shelfcheck

From The Digital Reader: “Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text…Adobe is not only logging what users are doing, they’re also sending those logs to their servers in such a way that anyone running one of the servers in between can listen in and know everything…But wait, there’s more.”

“Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries”

This past Wednesday, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood–an organization best-known for “taking down” Baby Einstein videos a few years ago–urged the FEC to look into the marketing of apps for babies. The CCFC is both looking particularly at apps by Fisher-Price and Open Solutions, and more generally arguing that apps have no educational merit whatsoever when it comes to young children. There’s been heavy media coverage (Mashable, NYT, Slate, HuffPo, etc). At School Library Journal, Rachel G. Payne, coordinator of early childhood services at Brooklyn Public Library, offers her take in Are Learning Apps Good for Babies? At Little eLit, I offer mine in Apps & Babies: Keeping Our Heads (and our iPads).

St. Paul Public Library’s “Read Brave” program is a One Read-like campaign with an added goal of youth empowerment. SPPL is encouraging teens to read A.S. King’s Everybody See The Ants–a YA novel addressing bullying–and to create art in response to it, in preparation for an author visit from King in late February. Bonus: participating teens get a chance to board Lady Gaga’s Born Brave tour bus, which will make a special stop before heading to her February 6th St. Paul concert.

Via Wired Campus: Anne Monsano, director of learning at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, has been working on digitizing the AIDS Quilt since 2010. Search the alpha version of AIDS Quilt Touch, created in collaboration with with researchers at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Iowa Digital Studio for Public Humanities.

“History has secrets, but secrets don’t stay hidden if you know where to look”: a video by the Milstein Division of the NYPL: click to view.

More about the video’s creation here.

Here’s a neat-and-easy programming idea to get local history buffs into the library and promote your special collections: invite folks in for a day of intensive Wikipedia-editing on local history entries. (Spotted on Hennepin County Library’s Tumblr; Minneapolis Central Library will be holding an edit-a-thon in early 2012)

Via NYPL:

“On May 20, 2011, 500 people will stay overnight at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building…and become the first in the world to play a new game: Find the Future at the New York Public Library.”

The game’s web site is gorgeously well-done–don’t miss the video message, and make sure to click on “Discover Your Powers” and “Get Inspired!” On the sign-up page, there is also an option to play the game “online only” (presumably in realtime, also on May 20th). Cool!

Looking for more book content for your e-reader or mobile device? Publishers large (HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and small are offering digital galleys to book reviewers and librarians through NetGalley. Registration is required, but is quick, simple, and free. Browse galleys by publisher or genre; download galleys in ePub or Kindle format.

In the past week, I’ve gotten galleys of new books by David Foster Wallace, David Vann, Günter Grass, and Linda Sue Park. Each publisher handles DRM differently, but every book I’ve requested so far has had a 60-day expiration date. Reviews aren’t required. If you do decide to do reviews, NetGalley suggests emailing publishers with a link to your reviews as a courtesy (whether you post them on your blog, to GoodReads, to a review publication, etc).

Nice!

NetGalley

From the full story at Publisher’s Weekly:

“‘Libraries buy direct from us and they own the content,” said [George Scotti, Springer Verlag’s director of channel marketing]. ‘Once users download content, they can give it out, share, whatever. They own it.’ Scotti explained that once libraries have paid for the content, the e-books are available without charge to everyone at these institutions, so there’s no need to repost or redistribute it online. Once the e-book is downloaded from the library, no return is necessary. ‘Some of our competitors are afraid to do this,’ Scotti said, ‘but we say, free the content.'”

Springer’s ebook offerings amount to “40,000 titles in the PDF format in the science, technical, and medical category (including some textbooks).”

More at Publisher’s Weekly and at TeleRead.

This week at BlackBerry DEVCON, Borders Kobo unveiled a social reading app for the BlackBerry (with BlackBerry Messenger integrated into the app). The tagline: “With BBM, reading just got social.”

The app will be available some time in 2011, and “will allow users to do everything from chat with friends while shopping for books to discuss passages in real time.” Video demo and details at Mashable.