I visited more sites than I can keep sorted out, most of them truly not useful for me in either a personal or an institutional sense. In some instances I have other known and trusted sources for the same information. Other sites take more time to navigate than the information they yield is worth to me (or any patron I can imagine.)
Some sites were fun to visit. I particularly liked the Flickr sets of "Vintage" and "Old" Children's book imagery.I also liked BookBrowse very much; it incorporated so many cool features I felt like a kid in the candy store. Reviews! Prepub info! Author interviews! Even a used book search! News items, demographic tidbits, et cetera! Even super, pertinent Links! Attached to a hefty (for me) fee! So no, I can only visit, not join. Phooey. The only other tempting service I investigated was ReadingTrails. I took several amusing excursions along other peoples' ideological highways and hitchhiked a few folks'nostalgia trips via this site. There was a trail of "books I plan to read to my children someday" that featured Edith Nesbit's entire output--I wanted to cheer . Another trail was a series of cookbooks based on childrens' authors--really fun. A few were heavy-duty academic lists generated by professors for their classes. One optomistic contributor even posted a trail titled something like "Every book I Ever Read in My Whole Life"! Fortunately, he was quite young.
As far as reviews, criticism, swaps, and all the other stuff...good to know about them, but not anything I want to do.I have other sources and limited time to putz and/or schmooze. I'd rather be reading!
As for library uses--online book communities are great for either age-or genre-related fans;I can see a very lively use for some of these communities among our patrons.For those who prefer to get their info online, the review sites would work either in-house or for patrons at home.
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