1.1 Introduction
An online book club is an internet website that runs an e-commerce service where online users can access information about books, buy or rent books whenever their timing is ideal. This online book selling websites helps to buy the books online with Recommendation system which is one of the stronger tools to increase profit and retaining buyer. On-line Book shopping entails buying and selling of books of all sorts with the buyer still making his choice and making the payment through the internet or through any other computer network. This pattern of trade conducted through the internet has grown extraordinarily simultaneously with wide spread use of the internet. This new trend in fact has contributed immensely to the growth of E-business and particularly in E-education. On-line Bookshop normally makes use of the World Wide Web (www) to an extent in the transaction life cycle; it also involves shopping of the physical items requested on-line.
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
1.2 Background of Study
People who read at least seven books a year are reported to be 2.3 times more intelligent than people who read only one. That stat, floating around the Internet, has been attributed jointly (and separately) to the U.S. Department of Labor and a survey by Yahoo!, Whether that information is strictly reliable or not, executives and avid readers everywhere will attest to the value of reading for personal development, leadership purpose, training, continuous learning and company innovation. To enhance reading culture among students, starting a book club with books that speak to career advancement and fulfillment.
For promoting reading and developing lifelong reading habits have always been parallel goals with developing information literacy through their integrated school library programs. This has traditionally included developing extensive collections of quality literature books (books and novels), as well as rich information books, all in support of the school curriculum and as resources to support positive reading habits. Computerization and the pervasive infiltration of the Internet have dramatically altered all areas of work for teacher-librarians.
The school library community has fully engaged in management uses of technologies: automating library collections; providing reference online; providing access to databases and electronic materials; as well as building a significant virtual presence through school library websites, archives of student work, and collected bookmarks of thematic resources. However, the traditional areas of promoting reading and providing readers’ advisory have often remained static and bound by face-to-face methods such as conducting book talks; building in-library displays; and bulletin board displays, as well as evidence that by improving students’ access to reading materials and opportunities to interact with peers about their reading, teachers can do a better job of helping all readers become skillful, motivated readers.
Since technology is seen as occupying more and more of students time out of school, it would seem important to explore how these two areas might unite to explore how new technologies such as e-books and e-readers support the goals of motivating students to read. Since digital technologies are so appealing to today’s youth, research seems to support the value of developing an online book club system as a factor in motivating young readers to read more with some evidence they may be particularly valuable in motivating reluctant readers. Online book club will enable e-readers also have been used in research exploring children’s reading comprehension (Larson, 2010). Evidence from this work suggests e-readers offer more than just portability and storage capacity; they support readers through their use of multiple tools and text features such as text-to-speech options, dictionaries and note-taking capabilities (Larson, 2010).
There can be little doubt that e-books and e-readers are here to stay. In fact, data from publishers/distributors of e-books and the makers/marketers of e-readers have all indicated that growing sales and growing demands will lead to further innovations in these technologies and wider acceptance of their use. This information, coupled with evidence that those who own an e-reader buy more books now than before they owned an e-reader (Duncan, 2010), should awaken teacher-librarians to a reality that looms before them, one that holds great promise in our goals of supporting literacy and promoting reading habits.
1.3 Statement of Problems
Investigation revealed that in most educational institutions there’s a need to increase the reading culture among students especially in this internet age, were students spend a lot of time on the internet. Students can’t have access to books on holidays or easily without having to visit the school library on campus, it is not only time consuming, but it is also reduce students’ academic performance due to no access to books without stress.
1.4 Aim and Objectives of Study
The aim of the study is to develop an online book club management system, to increase the reading culture among members of this online community, to enhance the sharing of books, proper reading, review books, rate books and connect with other readers. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to develop an application software that will:
- Increase reading the culture among students’ and members of using the system;
- Reduce money students spend on buying bulk of books;
- Increase academy performance of students; and
- Eliminate borrowing of books from library, informative books will be readable available for the reading pleasure of students.
1.5 Significance of Study
The importance of this study is based on transaction changes in the operation, the cost of executing some other operations, their functions and their benefits. This study will be of immense benefit to Students, Doctors, Engineers and other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.
1.6 Scope of Study
The scope of the study focuses on the Design and Implementation of an Online Book Club Management System. The proposed system is limited to several processes: handling of student ability to access academic materials without having to visit the campus, improve students’ academic performance through continuous reading with other peers.
The system will generate the reports such as books read by a particular student to encourage others read same book. The online book club management system is designed in such a way that makes it possible to access through any device connect to the internet.
1.7 Limitations of the Study
During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:
- Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
- Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
- Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
- Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).
1.8 Definition of Terms
Educational: Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits.
