Never underestimate the power and glory of the American ego. Granted, it can show its bizarre sides—for example, in the antics and hairdo of Donald Trump. And yet I see the good, too. We have the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the rest, not “Library Donors Anonymous.” At least some might bristle at this quest for publicity and immortality, as opposed to pure altruism. But let’s remember that despite all the government-and-corporate-enforced conformity around us, we are still in many ways a national of individualists. Didn’t Walt Whitman title a poem "Song of Myself," notwithstanding such lines as...

Digital Public Library Raises Questions of Ownership, Permanence, Access (Media Shift) Why would anyone want to attend a party to celebrate the opening of a virtual repository of metadata? A better question might be — what is a virtual repository of metadata? --- The Web Giants Are Rising Above Humans and Their Petty Rules, and that Worries Me (GigaOM) The titans of the web are rebels, playing by their own rules. That is to be applauded at times, but we should also be thinking about the wider, long-term implications for society and fair competition. --- Report: Kids Tend to Read More Digital Than Print (Good e-Reader) The...

LibraryCity knocked Amazon for not letting users of the Kindle Fire HDs adjust their line spacing. But guess what I noticed just now within the font-related submenu of my Kindle HD 8.9” model running version 8.3.1 firmware? Alas, on my several files tested, I still couldn’t narrow the spaces sufficiently on the HD even though the Kindle app for Android, as in previous versions for my Nexus 10, pulled off this trick just fine. Apologies if the HD improvement is old news, but Amazon pushes out updates automatically, and this is the first time I myself became aware of the line-spacing change. May Amazon...

The Digital Public Library of America has Arrived (Scholarly Kitchen) Debate Continues Over Enhanced, Interactive eBooks (Good e-Reader) Span Admits New Copyright Law is Designed to Keep it Off US Naughty List (Techdirt) Should Indie Authors Reach Out to Bookstores? (GalleyCat) Kindle Daily Deals: Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard (and 3 others)  ...

A caveat first. The Digital Public Library of America is evolving. What’s more, I’m a booster of the organization and of the people behind it, including the new executive director, Dan Cohen, who so decently reacted after the Boston Marathon bombings. But for now, the academic-and-hacker mindset is prevailing at the DPLA over the traditional public library one, judging from the demo’s worthy but rather limited debut yesterday. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. But then, why insist on the P word in the organization’s name? Also, the K-12 appeal so far is not quite as great as I’d hoped despite some...

Yes, LibraryCity has been on an S. R. Ranganathan kick lately (here and here). Still ahead is a DPLA-related essay on his Five Laws of Library Science as applied to K-12, including school libraries—a follow-up to the LibraryCity post by Apple Distinguished Educator Donald R. Smith, a teacher-librarian with 40 years of experience. If you want to share any relevant thoughts for the next Ranganathan-inspired essay, just e-mail LibraryCity or use the comments area of this post. The essay should be online at LibraryCity.org in the next week or two, after some crucial research materials arrive. Meanwhile, some other ideas on K-12-related matters: The DPLA should work with state and local libraries toward the creation of a...

Oh, the irony! In The Five Laws of Library Science, S. R. Ranganathan argued in the 1930s for libraries as improvers of life for rich and poor alike. Now Google Books has digitized 30 million titles, but you won’t find Laws on the Web in its entirety from Google at any price. You’ll see a teaser instead, just snippets and descriptions of commercially sold paper editions. If you go to Laws’ listing on Amazon, you’ll notice that the price of a new hardback edition now starts at $45.95 from a third-party seller, plus the $3.99 shipping. Just one new hardback copy is in stock from Amazon itself, for $54.99 with free Prime shipping. Amazon itself...

This is the era of bits and bytes and multimedia and 3D printing, not just books and other texts. But Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science would still apply today in spirit even after more than eighty years. Educated originally as a mathematician, S.R. Ranganathan was a library-science genius who studied librarianship in Great Britain and worked as the librarian at the University of Madras. Accurately or not, he is said to have beaten out 900 competitors for the job. He peppered his writings with Indian philosophy, dressed Ghandi-simple, and avoided coffee and tea. His laws, spelled out in a 1931 book available from the Hathi Trust in full text, are: 1....

If you can’t find the right library e-books for your new Kindle, Nook, iPad or other gizmo, you’re not alone. More than 100 patrons of the District of Columbia Public Library were lined up electronically today for 10 e-book copies of The Racketeer, John Grisham’s new novel about the murder of a federal judge. Some 400+ D.C. library users awaited 60 electronic copies of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the best-selling fiction title on the New York Times list. And a digital version of The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling, was not even in the catalog of the D.C. public library system. Could a well-stocked national digital library system—in...

John S. Knight Jr. and his brother supplied the first name in Knight Ridder, one of America’s best newspaper chains. Pre- and post-merger, the company’s papers won a total of at least 84 Pulitzer prizes. Years before most competitors, Knight Ridder’s people were envisioning digital newspapers displayed on iPad-style tablets. Knight himself, in character for the chain at its greatest, was fact- and conscience-driven. He was a conservative Republican, but his columns against the Vietnam war helped win one of the Pulitzers. The chain is gone now. But the brothers’ legacy lives on through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with something like $2 billion in assets. Last week,...

On MIT’s Technology Review, Nicholas Carr takes an in-depth look at the creation of the Digital Public Library of America, an attempt at a non-commercial universal electronic library (which I also mentioned last month) that hopes to provide universal access to as much of human knowledge as it can. Carr first looks at Google’s attempt to create Google Book Search, and the negotiated settlement that was thrown out as too overreaching. Though Google is moving ahead with its legal defense, the search market has shifted toward social networking meaning that a book search might not be as attractive to Google...

From the Internet Archive blog: The Internet has put universal access to knowledge within our grasp. Now we need to put all of the world’s literature online. This is easier to do than it might seem, if we resist the impulse to centralize and build only a few monolithic libraries. Centralization can lead to price controls, censorship without due process, lack of reader privacy, and resistance to innovators. We need lots of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers—and lots of libraries. If many actors work together, we can have a robust, distributed publishing and library system, possibly resembling the World Wide Web. The courts...