April 2011
51 posts
2 tags
The Globe and Mail: How to make money as a writer... →
I have good news for authors suffering through the decline of the publishing industry: I have discovered a new revenue stream. Authors can, increasingly, make a tidy living by giving our opinion on the decline of the publishing industry. Now that we have e-books, a discussion about the impact of e-books is about the only thing authors are asked to talk about, which is not a bad thing, as we...
2 tags
TorrentFreak: Netflix is killing BitTorrent in the... →
As we’ve said a few times in the past, the only way to decrease piracy is to compete with it and offer products that are superior to its pirated counterpart.
…
Movie piracy is not quite gone yet, but Netflix shows that people are willing to pay for access to movies online, even when plenty of pirated copies are available….
I would note they don’t really have data to say...
2 tags
Nieman Journalism Lab: Tweet late, email early,... →
Want to accumulate as many followers as possible? Then tweet a lot: Twitter’s A-listers — those with the most followers — tweet an average of 22 times a day, and more tweets generally lead to more followers. But if your goal is to drive more traffic to your site, you should show a little more restraint; accounts that share two or more links an hour show a dramatically lower clickthrough rate...
2 tags
Information Tyrannosaur: How Libraries Can... →
Some good suggestions; I’ll have to see if any will be helpful for my library’s Twitter audience. Of course, every organization’s audience is different, so what works there may not work here (our audience, for instance, is worldwide, so ‘building community’ would look rather different for us).
3 tags
Free Government Information: New Link Rot Report →
In an examination of “link rot” the project found that 30.4% of URLs examined no longer provide access to their original information.
This study is particularly relevant to government information specialists because more than 90% of their sample URLs were from state governments (state.[state code].us), organizations (.org), and government (.gov) the top-level domains.
Having...
3 tags
CBC News: E-book piracy may have unexpected... →
But there are also people who pirate because legit, paid options aren’t available to them. When it comes to books, movies and TV, increasingly, people want what they want when they want it. The lack of a legitimate paid option can turn willing customers towards piracy. According to Brian O’Leary, “Piracy really is the consequence of not meeting consumer demand.”
...
2 tags
BoingBoing: Meet Science: What is "peer review"? →
How does peer review work?
It may surprise you to learn that this is not a standardized thing. Peer review evolved out of the informal practice of sending research to friends and colleagues to be critiqued, and it’s never really been codified as a single process. It’s still done on a voluntary basis, in scientists’ free time. Such as that is. And most journals do not...
3 tags
Annoyed Librarian: Amazon's Cheapskate Marketing... →
Amazon is possibly thinking this move could expand their market and sales. Here’s one scenario. Kindle ebooks become widely available in libraries. More people decide to buy Kindles or use the Kindle apps because the books are so popular.
Readers look for Kindle ebooks from their libraries and discover that everything they want is checked out with a long waiting list. Amazon pushes an...
4 tags
In the Library with the Lead Pipe: What Are... →
So: music labels thought they sold CDs to people; newspapers think they get writers to make news articles and get people to read them; libraries think they give people access to books and computers. But they are all wrong, to a lesser or greater extent.
These kinds of definitions get you tied up in functional activities, and they don’t really get to the core of what’s important, what the...
2 tags
Nextgov: Amazon cloud crash endangers federal... →
And this would be the downside of the cloud. Stuff can go wrong and unless you’ve planned ahead to have your site up from another location (as recovery.gov did), you’re stuck waiting for someone else to fix it even as people are bugging you about when your service/website will be back online (like the Department of Energy site openei.org).
[Darrell West, founding director of the...
2 tags
FutureBook: Fighting piracy is the dumbest thing... →
The reason people illegally download is not always because they want something for free. Common reasons are: convenience (in a file format of your choice to use on a device of your choice), speed (why wait for it to become available here if you can already get it elsewhere? It feels unfair, and more important: the consumer doesn’t want to wait) or availability (see the Harry Potter example,...
4 tags
NY Times: Kindle Users to be Able to Borrow... →
Amazon said on Wednesday that it would allow Kindle users to read e-books from more than 11,000 public libraries on the devices beginning later this year, a reversal of the company’s previous policy.
Librarians more familiar with the details of ebook lending than me have questions about the details, but overall this sounds promising to me.
As someone who has toyed with the idea of buying an...
3 tags
Psychology Today, Wander Woman: What to Do About... →
… Focusing on what is good in your life right now and what good could possibly happen in the future won’t stop bad things from happening but it can make you happier and healthier in the moment.
Trying to focus on the good has helped me get through some tough stuff in my personal life. It’s still hard to have crap happen, but it’s a little easier to carry on with...
2 tags
TeleRead: You will NOT lose your Kindle back... →
An update to a link I posted yesterday. This blog post is mostly comprised of a Kindle user’s explanation of how magazine subscriptions have worked, and contradicts Gizmodo’s dire claim that back issues are lost if a magazine subscription is cancelled.
For example:
I subscribed to a new 60-day trial for the NY Times this last year but cancelled it because the price was too high. I...
