July 2011

Borders’ Landlords and Creditors, Kobo Object to Bankruptcy Liquidation
Borders Group Inc. faces objections as it heads to liquidation from creditors, landlords and e-book maker Kobo Inc., which called the sale process “hurried and confused.”

Borders will wind down its remaining 399 stores starting July 22 after it couldn’t reach an agreement with an earlier bidder, Najafi Cos., about an offer to keep the company running. The company won’t hold an auction as there have been no proposals to keep the company operating, it said in a statement yesterday.

10 Unconventional Bookstores For Your Browsing Pleasure
This week, the Paris Review let us in on a little secret — an illegal, speakeasy-style bookstore right here in our fair city of New York. While we try to hunt down the exact coordinates in hopes of a good read (and a good story), we thought we’d tally a few of our favorite unconventional and unusual bookstores from around the world, whether they be aquatic, underground, holy or just plain strange looking. After all, even us indie-bookshop devotees could use a little extra weirdness in our lives, and in our novels. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve left your favorite unconventional bookstore off the list!

The Tao of Librarianship
Librarians need the ability to be in touch with reality and not be blind or naive. The job of a librarian does not have to be a struggle against obsolescence or a constant proving of their value to stakeholders and administrators. Instead librarians can try to understand what is actually of value to our patrons and be leading the parade instead of fighting against it.

A bookshop going places
Although it’s geared to a much easier-going kind of shopping than we’re used to, the Book Barge is a genuinely dynamic enterprise

Amazon just issued a press release announcing the opening of their Kindle Textbooks store. Titles will be available to rent for periods from 30 days to 360 days, and students can increase the rental period in increments as small as one day, or purchase (license) the book outright at any point.

See: http://www.teleread.com/amazon/amazon-announces-textbook-rentals-for-the-kindle-platform/

Story at EarlyWord.com

The story is not sure why this is the case. One reason may be that local bookstores do not have the literature hispanic people want to buy and the ebook allows them to purchase what they want.

In late 2008, the University of Oregon’s library faced a financial double punch. The recession meant belt tightening across the university at a time when the rising cost of journal subscriptions had already put a strain on the library’s budget. “We were faced with a two-pronged financial attack here,” recalled David C. Fowler, the library’s head of licensing, grants administration, and collection analysis.

Something had to give. That something, as it turned out, was Oregon’s so-called Big Deals with two heavyweight publishers, Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons. Big Deals provide large collections of journal articles but also lock institutions into multiyear subscriptions at rising prices that many libraries say they can no longer afford. At Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, another institution under pressure to make ends meet, those deals were eating up 40 percent of the library’s materials budget.

http://chronicle.com/article/Libraries-Abandon-Expensive/128220/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Rumor About NSA-Google Alliance to Stay Just That
The National Security Agency does not have to disclose its relationship with Google amid press reports that the two partnered up after hackers in China launched a cyber attack on the U.S. government, a federal judge in Washington ruled.
In February 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center requested a number of communications between the NSA and Google regarding cyber security.

Finding good information on the internet
The internet empowers us to educate ourselves and make more informed choices and decisions without leaving our couches. But if we believe everything we find on the internet, we are likely to wind up making some very poor decisions. In this new digital information age, how do we keep from being misinformed? As a skeptical environmental research scientist and educator I have picked up a few tricks that anyone can use to find and select high-quality information from the internet.

#1 Don’t be scared of scientific papers
#2 Not all websites are created equal
#3 Checking the facts

From Asimov to Zelazny

Reading every single trade journal, for example, or understanding the marketing, engineering and sales of your field–there are countless ways to go deep instead of merely paying lip service to the current flavor of the moment.