Brian

Londonist talks up the city’s public libraries.

“If you need more convincing, we’ll point out the library’s huge advantage over most high street bookstores: the librarian.”

SearchEngineWatch discusses a recently-filed lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Healthcare Advocates, Inc. isn’t happy that opposing lawyers in some other litigation were able to use the Wayback Machine to pull up some of the company’s old webpages. SEW has a 48-page PDF of the complaint online.

Many of the charges are against the law firm, but the complaint slaps Internet Archive with counts of breach of fiduciary duty, negligent misrepresentation, and a couple other things because Internet Archive’s robots.txt exclusion policy failed to block access to Healthcare Advocates’ pages.

[Typo corrected 7/18/05.]

The Guardian asked readers to write an account of Albus Dumbledore dying, in the style of an author other than J.K. Rowling.** Versions “by” Dickens, Hemingway, Anne Rice, Hunter Thompson, and many more are here. Some are more entertaining than others, of course.

** (The writing is in the style of another author, not the dying.)

Garry Trudeau is donating his take from sales of the latest Doonesbury book, The Long Road Home, to Fisher House, a foundation that “offers family members of wounded troops temporary housing at little or no cost during their loved one’s hospitalization.” In addition, publisher Andrews McMeel is donating 10% of its profits from the book to Fisher House. Story in Stars and Stripes.

The book is a collection of Doonesbury strips following the character B.D., who is wounded as a soldier in Iraq and has a leg amputated.

Anonymous Patron writes “Reuters.com says a Greek court lifted a ban on selling a cartoon book that depicts Jesus Christ as a drinking buddy of Jimi Hendrix and a marijuana-smoking, naked surfer.

Austrian cartoonist Gerhard Haderer had been found guilty of ‘malicious public blasphemy’ earlier this year … .”

I can’t tell whether the article means that Jesus was drawn as the surfer, or that the surfer was drinking with JC and JH. (The former, I suspect.)

SarahL writes “I received this article via email from our Engineering librarian, forwarded from a Stanford Engineering Librarian…copies are being locked away as we speak. Pathetic, really…

Intel Corp. lives by Moore’s Law, but it apparently doesn’t have a copy of the magazine in which the law was first laid down.
The Santa Clara chip giant has posted a $10,000 bounty on eBay for someone who can provide a pristine April 19, 1965, copy of Electronics magazine.”

Here’s the WantItNow listing on eBay.

Have you ever read an article by an officer of a national organization, someone who doesn’t seem to understand some important aspect of the online world, that just makes you want to scream?

The immediate past-president of the American Psychological Society writes about why college textbooks are so expensive: Used-book dealers are like video pirates!

Unless and until laws are changed to prevent the organized sale of used books, you can expect textbook prices to keep increasing.

So I’m screaming: “There’d just be a boom in student-to-student book exchanges online!”

Not that that’s the only (or even most important) thing his legal solution ignores. Oh, the author also suggests that professors might do their small part to defeat used-book-sales piracy by giving their comp copies to libraries, but he doesn’t recognize that we’re part of the “problem,” too — I’ve sure noticed an increase in ILL requests for textbooks in the last year or so.

(Full disclosure: My spouse works for a textbook publisher.)

Some residents of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood aren’t happy that the American Girl book which introduces Marisol Luna to the $84-doll-buying public has Marisol moving to the suburbs. In the book, Marisol says her mother told her that Pilsen “was no place for me to grow up. It was dangerous, and there was no place for me to play.” The vice president of Pilsen’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum says that’s ridiculous and insulting. Story in the Sun-Times.

Citing “an unwritten policy against accepting ads containing religious messages,” Rolling Stone rejected an ad that Zondervan had booked for its Today’s New International Version Bible. An executive from the magazine’s parent company didn’t comment on why ad space had been sold to the religious publisher to begin with.

I suspect that the real problem RS has with the ad is that the guy in it isn’t in his underwear, surrounded by naked women.

Yesterday, a theology professor sitting outside a closed Nantucket library was told by a police officer not only to stop using the library’s open WiFi connection, but to close his laptop as well. “It’s a law, sir.”

Read AKMA’s account here, with a follow-up. Make up your own joke about working on Sunday.

This story has been going around the blogs (I saw it on boingboing and librarian.net).