LISNews: Librarian News

This fall, Penn State University Libraries and the English Department begin a year-long pilot project with student groups using the Sony Reader Digital Book, a portable electronic reading device that can hold books, audio files, and other downloaded materials. Sony donated 100 of the devices to the Libraries for the project that will test the utility of e-books in a higher education environment. The study will explore the potential of the Sony Readers in a variety of settings, including the Libraries’ leisure reading program, undergraduate and graduate classrooms, academic research projects, and as a service for people with disabilities.

Brother Industries Ltd conducted a verification test at "Pan-Pacific Imaging Conference '08 (PPIC '08)," an annual conference hosted by the Imaging Society of Japan, from June 25 to 27, 2008. The company displayed conference material data on its prototype e-paper terminals and had some conference attendees try them in the test.

Nikkei Electronics interviewed Norihisa Fujii, manager of the company's NID Research & Development Department and Takeo Terao of the Pre-Business Group in NID Research & Development Department at Brother Industries, about the outline of the verification test and the company's approach to e-paper devices. (Interviewer: Takuya Otani, Nikkei Electronics)

Found at Teleread:

"We all love e-books because you can take that one download and send it to all your friends—so you have twenty of them instead of just one, and the publisher can’t track you down or do anything about it.”

Did a librarian from Baytown, Texas, in fact say the above at a "Sci-Fi Fantasy Convention in Houston"? If so, what’s the full context, and might she want to apologize?

The quote comes to us by way of Cornelia Amiri, a fifty-one-year-old novelist with 5,580 friends on MySpace. I don’t know Cornelia, aka the Celtic Romance Queen. But I doubt she’d go out of her way to alienate librarians or fans. If anything, she strikes me as more tolerant of pass-alongs than would be most writers and publishers.

Full article here.

From David Pogue, NYT Technology Columnist

Well! My goodness!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how some of the computer books I’ve written wound up getting widely pirated online after I sent electronic PDF versions to readers who claimed to be blind.

That online column set off quite a firestorm. Readers, bloggers and pundits across the spectrum chimed in. Most of them painted me as a tenth-century village idiot.

But upon closer inspection, what looks like universal condemnation turns out to be a cacophony of conflicting lines of reasoning.

Full blog entry here.