February 2013

Three independent bookstores are taking Amazon and the so-called Big Six publishers (Random House, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan) to court in an attempt to level the playing field for book retailers. If successful, the lawsuit could completely change how ebooks are sold.

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Check out this cool film project Free To All:

Inside the Public Library is a multi-platform documentary project that brings together library stories from all across America. Whether historic or contemporary, humorous or heartbreaking, these individual dramas shed light on how public libraries have shaped our society. The project’s centerpiece is a feature-length film chronicling a year inside San Francisco Public, a very unquiet library. Shorter films bring alive other extraordinary chapters of the public library story – from the puritans and robber barons who launched it, through the immigrants, suffragettes and civil rights activists who transformed it, to the millions of Americans whose lives are changed at the public library today.

Filming at the San Francisco Public Library in progress…(trailer)

This week, we were psyched to hear the news that selections from the famed Riot Grrrl Collection, part of the Fales Collection at NYU’s Bobst Library, will be published in a book later this year. The book, which was edited by senior archivist Lisa Darms, who launched the Riot Grrrl Collection several years ago (and who lived in Olympia throughout the ’90s), will feature some 350-odd printed artifacts, including fliers, posters, and zines, some of which — like Girl Germs 3, Johanna Fateman’s Artaud-Mania, and Kathleen Hanna’s My life with Evan Dando: Popstar — are even reprinted in full for your complete consumption.

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New CEO Marissa Mayer launched a redesigned version of the Yahoo homepage on Wednesday, but the site’s new features seem like a lukewarm rehash of the company’s old portal strategy and imitations of what Facebook offers.

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Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index
A new study using the Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index measures how various mobile Q&A platforms deliver quality, accurate answers in a timely manner to a broad variety of questions. Based on the results of our analysis, ChaCha led all Q&A platforms on mobile devices.

Have you ever dreamt of quitting your cushy job and starting a new life halfway around the world to follow your passion?
Jessica Fox, a NASA employee in Los Angeles, decided one day to move to Scotland to live in a used bookshop.
Jessica told BBC News her story of instincts, falling in love, and road bumps along the way.

BBC News Magazine

Some 125 years after his first appearance, Sherlock Holmes remains a hot literary property, inspiring thousands of pastiches, parodies and sequels in print, to saying nothing of the hit Warner Bros. film starring Robert Downey Jr. and such television series as “Elementary” and the BBC’s “Sherlock.”

But according to a civil complaint filed on Thursday in federal court in Illinois by a leading Holmes scholar, many licensing fees paid to the Arthur Conan Doyle estate have been unnecessary, since the main characters and elements of their story derived from materials published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law.

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Glasgow maritime publisher Brown, Son and Ferguson is 163 years old, and still in the hands of its original owners. This is something of a record – not that they would ever boast about it

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Presidential libraries serve as official cultural repositories for the legacies of their namesake commanders in chief. More than 200 years after his death, it’s hard to believe that the country’s first president, George Washington, still lacks a library devoted to his remarkable life.

Mount Vernon, the Virginia home of Washington, has spent the last several years raising $100 million to construct an official library on its scenic grounds. Organizers announced on Friday — just in time for Presidents Day weekend — an opening date of Sept. 27.

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Books about homosexuality are on the same shelf as books on incest and prostitution.

Homer’s “Iliad” is in the nonfiction section.

The works of Shakespeare and books on Elizabethan culture are nowhere near each other.

“I think it’s troubling,” said Jeff Aubuchon, the librarian at Oakmont Regional High School. “I’m worried about the message that sends.”

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