Legislation approved unanimously by the Illinois House in April and awaiting Senate review would prohibit libraries from being treated differently from individual consumers when purchasing digital books.
EBooks
Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library
Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library
The voluminous papers of the celebrated neurologist include letters, notebooks, drafts and other traces of a man who couldn’t stop writing.
Now, the New York Public Library has acquired Sacks’s personal archive, a trove documenting his intellectual explorations of topics as diverse as “aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins,” to cite a partial list that once appeared on his website.
NotebookLM’s automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google%u2019s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a %u201Cdeep dive%u201D discussion about the collected content. These last around ten minutes and are very podcast, with an astonishingly convincing audio back-and-forth conversation.
NotebookLM’s automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
Requests to remove books from public libraries are on the rise in Oregon.
Here are the titles most in jeopardy
Individuals requested that 150 books and other documents, the majority of them young adult books and graphic novels, be removed or put in age-restricted sections in libraries between July 2023 and June 2024, according to the report from the clearinghouse, which is affiliated with the State Library of Oregon.
Under Tennessee’s stricter school library law, some books quietly disappear
Under Tennessee’s stricter school library law, some books quietly disappear
“Banning books is not OK,” Edwards told the board last month as it began reviewing the materials. “Just because you don’t like what the mirror shows you doesn’t mean you put the mirror down.”
This week’s vote comes after the district, south of Nashville, already removed 29 books from its libraries this year under a previous policy, part of a wave of purges on campuses across Tennessee and other states.
Poetry Book Checked Out in 1974 Returned to Library 50 Years Later
A Virginia library was in for a surprise when a book was returned 50 years late!
Late last month, Hopewell Library in Hopewell, Va. posted a video on Facebook about a patron who checked out Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection by Walt Whitman, in 1974.
According to the library, the book was due on June 3, 1974 and it was finally returned on August 22, 2024.
Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries
Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America%u2019s librariesThe decision locks libraries into an ecosystem that is not in readers; interests. Congress must act.
This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities’ reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. It steers Americans away from one of the few remaining bastions of privacy protection and funnels them into a surveillance ecosystem that, like Big Tech, becomes more dangerous with each passing data breach. And by increasing the price for access to knowledge, it puts up even more barriers between underserved communities and the American dream.
Internet Archive’s court loss leaves higher ed in gray area
Internet Archive Court Loss Leaves Higher Ed in Gray AreaThe nonprofit published thousands of ebooks for free, violating copyright law. What that means for research libraries remains to be seen.
The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending
The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending
The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”
E-Books Can Subvert Book Bans, But Corporate Profit-Seeking Stands in the Way
E-Books Can Subvert Book Bans, But Corporate Profit-Seeking Stands in the Way
Exorbitant costs and restrictive licenses are obstructing libraries’ efforts to resist book bans via access to e-books.
“The ultimate aim is to try to get five or six state laws passed, and then hope that the federal government says, ‘Okay, this is a mess. We’ve been kicking the can down the road for 30 years on this digital copyright stuff. It’s time for us to look at this and say, libraries have a vital function. We need to carve out special exemptions for them and make the terms under which they get books more fair.’”
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