LISNews: Librarian News

Sad story from Huffington Post of the librarian who shook herself out of a job.

Students and politicians alike are calling for an Oxford University librarian to be reinstated after she was fired for the filming of a Harlem Shake video in one of the school's libraries.

Though the librarian, Calypso Nash, did not actually take part in the making of the video, she allegedly lost her job because the filming took place on her watch, the Independent reports.

Rhetorical question from The Atlantic Cities:

In 2010, Poland's National Library performed a survey to determine the reading habits of the Polish citizenry. The results were not buoying: 56 percent of Poles had not read a book in the past year, either in hard or electronic form. Just as bad was that 46 percent had not attempted to digest anything longer than three pages in the previous month – and this included students and university graduates.

So architect Hugon Kowalski conceived of a new kind of library that he hopes will one day be built in Mosina, a town just south of Pozna?. On its first floor, it's all bibliotheca: Patrons squat on moddish stools among stacks and stacks of books. But then it gets weird: In the middle of the library is a glass column full of water and flailing human bodies. Go up one level and you're suddenly in the middle of a vast swimming facility, complete with a snaking water slide that takes whooping swimmers on a ride inside and outside of the building.

Kowalski got to thinking about his watery wonderland of reading after consulting surveys that showed Poles "rarely indicated" a desire to build new libraries. Rather, they wanted to see more sports halls, pools, kindergartens and retail shops. So the architect decided to supply the public with a fun reason to repeatedly visit a mixed-use library facility. If it so happens that bathers exit the pool's locker room with a fierce desire to consume Hans Fallada, that's just a happy side effect of the building's design.

Book: Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy

What’s happened since John Wood left Microsoft to change the world? Just ask six million kids in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. In 1999, at the age of thirty-five, Wood quit a lucrative career to found the nonprofit Room to Read. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world,” he strived to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the nonprofit sector—and succeeded spectacularly.

Article about Room to Read

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that U.S. companies that make and sell products abroad cannot prevent those items from being resold in the U.S.

For example if a textbook that is sold for $100 in the U.S. is sold in Brazil for $20 this ruling makes it legal for someone that purchases the $20 book to bring it to the U.S. to sell.

Full article

This is a unique reading list – these books were all written by librarians and most of them were recommended to us (AbeBooks.com) by librarians. If any profession is well qualified to write books then librarians truly fit the bill.

The best known works by librarians, excluding Chairman Mao's Little Red Book but including books by Strindberg, Borges, Ann Tyler etc.

Check them out in all their glory, courtesy of Library Journal. Lists include Change Agents, Innovators, Marketers and Advocates. Community Builders and Tech Leaders are forthcoming.

This week's program starts off with a bite-sized edition of Tech for Techies led by the owner & engineer of Erie Looking Productions, Mike Kellat. News is also highlighted relative to Google Reader and its impending demise. The new comment line is mentioned as being 1-206-299-2120, extension 1580. For those willing to risk using a SIP client, sip:1580@sip.sdf.org is also usable addressing.

Related links:

• LISNews: Google Reader to Disappear
• John C. Dvorak: Google Reader Bites the Dust. Who's Next?

Download here (MP3) (Ogg Vorbis) (Free Lossless Audio Codec), 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.

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/.

New business book out by Bob Garfield one of the host of the radio program "On the Media"
The book is called -- Can't Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results

On of the major premises of the book is authentic customer relationships.

Excerpt from book blurb on Amazon: So what does work in this bewildering new era? Where do “authentic customer relationships” come from? The answers will make some leaders sigh with relief while others rip their hair out: Honesty. Transparency. Shared values. A purpose beyond profit. Sure you still need a high-quality product or service to offer, but that’s not enough. Now that people can easily discover everything that’s ever been said about your brand, you can’t manipu­late, seduce, persuade, flatter or entertain them into loyalty. You have to treat them like flesh-and-blood human beings, not abstract consumers or data points on a spreadsheet.

This is an interesting contrast when you look at the book on Amazon. The book has all 5 star reviews on Amazon. I challenge people to read the 5 star reviews on Amazon and find one that you think is truly authentic.

A 20-year-old Racine, WI man who's accused of engaging in lewd behavior in a library has been banned from "all the libraries on the face of the earth."
Best Headline EVER!
[Thanks Marge!]

The website for Library World Records, the Guinness Book of World Records for libraries and books is now back online.

Library World Records is fascinating book first published in 2004 after research work began on the book in 2002. The book was further extensively updated in a second edition in December 2009. Library World Records provides hundreds of intriguing and comprehensive facts about ancient and modern books, manuscripts and libraries around the world.

A much bigger brand new 3rd edition of the book is being researched at the moment and further details of this brand new edition will be revealed on this website later in 2013.

Link:
http://www.lwrw.org

Godfrey
BSc, MSc.
London, Britain.

On March 13th, Google announced that its Reader application would disappear on July 1, 2013. Dan Seifert wrote at The Verge about the matter where it was indicated that Google is doing this as part of a regular service reduction exercise and that Google clims usage of Google Reader has declined. Chris Ziegler later noted at The Verge that this has generated some backlash.

