It’s Wednesday! We have some pretty great links today, but we still hope your work week is going well and not in desperate need of a pick-me-up. If it is, we’re happy to help with that too!
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Penguin Random House has a pretty quick quiz on “Which Romance Book Are You?” and it might just recommend a new to you author. I took it and the book they recommended to me was already on my TBR pile, so I’m willing to say it’s pretty accurate!
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In the subject line of this post, I did mention puppies and I’d never lie about puppies. If you haven’t seen it yet, this year’s Puppy Bowl lineup has been announced and they’re featuring three special needs pups.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Puppy Bowl, it’s essentially a parody of the Super Bowl, but with adorable puppies of all sizes. They also have a kitten halftime show!
There’s an interview with a Puppy Bowl cameraman that I read and loved. All of the puppies are adoptable and the cameraman said that must of the dogs are spoken for by the end of shooting.
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Daliyah Marie Arana is a 4-year old girl who got to be “librarian for a day” at the Library of Congress. How awesome is that:
“I like to check out books every day,” Daliyah told the Gainesville Times. “And I want to teach other kids to read at an early age, too.”
While Daliyah hasn’t yet had her reading level tested, she is able to read her 10 and 12-year-old siblings’ books. On YouTube, she can be seen reading the college-level text “The Pleasure of Books” by William L Phelps and pronouncing words like “punctiliousness.”
She’s so adorable and smart. If you ever need to put a smile on your face, I recommend watching one of her YouTube videos.
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For all Google Chrome users, there’s a new extension that checks whether an Amazon book is available at your library:
Any true book-lover will have a special place in their heart for libraries — but when was the last time you actually went to one? It’s just so much easier to order books online — until now. This new extension finds books at your local library while you shop, reminding you exactly how convenient libraries really are.
I haven’t personally given it a try, but for those looking to cut back on book buying, I think it’s a great way to keep your budget in check!
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Laptop Cord Winders
I have one of these from Above the Fray, and it's great for keeping my MacBook cord contained and safe from being pulled or frayed. There are earbud winders, too! -SW
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Lastly, ever wanted a quick place to see what books have been selling like hotcakes on the site so you don’t miss out? Or how about a one-stop shop for books that we’d recommend? Well, we’ve created an Amazon store for just that purpose!
Our SBTB Recommends store features books that have earned a B grade or higher on the site (going back about two months). We also have a Bestsellers tab, where we list books that have sold 50 or more copies through the site in the past two weeks. It’s updated daily as we check sales and it gets refreshed completely every two weeks.
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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Well, the Randy Penguin quiz fails as a personality test! I took it twice and got “You’re comfortable in the spotlight” and “ready for adventure.”
I would rather drink the literal poison I picked as a beverage.
I blame the inadequate music selection for these results.
Just a quick plug for the library Chrome extension– I’ve already found it to be super helpful when deciding whether or not to buy a book on Amazon. I like that it tells me the availability/status of both ebooks & print copies at my library, especially as I have access to 3 different library collections. Saves a lot of time & $$ already!
I second the library extension, it is fantastic. Its been around awhile so the bugs have mostly been worked out.
Per the quiz:
Oh yeah, let’s see- I’m happiest in a cozy cabin, dance to either pop or R&B, like funny charming men, my personal poison is tea, and I like to read either in my room or a hammock… and this makes me daring, unconventional & ready for adventure? What? Really? I’ve always considered myself the antithesis of those. Were I any more conventional I’d literally be square.
And my partner should be a risk-taker and up for any challenges. Where did funny and charming go? Omg, they got that so wrong. But I did get a few chuckles out of it.
I don’t know about that quiz. Somehow it decided that I was “Fifty shades darker.” I was expecting something by Jenny Crusie.
That quiz thought I was competitive and wanted a contemporary sports romance, which could not be a worse guess.
So with the SBTB recommends, just out of curiosity, are the books always going to stay 2 months current, or will you be adding highlights from the archives as time goes on or how does it work? I love the idea!
I saw a a picture of Daliyah at the Library of Congress and she looked just adorable! My husband heard her read on an NPR story and said Daliyah read well and with emotion.
We’re big Puppy Bowl fans here. We make popcorn and watch with our pups. Our household had been on NFL/Super Bowl embargo since Michael Vick.
LMAO….I am Fifty Shades Darker per quiz. Too funny, I picked NYC/London, Whiskey, Library, R&B. I can’t wait to make my husband take this stupid quiz, I’m laughing so hard I spelled quiz wrong three times before I got it right.
I thought that it would be interesting to take the quiz (as a male and not really a romance novel reader), and it gave me “sports romance” (specifically ROOKIE MOVE by Sarina Bowen) — which is WAY off for me. I have no interest in sports romance, and I prefer erotica; so I’d have been happier if I had gotten the FIFTY SHADES books, much as I hated the first one and didn’t read the rest. And why wasn’t soda a possibility in the beverages? Wild Cherry Pepsi is awesome!
I took the quiz and got some sort of action-y, SEAL type romance. I then gave the questions to my spouse and he got a sweet, cozy-type contemporary. I’m wondering what that says about us as a couple.
@kkw: Since the site is over a decade old, that’s a lot of books to add! For now, we’ll probably start with going back to the beginning of 2014 and see how many we’ve got!
Question on the store: Does purchasing via your store “wipe out” the Amazon Smile contributions that I make to my animal charity(ies) of choice? I’m thinking I probably have to chose one or the other.
Reading between the lines, Penguin Random House has a massive overstock of Fifty Shades Darker they need to unload. They tried it on me too.
Tried the quiz several timess and got offered a)what appears to be a contemporary military romance b)Fifty Shades Darker c)something by Christine Feehan(sp?) (a)not my thing b)yeah, no c)DNFed both books I’ve tried by her)
I didn’t really pay attention to the descriptors they gave me, other than noting they didn’t fit my selection of “most comfortable in the pages of a fantasy novel” in the slightest.
I know it’s not big right now, but why do so many places refuse to admit rock music still has fans? (I’ll ignore the whole “dance” issue with that question.)
@Jill-Marie: The store links unfortunately can’t be recoded to include smile.amazon, but there are two options to work around that problem.
First, the links to Amazon on the site are most if not all affiliate-coded, including the ones on the top left in the “Welcome” box. Moreover, they should all be lead smile.amazon.com. So if you don’t use the embedded store but do want to use the affiliate links, all but the store links should lead you to smile.amazon.
Alternatively, if you pull up an Amazon link that doesn’t connect you to your Smile account, you can highlight the “www” part at the very front of the link, erase it, and type “smile” instead. So it would change from http://www.amazon.com to smile.amazon.com, and your purchases would yield a donation to your selected charities.
I’m sorry there isn’t a more automated solution!
@ lostshadows
why do so many places refuse to admit rock music still has fans?
I think they’re refusing to admit that there exist humans over the age of 35.
I think the quiz takes the opposite of what you are – most comfortable reading fantasy and sipping cab in my quiet room with a funny and charming man due to pick me up later does not make me intense, brave, and bold. I mean, I know I am brave because I know what I have survived to get where I am. But that’s brave in an I Will Survive way, not brave, bold, and intense. And, Christine Feehan is not an author I’ve been able to get into.
I’ve been using Library Extension for a while, so I was surprised when it started getting buzz on book blogs just in the last few weeks. In addition to Amazon, the extension also works on Goodreads. That is really helpful for me because I have a shelf on Goodreads named “not at my library”, so I can read the description of the book and add it to the appropriate shelf without opening another tab to do a search at my local library.