Bill Gates has had some ambivalence about the end results of his library-oriented donations in rural towns, but a recent article for Rural Libraries suggest much good--and potential for good. The smaller the rural library, it seems, the higher the poverty rate as a rule. It's as high as 42 percent in the case of libraries serving populations under 1,000 and 23 percent at the upper end, 25,000+. Also see the rural library issue of a Gates Foundation publication, called Connections, as well as The Gates Legacy in Library Journal.The TeleRead take: One of the big issues of rural...

Better Late Than Never Department: D-Lib this month discusses education and digital libraries and among other things offers a variety of examples using Greenstone software. Another education-oriented collection of articles appears in the February and March issues of the Journal of Digital Information....

Have you seen Kevin Sites' Web log from Iraq? It's been suspended, perhaps forever, apparently the victim of corporate censors at CNN. Good example of the need for a variety of business models--commercial, nonprofit and library-funded--as TeleRead advocates. Guess who owns CNN. Yes, of course: AOL Time Warner. Let's hope that the new owners of the about-to-be-shed book division will be tolerant of quirky projects like Sites'. Memo to CNN: Check out another Iraq blog. As Dan Gillmore at the SJ Merc sees it, as do some others, this one is real. A little ironic, no? A blog from...

"The 'digital divide' between rich and poor children in the United States is rapidly shrinking as youngsters of all income levels and ethnic groups increasingly use the Internet, a report released on Wednesday said. Internet use among minority and low-income children has surged over the past two years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting reported, and children under 17 now spend nearly as much time in front of a computer as they do watching television." - Washington Post, March 19.The TeleRead take: That's good news even if the divide is far from closed, with just 29 percent of Afro-American children...

"A group representing college media centers is warning the U.S. Copyright Office about a possible conflict between two federal laws, one meant to limit electronic access to copyrighted material and the other designed to broaden access to the same material for online education. At issue are the Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." - The Chronicle of Higher Education, via LIS News.The TeleRead take: Another example of the follies of the DMCA, which forbids the bypassing of copy protection schemes. Allan Adler, a lawyer for publishers, says notes that conflicts of this...

"U.S. publishers take note: The Bookseller, Britain's magazine of publishing and bookselling, reports that 'public libraries continue to suffer from dwindling book stocks and public use,' according to the Annual Library Statistics survey for 2000...

Library Journal has a nice writeup on Jenny Levine of The Shifted Librarian. You can read her virtual bow after her appearance on LJ's "Movers and Shakers" list.The TeleRead take: The most salient aspect of Jenny is how quickly she's been to see the potential of RSS and other technologies in a people-oriented library context. Back in '92 when I first published TeleRead, I worried about the training costs and the rest. Would the librarians keep up with the techies? Jenny, Steve Cohen and others of their generation tend not to be programmers, but more and more...

"Electronic books are changing the way authors and publishers do business. The digital nature of these new 'e-books' affects a number of issues in publishing contracts, including copyrights and payments. This article explains the legal issues created by e-books." - Gigalaw.com....

"Major record labels have targeted about 300 companies whose computers were allegedly used by employees to feed file-swapping networks in the latest attempt to crack down on Internet music piracy. Letters sent out in the last week by the Recording Industry Association of America informed the companies of the alleged piracy and warned that employees and employers might be subjected to 'significant legal damages.' However, the letters made no explicit threat to sue." Wired News....

American publishers and writers enjoy a certain cachet around the world, and one hopes that anti-war sentiment won't diminish it in the short or long term. But what if the cachet fades eventually? Will the worst Darwinian economics kick in? Could a proposal from an Indian ghostwriter--wanting me to send clients his way--be an omen? For the moment at least, I'll assume the offer isn't a scam. It does come with a reference from a relative in Washington, DC, along with word that my correspondent has "ghost written 2 novels for a US ghost writing agency." Here's the deal....

"Electronic books, a new addition to the Association of American Publishers (AAP) monthly sales report, began 2003 with impressive numbers, up 1,447.4 percent, according to figures just released by the AAP. The electronic book segment grew from $211,000 in net sales in January 2002 to slightly more than $3.3 million in January 2003, a sign that consumer interest in electronic books is growing." - AAP news release.The TeleRead take: Nice percentage rate, but, extrapolated, that's still below $40 million a year, lunch money for Bill Gates and less than Tom Clancy's 2001 income. Time for a TeleRead-style distribution system...

New research shows that only nine percent of file traders view their activity as illegal, according to a Slashdot item. "With 40 million Americans identified as active file traders this is indeed stirring information, though not surprising. Another stat: 73 percent of U.S. downloaders report that their motivation for trading was to sample music for later purchase." TeleRead, of course, could include provisions for legalized file trading within the bounds of fair use. What's more, as noted earlier, file-trading would be fine on books covered by a National Digital Lbrary Fund. Just the ticket for writers and publishers to...