November 2011

Teleread had a link to this story.

With e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, becoming more popular, the Salt Lake Public Library is supplementing its print collections with 5,253 e-books.

With more than 16,000 checkouts since December 2010, the digital bookshelf seems like a hit, but the problem is the cost.

E-books are purchased through OverDrive Inc., an e-content provider to more than 11,000 libraries. The Salt Lake Library pays $12,000 a year for the OverDrive online checkout service, then pays a fee per title to rent out books to patrons.

Digital copies of new titles purchased from Overdrive tend to be on average about $8 more than a print edition and can jump as high as $75.99 for popular titles.

Full article here.

Many parents say they want their children to be surrounded by print books, and to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals.

Full story

How Facebook is ruining sharing

“Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing–we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.”

Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for “Salvage the Bones,” a haunting tale of the struggles of a 15-year-old pregnant girl as a hurricane bears down on her fictional Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Miss.

In the nonfiction category, Stephen Greenblatt won for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” a “rumination on the pleasure of knowledge and on the agony of its loss,” the judges’ citation said. It was published by W.W. Norton & Company.

“My book is about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space and time and distance, to have someone long dead seem to be in the room with you,” Mr. Greenblatt said in his acceptance speech. “My book is about what the magic of the written word is.”

More:

NPR piece on the book: Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
Translation and the Meaning of Everything

Excerpt:

The Russian language has a word for light blue and a word for dark or navy blue, but no word for a run-of-the-mill generic shade of blue. So when translators are tasked with converting “blue” from English to Russian, they’re forced to choose a specific shade.

It’s hard to imagine that this particular choice would have any serious implications, but interpreters are constantly translating concepts into other languages with words that have no exact match.

In his book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, David Bellos explores the history, the future and the complexity of translation — from the tangled web of simultaneous translation at the United Nations, to movie subtitles and the text on ATM screens.

Google Reader Is Not About Reading News It Is About Curation
“The core of my concern is that curators need tools to find those stories that may not be as popular as others. Otherwise, all news comes from a few select sites that are read by the masses. Obviously, this is not what we want to have happen. I hope Google finds a way to continue to provide tools for curators, or works with some other tools to allow for easy integration with Google+.”

Gravesend librarian Boris Loselev is on a mission to give his neighborhood a culture shock.

For the past ten years, Loselev has quietly turned the Avenue X library branch’s auditorium into a high-class gallery exhibiting emerging artists’ work.

“I want to raise the culture for everyone in the area,” said Loselev, 60. “Our goal isn’t selling art, it’s promoting art.”

Loselev said Gravesend is in desperate need of a culture shock so he works overtime on his own dime to pull off the monthly art exhibits.

Full article

NASHVILLE — After a beloved local bookstore closed here last December and another store was lost to the Borders bankruptcy, this city once known as the Athens of the South, rich in cultural tradition and home to Vanderbilt University, became nearly barren of bookstores.

A collective panic set in among Nashville’s reading faithful. But they have found a savior in Ann Patchett, the best-selling novelist who grew up here. On Wednesday, Ms. Patchett, the acclaimed author of “Bel Canto” and “Truth and Beauty,” will open Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore that is the product of six months of breakneck planning and a healthy infusion of cash from its owner.

Full article

Libraries must find way to draw teens, she says “As a general rule, libraries focus on little children but don’t offer teens that much in the way of programming,” she said. “We usually think they’re too busy with gym, soccer, football and other activities,” she said.

“They usually come back when they’re older adults, but we usually miss serving those in their teen years.”

Blake posted a link to this video in early October. I missed it then so I wanted to repost for any others that may not have caught it the first time.