Buffy Hamilton at the Unquiet Librarian writes about Book Tasting in the Library. This great article discusses an immersive activity that she organizes at her library which encourages students to select five books on a particular topic and evaluate them.

“Susan and I have worked together in past years to develop a collection of book sets (fiction and nonfiction) on issues related to countries and/or regions in Africa including the HIV epidemic, ethnic wars and genocide, famine, environmental issues, women’s rights, apartheid, and children soldiers. We’ve expanded the offerings for this fall to include other contemporary titles related to these issues in other regions of the world as well as immigrant rights, poverty, human trafficking, and privacy issues in a post 9/11 world. We placed the books on carts that were ready for students when they arrived in the library today…”

Audrey Watters writes an interesting piece for MindShift about How Social Networks Might Change the Way We Read Books.

“…critics will point out that the social aspect create distractions from reading. But we can also argue that the social element can add depth to the understanding of what’s being read, just as book clubs do. Peers can help define words and concepts that are sometimes hard to grasp when reading alone.”

1. Animoto
2. Stupeflix
3. Shwup
4. Flixtime
5. Masher

“The number of colleges using electronic textbooks available to students is on the rise. But what about the rest of the books on campus—the millions of volumes stored in the library? It turns out the digital text revolution is beginning to turn college libraries into places that no longer stock physical books.

As Time reports, the engineering libraries at Kansas State University, Stanford and the University of Texas are almost completely book-free. And now at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the new Library Learning Terrace, a 3,000 square foot residence hall-based space that opened in June, there are no books at all.”

1. Goodreads
2. Visual Bookshelf
3. weRead
4. aNobii Books App
5. I’m Reading

I am thrilled and honored to share that “The Tech Set” book series has been named the winner of the ALA’s 2011 Greenwood Publishing Group Award for the Best Book in Library Literature!!! Congrats to all the incredibly talented authors and the wonderful folks at Neal-Schuman. This was an amazing project to be a part of!!!

If you’re researching which e-book reader is right for you, you’ll want to check out Justin The Librarian VS e-Book Readers. Justin Hoenke rates and reviews four popular e-book devices detailing which features he enjoyed and which he disliked as well as providing further comments.

via LibrarianinBlack

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers reviews BlogBooker, an application which will Turn Your Blog to a PDF Book. This brief posts provides a feature summary of the application and short screenshot tutorial for how to export your Blogger or WordPress blogs as XML files for use with BlogBooker.

The folks at Technology to Software have put together a helpful list of 25+ Useful Free E-books Every Blogger Should Read. If you’re a blogger, you’ll want to check out the entries here.