May 2015

From The Guardian, a selection of queries addressed to NYPL librarians including “Is this the place where I ask questions I can’t get answers to?” – Phone question, September 13, 1947

I also believe that by using new technologies and strategies, distributed professionals can build a hosting service that is attractive to clients. We may not be able to stand around a water cooler or conference table, but we can replicate the essence of those environments with tools, policies, and a collaborative attitude. In doing so we have more freedom to hire the staff the make the right fit for our organization, no matter where they are located.

From Setting the Right Environment: Remote Staff, Service Provider Participants, and Big-Tent Open Source Communities | Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Technology Of Books Has Changed, But Bookstores Are Hanging In There

If the book is dead, nobody bothered to tell the folks at Capitol Hill Books in Washington, D.C. Books of every size, shape and genre occupy each square inch of the converted row house — including the bathroom — all arranged in an order discernible only to the mind of Jim Toole, the store’s endearingly grouchy owner.

Visitors are greeted by a makeshift sign listing words that are banned in the store, including “awesome,” “perfect” and, most of all, “Amazon.” The online giant has crushed many an independent bookstore — but not Toole’s. “Hanging in here with my fingernails,” he says with a harrumph.

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/28/408787099/the-technology-of-books-has-changed-but-bookstores-are-hanging-in

Publishing’s big week is almost over. The industry’s annual convention, BookExpo America, ends Friday in New York, and on Saturday the publishing world opens its doors to the public with BookCon, where avid readers will get the chance to mix and mingle with their favorite authors.

Last year, the lack of diversity on author panels at BookCon spawned the We Need Diverse Books campaign, which in turn sparked renewed conversation about the lack of diversity in publishing. Ellen Oh, one of We Need Diverse Books’ co-founders, says anger about the lack of diversity in publishing had been brewing for a long time, but when BookCon announced its guest list last year, it struck a nerve.

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/29/410272351/a-year-later-weneeddiversebooks-has-left-its-mark-on-bookcon

From 2Paragraphs (written for the modern attention span):

500 Questions is the new TV quiz game where contestants try to answer a series of rapid-fire questions. The show is being broadcast for seven consecutive nights. Tonight, May 27 is the sixth night (8pm on ABC). .

The contestant who came closest to answering all 500 Questions was librarian Steve Bahnaman. The affable, knowledgeable man works at the Campbell University library.He planned to get a PhD in religion but “that ended up not being something I wanted to do.” Turns out he preferred “being around research and helping people with research.” Bahnaman will return to his job $110,000 richer after answering 167 of the 500 Questions.

Discussion on the demand for paper in our digital world. The need for certain paper has even risen. The author of the book On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History makes a few comments and a graph in the story shows that the demand for book paper is down over 30%.

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/26/408794149/dont-write-off-paper-just-yet

What if the devastating drought in the western U.S. doesn’t end? A few years ago, the science fiction writer Paolo Bacigalupi started exploring what could happen.

“Lake Powell and Lake Mead were hitting historic lows, and they weren’t re-filling the way they were supposed to. Las Vegas was, in fact, digging deeper and deeper intakes into Lake Mead,” he remembers. “This question of scarcity. This question of too many people needing too little water.”

Those questions inspired Bacigalupi to write The Water Knife, a noir-ish, cinematic thriller set in the midst of a water war between Las Vegas and Phoenix. The novel follows three people: a climate refugee, a journalist, and a “water knife” — a secret agent for Las Vegas’s ruthless water czar. Think Chinatown meets Mad Max.

Full piece:
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/23/408756002/what-if-the-drought-doesnt-end-the-water-knife-is-one-possibility

Advertising does not make content free. It merely externalizes the costs in a way that incentivizes malicious or incompetent players to build things like Superfish, infect 1 in 20 machines with ad injection malware, and create sites that require unsafe plugins and take twice as many resources to load, quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, power, and stability.

From Monica at Mozilla: Tracking Protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015

In his prose poem Eureka, Poe concludes that God and the human soul are pervasively present in the universe itself. Truth is intrinsic to reality, as it is to consciousness. The pedantic voice of the postscript knows and does not know the meaning of the ciphers found at Tsalal, “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.” Poe has brought the tale to a region that, in his place and time, was far beyond the common understanding, and perhaps beyond his own as well, except in its deepest reaches, where he knew that God is just.

From On Edgar Allan Poe by Marilynne Robinson | The New York Review of Books

Statistics provided by Sean B. Minkel, assistant director of Rapid City Public Libraries, show that the circulation of traditional books, audiobooks, magazines and DVDs was down 14.8 percent in 2014, compared with the circulation in 2013.

By contrast, the library system’s circulation of electronic books (known as e-books) and other digital products rose by 34.3 percent in 2014.

From E-books soar, traditional books sag in annual library statistics