Jen writes “Here’s a magazine that I’ll never have a need to read.”
You might if you’re one of the “5.5 million American men over 6-foot-2 and the 1.5 million American women north of 5-foot-9.” (Does this mean tall people are a significant portion of your library’s user group and you need to subscribe?)
Tall magazine—”because life may be short, but we’re not”—”
I saw this at boing boing this evening:
Operating a WiFi hotspot that you charge money for costs $30 a day. Operating a free WiFi hotspot costs $6. Clearing $6/day in new profit from offering free WiFi is easy, clearing $30 a day in most locations is damned hard. Will more cafes do the math?
Here\’s the irony in Wi-Fi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free Wi-Fi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for Wi-Fi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. According to a market study coming out this summer, retailers are quickly learning this lesson: up to 30% of US location owners who plan to deploy commercial hotspots in 2004 intend those hotspots to be free or free-with-purchase. Here\’s the full link
All \”h-e-double-hockey-sticks\” came my way with the last story about WiFi I posted, so let\’s have it again! This story is another indication (through my pro-WiFi tinted specs) that libraries should be implementing WiFi for patrons and no charge should be associated with patrons using it.
The commercial world will eventually push people to expect this service, and libraries shouldn\’t be left behind. Now lemme have it.
Looking for some interesting new reads? Patrons getting bored of the same books you\’re giving to them? Then take a look at the following article from the New York Times. Its about young German authors and their books.
Young German readers are themselves restless, pursuing some new identity that some say is happiness; polls show that \”being happy\” is one of the most important goals of young Germans.
\”Today there is nothing to belong to,\” Andreas Petzold, the editor of Neon, a new magazine for 20-somethings, told a Berlin newspaper, Taggespiegel. \”Young Germans are therefore asking themselves, `What can I do to be happy?\’ \”
And they enjoy, apparently, reading about their quest.
Some of Ms. Hermann\’s characters wallow in a claustrophobic depression of the artsy 30-year-old waiting for life to happen inside a cozy haze of sex and cigarettes. But Mr. Kaminer, a Russian Jew who came to Germany in 1990, suggests in his work that the happiest, least-burdened Berliners are its newest immigrants, whose lives are eccentric, extraordinary and rarely dull.
Here\’s the full article.
[via Steven Fesenmaier]
Slate has an good piece highlighting some drawbacks of using Google.
The 3 Googleholes are:
It is a fine article, but perhaps a bit confused. It praises Google’s Page Rank system, even though it clearly is invloved with the Googleholes the author details. And of course I would have been happier if the article mentioned libraries as a place to fill in Googleholes.
So we know how to best teach them, it is always good to be reminded of the problems our patrons have searching.
Gary Deane sent us this story, straight from the home of the 2003 ALA Annual conference.
Toronto police are searching for the owner of a collection of extremely rare books that a suave young man was trying to sell in the city.
A man was arrested for possession of property obtained by crime after police were called by a suspicious book dealer, Inspector Ken Kinsman of the downtown 51 Division said yesterday.
The major-crime unit became involved because the centuries-old volumes were researched on the Internet and found to be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The most interesting part of the story may be that the books haven’t been reported stolen, as far as the police can tell. There are no library markings on the books, so they most likely are from a private collection.
FilteringFilter:
[I know we\’ve all been thinking about filtering, probably to the point where the word is beginning to lose any meaning. Sorry to add to this, but this article may be worth it.]
From the Lawrence Journal-World.
It raises a point about non-English speakers and Internet filters: if filtering companies can\’t deal with the nuance of one language (English), what about other languages? What will happen to Spanish speaking users?
It also details libraries that are choosing to filter their computers, even though implementing the technology will be most costly than not accepting federal funds. boo!
The full story
Gerry sent in this funny one.
The summer of 2003 will always be remembered as the summer when children and children-like adults everywhere got swept away by two wildly entertaining works of magical fiction. Of course, I’m talking about J.K. Rowling’s action-packed fantasy Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Ann Coulter’s Treason, a hilarious novel about a magical world where everything is black and white and there’s always only one solution to any problem and anyone who disagrees with today’s administration (not the last one and not the next one) is unfoundedly and beyond-stupid-ly guilty of a very serious crime whose specific definition does not even apply in said cases. Doesn’t that sound magically unbelievable?
Reported yesterday in South Carolina\’s The State was news of an anti-Clinton Library.
A bit of poking around the LISNews archives revealed that Blake already reported this in December.
What is it about Presidential Libraries that riles people up so?
From the Lincoln library, to the Nixon library, from the Clinton library, to the anti-Clinton library:
Gary Deane sent this one in.
Looks like other cities had better get reading; Seattle and Minneapolis are making us look bad.
Five years ago Margit Rankin moved to Seattle from Manhattan, the red-hot core of the literary world. One of her first nights out was at a reading featuring Charles Frazier, author of “Cold Mountain,” appearing with fellow Southern writer Kaye Gibbons.
Rankin was stunned. About 2,500 people showed up. At the mere mention of the Elliott Bay Book Co., a treasured independent bookstore trying for a new life after an ownership change, the audience rose and gave a standing ovation.
“That was my initial impression of Seattle” as a reading town, said Rankin, now director of Seattle Arts & Lectures. “And it hasn’t been diminished in the least.”
Yesterday a survey of literacy in 64 cities confirmed what Seattle bookworms have long suspected. It named Seattle as one of the country’s two most-literate cities, edged out for No. 1 only by Minneapolis.
Here’s the full story from the Seattle Times (where most paragraphs are, evidently, two sentances long.)
Here’s a quick but interesting little piece from the recent New Yorker.
Here’s an extended quote to pique your interest:
Innovators came up with new ways of selling products, handling suppliers, running organizations, or managing information. If the ideas were good, the innovators got rich, but they also got imitated, which made them less rich than they might have been. It was great for everyone else, though. The competition lowered prices and increased quality; the new ideas spread and were improved upon. The mail-order catalogue, the moving assembly line, the decentralized corporation, the frequent-flier mile, the category-killer store—none of these radical ideas were patented.
Those were the days. Now the first thing someone with a good notion does is press the government to protect it. Priceline patented its reverse-auction method for selling cut-rate airline tickets. I.B.M. patented a method for keeping track of people waiting in line for the bathroom.
The article has a tone and slant that many of us will appreciate. It places emphasis on the fact that the ownership of information and ideas isn’t beneficial to the majority. It doesn’t, however, go so far as to mention how our current economic system is quite distant to laissez faire Capitalism (and more like Corporate Socialism) becasue of copyright, IP, and other issues. /my opinion
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