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Book Trailers & Libraries

A week ago I had the pleasure to assist with the School Library Journal Leadership Summit event where the Trailees were awarded. Trailees are the new SLJ Awards for Book Trailers.

SLJ Leadership Summit 2010: Trailee Award Winners Unveiled
by SLJ Staff October 22, 2010

You can view all 24 nominees here.

Book trailers operate much like movie trailers. They promote the book in an interesting way and serve as a tease as well as a recommendation. Some trailers are produced by the publisher and some by the author. There is a growing corpus of book trailers being produced by students, librarians, teachers and general readers. I am enthralled by the creativity that can be shown in the amount of time that’s about the same as a TV commercial or an entertainment show segment. At the Trailees we only saw video trailers, but there are audio trailers too, using podcasts or just recording on a video with a book cover shot.

With the huge amount of inexpensive or free technology out there on phones, Flip cameras and more, the means to create a book trailer is within nearly everyone’s reach. Posting it to YouTube. TeacherTube, or Vimeo is a snap.

As of today, when I search Google, I get more than 34 million hits on the search !

Here are a few selected links:

Trailer (book)From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Book Trailers (from Squidoo)

Michael Hyatt has a good post on this trend at his blog:

How Publishers Are Using Book Trailers to Sell Books

How is your library using these trailers? Here are some ideas:

1. Start a book trailer blog. Just use the embed code and post 2-3 a day and you have a cute recommendation blog for books in your collection.
2. Troll publishers’ sites, author sites, author and publisher Facebook pages for trailers and link to them.
3. I am not good enough at MARC but is there a field to add a link to a trailer in the record?
4. Feature a trailer on your homepage every day/week.
5. Have teens and other users make their own trailers for books they like. (Here’s an opportunity for a contest / activity.)
6. Add more ideas in the comments.
etc.

Stephen

Trivia: Why are movie trailers called trailer when they come before the film? Apparently they used to be shown after the movie but people always left so then they trailed after the newsreels (which were killed by TV when that arrived).
Hmmmm, I wonder when trailers are going to show up in our e-books?

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Posted on: November 2, 2010, 1:59 pm Category: Uncategorized

2 Responses

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  1. We add them to the Video section in BiblioCommons.

  2. I – and my colleagues on the OPLA RA Committee – presented about trailers in libraries last month at RA in a day: http://ottawapubliclibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/opla-ra-in-day-book-trailers-have-you.html