LibWorm.com provides a librarian RSS filtering service. Over 1500 RSS librarian sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest headlines from journals and sites in the Ebooks interest group. http://www.libworm.com/rss/librarianqueries.php Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:08:55 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/459238027/ Macworld has a nice article by Adam Engst on how to slim down your PDFs. Since, unfortunately, so many e-books are only available in that format, perhaps some of our readers or publishers could pick up some tips. You can never be too rich or too thin, the old saying goes, but when it comes to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), adding richness in the form of images and fonts causes otherwise svelte PDFs to start pining for elastic waistbands. Balancing quality and file size in PDFs can be tricky, but in my five years of publishing PDF books I’ve learned—through much trial and error—numerous tricks that can help you keep your PDFs small, eliminating problems with bounced e-mail attachments, unnecessarily long downloads, and higher-than-necessary bandwidth bills. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:29:53 +0100 674652 http://ramblinglibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/11/quick-update-from-cckpl-bloggers.html There were a lot more bloggers for the CCKPL preview on Tuesday evening (maybe there was more time for people to respond). Eight of them turned up, hosted by the CCKPL branch manager, Ms. Lim Puay Ling (and treated to a nice dinner spread -- sorry we didn't have that for YIPL preview, mrsbudak!)There was a nice mix of familiar faces and new ones.Preetam was one of the familiar faces. I took a shot of him demonstrating the Bookeen's Cybook eBook reader. He makes good use of the NLB eResources, regularly downloading stuff to his Bookeen. Yi Chie was a new blogger I met. He's also the first to blog about the exclusive preview session. He told me he was an "Infographic Journalist", working for a newspaper publisher here. Next time you folks read the papers, check out the soccer infographics (hint-hint) and see if you can find his name.I was much impressed when he related how he got his current job, based on what he'd picked up from the library's collection of books on Photoshop and Illustrator. In fact, I don't think he's a unique case in this aspect (picking graphic skills from library books, I mean). Will update this post if the rest of the bloggers publish something (we really left it to them).Choa Chu Kang Public Library opens this Friday, 21 Nov, at 11am.   Web ramblinglibrarian.blogspot.com myrightbrain.wordpress.com roughnotes.wordpress.com (Source: Rambling Librarian :: Incidental Thoughts of a Singapore Liblogarian) Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 674729 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/459154996/ I published the article below, Clever Kindle promo for ‘Oz Chronicles’: Answer Oz question and qualify for contest to win free K machine, at 10am on Wednesday. At the same time I downloaded the PDF and sent it off to Amazon for their free conversion to Kindle format. I didn’t get any response, which was strange as it usually takes only 2 or 3 minutes to get the book back. Tried again twice more and still no response. Then I decided to become a big spender and at about 10:30am submitted it to the “fee” version for conversion and forked over my $0.10. Well it’s now 11:25pm on Wednesday night and still no response. When I go to my Amazon bookshelf I see it sitting there and listed as “Pending”. I wonder what’s going on. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:23:31 +0100 674637 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458930521/ I just went to BooksOnBoard with my iPod Touch and confirmed that direct downloads for iPhone and Touch owners seemed to working already. The "seemed" is just because I haven’t tested this. But BooksOnBoard instantly recognized my Touch browser. Via a link it offered some easy instructions for downloading within the store’s shopping cart. Just use the nonDRMed ePub format. Feedback wanted Congratulations to all three companies on this alternative to the consumer-hostile DRM approach. Of course I’d appreciate feedback from BooksOnBoard customers who do buy Samhain romance books. Is this going smoothly for you? I’d also welcome information from BooksOnBoard—on backup at the customer end and on the ability to use the same books on other ePub-capable devices. And can you and/or Lexcycle try to solve Jane’s iPhone-Stanza problem? Needless to say, I hope that DRMless Stanza-type services will soon be extended to mainstream fiction and nonfiction, SF and other categories. Hello, HarperStudio? So  I strongly encourage publishers to cooperate with BooksOnBoard, All Romance eBooks and other companies working with Stanza’s developers and other companies—on DRMfree direct downloads for the iPhone and other devices. Come on, HarperStudio. Dare to be different. Your parent company’s competitors at Samhain—yes, Harper’s Avon unit publishes romances—already are. Nothing against HarperStudio, moreover. I like your experimentation with different business models. Now do the same with the related issue of DRM. Otherwise you’ll be far, far less credible as innovators. DRMless downloads vs. ... Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:11:01 +0100 674519 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458602640/ An appeal of E Ink displays is that you can read e-books in bright light. LCDs don’t always fare so well under the circumstances. The view may look washed out. But now Funai Electric Advanced Applied Technology has come up with an experimental reflective display that supposedly doesn’t even need a backlight. Might it actually thrive in bright surroundings, then? And could Funai’s LCDs reduce power consumption enough to get into E Ink territory? That would be great for interactive e-books since E Ink displays typically aren’t fast enough (though this will be changing). Excerpt from Crunch Gear: The company claims their display uses 0.16MW of electricity per square centimeter, which translates back to just 1% of what conventional LCDs need. Reportedly, clarity can still be compared to that of characters printed on a piece of paper. The display uses dyes changing color when exposed to an electric current. Funai even says their new display boasts 80% reflectivity, 30% more than reflective LCDs so that images can be seen in sunlight more easily. On top of that, Funai doesn’t use thin-film transistors in the production of the screens, resulting in costs that are two-thirds lower than that of existing LCDs. Funai aims for a commercialization of the display sometime next year, initially rolling out versions ranging from seven to 14 inches in size. So what do you think, gang? Related: Item on Nemoptic technology, which apparently is also within LCD Land. Technorati Tags: Funai,LCD (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:15:47 +0100 674520 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458516569/ Tobias Buckell, 29, an SF writer familiar to many an e-booker, was rushed to the ER—with heart problems. Hey, Tobias. That’s my thing. A speedy recovery, please! Excerpt from his blog: "My mum turns out to have Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, as did her dad. It causes a heart to race. The cardiologist hasn’t come by yet, but the family is running bets that that is what I have." (Link added.) Free excerpt from Sly Mongoose, Tobias’s latest hardcover: Here. Related: Galley Cat item with more details. GC loves Mongoose, by the way. Technorati Tags: Tobias Buckell,Sly Mongoose (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:47:09 +0100 674521 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458473765/ E-books certainly lend themselves to clever marketing schemes, and author R.W. Ridley has come upon one of them. He’s giving away the first volume of his Oz Chronicles, The Takers. Then, if you can answer one question he poses about the book, you will be entered into his contest to win a Kindle. Technorati Tags: R.W. Ridley,Oz Chronicles (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:11:37 +0100 674522 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458543519/ Speaks for itself: Today I’m proud to release ORG’s annual Review of Activities [.pdf]. It’s been a bumper year for digital rights. From HMRC posting half the nation’s bank details to the Darknet, to the ongoing campaign against Phorm, to three strikes and the rightsholder lobby’s so-far thwarted attempt to take control of your internet connection, this year was the year digital rights went mainstream. Thanks to generous support from the ORG community, we’ve been there giving an informed perspective on the issues to the natonal press, working with policymakers behind the scenes and mobilising the grassroots into effective action. As ORG Chair William Heath writes in his foreword to the review: “Built on the enthusiasm and promise of people who live, work, play, socialise and create online, ORG is a celebration of the emerging possibilities that technology and the internet offer us. ORG exemplifies that social activism which brings out the very best people have to offer: expertise, creativity, energy, and professionalism – and none of this ever without humour. “Behind this lies an irrepressible motivation. The ORG community knows there are real abuses of our rights online, and real threats to our information society.” (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:00:44 +0100 674523 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458460597/ "The entire Samhain romantic fiction catalog of ebooks" will be readable via the DRMfree Stanza e-book reader for the iPhone and Touch, thanks to new agreements with Books on Board. BooksOnBoard is thus the first or one of the first commercial bookstores to link up with Stanza, which I’m guessing will also run on some other handheld devices in the near future. Toward a major DRMless ecosystem for booksellers I don’t know how seamless the buying process will be—as easy as the Kindle’s?—but this is definite progress, especially for those of us who dislike DRM. So far, Stanza lacks "protection." I’d love to see a DRMfree ecosystem of bookselling for the iPhone, Touch and other devices such as Android-OS phones! And same for dedicated readers. I’m delighted that Sony will set up its wireless system to include indie stores, and I hope it will likewise experiment with a DRMless approach. Related: Stanza tips for bookstores and writers: How to SELL ePub books for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which mentions All Romance eBooks’ support of Stanza. Meanwhile a slightly trimmed version of the press release follows. Technorati Tags: Stanza,Lexcycle,BooksOnBoard,Samhain BooksOnboard First to Offer New eBook Titles for the iPhone in Partnership with Stanza Austin, TX - November 18, 2008 - BooksOnBoard, the premier ebook retailer, has entered into definitive agreements with Samhain Publishing Ltd. and Lexcycle, Inc. to make the entire Samhain romantic fiction catalog of ebooks available on Lexcycle’s Stanza. Stanza is the highest rated and most popular ebook reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. ... Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:51:00 +0100 674524 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458383760/ With up to 600 pages, PC Magazine once looked like a small telephone book. It started up in 1982, and I could no more imagine it disappearing than I could the Empire State Building. Early next year, however, PC Mag will exist only as an online publication. The current Web site is here, complete with a headline from a John Dvorak commentary: Why Google must die. My friend made some clueful comments about Google’s shortcomings as a search engine—as opposed to wishing away such services—but the accidental irony couldn’t escape me. Who and what killed PC Magazine’s print edition, beyond the current recession? Another example of paper’s limits First off, the limitations of paper did, and that’s another lesson for the IDPF standards-setters and book publishers who don’t want to venture into interbook linking and standardized annotations. PC Magazine to a great extent is for shoppers foraging for specifics on a hot new desktop, printer or monitor—the very stuff that Google helps dig up from many sources at once. The Web serves as a more efficient conduit for product information or exchange of opinions than paper does. In addition, it has given birth to tiny but more precisely targeted specialty publications, including blogs like this one. The real shocker of the moment So the demise of the print edition—the January issue is the last—was and is inevitable. The real shocker of the moment is that Wikipedia’s item on PC Mag hasn’t been updated as of now (8:25 a.m., Washington, D.C. time) Less free-PR for high-tech vendors at the grocery store: Would you believe, grocery  and drug chains are publicity outlets for high-tech products. Indeed—through magazine cover stories displayed at newsstands. Now there’ll be one fewer cover to tout "The Best New PCs. ... Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:25:36 +0100 674525 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458011170/ Check out LCD panel price fixing—just the beginning, in Display Daily. The e-book angle: The anti-trust threat might lead to more competitive prices for LCDs and other tech in laptops, mobile phones and other devices used to display e-books. Related: Three LCD firms admit to price-fixing, pay $585 million fine, by Chris Meadows. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:23:31 +0100 674218 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/458046823/ Many thanks to Lancelot Kirby, a writer in Portmouth, Ohio, for the essay below. I wonder what Trithemius would have thought of E Ink. - D.R. At the start of the Renaissance, the abbot and occultist Johannes Trithemius wrote a book entitled In Praise of Scribes. In it he attacked the recent invention of printing and celebrates the superior qualities of the pen. How did he get the word out? In print, of course. Even Trithemius could see the writing, uh, printing, on the wall. Trithemius also wrote another book, this one about the use of spirits to communicate over long distances. He would have been amazed by the magic of the Internet. Like Gutenberg preceding it, the Internet threatens the previous technology just as startlingly as the press did the scribe, and just like the press it came seemingly out of the air to change everything that came before. This very abruptness has caught so many off guard it is no wonder the e-book is under a hail of derision. The book as an ongoing project To the unconverted let me remind you, the book is an ongoing project, a largely technology driven enterprise. If the medium in which it has evolved has remained relatively static for the past five centuries, it is not for lack of trying. Gutenberg had applied the available equipment of his age so well there would be no real advancements in printing until the Industrial Revolution and the power of the steam engine. Unlike Antony, I come not to bury the e-book, but to praise it, and I say this with all the passion of a true book lover. Confirmed bibliophiles will raise their hand’s in unison when asked what part of the book stands out the most—the smell. The olfactory experience of a library is like that of incense in a sacred space. Beyond its tactile properties the scent of a favorite title can instantly launch one into the time and place it was first read. Of lazy summer days by the pool, or quiet winter evenings in an armchair. ... Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:18:55 +0100 674219 http://yourlibrarycsu.blogspot.com/2008/11/good-reads-new-history-books-in-your.html The Cold War: a new history by John Lewis Gaddis Library catalogue holdings detailsAnzac Day: the undying debt by J.G. Pavils. Library catalogue holdings details Japanese military strategy in the Pacific War: was defeat inevitable? by James B. Wood Library catalogue holdings details Italy: the rise of fascism 1915-45 by Mark Robson Library catalogue holdings details The Cuban Missile Crisis: a concise history by Don Munton Library catalogue holdings details Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century by Jay Winter Library catalogue holdings details Fighting the Great War: a global history by Michael S. Neiberg Library catalogue holdings detailsConflicts in the Middle East since 1945 by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Peter Hinchcliffe Library catalogue holdings details The unfinished journey: America since World War II by William H. Chafe Library catalogue holdings details Australia's empire edited by Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward Library catalogue holdings details Worlds at war: the 2,500-year struggle between East and West by Anthony Pagden Library catalogue holdings details Barbarians to angels: the Dark Ages reconsidered by Peter S. Wells. Library catalogue holdings details Enduring the Great War: combat, morale and collapse in the German and British armies, 1914-1918 by Alexander Watson Library catalogue holdings details Beijing: a concise history by Stephen G. Haw. ... Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 674433 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/457654922/ Mac owners at last can enjoy audiobooks from libraries via the OverDrive Media Console. A slightly condensed news release follows. - D.R. OverDrive Media Console for Mac, the free software for playing and organizing digital audiobooks from public libraries, is now available for download. With this free software, Mac users can download audiobooks in the MP3 format from an OverDrive partner library’s download website and transfer titles to Apple® devices including iPod® Classic, iPod Touch, iPod Nano and iPhone™. OverDrive Media Console for Mac also provides the same superior listening features of the popular Windows version, which is installed on millions of computers worldwide. A national directory lists libraries offering iPod-compatible audiobook downloads. Mac users can also purchase MP3 audiobook downloads from online stores such as Borders.com  and WHSmith Online. “Millions of audiobook listeners around the globe are taking advantage of the great selection and ease of use provided through OverDrive’s audiobook download services,” said David Burleigh, Director of Marketing for OverDrive. “We’re proud to be the leading library download service that supports both PC and Mac users, and will continue to expand features and services for our partners and their customers.” “Denver Public Library has had great success offering digital audiobooks, eBooks, and other media thanks to our partnership with OverDrive, and now our Mac customers can enjoy the many benefits of using our service,” said Michelle Jeske, Manager of Web Information Services and Community Technology Center at Denver Public Library. “Customers with Macs have requested access to our growing digital catalog since we launched the service, and now they too have anytime, anywhere access to audiobook downloads. ... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:34:46 +0100 674095 http://techessence.info/node/105 Rachel Singer Gordon has launched a site, The Tech Static to "assist librarians with technology-related collection development." A press release about the launch says that the site contains: * Reviews of current computer books * Reviews of technology-related titles targeted at librarians * Collection development articles (weeding, “must-haves,” balancing a computer book collection) * Prepublication alerts * Publisher press releases * DVD and ebook reviews * Announcements * … and more! There are already a number of book reviews of technology books available. (Source: TechEssence.Info blogs) Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:29:41 +0100 674570 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/457480600/ Today marks the 80th anniversary of the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, “Steamboat Willie.” It also marks the 5th anniversary of the date that cartoon should have entered the public domain, if not for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Now the cartoon will be protected until 2023. It has been observed by many copyfighters that whenever the copyright on “Steamboat Willie” is in danger of running out, Disney goes running to the Congress to extend the copyright term. (Some claim that it was to bring the United States in line with international copyright treaties, but on the other hand a number of other countries in full compliance with those treaties have shorter copyrights.) This affects not only Disney’s own properties but virtually everything that has been published since 1923. Disney is, of course, concerned that once “Steamboat Willie” hits the public domain, they will have a million competitors all making their own derivative works based on “Steamboat Willie”’s Mickey Mouse. This is a touch ironic given that “Steamboat Willie” was itself a derivative work—a parody of the Buster Keaton film “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” released earlier that year. Copyfighter Lawrence Lessig and antique bookseller Eric Eldred sued to overturn the law, going all the way to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, they lost 7-2. The history of the suit and its failure at the Supreme Court are chronicled in chapter 13 of Lessig’s book Free Culture. It will be interesting to see what happens in another five years, when the expiration of Disney’s treasured copyright once more begins to loom ten years away. Will Disney begin to lobby Congress for another extension? Will Congress and the American people have learned their lesson about copyright extension yet? Time will tell. ... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:43:31 +0100 674096 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/457395688/ Stanza is one of the hottest e-book apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, with more than 500,000 downloads. New York Times columnist J.D. Biersdorfer recently recommended Stanza in Tip of the Week: Turn your iPhone into an e-book. Wouldn’t it be great if you could sell your e-books to Stanza’s growing number of iPhone-toting fans? By now, more than a few of these readers might want to extend their horizons beyond free public domain books. Just the other day, All Romance eBooks said it was offering Stanza-readable books for direct download (athough that’s a bit misleading—see Jane Litte’s comment, posted this afternoon). Want to do the same? Or are you a reader eager to have your favorite bookseller accommodate your iPhone or Touch? Check out the Stanza Bookseller page. Within the Stanza FAQ, here are some handy links: How can I link to a book on my web page so that it launches Stanza on the iPhone/iPod Touch? How can I integrate with Lexcycle’s Online Catalog? How can I create ePub files from my books? I am a bookseller. How can I make my books readable on Stanza iPhone/iPod? The e-commerce angle: Generic specifics can be found elsewhere. But, yes, it is possible to use Stanza with many existing systems. Tip: Stanza will work with oodles of formats, but ePub is the flagship one—the choice that displays best and offers goodies like italics. The DRM issue: While Stanza does not support DRM, I myself am hoping that it can work with booksellers to establish a DRMless ecosystem built around ePub. Owners of the ePub-capable Sony PRS-505 and PRS-700 would also benefit. Share your successes and knowledge: Booksellers and writers can share other pointers/tips here and brag of Stanza success stories to encourage others. Same for similar DRMless reading systems that allow direct downloads. ... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:18:02 +0100 674097 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/457368317/ Magnatune is a music site dedicated to independent musicians. It has some of the best music on the web. Here is Magnatune’s mission statement: We work directly with independent musicians world-wide to give you downloads of MP3s and perfect-quality WAV files. We never work with major labels, and our musicians always get 50%. You can listen to every album in its entirety before buying or becoming a member. Now get this, Magnatune is giving the music away and just asking for donations, and it is working. Here’s an excerpt from buckman’s magnatune blog: From today on, you are no longer required to commit to a 3 month minimum: you can have as short a membership as one month. Also, since the majority of people pay for memberships using Paypal (vs credit cards), we now support Paypal’s recurring payments feature, so that you can choose to auto-renew, yet retain total control over billing by being able to cancel from within your Paypal account. I’ve been working with Leah Belsky (from open-source-philosopher-guru Yochai Benkler’s group), to phase in each change at Magnatune in a controlled-experiment kind of way, so that both Magnatune (me) and the academics (Benkler’s group) can get data that is meaningful, quasi-scientific and which hopefully leads to insight. The final step in this transition happened today. Memberships to Magnatune are now: 1) no commitment: one month at a time, whereas previously the minimum was 3 months 2) pay what you want: you fill in the amount you want to pay (no drop down box), though there is a $5/month stream membership minimum, and $10/month download membership minimum. ... