Thing 20 - Books 2.0

This was a long one! I started off reading the articles at the beginning. I had never heard of Kindle before so I was a little confused with the first one. So I Wikipedia-ed it and figured it out. I can't believe that I had never heard anything about Kindle before; it's kinda surprising. It would be nice to have if you hate carrying around lunky books, perfect for traveling. It's very interesting that libraries are technically allowed to check out Kindle books free of charge. I was very surprised at that. I'm sure Kindle will add a library fee once it starts catching on.

I really enjoyed the article Literacy Debate: Online R U Really Reading? I for one think that reading online is still reading. It's true that traditional grammar is often overlooked, and abbreviations and shortcuts are the way to go, but reading is much more than just helping grasp the grammatical concepts of the English language. I feel like this is the natural progression of things. We no longer speak or write like they did in Shakespeare's time, so why should we be so worried that our written language is evolving now? As for the tests that measure a student's reading comprehension and grammar skills, I think they are stupid. Standarized tests have always been crap. (On a side note, my boyfriend is in grad school for criminology and is currently doing research on university students' perceptions of delinquency and self control. In order to measure their self control, one of the questions on his survey asked if they thought getting good grades was very important. He asked me that same question, and I said they were very important. The thing is that I think the way we are graded is absolutely ridiculous, but I realize that in this society, those grades are important. So instead of thinking its very important to get good grades just because, I think its important in order to get ahead in this society. More opportunities are open to you if you are perceived as "smart" even though the actual tests and grading don't really accurately measure a person's intelligence. Sorry for the tangent...) Internet reading opens up whole other doors for people of all ages. You are able to be creative and add to the content. You have interaction among other internet users from all over the globe. Don't get me wrong, I love reading books, but for those that have trouble sitting down and reading, the internet can help provide some of the same things that books do.

I am just going to list the websites I went to in the Learn section and then touch on the ones I really enjoyed. It went to: BooksInMyPhone, ReadingTrails, BookLamp, BookStumpers, Overbooked, BookGlutton, Booksprouts, Librivox, BookBrowse, Facebook app Visual Bookshelf, SwapTree, and BookCrossing. Most of them were pretty good, but there were only a few I would go back to. ReadingTrails was neat. It's a nice place to go if you don't know what book to read next. BookStumpers was awesome! I read this book in middle school, and for the life of me I can't remember the title or the author. So I think I'm going to add it onto that site and see if anyone else knows it. Booksprouts would be great for a book club. I'm sure we could use it in our library. We could start one and have a link to it from our website. Librivox is pretty cool. I'm not much of an audiobook listener, but I know people who are and they would love it. I really want to look more at BookBrowse. It looked like it would be a great place to find really good books. If I had known about the Visual Bookshelf app for Facebook, I would have gotten it a long time ago. It's a perfect, condensed list of books that I'm reading, want to read, and have read. And last but not least BookCrossing was by far the neatest. It reminds me of the Where's George site for dollar bills, but much cooler. If I can part with one of my books, I'm going to release it into the wild!