LISNews: Power Influencer, Passion Catalyst

The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West)

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohaves, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.

Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman’s friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois, through the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society, to her later years as a wealthy banker’s wife in Texas. This Bison Books edition features a postscript by the author with a newly discovered letter from Oatman.

Measurement

From Harvard University Press

For seven years, Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament enjoyed a samizdat-style popularity in the mathematics underground, before demand prompted its 2009 publication to even wider applause and debate. An impassioned critique of K–12 mathematics education, it outlined how we shortchange students by introducing them to math the wrong way. Here Lockhart offers the positive side of the math education story by showing us how math should be done. Measurement offers a permanent solution to math phobia by introducing us to mathematics as an artful way of thinking and living.

In conversational prose that conveys his passion for the subject, Lockhart makes mathematics accessible without oversimplifying. He makes no more attempt to hide the challenge of mathematics than he does to shield us from its beautiful intensity. Favoring plain English and pictures over jargon and formulas, he succeeds in making complex ideas about the mathematics of shape and motion intuitive and graspable. His elegant discussion of mathematical reasoning and themes in classical geometry offers proof of his conviction that mathematics illuminates art as much as science. -- Read More

From Harvard University Press

The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland

Between 1961 and 1967 the United States Air Force buried 1,000 Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. The Missile Next Door tells the story of how rural Americans of all political stripes were drafted to fight the Cold War by living with nuclear missiles in their backyards—and what that story tells us about enduring political divides and the persistence of defense spending.

By scattering the missiles in out-of-the-way places, the Defense Department kept the chilling calculus of Cold War nuclear strategy out of view. This subterfuge was necessary, Gretchen Heefner argues, in order for Americans to accept a costly nuclear buildup and the resulting threat of Armageddon. As for the ranchers, farmers, and other civilians in the Plains states who were first seduced by the economics of war and then forced to live in the Soviet crosshairs, their sense of citizenship was forever changed. Some were stirred to dissent. Others consented but found their proud Plains individualism giving way to a growing dependence on the military-industrial complex. Even today, some communities express reluctance to let the Minutemen go, though the Air Force no longer wants them buried in the heartland.

Complicating a red state/blue state reading of American politics, Heefner’s account helps to explain the deep distrust of government found in many western regions, and also an addiction to defense spending which, for many local economies, seems inescapable.

Why did Wal-Mart really decide to stop selling the Kindle?

This book cannot be read on a Kindle

E-Readers and the Public School Problem

Reading With Kids: Some stats to ponder …

Short-Form Digital Grows at University Presses

DVD: First Position

Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_...

Libraries might not be able to duplicate what Eggers has done but I think there are seeds of ideas that could be used from what Eggers has done.

Lovers of Proust, get out your headphones: Naxos AudioBooks, a British division of the classical music label, has recorded all seven volumes of “Remembrance of Things Past” on CD — 120 discs, which will take 153 hours to get through. The last one comes out on Oct. 29.

Nicolas Soames, the publisher, said in an interview that the new version replaces an earlier, abridged edition — just 36 CDs — that the company recorded between 1996 and 2000. He believes the 120-disc edition (also available for download), which will cost £380 (about $600), to be the longest audiobook in existence.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/audiobook-publisher-issues-120-disc-version-of-...

Interesting piece at Teleread

Konrath and Crouch on Libraries
http://www.teleread.com/drm/konrath-and-crouch-on-libraries/

"The Story" on APM had this piece:

Ken Perenyi paints like Rembrandt - and Modigliani and Picasso. He can forge a brush stroke better than most, and for a time he actually sold his works as originals in the big auction houses. He had a close call with the F.B.I., and now he makes pieces that are labeled as copies. He calls himself a "master forger," and he tells his story in his book Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger.

Download MP3 here

After the forgery piece there is a segment called Noun Project. Here is the description. If you get the MP3 this is part of it so you can decide if you also want to listen to this part.

Description of "Noun Project"
Edward Boatman started designing symbols to use in his presentations at work, and soon his library grew to hundreds of icons. Now, people around the world are sending him symbols – for the brain, a key or a prayer – to include in the library he has called the Noun Project.

We are nearing the election and some news stories and books may be appearing that are relevant for LISNEWS posts. I wanted to give some background on my thought process in regards to political posts.

I have zero interest in endorsing any candidate in this forum.

My posting a story that has a political topic, theme is not an endorsement of the specific article. If I am not endorsing the article why I am posting it would be a valid question. My answer would be that there are many articles and books that are good to be aware of whether you agree with their content or not. I would expect this to be a view held by many librarians but I have been surprised how often this is not the case. Too many times I have received a response to an article that assumes my motive in posting a story is me saying - "You must believe what is in this article" as compared to what I was trying to do was make people aware of an article.

If you think an article does not belong on the site say so. If you think an article makes a good point consider leaving a comment mentioning what that is. If an article makes a bad point consider commenting on that. More discussion is better than less discussion. -- Read More

The more users a social network site like Facebook attracts, the more others will want to use it. But a site’s audience can decline just as quickly as it grows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/business/Sites-Like-Groupon-and-Facebook-Disappoint-Invest...

