For those who are wondering, I’m talking about a remark the chief justice made last month during oral arguments in Bruce v. Samuels, a dispute about federal prisoners paying legal fees. Here I quote from Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog: When reminded that prisons maintain libraries, “Roberts then shot back, presumably sarcastically, ‘I’m sure they are very good libraries too.’”
From Don’t sneer at prison libraries, Chief Justice Roberts – Chicago Tribune
Because of the shady circumstances of the book’s publication, Poe sustained some career damage, being accused of plagiarism and finding himself blacklisted for a time with Wyatt’s publisher. Nonetheless, the book’s first edition sold out in two months; during Poe’s lifetime, the Conchologist’s First had the best sales of all his books.
From Edgar Allan Poe’s textbook on seashells was his only bestseller
“We’ve had enough. We’ve marked our line in the sand here. The government is behaving as if it doesn’t have a duty of care and they do, under the law. We think it’s time to be clear about what that means,” said Nick Poole, the chief executive of Cilip, after it was announced that more than 100 library branches were shut last year, and as further branches up and down the UK face closure.
From Librarians take legal battle against library closures to government | Books | The Guardian
From time to time this blog shows damaged manuscripts. One may be inclined to think that books are better off in pristine condition. However, Karin Scheper, conservator at the University Library Leiden, explains why it is sometimes better to leave a book be. Here is an intriguing guest post about useful disrepair and the upsides of damage. Enjoy! Erik Kwakkel
From “To conserve or not to conserve, that is the question” | medievalbooks
www.CRSReports.com joins at least two other efforts to wrest the highly regarded studies by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service from the confidential files of Senate and House lawmakers, who request the research and keep it secret unless they choose to release it themselves.
[Trying to crack open Congress’s confidential think tank after a century of secrecy]
“What we’re doing is simply accessing publicly available websites and downloading what we think are CRS documents,” said Antoine McGrath, 30, who is based in San Francisco and has a passion for digital archives. “We’re casting a wide net.”
This large chain in the U.K. made a shocking turnaround by doing something surprising: trusting its booksellers.
From Barnes & Noble is dying. Waterstones in the U.K. is thriving.
Books and their covers are confronting their own awkward questions of relevance and value in the escalating competition for attention against screens the size of Jumbotrons (or, conversely, wristwatches). To see publishers answer this concern with the craft, sophistication and pictorial wit that go into an increasing number of book covers each year reinforces the certainty that one of our oldest technologies remains one of our most perfect. Below are 12 covers from 2015 that made me stop, stare and ask aloud to no one in particular what the cover means, only to turn to the first page and then the following and then the one after that and onward.
First comes the elementary school desk, cramped and rigid (cursed by lefties everywhere), then the desk desk, in your own room in high school or college, and its cousin, the library carrel. After that, if you were lucky, maybe an office desk or cubicle. Then, of course, standing desks burst onto the scene, along with their overeager cousins, treadmill desks. Now, popping up in dozens of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, is another step in desk evolution — a stationary bike and desk combination called the FitDesk.
Most recently, Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina installed two FitDesks in its library in order “to have a little something different that gets [students] excited about coming to the library,” President Stephen Scott told the News Observer. “A little sizzle on the steak.”
From College libraries install desks on which students can study and cycle | Inside Higher Ed
Despite his embarrassing loss on the phonetics front, Carnegie kept funding the Simplified Spelling Board for nearly a decade afterwards, stopping only after it became inescapably clear that his attempt to influence the country to spell differently had failed.
“I think I hav been patient long enuf,” he wrote as he cancelled the funding in 1915. “I hav a much better use for twenty-five thousand dollars a year.”
From The Great Failure of Andrew Carnegie’s Simplified Spelling Lobby | Atlas Obscura
Those who advocate for OA with CC BY argue that there is no reason for authors to object to it: scholars and scientists (the argument goes) have already been paid for the work they’re writing up, and since they have little if any expectation that their writings will generate additional revenue for them, why not make their work freely available to those who may be able to find ways to add value to them through reuse and “remixing,” and maybe even to profit from doing so? In any case (the argument continues), authors retain their copyright under a CC license, so what’s the problem?
The problem, for many authors, is that their copyright becomes effectively meaningless when they have given away all of the prerogatives over their work that copyright provides.
From Mandatory open-access publishing can impair academic freedom (essay) | Inside Higher Ed
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