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, 03 Sep 2010 02:54:53 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60309 Access Panlibus (from Talis); Summer, 2010 (28 pages; PDF) Here are some of the Articles and Columns in this Issue: 4. The Reading Agency Miranda McKearney updates us on the latest from The Reading Agency 6-7. Effective 2.0 library services Meredith Farkas shares her tips to avoid the 2.0 graveyard 8-9. Strictly online? E-books in the academic world The present and the [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:38:42 +0100 868682 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60308 + Baidu, Most Used Site in China Begins Selling e-Books (via Bloomberg News) Baidu also provides a popular search engine. Baidu info page in English. + China: The E-Reader Boom (by Yu Shujyun, Beijing Review) + OPDS [Open Publishing Distribution System Catalog] Primer on Feedbooks (by Paul Biba, TeleRead) + Video Notre Dame ereader study (by Paul Biba, [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:18:23 +0100 868683 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60304 Yesterday we received an email from the University of Chicago Press alerting us that their free e-book of the month was a replica of the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style from 1906. TeleRead reported the news. Paul Writes: Of course, as with all University of Chicago Press free e-books, this book comes wrapped [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:32:34 +0100 868687 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/B4OywNxfzUs/ Neil Crab has started a Smashwords book review site called, appropriately, Smashwords Books Reviewed. Neil is a Smashwords author himself, with a book of short stories, Believable Lies, and is about ready to publish a novel and has a second novel on the way. His first review is The Storm Killer, by Mike Jastrzebski. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:10:13 +0100 868668 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/-dHvbT37r0U/  The photo at the left is by “legendarypoet” and I was struck by what a beautiful b&w shot it is, of a b&w e-reader.  Click on the image to see his original, or click on screen name to see his photo page. I spent time yesterday, by request, taking more comparison photos of font and text differences between the Kindle 3 and Kindle 2, and I’ll get some up later on. I’ll touch instead this morning on some subjects that have come up in comment-areas here and in topics being discussed on the various Kindle forums. FULLY CHARGE A NEW KINDLE One thing to know as you open the Kindle package is that you can read on the Kindle while it’s charging.  Give it a full charge when it’s new — it usually takes about 2 hours, as it already has some battery life remaining.  Mine was halfway down.  The bottom LED light turns a bright, solid green when done. Q & A HOW WILL I MOVE KINDLE BOOKS FROM MY OTHER KINDLE TO THE NEW KINDLE 3? Amazon’s few instructions (in an email you receive before getting your Kindle and instructions ON your Kindle) are brief but well written and cover most of what you need.  On the Kindle, the guide is named “Transferring Your Kindle Content” – and since your books and subscriptions content is in your personal area/library on Amazon’s servers, you’ll need to have the Wireless turned on in order to access those servers. For newcomers: With the Kindle, that’s done by pressing the Menu button and selecting the topmost choice, “Turn Wireless On” — and of course that slot toggles the choice, to turn it “Off” — to conserve battery power. ... Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:27:22 +0100 868669 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/ke94mbEqUro/ This is a part of a post from author Lynn Viehl’s Paperback Writer blog.. It deserves to be read in full, but I must point out that I can’t verify anything that it contains: It’s been brought to my attention that Scribd.com has begun charging people to download my free e-books hosted on their site. To get around my copyright and the free distribution notice I’ve placed in each e-book, they are using an archive subscription scam to make their money (this also neatly avoids them having to pay me any royalties on the profits they make.) Evidently all the money they’ve been raking in from the Google ads they’ve posted on my e-book pages hasn’t been enough for them. I was not made aware of this new policy by Scribd at all; a reader kindly brought it to my attention. If you have free stories or documents hosted on this site, chances are they’re doing the same to you. I immediately contacted Scribd.com and demanded an explanation, which they provided at their leisure. Basically they washed their hands of any liability and ethics by telling me it was my problem, not theirs. In order to prevent Scribd from further profiting from my free books, I have to remove each e-book individually from their archives (for instructions on how to do this, see Scribd’s instructions here.) As I discovered this morning this is going to take a considerable amount of time for me to accomplish, and it’s not a permanent solution; they tell me I’ll have to check the documents regularly to see to it that they aren’t arbitrarily returned to the archive, where Scribd can then again start charging people to download them. I find the situation particularly ironic, as anyone can bootleg my work on the internet with no problem, yet when I try to give it away for free, greedy people still try to make a buck off it. Writers just can’t win. ... Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:07:05 +0100 868670 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/75rGU4yDwQg/ How Bookofjoe finds this stuff I don’t know. But, it shows you why I no longer read the 3 pound bricks that are being published. Give me an ereader over this any day! Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:53:27 +0100 868671 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/zINsZfq6ghY/ From Boing Boing. I hate serials so I won’t jump in, but I’ll probably buy the thing when it’s finished. The Mongoliad is live! This is the collaborative, participatory shared-world project from Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and pals. It’s an epic fantasy novel about the Mongol conquest, told in installment form, with lots of supplementary material (video, stills, short fiction, etc), and a strong audience participation component in the form of a Wikipedia-style concordance, fanfic, etc. You can read the free samples without registration, but you need an account to edit the “Pedia.” For $5.99 you get a six-month subscription to the main body of fiction; $9.99 gets you a year (you retain access to the fiction after your subscription expires, but don’t get any new material until you renew, which is a major plus in my view — much fairer than most online “subscriptions” that lock you out once you let your sub lapse). Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:30:24 +0100 868672 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/nOoyZW7EEXw/ From the press release: ebrary®, a leading provider of digital content products and technologies, today announced that its flagship subscription e-book database, Academic Complete™, now exceeds 50,000 titles from the world’s leading publishers. Academic Complete continues to be the largest multidisciplinary e-book database licensed to libraries throughout the world, under a simultaneous, multi-user access model with continual growth. Furthermore, ebrary’s Academic Complete, Government Complete™, Public Library Complete™, and College Complete™ are the only e-book products that enables libraries to upload and integrate their own digital materials such as theses and dissertations, yearbooks, and newspapers with DASH!™ (Data Sharing, Fast). Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:33:44 +0100 868673 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/SyEJKlahFkw/ More info, and other categories, here. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:07:00 +0100 868674 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/ZdUypXL0x4g/ Audible is now available in the Android Market. It features chapter navigation, bookmarking, sleep mode and button free mode. It will support wireless transfer from My Library to your android phone. More info here. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:03:52 +0100 868675 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/ZaHMEN3Ilv4/ This pressure by the US to keep the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement secret is unfathomable, especially in an Obama administration which professes more open government. Campaign contributions at work? From EurActiv: The United States is behind the wall of secrecy surrounding global trade talks to combat counterfeiting, say EU policy sources, who claim that American officials are refusing to let their European counterparts publish the draft agreement online. American officials blocked European attempts to publish the latest draft of the global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on an EU website after a Washington-based round of negotiations in August. The European Commission, which has been feeling the heat from lobby groups and the European Parliament for greater transparency in the negotiations, debriefed MEPs on the August negotiations yesterday (1 September). MEPs have been demanding to see the full negotiating text as they will be asked to give ACTA their consent in a vote later this year. “If we want to be leaders in the EU on transparency, we really have to put more pressure on our partners to have more transparency,” an Austrian Green MEP told EurActiv. Swedish MEP and Swedish Pirate Party member Christian Engström did not take part in yesterday’s debrief as he allegedly left a July meeting disgruntled that he could not distribute documents about the trade negotiations to fellow parliamentarians. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:07 +0100 868676 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/aed8EKSGaFk/ From the press release:   Poole Literary Festival in partnership with the Media School at Bournemouth University has established a prize for new media writing. The prize creates an exciting opportunity for writers working with new media to showcase their skills, provoke discussion and raise awareness of new media writing and the future of the written word. The competition deadline is approaching rapidly, with a cut-off point of Midday (GMT – UK time) on 15 September for entries. There are two awards, one for Best New Media Writing and one for Best Student New Media Writing. Prizes will be awarded at a prestigious Awards Ceremony on 31 October 2010. Please ensure all entries are received by the closing date. This is very important as in the interests of fairness to all entrants exceptions cannot be made for late submissions. Entry details: HYPERLINK “http://www.poolelitfest.com/new-media-prize.php” http://www.poolelitfest.com/new-media-prize.php   The judges of the New Media Writing Prize have a blog at: HYPERLINK “http://www.newmediawritingprize.co.uk/” http://www.newmediawritingprize.co.uk/   Poole Literary Festival: HYPERLINK “http://www.poolelitfest.com/index.php” http://www.poolelitfest.com/index.php Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:51:05 +0100 868677 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/oj7s4wRW9js/ As I mentioned below, we will be at the US release of the Tab, and now here is some great news for Kobo. From the Samsung press release: As a new category of device, the Samsung GALAXY Tab brings a wealth of mobile experiences. Its striking 7” TFT-LCD display delivers exciting mobile experience for watching films, viewing pictures, e-reading or sharing documents. In design, its light (380g) build provides perfect portability, with its svelte dimensions making it easy to grip and use. Supporting the latest Adobe Flash Player 10.1, the Samsung GALAXY Tab fully supports swift, seamless viewing of every single page of the web. The ‘Readers Hub,’ Samsung’s unique e-reading application, provides easy access to a vast digital library – from classical literature to the latest bestsellers and reference materials. At the same time, Samsung unveils ‘Media Hub,’ a gateway to a world of films and videos, and ‘Music Hub,’ an application giving access to a wide range of music tunes. The Samsung GALAXY Tab has made rich communication truly mobile; it presents a level of converged technology that moves beyond mobile or PC to an entirely new category. Users have new powers to consume, create and communicate from wherever they are. Powerful, always-on communication With 3G HSPA connectivity, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth® 3.0, the Samsung GALAXY Tab enhances users’ mobile communication on a whole new level. Video conferencing and push email on the large 7-inch display make communication more smooth and efficient. For voice telephony, the Samsung GALAXY Tab turns out to be a perfect speakerphone on the desk, or a mobile phone on the move via Bluetooth® headset. Powered by a Cortex A8 1.0GHz application processor, the Samsung GALAXY Tab is designed to deliver high performance whenever and wherever you are. At the same time, HD video contents are supported by a wide range of multimedia formats (DivX, XviD, MPEG4, H.263, H. ... Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:38:05 +0100 868678 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/OIp7LLzds_M/ As the new iPod Touches (iPods Touch?) have been announced, are pre-ordering, and shipping in a week or so, it’s also time to look at the “shadow market” that trails the new devices—the last-gen refurbs, for those people who don’t mind going a generation or two back in search of a bargain. While it’s true that last-gen iPod Touches won’t have the nifty new Retina Display, their screens have been “good enough” for e-reading up to now, and won’t be made any worse by something better coming out except by comparison. And looking at the Apple Store’s refurbished iPods page (which is subject to change after this is posted, due to people buying iPods or sending them back in), I see a 3rd-gen 64GB iPod Touch refurb listed at $319, which is down $30 or $40 from what it was when I checked it a few days before the Apple event. There’s also a 32GB 2nd-gen for $249, and a 32GB 3rd-gen for $229. (Yes, that’s right. The 3rd-gen is actually cheaper than the 2nd-gen. Perhaps someone accidentally got the prices reversed?) At the top of the page in the “Featured Products” section is an 8GB 2nd-gen for $149. Another interesting thing to me is where it says “save (some amount)” under the refurb pricing. For current-generation iPods, adding the savings to the price equals the list price of a brand new version of the item. Doing this for older-gen refurbs generates some interesting theoretical list prices that are only theoretical, because Apple doesn’t actually sell new units of anything except the current generation. So if a 3rd-gen 64GB model would cost $369 new ($319 + $50 “savings”), it doesn’t really mean anything because you can’t get the “new” version, at that price or otherwise. Taking a few moments for a quick unscientific survey of eBay, it looks like prices are about the same to a little higher as the refurbs on the Apple store. ... Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:15:00 +0100 868679 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/kkJF/~3/ERMqhjfd5aI/digitale-bibliotheekvernieuwing-een.html Frank Huysmans attendeerde mij zojuist op het rapport Een krimpend perspectief: Gemeentelijke bezuinigingen op openbaar bibliotheekwerk in de periode 2010-2013. Nadat ik dat document ook op Slideshare had gezet las ik het 'diagonaal' en scande ik het op bevindingen en aanbevelingen met betrekking tot digitale ontwikkelingen. In het persbericht (PDF) staat "Bezuinigingen bedreiging voor innovatiekracht openbare bibliotheken", dus ik was wel benieuwd in hoeverre bedreigde bibliotheken nadenken over bezuinigen door gebruik te maken van open source software en vrij beschikbare tools op het web, of door het inzetten van nieuwe media, in plaats van de traditionele en geldverslindende methoden en technieken. Het resultaat is, uhm, teleurstellend. Het enige dat ik lees over digitale ontwikkelingen in dit kader: Er is grote behoefte aan een snelle invoering van de digitale bibliotheek. Een landelijke catalogus en landelijk geregelde mogelijkheden voor het ebook bieden nieuwe mogelijkheden in het licht van de afnemende spreiding van de bibliotheekvoorzieningen.en: Tegelijkertijd zullen, wanneer de landelijke ontwikkelingen doorzetten, de digitale mogelijkheden toenemen en zullen gebruikers steeds meer gebruik kunnen maken van de digitale bibliotheek. Overigens geven bibliotheken aan te verwachten dat door de bezuinigingen juist de invoering van de digitale bibliotheek onder druk zal komen te staan."Goed, dat is het dus, voor wat betreft het nieuwe web en het nieuwe werken. De in aanbouw zijnde Nationale catalogus en 'iets met ebooks' worden als digitale kansen genoemd en verworden waarschijnlijk tot het nieuwe mantra in de beleidsstukken voor de komende jaren. Hebben we nu echt alleen de hoop op die dingen gevestigd, met z'n allen? Ondanks deze constatering is het rapport interessant leesvoer. Het geeft een aardig inkijkje in de dillema's waar veel bibliotheken mee worstelen. ... Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:22:00 +0100 868472 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/DxFY11ON8xo/ Ben Kunz at Bloomberg Businessweek has an interesting post on Apple’s pricing practices. Kunz posits that Apple uses psychological pricing tricks such as reference prices and price “decoys” to boost sales of more expensive items. I can’t say I agree with all of his points, but he brings up some interesting things to consider. Kunz first discusses price decoys, items that don’t really look like very good deals in order to make slightly better items look much better. He suggests that the rumored 7” iPad is such a price decoy, to make a 10”, more featureful version look like a bargain and defend against the impending tidal wave of lower-priced tablets from competitors. Decoys explain why Apple often sells each gadget in a pricing series, such as the new iPod Touch’s $229, $299, and $399 price points for different storage capacities. You may gladly spend $229 to get a hot media player, thinking it’s a deal vs. the highest-priced version … and not blink that you could instead buy an iPhone 4 at the lower price of $199 with more features. The $399 "decoy" has clouded your judgment. Apple wins the best of both worlds—stoking demand for products that look like bargains and for all the decoys it sells at much higher prices. Yes, some people will spend $399 for a music player with slightly better technology—and Apple makes even fatter margins. Here Kunz brings up a point he will hammer on a couple more times over the course of the article: that the iPod Touch is more expensive than the more-capable iPhone, therefore Apple must employ eeeevil pricing tricks to sell it. I’ll come back to that in a bit. A couple of Kunz’s other points have to do with setting a reference price—introducing something at a high price, then discounting it quickly so that it looks like a bargain compared to its original asking price (as Apple did with the originally $599 iPhone). ... Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:15:00 +0100 868465 http://www.lisnews.org/two_minds_about_books Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” but not about the plot. The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad. And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet. Full article in the NYT (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:18:27 +0100 868592 http://lisnews.org/two_minds_about_books Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” but not about the plot. The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad. And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet. Full article in the NYT (Source: LISNews.org) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:18:27 +0100 868425 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LawLibrarianBlog/~3/fgOBAP2AFlY/when-are-ereaders-a-good-deal.html On the WSJ ROI blog, Brett Arends provides advice on personal finance matters. Recently, he offered several tips on whether eReaders are a good deal. He recommends that casual readers should save their money simply by not joining the eReader... (Source: Law Librarian Blog) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0100 868559 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60269 Thanks (as always) to Paul Biba at TeleRead for alerting us to a recently published white paper from ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) titled, "Handheld E-Book Readers and Scholarship: Report and Reader Survey." ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) recently concluded its survey to test the use of digital scholarly monographs for research purposes on various handheld reading devices, [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:07:06 +0100 868476 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/teleread-to-implement-recaptcha/ Along with the site redesign, I’ve asked our owners, NAPCO, to implement reCAPTCHA. You have undoubtedly seen this on other sites you’ve visited. Since May we have received over 172,000 spam comments. Why is this important? It’s important because all those spam comments are held by our filter for review before being deleted. That means that Chris and I have reviewed over 172,000 spam comments to be sure that they do not contain false positives. We regularly find false positives and have to approve them. This isn’t the end, though, because an “approved” spam then becomes, in WordPress’s wisdom, a pending comment and we have to go into the pending comments area to approve the false spam for posting – a two step process. Quite honestly, this is taking too much time. So we’re going to try to see how well reCAPTCHA works. At least it will contribute to TeleRead’s mission. Here’s the scoop on it, in case you don’t know: reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly. But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:30:18 +0100 868278 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/D0JN8cYZ9J8/ Along with the site redesign, I’ve asked our owners, NAPCO, to implement reCAPTCHA. You have undoubtedly seen this on other sites you’ve visited. Since May we have received over 172,000 spam comments. Why is this important? It’s important because all those spam comments are held by our filter for review before being deleted. That means that Chris and I have reviewed over 172,000 spam comments to be sure that they do not contain false positives. We regularly find false positives and have to approve them. This isn’t the end, though, because an “approved” spam then becomes, in WordPress’s wisdom, a pending comment and we have to go into the pending comments area to approve the false spam for posting – a two step process. Quite honestly, this is taking too much time. So we’re going to try to see how well reCAPTCHA works. At least it will contribute to TeleRead’s mission. Here’s the scoop on it, in case you don’t know: reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly. But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:30:18 +0100 868276 http://joblist.ala.org/modules/jobseeker/controller.cfm?rssjobid=15579 Electronic Resources Librarian (St. Olaf College, Nortthfield, Minnesota) St. Olaf is seeking a library professional who recognizes St. Olaf's unique place in higher education as a college of the church, an exemplary national liberal arts college, and a leader in global education. The Electronic Resources Librarian provides leadership to the Libraries in the rapidly developing realm of electronic collections and manages the Libraries' electronic resources including e-journals, research and reference databases, e-books, online sound and multimedia databases, and archival electronic document collections. The Electronic Resources Librarian also provides reference services to students and faculty. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:20:01 +0100 868211 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kraftylibrarian/OLay/~3/1Ncy1KeD3dc/ Last week I sat in on the Springer LibraryZone Virtual eBook webinar and it was a very interesting discussion.   Many libraries (especially academic) are investigating and collecting e-books in lieu of some printed text.  How much they are collecting and the nature by which they to the selection process seems to vary according each library, their type, size, consortia involvement, usage data, etc.  The reasons why and how much they bought all varied but the frustrations, questions, and concerns the faced were very similar and seemed on the minds of every librarian regardless of their library, type, size, consortia involvement, etc.  So what were these concerns? DRM- Digital rights restrictions.  It seems that every publisher has different rules and while some things can be put on electronic reserve others cannot.  While some things can be shared through ILL or on Blackboard others cannot.  This is not only a particular frustration among librarians but also patrons who aren’t as savvy with copyright issues.  The patrons get frustrated with DRM restrictions for library materials and they are even more frustrated with the restrictions for e-books they buy themselves.  Their view is, “I bought, don’t tell me how I am allowed to use it.”  I am not saying this is always the right or wrong thought process, but it is their thoughts and to a certain extent librarians. Access – How do people find your e-books was a common question among the librarians.  The e-books publishers don’t always have decent MARC records (if they have any) that can be easily added to the catalog.  So the cataloger must work to add them into the catalog, yet more and more patrons really don’t use the catalog these days.  They would rather randomly search the library’s website or Google. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:10:53 +0100 868390 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/jobs-reveals-new-ipod-line-apple-tv-ios-4-1-itunes-10/ Steve Jobs had some interesting things to reveal today. In the iPod line, the Shuffle, Nano, and Touch get refreshes. No mention at all of the Classic line; I suppose they’ve had their day. The Shuffle moves forward by taking a step back—the new one resembles a smaller version of the second in form factor, bringing back the buttons everybody missed from the third, but with the Voiceover and other nifty features that people did like from the third. The Nano loses the physical controls and goes multitouch, looking like a smaller version of the iPod Touch (but without apps). Now we know what that mysterious small square touchscreen we mentioned in an Apple rumor post I don’t have time to dig up right now was for. And the Touch is about as expected. Slimmer than ever, Retina Display, A4 chip, Facetime camera, and rear-facing HD video camera. No mention of photographic capability, so presumably it’s a video-only camera like the one from last year’s Nano. If it can’t take photos, that’s a bit disappointing (especially with the new HDR photo capacity in OS 4.1), but on the whole it’s still a considerable improvement over the previous generation. Price points remain the same $229/$299/$399; it is available for pre-order today and ships later this month. Even Steve Jobs pointed out one of the big benefits it has over the iPhone: "A lot of people call it the ‘iPhone without the phone’. It’s also an iPhone without a contract." Of course, it doesn’t include everything that the iPhone does; there was no mention of 3G wireless or GPS, two of the features I know at least some people had been anticipating. (I must admit to being so impressed by the presentation, I forgot to snap screenshots of it, and don’t have time to hunt for any now. Oops.) OS 4.1 includes a number of bug fixes, HD video upload to the Internet over wifi, TV show rentals, and the premiere of Game Center. