February 2013

Participating libraries will host dedicated co-working spaces for the program, as well as both formal classes and informal mentoring from the university’s start-up resources. The librarians themselves will be trained by the university to help deliver some of the material. The network will offer everything, in short, but seed money. “As we develop this pilot and start to scale it out,” Lea adds, “we would like to be able to direct people on how to find those resources.”

“With the glut of self-published books on the market, the biggest obstacle for authors is discoverability – to rise above the noise and clutter and distinguish one’s work. A Rotten Tomatoes sort of rating system seems inevitable.

Inside an old box factory in Brooklyn, N.Y., there are shelves upon shelves of discarded texts — bizarre how-to manuals, grossly outdated atlases, back number encyclopedias.

It sounds like a place where old books go to die. But at the Reanimation Library, these paper orphans are getting a second life.

“Most of the books I collect would be considered useless, and most libraries would have taken them out of circulation,” said Andrew Beccone, a New York City resident and founder of the Reanimation Library. “But you can show their continued relevance by pointing to the visual material.”

Read more: http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Reanimation-founder-to-speak-at-Ferguson-Library-4313890.php

I have noticed over the years that every so often magazines (and now blogs) feature beautiful spreads of book-filled rooms, with headlines like “Living With Books” or “The Pages of Our Lives.” Usually the images feature poetic, far-off places where leather volumes fill 15-foot-tall, wood-paneled shelves, or sparse rooms with gauzy curtains have stacks of books on the floor, standing like architectural columns. As a book lover, I find these rooms transporting and inspirational but totally out of touch. A growing number of people, I think, don’t have books. After all, who wants those heavy, clunky volumes when you can store a seemingly endless library on a device that weighs less than a single paperback?

This week the entertainment industry and American ISPs rolled out a system that aims to curb illegal media downloads. The system is designed to first notify users of copyright infringement, and then to curtail Internet connectivity in response to repeated offenses.

Full article

A year ago, Hugh McGuire, the founder of PressBooks, was ready to give up. “If you talked to me last year at this time, I was ready to just quit because it was so frustrating,” he says of his latest startup, which allows people to use a simple blog-like content management system to publish e-books – for free. But a lot has happened in 12 months. “We’ve stuck at it, the market’s moved a little bit, and the product’s a bit better,” says McGuire, who previously founded audiobooks company Librivox. “We’re now on the cusp of really making a difference in the world.”

Carl Zimmer writes: A year ago, some friends (including my three fellow Phenomena writers) and I put together a web site to review science ebooks. We dubbed it Download the Universe, and we’ve reviewed about 80 titles since then, on everything from avalanches to Leonardo da Vinci. I’ve just written an anniversary post, in which I reflect on what works and doesn’t work in this new medium, and the things that give us as reviewers hope, along with a touch with anger. Check it out.

Article about book bindery in Utica, Nebraska.

Excerpt: Houchen has acquired 14 regional book binderies over the years, keeping a small bindery of five employees in St. Louis and bringing the rest of the work to Utica. They’ve expanded the Utica facility from 15,000 square feet when the Osbornes bought it to 40,000 square feet today. Their customer base has grown, too, from two states to 21, covering the middle third of the United States.

Today, they serve about 200 printing companies throughout the Midwest, ranging from small, independent self-publishers to some of the biggest names in book publishing. They also have 200 individual comic book customers.

As austerity measures go, rationing toilet paper sounds pretty austere.
They’re trying it at the public library in Trenton, the New Jersey capital, after repeated incidents of vandalism and theft from the restrooms. Individually sized allotments of toilet paper and other personal hygiene items are available by request only, CBS New York reports.

While you can’t yet make a trip to Washington D.C. and have casual perusal of all the world’s tweets, the technology to do exactly that is readily available—for a cost. Gnip, the organization feeding the tweets to the Library, is a social media data company that has exclusive access to the Twitter “firehose,” the never-ending, comprehensive stream of all of our tweets. Companies such as IBM pay for Gnip’s services, which also include access to posts from other social networks like Facebook and Tumblr. The company also works with academics and public policy experts, the type of people likely to make use of a free, government-sponsored Twitter archive when it comes to fruition.

Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/02/25/what-the-library-of-congress-plans-to-do-with-all-your-tweets/