January 2012
77 posts
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#libday8: Tuesday
Ah, Tuesday… somehow this morning I got confused and fleetingly thought it was Thursday (if only!).
Arrive, turn on some of the patron computers (I was backup librarian for first shift again)
Took a few minutes while the email was loading to call the vet and schedule an appointment for my tabby cat
Throughout the day: sort through the messages in the reference email box; forwarded,...
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Jonathan Coulton: MegaUpload →
This whole post is definitely worth a read.
…Tim points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so...
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How Publishers’ Digital Revenues Stack Up |... →
ebooknoir:
Comparison of some publishers and how their digital revenues stack up and have changed. Be interesting to see more, believe there is another chart out there with even more, just have to find it…
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#libday8: Monday
I am primarily a reference librarian with additional tasks pertaining to Twitter and our digital services. This is roughly how my Monday went.
Arrive, turn on and log in the patron computers in preparation for opening (I was backup librarian for the opening shift)
Sort through the weekend’s messages in the reference email box; forwarded, answered, or assigned the questions that came in (we...
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Simply Zesty: How the music industry managed to... →
Okay, so the archaic nature of the music industry and the steadfast refusal to adapt to the changes brought about the internet may hardly be a new topic for discussion, but given recent events (namely MegaUpload being taken down), it is worth looking at how the music industry and record labels have reacted since the introduction of the internet.
What should have been a medium that allowed...
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ARL Policy Notes: What If We Asked the Librarians?... →
arlpolicynotes:
Today, with help from our partners at the Center for Social Media at American University, and the Law School at AU, and with support from a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ARL is proud to unveil the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. Based on 36 hours of focus group deliberation with 90 academic and research librarians...
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Copyright Librarian: Academic publishing is full... →
Good commentary on some factual issues with a recent article in The Atlantic (linked in the piece).
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PaidContent: Well, Here’s How Amazon Publishing... →
Booksellers should not expect to be visited by a friendly Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Publishing sales rep anytime soon. Rather, in an agreement announced today, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish the print versions of all of the adult titles from Amazon Publishing’s New York-based division (run by publishing industry vet Larry Kirshbaum), and will distribute them everywhere in North America...
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Writer's Guide to ePublishing: How much does a 99c... →
Not a recent article (from 27 Nov 2011), but extremely illuminating regarding how Amazon does business in the ebook realm, especially in many English-speaking but non-U.S. locations.
But spare a thought for the rest of the world. Because the vast majority of your potential readers don’t live in the USA. And if you’re thinking, So what? Amazon is the world’s biggest book store and my book is...
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Wired Science: How Do We Identify Good Ideas? →
The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity. (The Beatles are the exception that proves the rule, although their subsequent solo careers prove that even Lennon and McCartney were fallible artists.) The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious...
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EFF: Google+ and Pseudonyms: A Step in the Right... →
Nearly four months after first announcing it would support pseudonyms, Google rolled out changes to the account creation process for Google+ yesterday. The changes will allow users the option of choosing a nickname/alternate name to display in his or her Google+ profile, or choosing a pseudonym which is not linked a real name.
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For users who want to use a real pseudonym—a name that...
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AP: New library e-catalogs offer expanded... →
Library users searching for e-books will soon get to look through a much bigger catalog and help decide what their local branch might carry.
OverDrive Inc., a major e-distributor for libraries, announced Wednesday the launch of a vastly expanded list for patrons, featuring not just e-books available for lending, but hundreds of thousands of those which include a collected of Edgar Allan Poe...
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IHE blog Law, Policy--and IT?: Hamlet's Dilemma →
Whether ‘tis nobler to abide by a law out of sync with technology or to take arms against a sea of troubles, that is the question for the common user of the Internet who desires content at the lowest price point, instantaneously and within some framework of economic fairness and personal ethics.
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Computerworld Blogs: Using libraries in the age of... →
But one of the main problems with borrowing books is expressed in Matt Hamblen’s article — that because of increased demand (and decreased budgets), libraries are having trouble meeting the needs of the readers who want to use them.
