In the UK libraries pay into a fund to pay authors for borrowed books. This is called a Public Lending Right. Volunteer libraries that are springing up to fill the place of government run libraries do not have to pay the PLR fee. Authors are not happy.
July 2012
Califa Lands $325,000 in Funding for Ebook Ownership Project; Deal Close With Smashwords
The San Mateo-based Califa Group, which is the largest library network in California, has made major strides in its project to create an ebook ownership model along the same lines as the Douglas County Libraries in Colorado.
Penguin Parent Buys iUniverse Owner
Pearson, parent company of Big Six publishing company Penguin, acquired self-publishing company Author Solutions Inc. (ASI) from private equity firm Bertram Capital for $116 million in cash. The five year old company is better known by its brand names iUniverse and Xlibris, under which it has published about 190,000 print and electronic books so far by about 150,000 authors. The company has grown at approximately 12 percent for the past three years; in 2011, it made about $100 million in revenues.
Sifting through quantities of information
A recent article at the tech news blog, Gigaom, provides food for thought for libraries. In the piece, the author describes the value of simplicity and delivering what users want in terms of content, using the example of a news service called Evening Edition. One of the quotes from this post that stands out is “Of course, sifting through vast quantities of information in order to show people the important stuff is what newspapers are supposed to do…” Substitute the word ‘newspapers’ for ‘librarians’ and we are talking the same language.
2012 Podcast Hiatus
This brief announcement by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions announces a production hiatus effective immediately and lasting until August 20, 2012. Download here (MP3) (ogg), or subscribe to the program (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like my.gpodder.org especially as the program is no longer offered via e-mail using FeedBurner due to a recent de-Google that also wiped away the Google Voice line previously mentioned.
Batman Kids Event Goes On at Birmingham Area Library
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama: Jeff Bogart wouldn’t let a Colorado gunman who shot 70 people, 12 fatally, during a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in a movie theater spoil his 4-year-old son’s chance for his favorite comic book character, Batman.
The father and son were among about 300 people who attended a Batman event at the Hoover Public Library celebrating this weekend’s release of the latest Batman movie. The 10:30 a.m. event included library personnel dressed up as Batman, Batgirl, The Riddler and other characters from the popular comic book series.
“You still need to live life to the fullest and not let people like that crazy gunman stop you,” Bogart said. “Our prayers are with those families who went through that unimaginable horror there.”
Hoover Public Library director Linda Andrews said she and other library officials toyed with canceling their event, which had been planned weeks before the tragic shooting shortly after midnight Friday at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. But in the end they felt there was no need stopping the kids from having their fun.
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama: Jeff Bogart wouldn’t let a Colorado gunman who shot 70 people, 12 fatally, during a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in a movie theater spoil his 4-year-old son’s chance for his favorite comic book character, Batman.
The father and son were among about 300 people who attended a Batman event at the Hoover Public Library celebrating this weekend’s release of the latest Batman movie. The 10:30 a.m. event included library personnel dressed up as Batman, Batgirl, The Riddler and other characters from the popular comic book series.
“You still need to live life to the fullest and not let people like that crazy gunman stop you,” Bogart said. “Our prayers are with those families who went through that unimaginable horror there.”
Hoover Public Library director Linda Andrews said she and other library officials toyed with canceling their event, which had been planned weeks before the tragic shooting shortly after midnight Friday at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. But in the end they felt there was no need stopping the kids from having their fun.
“The fact that we have so many parents and children here shows that people are not willing to allow what happened deter them from enjoying their freedoms,” Andrews said. “The public library is a place where families can come to read and participate in fun activities like we have going on here today. In light of what happened, we have a Hoover police officer here just in case some parents felt nervous.”
Pornography Takes the Next Seat in Public Places
The growing public display of pornographic content is a thorny issue for legislators, libraries and airlines.
Full article in the NYT
Edward Hopper, 11AM, 1926
What’s Become of the Philadelphia Free Library’s ‘Know It Alls’?
From Daniel Rubin’s column in The Philadelphia Inquirer: Now that everyone’s an expert on fast facts, I wonder what has become of those Free Library of Philadelphia treasures known as the Know-It-Alls.
When I last visited these general-information specialists, in 1991, business was brisk. Surrounded by a wall of books and directories, they fielded 50 phone calls an hour from Philadelphians wondering how to spell Tiananmen Square, what glasnost is, how far to Fargo?
The rotating staff of 14 librarians – each with a master’s in science – was in such demand that each caller was limited to three questions.
Well, all that was so last century.
Today, there’s one full-fledged Know-It-All left – Lori Morse, a librarian who runs the General Information department. She’s backed up now by nine less-seasoned librarian assistants.
Where the department used to field 400 calls a day, now phone requests for what Morse calls “ready research” can be counted on one hand.
“We get maybe a couple a week,” she said. “We’ve turned more into customer service representatives – people needing to renew books, needing help downloading e-books.”
MIT Economist: Here’s How Copyright Laws Impoverish Wikipedia
What do copyright law, baseball, Wikipedia and Google have in common? Read on:
Everyone knows that the flow of information is complex and tangled in society today — so thank goodness for copyright law! Truly, no part of our national policy is as coherent, in the interest of the public or as updated for the Internet age as that gleaming tome in the US Code.
Not.
But one MIT economist, who recently presented his work recently at Wikimania, has found a way to test how the copyright law affects one online community — Wikipedia — and how digitized, public domain works dramatically affect the quality of knowledge.
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