, 1755-1763.

973.26

In the early1750s three nations struggled for control of a very strategic piece of North American real estate: the Ohio County. They had very different plans for it. For England’s colonies spread along on the eastern coast of the continent it was land to be settled and farmed. For France it was a link between its trading outposts on the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Valleys, a vital transportation and commercial link with its Native American trading partners. For the Iroquois Confederacy it was land to fall back on and protect their culture from the encroachments of the Europeans. Yet at the same time, trade was also important because it provided metal tools and weapons. European trading partners were far more welcome than European farmers.

Distrustful of the incursions and expeditions of Virginian land companies and Pennsylvanian traders, the governor-general of Canada, the marquis Duquesne, ordered a series of forts built between Lake Erie and the Forks of the Ohio River, a place now occupied by the city of Pittsburgh. The Virginia colonial government was incensed by the action, alerted London, and was given the authority, along with other colonial governments, to act against these encroachments. So an expedition led by a young but ambitious Virginia major, George Washington, was sent to the Forks of the Ohio to remove the French by force.

The results were disastrous for the English, both militarily and diplomatically. It was the first blood spilled in what would become The Seven Years War, a war that stretched from North America to the east across an ocean to Europe, Africa, India and the Philippines. English historian and Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to it as “the first world war.” The outcome in North America led first to English victory, and then, a decade later, to the revolt of its original colonies. A major theme of Anderson’s book is to show how the political and financial cost of the war with the French and Indians sowed the seeds of the war of revolution. This is a well written, well illustrated, and informative history.