4 tags
The Technium: What Books Will Become →
A book is a self-contained story, argument, or body of knowledge that takes more than an hour to read. A book is complete in the sense that it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.
In the past a book was defined as anything printed between two covers. A list of telephone numbers was called a book, even though it had no logical beginning, middle, or end. A pile of blank pages bound ...
4 tags
Guardian, Comment is Free: Whither the dream of... →
The central issue is this: how can we make books and articles – not just snippets, but entire works – available to everyone, while preserving the rights of the works’ creators? To answer that, of course, we need to decide what those rights are. Just as inventors are given patents so that they can profit from their inventions for a limited time, authors were originally given copyright...
4 tags
Denver Post: The new way we read: 10 ways digital... →
The Hermitage Bookshop in Cherry Creek North, decidedly old-school with its oak furniture and elaborate Persian rug, isn’t where you’d expect to find a fan of e-books, but listen to owner Bob Topp: “E-books have increased the purchase of print books,” he says.
“It’s easy for people to read the Sunday paper, look at a book review, and 10 minutes later,...
3 tags
Hongkiat: E-book Readers & Managers - Best of →
A run-down of 15 free ebook readers/managers for your computer, including notations on which platforms are supported (Windows, Mac, Linux).
3 tags
O'Reilly Radar: The line between book and Internet... →
Ebooks to date have mostly been approached as digital versions of a print books that readers can read on a variety of digital devices, with some thought to enhancing ebooks with a few bells and whistles, like video. While the false battle between ebooks and print books will continue — you can read one on the beach, with no batteries; you can read another at night with no bedside lamp...
2 tags
NPR-Monkey See: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're... →
If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t...
2 tags
Gizmodo: When you cancel your magazine... →
Consider this to be your dismaying PSA of the day: Apparently, if you’re a Kindle owner with a magazine subscription, and you decide to stop subscribing, the back issues you previously downloaded are also lost—for good.
Depending on the magazine, this makes some sense -most people don’t keep magazines once they read them- but for the collectors in the world, it’s vital to...
4 tags
LIS News: The Library War →
So, although the library is actually doing pretty well and not at all at death’s door, these groups think it’s wise to declare the death. Yes, print may not ever recover fully; the wound is too deep. But to attack now can only weaken the library more. Because the library and print are inseparable in the eyes of the people. So that’s the war, as it is now. The library...
2 tags
LA Review of Books: The Death of the Book →
Pity the book. It’s dead again. Last I checked, Googling “death of the book” produced 11.8 million matches. The day before it was 11.6 milion. It’s getting unseemly. Books were once such handsome things. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their ink fades. Their spines collapse. They are so pitiful, they might as...
2 tags
NSA: Best Practices for Keeping Your Home Network... →
A few of the suggestions are probably beyond the average home user (e.g. implementing an alternate DNS provider), but the majority of this is pretty approachable. The internet behavior recommendations have some particularly good pointers.
2 tags
Roger Ebert: Does anyone want to be "well-read"? →
There is no pattern. My only goal is to enjoy reading. I learn that he average American teenager spends 17 minutes a weekend in voluntary reading. Surely that statistic is wrong. Do they mean reading of “serious” novels? I would certainly count science fiction, graphic novels, vampires, Harry Potter, newspapers, magazines, blogs—anything. Just to read for yourself for...
4 tags
Wall Street Journal: 'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data... →
Or: Why you should think long and hard about what personal information you reveal online.
Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites.
Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and...
4 tags
Chronicle Review: 5 Myths About the 'Information... →
…every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg’s day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented.
1 tag
SAU Curriculum Library: Whither, Librarianship? →
So. What sets us apart, makes us essential? How can we describe our role in academia, education, or the public sphere to those who have no idea what the title “librarian” entails? To those who think that anyone who works in a library is a librarian? Who wonder why we would need a master’s degree to check out books? Let me attempt to answer this question in general terms.
2 tags
Closed Stacks: Books: bad real estate? →
I think the answer comes back to this: what is the mission of the library? If the mission is to provide access to information, to preserve it and to defend it, then how does leasing content fit into that mission? I don’t think it does.
If that’s the mission, then libraries are better off buying than renting.
2 tags
Librarian in Black: Just say no to Freegal →
My publib offers Freegal, and while I’d poked around a bit in the catalog, I haven’t used the service. I always thought the 3-songs-a-week limit was weird (and annoying if trying to download an album, which is usually how I roll), and now to find out they only offer some Sony titles, well, I’m not much inclined to give this service much more thought. And the post provides even...
2 tags
In the Library with the Lead Pipe: Filter This →
A look at the various aspects of the debate over internet filters in libraries. Some very good points are brought up, but one part sums it up for me:
The debate about filters is not really about two ethical issues, freedom and safety. It’s about the ethical issue of freedom pitted against the more practical issue of offending patrons. Mandatory filters create a double-standard for...
2 tags
Annoyed Librarian: A Failure of National Library... →
Everyone knows how I love articles about librarians busting stereotypes. National Library Week is the week to break free from library and librarian stereotypes, and a kind reader hinted that the Google News Archives would show that this has always been the case.