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:52:01 +0100 868280 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/_wIe35ze4P0/ Steve Jobs had some interesting things to reveal today. In the iPod line, the Shuffle, Nano, and Touch get refreshes. No mention at all of the Classic line; I suppose they’ve had their day. The Shuffle moves forward by taking a step back—the new one resembles a smaller version of the second in form factor, bringing back the buttons everybody missed from the third, but with the Voiceover and other nifty features that people did like from the third. The Nano loses the physical controls and goes multitouch, looking like a smaller version of the iPod Touch (but without apps). Now we know what that mysterious small square touchscreen we mentioned in an Apple rumor post I don’t have time to dig up right now was for. And the Touch is about as expected. Slimmer than ever, Retina Display, A4 chip, Facetime camera, and rear-facing HD video camera. No mention of photographic capability, so presumably it’s a video-only camera like the one from last year’s Nano. If it can’t take photos, that’s a bit disappointing (especially with the new HDR photo capacity in OS 4.1), but on the whole it’s still a considerable improvement over the previous generation. Price points remain the same $229/$299/$399; it is available for pre-order today and ships later this month. Even Steve Jobs pointed out one of the big benefits it has over the iPhone: "A lot of people call it the ‘iPhone without the phone’. It’s also an iPhone without a contract." Of course, it doesn’t include everything that the iPhone does; there was no mention of 3G wireless or GPS, two of the features I know at least some people had been anticipating. (I must admit to being so impressed by the presentation, I forgot to snap screenshots of it, and don’t have time to hunt for any now. Oops.) OS 4.1 includes a number of bug fixes, HD video upload to the Internet over wifi, TV show rentals, and the premiere of Game Center. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:52:01 +0100 868277 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/sep/01/borders-suffers-revenue-fall Borders book retail chain suffers sales fallThe continuing woes of the book industry were underscored today when the US retail chain Borders, which pulled out of Britain last year, said its losses had increased amid sharply falling revenues.American book retailers, who have been struggling to compete with online rivals and supermarkets, now face the threat of digital books, which have begun to appeal to a wider audience.In Britain the picture is little better, and investors have begun to put pressure on HMV to rid itself of Waterstone's, the only remaining large high street book chain.Borders said like-for-like sales at stores open for more than a year had dropped 6.8% in the second quarter. It made losses of $46.7m (£30.2m), compared with the $45.6m loss recorded in the same quarter last year. Revenue fell 12% to $526m.US rival Barnes & Noble is also deep in the red, and reported losses of $62.5m for its fiscal first quarter, ending in July.Borders arrived in Britain in 1998, promising to revolutionise book-buying, and opened a chain of 45 stores. But by 2007, the company admitted it was considering a sale of the UK division. In the summer of 2009, there was a management buyout; the new owners lasted only a few months before going into administration.Borders sold the stationery chain Paperchase in July for $31m in an attempt to shore up its finances.The US chain has launched its own website for physical sales and a digital store for e-books to be read on handheld devices; 6% of book sales in the US are now digital. Borders also plans to extend its range of electronic book readers for sale in store – it currently sells six, including a co-branded device with manufacturer Kobo.The pace of the change in the market was illustrated in July, when Amazon announced that sales of digital books on its US website had begun to outstrip hardback books in volume terms. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:58:37 +0100 868197 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BabyBoomerLibrarian/~3/wm4Aw0ZbXe8/jobs-systems-librarian-university-of-la.html #3041 – Systems Librarian, University of La Verne  -- Wilson Library The University of La Verne invites applicants for a Systems Librarian (Assistant Professor), a non-tenure track 12-month faculty appointment. Reporting directly to the University Librarian, the Systems Librarian will use a high level of technical, instructional, and interpersonal skills. The responsibilities of this position include administering and providing technical support for all aspects of library technology including the Innovative Interfaces Millennium integrated library system, hardware and software installations and maintenance, library wireless, opac, proxy server, online resources and services such as LINK+, ILLIAD, ERM, OCLC, link resolver, research databases, e-journals, e-books, etc.; assisting the University Librarian with technology planning and project implementation; serving as primary liaison with the university’s Office of Information Technology to coordinate all library systems’ installation, upgrade and maintenance; supervise one full-time staff member (Electronic Services Technician); serving as liaison to database and online service providers; providing technology training to library staff; providing research consultation services to library users in a multi-disciplinary environment using multiple formats (in-person, e-mail, phone, and chat); developing, promoting, and delivering effective library research skills/information literacy instructional sessions, seminars and workshops for both on-campus and off-campus programs; developing the library collection by selecting materials for acquisition in all formats; serving as liaison with selected academic departments; maintaining a program of professional development. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:44:00 +0100 868359 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60243 The monthly lists of the most requested eBooks and Audiobooks, August, 2010) are now available from OverDrive. Below is the number one title in each category The complete list provide the Top 10 titles in each of the eight categories. Most Downloaded Audiobook from the Library - Adult Fiction 1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:24:41 +0100 868316 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/1906-chicago-manual-of-style-free-but-not-drm-free/ This month’s free e-book from the University of Chicago Press is a replica of the very first, 1906 edition of the Chicago Manual of Style to commemorate the 16th edition of that work. Of course, as with all University of Chicago Press free e-books, this book comes wrapped in Adobe Digital Editions DRM—even though, since it was originally published in 1906, this book is well within the public domain by now. (Oddly, I can’t seem to find any public domain version of it on-line, at least not in Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, or Manybooks. There is a somewhat rough scan of a 1911 edition on Wikimedia Commons, however.) It’s a pity that this press—an academic press, yet, and thus part of an organization supposedly dedicated to advancing the spread of knowledge—should choose to impose technological restrictions upon a document that should legally be free to all. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:47:03 +0100 868282 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/4YACnoATvio/ This month’s free e-book from the University of Chicago Press is a replica of the very first, 1906 edition of the Chicago Manual of Style to commemorate the 16th edition of that work. Of course, as with all University of Chicago Press free e-books, this book comes wrapped in Adobe Digital Editions DRM—even though, since it was originally published in 1906, this book is well within the public domain by now. (Oddly, I can’t seem to find any public domain version of it on-line, at least not in Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, or Manybooks. There is a somewhat rough scan of a 1911 edition on Wikimedia Commons, however.) It’s a pity that this press—an academic press, yet, and thus part of an organization supposedly dedicated to advancing the spread of knowledge—should choose to impose technological restrictions upon a document that should legally be free to all. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:47:03 +0100 868279 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/teleread-meets-with-sony-in-new-york-to-see-sonys-new-ereaders-impression-sophisticated-refinement/ I just spent about 45 minutes with Phil Lubell, Vice President of Digital Reading, to get a hands-on with the new ereaders. All three readers are touch enabled and Phil started out by saying that, much to Sony’s surprise, the $100 premium old Sony Touch had a larger demand than the cheaper Pocket Edition. Surveys they have done have shown that 78% of readers want touch and 81% of reading is done in homes. The new readers use the Pearl screen, just like the Kindle, and it is remarkable that Sony’s new touch interface does not seem to interfere with the screen’s sharpness or contrast at all. I couldn’t tell the difference between their touch screen and my Kindle 3. Page turns are definitely faster than my Kindle 3 and the units have buttons to turn pages, as well as using a swipe on the screen. They will come with 12 dictionaries in various languages, including one American English and 1 British English dictionary. In a very neat feature, the units will keep a log of all words that have been looked up. The Pocket Edition is 41% lighter than the Kindle and 51% lighter than the Nook. All units will allow for customizable screen savers, allow books to be stored in collections (folders) and can be engraved. One option that is unique, as far as I know, is that you can adjust the contrast and brightness of the screen, and the unit has various settings for screen detail, among other things. These adjustments could be very important in viewing PDFs. The units also have “Intelligent PDF Zoom” which divided the PDF into 4 quadrants. The Daily Edition is actually lighter than the old Pocket Edition and all three are incredibly light given the solidity of the build. Of course, only the Daily Edition has WiFi and 3G, which is a surprise. Phil said that Sony’s surveys showed that most people don’t care about this feature, especially since readers tend to buy more than one book at a time. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0100 868283 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/QMraCNi04SU/ I just spent about 45 minutes with Phil Lubell, Vice President of Digital Reading, to get a hands-on with the new ereaders. All three readers are touch enabled and Phil started out by saying that, much to Sony’s surprise, the $100 premium old Sony Touch had a larger demand than the cheaper Pocket Edition. Surveys they have done have shown that 78% of readers want touch and 81% of reading is done in homes. The new readers use the Pearl screen, just like the Kindle, and it is remarkable that Sony’s new touch interface does not seem to interfere with the screen’s sharpness or contrast at all. I couldn’t tell the difference between their touch screen and my Kindle 3. Page turns are definitely faster than my Kindle 3 and the units have buttons to turn pages, as well as using a swipe on the screen. They will come with 12 dictionaries in various languages, including one American English and 1 British English dictionary. In a very neat feature, the units will keep a log of all words that have been looked up. The Pocket Edition is 41% lighter than the Kindle and 51% lighter than the Nook. All units will allow for customizable screen savers, allow books to be stored in collections (folders) and can be engraved. One option that is unique, as far as I know, is that you can adjust the contrast and brightness of the screen, and the unit has various settings for screen detail, among other things. These adjustments could be very important in viewing PDFs. The units also have “Intelligent PDF Zoom” which divided the PDF into 4 quadrants. The Daily Edition is actually lighter than the old Pocket Edition and all three are incredibly light given the solidity of the build. Of course, only the Daily Edition has WiFi and 3G, which is a surprise. Phil said that Sony’s surveys showed that most people don’t care about this feature, especially since readers tend to buy more than one book at a time. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0100 868281 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/BLAb6lspLVM/ A couple of further notes about Apple’s event, due to start in just over an hour. Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac has an exclusive tip from an insider who explains that the streaming process is going to serve as a stress test for Apple’s new server farm, which will later be used to stream a version of iTunes for iOS devices. Kahney notes: Some have speculated that Apple is streaming the show to thwart livebloggers, who may have sabotaged Jobs’ iPhone 4 keynote at Apple’s WWDC event in June. Problems with the venue’s WiFi network ruined Jobs’ FaceTime demo and forced him to ask bloggers in the audience to shut their laptops to reduce the strain on the wireless network. He dismisses the suggestion of some that Jobs wants greater control over the delivery of the news, but notes that if Apple livestreams future events it could mean an end to the considerable traffic that the events bring sites that liveblog them. Meanwhile, MacRumors explains the limitation of Apple’s livestream to iOS devices only, and suggests a possible workaround for viewing it without Apple products. Apple is using its new HTTP Live Streaming technology, which has been proposed as a standard but largely implemented only by Apple so far. Among its advantages include that it avoids router/firewall issues since the stream goes out over standard http. Non-Apple-owning viewers might be able to watch the event anyway, to some extent, as long as they keep manually refreshing the stream’s playlist file. And that should be the last I’ll say on the subject until after the event! I may livetweet it under the #teleread hashtag, however. