Is there an easier way to make staff happy or save money than eliminating work? That is what BookLetters does, eliminate staff reliance on others, automate the tedious mundane tasks, cut red tape, and get rid of the technical mumbojumbo. BookLetters includes a tool kit that gives the staff responsible for the work, the control, tools, and flexibility to quickly and easily update your e-library services with customized features.

Branding with the Header and Side Bar

This is a cut-and-paste process that BookLetters helps to create for you. It typically takes us 10 minutes to complete. The results appear instantly and can be re-edited as often as needed until satisfactory. We create one header and one side bar that appear on all pages. You may not need to modify these settings more than once a year. If you should need a new link, you add it in one place to update every page. Compare this with adding a link to traditional web pages, where a change in a single link would have to be duplicated separately on every page. The time difference, cost difference (if paying a web designer), and effects of eliminating tedious tasks such as these are substantial.

Bestseller Lists

Lists of bestsellers by category are updated weekly by BookLetters. Just build in the original link on your site and never touch it again. Creating similar pages would take countless hours to code by hand.

Newsletters as Web Pages

BookLetters features 15 genre-specific e-newsletters prepared by the editors of BookPage. These 15 newsletters—which include such topics as Meet the Author, Book Club Choices, Mysteries, and Teen Scene—are maintained by BookLetters and easily linked to your site in a manner similar to the Bestseller Lists. You can use these newsletters “as is,” or customize them with your own announcements to promote services and events at the library.

Adding Enhanced Content

BookLetters has more than one million book detail pages with enhanced content. Rather than code in a special book feature by hand, simply link to the appropriate BookLetters book page. This is an easy way to enhance your existing book lists.

Creating E-mail Newsletters

Just one click in the toolkit of a BookLetters or custom list turns it into an e-newsletter. Integrated into this process is the e-mail server. Patrons sign up for the various offerings using the automated sign-up page. All normal time-consuming, tedious, e-mail manual administration has been automated. BookLetters even has an automated bulk e-mail address upload feature for libraries that already have a substantial e-mail address file developed.

Generating Custom Recommendations

Instead of creating an entirely new page, staff simply adds the ISBNs of the recommended books to the list. BookLetters automatically creates the page with enhanced data and links to book detail pages. A tedious two-day job per list, if coded manually, turns into an enjoyable two-minute activity through this feature.

Do-It-Yourself

BookLetters allows regular staff personnel to update the features on their own, eliminating red tape and streamlining administration. All of the hours preparing specifications, discussing those specifications with technical support staff, checking to see when the changes have been implemented, and reviewing the changes once made, are replaced with a procedure that is akin to editing a short paragraph in a “Word” document, eliminating work for both your staff and the technical support staff.