Audio Book Reviews

byrd books

Way, way back in May of 2005 I had the following idea-

Audio book reviews-
This is something Steve Dembo of Teach42 and I discussed. I’d like to see short podcast book reviews attached to the school library database and in RSS feeds. How cool would it be to look up a book and be able to listen to the reviews of other students. Having a RSS feed for various types of literature would also be good. This would seem to encourage both more reading by listeners and more reading by those wanting to make podcast reviews.

That idea is (at least partially) coming to fruition now. Mainly because our librarians and another teacher I work with frequently came up with it on their own and got me motivated. It’s odd how circular somethings are.

We’ve started a Byrd Books blog with audio, video or text reviews of book submitted by students. The posts and thus the books are also rateable by other readers through a neat ajaxy star system.

I’m going to work on creating dynamic pages and feeds based on book type and reviewer so you can subscribe to just the book type you like or to the reviewer of your choice. I also need to install a tagging plugin. I’ve been really happy with the flash player plugin. It’s just slick looking.

I’m working on getting it integrated with our library database (at the very least linking directly to the book’s page in our online catalog- a big hassle so far) but to be honest I don’t see that that happening anytime too soon.

Of course it won’t matter if no one busy in but I have high hopes (as usual). I really see this site as having the potential to become part of the community with parents and teachers submitting quick reviews as well as students.