June 2011
102 posts
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May 2011
97 posts
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Craphound.com: Every Pirate Wants to Be an... →
Great video of Cory Doctorow talking about copyright. I love his point that calling something ‘piracy’ is nothing new.
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“In Google’s defense, part of Chrome’s raison d’être is to hasten the development...”
– Steven Levy on the Perils of Cloud Computing | Magazine (via infoneer-pulse)
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PC World: E-Book Prices Fuel Outrage--and... →
Great read that covers a lot of the factors involved.
An e-book that costs the same as a printed book doesn’t feel right. No trees died to make it. No heavy machinery ran to print it. No planes flew to ship it. You might need to buy one of those new $139 Barnes & Noble Nooks, announced this week, to be able to read it. So why should you have to spend as much as you would for a heavy...
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Library Juice Blog: Turning the Reference Desk... →
So why not set up, as part of a public library organization, a “Public Library Reference Bureau,” that gathers up, sorts through and compiles already-published data in the service of clarifying the questions of the day? I will not worry here about the logistical issues around how to determine what questions are researched and for whom, except to say that one option could even be to develop...
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“Don’t listen to any advice, that’s what I’d say. Write only what you want to...”
– Philip Pullman (via writingadvice)
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The Pixel & Page: The legal case for public... →
America’s legal system is predicated on equal access to the tools of success. While we can’t guarantee that everyone will be successful, we can at least work to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to be successful. This was part of the reason that public libraries were originally founded—not as community “perks,” nor parklike “centers” (though many libraries can, have and continue to...
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Digitization 101: Reports on maximazing the... →
The proliferation of computing and network devices has meant that, over the past 10 years, the internet has become the primary driving force in the access, use and engagement with information. Easy access for all to simple social networking and the explosion in interconnectedness has also turned marketing on its head forever. In an age when media, business, government and almost every...
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Book Business: BookStats Survey Finds Industry on... →
Preliminary results from an ambitious new book publishing industry survey show growth in both revenues and units sold across the contemporary book publishing landscape.
[…]
“From these 1100 source publishers we see units from the last three years are up, and we also see, more importantly, that dollars are up,” said Kelly Gallagher , vice president of publishing services...
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The Globe and Mail: Don’t discard the librarians →
Nice summary of some of the debate that’s been going on in and about libraries.
Here is the case for human librarians: You, the information consumer, don’t want to go insane.
[…]
Librarians know what’s available in a field, where to find it, whether to use it. You, on the other hand, have to write a paper about the self in Hamlet. Try Googling that without the help of...
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ALATechSource: Quick Tips for Technology Training →
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GOOD: Why Isaac Asimov Would Be Ashamed of Los... →
In so many low income parts of the city, students who, like Isaac Asimov, are growing up in poor families, don’t have easy access to books. Having previously supervised teachers at almost every school in South Los Angeles, I can tell you that in many neighborhoods the only place to buy a book is the 99 Cent Store or the swap meet. There are no book stores. Hours at public library...
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O'Reilly Radar: The search for a minimum viable... →
I have a deep appreciation for the complexities involved in this sort of project (though they’ve made their lives far easier by just doing books -meshing together article records can be exceedingly difficult, especially when there’s also book records in the mix).
At first blush, bibliographic data seems like it would be a fairly straightforward thing: author, title, publisher,...
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Vancouver Sun: Libraries face growing demand for... →
Good overview of the ebook issues involved with library lending.
The book-lending business at public libraries used to be a simple affair: Buy books, catalogue them, loan them out and keep them in good repair. But that’s all changing with the soaring popularity of ebooks.
While libraries try to provide the same seamless service for ebooks as they do for print copies, they are stymied...
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BookExpo America Underlines Industry Shifts →
infoneer-pulse:
Authors are shrugging off publishers to self-publish their work. Publishers are advancing into retail. Barnes & Noble is getting deeper into the gadget business, and Amazon is stepping into publishing.
There is a Wild West quality to the book business these days, and it is on full display at BookExpo America, an annual trade show that draws tens of thousands of authors,...
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ReadWriteWeb: To Bot or To Tweet, That Is The... →
An interesting question emerges on how people, companies and publishers should be using the social space to build their brands, especially those focused on content. […] Is there a perfect mix between bot and human that works best in social media?
