March 2008

BookSurge, Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary, is making an offer that most publishers would like to refuse, but don’t feel they can. According to talks with several pod houses, BookSurge has told them that unless their titles are printed by BookSurge, the buy buttons on Amazon for their titles will be disabled. A detailed explanation of her how the new program was explained to her is provided by BookLocker.com co-owner Angela Hoy on her writersweekly.com blog.

Over the last year, BookSurge has been trying to cut into the market share of pod leader Lightning Source and is using the selling clout of Amazon to generate more business. “I feel like the flea between two giant elephants,” said the head of one pod publisher about the upcoming battle between Lightning Source and BookSurge/Amazon. He said although the deal with BookSurge will be more expensive, he has no choice but to make the move since most of his authors expect their titles to be for sale on Amazon. He added that his company will also continue to use Lightning Source for printing as well. Amazon’s BookSurge mandate extends to traditional publishers as well as to online pod houses.

Story continued at Publisher’s Weekly

This link came courtesy of Michael Sauers from Cnet.
Apparently Google has an age limit to use, well anything associated with it. From searching to using services such as Gmail. Here’ the link to the article. Who knew? So often we ignore or look quickly at the terms of use, that we miss things like this. I guess I should be glad that I’m old enough to use their services.

We all hear growing up that the first recording of a human voice is Thomas Edison’s “Mary had a little lamb.” However, this may not be true. Audio historian David Giovannoni, has discovered a recording that predates Edison’s by 17 years. Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville used a phonautograph to create this artifacts.

If you’re going to read in the tub, you may as well be tidy about it and keep your books shelved nearby, or rather, within the tub itself.

This tub includes a nice back rest and shelving for several books. And for only US$17,300, it’s well designed to fit any librarian’s income!

American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is challenging a new Indiana law which requires dealers of sexually explicit materials to register and file a statement with the secretary of state. Full story at the Bookfinder Blog.

Another Report From The Buffalo News on $2 million donated to the school for an academic endowment and library addition, the donors allege St. Bonaventure University failed to provide a complete accounting of how it spent the money in a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court.
“I just want to see why the project has gone over budget so dramatically,” Paul Bogoni said. “It could have been rebid and redesigned to stay within budget. Instead, the university changed the scope of the project far beyond what we originally intended without first discussing it with us.”

The university raised additional funds to cover the cost overruns, and the project is 75 percent complete.

Some really interesting numbers from Walt Crawford’s book Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples. His series of detailed metric summaries on the 231 blogs in his book which as far as I know is the only broad objective survey of academic library blogs.

Academic library blogs: Doing the quintiles 1, Posting frequency: In all, the 232 blogs included 6,229 posts, for an average (mean) of 27 posts per blog–about two per week. The median is 14 posts, just over one per week.

Academic library blogs: Total words: The complete set of posts total 852,930 words. The average blog had 3,692 words. The median was 2,244. Comparing that to public library blogs, the average academic blog was about 10% shorter–but the median academic blog was about 17% longer.

Academic library blogs: Average post length: Overall, the average (mean) average length per post is 178 words. The median is 144 words.

Academic library blogs: Illustrations: In the case of illustrations, the blogs in the survey have a fairly freakish pattern: To wit, of 3,662 illustrations used in all 231 blogs over the 92-day study period, more than half (1,975) were in one blog, leaving 1,687 or roughly seven per blog for all the others. The truly meaningless average (mean) is 15.9 illustrations per blog, but the median is all of one illustration.

Some really interesting numbers from Walt Crawford’s book Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples. His series of detailed metric summaries on the 231 blogs in his book which as far as I know is the only broad objective survey of academic library blogs.

Academic library blogs: Doing the quintiles 1, Posting frequency: In all, the 232 blogs included 6,229 posts, for an average (mean) of 27 posts per blog–about two per week. The median is 14 posts, just over one per week.

Academic library blogs: Total words: The complete set of posts total 852,930 words. The average blog had 3,692 words. The median was 2,244. Comparing that to public library blogs, the average academic blog was about 10% shorter–but the median academic blog was about 17% longer.

Academic library blogs: Average post length: Overall, the average (mean) average length per post is 178 words. The median is 144 words.

Academic library blogs: Illustrations: In the case of illustrations, the blogs in the survey have a fairly freakish pattern: To wit, of 3,662 illustrations used in all 231 blogs over the 92-day study period, more than half (1,975) were in one blog, leaving 1,687 or roughly seven per blog for all the others. The truly meaningless average (mean) is 15.9 illustrations per blog, but the median is all of one illustration.

Academic library blogs: Comments per post: Even more so than total comments per blog, the blogs in Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples lack extreme cases of high interactivity on a per-post basis: The highest is 2.2 comments per post. The overall average (an average of averages) is all of 0.12 comments per post–basically one comment for every eight posts. The median, of course, is zero.

Academic library blogs: Comments on posts: Overall, there were a total of 575 comments (just less than a third as many as for public library blogs). That’s an average (mean) of 2.5 comments per blog. On the other hand, the median number of comments per blog is precisely the same as for public library blogs: Zero. While 118 of the 252 public library blogs had no comments, 145 of the 231 academic library blogs–nearly 63%–lacked comments entirely.

A few months ago Connie Reece did some serious pruning on her Google Reader, which was choked by an overgrowth of blog feeds. One day she decided she had officially hit Information Overload. she was either spending so much time reading that I had no time to write, or I was feeling guilty for clicking on “mark all as read.” Choices were difficult, but she managed to cut back to 50 RSS feeds.

Now She’s Trying another tactic: cutting RSS feeds even further, yet increasing the number of blogs she’s able to read, through Twitter, Instapaper, Alltop.com and a couple other sites

Aaron Schmidt has used quite a few library OPACs. He’s also used and sought out the best of the open web. You’ve probably done the same and like him, you’ve probably been dismayed at the disparity between the two worlds. The open web can be fun and inspiring. Would you say the same of our OPACs? He’s thought about what OPACs should be like in bits and pieces and decided to assemble them here.

A Problem
Besides all of the small, simple usability enhancements OPACs need (listed way below) a big concern about library websites and OPACs is the distracting transition between the two. You know the routine. Ubiquitous “Click here to search the catalog” links take users from one place to another and create a disjointed experience.

Aaron’s Solution
One way to provide a seamless experience is to put some OPAC functions into the website, letting people accomplish OPAC tasks without having to leave the library website. In Aaron’s dream OPAC this go-between is essentially an ecommerce shopping basket but called a backpack or bookshelf in this instance. Just like on amazon.com, when logged in, a patron’s library backpack appears on every library webpage, whether it be the homepage, a book list, or the results list of a search. Any item cover on the website can be dragged and dropped into users’ backpack/bookshelf.

An exhibit highlighting the rising cost of library journal subscriptions to support faculty and student research. The Cornell Libraries subscribe to over 60,000 journals in paper or electronic form. Five years ago the most expensive engineering-related journals cost $4,000 to $12,000. Now prices reach $18,000.

To get a better sense of what this much money is worth, please Enter the Exhibit!

Sticker Shock 2 (2007) updates the original 2002 Sticker Shock display.