LISNews: Librarian News

Article in the NYT Sunday Book Review about ebooks and footnotes.

Excerpt: Since typing that small type, I have received dozens of angry and concerned queries about the anecdote. Why had I fed her grapes? Did I not know they were toxic? After some back-and-forth, I was surprised to discover that these incredulous comments often came from readers of the electronic version of my book, where the footnotes are shunted off to the end of the text, relegated to being mere endnotes. If footnotes are at risk of going unread, endnotes are even more so.

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.
http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html

(Los Angeles, CA) - Today, the County of Los Angeles Public Library announces that it will add an additional 10,000 eBooks to its digital collections. These eBooks will be available free of charge for County Library card holders at http://colapublib.org/eBooks.

Yesterday, Amazon.com announced that “Kindle and Kindle app customers can borrow Kindle books from more than 11,000 libraries in the United States.”

Support for the Kindle platform means that even more County Library customers can take advantage of the County’s growing digital collection. Other supported devices include the Nook by Barnes & Noble, the Sony Reader, the iPad and smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry and Android.

County Librarian Margaret Donnellan Todd says, “We are a library for the 21st century. Our mission is to support reading and the love of books. For a hundred years this Library has made the printed word accessible to all Los Angeles County residents. For the next hundred years and beyond, we will continue this important mission. Our investment in eBooks and digital technology ensures that we provide continued access to books regardless of format.”

Many library patrons looking to purchase an eBook reader first ask the County Library which one is compatible with its digital collections. With the addition of support for the Kindle, the County Library now supports all major eBook reader platforms. -- Read More

Public Library eBooks for Kindle Now Available, Check Your Library
Amazon and OverDrive have quietly started rolling out Kindle ebook lending from public libraries, albeit in Beta. Even though there hasn’t been any official announcement yet, some public libraries have already started lending ebooks for the Kindle. (e.g. Seattle)