This is not just a discussion about Twitter but about resources that a company puts in to social media and the return it can expect. Social...
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Gabor hits Send: Organizing your Email into... →
I have my doubts about this conclusion. They only tested one specific email (web-based) interface, and from my experience with multiple email interfaces, the effectiveness of the search utility would have a HUGE difference on the outcome of this study. I would love to see someone test this using Outlook 2007, for instance, because the search is horrendous (even Outlook 2003’s search was...
“Libraries are the earliest and most enduring cultural entity. Since their...”
– Paul LeClerc, President of the New York Public Library | Introduction of Know the Past, Find the Future: The New York Public Library at 100 (via evoketheforms)
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Hyper-public: Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age... →
He proposes some interesting things about what libraries should be taking advantage of now that reading is more of a networked activity (like notes made on an ebook). I don’t think most libraries have the technology in place to make use of these suggestions, though, and I really don’t think they’d be deemed sufficiently necessary to be pursued at times like this when budgets are...
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Agnostic, Maybe: Public Libraries & Copyright... →
The fact of the matter is that being lax on copyright does not get a chair at the table the next time it becomes a priority to change. It weakens our standing within that conversation to be turning a blind eye or offering up weak rationales for not educating the public or taking action when warranted. It is true that we cannot control what patrons do beyond our front door, but librarians...
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e-reads: The Real Kindle-Killer →
This is an awesome, awesome post.
Behold, emerging from 500 years of beta testing, the real Kindle Killer. Like so many other reading devices it’s got a cutesy name. It’s called The Book.
…
Right now we are totally infatuated with reading on screens, and there’s a lot to be infatuated about. Everyone I know who has a Kindle adores it. And the Apple iPad is a miracle of modern...
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FirstBook: Are libraries still relevant? →
They’ve gotten some great answers, most of which are resoundingly positive.
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HASTAC blog: It's Not the Technology, Stupid!... →
A response to Bill Keller of the NY Times, The Twitter Trap (read that first; he makes some… interesting statements).
But that’s not about technology, it’s about humanity. Between the human brain and the computer screen, comes us, our will, our desires, our habits, our training, our work, our incentives, our motivations, our culture, our society, our institutions, all of...
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Consumerist: Are Publishers, Not Technology, To... →
Ah, books, those paper-paged dinosaurs! Lovers of the non-electronic form of literature are already bemoaning the end of an era, as Kindles and other e-readers seem poised to replace physical books forever. But should we be blaming technology or publishers for the possibly imminent extinction of books?
Pointing fingers is always fun, and since the rise of devices that allow users to read...
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Ottawa Citizen: The book will survive →
I don’t agree with all of his statements (I think it’s possible for someone who ‘genuinely enjoys reading’ to prefer ebooks), but some of his points are solid.
Of course there are advantages to being able to retrieve countless volumes of electronic information at the touch of a button. But it’s important not to confuse retrieving information with reading. Many ...
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NYPL Wire–The New York Public Library: Happy... →
nypl:
One hundred years ago today, our iconic marble lions, Patience and Fortitude, were placed on their Fifth Avenue pedestal to guard the the 42nd Street Library, now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. A few days later on May 23, 1911, the building officially opened. We’re celebrating…
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Information overload and failure filter are false... →
infoneer-pulse:
The current situation may be detrimental to our thought processes as some have argued, but that situation won’t last. Not only will technology filters improve, but humans are a pretty adaptable species, and the current supposedly harmful adaptions to accomodate skimming and processing lots of data. And I’m not even sure that information paralysis is the real problem, as we can...
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The Next Bison: Should you believe Wikipedia? →
As with so many things in life, the answer is both yes and no.
…I will argue that a popular, high profile Wikipedia page is the most accurate reference that has ever been created in the history of the written word. (Really!) A low-profile page that few people have edited is unreliable. It all depends on how many people have checked the article and its references.
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Library Renewal: ePubs on the Kindle →
…ePub on Kindle doesn’t mean anything to libraries or to patrons. Why? Our good friend DRM. It is extraordinarily unlikely that Amazon will replace their own DRM with that used by the library industry (and by others in the eBook world), Adobe Digital Editions. If you aren’t familiar with the various DRM used in the industry, I’ll refer you to my previous post on eBooks, Filetype, and...
