Librarians and book-lovers have a community going on Second Life, and real-world library science programs are taking notice. The Library Science program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be offering a course on Second Life librarianship, with class meetings held in Second Life. Meetings on-line are held for two hours on Friday mornings (May 25 - July 13) with further discussion and assignments taking place through forums. More info and registration are available on the course webpage. Disclaimer: As of this summer, I will be a UIUC library science student through their on-line program. Book-loving avatar image by Travelin' Librarian, as...

Ever noticed how e-book features---like web links and multimedia---are creeping into p-books? This is nothing new in the history of books. While the printing press quickly replaced the manuscript in Western Europe, printed books in Russia played a minor role for over a century after their introduction. Instead, manuscripts adopted certain characteristics of printed books. And that's not the only parallel between early Russian printing and modern e-books. The printing press was invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg in 1447. In 1563, Ivan the Terrible established the first state printing house, run by Ivan Fedorov, a deacon in the Orthodox Church. Although...

How many episodes of "Law & Order" does it take to scan a 400 page book? With my clunky old scanner, the answer is 3 1/3. That's a third of the time I spend in class each week. It's time to get a new scanner, but I'm faced with a predicament: I want something better than the $100-$300 models that are out there, but can't afford a multi-thousand dollar model that costs more than a year's worth of rent. I'm looking for a flatbed that can give me grayscale scans at 300-400 dpi, and the largest possible size to accommodate scanning...

"Will eBooks replace print? Well, when's the last time you unfurled a freshly scribed scroll?" asks Ruth Beal. "All libraries will one day simply be websites for virtual visitation," says David W. Boles. Even Bill Gates predicts the death of the p-book: "[P]aper is only the latest in a long line of reading 'technologies' that were made obsolete each time an improved solution emerged." But p-books and e-books are not complete equivalents. They each have different optimal functions that are suited to different kinds of reading. It's time for a truce in the battle of p-book vs. e-book in favor of...

When you think of the people adamantly opposed to digitization, and their motivation for that position, who comes to mind? Greedy corporate executives, perhaps? Talking with people at the Hilandar Research Library at The Ohio State University about attitudes among curators, however, I have learned of a surprising group of people just as staunchly opposed to digitization, on very different grounds. Unlike most in their profession, some librarians in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe are opposed not only to digitization of medieval Slavic manuscripts, but any form of distribution. Their reason essentially boils down to politics, but it's a far...

The upcoming University of Chicago colloquium, "What to Do With a Million Books?" (held in November, submission deadline in August) now has a website with the updated announcement and submission guidelines....

It's a student's nightmare: a professor with 38 years in the field is retiring. What's worse, without an inclination for self-promotion, a significant number of his best works have never been published. A paper copy of some of these works has been handed out in classes, but paper is so easily lost. What happens to all of his papers once he's gone? This is the dilemma I've faced this week. My solution? You guessed it: e-books. The problem Prof. Bill Darden has spent much of his career on linguistic developments arising out of Balto-Slavic (the proto-language for Lithuanian, Russian, Serbian, Czech, and...

The University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology have put out a call for papers for a colloquium entitled "What to Do With a Million Books," to be held November 5th and 6th at the University of Chicago. The goal of this colloquium is to bring together scholars and researchers in the Humanities and Computer Sciences to examine the current state of Digital Humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry, and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research. Proposals for paper presentations, poster sessions, and software demonstrations are due August 15th. The full call for papers...

At BookExpo, in 3 days, my boyfriend and I picked up 290 books, in 16 tote bags, before driving 694 miles back to Chicago. After taking 5 trips up 2 flights of stairs, we filled 6 shelves. Did I mention we have to move in 20 days? I dream of a BookExpo where anyone registered can log onto a website and download publishers' pre-release books, and post feedback through annotation. If only because 290 books in the back of a minivan don't do good things for gas mileage....

In the year 2020... The day's listless discussion of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov draws to a close. As the students put their e-book readers in their backpacks, desperate for the dismissal bell to ring, the teacher shouts out the homework: "Read the next three chapters-- but when you reach the dialog box asking if you want to read what Ivan tells Alyosha about The Grand Inquisitor, just click 'no'. You kids should be grateful! When I was in high school we lugged around paper books, and we had to read all those boring tangents in Russian literature."...

Stealing books is a problem as old as books themselves. Filologanoga recently posted about curses on Latin manuscripts, with the goal of preventing people from stealing them. (Site is in Croatian.) An example: Qui furabitur librum istum. non videbit Iesum Christum. Sed ibit in Infernum. ad poenandum in aeternum. cum Turba Diabolorum. per omnia saecula saeculorum. "Whoever steals this book / will not see Jesus Christ / but will go to hell / so that he will be tortured eternally / with a pile of devils / for all eternity" ( Bibliografia delle opere a stampa di Giambattista Marino) I guess that's one...

As a member of a university community, I'm always interested in what publishing industry people have to say about e-books in academia. A couple weeks ago, there was a post linking to a speech by Mike Shatzkin, which discussed the topic. He suggests that the natural grouping of interests present in a university setting has caused "college and professional publishing [to live] in the new digital world far more than trade or consumer publishing." He also mentions that Abebooks.com found 49% of 5,000 students polled "'were not prepared' to use digital texts at all", but is unclear "whether the students...