The Teen Talks (6): My Initial Reaction to Edelweiss

The Teen Talks is a semi-regular discussion type feature here on the blog, that allows me to talk about a variety of things from my teen perspective.

So now my ranting about pet peeves in books is done (I know, I know, you guys are relieved, but I just absolutely had to get those off of my chest!). Today I’m going to be talking about my first thoughts about Edelweiss.

For those of you that don’t know, Edelweiss has become an increasingly popular website to request books off of. It basically has all of the publisher catalogs, and it has a much wider selection of books to request.

I’d heard a ton about Edelweiss before jumping on the train yesterday and getting my own account. I knew that there were a ton more books on there, as compared to NetGalley. However, I’d heard that getting approved is much harder as well. As to why this is, I honestly don’t know.

I decided to get my account because of a blog tour, since we were supposed to request the book off of Edelweiss to get access of an eARC for the blog tour. My first thought: confusing. Seriously, I can’t figure this website out. While I think I have the basics down, I still don’t know how to actually request a book that I’ve searched for (which is what I’m supposed to do for the blog tour). I’m still trying to learn the ropes, but it’s just so different from everything else, so I’m having a lot of trouble with it, admittedly. It’s pretty frustrating at this point.

However, there such a wealth of information on Edelweiss, and it’s pretty dang cool. I love how we can see the popularity of a book on Goodreads, blogs, and Twitter, and it’s even cooler to see all the Tweets related to a specific book. There’s also a ton of other extra information about each book which is so interesting to look at. Not only that, but I like this whole catalog thing, where the entire system is basically sorted through each publisher’s catalog. While I haven’t had that much time to play around with that yet, I think it’ll be great for finding more books from specific publishers.

Also, there are so many books to request on Edelweiss, a ton more than NetGalley. It took so much self-restraint (you honestly can’t even imagine how tempting it was!) to not request anything in the few minutes that I was actually playing around in (while not trying to figure out the whole blog tour thing, which was my original intent). I still gave in and requested 2 books, though. It’s interesting that they make you fill out the information right before they submit your request, rather than NetGalley, which just submits your request with the click of a button. I’m not exactly sure if this is a good or bad thing yet.

So overall, confusing? Yes. Interesting? Yes. Worth it? Maybe. I definitely need to continue playing around with Edelweiss, and hopefully I’ll like it much more after I actually begin to understand everything. I’m interested to see if publishers are actually going to accept me or not, and how the process of getting an e-book onto my Kindle will actually work. But for now, Edelweiss is something I will be trying to figure out more in the future.