I watched Ghostbusters with my parents recently, and as I was watching the first five minutes, featuring a ghost in a big old library, I was struck by how dated that part of the movie is now, with those big card catalog drawers opening and cards spewing out all over. You’d be hard-pressed to find a physical card catalog in many libraries these days; even the small public library from the town where I grew up is all computerized now. And that thought again came to mind when I came across Ars Technica’s look at the present and future...

American Libraries Magazine has an article by ALA President Molly Raphael, who last week led a 4-person delegation to meet with Hachette Book Group and four national organizations representing authors. Raphael calls the meeting “very promising” with regard to convincing Hachette to resume providing libraries access to its newer e-book titles. (Hachette stopped providing its e-books to libraries in 2009.) It quickly became obvious that Hachette Book Group executives and digital strategists have spent considerable time thinking about the library ebook market. Hachette sees libraries as strong partners because of our benefits as direct customers and...

The Innovative Educator has a fairly long blog post proposing a number of ways that schools could use students’ cell phones to increase engagement with reading and writing in the classroom. The piece starts with the startling assertion that texting actually helps students’ grasp of grammar, and goes on to list some interesting ideas for ways cell phones could help kids learn. Some of them have to do with using phones to text notes or journals to themselves, or send text messages to teachers so they can offer feedback without fear of being embarrassed in front of their peers....

Libertarian think-tank the Ludwig von Mises Institute is carrying an article by self-published author Genevieve LaGreca about “Dead-Tree Luddites”. But it’s not, as you might expect, about those people who insist they love “the smell of books” and won’t ever read an e-reader, which is the image that phrase immediately brings to mind for TeleRead regulars (or at least for me). Instead, it’s aimed squarely at the agency pricing publishers and their insistence on clinging to the dead tree business at the expense of e-books. The low pricing of ebooks, scorned by the traditional publishing interests, is the emerging writer's new...

On his blog “Get Published Now, David J. Vallieres looks at a Kickstarter-style crowdfunding project based around a small-press-published historical horror novel called The Express Diaries, with a goal of $5,500. The idea was to get paid to create a deluxe edition of the book before it even shipped, and also create some buzz so that their regular self-published edition would get a good sales boost at the outset. It seems to be working well: As of this minute they have raised a total of $7,195 for this project. By my count they have promised delivery...

On Blog Kindle, blogger “matthew” ponders whether the Kindle would be good for classroom use in early education (first through fifth or sixth grade). It would mean students wouldn’t have to worry about forgetting their books, and it could avoid vandalism such as notes scribbled in margins. Of course, it does have its drawbacks—most notably, students’ tendency to break things, intentionally or accidentally. Though Amazon does have a good return and repair policy, it is unclear whether it could stand up to the rigors of grade school use. More important would be the issue of...

Publishing Perspectives has an article discussing various new tools for electronic research. Though this isn’t directly connected to e-books, in a separate discussion seed post editor in chief Edward Nawotka draws a parallel between the problems of researchers sifting through reams of data to find what they need and readers confronted by a million zillion $2.99-or-less self-published e-books to find something worth reading. Unfortunately, those research tools in that main article won’t help. The internet and digital age promised us tools that would help us find the perfect books to read. But with the proliferation of...

I wrote, a couple of April Fool’s Days ago, that the rash of fake stories on April 1 might serve as good practice for us to use all year ‘round in figuring out whether that story our friends emailed to us is true. It turns out that redditors—the denizens of news discussion forum site Reddit—have that ability in spades. The Atlantic recently posted an article about a college course professor T. Mills Kelly offers from time to time at George Mason University which tries to teach its students to become better at evaluating historical fact by creating historical...

I mentioned yesterday that as part of the Copyright Office’s 3-year DMCA exemption hearings, the office would hear arguments on whether to permit cracking the CSS encryption on DVDs. Although it doesn’t directly have anything to do with e-books, I found this coverage by Ars Technica/Wired of the CSS issue interesting enough to bring up in a general DRM-related sense. As with the last go-round, one of the proposals was to allow filmmakers and other clip-users to decrypt DVDs so as to excerpt clips for use in films and for other fair uses. This use was authorized last time,...

Here’s an interesting post from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the people responsible for the EPUB format. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies lays out a proposal for a “lightweight DRM” standard for EPUB that would be more permissive than some of the “heavyweight” DRM systems currently in use. The idea is to prevent “oversharing” such as peer-to-peer while allowing users to make most of the sorts of uses they take for granted with physical books. As Rosenblatt explains, the idea is not to be uncrackable—he specifically admits that “we expect that a lightweight DRM (in reality, any DRM)...

Might an ad-supported Kindle Fire be in the offing? Ad Age reports that Amazon has been soliciting ads to appear on the Fire’s welcome screen, according to an executive at an agency Amazon pitched. The ad packages would start at $600,000 and include both Kindle Fire and Kindle with Special Offers ads, going up to $1 million for additional ad perks. The current Kindle Fire has no advertcising, but Amazon has been reported to have a new model of the tablet in the offing for July and may be looking to start the program then. An interesting note is...

Wired’s Threat Level blog has some coverage of the latest hearing in the current round of U.S. Copyright Office DMCA exemption hearings. Topics argued today included the iPhone jailbreaking exception, cracking CSS on DVDs, cracking the protections on video game consoles, Prospects look poor for cracking video game consoles (sadly for PlayStation hacker George Hotz), but good for the jailbreaking exemption. Apple, which argued last time around that jailbreaking would destroy its business model and open cell phone towers to sabotage, was nowhere to be found at this meeting after its business model turned out to remain notably...