A panel with five people… moderator – from earlyword.com
publishers have been talking about libraries as discovery venues
Why? Brick & mortar stores are disappearing, so libraries are a great place to actually still touch stuff.
Modern public library is designed to display books, library websites are just starting to display books
Michael Colford – their catalog
- they use Bibliocommons
- Bibliocommons sites sorta share audiences – if you put up a book trailer, it’s shared across all sites
- interesting comments about books as our brand. He thinks we should embrace that instead of distance ourselves from it
- discovery – make the book easy to find, make similar books easy to get as a second option, make a buy it now button easy to find too. Have all of this be a complete library experience, rather than sending someone off to an outside store.
- Reader’s Advisory – reviews, book trailers, aggregation of book blogs – pull all of those together
- hook events into the catalog – mentions of, other libraries, live stream these from the catalog, etc
- de-emphasize the best sellers. We build the reader, and are market-makers for books and authors. Connect people with other books besides the best sellers
Sari Feldman, Cuyahoga County Public Library
- 40% of their materials budget is for print books, 60% for other things
- They focus more on best sellers than Boston Public does
- They consulted with Nancy Pearl to help them re-work their readers advisory focus
- She said there are no bookstores in Cuyahoga County (then she said there are two independent bookstores). They are The Place for books
- They use their Facebook Page heavily. Readers advisory – tell us three books you love, we’ll tell you three more you will love. Love this idea!
- People are looking for recommendations on Facebook – people come there to chat about it, and other people answer (the librarians do too).
- They want their website and catalog to have that energy too
Lynn Wheeler, Director, Carroll County Public Library
- They chose a book – The Dressmaker – bought a bunch of them and displayed it in all of their branches, promoted it in all branches, held an author talk, did programs around the event, etc. Made the book a local best seller.
- you can do partnerships – example was a partnership with schools
- battle of the books – bought a bunch of books, then had kids vote for books. Gave a set of the books to the schools who were competing. Held a trivia type event in the schools. Gave a huge trophy to the winners.
Virginia Stanley, Director, Library Marketing, HarperCollins
- library marketing
- do Skype sessions with the authors