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I can’t blame the libraries. They have to allocate their resources where they can, and e-books can cost (according to Hamblen’s...
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mocoNews: E-Book Bummer: Growth Slower Than... →
Last year was widely perceived to be a year of outrageous e-book growth, but some new research suggests otherwise. According to new data from Bowker and the Book Industry Study Group, the number of book buyers who also purchased an e-book increased by 17 percent in 2011, compared to 9 percent in 2010 – well below the 25 to 30 percent growth that some had hoped for.
Near the end is an...
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Sample & Hold: Browsing Now (2) →
Browsing and serendipity are not limited to the book stacks. Skimming and scanning are habits of mind, and can lead to unexpected discoveries anywhere. Like millions of other people, I use Twitter to bring a mix of relevant and entertaining content to my attention. While Twitter’s brief messages and links rarely include books, they do provide a loosely-shaped browsing experience that...
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Cavalier Daily: University launches pilot e-book... →
The initiative, if implemented permanently, would require students to pay a course materials fee to their respective university. The money would then allow students to purchase e-books at discounted prices.
Students receive McGraw-Hill eTexts, the Courseload reader and an annotation platform integrated with their Learning Management System. Courseload software allows students to print,...
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CALI Spotlight Blog: The Enhanced Book →
But like I said, I’m not here to debate the merits of print vs digital books. There’s definitely merits to both and non-quantifiable personal preferences that factor in when someone is choosing which to purchase. And until most traditional publishers – both mass market and legal – up their game when it comes to producing ebooks, this debate isn’t going to end any time soon.
So, what is...
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PaidContent: New Stats: Kids Find E-Books ‘Fun And... →
The children’s and young adult e-book market faces special challenges not shared by the adult market, new research shows. And teens are slow to adopt e-books, in part because they do not see e-books as a social technology and they think there are too many restrictions on sharing digital titles.
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eReader database and comparison tool - Easily... →
ebookporn:
eReaderLookup.com is a database of ebook reader devices that has quick filtering and comparison capabilities.
This website was created to facilitate the research of ebook readers. Today it is sometimes difficult to make an informed choice based on marketing campaigns of big corporations, although there might be ereaders offering much more at the same or better price.
This site...
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Library Hat: About the Merit of an e-Reader as a... →
Despite the popularity of an e-book reader, I was never really tempted to purchase a Nook or a Kindle. I figured since I have an iPad, it would be completely pointless to own and use a e-book reader, which I understood mostly as a single-purpose device. (But to confess, I didn’t use my iPad much for reading… )
This conviction, however, was completely swept away since I had taken out a...
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NPR Books: Publishers And Booksellers See A... →
Booksellers and publishers are worried that Amazon is going to devour their industry. The giant online retailer seems to have its hands in all aspects of the business, from publishing books to selling them — and that has some in the book world wondering if there is any end to Amazon’s influence.
Publishers have a problem when it comes to discussing Amazon: They may fear its power,...
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O'Reilly Radar: On pirates and piracy - The media... →
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) have to be understood in this light: it’s just another IP land grab. It’s an attempt to frighten those who would compete with the established media companies, an attempt to assert monopolistic control over creativity. The ability to take domains offline without due process, even on the basis of inadvertently linking to...
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Chronicle of Higher Education: Who Gets to See... →
The battle over public access to federally financed research is heating up again. The basic question is this: When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles?
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In Congress, meanwhile, U.S. Reps. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican of California, and Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat of...
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Ars Technica: If the feds can shut down... →
For more than a year, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have argued that existing laws were insufficient to deal with the problem of “rogue sites” hosted overseas. They’ve been pushing bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act as essential weapons in the fight.
But evidently, American law...
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GigaOm: Why e-books will be much bigger than you... →
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UKSG eNews: The Research Works Act: a threat to... →
Librarians and scientists are not always in perfect accord, but if anything is going to unite them, it’s opposition to the Research Works Act (HR 3699). Introduced on 16 December 2011 by Representative Darrell Issa (Republican, California) and Representative Carolyn Maloney (Democrat, New York) and immediately referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, RWA...
