Libraries Can't Buy Many of Amazon's Ebook Hits (American Libraries) Don't Burn Your Books—Print Is Here to Stay (Wall Street Journal) Library of Congress digs in to full archive of 170 billion tweets (CNET) Musician uses phony online dating profile to trick iPhone thief (NY Post) 5 Reasons Being a Librarian Is Stressful (Screwy Decimal) Amazon Daily Deals: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh {and 3 others}...

Speaking of the Espresso, a digital publisher’s paen to self-publishing through it led me to a blog post from last year in which librarian Rick Anderson of the University of Utah’s Marriott Library discussed the Espresso’s pros and cons in a bit greater depth than I’ve seen other posts go into. The problems Anderson found mainly have to do with a few technical glitches in the device itself, particularly due to the desert climate of his library being drier than the Espresso was originally designed for. Also, the device has a 45-minute-to-1-hour warmup time due to the glue...

The United Arab Emirates newspaper The National has an article about a UAE librarian who feels that the Internet is “killing” the Arabic language, making people too lazy to find information in a book rather than on-line. One of few librarians in the UAE, 57-year-old Abdul Razak Al Khumairi works at the new UAE and Arabian Gulf library that opened this month with 15,000 books, including 5,000 in English. Although the article is headlined with Al Khumairi’s complaint against the Internet, it actually makes up relatively little of the article, which seems more directed toward discussing his life and...

While not exactly news, it’s fun to look at a conversion-of-an-e-reader-skeptic story every now and then. Here’s one from Florida International University Medical Library Digital Access Librarian Bohyun Kim. Despite the digital nature of Kim’s job title, she had never really been tempted to get an e-ink e-reader device—mainly because she already had an iPad. But when she checked out a Kindle loaded with e-books from the university lending library, she found she enjoyed the experience more than she expected. And although the lighter weight and less eyestrain-inducing screen were nice, what she really liked was the way there...

From an Article by Michael Kelley at Library Journal: Librarians’ passionate advocacy of our titles is vital to our efforts  and we remain committed to keeping our ebooks available in the library channel,” said Josh Marwell, Harper’s president of sales. Marwell said that the 26-loan cap remains a work in progress, but no other business model has emerged in the past year that makes more sense to the company. [Clip] The Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County (MLC), which consists of nine independent community libraries in Missouri, has now changed its mind about the boycott it approved last year. “A couple of months ago we started purchasing...

Amazon has been racking up a reputation as “the enemy” in publishing circles. That has led to a sort of “with us or against us” mentality in which any formerly respected person who is seen to work with Amazon in any capacity whatsoever suddenly gets tarred with that brush. It happened with Larry Kirshbaum, the long-time publishing-industry exec and agent who Amazon tapped to run its publishing subsidiary, who Mike Shatzkin says “has gone from one of the most well-liked people in publishing to the one of the most reviled.” And PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen reports it seems...

The October 2011 Corner Shelf (an online supplement to Booklist magazine) focused their discussion on eBooks in libraries.  Several feature articles are offered, including one on weeding eBooks. Here is the opening paragraph of Corner Shelf which includes links to the articles. Welcome to the second issue of Corner Shelf, dedicated to the proposition that collection development and readers’ advisory go hand in hand. This issue we’re focusing on e-books in libraries, the topic du jour in our profession. Sue Polanka, author of Booklist’s popular Off the Shelf column and moderator of the cutting-edge blog No Shelf Required, leads off with...

When David Rothman started Teleread, he had a dream of establishing a national digital library. Today, I wished that dream was a reality---I spent most of my morning in Librarian Hell, as part of the annual school clean-up now that classes are done for the year!Here was the problem: children had brought back library books they had signed out during the year, and teachers had also brought back all the books they had been hoarding in their classrooms. But since classes are done, we did not have any parent volunteers around on whom we could pawn off the shelving! We...

From Defective by Design: In 2008, the DRM Elimination Crew stood on the steps of the Boston Public Library (BPL) and demanded that they Kick DRM Out (1, 2). The DRM technology got into the BPL through a contract with the company OverDrive, who uses DRM (on most titles) to control how and when people can read ebooks. This setup essentially moves control of the library's digital collection into the hands of the publishers and intermediary companies like OverDrive that do the dirty work of implementing DRM. Back then we found that librarians were somewhat disgruntled with this setup, but, unfortunately, few...

From the press release.  It looks like it will be quite interesting: Public and school librarians from around the world will come together with publishing industry leaders at OverDrive’s third international user group conference, Digipalooza (www.digipalooza.com), July 28-31, 2011, in Cleveland. Held every two years, this four-day educational and networking conference will address the massive surge in library eBook borrowing with panels on industry trends, best practices, marketing and outreach, and upcoming enhancements to the OverDrive (www.overdrive.com) service. A roundtable featuring representatives from several of the world’s leading publishing houses will provide librarians with the chance to ask questions, in-person, about...

Artist Nina Paley has created a cool collection of images for those ready to rail against DRM. She created versions for Readers Against DRM, Authors Against DRM, and Librarians Against DRM. If you share these sentiments, go to the ReadersBillofRights.info site, download the images and sprinkle them on your blog or web site. The images can be freely distributed, though please cite http://readersbillofrights.info as the source of the images. DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management." It's a copy protection scheme designed to prevent piracy. While few would disagree that authors deserve compensation for their hard work, the problem with DRM...

I received this press release from the AAUP mailing list today.  It is reprinted in part below. Two major university press e-book initiatives –Project MUSE Editions (PME) and the University Press e-book Consortium (UPeC) — have joined forces. The result of this merger — the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC) — will launch January 1, 2012. The partnership allows e-books from an anticipated 60-70 university presses and non-profit scholarly presses — representing as many as 30,000 frontlist and backlist titles — to be discovered and searched in an integrated environment with content from nearly 500 journals currently on MUSE. The merger is part...