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TeleRead: The cost of ebooks - revisited →
This post (and its comments) illustrate very nicely how the relative cost of print books vs. e-books depends a lot on the individual and their tastes.
Last year, I wrote a post for Teleread on the true cost of ebooks, using my own collection as an example. The recent dialogue between Rich Adin and I on the relative costs of print books (in which real estate for paper book storage is a...
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NY Times Opinionator: A Book in Every Home, and... →
Forget the digital divide; some people are still contending with the print divide.
Some 42 percent of American children — more than 31 million — grow up in families that lack the income to cover basic needs like rent, child care, food and transportation. “These are families that are not buying books at retail,” notes Kyle Zimmer, the co-founder of First Book. “Not only are we losing 42 percent...
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techdirt: How Neil Gaiman Went From Fearing... →
I like his view of piracy as ‘lending’ (which even holds true when you think about people who borrow your books and never return them… those would be the people that pirate and don’t buy, I think ;-) ).
[Gaiman] then mentions that after a lot of persuading, he got his publisher to release a free digital copy of American Gods, and sales went up by 300%, even though it had...
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INFOdocket: eBooks: Smithsonian Libraries Converts... →
Direct link to the titles available (more will be added): http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/sics_epubs.cfm
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Gizmodo: University of Chicago’s Robotic Library... →
The video of how it works is quite… enlightening. I just hope the machinery is more reliable than our book lift! (Of course, our book lift is decades old…)
What I find especially interesting is that the mechanization only goes to the bin level -you still must have a person retrieving the correct item from the bin itself. This will still leave room for human error in...
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librarian.net: The uncomfortable problem of... →
What I find sad is that some of this work wouldn’t even be necessary if copyright didn’t keep getting extended.
Orphan works are works that are in-copyright but do not have a contactable copyright holder. They’re tricky and annoying as far as reuse goes because while technically they’re not re-usable without permission, how do you get permission? People have discussed this problem...
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a few more reactions to Godin's post
PC Sweeney: Seth Called Us Out On Our Bullshit And Folks Got Mad
janholmquist: The future of libraries – Why Seth Godin and Bobbi Newman are both right
Censored Genius: The Fight Goes On
Digitization 101: Wayback Wednesday: Looking at the future of libraries
O’Reilly Radar, Nat Torkington: Four Short Links: 18 May 2011
and libraryguy:
Have I got this right? Seth Godin says: “We...
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In the Library with the Lead Pipe: A Short... →
A great read. I especially liked the ‘ridiculous’ advice:
Breathe. Maintain a joyful mind and an open heart. Be compassionate with everyone who crosses your path. Live in this moment. All you need is now. But most importantly, don’t try to be a librarian like me, or—heaven help us—any “famous” librarian. Figure out what kind of librarian you are, and then be her as best you can,...
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ALAnews: Department of Education withdraws federal... →
The Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program was zeroed out under the Department of Education’s allocation for FY2011 funding (PDF), released today.
Improving Literacy Through School Libraries is the only federal program solely for our nation’s school libraries. This program supports local education agencies in improving reading achievement by providing students with increased...
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Paid Content: How Libraries Are Bypassing Big... →
A new partnership aims to help libraries build their romance e-book collections by giving greater exposure to more titles from smaller, ebook-only publishers. Starting today, Library Journal, which has long helped librarians decide which books to purchase, will begin reviewing romance e-book originals. The advance review copies will come through NetGalley, which provides digital galleys to...
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Agnostic, Maybe: “Bring Me the Head of Seth... →
This response to Seth Godin’s post is the best one I’ve seen thus far.
In coming up with the blog post title, I thought it might grab’s people attention (nothing quite like a little cheap ‘Gotcha!’ advertising ploy, right?) but also serve two functions. First, librarians can’t keep trying to kill the messenger when it comes from outside libraryland. Putting Seth’s head on a...
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TeleRead: The buying conundrum: pbook or ebook? →
The comments raise some interesting points in response to/in contradiction of this post. For readers, the absolute best economic value is using the public library rather than purchasing any book (whether print or electronic), but this isn’t mentioned.
But libraries need to decide which format to obtain, in which case the arguments here may help.
(The comment about this post not really...
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The Chronicle Review: Why Privacy Matters Even if... →
Commentators often attempt to refute the nothing-to-hide argument by pointing to things people want to hide. But the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion about information that people would very likely want to hide. As...
