Book Club Experience

I chose an online book club for this assignment, as my work schedule did not line up with any book club meetings locally. I feel like there probably would have been much more actual discussion regarding specific books if I were able to attend a live discussion, but an online book club is very intriguing. This book club is hosted by a local library and states that it is an online book club via a Facebook Group for patrons to discuss books, just as if they were to have meetings. While I would have liked to attend a live book club discussion if my schedule would have allowed, I feel the online environment could allow for interesting discussion and I was glad to have the opportunity to “observe” one for this assignment.

The Group is viewable to the public and a little over 140 members. There was a library staff member that was there to moderate with the position of ‘admin’ and would post questions regarding the book or genre the group was reading at the time. The leader did not participate in answering questions, but they would occasionally comment on another member’s response to give feedback or spur conversation. Looking back at discussion history I can see that there has been multiple library staff under the ‘admin’ position. I’m not sure if this just has just transferred to different staff member’s responsibility or if being the administrator of the online book club is a rotating responsibility.

The questions brought up in the group discussion seem to vary. Sometimes it appeared to be just whether or not everyone is enjoying the book, sometimes it is an open-ended question regarding the book or a genre. Every month there appears to be polls and group member can vote on what book they would like to read next. There were other posts that I noticed fairly frequently by the admin linking to articles, pinterest posts, etc that were not necessarily directly relevant to the book they were reading or the book club, but seemed like they might be interesting to general “book lovers”. I feel like these kinds of posts could go two ways. 

Unfortunately, I think some members might see it as a nuisance or ‘spam’ getting in the way of their other social media, but some might like it. For members that do enjoy these types of posts I think it is an added bonus and good use of the online platform for the book club. For posts like that to go over well I think the admin would need to get an idea of how active the members of the club want to be, and how much they would or would not appreciate the posts.
Unfortunately, it appears that most members do not actively participate. Scrolling pretty far into past postings I saw maybe 20 different members posting and discussing topics. I did notice that there were maybe four members that would reply first and often on pretty much every post. Since there was not a whole lot of activity otherwise I wouldn’t necessarily say that these members where stealing the spotlight.

Even though in the information about the book club on the library’s website and in the ‘About’ section of the group page it said it was an online only book club, I noticed a post about once a month reminding people of an in-person book club meeting for the group. This was slightly disappointing because I really thought the idea of an active online-only book club was kind of awesome. The online element allows for asynchronous communication, which allows for people to participate who live on all types of schedules. Also, I thought people may be more likely to participate due to the convenience. The library is already utilizing the popular social media website Facebook, and no one has to go out to be able to be a part of the group. So, while it appears that this online book club isn’t exclusively online only, I feel that the lack of activity from so many members may be due to the fact that they do have in person book discussions.

Something that I found interesting was how they chose the books for their discussions. As mentioned above, they often used a built in polling system through their Facebook group, picking between 4 or 5 options. The books appeared to be familiar, mostly bestseller fiction books. The interesting part though, was that on some months I noticed that they all didn’t read the same book. Some months they were to read any book from a particular genre, or pick books that all had a similar theme. For examples, one of the themes was books related to fairy tales. I had never heard of this before. I thought the whole point of a book club was for everyone to read the same book together. But, the more that I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. The occasional discussion where people read different books with similar themes has the opportunity to create some awesome comparisons and debate surrounding the different books. This would also get around the possible problem of the library not having enough copies of a book for each member to be able to gain access to the book for that month.