Sounds like an instance of ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’…
1 tag
Pegasus Librarian: Anatomy of a Mass Internet... →
Hahaha, YES. So true.
1 tag
The Shatzkin Files: It will be hard to find a... →
The core purpose — the founding purpose — of a library, around which other things have grown, is to deliver access to printed words. Even the smallest local library almost certainly had more content housed within it than any individual had in their home and, in most cases, far more content than would be available at any local store. It was the books in the library that initially defined the...
3 tags
Publishers Weekly: Books Without Batteries: The... →
I appreciate the author pointing out the vast difference in the amount and type of resources consumed when creating an ereader rather than a book, especially since trees are renewable while minerals are not.
However, the author uses that to then jump to assertions based on Nicholas Carr’s _The Shallows_ that consuming digital information is ruining people’s ability to read and write...
1 tag
Lifehacker: When Not to Google: Searches You're... →
I’ll have to try these when I’m doing reference work. I usually default to Google (for better or worse) just because it’s there and it’s easy. :-p
1 tag
Go To Hellman: The Public Broadcasting Model for... →
But EBOOKS ARE NOT BOOKS. They’re just bits, and typically not so many, compared to a radio show. The cost of making a copy is negligible. It needn’t cost anything to distribute the ebook. eBook distribution is even cheaper than radio, because you don’t have to pay for transmitter power, and you don’t have to own a frequency license. It’s the monetization...
2 tags
Mashable: Why Users Are More Engaged With Social... →
However, Liebling adds that there might be another factor at work: There may be fewer posts overall on Fridays, which means a greater number of average click-throughs.
Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist at HubSpot, agrees with that assessment. “I call it ‘contra-competitive timing,’” Zarrella says. “As the overall activity seems to slow down from the hustle and bustle of the week,...
2 tags
David Lee King: No One Starts at Your Website →
Guess what? Your patrons aren’t starting their information searches at your library’s website. In fact, OCLC checked that out. In their Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community report, they found that … NO ONE … started their info search at a library website. Yep – that’s a big, fat 0%.
1 tag
WaPo: E-book business should take a page from... →
1 tag
2 tags
Inside Higher Ed: Familiar (Mis)Quotations →
Every academic by now knows the routine. You come across a pithy quote by a famous author that doesn’t sound quite right. No source text is given. A general web search yields ten pages of links to self-help sites or quote-a-day webpages. A Google Books or Google Scholar search will offer links to published self-help books or articles going back to the 1980s. None of the sites will offer a...
2 tags
Prospect Magazine: The joy of e-reading →
The switch from page to screen is certainly a radical one, however, so the over-my-dead-bodiers should not be mocked too caustically. Instead we should remind them, gently, that they have become obsessed with crockery instead of food.
2 tags
Information Will Out →
We know people will happily pay for easy. We also know that we can’t eliminate theft entirely. Anyone who has stood amongst empty DVD cases and wondered why people would steal what we’re loaning for free knows that there will always be thieves. Still, when it comes to electronic content, we can’t just give stuff away. There has to be authentication or some other kind of hoop to ensure that...
1 tag
What Is a Library? An Attempt at Common Sense →
A library is a social institution that establishes a common space (physical or virtual, but usually both) for the use of commonly-held knowledge resources. Such institutions require three things: a community, people hired to help the community share knowledge, and commonly-owned information resources.
2 tags
Music Industry Will Force Licenses on Amazon Cloud... →
If Apple and Google are dutifully trying to hammer out licensing deals, why did Amazon go ahead and launch Cloud Player without them?
Amazon argues that Cloud Drive and Cloud Player are just services that let users upload and play back their own music, just like “any number of existing media management applications.” After all, licenses shouldn’t be necessary for users to play their own...
2 tags
5 Burning Questions About Cloud Computing →
Cloud computing isn’t just a hot topic in the private sector -the federal government wants in on it, too, particularly since they want to close 800 (out of 2,100) federal data centers by 2015. USDA, for example, is moving email and related messaging applications to the cloud (but it’s still Microsoft…).
Let’s just hope these efforts by the gov’t won’t result...
3 tags
OMB prepares for open gov sites to go dark in May →
The government’s inability to get its act together and pass a FY2011 budget (by the way, we’re already halfway done with FY2011…) is making life difficult in the federal arena in a variety of ways. In this case, if a new budget isn’t passed, several open gov sites will have to be shut down because they’ll run out of money.
I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of...
2 tags
think about it →
strangemonkey:
Giving more people the right to be recognized by the government as ‘married’ won’t do any more harm to the institution than has already been done.
1 tag
Salon: The 10 most segregated urban areas in... →
I went ahead and linked straight to #1: Milwaukee.
I grew up in the Milwaukee suburbs and went to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, overall spending 23 years of my life in that area. I started noticing the stark differences in where certain races lived when recognizing that there were times that I was the only white person in the Walmart near UWM.
Now I live in a county where blacks...
