June 2012

Those subscribed to LISTen: An LISNews.org Program via one FeedBurner feed or another must change the feed location in their podcatcher or other RSS reader immediately. The new feed to use is http://www.lisnews.org/taxonomy/term/113/feed and will be going into effect on June 22nd local time in Ashtabula. On and after that day you will no longer receive updates if you subscribe to the podcast via FeedBurner.

The publisher, in conjunction with city libraries and 3M, will make its books available in e-format, though they will not be available immediately after release.

Full article

The French, as usual, insist on being different. As independent bookstores crash and burn in the United States and Britain, the book market in France is doing just fine. France boasts 2,500 bookstores, and for every neighborhood bookstore that closes, another seems to open. From 2003 to 2011 book sales in France increased by 6.5 percent.

Full article

From the Malaysian Digest, news that a Borders store manager in Kuala Lumpur is facing possible arrest for stocking a Canadian title that Muslim religious authorities find objectionable.

Nik Raina Nik Abdul Aziz was charged in the Kuala Lumpur Syariah Court for allegedly violating the Hukum Syarak by distributing or selling Irshad Manji’s book Allah, Liberty and Love.

“The management of Berjaya Books Sdn Bhd who own and operate the Borders bookstore chain in Malaysia is very disappointed that our store manager Nik Raina Nik Abdul Aziz has today been charged by Jabatan Agama Wilayah Persekutuan (JAWI) in the Kuala Lumpur Syariah Court for distributing a book by Canadian author Irshad Manji deemed to be against the Islamic Law (Hukum Syarak) and banned in Malaysia. The charge was brought under Section 13(1) of Prime Minister’s Department for Islamic Affairs Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom have also been named as respondents in the application for judicial review.”

An interesting article reporting on a recent session at the meeting of the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), relating a discussion about patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) and its impact on library collection development.

“Libraries…are beginning to flip the process of collection-building on its head by striking deals that let their patrons’ reading habits determine which works they purchase.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/20/research-foresees-demand-driven-book-acquisition-replacing-librarians-discretion

If something is where it’s supposed to be, can you still call it a “discovery”? Suzanne Fischer, in the Atlantic, says “no.”

It’s an interesting discussion about cataloging archival material and the work that is, by necessity, still on the shoulders of researchers, spurred by the recent reporting of the “discovery” of a medical report filed by Charles Leale, the first doctor on the scene when Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot at the Ford Theater.

In the case of the recent press on the Leale report, the report had not yet been catalogued, cutting off discovery for ordinary researchers searching with finding aids and online catalogues. It’s very possible, of course, with the volume of material that archives hold, for a particular professional to not know exactly what the repository holds. This is because archivists catalogue not at “item level,” a description of every piece of paper, which would take millennia, but at “collection level,” a description of the shape of the collection, who owned it, and what kinds of things it contains. With the volume of materials, some collections may be undescribed or even described wrongly.

Novelist Richard Brautigan’s Brains At Bancroft Library: A Grand Guignol Adventure!

“I know you know that Brautigan blew his brains out, literally blew his mind,” she wrote to poet, novelist and essayist Andrei Codrescu at Exquisite Corpse. “What you might not be aware of is that he blew his brains out all over pages of his last manuscript… I handled them, archived them, ran my hands over his desiccated brain matter on numerous occasions, though at first I had no idea what I was touching because the Library said nothing and even denied what became all too apparent after I eliminated the other possibilities of what this strange stuff could be (I’m not unfamiliar with such things, and my eyes didn’t deceive me).

[Thanks Stephen!]

Excerpt from article:

Mr. Blum is a correspondent for Wired magazine, which happily is not called Tubes magazine. His quixotic and winning book is an attempt to comprehend the physical realities of the Internet, to describe how this seemingly intangible thing is actually constructed. Early on, he lays down this bedrock assertion, which is worth quoting at modest length:

“I have confirmed with my own eyes that the Internet is many things, in many places. But one thing it most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes. There are tubes beneath the ocean that connect London and New York. Tubes that connect Google and Facebook. There are buildings filled with tubes, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and railroad tracks, beside which lie buried tubes. Everything you do online travels through a tube.”

NYT article about the book – TUBES A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin argues that publishers will need to be able to sell direct to consumers in the future. Interesting question is that if this happens what will be the effect on libraries?

Full blog post

Fifty Shades Of Grey outstrips Harry Potter to become fastest selling paperback of all time

Last week alone, the first instalment sold more than 100,000 paperback copies – a feat most of the Harry Potter books and all of the Twilight novels failed to achieve.
Fifty Shades of Grey has been Britain’s best-selling book for nine weeks, while the trilogy has held the top three spots on the UK paperback book chart for the past six weeks.