January 2014

Reimagining the book – The End Of Passive

http://aenism.com/end-of-passive/
“Now imagine that a reader can choose to be any character in the story. At any point in the book, the events are premeditated by the prior decisions of an instance of a character played by another reader and your actions is going to determine how another reader’s story will play out. With each juncture, your story is matched with someone else’s so your fates intertwines. With a tree like this, there will be multiple endings and not every branch will lead to an ending. Some unfortunately lead to the demise of a character. Perhaps only a few branches for each character will lead it to one of its favorable endings. Like how you may still be fatally struck by lightning in real life despite living healthily, your encounters are out of your control so you will never have ultimate control of your fate.”

This is how Google is killing the Web

http://pando.com/2014/01/27/this-is-how-google-is-killing-the-web/
But you won’t find these great sites on the first page of Google results—you might not find them on the first 10. As a result, these services, some of them genuinely life-changing, get lost in the dark recesses of the Internet. Even when you find these gems, you probably won’t think to access them the next time you log on. Their biggest challenge is finding a large enough audience to create a habit around their product.

Creating a habit around a product is limited by the way we browse the Web.

Take a moment and think about the browser user experience. It hasn’t changed much in the past 20 years and since the days of Netscape, we’ve been confined to a search box. We need to know exactly what we’re looking for, either through a search or by typing in the exact web address.

Queens Library president gets $390G salary, luxe office makeover while shedding 130 jobs

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/queens-library-president-390g-shedding-130-jobs-article-1.1592194

Last year, Queens Library President Thomas Galante was paid more than the mayor or the MTA chairman, and spent $140,000 to renovate his offices at the Central Library. Meanwhile, Galante eliminated nearly 130 library jobs through layoffs and attrition over the past five years.

11th Annual BookFinder.com Report Out-of-print and in demand

http://www.bookfinder.com/books/bookfinder_report/BookFinder_Report_2013.mhtml

In this the 11th annual BookFinder.com Report we publish a list of the top 100 most searched for out of print book titles from the previous 12 months. The books featured in this 2013 edition of the report run the gambit of publishing from true to life memoirs to science fiction, cookery to crochet, and firearms to photography.

Most of the books published over the course of history are out of print today. For hundreds of years the lifecycle for the vast majority of books has been the same: a book is written, it is published, many people buy and enjoy it, the book begins to fall out of favor and then publishers stop printing copies and the book falls out of print. This happens to exceptional books, average books and books that perhaps should never have seen the light of day in the first place. This lifecycle remained the same from the days Gutenberg walked the earth until the very recent past; a book being out of print meant it was a dead book. Once a book was dead the only way you were going to read a copy was to find someone to lend, give or sell it to you, or convince a publisher that issuing a new pressing was going to be financially viable.

Subterranean trove of books, papers at risk in NYS Education Building

http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/State-Library-s-tough-calls-on-what-to-save-what-5156008.php

It is an eerie bibliophile’s netherworld, accessible by cramped cages of creaky service elevators, dark and cool and redolent of mildew, old leather bindings and sloughing paper that litters the floor like snowflakes. There is no climate control among miles of metal shelves, and accessing the hundreds of thousands of volumes is an arduous task. From the time a patron requests a book at the State Library, it typically takes two days to retrieve. A clerk drives a van four blocks around the Plaza, descends into the stacks, hunts among the haphazard holdings and drives back with the book.

[Thanks Elaine!]

Library cuts trigger fears of Canadian knowledge drain

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Library+cuts+trigger+fears+knowledge+drain/9432991/story.html
“With libraries closing, there’s content … that’s no longer available to the users be they researchers, members of the public, people who are developing policy in government departments and that’s always worrying,” said Marie DeYoung, president of the Canadian Library Association and librarian at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.