August 19, 2010

A Quick Look at Novelist: The "Pandora" of Reading


Pandora is a service that many people use to listen to new music based on their tastes. You enter in a particular artist, and Pandora will play a constant stream of music based on the genre, sound, and user recommendations for the artist entered.

This is almost exactly how Novelist works, except instead of music, it is geared toward books. A user enters in information about a genre, author, subject, or year into the Novelist search box, and it will find books that Novelist thinks are related to your description. In addition, you can find similar novels to popular titles, such as the Best-Sellers, listed directly beneath the titles when you first access the Novelist homepage.

In its most basic form, Novelist is a book recommendation eResource. Let's say you have just finished the latest Lee Child novel and you wanted to find authors with a similar writing style. You could perform a search for "Lee Child" under the Author search, and you'll be taken to a page that not only lists every book he has written, but Novelist will also list similar genres that you can select to find additional titles and authors with a similar writing style. Novelist also features reviews, plot lines, and the option to create an account to keep track of books you are interested in, and have read.

Novelist provides you with some extensive tutorials to get the most out of this excellent eResource. You can find these tools here. Finally, here is a quick PowerPoint, that I found helpful for discovering the great features of Novelist.

The Troy Public Library currently subscribes to 3 different Novelist products. The main product, Novelist, features fiction titles. Novelist Plus features fiction titles and also readable non-fiction. Novelist K-8 Plus features fiction and nonfiction titles for younger readers.

To access any Novelist product, you will need a Troy Public Library card. Go to our website and click eResources on the left under Library Links. Click on Literature and Reading, then Novelist, Novelist Plus, or Novelist K-8 Plus.Try it out and let us know what you think.

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