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:59:23 +0100 868285 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/the-music-event-why-apple-is-streaming-it-and-how-to-watch-without-apple/ A couple of further notes about Apple’s event, due to start in just over an hour. Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac has an exclusive tip from an insider who explains that the streaming process is going to serve as a stress test for Apple’s new server farm, which will later be used to stream a version of iTunes for iOS devices. Kahney notes: Some have speculated that Apple is streaming the show to thwart livebloggers, who may have sabotaged Jobs’ iPhone 4 keynote at Apple’s WWDC event in June. Problems with the venue’s WiFi network ruined Jobs’ FaceTime demo and forced him to ask bloggers in the audience to shut their laptops to reduce the strain on the wireless network. He dismisses the suggestion of some that Jobs wants greater control over the delivery of the news, but notes that if Apple livestreams future events it could mean an end to the considerable traffic that the events bring sites that liveblog them. Meanwhile, MacRumors explains the limitation of Apple’s livestream to iOS devices only, and suggests a possible workaround for viewing it without Apple products. Apple is using its new HTTP Live Streaming technology, which has been proposed as a standard but largely implemented only by Apple so far. Among its advantages include that it avoids router/firewall issues since the stream goes out over standard http. Non-Apple-owning viewers might be able to watch the event anyway, to some extent, as long as they keep manually refreshing the stream’s playlist file. And that should be the last I’ll say on the subject until after the event! I may livetweet it under the #teleread hashtag, however. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:59:23 +0100 868284 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/new-sony-readers-announced/ I’m in NYC waiting to get a hands-on with the new devices. However I just received this press release which I’m reprinting in full.  Pictures at the end of the release: SONY BRINGS DIGITAL READING EXPERIENCE TO LIFE WITH THE LAUNCH OF ITS NEW LINE OF READERS New Readers Feature Sony’s Unique Touch Screens with Anti-Glare Technology for the Optimal Digital Book Reading Experience SAN DIEGO, September 1, 2010 – Continuing to provide book lovers with the most natural, immersive digital reading experience, Sony today announced the launch of its beautifully-designed new line of Reader digital books, including the new Reader Pocket Edition™, Reader Touch Edition™ and, in the US, the wireless Reader Daily Edition™.  The new line of Readers features a host of new design and technology enhancements that make them the perfect device for any reader’s lifestyle. “Today, we’re excited to announce not just the availability of the Reader Touch Edition and Pocket Edition in the countries we already serve but also plans to expand the Reader line to previously untapped markets,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “We take a thoughtful approach to country expansion, including Italy, Spain, Australia, Japan and China, working with local bookstores to ensure content is compatible, relevant and in the appropriate language for each market.” The new Reader models bring a fresh level of flare to e-reading with colorful, elegant aluminum designs and all new, highly responsive touch screens. In addition to the new devices in the US, Sony announced development of a set of applications for iPhone and the Android Marketplace to extend the Reader experience across multiple portable devices. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:18:37 +0100 868287 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/ohaadWbWw5Y/ I’m in NYC waiting to get a hands-on with the new devices. However I just received this press release which I’m reprinting in full.  Pictures at the end of the release: SONY BRINGS DIGITAL READING EXPERIENCE TO LIFE WITH THE LAUNCH OF ITS NEW LINE OF READERS New Readers Feature Sony’s Unique Touch Screens with Anti-Glare Technology for the Optimal Digital Book Reading Experience SAN DIEGO, September 1, 2010 – Continuing to provide book lovers with the most natural, immersive digital reading experience, Sony today announced the launch of its beautifully-designed new line of Reader digital books, including the new Reader Pocket Edition™, Reader Touch Edition™ and, in the US, the wireless Reader Daily Edition™.  The new line of Readers features a host of new design and technology enhancements that make them the perfect device for any reader’s lifestyle. “Today, we’re excited to announce not just the availability of the Reader Touch Edition and Pocket Edition in the countries we already serve but also plans to expand the Reader line to previously untapped markets,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “We take a thoughtful approach to country expansion, including Italy, Spain, Australia, Japan and China, working with local bookstores to ensure content is compatible, relevant and in the appropriate language for each market.” The new Reader models bring a fresh level of flare to e-reading with colorful, elegant aluminum designs and all new, highly responsive touch screens. In addition to the new devices in the US, Sony announced development of a set of applications for iPhone and the Android Marketplace to extend the Reader experience across multiple portable devices. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:18:37 +0100 868286 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/CQTdZsvuRRQ/ Katie Gatto at our sister blog Appletell has made a post explaining how to determine which e-books in your iTunes listing are DRM-protected and which are DRM-free. It is a useful little tutorial for those who are not sure (or, for that matter, bother to purchase iBooks titles in the first place). However, annoyingly, Gatto repeatedly conflates DRM with copyright. She begins the article with “If you want to know which of your ebooks are DRM free and which have been protected by copyright,” then mentions that this process “will let you know if a book has DRM protections or if you’re free to share it with others,” and says that if a book is listed as protected, “it has a copyright attached.” She then concludes, “Use accordingly to avoid lawsuits.” Of course, if you use according to her advice, you probably won’t be avoiding lawsuits. It should be needless to say that plenty of non-DRM-protected e-books (such as those sold by Baen, or posted online by Cory Doctorow) are fully copyright-protected—meaning that while you might be able to share them with friends, you are not necessarily legally free to unless the holder of the copyright allows it. Might a decreased understanding of copyright be one of the casualties of the media industry’s reliance on DRM? I didn’t think the fact that everything is copyrighted under current copyright law (including books, e-books, Internet posts, and even scribblings on the backs of napkins) was that hard to understand, let alone that foregoing DRM does not mean you are foregoing your right to protection under the law. Or perhaps peer-to-peer is to blame for this “anything not strictly forbidden must be permitted” attitude. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:15:00 +0100 868289 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/how-to-for-determining-if-ibooks-are-drmed-misses-copyright-point/ Katie Gatto at our sister blog Appletell has made a post explaining how to determine which e-books in your iTunes listing are DRM-protected and which are DRM-free. It is a useful little tutorial for those who are not sure (or, for that matter, bother to purchase iBooks titles in the first place). However, annoyingly, Gatto repeatedly conflates DRM with copyright. She begins the article with “If you want to know which of your ebooks are DRM free and which have been protected by copyright,” then mentions that this process “will let you know if a book has DRM protections or if you’re free to share it with others,” and says that if a book is listed as protected, “it has a copyright attached.” She then concludes, “Use accordingly to avoid lawsuits.” Of course, if you use according to her advice, you probably won’t be avoiding lawsuits. It should be needless to say that plenty of non-DRM-protected e-books (such as those sold by Baen, or posted online by Cory Doctorow) are fully copyright-protected—meaning that while you might be able to share them with friends, you are not necessarily legally free to unless the holder of the copyright allows it. Might a decreased understanding of copyright be one of the casualties of the media industry’s reliance on DRM? I didn’t think the fact that everything is copyrighted under current copyright law (including books, e-books, Internet posts, and even scribblings on the backs of napkins) was that hard to understand, let alone that foregoing DRM does not mean you are foregoing your right to protection under the law. Or perhaps peer-to-peer is to blame for this “anything not strictly forbidden must be permitted” attitude. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:15:00 +0100 868288 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/ou55lWkhfJ8/ Received the following email. The report is quite interesting, but is way too long to summarize here: ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) recently concluded its survey to test the use of digital scholarly monographs for research purposes on various handheld reading devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Apple’s iPhone. HEB has just published the detailed results of this survey and an overview of the process of converting titles for handhelds, including costs, in a new whitepaper available at: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/heb-whitepaper-3.html Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:57:25 +0100 868291 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/handheld-e-book-readers-and-scholarship-report-and-reader-survey/ Received the following email. The report is quite interesting, but is way too long to summarize here: ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) recently concluded its survey to test the use of digital scholarly monographs for research purposes on various handheld reading devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Apple’s iPhone. HEB has just published the detailed results of this survey and an overview of the process of converting titles for handhelds, including costs, in a new whitepaper available at: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/heb-whitepaper-3.html Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:57:25 +0100 868290 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/Zpi8AFlrtqE/ From her article in the Sacramento Book Review: As I read through the month, I snuck looks at the various eBook blogs and industry news pages that I frequent, adding comments where incited to and re-tweeting when especially impressed. A particular piece by J. A. Konrath caught my eye on Monday, titled The Changing Face of Publishing; in it, Konrath voices fears that the paper book industry may be spiraling downward. “I’m sensing a shift.” he writes, “And this shift will likely prove fatal for many of the parties involved. If, as I suspect, publishers are going to print fewer books, that will result in a death spiral. Fewer books printed means fewer sold in bookstores, which will no longer be able to stay open. Without bookstore orders, publishers will print even fewer books. And so on.” After reading the above, I glanced over at the sizable stack of advance copies on my backyard table and realized that if Konrath’s prediction played out, my lengthy season of receiving free paper books to review might also be waning. Advancing technology takes its toll – remember metal typewriters with hand-turned rollers? I saw one the other day on display in an antique store window; it was selling for $300. As long as paper books are around I’ll read, review and display them on my shelves, encouraging my children to take down a volume when bored, or curl up with them by the fire on a windy winter night, reading from tangible pages in the flickering firelight, yet I will also continue to write eBooks and self-publish online, for that’s where the money is. No one buys the paper versions of our books anymore – they are simply too expensive. The air surrounding my stack of books has a melancholy feel to it all of the sudden, as if an end to an era looms, while under it another gathers strength. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:50:36 +0100 868293 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/author-meredith-greene-talks-about-ebooks/ From her article in the Sacramento Book Review: As I read through the month, I snuck looks at the various eBook blogs and industry news pages that I frequent, adding comments where incited to and re-tweeting when especially impressed. A particular piece by J. A. Konrath caught my eye on Monday, titled The Changing Face of Publishing; in it, Konrath voices fears that the paper book industry may be spiraling downward. “I’m sensing a shift.” he writes, “And this shift will likely prove fatal for many of the parties involved. If, as I suspect, publishers are going to print fewer books, that will result in a death spiral. Fewer books printed means fewer sold in bookstores, which will no longer be able to stay open. Without bookstore orders, publishers will print even fewer books. And so on.” After reading the above, I glanced over at the sizable stack of advance copies on my backyard table and realized that if Konrath’s prediction played out, my lengthy season of receiving free paper books to review might also be waning. Advancing technology takes its toll – remember metal typewriters with hand-turned rollers? I saw one the other day on display in an antique store window; it was selling for $300. As long as paper books are around I’ll read, review and display them on my shelves, encouraging my children to take down a volume when bored, or curl up with them by the fire on a windy winter night, reading from tangible pages in the flickering firelight, yet I will also continue to write eBooks and self-publish online, for that’s where the money is. No one buys the paper versions of our books anymore – they are simply too expensive. The air surrounding my stack of books has a melancholy feel to it all of the sudden, as if an end to an era looms, while under it another gathers strength. