LISNews: Librarian News

The American Booksellers Association recently announced that its ranks grew by 43 stores in 2012, as independent shops sprouted up from coast to coast.

Another good sign from that round-up is that six of those new stores are expansions of existing independent businesses, which would indicate that these smaller operations are not merely able to stay afloat, but also grow.

The Consumerist Has More.

Bookish, the Web site built by top publishers to provide information on their books and authors in a literary magazine-like format, opened for business Monday night.

Although the site received financing from just three houses – Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group USA and Hachette Book Group – it will include books by 16 other publishers including Random House and Scholastic.

Meant primarily as a destination for readers, visitors can also purchase books on the site directly from the publishers through bookish.com or other retailers if they’d like.

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Kickstarter distributes an email called "Projects We Love"

In a recent email they featured this Kickstarter project - The People's E-Book

The great English novelist Charles Dickens was born this day in 1812. Happy birthday Boz!

About nine months ago, the founders of Readmill noticed a trend was crystallizing. The makers of the popular book-reading iPad app kept receiving requests for an iPhone version. It was the most common request among Readmill users, and it just kept reappearing. Demand never slowed down; it only increased.
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So while the practice of reading is breaking out of its traditional confines – first bounded pages, then Kindles and Nooks, and now even away from tablets – its economics will, at least for now, continue to very much be dominated by the Internet-era’s traditional overlords. Sadly, even the snazziest iPhone app in the world isn’t going to change that.

The Future of Librarians in an EBook World

While the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation is funding tech initiatives such as a smartphone app for the Washington State Library, the focus on the human element is key, according to Sue Coliton, the foundation’s vice president. “We believe it’s not either/or,” says Coliton. “The technology opportunities are additive. The librarian should remain at the center.”

Good Marketing?
Giving “Love Your Library Day” a decidedly spicier feel than in past years, the Mayfield Library in Dalkeith, Scotland, offered free pole dancing lessons.

“It’s a day of excitement and engagement and bringing the community into a library, which people who have never been into a library before will see so much happening,” Constable said.

Slashdot's great headline "Internet-Deprived Kids Turning To 'McLibraries' 315" for This WSJ Article on the digital divide was great.... "In many communities, after the library and the computer lab close for the night, there is often only one place to turn for students without internet access at home: the local McDonald's."

Susan Eloise Hinton was a teenager when she wrote The Outsiders, the story of rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She used the pen name “S.E.” so readers wouldn’t know she was a girl, and bought a Camaro with the earnings. “Some of [the novel’s] faults, like its over-the-top emotions and drama, are what make it so popular because that’s the way kids really feel,” she says. “You’ve got to have the hormones going before you really appreciate that book.”

Librarian Elizabeth Bird says the novel’s unresolved class struggle resonates as powerfully as ever. “There are always going to be the haves and the have-nots — the divide is getting bigger and bigger all the time. And this book talks about that. A lot of books for kids and teens do not.” -- Read More

A small-town library in Colorado is lending more than just books. Patrons can now check out seeds and farm them. After the crops are harvested, the patrons return the seeds from the best fruits and vegetables so the library can lend them out to others.

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Beyonce has reportedly hired a librarian to catalogue the reams of intimate footage of herself that she has secretly been amassing for almost ten years.

The 31-year-old singer is getting up to 50,000 hours of intimate home videos stored in a digital archive in a temperature-controlled room so she can access moments from her life at the touch of a button, the Sun reported.

During the week she may look like an average elementary teacher and librarian, but in her spare time and during her summer vacations, Diane McCormick has dedicated herself to completing a hike of the Appalachian Trail. The trails stretch across 13 states and total 2,183 miles. Although she never intended on finishing the entire thing, she reached the impressive goal this past summer.

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The reason why publishers won't supply ebooks to public libraries is because libraries insist on having marc records and their own catalogues.

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Libraries are LOUD... For rich people, that’s not a problem. They live in spacious homes, glide along in hermetically sealed cars, book weekends in restful spas, dine in restaurants where the nearest table is 6 feet away. Quiet is one of the sweetest luxuries they’re able to afford. But most rich people don’t use libraries. For the rest of us, refuge from this cacophonous world is getting harder and harder to come by. Let’s hope librarians are listening to all the patrons asking them not to take it away.

Front page of the NY Times today (below the fold) and home page of the NY Times website features a story by the architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, suggesting that the New York Public Library's plan to remove the stacks from the central building and design a massive new circulating library in that space is a plan that doesn't make sense. Rather than focus on criticisms of how the move to greater off-site storage will hamper researchers or to snotty complaints from researchers that the hoi polloi will sully their temple, Kimmelman looks at the budget and doubts that it can be kept from ballooning.

San Francisco Animal Care & Control has been relying on public contributions and occasional Chronicle donations of old newspapers to line animal cages and catch waste from puppies who don't know how to take their business outside yet. But Thursday, an animal control van parked at the San Francisco Public Library was loaded with two 32-gallon recycling bins full of old newspapers from the library as part of a new program to ensure that the shelter has a consistent stream of paper.

"This most likely will take care of 100 percent of our newspaper needs," said animal care supervisor Eric Zuercher.

How's that for a happy subject? "While bookstores are failing, libraries are thriving"... But libraries afford the valuable loan aspect of book reading. In this digital age, some people still want to hold physical books, not tablets, but that doesn’t mean people actually want to buy a print version. Paper versions that only occupy a house for a week, though, are much more likely to be taken home and thus libraries continue to survive in an increasingly online world.

Interesting question on shrinking shelf space at book stores... how will that impact us? How will shrinking shelf space impact publishing?

However, the shelf space is shrinking.
It is hard to see these lost shelves being replaced by others and therefore the volume of print itself may have to shrink further. Some believe that a direct marketing approach will replace the High Street and to a degree it is true, but unfortunately the biggest direct marketer today is Amazon. The one that knows more about your book buying habits, tastes, dislikes and your disposable income is only one click away. Many direct marketers merely only handle the marketing and throw the fulfilment over to – yes, Amazon.

Park School librarian Laura Amy Schlitz on Monday joined a select group of authors to be twice honored with one of the nation's top prizes for children's literature. - 9030z8e

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Data is being collected about your reading habits. That information belongs to the companies that sell e-readers, like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And they can share — or sell — that information if they like. One official at Barnes & Noble has said sharing that data with publishers might "help authors create even better books."

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