LISNews: Librarian News

From the junk e-mail goddess...
Someone writes...

\"A rare first-edition copy of Charles Darwin\'s seminal work on natural selection has been returned to the Boston Public Library after disappearing at least eight decades ago.
An 1859 copy of Darwin\'s \"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection\" was returned last week after a woman found the book while cleaning out a relative\'s home, Roberta Zonghi, the library\'s keeper of rare books, said on Wednesday. The library received the book in the 1860s as a gift, Zonghi said. The library noted that the book was missing in 1933, but it could have vanished a decade earlier.\" more...
The folks at ABCNews have this one

I\'m not sure if it has an application in the library world, but, the \'ATM for books\' is eight feet long, 38 inches wide, it can produce a book in 12 minutes, and costs $82,000. The MTI PerfectBook-080 machine could change book stores as we know them. Instead of allowing books to go out of print, you can store them as digital files and publish them \"on demand\" in bookstores, while customers wait, using self-contained book printers.

Does something like this have a place in a library?

Digital Mass Has The Story

Newspapers are dissing book reviews. Reasons cited are \"the average reader really doesn\'t care about quality.\" I wonder, according to whom? One editor says \"book review sections only appeal to a small, elite, older readership.\" Ya don\'t say... The article also goes on to say that \"newspaper editors don\'t read books.\" Now, that doesn\'t surprise me. [more...] from Salon.

Juan P. Dayang, President of the Publishers Association of the Philippines, Inc. and governor of the National Book Development Board, recently posed a challenge to the Filipano nation to increase a love of reading. With well over a 97% literacy rate, a high percentage of those people just don\'t want to read. \"Sadly, we say that we have today a deteriorating habit of book reading which has resulted in lesser quality of education ... The relevance of books and, of course, readership, could not perhaps be equated with anything else in the making of civilized societies. Books are the fundamental tools of man in acquiring new and wider experiences to enrich his existence.\" [more...] from Manila Bulletin.