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:56:39 +0100 674098 http://library.waubonsee.edu/wordpress/2008/11/18/november-featured-book-display/ We will be saluting “National Native American Heritage Month” throughout the month of November. Come join us and learn more about past history and present day life among the various tribes. If you can’t make it into the library, you may still check out our collection of Ebooks from your home computers through our online [...] (Source: Featured Resources) Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:36:39 +0100 674327 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/457228906/ In a victory for free speech, the German-language Wikipedia is back online despite a far-left pol’s claim that it defames him. Here’s the fun part. Spurred on by the fuss, more people than ever have now read the evil article about Lutz Heilmann—and the German edition is finding new donors. German version here. Related: New York Times item and earlier TeleRead mention of the controversy (at end of post). Technorati Tags: Lutz Heilmann (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:29:31 +0100 674099 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/457179389/ Sure though, comp-sci professor Christos H. Papadimitriou, author of Turing (A Novel about Computation), wants the MIT Press to publish an e-book version. That’s the professor in the photo below. He wrote me: "Obviously I’d love to see this. Let’s see how they react to the idea." Currently, the only versions of his book online are pirated—scanned from the p-edition and mocking those who think DRM can protect books. For book people who don’t know, mathematician Alan Turing is regarded by some as the father of modern computer science. Talk about the ironies of there being no e-book, even five years after publication of the Papadimitriou novel! On top of that, the Press and ASIS&T published Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, the last chapter of which contains a 1990s incarnation of my TeleRead proposal for well-stocked national digital libraries integrated with local and academic libraries and schools. Technorati Tags: Turing,Alan Turing,MIT Press,Christos Papadimitriou (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:35:01 +0100 674100 http://medinfo.netbib.de/archives/2008/11/18/2848 Der Survey of Academic & Research Library Journal Purchasing Practices ($99) der Primary Research Group (gebloggt im August) ist nun publiziert und die Ergebnisse sind sehr interessant, vor allem Chapter Eleven: Journal Pricing. Hier wurde nach der “Librarians’ opinion of pricing policies of the following journal publisher over the past three years” gefragt. Antworten konnte man von “Prices have not really increased in real terms.” bis “The price increases have been ridiculous and we’ve had to take action to reduce subscriptions.” Ich liebe Schwarze Ranglisten und habe aus den Antworten der Unibibliotheken mal eine solche gemacht: Elsevier (Heil dir im Siegerkranz!) - 69% antworten “that journal prices of this publisher increased significantly or ridiculous” Wiley-Blackwell - 50% Nature Publishing Group - 45% Springer - 39% Taylor & Francis - 39% American Chemical Society - 34% SAGE Publications - 28% Oxford University Press - 24% American Medical Association - 18% American Institute of Physics - 10% American Physiological Society - 7% IOP Publishing - 3% Elsevier hatte sich ja, wie bekannt, 2002 eine drastische Preiserhöhungsabstinenz verordnet, was aber interessanterweise bei den Erwerbungsabteilungen noch nicht so richtig angekommen zu sein scheint. Was die plan to reduce or increase the role of print editions angeht (Antworten ab Seite 50), planen die allermeisten so schnell wie möglich auf e-only überzugehen, insbesondere die STM-Fachgebiete scheinen hier schon weit zu sein. Die in der Umfrage angesprochenen Probleme, dass in den digitalen Versionen Teile der Zeitschrift fehlen würden, interesssiert die Bibliotheken dagegen wenig. ... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:29:37 +0100 674415 http://lis.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/4/255?rss=1 The project described in this article explores the transition from a paper-based book, which deals with higher education (HE) ranking tables, namely The Times Good University Guide (GUG), to a fully customizable e-book. This article sets the background of the project, identifies design research as the general methodological approach, examines the existing e-book models and describes the current state of the research. It concludes, based on a set of real-life full prototypes that have now been live on the web for three years, that current e-book model propositions are too limited in terms of implementing a fully customizable and dynamic league table web application. The article's originality lies in the specific nature of the book being digitized and the nature of that digitization. The GUG is an entire book based around a university league table. What is envisaged is not just the translation of this league table, and corresponding information into a digital format, but a fully customizable and dynamic web application that fully explores this table in ways that would not be possible in a paper-based form. (Source: Journal of Librarianship and Information Science current issue) Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 674376 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversationalReading/~3/C8XV1CCwDN4/publishing-mark.html Chad Post will be offering a series of posts on how publishers might weather the economic turbulence (which at this point seems to be on the "once-every-30-to-40-years" level). Step one is to overview the industry. Much happiness lies this way:Rarely—if ever—did people start up publishing houses with the idea that this would make them millions. Same goes for bookstores and bookstore owners. In the best of times, these businesses aim for 3% profit margins. As conglomerates took over the industry though, and houses started merging, the expectations jumped to the 10% range, fundamentally changing the rules of the game and, in my opinion, pushing the industry into its current tenuous position where a lot of people are filled with anxiety and dread. . . . [Quoting Boris Kachka]: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstores sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of this business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon.com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business. (Source: Conversational Reading) Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 674257 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/456263933/ From the Feedbooks blog (slightly edited): One of the most important things about Feedbooks, is that we don’t store our e-books as terminal formats. Instead, we generate these formats on the fly and can easily update everything archived on the web site. Most of the time, we update our output to improve how the text in our books look, to offer more relevant recommendations or add new features. This time, though, we’ve been working on our metadata in both Mobipocket and ePub. We’ve started using the dc:description and dc:rights fields to provide more information about our books. Shown is a screenshot from Mobipocket Desktop. Moderator: We’ve added links. And meanwhile to fill up space so we can run the long image, here’s the start of "The Last Dream of Bwona Khubla"—the first story in Tales of Three Hemispheres. - D.R. "From steaming lowlands down by the equator, where monstrous orchids blow, where beetles big as mice sit on the tent-ropes, and fireflies glide about by night like little moving stars, the travelers went three days through forests of cactus till they came to the open plains where the oryx are. "And glad they were when they came to the water-hole, where only one white man had gone before, which the natives know as the camp of Bwona Khubla, and found the water there…" Technorati Tags: Tales of Three Hemispheres,Lord Dunsany (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:20:07 +0100 673638 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/456258984/ The following little article by Cory Doctorow was published on boingboing today. I guess that by re-publishing it here I am just making Cory’s point: My latest Locus column, "Why I Copyfight," was published a couple weeks back while I was on honeymoon and made quite a stir. It’s intended as a concise answer to the question, "Why should we care about the copyright wars, anyway?" The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation on the net involves making thousands of copies. Every time you press a key, the keypress is copied several times on your computer, then copied into your modem, then copied onto a series of routers, thence (often) to a server, which may make hundreds of copies both ephemeral and long-term, and then to the other party(ies) to the conversation, where dozens more copies might be made. Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you’re not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you’ve violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement. There’s a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture. Culture’s old. It’s older than copyright. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:15:43 +0100 673639 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/456145741/ The  idea sounded noble. For $400 total, buy an XO laptop for yourself and another for a child in a developing country. But the execution was a mess. Some customers waited months past the expected time for their little green machines to arrive. Now, however, One Laptop Per Child has wisely farmed out the retail arrangements to Amazon, which can ship both inside and outside the United States. The main order page is here. As reported in PC World, "The devices will be shipped within 30-days in the U.S. or longer for people ordering from the U.K. or other parts of the world. " I sold my XO some months ago because OLPC wasn’t paying sufficient attention in my opinion to e-reading software, and more importantly I wanted to raise cash to try other machines. But I still have fond memories of the crisp screen, which actually fared better in bright sunlight. I also liked the ability to use the XO as a tablet. Yes, I’d welcome updates from XO boosters, including fresh information on the status of FBReader for the laptop. Related: Relevant items from the independent OLPC News (try here and here if you’re not visiting OLPC News today). (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:28:37 +0100 673640 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/456060481/ Could Nintendo be about to battle the iPod Touch and maybe even the iPhone? Mobile Entertainment reports that Nintendo has trademarked "a number of DS-related titles that could offer a sneak peek at the plans the firm has for its machine." Among them? "DSBook" as well as "DSPhone." Says ME: "The eclectic list points to all sorts of possible software, or even hardware, releases for the machine over the coming years, with hints towards, sat-nav software, movie downloads, mobile telephony, email, TV and e-books clear to see." Related: Earlier Nintendo-related stories from the TeleBlog. E-book apps have been running on Nintendo machines already. But maybe new arrangements and new software can broaden the range of titles, among other improvements. Technorati Tags: Nintendo,DS Lite,DS (Found via MobileContent Today.) (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:02:15 +0100 673641 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/455660471/ Turing (A Novel about Computation) should be an obvious candidate for an e-book—and not just because of the topic. After all, the publisher is none other than The MIT Press. No such luck for honest e-bookers, though. I can’t even find a Kindle edition. And here the book has been out for five years. Meanwhile a pirate site is merrily promoting the novel, by Christos H. Papadimitriou, as a free e-book. The site even slapped its name on a modified cover. When, oh when, will legit publishers learn? Meanwhile I’ve e-mailed the MIT Press for comment. An aside: What’s the University of Phoenix doing with an advertisement on the sleazy pirate site, in between sex ads? Perhaps an agency lined up the ad, and the University doesn’t know what’s going on. Technorati Tags: Turing,MIT Press,e-book piracy,University of Phoenix (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:37:23 +0100 673370 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/455621741/ A Harvard law professor is arguing that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act isn’t constitutional. The reason? In effect, he says, the RIAA is enforcing criminal law. Prof. Charles Nesson, who founded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, is defending a Boston University student—one of tens of thousands of people whom the RIAA has accused of online song-sharing. If Nesson succeeds, the RIAA will have one fewer tool to use against piracy. No, I don’t think people should be able to share books with impunity via P2P, but the act is really over the top—with fines as high as $150K for just one violation. The e-book industry is asking for trouble if it relies on  atrocities like this. Better business models would be far, far more effective and durable. Related: Harvard Crimson article. Also on the legal front: Local Wikipedia blocked by German MP, in OhmyNews. As much as I believe in well-stocked national digital libraries, I also believe in robust alternatives. This clip is a good illustration of the reasons why. (Thanks to Wiebe de Jager.) (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:43:17 +0100 673371 http://jweblib.livejournal.com/13704.html On October 28, 2008, Google, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and the Authors Guild reached a settlement agreement concerning Google’s scanning of copyrighted works.The Association of Research Libraries has prepared a helpful guide to the implications for libraries:A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries & the Google Library Project Settlement (Nov. 13, ‘08) (Source: Journal of Web Librarianship) Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:08:11 +0100 673517 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/455213357/ "…if college students had the ability to buy all their textbooks on Kindles, they could wipe out the cost of a Kindle with their savings over printed books in 3 semesters, or a year and a half." - Jason Perlow’s ZDNet blog. The TeleRead take: See the full Perlow item for context. Also remember, this calculation doesn’t cover a more typical reader. "At the two books per month level," Pelow writes, the $359 Kindle is "going to need to cost around $125.00 or $150.00 or so." Other issues exist besides costs—for example, durability and whether the Kindle’s six-inch monochrome screen is suitable for illustration-heavy textbooks and others with many pictures. Related: Past TeleBlog posts on the Kindle economics issue and Slashdot discussion. Photo credit: CC-licensed image from Kari Sullivan of her dog Robot "modeling" the K machine. She’s separately shared her own impressions of the Kindle. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:07:23 +0100 673283 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/455081287/ A reader of my Publishing 2020 blog recently e-mailed me this link to a new product for the Kindle. This new product is the feed of the 2020 blog, which Amazon is now selling for 99 cents per month. I was never asked to participate in the program, so I’m assuming it’s the result of a blogging syndication deal I signed a couple of years ago. Thanks to the world of syndication you never know where your content might appear, and you really don’t have much say in the matter. I’m not complaining, and I certainly don’t anticipate many (any?!) subscriptions to materialize via this service; even if they do, I’m getting a slice of a slice of a pretty tiny (99-cent) slice, so it’s not changing my world. The bigger question I have is "why?" Why is Amazon bothering with adding these blog feeds? The rankings I’m seeing for most of them is pretty low. More importantly, I’ve found that once Kindle owners discover free blog feed services like Kindlefeeder, they feel the paid feeds are a rip-off. think Amazon would be better off redirecting their efforts to increase the number of available paid blog feeds. For example, they still only have 18 magazines for sale on the Kindle, and loads of technology and business titles are noticeably absent from the list. Every minute spent adding another blog to the service is time that should have been spent building up the magazine base, IMHO. Moderator: Some of the 2020 posts, through arrangements with Joe, also appear in the TeleBlog. - D.R. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:34:51 +0100 673284 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/454975801/ Eric Engleman of TechFlash has published a Q&A with Ian Freed, the guy at Amazon who is responsible for the Kindle. You can read the whole thing here. The thing that surprised me the most was Ian’s answer to the question: Are there some Kindle features that you’ve found work particularly well and some that don’t? He responded that newspaper delivery and the experimental browser have gone over really well, but here’s the part of the answer I never would have expected: The other one — we had pretty good instincts on this but didn’t know for sure how consumers would react — is blogs. The blog experience on Kindle is very different in some ways from the blog experience on the PC. If I’m reading a blog on Kindle I don’t actually have to be connected. I can get five blogs delivered and hop on an airplane with wireless turned off and read through the entire blog as if I’m reading through a newspaper or magazine. And that’s something that we weren’t sure how consumers would react, and frankly, while there is a nominal fee of 99 cents or $1.99 per month for an entire blog, we weren’t sure how people would react to the idea of a paying for a blog. If you think about it, it’s a third or a half the price of a cup of coffee for a month of your favorite blog. It’s not that much money. Related: Kindle might be open to non-Amazon apps someday, says Kindle VP. Technorati Tags: Ian Freed (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:20:28 +0100 673285 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/454912869/ What if your iPod or Touch screen could display the same view as on your PC or Mac? Including even programs such as Mobipocket that will work on a PC but not the Apple gizmos? I can’t promise that the free Mocha VNC Lite app for the iPhone and iPod will allow such miracles. But maybe some kind soul can at least try—and share the results with us. Lite does not just provide the desktop view, it also offers at least right mouse-button support. Thwarted by clash with Vista So why haven’t I tested Mocha VNC Lite on my HP machine? Because, alas, VNC Lite needs a VNC server on the desktop, and the free versions of the required software don’t get along well with Vista. Could this be my punishment for the Faustian deal I made when I bought a Vista-OS desktop? VNC server info For the desktop end of the WiFi link, compatible software comes with the Mac’s OS X Software and free versions apparently exist for Windows and Linux. By the way, a 3G connection will also work. So if my hunch is correct, you just might be able to access your desktop e-library from anywhere with your iPhone. And speaking of Mobi… As for Mobipocket running on iPhone or Touch itself, does anyone have an update? Is an iPhone/Touch version of Mobipocket for the iPhone still due by the end of the year, as was suggested at the IDPF conference last spring? Mobi has wonderful features. But its delayed appearance on the iPhone reminds us of one more negative of DRMed proprietary formats. The Stanza iPhone app can read Mobi, imperfectly, but not the “protected” variety. Related: Gizmodo’s  20 essential iPhone Apps, through which I discovered VNC Lite. Technorati Tags: Mocha VNC Lite,VNC,VNC Lite (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:47:55 +0100 673286 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/454261020/ The Amazon Kindle Review has started a comparison of these two machines. The author hopes the comparison will continue to be filled out in the comments section. While not unbiased, as he admits, it’s still worth reading. One of the points he makes is one I hadn’t thought of before. Under the advantages of the Sony he says: ePub support - Lots of people drum this up as a huge advantage. However, opening up the Kindle too much would lead to Amazon not being able to support whispernet i.e. if people start buying their books from other stores. Is that a valid argument? (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 20:29:30 +0100 673011 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/454099182/ BookGlutton has done a major upgrade to its GUI. You can find all the details here. Among other things: We recently finished a massive under-the-hood effort to prepare for the next big release of the Unbound Reader. You’ll see some of the improvements right away. For one, we got rid of that pesky pop-up window. None of us has ever been a big fan of pop-up windows, but initially it bought us time to face some of the challenges with having a single-page app open up right in the midst of another navigation framework. Now the reader OPENS IN THE SAME WINDOW as the rest of the site, and conforms to whatever dimensions please you for reading on-screen. So RESIZE AWAY. We’ve scaled it down to fit on my tiniest laptop and up to fill my ginormous 24-inch flatscreen, and it looks great either way. We added A THIRD FONT-SIZE to the font-scaling for those who really want to bump up the dots-per-em. I had looked at BookGlutton before but, to be honest, had found the interface to be rather annoying so I never used it. I’ve played around with the new GUI and I can say that I will use it now on my eeePC. Good job, and it looks as if better things are coming. One of the books I’ll probably read is Journey to Bagdad - 1915 by Charles S. Brooks. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:02:38 +0100 673012 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/454034805/ Mind and Body, a free Creative Commons book by Aaron Dunlap, is the TeleBlog’s latest e-book sighting at Manybooks.net. See if the start doesn’t hook you. “I was seventeen, almost eighteen, the first time I killed someone. “It was kind of an accident, in the same way that bubble gum is kind of a food. I hadn’t set out to kill him, honestly, but I wasn’t exactly trying not to kill him either.” That’s just a hint of the plot, which includes a $500K life insurance payout directly to a teenager without trust safeguards to spoil the fun. His father worked in Quantico, Virginia, “a self-contained ‘city’ that’s home to the nation’s largest Marine Corps base, the Marine Corps University, DEA University, FBI Academy, and a few other assorted pillars of dread.” Plot summary: Chris Baker considered himself a normal teenager until shortly before his eighteenth birthday when his father died mysteriously, leaving behind an unexpected fortune. Everything changed after that. Now in the crosshairs of the FBI, the Marine Corps, Interpol, and a handful of trained killers, Chris finds himself in a world of guns, assassins, poison, and high-tech espionage. Using techniques and skills he never knew he had, Chris must uncover a government conspiracy that seems to involve everyone and everything he knows. Formats: Manybooks offers eReader, PDF, Mobpocketi, Kindle and most other common formats for the free edition. Via eReader software and otherwise, it’s readable on an iPhone. Related: “Buy” link at Amazon (source of above summary), in case you want a p-book edition. Technorati Tags: Aaron Dunlap,Quantico,Virginia,Fredricksburg (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:37:47 +0100 673013 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/454009228/ “The Boulder Public Library is phasing out its collection of VHS tapes, and by the end of this year, patrons no longer will be able to find the fast-becoming antique technology at any of the city’s library branches.” - Boulder Daily Camera. The e-book angle: VHS was a lot more popular in its heyday than any e-book format. So what will happen if libraries and users stock up on devices built around specific proprietary formats? Even software-based readers can be a hassle to change because of the limitations of operating systems and hardware. What’s happening at the Boulder library with the VHS cassettes, of course, is hardly unique to it. Technorati Tags: Boulder,Colorado (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:00:00 +0100 673014 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/453994813/ Like many, I’m rooting for Android OS phones because of their open approach. What’s more, they’ll run FBReader and, I’d hope, other ePub-capable programs. But can Android compete successfully against the iPhone, whose prices have dropped? Not to mention all of Apple’s experience with interface and design. In Android: No iPhone Killer, Ted Landau of the Mac Observer served up these first impressions based on a quick tryout The hardware design felt “clunky” — especially the flimsy-feeling sliding of the touchscreen, needed to reveal the keyboard underneath. As for the software, it had had some impressive features (including a few that I hope to see added to the iPhone someday, such as barcode reading and application multitasking) and a decent collection of built-in apps. But it did not have a particularly intuitive user interface. So, is he on target and not reflecting the possible biases of a Mac-related publication? The third-party question: Maybe from an e-book perspective, it’s too early to say which platform will be best. Much will depend on Apple’s long-term treatment of third-party apps such as Stanza. