March 2011

A letter to Cory Doctorow asking him to allow purchasers of his ebooks to OWN them.

One advantage of e-books is that they’re virtually indestructible.

But a decision by publisher HarperCollins to limit the circulation of library e-books is rousing librarians, who have started a boycott via blogs and Twitter protesting what some consider the digital “destruction” of books.
Under a policy that began Monday, libraries can “lease” (for a fee) new HarperCollins e-books and loan them no more than 26 times. At that point, the book disappears — digitally — unless the library pays to lease another copy for the next 26 readers. (Libraries lend e-books one at a time, just like print, unless multiple copies are bought.)

Full article

As the Nazi’s power grew in the early 1930s, a Jewish librarian living in Frankfurt published a catalogue of of 15,000 books he’d collected.

When the war hit, large portions of the collections disappeared, a frighteningly common occurrence with Jewish literature and writing in Germany just before and during World War II. Yet somehow many of these books made their way to America, to the shelves of the Leo Baeck Institute where they were recently re-discovered.

More from the New York Times.

As the wait for a decision on the Google Book Settlement approaches the one-year mark, PW talks with the author of the forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything, about the Internet giant’s expanding dominance.

Excerpt: In his new book, The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (Univ. of California Press) Vaidhyanathan explores the young company’s increasingly dominant role not just online but in our lives. “What is most fascinating about Google to me is its effect on us,” the author tells PW. “Its effect on the media business is interesting, but I wanted to write a book that could inform a casual Google user about some of the hazards and habits of Google. In that sense, my book is much more about us than it is about Google. In fact, the critical faults of the story I tell are ours, because we’ve become so addicted to getting more stuff, faster, for free.”

Full piece at Publisher’s Weekly

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin saw this Cnet article: The rise of the 99-cent Kindle e-book and thinks it contains two wake up calls for the big publishers.

In short they need to work on their prices. Mainly lowering them. Full blog post here.

Breaking Down Social Media
Maybe it’s time to do the same on the other side of the “internet and society” question. Maybe we should stop talking about “information and communication technologies” or “the Internet” or “new and social media” as a single constellation of technologies that have key characteristics in common (distinctively participatory, or distinctively intrusive, for example), and that are sufficiently different from other parts of the world that they need to be talked about separately. The Internet is still pretty new, so we tend to look at it as a definable thing, but digital technologies have now become so multifaceted and so enmeshed in other facets of our lives that such a broad brush obscures more than it reveals.

So here is an exploration of what some of the consequences might be, and a rough sketch of how we might break down “new and social media” into more manageable mouthfuls.

Library of the future: Wi-Fi, flat screens, automated book sorting
The shiny, LED-lit future of libraries opened Monday in Bolingbrook, promising to be a technology blueprint for others as iPads, Kindles and Nooks replace dusty old paperbacks.

Crowds of curious and eager patrons visited the three-story, $39.5 million building featuring flat-screen TVs, computer terminals, self-checkout stations, an automated book sorter and a cafe.

The Fountaindale Public Library, with its state-of-the-art, Wi-Fi equipped space, is starkly different from the previous antiquated library, a nearby one-story brick structure built in 1975 that awaits the wrecking ball.

on “good” repositories:
Back to Chris’ question. Perhaps the “digital” is a red-herring. What if we consider his question in light of traditional libraries? This got me thinking: could Ranganthan and his Five Laws of Library Science serve as a touchstone? Granted, bringing Ranganathan into library discussions is a bit of a cliché. But asking ethical questions like the “goodness” of something is a great excuse to dip into the canon. So put on your repository colored glasses, which magically substitute Repository Object for Book, and …

On Friday, March 4th, actress Vivica A. Fox participated in a Read Across America program that was held at the Marcy Branch (Bed-Stuy) of Brooklyn Public Library. The event was intended to promote literacy to children, who also received free books to take home.

Read the full story here.

Article in The University of Baltimore Intellectual Property Law Journal
Article title: UNLOCKING THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES: DIGITAL LICENSING THAT PRESERVES ACCESS
Cite: 16 U. Balt. Intell. Prop. L.J. 29
Author: Kristen M. Cichocki

Abstract: The traditional role of the public library as a content intermediary is being altered by recent changes in contract practice between publishers and libraries, alterations to copyright law, and new applications of technology to digital content.

This article will examine how licensing contracts for digital content, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the application of digital rights management are all calling into question the role of the public library in the digital future. The article will then discuss possible approaches to reframing publisher-public library licensing agreements in order to mitigate the negative impact of certain contractual terms and promote uses of content expected by libraries, keeping in mind the difference in scale and distribution between real and digital space.