Is it just us, or does it seem as if there's an unusually large number of quirky library stories floating around lately? Thanks in no small part to the digital revolution, many municipal libraries today are watching their budgets shrinks at they same time they find themselves having to defend against accusations of irrelevance. But there is an upside to the pressure so many libraries are experiencing these days: entrepreneurial creativity. After all, when it begins to look as if your very business model may be facing extinction, new and oftentimes unusual ideas tend to begin sprouting like so many weeds. Case in...

TeleRead posted earlier about an idea that was floated by Victoria Barnsley, a HarperCollins CEO, during a recent NPR interview: the idea of charging people for the privilege of browsing in bookstores. The idea was that they'd pay to browse, and then go home and order online from the vendor of their choosing. The analogy Barnsley gave with this was that of a high-end clothing store—say, for wedding dresses—charging a nominal trying fee that is taken out of the cost of your purchase. But I think that analogy is a faulty one, and I think the true analogy demonstrates why 'pay...

Self-publishing a book can come with pre-conceived notions from readers, other writers and even publishers. People used to think self-publishing a book meant it wasn’t good enough to get picked up by traditional houses. However, the stigma of self-publishing is changing. Success stories have become more and more abundant, and the shock those successes caused even five to 10 years ago is slowly beginning to dissipate. Those in the industry have watched the development closely. Smashwords founder Mark Coker began his site five years ago as an outlet for self-published authors. It started small and has grown into a site where nearly...

Blind Date with a Free eBook (Galleycat) Students Still Not Taking to E-Textbooks, New Data Show (Digital Book World) Barnes & Noble's Big Problem — and a Solution (Digital Book World) Why Traditional Publishing Is Really In A 'Golden Age': (NPR) The Most Borrowed Library Books and Authors in UK 2011-2012 (Info Docket) Kindle Daily Deals: Merle's Door by Ted Kerasote (and 3 others)...

                  Is This the Most Amazing Library in the World? (Flavorwire) Don't hold your breath waiting for Amazon to give you Kindle copies of your books (Paid Content) An Open Letter to Audible and Amazon: Stop the DRM (ZDNet) NBA Star Aims  To Inspire Young Readers With 'Slam Dunk' (NPR) * * * Watch This: First Trailer for Upcoming Pirate Bay Documentary (The Verge) ...

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...

Print book sales rise hailed as a sign of fightback in a digital world (The Guardian) Print book sales soar to three-year high (The Bookseller) E-Book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines (Pew Internet & American Life Project) 'Fifty Shades Is The One That Got Away. At Least From Me (NPR) Kindle Daily Deals: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen {and three other choices} * * *                            ...

Looking Forward to 2013 (Digital Book World) Good-bye books, hello e-books (ZDNet) E-Books Destroying Traditional Publishing? The Story's Not That Simple (NPR) Kindle Daily Deals: Under the Dome by Stephen King; Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz; and two other choices * * *      ...

"Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a story about a young man who loses his job as part of the Great Recession of the early part of the 21st century, and gets a new one working a night-shift at a 24-hour bookstore in San Francisco. He quickly discovers that there's much more than meets the eye to this store. And before long, he's criss-crossing the country and enlisting all his friends in the quest to hack the code behind this mysterious place. "I actually wrote this book for myself—or for people like me—because I was tired of people asking the question, 'Books, or cool digital...

Over the last few years, NPR and its many affiliate stations have done a fantastic job in their reporting of the changes taking place in the publishing industry today. Many of those stations, it turns out, seem to have a soft spot for e-books. I figured it might be fun, and maybe even useful, to compile some of NPR's most interesting e-book radio reports on one easy-to-access page. And while many of the stories that follow are straight-forward news reports, others are fairly lighthearted, including the Andrei Codrescu essay, "In Praise of E-Books," that opens the collection below. Enjoy! * * * In Praise of E-Books by Andrei...

Here are two articles that expressly discuss pirated music, but a lot of the same issues of morality and artist compensation apply to any pirated media—movies, games, and, yes, e-books. They make an interesting presentation of two sides of the piracy argument: what can be done to get artists paid for their music? On one side is 21-year-old NPR All Songs Considered intern Emily White, who penned a piece at the NPR website discussing how she’d accumulated her 11,000 song music collection largely by copying CDs from the radio station she ran, mix tapes from friends, and so on. She writes: As...

We’ve heard a lot of people arguing that publishers should fight Amazon by dropping DRM. However, in The Scholarly Kitchen, Joseph Esposito has written a long and thoughtful piece looking at the possible drawbacks of this approach. Esposito first looks at the question of whether unauthorized sharing of e-books increases the market for them. His own guess is that infringement helps sales when there is sufficient friction—i.e. the free copy is harder or more annoying to use for some reason—but hinders them when friction approaches zero. And since free e-books are getting easier and easier to find, publishers...