May 2008

A 2003 California law says Web sites must put links to their privacy policies on their home pages. Google doesn’t do this, saying users can simply search to find out what information it collects about them.

Story in the New York Times.

Marketplace on American Public Media:

Publishing is a world of increased competition, shrinking margins and long waits to see any green. Jill Barshay reports on how publishing houses are coping with changing times.

Full story here.

Marketplace story on American Public Media:
Even in an era of economic downturn and the big box store, independent book store Skylight Books is expanding. Commentator Kerry Slattery says it’s all thanks to growing shopper awareness for the impact of local businesses.

Read and listen to full story.

Penguin has reported that e-book sales from the first four months of 2008 have surpassed the house’s total e-book sales for all of last year. According to the publisher, the spike is “more than five times the overall growth in sales, year-on-year, through April 2008.” Penguin Group CEO David Shanks said he attributed the jump, in large part, to the growing popularity of e-book readers.

Full story at Publisher’s Weekly

The production of traditional books rose 1% in 2007, to 276,649 new titles and editions, but the output of on-demand, short run and unclassified titles soared from 21,936 in 2006 to 134,773 last year, according to preliminary figures released Wednesday by R.R. Bowker. The combination of the two categories results in a 39% increase in output to 411,422. Although it has tracked production of on-demand titles in the past, this is the first year the company has broken out the segment to better show the differences in the traditional categories (such as biography, fiction, juvenile) and the on-demand segment.

Full story at Publisher’s Weekly.

Editorial in The Vancouver Sun – British Columbia, Canada: “Over the last year, the Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch has become a shelter for the homeless. It is a sad time for all of us who loved everything the VPL offered to see this Vancouver icon reduced to a place where the unwashed and the unhinged openly imbibe pharmaceuticals, sleep off their intoxications, and have conversations with their shadows.”

Are You a Productive Reader? Here’s a good list of tips about reading productively:

Pay attention to structure.
Google it.
Use an index card as your bookmark.
Accept defeat.

Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.

They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated. In “The Laws of Cool,” Alan Liu writes: “Cool is a feeling for information.” When someone has that dexterity, you know it.

From the “Cataloging Futures” blog.

So after 3-4 years of talking about the future of cataloging–Where are we? That’s the question I’m asking myself before next week’s Palinet symposium on the future of cataloging.

Full blog entry here.

I followed the link at the “Cataloging Futures” blog to the Palinet symposium and there was this blurb about Karen Calhoun, who is the keynote speaker.

Karen Calhoun joined OCLC in May 2007 as Vice President, WorldCat & Metadata Services, to chart the future of OCLC’s cataloging services and extend WorldCat’s global reach. From 1996 to April 2007, Ms. Calhoun served in leadership positions at Cornell University Library, where she penned the infamous “Calhoun report” on the future of the catalog.

Here is a link to the Calhoun report.

Nate Anderson Says Libraries, foundations, and groups like the Internet Archive are arguably more interested in offering truly open access to resources, but without major funding from companies like Microsoft, will such projects remain viable in the long term? Kahle acknowledges that he needs to “scurry” to keep the library scanning centers operational; after all, several hundred people currently spend their days scanning books in these thirteen locations and they need to be “treated right.”

But several months remain to figure out the financial details. For now, Kahle just wants to say thanks. “In the long term,” he says, “it makes more sense this way.”