YALSA’s Teen Book Finder Reviews

Great lists, but "find it" feature lacking

Ohellodello

These are great lists and it's awesome to have them so readily available. The only problem - and perhaps someone can enlighten me on this point - is that the "find it" feature, which as far as I know is powered by oclc's worldcat search api, doesn't bring up local, relevant results (essentially the results you would get if you used worldcat's actual site). A previous reviewer suggested that only academic libraries were included in results, but I'm not sure that's the problem. Utilizing the find it feature for HP & the deathly hallows, for example, tells me that the nearest copy (I'm in Wisconsin) is at an elementary school outside Philadelphia. Hmm. Has anyone else experienced this problem? Regardless, I think it's a great readers advisory/collection development tool, but marketing it to teens with the promise of a feature that isn't actually functional seems problematic. 4 for great potential and because I'm sure yalsa can iron out the wrinkles.

Good idea, clunky implementation

teacherskip

So, I love the YALSA lists online. They are top-notch and a great place to go to find titles for my 9th grade classroom library. Actually, they're the best place I've found. And all the books are in this app, I suppose, but... a lot of buts. A few of the screens are missing "back" buttons, so once you get there you're kind of trapped and have to start over instead of just going back and searching for more "sci fi" titles or whatever. I wish the reviews or synopses were a bit more substantial—there's all this app infrastructure but then not all that much that actually tells you about the actual titles once you find them. And the searching—yikes! Authors names are actually NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER. First, they seem like they're sorted by first name, but then you look closely and realize all the first names are L's, for example, but after that the names jump all around. Bizarre. The first time I tried searching by author, I was looking for other books by the same author of a book I'd just found through the app. When I finally found her name (not in alphabetical order), it said "NO TITLES LISTED." And I had just looked at a book by her in the app! (Lish McBride/"Hold Me Closer, Necromancer" if any folks who work on the app are reading). So as a result, I fear this may not be a reliable way to locate books for kids as I'd hoped. If this worked the way it should, it'd be awesome!

Disappointing

Carmen Lawless

The most useful aspect of this app is the book lists, which seems to have been the intention. However because the book database is limited to the books on the list, it's not very functional for finding a new book to read. The "locate book" option only shows results for southern Indiana--a place I've never been--and there nowhere I can find to change that. Ultimately I don't know how to use this app in a way that a quick google search doesn't offer.

Good

asiangirl

Works well for when I'm looking for a new book to read. The app is simple, but I like that.

Crap!

OoooooooreviewoooooOobv

This app is junk. Plain and simple. NONE of the books I want are on there! They're not too well known books but so what!?!?! This app should have them in its database! This app doesn't even recognize two amazing books, one a classic entertainment, Ragweed and the other a great series, the original Percy Jackson series and the dumb thing doesn't even have THAT!!!???!!!!

Alphabetical order please

Deafball

Why is a site associated with The American Library Association listing its authors by their FIRST names? Alphabetical order of people is by last name, first.

So

Fm maladies

This game will not do anything

About the App

AmerieGR

It would be great if you could put more hot picks in display and new books in display. It would be great if once that you locate the library it could give you a link to place a hold or the phone number to call the library directly and place a hold. I tried to call to the phone that you provide and even though there's a path to call to Reston Regional Library, the path is long and a teenager wouldn't invest this effort. I insist it would be such a great service just to link the library's location with the phone number. There's a lot of Library systems around the country but, why not? Thank you from an avid reader from Fairfax County.

Updated one year ago

Dire raven

Since all the other reviews are older than one year I thought I would try this app out and review it. The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars was I was surprised at how many books were missing from popular authors. Brandon Sanderson only had two books listed when his Mistborn and other series are very popular for instance.

Rip off

Banjo n Skippy

This is not what I thought it would have been I thought I would have been able to read books but I cannot this just really shows ware you can buy some

YALSA’s Teen Book Finder Reviews – Page 2