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:50:36 +0100 868292 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/aptara-offering-free-webinar-on-ebooks-apps-and-print/ From the Aptara site: You’ve committed to an eBook strategy for growth. Now what? One of the most perplexing problems facing publishers is how to master the technology, workflow and format variables required to optimize eBook production, while still producing print and piloting Apps in parallel. The solution lies in modifying your publishing processes to enable cost-effective, multi-channel output. In this webinar, eBook and industry experts from Gilbane Group and Aptara describe an approachable single content strategy for achieving production flexibility and monetizing content assets in an explosive, mobile-centric market. Event Date: 09/28/2010 11:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:46:20 +0100 868295 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/S-weF0xPXNw/ From the Aptara site: You’ve committed to an eBook strategy for growth. Now what? One of the most perplexing problems facing publishers is how to master the technology, workflow and format variables required to optimize eBook production, while still producing print and piloting Apps in parallel. The solution lies in modifying your publishing processes to enable cost-effective, multi-channel output. In this webinar, eBook and industry experts from Gilbane Group and Aptara describe an approachable single content strategy for achieving production flexibility and monetizing content assets in an explosive, mobile-centric market. Event Date: 09/28/2010 11:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:46:20 +0100 868294 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/hannspree-to-release-tablet-in-november/ Hannspree has released some good products in the past so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with a tablet. According to Liliputing, they will release a 10 inch tablet with a 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, 16GB of internal storage, and Google Android 2.2 Froyo. It will also have WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI output, a USB port and microSD card slot. It comes with a 3500mAh battery and can handle 1080p HD video playback thanks to the NVIDIA chipset. It will be released in Europe and there is no word about a US release. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:24:08 +0100 868297 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/CIe1xdiHPtM/ Hannspree has released some good products in the past so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with a tablet. According to Liliputing, they will release a 10 inch tablet with a 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, 16GB of internal storage, and Google Android 2.2 Froyo. It will also have WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI output, a USB port and microSD card slot. It comes with a 3500mAh battery and can handle 1080p HD video playback thanks to the NVIDIA chipset. It will be released in Europe and there is no word about a US release. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:24:08 +0100 868296 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/new-ipod-touch-could-replace-several-gadgets-at-once/ Sometimes we get accused of becoming an Apple blog, we post so much Apple-centric stuff, but there’s a reason for that. Apple might be obnoxious in its app approval behavior, closed in its development platform, and prudish in its gatekeeping, but there’s no denying that they make some damned fine e-book reading devices. My iPod Touch was my sole e-reader for most of the two years I had it, and I still miss it badly. Matt Buchanan makes a similar point on Gizmodo, where he says that if the rumors are true about the new iPod Touch that will (presumably) be revealed tomorrow and it ends up with the same retina display, Facetime camera, and 5-megapixel rear camera as the iPhone, it has the potential to be a device “serial killer”—replacing just about every gadget one would carry around (iPod, point-and-shoot camera, motion picture camera, notepad, gaming device, etc.) except the phone. Buchanan says: Inexplicably, there’s never been a credible iPod touch competitor. The Zune HD doesn’t run apps (the handful it’s got don’t count), so it’s limited in what it can do—it’s simply a very good music player. Android is still a miserable place to be when it comes to media, and on top of that, all of the Android "tablets" have been thoroughly mediocre. There’s nothing out there that’s remotely like the iPod touch. And obviously, there’s a demand for it, since it’s the only iPod whose sales are still growing. The iPod Touch has basically taken over the ecological niche vacated when PDAs evolved into smartphones, in much the same way as rats or cockroaches might evolve to replace humans after we kill ourselves off. There haven’t been any real competitors, perhaps because most tablets are larger and most devices the same size are smartphones. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:15:00 +0100 868299 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/h625QTM7SKM/ Sometimes we get accused of becoming an Apple blog, we post so much Apple-centric stuff, but there’s a reason for that. Apple might be obnoxious in its app approval behavior, closed in its development platform, and prudish in its gatekeeping, but there’s no denying that they make some damned fine e-book reading devices. My iPod Touch was my sole e-reader for most of the two years I had it, and I still miss it badly. Matt Buchanan makes a similar point on Gizmodo, where he says that if the rumors are true about the new iPod Touch that will (presumably) be revealed tomorrow and it ends up with the same retina display, Facetime camera, and 5-megapixel rear camera as the iPhone, it has the potential to be a device “serial killer”—replacing just about every gadget one would carry around (iPod, point-and-shoot camera, motion picture camera, notepad, gaming device, etc.) except the phone. Buchanan says: Inexplicably, there’s never been a credible iPod touch competitor. The Zune HD doesn’t run apps (the handful it’s got don’t count), so it’s limited in what it can do—it’s simply a very good music player. Android is still a miserable place to be when it comes to media, and on top of that, all of the Android "tablets" have been thoroughly mediocre. There’s nothing out there that’s remotely like the iPod touch. And obviously, there’s a demand for it, since it’s the only iPod whose sales are still growing. The iPod Touch has basically taken over the ecological niche vacated when PDAs evolved into smartphones, in much the same way as rats or cockroaches might evolve to replace humans after we kill ourselves off. There haven’t been any real competitors, perhaps because most tablets are larger and most devices the same size are smartphones. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:15:00 +0100 868298 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/samsung-announces-media-hub-and/ On September 16 we’ve been invited into New York to attend a Samsung press event. They will be unveiling their new Media Hub. Also, they will be announcing their “latest Android-powered device”. What could it be – a tablet perhaps? We’ll be there and let you know. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:12:40 +0100 868301 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/65JPaVEyOdI/ On September 16 we’ve been invited into New York to attend a Samsung press event. They will be unveiling their new Media Hub. Also, they will be announcing their “latest Android-powered device”. What could it be – a tablet perhaps? We’ll be there and let you know. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:12:40 +0100 868300 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/project-gutenberg-timeline-events/ From the Project Gutenberg News comes this article by Michael Hart: The latest Project Gutenberg Grand Total figures have just passed 37,500 titles this past month and will have 40,000 eBooks during our 40th year celebration, 1,000 a month over 40 years doesn’t sound like much, but we are on track right now to do 5,000 this year. We are currently giving away about 100,000 books a day, just through the one single site: http://gutenberg.org. About 3 million eBooks per month or 36 million per year. In 2000 USB flash drives were just getting started with 8M “IBM Memory Sticks” available for about $60 and also 16M and 32M size were available. Today 1,000 times as much memory, 8G, is available from over the counter stores for $20. I just bought a somewhat larger “terabyte pocket drive” for $75 over the counter. Larger is a relative term in this case, it’s still pocket-sized, but just requires a doubly larger pocket and the weight is noticeable and a “wall wart” power supply is required, so I should NOT think the term “pocket-sized would be appropriate but I bought it anyway, sight unseen, due to misunderstanding or being misled by the advertizing. Still, it’s no larger and not much heavier than a book, and it will hold 2.5 million such books in .zip format. Think for just a moment about how much a terabyte would cost you back in the year 2000, how much power it took, and how hard it would be to fill it up. Google wouldn’t even announce its “invention” of eBooks for about 5 more years, Project Gutenberg wouldn’t have 10,000 titles for another 2 3/4 years, so just think of the changes we have in store by 2020, the next decade. We should all be considering getting petabytes if we do have them already by then, and all of the findable book titles that are public domain should have been put into at least some eReadable formats, if not most or all. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:37:29 +0100 868303 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/TxrbEIk--ww/ From the Project Gutenberg News comes this article by Michael Hart: The latest Project Gutenberg Grand Total figures have just passed 37,500 titles this past month and will have 40,000 eBooks during our 40th year celebration, 1,000 a month over 40 years doesn’t sound like much, but we are on track right now to do 5,000 this year. We are currently giving away about 100,000 books a day, just through the one single site: http://gutenberg.org. About 3 million eBooks per month or 36 million per year. In 2000 USB flash drives were just getting started with 8M “IBM Memory Sticks” available for about $60 and also 16M and 32M size were available. Today 1,000 times as much memory, 8G, is available from over the counter stores for $20. I just bought a somewhat larger “terabyte pocket drive” for $75 over the counter. Larger is a relative term in this case, it’s still pocket-sized, but just requires a doubly larger pocket and the weight is noticeable and a “wall wart” power supply is required, so I should NOT think the term “pocket-sized would be appropriate but I bought it anyway, sight unseen, due to misunderstanding or being misled by the advertizing. Still, it’s no larger and not much heavier than a book, and it will hold 2.5 million such books in .zip format. Think for just a moment about how much a terabyte would cost you back in the year 2000, how much power it took, and how hard it would be to fill it up. Google wouldn’t even announce its “invention” of eBooks for about 5 more years, Project Gutenberg wouldn’t have 10,000 titles for another 2 3/4 years, so just think of the changes we have in store by 2020, the next decade. We should all be considering getting petabytes if we do have them already by then, and all of the findable book titles that are public domain should have been put into at least some eReadable formats, if not most or all. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:37:29 +0100 868302 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/09/01/online-conference-ebooks-libraries-at-the-tipping-point-sepetember-29-2010/ From the August Issue (Published 8/31/2009) of the Book Industry Study Group Bulletin (BISG): BISG is a supporting organization for several industry conferences each year, including ebooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point presented by Library Journal & School Library Journal. Sponsored By: OverDrive (Platinum) Gold sponsors: Baker & Taylor; Capstone Digital; Gale Cengage; and Springer Keynote Speakers Ray Kurzweil, National best?selling author Kevin Kelly, Founder, Wired magazine R. David Lankes, Director of the Information Institute, Syracuse U. URL: www.ebook?summit.com ebooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point is an online conference that functions just like an in?person conference, with keynote speeches, special tracks and an exhibit area. The day?long event will bring together librarians, technology experts, publishers and vendors in a virtual setting to explore how the book is changing in the digital world. Date: September 29, 2010 Time: 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. EDT Location: Online event Cost: Early bird pricing extended through August 13, 2010 with registration as low as $19.95 (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:21:45 +0100 868115 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/JZkuOwOgy4Y/ Boston.com’s Tom Sococca has an absolutely fascinating interview with Andrew Pettegree, author of The Book in the Renaissance. The parallels between printers’ problems at the time and the publishing industry today are legion. Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one. Nor was print clearly destined to replace manuscript, from the point of view of the book owners of the day. A few fussy color-printing experiments aside, the new books were monochrome, dull in comparison to illuminated manuscripts. Many books left blank spaces for adding hand decoration, and collectors frequently bound printed pages together with manuscript ones. “It’s a great mistake to think of an absolute disjunction between a manuscript world of the Middle Ages and a print world of the 16th century,” Pettegree said. As in our own Internet era, culture and commerce went through upheaval as Europe tried to figure out what to make of the new medium and its possibilities. Should it serve to spread familiar Latin texts, or to promote new ideas, written in the vernacular? Was print a vessel for great and serious works, or for quick and sloppy ones? As with the iPad (or the Newton before it), who would want to buy a printed book, and why? Pettegree’s book is available from Amazon for $26.40 but not in an ebook version yet. I guess I’ll have to wait to read it. Thanks to a tweet from johnmiedema1 Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:20:21 +0100 868305 http://www.teleread.com/2010/09/01/after-youve-printed-a-book-what-do-you-do-with-it-gutenbergs-problem/ Boston.com’s Tom Sococca has an absolutely fascinating interview with Andrew Pettegree, author of The Book in the Renaissance. The parallels between printers’ problems at the time and the publishing industry today are legion. Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one. Nor was print clearly destined to replace manuscript, from the point of view of the book owners of the day. A few fussy color-printing experiments aside, the new books were monochrome, dull in comparison to illuminated manuscripts. Many books left blank spaces for adding hand decoration, and collectors frequently bound printed pages together with manuscript ones. “It’s a great mistake to think of an absolute disjunction between a manuscript world of the Middle Ages and a print world of the 16th century,” Pettegree said. As in our own Internet era, culture and commerce went through upheaval as Europe tried to figure out what to make of the new medium and its possibilities. Should it serve to spread familiar Latin texts, or to promote new ideas, written in the vernacular? Was print a vessel for great and serious works, or for quick and sloppy ones? As with the iPad (or the Newton before it), who would want to buy a printed book, and why? Pettegree’s book is available from Amazon for $26.40 but not in an ebook version yet. I guess I’ll have to wait to read it. Thanks to a tweet from johnmiedema1 Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:20:21 +0100 868304 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60235 From the August Issue (Published 8/31/2009) of the Book Industry Study Group Bulletin (BISG): BISG is a supporting organization for several industry conferences each year, including ebooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point presented by Library Journal & School Library Journal. Sponsored By: OverDrive (Platinum) Gold sponsors: Baker & Taylor; Capstone Digital; Gale Cengage; and Springer Keynote Speakers Ray Kurzweil, National [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:21:45 +0100 868317 http://liszen.com/trends/story.php?title=Medicine_Hat_College_Library_Services_Blog_Kobo_E-book_Reader_is_--- Library Services is introducing the Kobo e-book reader to its repertoire of multimedia devices available to employees and students at Medicine Hat Co (Source: pligg - all) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:28 +0100 868122 http://liszen.com/trends/story.php?title=Jason_Griffey_explains_ebooks_and_DRM Ebooks aren’t just electronic books. They are a combination of certain file types, certain readers and certain software designed to keep people (Source: pligg - all) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:18 +0100 868135 http://liszen.com/trends/story.php?title=E-books_in_a_Correctional_Setting_a_niche_market Excerpt from article at Corrections.comI immediately saw the advantage of e-books in the prison setting. If each inmate could have a library of (Source: pligg - all) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:07 +0100 868138 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/booksquare/~3/hTOxRIC86D0/ I’ve been thinking about the topic of the value of books a lot. Not for days. Not for months. Years. However, recently I’ve been angered by the implication that readers are cheap, that they won’t pay a proper price for books, that they don’t get it. Whatever it is. These assertions are not untrue. They are also not entirely accurate. Perspective is everything, nuance matters, and I have thoughts. Of course. What is a book worth? Well, there’s list price created by the publisher. That seems to be the value referenced by publishers. Then there’s the price consumers actually pay. That gets more complicated, of course. You have to break it down to various levels including the price for the first sale and the price for the second sale. Library patrons pay a different price; we call that “property tax”. Oh, and then there are the books acquired for free. This is what I think about when I hear publishers talking about this, that, or the other devaluing the price of content. And by devaluing content, they really mean consumers paying far less than publishers would like. This is absolutely a valid concern. Once consumers get lower price points in their minds, they might expect to pay less all the time. As noted above, the way consumers acquire books means they pay varying amounts for the same product; I’d wager the number of full retail list price sales is greatly outnumbered by all other types of sales. Resolution: the price I pay for a book has absolutely nothing to do with how I value the book. This leads me to an inescapable contention. When publishers talk about the value of books, what they really mean is the value they have assigned. Conclusion: publishers are as responsible for devaluing the content of books as anyone else in the food chain. Recently, some friends and I discussed an author we love. Or loved. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:10:00 +0100 868021 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/zvZ1X9i_rlI/ Well, this is a first. Rather than waiting to post the video until several hours after the event, Apple will be livestreaming its presentation this morning…at least, to those with Macs, iPod Touches, iPhones, or iPads. Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com. I really like how in one sentence they say it’s “based on open standards” and then in the next say that viewing requires one of their devices. That’s Apple for you. Non-Apple-device-owning Windows users are apparently going to have to make do with the liveblogs. I don’t usually get up until about 1:00 these days, but I’m going to be setting my alarm an hour early so as not to miss this. (Found via Engadget.) Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:01:00 +0100 868111 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/booksquare/~3/5Rpy6MdMt9A/ Today’s links of interest: Borders Reduces E-reader to $99And there you have it. An ereader below $100. Oh, wow, the world is still turning. Random House’s Strong Half-Year Results Driven By ‘Dragon Tattoo’ SalesStieg Larsson, who will not likely be producing more books, drives huge dollars to Random House. His ebook sales are phenomenal. Which leads to the question: does the lack of an iBookstore agreement hurt RH in any way? A Moment of JenFrom Jennifer Weiner: Instead of asking which books and which authors deserve the Times’ coverage, maybe we should think about what kind of book review section readers deserve. Not a crazy idea at all. (Source: Booksquare) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:15:06 +0100 868022 http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2010/09/social-news-curation-packages.html Actually a lot more interesting than they sound. There have been many 'Create your own newspaper' sites over the years - Crayon being the one that most people probably know. You provide the resource with subjects that you're interested in, and it will go out and gather useful and appropriate information from various different sites and present it back to you. I've never really got on well with them because I've always found them rather too clunky and difficult to fine tune. Besides, I make huge use of RSS feeds and alerts so I just don't find them that useful. However, there's a new(ish) bred of resources that are coming to the fore, and I've looked at three in particular - Paper.li, Flipboard, and Twitter Times. What they all have in common is that they will take content such as a Twitter user name, or a Twitter list or subject and will automatically create a newspaper for you - in the main based on a Twitter feed. They all try and create a newspaper look and feel, so that you can read through your newspaper. Why is this different from a Twitter feed? Well, the resources will pull in the content from a link, so if someone refers to an article in the Guardian for example, that article will be pulled into your newspaper so that you can read it there and then. You'll also find that the resource tries to position content on the page in the order that it thinks you want to read it, and/or by grouping content together. Here's a screenshot of my Paper.li which was created for me today.   Now, it's a huge page, with lots of scrolling required. You can't move stuff around, mainly because the paper only lasts for the day, so that's three things that irritate me right off the bat - it's inflexible, it thinks it knows what's best and it's updated once a day. This isn't how social media is supposed to work. ... Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0100 868256 http://www.lisnews.org/ebooks_correctional_setting_niche_market Excerpt from article at Corrections.com I immediately saw the advantage of e-books in the prison setting. If each inmate could have a library of over 1,000 titles in one small e-book reader, it would cut down on hiding contraband among the books (such as sandpaper to erase their uniform logo), remove the unsanitary habit of reading books in the rest-room, cut down on repairing books (averaging 20% or over 1,200 books destroyed each year), free up space by limiting the 3 X 8 foot long bookshelves that only hold 640 books for 100 inmates in each unit, encourage struggling readers to listen to a book while reading the text on the screen, and, finally, allow anyone to increase the size of the font so LARGE PRINT will never be limited to a few titles! Full article (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:11:50 +0100 868598 http://lisnews.org/ebooks_correctional_setting_niche_market Excerpt from article at Corrections.com I immediately saw the advantage of e-books in the prison setting. If each inmate could have a library of over 1,000 titles in one small e-book reader, it would cut down on hiding contraband among the books (such as sandpaper to erase their uniform logo), remove the unsanitary habit of reading books in the rest-room, cut down on repairing books (averaging 20% or over 1,200 books destroyed each year), free up space by limiting the 3 X 8 foot long bookshelves that only hold 640 books for 100 inmates in each unit, encourage struggling readers to listen to a book while reading the text on the screen, and, finally, allow anyone to increase the size of the font so LARGE PRINT will never be limited to a few titles! Full article (Source: LISNews.org) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:11:50 +0100 868097 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60226 by Emily Williams From the Article: When paperbacks took off, through lucrative deals with paperback publishers, that became another right to carve out, as did film, and book club, and serials, and audio. Some of these rights — like film – are almost never sold to publishers anymore; others — like paperback — are still included [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:21:11 +0100 868325 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60224 Some people not only have vision but are able to keep the vision alive and growing. It was 40 years ago when Michael Hart began Project Gutenberg. It's a great reminder for some and history for others that book digitization did not begin in that past several years. From a Project Gutenberg News Post By [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:32:51 +0100 868326 http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/60223 Last week we posted that Kaplan Publishing (the test prep company) was providing FREE access to 95 full text e-books that you can download from the iBookstore for the iPhone/Pad/Touch. They're full text titles. Here's the post from last week. Today, Kaplan Publishing announced they will continue to offer free access to 21 titles for [...] (Source: ResourceShelf) Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:03:29 +0100 868327 http://146.74.224.231/archives/2010/08/californias_dig.html California's Free Digital Textbook Initiative provides students, teachers and parents access to free digital high school textbooks that meet California's academic content standards. Textbooks are free to view or download. Search SCCL's catalog, browse the full list of eBooks or go direct to Digital Textbook Initiative's website to access any of the 30 textbooks available. (Source: Santa Clara County Library - The Latest SCCoop) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:54:28 +0100 868145 http://www.librarystuff.net/2010/08/31/students-face-new-textbook-picks-rent-vs-buy-print-vs-e-book/ USA Today – “With another summer ending, the time has come to ask the perennial question: Could this be the year higher education finally embraces the e-book?” (Source: Library Stuff) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:05:43 +0100 868110 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/yPcSxGkPxDc/ I’ll be traipsing into New York tomorrow morning to visit Sony and talk to the VP of the Digital Reading Division for a briefing on the new Sony Readers. Don’t know whether it will be under embargo or not, but I’ll let you know after the meeting. As I’ll be in the City (in 94 degree heat according to Weather Underground!) postings may be a bit thinner than usual. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:12:12 +0100 867889 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/oLP9qzxJ2_c/ We will have at least one maintenance outage in the next couple of days preparatory to the site redesign. Work will have to be done on the WordPress database and the site has to be off line for this. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:02:36 +0100 867890 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/08/31/publishing-statistics-slides-from-recent-presentation-by-ceo-of-wolters-kluwer-nancy-mckinstry-at-2010-beijing-international-publishing-forum/ On Sunday, Nancy McKinstry shared her thoughts about publishing, China, her company and a number of other topics during the 2010 Beijing International Publishing Forum. You can find a the news release here. Included in the 34 slide presentation are a number of statistics and other items that might be of interest. Access the Presentation Slides (PDF) Examples Include: Facts About Wolters Kluwer + Approximately 19,300 employees in more than 40 countries across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America + 3.4 EUR billion revenue Total Number of Professionals (Global, With Sources) + 8.4 Million Physicians + 13 Million Nurses + 2.5 Million + A List of Three Megatrends Impacting Wolters Kluwer Business Today + Numbers and Comparisons Including 10 Petabytes, All U.S. Academic Research Libraries 1/2 Yotabyte, The Entire Internet in 2009 + Wolters Kluwer 2010-2012 Strategy + A Breakdown on Wolters Kluwer Revenue by Format and Types (Cyclical, Books, Subscriptions) Example: In 2009 52% Electronic vs. 34% Print; 71% Subscriptions vs. 11% Books + China Digital Publishing Developments Examples: .5% of the total output of the publishing industry in 2009 + Digital journal 0.6 bln; eBooks 1.4 bln; online advertising 20.6 bln; online gaming 25.6 bln; and mobile phone publishing 31.4 bln + Almost 90% of the Chinese publishing houses have developed an eBook publishing business + Wolters Kluwer in China Source: Wolters Kluwer (Source: ResourceShelf) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:41:17 +0100 867909 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/e7sniLX0nHg/  by Judith Jordet, MLS From the Article: If each inmate could have a library of over 1,000 titles in one small e-book reader, it would cut down on hiding contraband among the books (such as sandpaper to erase their uniform logo), remove the unsanitary habit of reading books in the rest-room, cut down on repairing books (averaging 20% or over 1,200 books destroyed each year), free up space by limiting the 3 X 8 foot long bookshelves that only hold 640 books for 100 inmates in each unit, encourage struggling readers to listen to a book while reading the text on the screen, and, finally, allow anyone to increase the size of the font so LARGE PRINT will never be limited to a few titles! However, my research revealed problems that only a niche market can solve. I studied the Kindle, Sony and Nook e-book readers; all of them are equipped to access the Internet. I wish an e-book reader existed that only accessed the millions of legitimately published books (rather than anonymous individuals self-publishing on the Internet, not accountable to anyone even for spelling or grammar). Imagine an e-book reader that specialized in accessing books by title, author, subject, date, publisher, language, format (audio, digital) and/or keyword! Much More in the Complete Article Source: Corrections.com Via Resource Shelf and Frank Sleightholme Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:16:50 +0100 867891 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/KUDkj7m3CRs/ From the Nashua Telegraph comes an article on innovative ways for state governments to provide services: A woman was spending four hours a day helping her husband to read books, because Parkinson’s disease had deprived him of the ability to turn the pages on his own. The state determined that hiring someone to do that two hours a week for a whole year would cost about $2,300, based on the standard companion rate for that region of the state. Doing it five days a week would have cost more than $11,500 a year. Instead, they agreed to purchase a Kindle at a one-time cost of $495. “For less than $500, the family caregiver was afforded more respite than she could have wished for and her husband won some of his independence back,” the state wrote. Thanks to Frank Sleightholme for the link. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:11:16 +0100 867892 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/006Uv3crIlg/ I reported earlier that TeleRead will be undergoing a redesign. Well, we’re proceeding according to schedule and don’t be surprised if in a day or so you are treated to a whole new experience. Keep your eyes peeled. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:40:03 +0100 867893 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/fRy3q5Mg4fs/ From the Staples press release: [Staples] announced today plans to offer customers Kindle, Amazon’s #1 best-selling, most-wished-for and most-gifted product for two years running. Staples is the only office superstore to carry the wireless reading device in all of its stores nationwide beginning this fall. … Staples will also carry a full assortment of Kindle accessories. Kindle is part of several new exciting technology products available from Staples in time for the 2010 holiday season. Staples will announce their full line-up of top tech products and other great savings for the season later this fall. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:25:45 +0100 867894 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/q5HA_D-P5Uw/ A while back I covered the introduction of the Samsung Galaxy S phones and said that they would make great ereaders. Well, they are finally hitting the streets with all the carriers. According to the L. A. Times blog they have sold 1 million phones in the first 45 days of availability. My favorite of the phones, because it has a keyboard, is the Epic 4G which is being carried by Sprint. 4G (if it’s in your area) and a keyboard are an unbeatable combination. The article also has a pointer to a great chart that compares the features and prices of all 4 Galaxy S phones: the Epic 4G, Fascinate, Vibrant and Captivate. Update: just noticed that our sister blog, Gadgetell, has a review of the Epic 4G. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:47:20 +0100 867895 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/PcH8sgoNitE/ This looks like a fantastic idea. Sena, who is known for the quality of their cases, has developed an folio case for the iPad that includes a bluetooth keyboard. It comes in black, orange, red and brown and is currently only available for pre-order. The case will sell for $150, but the price on pre-order is $130. They say that the shipment date will be October 7. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:36:17 +0100 867896 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/ZpBwE9McwaU/ The Kobo was selling at Borders for $149 and the Aluratek for selling at $119. Well, according to CrunchGear, Borders has dropped the price of the Kobo to $129 and the Aluratek to $99. They also announced Velocity Micro’s Android based Cruz Reader and Cruz Tablet at $199 and $299, respectively. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:23:15 +0100 867897 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/4_MbXWInI7g/ According to Feedbooks: This is an introduction to the Open Publishing Distribution System Catalog 1.0 specification. This document is informative rather than normative. When this document disagrees, if ever, with the OPDS Catalog specification, please refer to the spec. Via a tweet from @liza Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:17:02 +0100 867898 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/f99QAzCj0E4/ Only one more day remains until we discover the newest things Steve Jobs has up his sleeve, and our sister blog Appletell has a roundup of all the recent rumors I’ve already looked at the rumors that the iPod Touch is going to gain cameras, Facetime, and the Retina Display here and here, suggesting it may become not only a better e-book reader than ever before but also a better communication tool—essentially, a wifi-only cell phone without the cell. And it will even get the “cell” back if it is paired with an unlimited 3G-to-wifi plan such as the prepaid plan offered by Virgin Mobile for $40 per month with no contract required—not only does that cost less than an iPhone voice + data plan, but it also foregoes AT&T’s iPhone bandwidth cap. And now it comes out that Clearwire, the “4G” unlimited-bandwidth wireless ISP I mentioned in my first post about “retrofitting” 3G to wireless readers, is launching its own contract-free, pay-as-you-go wireless broadband plan. It will cost slightly more than Virgin’s, at $50 per month, and will be limited to use in Clearwire’s 49 markets—but on the other hand, it will offer download speeds of 3 to 6 megabits per second, somewhat faster than 3G can provide. It’s going to be interesting to see what Apple announces tomorrow. What does the acoustic guitar logo mean? Are any other bombshells going to drop? Will there be “one more thing”? All the usual suspects will be liveblogging the event, and I’ll try to post a summary soon after it ends. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:15:00 +0100 867899 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/TyikTs5LqPo/ We’ve previously mentioned the Kaplan free ebook offer, now that offer has been extended until September 6, according to a press release. The titles for the extended promotion are: 1. Kaplan ACT Strategies for Super Busy Students 2. Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Dictionary 3. Sharp Vocab 4. Sharp Writing 5. Kaplan Portable GMAT 6. Kaplan Portable GRE Exam 7. Kaplan PMBR: Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE) 8. Kaplan PMBR Finals: Constitutional Law 9. Kaplan MCAT Organic Chemistry Review 10. Kaplan MCAT Biology Review 11. Kaplan NCLEX-RN 2010 -2011 Edition 12. Kaplan CCRN 13. Kaplan101 Algebra Practice Questions 14. Kaplan 101 ASVAB Practice Questions 15. Kaplan101 GRE Quantitative Practice Questions 16. Kaplan 101 GRE Verbal Practice Questions 17. Kaplan 101 MAT Practice Questions 18. Kaplan 101 PSAT/SAT Critical Reading Practice Questions 19. Kaplan101 Biology Practice Questions 20. Kaplan 101 SAT/PSAT Writing Practice Questions 21. Kaplan 101 GMAT Verbal Practice Question Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:12:20 +0100 867900 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/FlhZTVvV_zQ/ Everybody is getting into the act! BenQ is going to unleash a solar powered ereader, according to E-Reader-Info, next year. The solar power probably will only be used to extend battery life. There’s not a lot of info at present, but from the picture it looks as if it will be using an e-ink screen. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:01:18 +0100 867901 http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2010/08/31/library-blog-search Sometimes when I am working on a post, I wonder if another library blogger has already covered it - an am afraid I’ll look kind of dumb rehashing something. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great to set up a Google custom search engine to search all library-related blogs? Before I did, I checked if anyone already created one, and it turned out Library Zen had - four years ago (I’m even further behind than I thought). LISZEN Search searches over 500 library blogs, and has an accompanying wiki to keep track. If you write about the library world, add yourself. Something related that would also be nice is a custom search of just library websites - so it would be easy to quickly see what other library’s policies are regarding ebooks, or circulating laptops, or how much they charge for printing, etc. But considering the breadth of libraries and the complexity of maintaining it, just using regular Google might be more realistic. (Source: herzogbr.net blog) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:53:35 +0100 867943 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/EBWPhY87mrg/ A comment on a recent post comparing Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 screens noted that the near-black background of the graphite version caused the background on the Kindle 3’s screen to seem brighter, though it was actually exactly the same. However, it turns out that the Kindle 3 is also available in a white model, and Andrys Basten at A Kindle World has posted a head-to-head comparison photo of both devices showing a screensaver, as well as pictures of the Kindle 3 by itself displaying the New York Times. These photos make it a lot easier to judge the Kindle 3 against the Kindle 2 without the different case colors complicating things. It is clear from the photo that the Kindle 3 has significantly better contrast than the 2, though I kind of wish Andrys had posted some more comparisons, depicting how text looked on both screens next to each other. I found the comparison via a post by Tim Carmody at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog. Carmody also talks about a few of the interesting tips he worked out from the photos of the Times, and some of the annoying things the Kindle’s web browser can’t do. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:15:00 +0100 867902 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/UfEe-_IWyDU/ Scott Rosenberg, late of Salon Magazine, has an interesting post on his blog, Wordyard. It is actually a rebuttal to another post by Nicholas Carr depicting hyperlinking as a bad, confusing thing. Rosenberg points out that Carr is actually conflating two different forms of linking in his rant: the artistic and the pragmatic. Artistic hyperlinking is predicated on creating an artistic work in segments with links that lead to different parts of the work. An example might be a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Pragmatic hyperlinking uses links as footnotes and references, demonstrating where information comes from and where they can learn more. Carr, Rosenberg says, rails against the pragmatic hyperlinking upon which the web is built using arguments predicated on the confusing nature of artistic hypertext works. Links, Rosenberg says, can be confusing at first, or if used to excess, but judicious linking is not the impediment to understanding that Carr claims it is. If your experience matches mine, then today, your eyes pass over a link. Most often you ignore it. Sometimes, you hover your mouse pointer to see where it goes. Every now and then, you click the link open in a new tab to read when you’re done. And very rarely, you might actually stop what you’re reading and read the linked text. If you do, it’s usually a sign that you’ve lost interest in the original article anyway. Which can happen just as easily in a magazine or newspaper — where, instead of clicking a link, we just turn the page. Rosenberg’s post is the first in a three-part series. Carr responds to Rosenberg’s points (and Rosenberg replies in turn) in the comments below it. My own linking strategy for the stories I write in TeleRead is to link (of course) the source of the story, and where I found the story (since it’s courteous to give credit where credit is due). Beyond that, I will occasionally link informational pages, especially from Wikipedia. ... Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:15:00 +0100 867903 http://yourlibrarycsu.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-ebooks_31.html Below is a list of new eBooks added to the collection this week:Digital libraries - Presents all aspects of the effects of digitization of today's and tomorrow's libraries.Check AvailabilityEthics and research with children : a case-based approach - Presents and discusses challenging cases in the field of pediatric research ethics. Check AvailabilityFrom teams to knots : studies of collaboration and learning at work - Different case studies of teams at work, professionally and extra-professionally. Check AvailabilityHandbook of psychobiography - Brings together for the first time the world's leading psychobiographers, writing lucidly on many of the major figures of our age - from Osama Bin Laden to Elvis Presley. Check AvailabilityIntroduction to food engineering - Presents the engineering concepts and unit operations used in food processing in a classroom-proven and unique blend of principles with applications. Check AvailabilityLiving land living culture : Aboriginal heritage & salinity - Based on a two-year research project to investigate the impact of salinity on Aboriginal culture and heritage in NSW. Check AvailabilityReading comprehension boosters : 100 lessons for building higher-level literacy, grades 3-5 - This book is designed to help students gain fundamental comprehension skills so they can succeed in reading complex and varied types of texts. Check AvailabilityResearch methods for sports studies - Provides a complete grounding in both qualitative and quantitative research methods for the sports studies student. Check AvailabilityClick on Check Availability to access these titles.The full list of new eBooks can be accessessed here and more information on eBooks is here. (Source: Your Library@CSU) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 868699 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LawLibrarianBlog/~3/asPof8eEOLw/legal-ebooks-and-the-institutional-buyer-an-llb-poll-on-use-acquisition-interest-and-market-penetrat.html Since the advent of full-text search in the late 1970s-early 1980s, law libraries have tended to be at the forefront of technological innovation in the provision of resources to its users. When one reads what general public libraries are doing... (Source: Law Librarian Blog) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 868567 http://csbsjulibrary.blogspot.com/2010/08/springer-trials.html Springer is offering trials to their online resources this fall, and so we've decided to take a peek. These trials last through October 31st. Springer Books>20,000 ebooks from 2005-2010Annual updates may be purchasedSpringer Materials 165,000 substances and material systems, 3,000 properties, and 1,000,000 literature citationsBased on Landolt-BörnsteinUser-friendly one-stop web platformSpringer Images2.5 million hard to find science imagesSpringer ProtocolsDetailed instructions for recreating experiments.Further information about these resources is available from the Springer Trials page.--DW (Source: CSBSJU Library Blog) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 867944 http://dallnet.blogspot.com/2010/08/mysteries.html Liz Petty brought this book to my attention: Murder Past Due (Cat in the Stacks Mystery Series), by Miranda James. It is available in paperback and ebook - from Barnes and Noble and in print from Amazon.com. (Source: Lex Scripta) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 867852 http://digital-scholarship.com/digitalkoans/2010/08/30/daily-tweets-2010-08-30/ Copyright, Ebooks and the Unpredictable Future http://icio.us/k5hucm # Testing Jan Velterop's Hunch about Green and Gold Open Access http://icio.us/vy50jx # First Results of the SOAP Project http://icio.us/q1g1xq # Institutional Repositories: The Promises of Yesterday, The Promises of Tomorrow http://icio.us/q0mbwt # Authors Publication Strategies in Scholarly Publishing http://icio.us/5irxkv # Colour Me Red – the Ingect System for Research Data Collections http://icio.us/no0bqd # Oxford English Dictionary "Will Not Be Printed Again" http://icio.us/yam2hl # Reason for Hope Survives in Academic Publishing Despite a Month of Bad News http://icio.us/i2iw5m # Elsevier and Royal Tropical Institute Sign 5 Year Memorandum of Understanding http://icio.us/khtalh # (Source: DigitalKoans) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 867653 http://digital-scholarship.com/digitalkoans/2010/08/30/opds-catalog-1-0-specification/ The OPDS Catalog 1.0 specification has been released. Here's an excerpt from the announcement: The open ebook community and the Internet Archive are pleased to announce the release of the first production version of the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) Catalog format for digital content. OPDS Catalogs are an open standard designed to enable the discovery of digital content from any location, on any device, and for any application. . . . Based on the widely implemented Atom Syndication Format, OPDS Catalogs have been developed since 2009 by a group of ebook developers, publishers, librarians, and booksellers interested in providing a lightweight, simple, and easy to use format for developing catalogs of digital books, magazines, and other content. (Source: DigitalKoans) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100 867650 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/08/30/a-librarian-shares-her-ideas-in-e-books-in-a-correctional-setting-a-niche-market/ by Judith Jordet, MLS From the Article: If each inmate could have a library of over 1,000 titles in one small e-book reader, it would cut down on hiding contraband among the books (such as sandpaper to erase their uniform logo), remove the unsanitary habit of reading books in the rest-room, cut down on repairing books (averaging 20% or over 1,200 books destroyed each year), free up space by limiting the 3 X 8 foot long bookshelves that only hold 640 books for 100 inmates in each unit, encourage struggling readers to listen to a book while reading the text on the screen, and, finally, allow anyone to increase the size of the font so LARGE PRINT will never be limited to a few titles! However, my research revealed problems that only a niche market can solve. I studied the Kindle, Sony and Nook e-book readers; all of them are equipped to access the Internet. I wish an e-book reader existed that only accessed the millions of legitimately published books (rather than anonymous individuals self-publishing on the Internet, not accountable to anyone even for spelling or grammar). Imagine an e-book reader that specialized in accessing books by title, author, subject, date, publisher, language, format (audio, digital) and/or keyword! Much More in the Complete Article Source: Corrections.com (Source: ResourceShelf) Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:21:30 +0100 867696 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/31/libraries-coalition-volunteers People who know how borrowing books helped to transform their own lives now need to hold their councils to accountNaturally, those who most loved libraries as children are now their most articulate supporters. Some were dismayed by Margaret Hodge's report on public libraries earlier this year, which praised the network as "a triumph of infrastructure and branding". In the coalition era, they may be equally crestfallen at the Future Libraries Programme's promise of "customer service improvement opportunities" in Greater Manchester.Do not be deceived by the familiar jargon. The government's current vision is very different from Lady Hodge's. The 10 projects are testbeds for many of the ideas that the coalition would like to apply to other public services. Two London boroughs are considering a merger of their library provision. Suffolk wants community groups to manage them. Most controversially, some of Bradford's books could be moved into shops. Lady Hodge's excellent suggestion that a library card be issued automatically to every baby has been ignored. More understandably, her enthusiasm for ebook lending – which sounds pleasingly modern, but is fraught with copyright and technical obstacles – has also gone. National guarantees are out; cheaper offerings, aimed specifically at the communities they serve, are in.Recruiting more volunteers to help run libraries is a laudable idea (though it may well come at the expense of professional librarians' jobs). Only 15,000 people currently volunteer.The internet has made some of libraries' traditional functions almost redundant, as well as driving down the cost of books for those who can afford them. Yet given the pressures they face, libraries have held up rather well: 83m children's books were issued last year, which represents around 90% of the number lent out a decade earlier. The same period has seen broadband installed in every library and a boom in reading groups. ... Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:05:11 +0100 867635 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Elsua/~3/yoV2LAmymQc/ Late last week you would remember how I put together a blog post where I started collecting a number of the Daily #iPad Apps that I keep sharing across over in Twitter, for those folks who may be potentially interested. Also as a good reference for myself, i.e. as part of my own personal knowledge sharing experience, so that I can keep going back and forth over time and see what I may have shared and what not, just in case I may need it for a future reference. Then, my good friend Barry Leiba mentioned, in the comments, how he would be “interested in reading more about specifically HOW the iPad fundamentally changes your online interactions and experience“. Thus I thought I would go ahead today and put together a blog entry where I could share with folks my top 10 reasons why the iPad has changed my computing habits and overall Internet experience for good with no looking back! It’s going to be a rather interesting experiment, where I am sure I’m going to fall short on words on what it actually means for me, specially when not paying much attention to the tools and applications themselves, but more how I interact with the device. I know that some of those reasons will also surprise a bunch of folks out there who may have a perceived different persona of me than who I actually am, but I think that overall, it will help set the stage as to why I have finally fallen for the iPad as perhaps one of my last mobile devices I will own for a good while. A long one, actually. Thus without much ado, here are My Top 10 Reasons Why I Bought a 3G 64GB iPad, back while I was in Boston, in June, attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference event (Yes, I couldn’t buy one over here in Spain after having visited 18 shops!). ... Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:29:36 +0100 867964 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/UGA54yDTrpg/ The review pretty much trashes this $200 Android ereader that can also double as a tablet. The author says: Unfortunately, it falls short of the mark. As a tablet/e-reader combo that tries to compete with Apple’s iPad, the Novel is slow and inelegant …. Physically, the Novel is clunky …. Readability is something you can expect to struggle with on the Novel. … For reading novels, the Pandigital will quickly frustrate. The device’s performance is sluggish …. And it goes on. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:56:14 +0100 867689 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/ezFR/~3/dUmfKEpsjlk/ From the press release: The Digital Marketplace, an initiative of the California State University Office of the Chancellor, announced plans today to launch a pilot to license digital course content from Bedford/Freeman/Worth, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Starting in the fall 2010 semester, pilot courses are scheduled at five CSU campuses: Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, San Bernardino and San Francisco State. Each participating instructor volunteered for the program that promises students will pay the lowest price available for the licensed, digital version of their course materials that are interactive and engaging. Students will purchase their personal-use subscriptions for the digital content through their local campus bookstore. “Offering faculty the choice of a licensing model gives them the option of finding the highest quality content at the lowest cost,” said Gerard L. Hanley, PhD., Senior Director of Academic Technology Services for the CSU. “The purpose of the Digital Marketplace is to provide everyone access to quality, affordable educational content. This is a wonderful example of an academic institution and publishers working together for the benefit of our students.” Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:00:45 +0100 867539