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Letters to a Young Librarian: A Quick-and-Dirty... →
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CNN Tech: Really? IBM predicts the end of the... →
In a video, IBM put it this way: “In our global society, the wealth of economies are decided by the level of access to information. And in five years, the gap between information haves and have-nots will cease to exist due to the advent of mobile technology.”
The digital divide (a term that refers to the gap between people who do and don’t have high-speed Internet access)...
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Wired: Supreme Court Says Congress May... →
For a variety of reasons, the works at issue, which are foreign and produced decades ago, became part of the public domain in the United States but were still copyrighted overseas. In 1994, Congress adopted legislation to move the works back into copyright, so U.S. policy would comport with an international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention.
In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer...
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Paid Content: No More New Penguin Digital... →
Hoping to skirt Penguin’s library e-book restrictions by checking out a hot new title as a digital audiobook instead? Sorry, that strategy will no longer work as Penguin changed its library policies again today.
Digital Shift has the message that OverDrive, which distributes e-books to libraries, sent to its library partners today:
This change does not affect any Penguin audiobook titles...
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Librarian by Day: Sign Up For Library Day in the... →
I can’t believe it but it’s almost time for Round 8 of Library Day in the Life Project! It will run January 30th through February 5th.
What is the Library Day in the Life Project?
It’s a chance to share your day, or week, with other librarians and hopefully the public at large. It started when I come discovered someone had searched “What’s a librarian’s day like” to find my blog so I wrote a...
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Inside Higher Ed: Apple’s New Textbook Platform:... →
The word “free” came up during Apple’s presentation quite often. Apparently, Apple is offering authors a suite of powerful tools that they can use to create multimedia updateable textbooks, a CMS-like classroom platform for using them, and a distribution platform. They showed texts being put together with gorgeous illustrations and embedded video.
And all I could think (still sensitized by...
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Letters to a Young Librarian: When to Say Yes, or... →
Some excellent points are made about what to consider when you are given the option to participate in a committee (though I’ve realized that, in many cases, you aren’t given the option of saying ‘no’).
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WaPo: As demand for e-books soars, libraries... →
Frustration is building on all sides: among borrowers who can’t get what they want when they want it; among librarians trying to stock their virtual shelves and working with limited budgets and little cooperation from some publishers; and among publishers who are fearful of piracy and wading into a digital future that could further destabilize their industry. In many cases, the publishers...
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Planned Obsolescence: Giving It Away: Sharing and... →
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zephoria: We need to talk about piracy (but we... →
Take special note of the blackout day for tomorrow (1/18). A list of sites participating in the blackout is here: sopastrike.com
Much to my happiness, the internets are in a frenzy about the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (aka SOPA). Congress is currently in recess, but the House announced a hearing on the potential impact to the Domain Name Service on January 18 and everyone expects the Senate to...
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The Atlantic: 'Highly Tweeted Articles Were 11... →
The bottom line is simple: articles that many people tweeted about were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than those who few people tweeted about. Its implications are even more interesting. It generally takes months and years for papers to be cited by other scientific publications. Thus, on the day an article comes out, it would seem to be difficult to tell whether it will have a...
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Library Babel Fish: Collision Course: RWA versus... →
The RWA is all about ensuring that the intellectual work of scholars and scientists will be protected as corporate property (hence the “regulatory interference” versus “private-sector” language.) Publishers control access to research in large part because they and the volunteer labor they harness have pretty much cornered the market on prestige and the imprimatur of...
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“Libraries’ ability to provide public access to the Internet accounts for much of...”
– Susan H. Hildreth, “Libraries Succeed by Constantly Evolving” (via thelifeguardlibrarian)
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PC Sweeney's Blog: Nooks and the Print Disabled... →
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Impact of Social Sciences blog: Can’t tweet or... →
So why aren’t researchers using web 2.0 tools more? Broadly speaking, the reasons fall under three categories: researchers don’t know that the tools exist, researchers are unable to use them, or researchers choose not to use them. In this last category, the reluctance can spring from:
lack of time to try new tools and lack of institutional incentives to make time to use them;
their value...