Debian developer Richard Hartmann noted that this shows some of the dangers of relying solely on cloud services. Work is underway to bring the self-hosted reader Newsblur into the JuJu Charm Store for easy deployment to the Amazon Web Services public access cloud to have your own personal web-based RSS reader. The personal cloud platform ownCloud is available with an RSS reader mode added to the latest version. Ars Technica writer Casey Johnston speculates this closure is an attempt to make RSS reading social by moving it into Google+ perhaps.

The situation continues to develop especially as librarians like Michael Sauers explain how to migrate from Google Reader back to Bloglines.

Two industry groups argue that the retailer's plan to control several generic top-level domains, including .book, .author, and .read, would be anti-competitive.

Full article

Authors are snubbing publishers and insisting on keeping e-book rights. How one novelist made more than $1 million before his book hit stores.

Excerpt from article: In a highly unusual deal, Simon & Schuster acquired print publication rights to "Wool" while allowing Mr. Howey to keep the e-book rights himself. Mr. Howey self-published "Wool" as a serial novel in 2011, and took a rare stand by refusing to sell the digital rights. Last year, he turned down multiple seven-figure offers from publishers before reaching a mid-six-figure, print-only deal with Simon & Schuster.

"I had made seven figures on my own, so it was easy to walk away," says Mr. Howey, 37, a college dropout who worked as a yacht captain, a roofer and a bookseller before he started self-publishing. "I thought, 'How are you guys going to sell six times what I'm selling now?' "

Full article

Radio program - On the Media - A special hour on our changing understanding of ownership and how it is affected by the law. An author and professor who encourages creative writing through plagiarism, 3D printing, fan fiction & fair use, and the strange tale of who owns "The Happy Birthday Song"

Download full program here.

See a list of the individual segments of the show here.

For this blog ( http://kahnscorner.blogspot.com/2013/02/100-years-94-books.html ) I plan, among other things, to read and review every novel to reach the number one spot on Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers list, starting in 1913. Beyond just a book review, I'm going to provide some information on the authors and the time at which these books were written in an attempt to figure out just what made these particular books popular at that particular time.

I decided to undertake this endeavor as a mission to read books I never would have otherwise read, discover authors who have been lost to obscurity, and to see how what's popular has changed over the last one hundred years. I plan to post a new review every Monday, with links, short essays, and the like between review posts.

LOOK inside any book published since 1970 and you will find a number. But perhaps not for much longer. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN), invented in Britain in 1965, took off rapidly as an international system for classifying books, with 150 agencies (one per country, with two for bilingual Canada) now issuing the codes. Set up by retailers to ease their distribution and sales, it increasingly hampers new, small and individual publishers. Yet digital publishing is weakening its monopoly.

A tiny shop in Toronto, specializing in the arcane and the absurd, may just be publishing’s great new hope.
“This isn’t the store where you’ll find the book you were looking for,” Fowler says. “It’s the store where you’ll find the book you didn’t know you were looking for.” You may find something else surprising at the Monkey’s Paw, too: a glimpse of the future, a way forward for the old-fashioned bookstore in the age of the iPhone and the e-book.

This week's program provides a news miscellany.

Related links:

• CBS New York: Officials: Most NYC High School Grads Need Remedial Help Before Entering CUNY Community Colleges
• PCMag.com: Cablevision: Viacom Threatened Billion-Dollar Fine for Dropping Channels
• CBC News: Canadians no longer the biggest web addict, report shows
• Pegasus Librarian: Do you MOOC at all?
• The Corner: The Unemployment Rate: Apples to Apples

Download here (MP3) (Ogg Vorbis) (Free Lossless Audio Codec), 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. The production team's Amazon wish list can be found here.

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/. -- Read More

The paperback of “Fifty Shades of Grey” is exactly like the digital version except for this: If you hate the paperback, you can give it away or resell it. If you hate the e-book, you’re stuck with it.

The retailer’s button might say “buy now,” but you are in effect only renting an e-book — or an iTunes song — and your rights are severely limited. That has been the bedrock distinction between physical and electronic works since digital goods became widely available a decade ago.

That distinction is now under attack, both in the courts and the marketplace, and it could shake up the already beleaguered book and music industries. Amazon and Apple, the two biggest forces in electronic goods, are once again at the center of the turmoil.

Full article

After three Big Serious Issues in a row, and with a Big Serious Essay on the Mythical Public Library coming up in May, it's time for a little break...

The April 2013 Cites & Insights (13:4) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ13i4.pdf

It's 34 pages.

The 6x9" single-column "online version," optimized for e-reading, is also available at http://citesandinsights.info/civi13i4on.pdf and is 63 pages.

The issue includes:
The Front (pp. 1-2)

The Year of Both? My possibly-too-hopeful sense that more and more sensible people, and even some pundits, are recognizing that ebooks and print books are both likely to have substantial roles going forward.

The Middle: Deathwatch 2013! (pp. 2-19)

Catching up with the doomcryers (excluding print books--but see below).

Words: The Death of Books (or Not) (pp. 19-27)

What it says.

The Back (pp. 27-34)

Catching up with miscellaneous snarkiness through 2011 (and more recently for magazine items).

Enjoy!