Thing #12

Books, books, and more books. I downloaded iStoryBooks, YALSA Teen Book Finder, and AudioBooks. I was especially interested in iStoryBooks. My granddaughter Kiera enjoys having me read eBooks to her on my Mac. Personally, I'd much rather read to her from a regular book, but an ebook mixes it up now and again. She owns an iPod and can also probably download this app to her device and use the app herself. I was less than thrilled with the quality of the content of this app, however. The candy colored illustrations and attention-seeking font are too cartoony for my taste. There's a cheapness to the quality of the stories. I think this app could be a useful temporary babysitter for a child on a long drive or waiting in the doctor's office if there are no books around.

I enjoyed looking though the YALSA Teen Book Finder. I work at Teen Central at the downtown Minneapolis Library and get a fair number of reader's advisory questions from parents and teens. I would definitely recommend this app to them. Since it's from the ALA, it has credibility and authority. The app offers several ways to search titles and you can quickly find a local public library that carries a title in its collection. My only complaint is that I think a more thorough description of each title is warranted. It would give readers a better idea of what each book is about.

I had previously downloaded AudioBooks to my iPhone, but had deleted it due to lack of use. I was happy to reevaluate it for this project. I spent some time scrolling through the collection, noting the variety of titles. AudioBooks can be searched in several ways--genre, recently added, professional books, popular books, free books, plus books (which are purchased), authors, durations, and even narrators, which was a surprising and welcome search function. For avid audiobook listeners, who often have favorite narrators, this category for search is an unexpected bonus.