Thing #19: Discovering Web 2.0 Tools

I explored the book sites in this exercise. I was truly fascinated by Lulu. My goodness, they have made it easy to publish one's own book! I have always wanted to create a cookbook of my mother's recipes, and with this, I might actually be able to do it! It would be so amazing to create books of poetry, artwork, or children's picture books using this tool. From what I saw, the cost didn't seem too prohibitive. One can self-publish, buy, or sell from Lulu. Self-publishing is all laid out in an easy to follow format. I could imagine that libraries could publish award-winning teen or children's poetry and/or artwork and have it on display in the library to promote services to youth. I'm sure one could think of plenty of other uses. I also discovered Biblio, which is a site devoted to helping users find rare and out of print books. It isn't too different from Alibris or other such sites, though. I guess they claim they can get items from more sources, and they boast 50 million titles. That is nice, but I wasn't impressed with their prices. All in all, it was fun to look at some of these Web 2.0 tools and sites.