Here’s a bandwagon I urge you climb on: ‘Using RSS Feeds for New Book Titles – Calling All Publishers.’ In her essay, Connie Crosby at LLRX.com asks a series of excellent questions:
Indeed, why not?
Connie suggests that publishers link their new book titles to their own shopping carts — a great first step. I’ll go one further: What if you, as a librarian, gave publishers (or the company that aggregated RSS feeds on behalf of many publishers) a URL that could link a new book title directly to the relevant order screen on your library’s book jobber’s web site. This could even be something as simple as an OpenURL — you provide the “stem,” the address of a link resolver, while the publisher appends all the specifics of the given book title — assuming your book provider has a resolver. You subscribe to the RSS feeds (broken down, of course, by subject, genre, age, or however you like), click a link, and order the book. And from there, the book flows into your normal ordering process.
Next time you meet with a book vendor’s sales rep, ask them if they can so something like this — and if not, when they will be able to.