Late last year, OverDrive began rolling out a new look to their site. My own library in Fairfax County had a "New Look Coming" banner up for several weeks. When I tried it out for the first time, my reaction was, "Not great, but I can live with it." I wasn't crazy about the new thumbnail view of the catalog. Maybe it's just me, but I find it easiest to process information in lists, not in blocks of images. I also missed the feature that told me exactly where I was in the hold line. The old site would tell me,...

People in Bexar County, Texas, should be excited about the 10,000-e-book “BiblioTech” library system that the country is starting from scratch—without paper books. This is reportedly the first U.S. public library system to shun paper, cardboard and ink, except for computer printouts. Any books are better than none, and besides, the 10K figure encompasses only copyrighted books, not the tens of thousands of free classics that library patrons will be able to read electronically. What’s more, Bexar will add to the 10,000. County Judge Nelson W. Wolff, the main brain behind the plan, deserves praise for his open-mindedness about e-books, their cost-saving potential and other advantages. Many people, especially dyslectic Americans and...

The Wrong War Over Libraries: Publishers vs Libraries (Forbes) The European Union Strikes Down Agency Pricing (Good E-Reader) Let Congress Know That Now is the Time to Fix Copyright, Not Put Their Head in the Sand (Techdirt) Librarians Use Social Networking More Than Teachers and Principal (The Digital Shift) Kindle Daily Deal: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy {and} three other choices * * *  ...

In his Copyright and Technology Blog, Bill Rosenblatt has an interesting column looking at the Owners’ Rights Initiative, a lobbying coalition of interested parties who have united under the slogan “you bought it, you own it,” seeking to promote the right to resell digital property. The group includes used book vendors such as Powell’s, movie rental firm Redbook, and used merchandise outlets like eBay, Overstock, and others. But it also includes a number of public library advocacy organizations, because if you “own” something like an e-book, you also have the right to lend it. The group seems particularly interested...

* * * I've lived in Philadelphia for about five years now, and I don't plan on leaving anytime soon. But like most people, I've got a short wishlist of cities I'd like to live in, assuming I ever do decide to relocate. There's New York City, of course; I'm a writer, so that one's pretty obvious. There's also the Bay Area; most of my family is spread out around Northern California, and I think about returning from time to time. But now I've got an international city to add to my list: Spijkenisse, Netherlands. Why? Well, because that's the location of Book Mountain,...

In the UK, culture minister Ed Vaizey is holding a review into e-book lending in libraries, and is receiving advice from a number of industry lobbies. The All Party Parliamentary Group on libraries has proposed requiring physical visits to the library to check out e-books, and also that any money received from charging a patron for the checkout should be used to finance other library services. However, the Booksellers Association has objected to the latter proposal, saying that such revenues should be used to buy more books only, and requested direct inclusion into the talks: ...

On The New Republic, David Bell takes a five-page look at some of the implications e-books have for the future of libraries. In light of the New York Public Library’s ongoing plan to move many of its books away from its main branch into offsite storage with 24-hour advance request required, Bell wonders to what extent libraries really need to keep books around anymore, and what the changing role of the library might mean in years to come. One thing Bell points out is that millions of public-domain book titles are available through the auspices of organizations like Project...

That's the title of an article by Christopher Harris in American Libraries magazine: How many books are on your “to read” list right now? 10? 20? More? The real truth about ebook purchasing—really about any content acquisition these days—is that we are so overwhelmed by choices that our to-be-experienced list is already quite overwhelmed. That doesn’t even take into account the revisiting of older content! So when publishers threaten to withhold ebook versions of new releases for a few months, who is it really hurting? Joe Wikert, currently publisher at O’Reilly Media (with former executive experience at Wiley and Macmillan) shared his...

The latest HathiTrust Update (June 2012) is now online. Here are a few highlights. You can access the complete issue here. HathiTrust has updated its bibliographic metadata specifications and minimum bibliographic metadata requirements in preparation for moving to Zephir (under development by California Digital Library) as the bibliographic metadata management system for HathiTrust. The requirements are in effect immediately for institutions that have not previously deposited content in HathiTrust. The University of Michigan made the first iteration of tools available to aid institutions in transforming, validating, and packaging digital content for deposit in HathiTrust. The tools can be downloaded at http://www.hathitrust.org/ingest_tools. Michigan staff...

From the press release: As technology and pop culture transform the English language, Collins, leading British dictionary publisher since 1819, invites the public to play a role in identifying and submitting new words and meanings that should be included in the dictionary. That means it might only be a matter of time before words like “tweeps” and “Tebowing” officially enter the lexicon alongside other modern-day additions such as “OMG.”Collins welcomes anyone who speaks English to submit new words through www.collinsdictionary.com to be considered as official entries. Starting this month, anyone can suggest and define words online that will be reviewed by Collins Dictionary editors,...

Springer, in collaboration with PCG (Publishers Communication Group) released a white paper, Scholarly eBooks: Understanding the Return on Investment for Libraries, today.  It is available for a free download from the Springer site. The following is the introduction:  The Return on Investment (RoI) of scholarly eBooks in research and academic libraries can be difficult to determine, as the factors considered can vary from library to library, or even from person to person. RoI can be defined as a performance measure used to quantify and evaluate the efficiency of an investment in library resources or to compare efficiency among different investments. While...

With a $10,000 research prize as well as thousands of periodicals for reading and study, I've very recently found a great resource for librarians, eReaders and classic pulp fiction fans.  With titles ranging from Collier's Weekly to classic works of pulp such as Argosy, Weird Tales, and even Yank magazine, I've been reading for hours. If this sounds interesting to you, then head on over to unz.org, a site I recently stumbled across when doing some research for my history blog.  Brought online by Ron Unz, who has been a huge fan of Wikipedia, there are thousand of resources to look...