LISNews: Librarian News

Book: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

Jason Griffey: "Really great write up of the internals of the tech team for the Obama campaign over at The Atlantic. Librarians and educators should read it as an argument for why it’s important to have technologists on your team directly, and not just rented out. "

The lessons of Indie Rock for the publishing industry are pondered in a post at The Scholarly Kitchen,
"Whenever you buy a record from just about any indie band, it comes with either a CD or with a card that contains a URL and a download code so you can get a digital copy at no additional cost...
If implemented in the right way, publishers could kill two birds with one stone: they could support a mechanism for downloading e-books purchased in conjunction with hardcovers that not only makes their best customers happy and extends the life of hardcover sales, but that actually fosters competition in the ebook marketplace."

From the Guardian:

A fiery Jeanette Winterson has called for the hundreds of millions of pounds of profit which Amazon, Starbucks and Google were last week accused of diverting from the UK to be used to save Britain's beleaguered public libraries.

In an impassioned speech at the British Library this evening, the award-winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit said: "Libraries cost about a billion a year to run right now. Make it two billion and charge Google, Amazon and Starbucks all that back tax on their profits here. Or if they want to go on paying fancy lawyers to legally avoid their moral duties, then perhaps those companies could do an Andrew Carnegie and build us new kinds of libraries for a new kind of future in a fairer and better world?"

Winterson was referring to the meeting at parliament's public accounts committee last Monday which saw executives from the three companies vigorously quizzed by MPs over their tax affairs, and accused of diverting UK profits to tax havens. Her lecture was to mark the 10th anniversary of the independent charity The Reading Agency, and was attended by fellow authors including David Nicholls, Julian Barnes, Joanna Trollope and Sarah Waters.

Probably should have saved this one for Friday, but... (I suggest you mute before trying).

Here's "Take me to a useless website please."

Do library eborrowers also buy ebooks?

Well, stop the presses. OverDrive, the leading aggregator providing libaries with ebooks, and Library Journal have done research that proves that they do.

The survey results are interpreted as evidence that the big publishers are making a terrible mistake being cautious about making ebooks available for library lending. And it is being reported that way. By one outlet after another, although one made the point that the publishers aren’t listening.

Full blog post here

From Bookriot:

We usually keep things pretty positive here at the Riot, but after many years of life in the bookish interweb, we’ve identified some conversations that just keep coming back up. And we’re ready to put an end to them. So pull on your crankypants, kids, and join editors Rebecca and Jeff for a good old-fashioned Airing of Grievances.

See the 10 book topics never to discuss again.

This week's episode starts off with a brief economic discussion and then heads into a news miscellany. Believe it or not, LISTen has now been around for five years as of this week.

To cheat and spoil the last lines of this episode:

This episode came to you from the south shores of Lake Erie. This program first originated from metro Las Vegas. Where might it come from at this time next year?

Related links:

• Associated Press: Twinkies likely to survive sale of Hostess
• Reuters: Petrified by the fiscal cliff? Relax, it's just a slope
• Zero Hedge: Intended and Unintended Consequences: The ‘Darden Approach’ to Obamacare
• The Corner at National Review Online: Obamacare Forces Applebee’s New York to Stop Hiring
• Stephen's Lighthouse: How to kill a library
• On a + note: How to kill a library… #39: 2012
• The Verge: Boxee CEO Avner Ronen: 'I'm not sure people want everything on demand'
• Daring Fireball: Tweetro, Popular Metro-Style Windows 8 Twitter Client, Hits 100K User Token Wall
• WindowsObserver.com: Tweetro Forced To Pull Their App from Windows Store
• The View From Chaos Manor: eBooks; Benghazi
• TeleRead: In B&N’s closure of Fictionwise, Canadian customers lose big
• Public Libraries News: Make it one to remember: National Libraries Day, Saturday 9th February 2013
• Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals: National Libraries Day takes place on Saturday 9 February 2013
• BBC News: Many teenagers 'can't read GCSE exam papers'

Download here (MP3) (Ogg Vorbis), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net. Support and subsistence items for the production team can be purchased and sent from here via Amazon, as always.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/.

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

Story on NPR

A BASTION of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.

What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable.

Opinion piece at NYT

Apple is now the proud owner of the page turn.
In a patent approved this week by the United States Patent Office Apple was awarded a design patent for

"Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface."

Full article at CNN.com

Barnes & Noble won’t carry Amazon titles in its stores. But that doesn’t make Amazon author Tim Ferriss’s upcoming Four-Hour Chef “the most banned book in U.S. history.”

Full article

A University High School student who accidentally shot himself inside a library in Orange City is still in the intensive care unit at Halifax Health Medical Center in Daytona Beach, a police detective said Friday morning.

Fair use is a "very gray area," says Julie Ahrens, who runs the Fair Use Project at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society.

"There are lots of things that are not clear."

"I get things where people are like, 'Are you sure I can do this?' And the best I can say is, 'Yes, you should be able to,' " she says.

Famed quotation isn't dead -- and could even prove costly

Two new developments in the two big cases concerning book scanning and fair use: first up, we've got the somewhat unsurprising news that the Authors Guild is appealing its rather massive loss against Hathitrust, the organization that was set up to scan books from a bunch of university library collections. As you may recall, Judge Harold Baer's ruling discussed how the book scanning in that case was obviously fair use. It was a near complete smackdown for the Authors Guild.

If the National Book Awards are meant to be evolving into something like Britain’s much more popular and influential Booker Prize, then this year’s awards, and last night’s ceremony, are steps in the right direction. Here’s a list of the winners:

Nonfiction: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” by Katherine Boo
Fiction: “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich
Young People’s Literature: “Goblin Secrets” by William Alexander
Poetry: “Bewilderment” by David Ferry

A hard-hit area of Queens is getting a temporary library — set on blocks in the sand.

The permanent Queens Library at Arverne was badly damaged by superstorm Sandy.

On Friday, a double-wide trailer is being set up next to the library.

It's expected to open to the public by Monday.

A couple of months ago I offered to give a talk on Children and e-books. Who is reading them, what they are reading them on, where the books come from, etc.
A lot has been written on adults and ebooks, a bit less on teens and ebooks and next to nothing on kids and ebooks except for the pieces on pre-schoolers and iPads.
Clearly, the organizers of the conference thought that there wasn't enough discussion on this topic and agreed to have me speak. But it turns out to be a Catch-22. What do I speak on, if there isn't enough information out there?

One solution I have come up with is to create a short survey. This survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/kidsebooks

The one that I hope anyone reading this, will take. I made it general so that anyone with any experience of kids and ebooks can answer the questions.
My audience will thank you.

Is the brick-and-mortar bookstore dying out? Not in these pages. In 'My Bookstore,' dozens of authors celebrate their favorite brick-and-mortar booksellers, located all across America. From California to Florida, here are 10 of their picks.

Louise Erdrich's The Round House, a novel about a woman who is raped and left traumatized on an Indian reservation in North Dakota, won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday.

Erdrich, who gave part of her acceptance speech in Ojibwe, said the award "recognized the grace and endurance of native women." USA TODAY's four-star review called it "deeply moving" and "impossible to forget."