Perhaps the revolution has reached an evolutionary stage
http://www.idealog.com/blog/perhaps-the-revolution-has-reached-an-evolutionary-stage/

Excerpt: The dizzying pace at which US consumers were switching from print to digital couldn’t last forever. Based on the numbers being published by the AAP, with a huge assist in interpretation by Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch, it seems that the slowdown has become very noticeable in the past 12 months.

Between late 2007 when the Kindle came out and late 2011, ebook sales doubled or more every year. Since September 2011, during which Cader reckoned sales were double the year before, the monthly numbers are showing much lower (and declining) year-on-year growth. The April numbers showed only a 37% increase from the year before.

I’ve been pondering this question about when ebooks uptake would slow down for a long time. In March of 2010, 17 months ago, I wrote that my hunch was that the switchover “won’t start slowing down until ebook sales are 20-25% of what a publisher expects on a new title.” And I guessed that would occur before the presidential election of 2012. That feels reasonably consistent with what appears to have happened.

Full blog post:
http://www.idealog.com/blog/perhaps-the-revolution-has-reached-an-evolutionary-stage/

Google Plans to Buy Frommer’s Travel Guides
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/google-to-buy-frommers-from-wiley-publishing/

Book: A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End

Like many coral specialists fifteen years ago, J. E. N. Veron thought Australia's Great Barrier Reef was impervious to climate change. "Owned by a prosperous country and accorded the protection it deserves, it would surely not go the way of the Amazon rain forest or the parklands of Africa, but would endure forever. That is what I thought once, but I think it no longer." This book is Veron's Silent Spring for the world's coral reefs.

Veron presents the geological history of the reef, the biology of coral reef ecosystems, and a primer on what we know about climate change. He concludes that the Great Barrier Reef and, indeed, most coral reefs will be dead from mass bleaching and irreversible acidification within the coming century unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed. If we don't have the political will to confront the plight of the world's reefs, he argues, current processes already in motion will become unstoppable, bringing on a mass extinction the world has not seen for 65 million years. -- Read More

Electronic Superhighway
http://www.flickr.com/photos/heyitsgarrett/2224498674/in/set-72157600509093567/

Book received a Publisher's Weekly starred review.

From James McManus, author of the bestselling Positively Fifth Street, comes the definitive story of the game that, more than any other, reflects who we are and how we operate.

Cowboys Full is the story of poker, from its roots in China, the Middle East, and Europe to its ascent as a global—but especially an American—phenomenon. It describes how early Americans took a French parlor game and, with a few extra cards and an entrepreneurial spirit, turned it into a national craze by the time of the Civil War. From the kitchen-table games of ordinary citizens to its influence on generals and diplomats, poker has gone hand in hand with our national experience. Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama have deployed poker and its strategies to explain policy, to relax with friends, to negotiate treaties and crises, and as a political networking tool. The ways we all do battle and business are echoed by poker tactics: cheating and thwarting cheaters, leveraging uncertainty, bluffing and sussing out bluffers, managing risk and reward. -- Read More

When I was young, I had an eccentric, poker-playing uncle. At family reunions, he loved to show me how to play five-card draw, which introduced me to the concept of betting and bluffing. He’d deal out the cards, ask me to make a mock wager with fake chips, and then tell me to decide whether to fold or go all-in. As an 11-year old, my poker-playing skills weren’t well-honed. So, invariably, I’d fall for my uncle’s bluff by folding too early, turning over our cards, only to find out that I had held the winning hand. My uncle would joyously rake the jackpot into his pile and cackle at me, “You sure left a lot of money on the table, kid!” To this day, I can remember the frustration that I felt knowing I had held the winning hand but still lost the game.

If my uncle were alive today, I think he’d make a similar observation about the publishing industry. He’d say that publishers are leaving millions of dollars on the table each year, because their marketing tends to fold too early. In other words, you can’t afford to let your marketing copy fold when skeptical shoppers call your books’ bluff. When people browse your titles, your marketing copy has to overcome their skepticism and convince them that the book is worth buying. You have to speak the readers’ language and capture their interest. If they call your bluff and your marketing folds, then you lose book sales.

Full article:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/publishers-make-poor-poker-players/

How Google's 'Penguin' Update Will Change Publishing, for the Better

Over the past decade, the publishing industry been swinging on a pendulum created by the effects of search engine optimization (SEO). In the old, primarily print days, the most successful publishers were those that could produce great content for a specific audience and keep that audience engaged via subscriptions or at the newsstands. More recently, the kings of publishing were those that could best engage web crawlers and monetize their sites through a windfall of free search traffic. The focus has been less on creating great content and engaging readers than on producing lots of words on lots of pages to engage web crawlers.

But there is a silver lining to all of this. With last year's Panda release, and the more recent Penguin release, Google is going to flip SEO on its head. If Old SEO enabled some to fool a crawler into indexing borderline junk content to get high rankings, New SEO looks likely to take any notion of fooling anyone out of the equation.

http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/google-s-penguin-update-change-publishing/236580/

Interesting link at Library Journal
http://www.infodocket.com/2012/08/10/metadata-the-isbn-users-manual-6th-ed-2012/