Electronic Publications

Stephen King nixes e-book version for his latest novel

More than ten years after becoming one of the first novelists to embrace the e-book format, Stephen King has become one of the first novelists to reject it.

King’s book, Riding the Bullet, was published as a one of the first e-books by Simon & Schuster in 2000 and sold for $2.95. Just recently King told the Wall Street Journal that he would withhold digital rights to his upcoming novella, Joyland, to be released in early June. The book will be sold by Hard Case Crime, an independent publisher of crime fiction paperbacks with pulp-style cover artwork. Hard Case Crime also published King’s The Colorado Kid in 2005.

Read more: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/its-about-time/2013/may/21/stephen-king-...

Upstate NY Man Digitizes 22 Million Newspaper Pages

I thought you might be interested in this new video and article for Reason.com on Tom Tryniski, who has digitized 22 million old newspaper pages and is getting 6 million views per month on his website (beating the Library of Congress 2 to 1).

http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/03/05/amateur-beats-gov-at-digitizing-newspape

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013
The gold open-access model has given rise to a great many new online publishers. Many of these publishers are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts.

There are two lists below. The first includes questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. Each of these publishers has a portfolio that ranges from just a few to hundreds of individual journal titles.

The second list includes individual journals that do not publish under the platform of any publisher — they are essentially independent, questionable journals

In both cases, we recommend that researchers, scientists, and academics avoid doing business with these publishers and journals. Scholars should avoid sending article submissions to them, serving on their editorial boards or reviewing papers for them, or advertising in them. Also, tenure and promotion committees should give extra scrutiny to articles published in these journals, for many of them include instances of author misconduct.

There are still many high-quality journals available for scholars to publish in, including many that do not charge author processing fees. An additional option is author self-archiving of articles in discipline-specific and institutional repositories.

The author is grateful to the many colleagues who have shared information about potential predatory publishers. Last year’s list included 23 publishers, and this year’s has over 225, evidence of the rapid growth in the number of predatory journals and publishers. This list will be updated throughout the year at the blog Scholarly Open Access, http://scholarlyoa.com.

The criteria for inclusion in the lists can be found here. The author’s email address is: jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu.

Libraries continue battle for e-content

The future of e-books in libraries is not entirely rosy, however. Library associations throughout the country are responding forcefully to a troubling change in the relationship between libraries and publishers with regard to the latter's digital content. Certain publishers, such as Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, refuse to sell their e-books to libraries. Others, such as Penguin, have lately restricted the titles, authors and digital formats they make available to libraries.

eBooks and Libraries

Today's Diane Rehm show on NPR carried an excellent program on eBooks and Libraries.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-08-28/e-books-and-libraries

May 4, 2012 - A Day Against DRM

Dan York writes about why he's against Digital Rights Management:

As an author of multiple technical books, and a prolific online writer, I care a lot about intellectual property issues as they pertain to my content. On one level, you might think I would be extremely concerned about people stealing and re-using my content. And don't get me wrong... I am concerned. I choose distribution licenses carefully and I have pursued those who have scraped my content to simply wrap it in ads. But I do NOT see "DRM" as the answer.

As a reader and as an author, I truly hate Digital Rights Management (DRM) for ebooks and look forward to the day when it ceases to exist. My latest book, "Migrating Applications to IPv6" was published DRM-FREE by O'Reilly and I plan to publish all future books DRM-free as well.

York goes on to list six reasons why he hopes to see the end of DRM in the near future.

'Predatory' Online Journals Lure Scholars Who Are Eager to Publish

This is a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Jeffrey Beall, metadata librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, keeps a running list on his blog Scholarly Open Access of what he calls "predatory" publishers and journals. He said he has identified about 50 so far, and comes across a new one nearly every week.

Publishers hate you. You should hate them back.

Publishers hate you. You should hate them back.
So library-types, let’s get our story straight. Publishers have contempt for the authors they need to write works, and the readers they need to read works. Publishers are scared that the internet is going to disintermediate their asses into the dustbin of history, and the best response that many of them have come up with is to express their fear through hatred. For all the things that we might need to improve in libraries or apologize for, this isn’t one of them.

Burning Circle Episode 59

This program is double counted as LISTen: An LISNews.org Program -- Episode #186

This week's program provides a bit of a news recap. Links to the issues mentioned and more can be found at the Erie Looking Productions blog.

Download here (MP3) (Ogg) or subscribe to the podcast MP3 to have episodes delivered to your media player. Although we suggest subscribing by way of a service like my.gpodder.org, you can also subscribe to the Burning Circle via FeedBurner's email tool to receive show posts in your inbox with links to episode audio.

Creative Commons License
Burning Circle Episode 59 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. -- Read More

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