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:37:54 +0100 673015 http://liszen.com/trends/story.php?title=Tip_of_the_Week_Turn_Your_iPhone_Into_an_e-Book The #5 most emailed story at the New York Times is "Tip of the Week: Turn Your iPhone Into an e-Book". (Source: pligg - all) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:00:06 +0100 672828 http://www.libology.com/blog/2008/11/14/the-library-and-the-bazaar.html The Library and the Bazaar is an essay by Greer Hauptman that discusses copyright options, libraries, and the freedom to read. Of note is his argument that with greater control being exerted by publishers over access to content (think e-journals) it becomes important to recognize how critical access to information is to the library’s mission.  Now think about this in terms of e-books where we might be ten years from now. found via Open Access News (Source: LibrarySupportStaff.Org) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:37:56 +0100 672773 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_library&diff=251880051&oldid=prev spam: Undid revision 233023911 by 125.125.190.40 (talk) ← Previous revision Revision as of 01:09, 15 November 2008 Line 170: Line 170: *[http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ UPenn: The Online Books Page] Search for free online books by author, title, keyword, etc. *[http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ UPenn: The Online Books Page] Search for free online books by author, title, keyword, etc. *[http://www.bookglutton.com/ BookGlutton] Read and share free online books. *[http://www.bookglutton.com/ BookGlutton] Read and share free online books. - *[http://www.asiaing.com Asiaing: News on free online books] Collection of free ebooks.   *[[Internet Public Library]] Search for free online books by author, title, keyword, etc. *[[Internet Public Library]] Search for free online books by author, title, keyword, etc. *[http://www.pdfbooks.co.za/ pdfbooks.co.za] A project to convert many of Project Gutenberg's books to PDF format. *[http://www.pdfbooks.co.za/ pdfbooks.co.za] A project to convert many of Project Gutenberg's books to PDF format. (Source: Digital library - Revision history) Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:09:27 +0100 672939 http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/11/assorted_cool_s.html A few things have been happening at SLA where I am still president through year end. I encourage you to check out the SLA website (and join SLA) but I thought I'd highlight a few things today. The SLA Salary Survey was just released and we're trying to get the word out. Here's a link to the SLA Blog post about it: http://slablogger.typepad.com/sla_blog/2008/11/2008-sla-salary.htmlOf course there's a free component as well as the full report for a fee. Also, check out the SLA Information Center Connections blog (esp. the posts on value). The librarian's librarians point to some cool stuff and it's worth subscribing to. http://slaconnections.typepad.com/info_center_blog/ They also manage a bunch of RSS feeds for members from NewsGator and Factiva on LIS issues that are very cool. And 2009 is SLA's Centennial! The SLA Centennial Commission announced the launch of the SLA Centennial Celebration Web site, the official gateway to celebrations for the 2009 SLA Centennial! One hundred years later, SLA continues to promote that spirit of knowledge sharing among information professionals and our value to the global information and knowledge based economy.. It is time to start getting excited for an amazing SLA Centennial Celebration in 2009! The DC annual conference promises to be spectacular. Not sure how to get your own celebration underway? How about getting started on your entry for the SLA Centennial Video Contest!?! Also we have the cool fact that SLA Granted Observer Status in WIPO. Being granted observer status to meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO grants SLA an important voice in intellectual property and provides an additional forum for advocacy. More here. SLA is also participating in executive discussion at hte SIIA, one of the most influential industry associations as well as being invited to the Google D.C. ... Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:29:48 +0100 673195 http://www.shush.ws/wordpress/?p=324 I try to love my Sony Reader, I do. There have been a couple stories over the past year that have been very encouraging. Publishers using Readers for their staff to go over transcripts. The Navy making ebooks available to their servicemen. Google making legal headway on their book scanning. We’re getting close to that tipping point where using a digital reader can be as easy and as common as having iPod. But marketwise both Sony and Amazon are botching it big time. I can no longer find even the 4-5 Nero Wolfe novels that were available in the Sony store, Amazon doesn’t seem to have them either. And while I was shopping around I did find that Ian Fleming’s Bond series is now available. Cool right? No. They’re $11 a pop, same as print. Both Sony and Amazon. If I don’t want the fancy new cover I can get an older edition of Casino Royale in print from Amazon for $7. If I don’t mind used I can get it for 25 cents. Its an ebook, no paper, no ink, no warehousing costs. I’ll pay $5-6 each for the convenience of having 4-5 Bond books on one device to dig into. I’m not paying $11. Its been an exciting device to use and explore but a tough one to stick with over a long period of time. If Google books can be made available for purchase for these devices and priced more conveniently like Apple and iTunes then that would be massive. …soon… I hope. (Source: The Notebook) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:23:30 +0100 672614 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/453293317/ NatCh over at mobileread has a nice write-up on the new Sony Reader bookstore. If you have a Reader you might want to go over there and read his article and the comments that follow. Since I broke my Reader I haven’t looked at the store in a long time, so I can’t give you much of an idea as to what has changed. At the Sony press event for the PRS700 they said that one of their main goals was to re-do the store and make it easier to use. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:42:43 +0100 672558 http://www.lisnews.org/tip_week_turn_your_iphone_e_book The #5 most emailed story at the New York Times is "Tip of the Week: Turn Your iPhone Into an e-Book". (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:27:53 +0100 673149 http://lisnews.org/tip_week_turn_your_iphone_e_book The #5 most emailed story at the New York Times is "Tip of the Week: Turn Your iPhone Into an e-Book". (Source: LISNews.org) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:27:53 +0100 672550 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/453235332/ Baen has long been in the habit of bundling CD-ROMs into the first printings of selected hardcovers, containing unencrypted electronic versions of the book itself, related books, and other books by the same or other authors. These CDs may be copied and shared, but not sold commercially. It is startling to consider just how long they have been in this habit. Baen has just released its sixteenth CD-ROM, in the hardcover edition of John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor’s book Claws That Catch. (Though, to be fair, not all of those sixteen were actually bundled into books—some were made expressly as convention and trade show handouts.) As with all the CDs that come before it, the Claws That Catch disc can be freely downloaded or viewed on-line at the Fifth Imperium Baen CD page, or downloaded via BitTorrent—all with Baen’s consent. (Found via the Mobileread forum.) Technorati Tags: Baen,freebies,CDROM,e-books,science-fiction,SF,scifi,John Ringo,Travis S. Taylor (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:45:21 +0100 672559 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/453156914/ Here’s an interesting article from DigiTimes. Be sure to look at the stats. I hope they are correct because this means that e-book are really starting to catch on. I’ve poked around on AUO’s English website, but couldn’t find any info on e-books. Taiwan-based first-tier LCD panel maker AU Optronics (AUO) has decided to enter the e-book display market in 2009, according to market sources. According to AUO’s development roadmap, after introducing a convex display this year, the company expects to mass produce e-book displays in 2009 and introduce flexible e-paper with a plastic substrate by 2010. AUO has cooperated with e-paper developers such as E-Ink and Taiwan-invested US-based SiPix in developing electrophoretic displays (EPDs) and, according to the market sources, products are currently being validated by clients. Worldwide e-book display shipments are expected to reach one million units this year, 3.6 million units in 2009 and rise to 18.3 million units in 2012, according to predictions by iSuppli. Global e-book display revenues are forecast to reach US$291.2 million by 2012, rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 143% from US$3.5 million in 2007. The most popular average display size for e-books is 6-inch. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:27:31 +0100 672560 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/netbib/DFxV/~3/453050238/ Jin Tan - of Second-Life-Fame - und Mark Bunzinkay haben zusammen einen Ratgeber zum Thema “eGames in Libraries” herausgebracht: Wie man dem Titel entnehmen kann, geht es um die Möglichkeiten, die elektronische Spiele im bibliothekarischen Bereich bieten bzw. um Bibliotheken, die elektronische Spiele in ihrem Service-Repertoire haben. Das eBook ist kostenlos zum Download bereit gestellt unter: http://www.buzinkay.net/egaming.html (18,5 MB, pdf-Format, 70 Seiten) Ich habe noch nicht reingeschaut von daher kann ich jetzt nicht sagen ob es sich um den Bereich der eGames an sich - plus Konsolenspiele - oder nur um Computer-Spiele im allgemeinen Sinne handelt. (Source: netbib weblog) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:47:05 +0100 672947 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/NetbibWeblog/~3/453067392/ Jin Tan - of Second-Life-Fame - und Mark Bunzinkay haben zusammen einen Ratgeber zum Thema “eGames in Libraries” herausgebracht: Wie man dem Titel entnehmen kann, geht es um die Möglichkeiten, die elektronische Spiele im bibliothekarischen Bereich bieten bzw. um Bibliotheken, die elektronische Spiele in ihrem Service-Repertoire haben. Das eBook ist kostenlos zum Download bereit gestellt unter: http://www.buzinkay.net/egaming.html (18,5 MB, pdf-Format, 70 Seiten) Ich habe noch nicht reingeschaut von daher kann ich jetzt nicht sagen ob es sich um den Bereich der eGames an sich - plus Konsolenspiele - oder nur um Computer-Spiele im allgemeinen Sinne handelt. (Source: netbib weblog) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:47:05 +0100 672607 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/453047514/ According to the BBC, the OLPC laptop will go on sale, in the “Give One, Get One” mode, in Europe on November 17. The machine will cost 268Pounds (313 euros) and will be available in 27 EU nations, as well as Switzerland, Turkey and Russia. The original idea for the OLPC was to create a small, powerful laptop for school children that would sell in the millions yet cost less than $100. The final version of the machine ended up costing about $188 and the OLPC group has only sold about 600,000 of the machines. Many nations have expressed an interest in using the XO but few have signed up to buy them in the numbers expected by the OLPC organisation. Most recently the Caldas region of Colombia signed up to buy 65,000 XO machines. The XO has also faced competition from Intel’s Classmate laptop. In September, Venezuela ordered one million Classmate laptops for its school children. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:45:34 +0100 672561 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/452906168/ It is being reported in a number of places (notably Ars Technica and Engadget) that a recent Apple patent covers a dockable, tablet-like device for multi-touch computing. As Ars says, the patent has actually been around, in slightly different form, since 2005, so it is probably still too soon for speculation. (In fact, Ars is rather cynical about it—their headline states that the patent “offers hope, inevitable disappointment.) Nonetheless, if Apple ever does come out with a tablet, a “neo-Newton” as Ars calls it, it could be good news for a lot of e-readers who prefer the responsiveness and bright colors of LCD and the responsiveness of the iPhone/iPod Touch software, but would like a bigger screen on which to read. Technorati Tags: Apple,iPod Touch,iPhone,Newton,tablet,patent (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:00:20 +0100 672562 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/452873186/ Non-Amazon apps might legally run on the Kindle someday, according to Ian Freed, the company’s VP for Kindle. He says more consumer choices would  result. Great, if it happens! So why not open up the Kindle now? Because, Freed says, “our focus is on providing a great reading experience and we’ve developed applications that do that.” Hmm. So a Kindle-specific DRMed format—useless on desktops and other devices—lead to a great experience? And why not a native ability to read ePub, the IPDF standard that’s catching on? On Stanza vs. Kindle In an interview in TechFlash, Freed also had a few words to say when asked the mix of the iPhone/Touch and the Stanza e-reader software, which some see as a threat to the Kindle. Here is his reply—or semi-reply, since he really steered the conversation back to the K Machine: We think the Kindle ecosystem, end to end, is pretty special. The idea that you can get over 180,000 books from publishers that are sold on a regular basis delivered to you under 60 seconds—that’s something that we really do uniquely. And moreover being able to get over 25 different newspapers and over 25 different magazines delivered on a regular basis is something we do uniquely. So far things have been great and we think that will continue. But wait. What if Stanza turns into a major ecosystem to rival Amazon’s? Stanza enables you to download books directly to your iPhone or Touch? If the DRM issue can be addressed, ideally by avoiding “protection,” Stanza could be one solution for book publishers and others who fear Amazon’s growing power. What’s more, Stanza isn’t the only potential threat to the Kindle. eReader also allows direct downloads to the iPhone/Touch, although the shopping experience right now isn’t as seamless as at Amazon. ... Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:01:44 +0100 672563 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/452864519/ O’Reilly’s annual Tools of Change Conference will be held in New York on February 9 - 11. David and I covered the conference last year for you here on TeleRead, and we will be doing the same thing again. David and Joe Wikert, an O’Reilly executive who regularly appears in the TeleBlog, will be on an e-book panel. Other participants will be CEO Russell Wilcox of E Ink and writer-publisher April Hamilton, who herself has written for TeleRead. The moderator will be Mark Coker of Smashwords. Here is the blurb: The Rise of E-BooksMark Coker (Smashwords, Inc.), Joe Wikert (O’Reilly Media, Inc.), April Hamilton (April Hamilton), David Rothman (TeleRead.org), Russell Wilcox (E Ink).eBooks, written off just a few years ago as a massive failure, are on the rise again. According to the latest industry data, ebooks are the fastest growing segment in an otherwise stagnant trade book industry. This panel discussion, moderated by Mark Coker, will cover the latest trends in the ebook business and provide publishers actionable strategies to profit from the rise of ebooks. Technorati Tags: O’Reilly,Tools of Change (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:00:26 +0100 672564 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ouseful/~3/452852671/ In an article in the Guardian a couple of days ago - UK universities should take online lead, it was reported that “UK universities should push to become world leaders in online higher education”, with universities secretary, John Denham, “likely to call” for the development of a “global Open University in the UK”. (Can you imagine how well that call went down here?;-) Anyway, the article gave me a heads-up about the imminent publication of a set of reports to feed into a Debate on the Future of Higher Education being run out of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. ... Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:47:41 +0100 673241 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/452844089/ The British Booksellers Association weighed in against the Google settlement. Now the European Booksellers Federation speaks out as well. Here is its statement: The European Booksellers Federation, on behalf of its membership, makes the following comments in response to the announcement in the US by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google on 28th October 2008 of a settlement that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the US from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. Google is an undisputed global leader in content provision and has revolutionised accessibility of content across our planet and for this, and other ground breaking digital development, it must be applauded. In respect of its latest announcement, and other announcements that have been in support of it, the EBF does wish to express some clear concerns: As such a dominant player in the online world, Google will occupy a unique gateway position that, if abused, will inevitably create a de facto monopoly. A situation where competition is removed from the market place by such a dominant player cannot, ultimately, be good for the consumer and would be highly damaging for cultural diversity in the European Union, if Google was planning to extend its policy in the US to Europe. As pointed out by one of EBF’s Members, the agreement is like a Trojan horse on which Google advances to take over the worldwide dissemination of knowledge and culture “…this amounts to an expropriation of authors through the backdoor. The issue is not to acquire the inalienable rights of authors through a “golden hand shake“”. The only way in which an author can guard his or her rights under the proposed settlement is to register the works of which he or she is the originator in a catalogue of book rights. ... Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:35:02 +0100 672565 http://wulibraries.typepad.com/bionews/2008/11/new-books---nov14---nov21-2008.html Advances in enzymology and related areas of molecular biology Review serial v.76 (2009) Book of honu : enjoying and learning about... Bennett, Peter QL666.C536 B46 2008 Critique of intelligent design : materialism... Foster, John Bellamy BS651 .F715 2008 Freaks of nature : what anomalies tell us... Blumberg, Mark Samuel QM691 .B63 2009 Natural environments of Arizona : from deserts... HC107.A6 N38 2008 (Source: Biology Library News) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 672859 http://library.mcmaster.ca/php/blog.php?id=947&display=full The Health Sciences Library has complimentary access to several full-text electronic books through MD Consult for a limited time! (Source: McMaster Libraries RSS Feed - Library News) Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 672477 http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00015128/ Garner, Jane and Horwood, Lynne and Sullivan, Shirley (2002) Examining one model of ebooks for an academic library setting. In Proceedings VALA Biennial Conference and Exhibition, Melbourne (Australia). (Source: E-LIS) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:15:02 +0100 672080 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/452072742/ Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who famously decided the Napster case seven years ago, gave a speech at her alma mater proposing a sweeping reform of existing copyright law. The reform seemed focused on music in particular, which is understandable given the nature of the case Patel decided. At the heart, the reform proposes establishing a copyright commission made up of people from every group that has a stake in copyright, including the public. Under this commission, all current compulsory licenses would be abolished and a blanket licensing system adopted instead. The commission would administer royalty payments under that system and adjucate royalty disputes. Not everyone agrees that this level of bureaucracy would be a good idea, but the last point in Patel’s proposal is one that some find especially troubling: the commission would also have veto power over any new device or application capable of recording, distributing, or copying music. This would have the effect of stifling innovation, particularly in the open source/free software movement. Thomas Sydnor of the IPCentral.info blog thinks that Patel is barking up the wrong tree altogether. Sydnor thinks that the reason America has evolved such a burgeoning market of expressive works over the last century is the relatively hands-off position the government has taken: In short, the critical difference for the U.S. may be that we have tended to encourage the production of expression through mechanisms that more strongly tend to encourage creators to please private, rather than governmental, tastes—be they those of wealthy private patrons or private markets. For now, the discussion is largely academic, as Patel does not have any backing for her proposal. But copyright system reform is a subject on the minds of many in these days of rampant illicit peer-to-peer activity, and sooner or later someone’s proposal may be put into effect. With that in mind, any proposal merits consideration. ... Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:46:41 +0100 672184 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/451732832/ DailyLit seems to be one of the more aggressive innovators in the e-book world, as of late. The following is from its blog: We’re happy to announce that we’ve worked with Viigo, a developer of mobile content and delivery platforms for smartphones, to make 25 of our most popular books available through the Viigo service. Viigo works as a mobile RSS reader and complements DailyLit’s current offering of books by email and RSS by giving readers another way to enjoy DailyLit on their mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.). The current books available on Viigo include Pride and Prejudice, Dracula, Moby Dick, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and other well-known books. If you’d like to try reading your DailyLit through Viigo, go to getviigo.com on your mobile device to get started. Technorati Tags: DailyLit,RSS,Viigo (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:21:10 +0100 672185 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/452035148/ Richard Shedd is based in Shoreditch, East London. His practice provides consultancy to companies, design and development of products for mass manufacture and small batch production, cross discipline and collaborative projects, as well as applied research and development for both industry and academic institutions. About the book you see in the picture: Produced for Friday Late, Blood on Paper at the Victoria and Albert Museum Friday 25 April 2008 Celebrating the Blood on Paper exhibition, a selection of artists and designers were commissioned to customise a book. I was given The New Machiavelli by H.G.Wells. Faced with a book that was over 60 years old I thought it would be wrong to deface it. I decided to conserve it by photographing every page, converting it to a PDF document and saving it to a USB stick. The digital book as an art form. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:01:05 +0100 672186 http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/whats-up-with-ebooks-interview-nagle-2008.mp3 Here’s the mp3 of an Advisorpress.com podcast I did with Peter Johnson on the subject “What’s Up with e-books?” This 55 minute discussion provides a good overview of the e-book world in November 2008. What is environmentally-friendly, endorsed by Oprah, distributed worldwide, can be read in the dark, empowers aspiring authors, could end textbook shortages, and gets 38 million hits on Google? E-books! And this month, on our Author Marketing Teleseminar, we have just the person to bring us up to date on this emerging form of publishing! Robert Nagle…will share his views on the current state of this emerging industry. According to Wikipedia, as of 2008, new marketing models for e-books are being developed, formats are beginning to homogenize, and dedicated reading hardware has been produced. E-books have achieved global distribution, and electronics manufacturers are releasing more e-book readers for general consumer use, such as Amazon’s Kindle model or Sony’s PRS-500. E-books have seen tremendous market growth in Japan throughout the 2000s and currently has an e-book market worth ¥10 billion. E-books may be reaching a tipping point. Just a few days ago, Oprah Winfrey gave an enthusiastic endorsement of Amazon’s Kindle E-book reader on her nationally-syndicated TV show, while major publishers are launching new titles as well as backlist titles in E-Book format. Apple’s extremely popular iPhone is also breeding a whole new generation of E-book users, with its gorgeous screen and wireless download capabilities. Robert Nagle is a Houston-based technical writer with a background in literature and teaching. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and writes pseudonymous fiction. Robert is TeleRead’s Web administrator and frequent contributor. ... Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:18:04 +0100 672187 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/451925919/ Canada’s Quill & Quire Blog has a short article by Nathan Whitlock in which he says: Peter Darbyshire, author and columnist for Vancouver’s The Province, has decided to set free his first novel, Please, by making it downloadable from his website. Please, which was originally published by Raincoast in 2002, won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, as well as the K.M. Hunter Award for Best Emerging Artist. On his blog, Darbyshire writes that he decided to make the book freely available because copies of it were becoming hard to come by through traditional retail channels. (Though it is still technically available online at Amazon and elsewhere.) Nathan then goes on to say that “More and more authors, such as Cory Doctorow, are opting for the free route right off the bat, figuring that a wide readership is better than the paltry income likely to come from a regular publishing deal. “ Cory responded to this in a comment: “I don’t figure ‘that a wide readership is better than the paltry income likely to come from a regular publishing deal.’ Nothing could be further from the truth! Instead, I figure that giving away e=books sells more of the print books that I sell through my regular publishing deals with publishers such as Tor (my novels), Avalon/Perseus (my short story collections) and IDW (comic books).” (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:08:29 +0100 672188 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/451892289/ The Amazon Kindle Blog has a great summary of all the newspapers available on the Kindle, along with a discussion of their ratings by Kindle users. Anyone interested in Kindle newspapers should go over and take a look. The Kindle blog says: There’s a Kindle Newspapers section of the Kindle Store. I thought it’d be interesting to list all the newspapers available on the Kindle in terms of popularity and see if there are any inferences to be made. Also for nearly every newspaper you can buy the current edition for $0.75 to $0.49 cents - a great way to see whether it’s worth it to subscribe. Related: ‘800 Newspapers from NewspaperDirect now available on iRex Digital Reader.’ (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:36:04 +0100 672189 http://www.libraries.wvu.edu/news/2008/11/13/conduct-research-247-with-library-databases/ Research material for papers and projects is just a few web clicks away whenever you need it. WVU Libraries provide 24/7 access to online resources for WVU students, faculty and staff through our list of Databases. Resources in the Databases list include a wide variety of types of material and cover every academic discipline. Some of the things you will find are: collections of peer-reviewed journal articles in JSTOR news from broadcast, print, and internet sources in Lexis Nexis early books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online encyclopedias AccessScience and Grove Art for specialized topics collections of eBooks in engineering from Knovel extensive company information from Mergent Online Browse the Databases list for complete listings and descriptions of the more than 300 online sources available. If you have questions about which might be useful for your research, you can always Ask a Librarian for recommendations. (Source: WVU Libraries News) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:31:34 +0100 672200 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/451859960/ A Kindle, iPhone or a big-screen iRex or other device—which would you rather read an e-newspaper  on?  It’s a case-by-case decision, of course. But judging from this announcement from NewspapersDirect, the iRex option might offer you some new choices. Excerpt: With newspaper publishers facing mounting pressure to cut costs while maintaining their circulation, PressDisplay.com and the other distribution channels offered by NewspaperDirect (which include libraries, hotels, cruise ships and a range of custom-publishing solutions) are providing them with more ways to reach their readers. The iRex DR1000 is a sleek and lightweight portable digital reader featuring the world’s largest electronic paper display. The 10-inch screen is as sharp and natural as reading ink on paper, unlike the strain and glare of a computer screen. With official release in December 2008, the iRex DR1000 will join a growing list of handheld devices on which PressDisplay.com is available, offering 800+ newspapers and magazines from 80+ countries. These include Apple iPhone, Apple iPod Touch, BlackBerry and numerous smartphones. Apparently this is a list of available newspapers. How are you reading the news on portable devices? While TeleRead focuses on e-books most often, I’d be curious to know how TeleCommunity members are getting their e-news. I myself am using an iPod Touch and tend to favor the New York Times mobile site, because of its usability on small-screen devices. The Washington Post’s mobile edition, though supposedly optimized for the iPhone/Touch when it detects the related browser, is clunky by comparison. I also continue to be a big fan of the AP app for the iPhone. (Thanks to  Wiebe de Jager at eBook Readers) Technorati Tags: iRex,iLiadmNewspaperDirect,PressDisplay.com,New York Times Company,Washington Post,Washington Post Company,newspapers,journalism (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:46:15 +0100 672190 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/451710850/ release on the subject: STATEMENT FROM THE BA In response to the announcement in the US by The Authors Guild, The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google on 28th October 2008 of a Settlement [see note at end] that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the US from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search, The Booksellers Association of the UK & Ireland Ltd (BA), on behalf of its membership, makes the following comment: Google is an undisputed global leader in content provision and offers a superb search service; it has revolutionised accessibility of content worldwide and created many other ground breaking online services. However, in respect of the latest announcement from the US and various reactions to it, the BA wishes to express some concerns about the future for digital content if the District Court in New York approves the proposed Settlement. As such a dominant player in the online world, Google will now occupy a unique gateway position that, if abused, could easily create a de facto monopoly. A situation where competition is removed from the market place by placing the keys in the hands of one company cannot, ultimately, be good for the consumer. This is a bridge too far. Monopolies = reduced choice and higher prices. Many of our members in the UK and Ireland are already taking initiatives to participate in the digital book world. Our well received report, Brave New World, took the view that booksellers should embrace this future. However, it is the BA’s belief that if this ‘one-stop shop’ direct to consumer approach of Google comes to Europe, it will surely result in a world that is culturally poorer for the consumer. ... Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:30:55 +0100 672191 http://www.slis.indiana.edu/careers/view_job_specific.php?job_id=4795 State: New York The Electronic Resources Librarian plays a key role in the library's commitment to user-centered service development, reporting to the Electronic & Technical Services Librarian and supervising one staff position. The Electronic Resources Librarian coordinates and supports the acquisition, licensing and maintenance of electronic resources, including the assurance of continuous access to these resources. The incumbent is responsible for the management and tracking of the electronic resources budget, and serves as a liaison between the technical services and public services aspects of electronic resources, including marketing and outreach; and participates in collection development activities for electronic databases, e-journals, e-books and emerging technologies, including public domain electronic resources. Duties also include some information services desk service and serving on departmental and library-wide teams as appropriate. Ithaca College is a selective medium-sized comprehensive College in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of Central New York. The City of Ithaca and surrounding environs offer diverse cultural, recreational, and educational opportunities in a small college town setting. Founded as a school of music, the College has long recognized the value of combining theory and performance, providing a rigorous education that blends liberal arts and professional programs. Required qualifications: MLS or MLIS from an ALA-accredited school received by date of hire; two or more years of relevant library experience; familiarity with standards for access and use of electronic resources and emerging technologies; excellent communication, interpersonal, organizational, analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to prioritize work to ensure Library goals are realized; ability and willingness to work independently within a team environment and a changing library and college environment. ... Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:21:01 +0100 671864 http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/wndReader.asp?ArticleId=51529 Palgrave Macmillan (www.palgrave.com) will launch its own ebook platform, Palgrave Connect (www.palgraveconnect.com), in January 2009. Developed in association with its sister company, Nature Publishing Group (NPG; www.nature.com/npg), Palgrave Connect will offer libraries a flexible approach to building an ebook collection in the humanities, business, and social sciences. (Source: Infotoday Newsbreak RSS Feeds) Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 672269 http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2008/11/michael-cairns-on-publishing-in-digital.html Thanks to Michael Cairns of Information Media Partners for bringing his recent presentation to my attention. It is one he delivered at the Frankfurt Bookfair Supply Chain Meeting and the full title is Publishing in a Digital Age: How Traditional Publishing is Leveraged.Slides here and video too.I like what Michael says in the speaker's notes at the end, for slides 22 and 23:So I ask the following: Do we want to hang on with our finger tips operating in an increasingly unfamiliar business environment? Or, do we embrace the opportunities that digital publishing offers and endeavour to influence and manipulate the publishing environment of the future to our advantage? The answer is obvious but it connotes significant change. *snip*Lastly, I hope you will not begrudge me for not mentioning supply chain once in this presentation. Frankly, the changes I have discussed will change everything about our supply chain and that much should be obvious.As Michael points out, he doesn't really mention supply chain anywhere in his presentation and I think that's probably very appropriate from the academic library perspective. What's the supply chain for getting book-like information from the producers/publishers to our patrons? In a world of Google Books, big ebook collections that we can buy directly from publishers, torrent sites and Wikipedia, there are very nearly an infinite number of supply chains out there. And academic libraries do have roles in many of those supply chains, but not all of them.Or perhaps we can imagine a world with just one (important) digital supply chain -- maybe Google, the 800 pound gorilla of the online (publishing) world, will become that ebooks supply chain in the future. I think with their latest announcement they may be setting itself up as a kind of supply chain by selling to individuals and licensing to libraries. As I said in that post, it's a potential game-changer for the ebook business for academic libraries. ... Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100 672266 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/451220108/ MobileTechReview is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best, review sites on the web. They have just published their detailed review of the Sony PRS-700. They give the machine an excellent review but do have one problem with it: What’s the catch? The touch screen layer reduces contrast. Digital readers like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle use e-ink technology, a very low power, paper-like display that’s non-glare and high contrast (much like a book’s pages). Touch isn’t part of the e-ink technology, nor is backlighting, so we rarely see a reader offering these. Sony, cutting-edge company that they are, found a way to add these two desirable features. Sony added a touch layer on top of the e-ink display and embedded LED side-lights into the frame that surrounds the display. Clever. But this comes at the expense of contrastand glare, and the Sony Reader PRS-700 looks more like a grayscale notebook screen than an eBook reader. I must admit I didn’t notice reduced contrast when I saw the unit at the Sony press event, but I did not have a comparison unit with me. I suggest you pop over to the site and take a look at Lisa’s excellent review. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:30:21 +0100 671737 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/451192921/ Three Asian electronics firms have admitted to fixing the prices on their LCD panels between 2001 and 2006. As covered on CNet and in the New York Times, LG Display, Sharp (maker of the “LCD paper” device pictured at left), and Chunghwa Picture Tubes will plead guilty, pay a total of $585 million in fines, and cooperate in a Justice Department antitrust investigation. Though neither of the articles directly mentions e-book readers, they do note that the price-fixing affected millions consumers, driving up prices on a number of popular electronic devices including the Motorola RAZR cellphone and Apple’s iPods. It has long been known that LCDs are the most expensive component of PDAs and similar devices. But given that the pricefixing in question apparently ended in 2006, it is unknown what if any effect this will have on present or future LCD-containing devices such as the iPod Touch. (Found via Slashdot.) Technorati Tags: LCD,Sharp,LG,Chunghwa,pricefixing (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:54:34 +0100 671738 http://pintini.blogspirit.com/archive/2008/11/12/information-literacy-12-11-08.html - Giglia, E. (2007) PubMed at its best. Useful skills to perform an effective search, save it and automatically receive updates . Europa Medicophyisica 43(3):pp. 427-437.(déposé sur E-LIS, 23/10/08)- Teens and Their Technologies in High School and College: Implications for Teaching and Learning(source: The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 26/10/08 / sur abonnement)"This paper presents the findings of two surveys comparing the frequency and use of various digital and communication technologies by high school and college students. Differences between populations, implications for teaching, and questions for further study are explored. Results suggest high school teens may bring facility with newer technologies to college."- Communications in Information LiteracyLe dernier n° (vol. 2, n° 1, 2008) est en ligne.- Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future (source: Educause, 29/10/08)- Tomorrow's Students, Today's K–12 Digital Learners: Are You Ready for Them? (source: Educause, 30/10/08)"Since 2003, the Speak Up National Research Project has collected authentic feedback about technology and education from over 1.1 million K–12 students. Learn about the expectations of today's digital learners for 21st-century learning environments, and how you can be prepared to address the technology needs of your future students."- Driving Substantive Teaching and Learning Improvement Using the Five Sloan-C Pillars of Quality (source: Educause, 31/10/08)"Instructional technology solutions can help educational institutions achieve substantive teaching and learning improvement if they are theoretically grounded, focused on achieving clear goals (using one or more of the five Sloan-C pillars of quality), designed to accomplish those goals, and evaluated based on their attainment of those goals."- A Guide to free ebooks(source: Springfield Township High School) (Source: pintiniblog) Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:24:14 +0100 672024 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/450976448/ A judge in September found that the print publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon would violate J.K. Rowling’s copyright. He issued the lowest possible fine permitted by statute. The ruling seemed to many observers, including me, to be a balanced reading of the law that was as fair as possible to both sides. However, the publisher has apparently decided not to leave well-enough alone. The Stanford “Copyright and Fair Use” blog reports that RDR Books (and its Stanford lawyer) have filed an appeal. (Found in RIAA-fighting lawyer Ray Beckerman’s blog via a Slashdot story.) There is no information yet on what grounds the appeal is founded—the only legal document available so far, the Notice of Appeal, just says in effect, “We’re appealing,” and none of the other blogs covering the story has much more information than that. Ars Technica does remind us that the case is a matter between the publisher and Rowling—the Lexicon’s actual author, James Vander Ark, “remains something of an ‘innocent bystander’ as this all plays out.” In related matters, it is interesting to note that the Internet version of the Harry Potter Lexicon has just won an American Library Association award, being listed as one of the ALA’s top 15 “Great Web Sites” for children. Meanwhile, Rowling’s lawyer in the Lexicon case, Professor Dale M. Cendali, gave a presentation at Harvard Law School about the differences between on-line and print intellectual property a few days ago. Cendali explained that Rowling has different standards for on-line and print references—something she feels is all right on the Internet will not necessarily fly as a printed book. And Rowling has endorsed (and written the foreword to) a book by another Harry Potter fan site webmaster. ... Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:31:41 +0100 671739 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/450912095/ Thirteen candidates, from companies ranging from McGraw-Hill and HarperCollins to Stanza’s developers, are competing for an open IDPF board seat. Voting will happen November 17-24, with results reported the 25th. I see quite a collection of talent among the candidates. An interesting possibility would be Andrew Savikas, from O’Reilly. He wants the IDPF to lobby Google to “add ePub to the export options within Google Docs.”  Fantastic idea! And if Google can join and help support the IDPF—short for the International Digital Publishing Forum—then so much the better. The IDPF is the e-book industry’s main trade group and developed ePub. Stanza-related candidate keen on continued ePub focus Yet another possibility would be Neeland Choksi, from Lexcycle, the developers of the DRMless Stanza iPhone app, an MIT grad who correctly thinks that ePub should be the IDPF’s main focus. Trust me, English majors. Trustworthy, comprehensive and widely used standards are a “must” if e-books are to be truly simple for nontechies. Links to all candidates’ statements Here are the candidates,with their statements linked, in the order the names appear on the IDPF site: Andy Weissberg (R.R. Bowker LLC) Ken Brooks (Cengage Learning) Gurvinder Batra (Aptara) Bob Kohn (RoyaltyShare, Inc.) Stephen W Smith (McGraw-Hill Professional) Scott Cook (codeMantra, LLC) James Macfarlane (Easypress Technologies) Ronald Schild (MVB Marketing) Andrew Savikas (O’Reilly Media) Robert Kasher (MPS Mobile) Neelan Choksi (Lexcycle Inc.) Leslie Hulse (HarperCollins Publishers) Russell Reeder (LibreDigital Inc.) Good luck to all! Related: IDPF call for board candidates: Chance to help reform the e-book industry and advance tech standards. Disclosure: I’ll be a speaker at a forthcoming O’Reilly conference. ... Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:30:07 +0100 671740 http://blog.case.edu/orgs/ksl/news/2008/11/12/international_news_commons_open_house_november_19th Join us in the afternoon on Wednesday November 19th at Kelvin Smith Library, for an Open House in the International News Commons! While you enjoy international appetizers, you can see what's new in the area, pick up some free items, and perhaps win a prize! International News you can use: - The International News Commons in the Lower Level now has a computer kiosk dedicated just to the PressDisplay database, where you can see over 700 newspapers in 36 languages. Practice reading a language (or hearing audio files of selected newspapers) and see what the news is around the world, on the day it's published in over 76 countries. - Have a seat on the sofa at the SCOLA TV screen and watch half hour programs in languages from around the world. Find out how Case individuals can see archived shows, as well. - KSL Electronic Resources Overview—staff will show you how to find out more places to get news, including other non-English resources, ethnic newspapers, ebooks, ejournals, and much more. Save the date and join us in the KSL International News Commons, and expand your world! November 19, 2008 2:00 -4:00 p.m. Kelvin Smith Library Lower Level International News Commons Door Prizes, Free Gifts, International Appetizers, and much more! (Source: KSL News Blog) Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:48:24 +0100 671529 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/450871801/palgrave-macmillan-and-nature.html "In response to the growing demand for digital resources Palgrave Macmillan will launch its own ebook platform, Palgrave Connect, in January 2009. Developed in association with Palgrave Macmillan's sister company, Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Connect offers libraries a flexible approach to building an ebook collection in the Humanities, Business and Social Sciences. From January over 4000 ebooks will be available in collections organised by year of publication and by discipline. 2009 collections will be updated quarterly with newly published titles. Both 2009 and backlist collections are available to purchase on a one-time fee perpetual access basis" (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:37:16 +0100 671687 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/450779845/ Lexcycle’s Stanza e-reader has drawn 500,000+ downloads from the iPhone App Store since mid-July, as suggested earlier. “The current version of Stanza is available in twelve different languages and has users in more than 50 countries,” says a Lexcycle release. The Stanza Online Catalog includes over 40,000 book and other items, “in more than 20 languages.” I wonder what the book download count is. Significantly, Stanza can display files in ePub, the IDPF standard, which participating publishers are using. That’s not all. Obviously not one of catalog entries carries a DRM taint; could a whole new book distribution system be aborning? Speaking of Stanza and the DRM issue… Also check out eReader Death Match: iPhone vs. Kindle, in the 26th story blog, associated with the HarperStudio imprint, which mentioned Stanza’s lack of DRM capability as a barrier. Photo shows the HarperStudio crew, with publisher Bob Miller at the left. Just what do you think of the HarperStudio blog’s statement, from last month, that “all roads lead back to DRM”? Will HarperStudio, billed as open to experimentation, please try do something about DRM, the way Pan Macmillan is? It should urge authors not to hamstring themselves with consumer-hostile “protection.” And then maybe it can offer ePub books for the growing iPhone market. Just in case HarperStudio is already attempting DRM bypasses or planning to, I’ll e-mail the company for the latest. Last I’d heard, people there were undecided. On the multiformat bundling front… Meanwhile the best of luck to Miller and colleagues with the imprint. Among other things, HarperStudio is striving for more sustainable publishing models—a laudable goal for appropriate books if the house treats writers fairly. ... Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:02:22 +0100 671741 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Librarian&diff=251346954&oldid=prev Date audit per mosnum/overlink/Other ← Previous revision Revision as of 14:55, 12 November 2008 Line 78: Line 78: Librarians must continually adapt to new formats for information, such as [[electronic journals]] and [[e-books]], which present both challenges and opportunities in providing access and promoting them to library patrons. Librarians must continually adapt to new formats for information, such as [[electronic journals]] and [[e-books]], which present both challenges and opportunities in providing access and promoting them to library patrons. - Increasing technological advance has presented the possibility of automating some aspects of traditional libraries. In [[2004]] a group of researchers in [[Spain]] developed the [[UJI Online Robot]]. This robot is able to navigate the library, look for the specified book, and upon its discovery, carefully take it from the shelf and deliver it to the user. Because of the robot's extremely limited function, its introduction into libraries poses little risk of the employment of librarians, whose duties are not defined by menial tasks such as the retrieval of books. + Increasing technological advance has presented the possibility of automating some aspects of traditional libraries. In 2004 a group of researchers in [[Spain]] developed the [[UJI Online Robot]]. This robot is able to navigate the library, look for the specified book, and upon its discovery, carefully take it from the shelf and deliver it to the user. Because of the robot's extremely limited function, its introduction into libraries poses little risk of the employment of librarians, whose duties are not defined by menial tasks such as the retrieval of books. == See also == == See also == (Source: Librarian - Revision history) Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:55:50 +0100 671567 h