You can add Iowa Western Community College (IWCC) to your list of libraries going “bookless” or “all electronic.” The article linked below quotes IWCC president, Dan Kinney, saying it’s all cyber from this point forward and the college will stop acquiring books. We’re not sure if this means all printed material but from the extremely positive tone about the electronic world that Kinney shares in the article, it sounds like no paper at all. The article mentions the time it took to get materials from another library. Kinney says, “Now, it’s right there,” he said. “They want...

 The Kindle for PC app has been quietly updated.  Some have chosen the option to have it updated automatically when they open the program and an update is available. I like to choose the time, but then I didn't get a notice that there was an update waiting to be 'noticed.' I read about it when @MikeCane tweeted it the other day in his inimitable way. See below: So, I went to my Kindle for PC program, still showing a bright, plain white background, chose the menu's install-update option, and got what ...

From the The Chronicle Herald (Halifax, Nova Scotia): A new provincewide library service launched Tuesday in Westville allows borrowers to sit at their home computers to withdraw electronic books, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The digitized tomes, which may be in audio or text format, can be stored in a laptop, desktop computer or on a special electronic reader designed for the purpose and read from the devices’ screens. Audio files may also be stored in hand-held devices for listening and some can be burned to CDs for portability. “With a free library card...

  The “big” news ebook reading devices recently has been Amazon’s new Kindles with their Pearl screen. OK, ebookers got the point: Amazon is moving right along in its attempt to capture the wallets of all ebookers. Which raises the question, here in the United States, “Sony, Sony (and Barnes & Noble, as well) — Wherefore art thou?” Not a hint, not a misspoken word, not anything leaked to eBookland about a response by Sony and/or B&N to Amazon’s new Kindles. I, for one, am desperately seeking solace, especially from Sony, that there will be new competitive...

   (Not a geek? You might still want to check out this offer–there are at least a couple of titles that might make good ebook gifts for the geek in your life.) You may already know that I love O’Reilly Media, the company that publishes lots and lots of tech-oriented manuals and reference works. First, I love them the way you might love any company that collects knowledge, organizes it for easy access, and distributes it for mass consumption. More important (from an ebook perspective), I love them because they’re one of those few, smart...

From the Original Announcement from the Tennessee Secretary of State The State Library and Archives, which is part of the Tennessee Department of State, has been preserving newspapers on microfilm since 1957. The two-year process of converting those microfilmed documents into digital records will be managed by the University of Tennessee. Eventually, the digital images of Tennessee newspapers will be part of the Chronicling of America [from the Library of Congress] website: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Newspapers from 15 other states are already available for use on the site. “We are delighted to be a part of this project,” Secretary of State ...

By now Stanza is the most robust e-reading application for iOS. It’s packed with features other apps, like Kindle or iBooks are missing. However it has one big disadvantage: no cloud-based bookshelf. The application is associated to a device not an account. There is no way to sync books and bookmarks like in Kindle. It’s fine when you have one device. Things get complicated to those iPhone or iPod Touch users who are buying iPads. They realize that to read books they collected in Stanza, they need to download them again. There are a few ways to transfer books to Stanza. I’d...

The new bookless/electronic engineering library opened yesterday in Palo Alto, CA. Here’s the announcement from yesterday and a look at their web site. Much More in an Article (Published Last Week) in Stanford News: The Engineering Library’s move from the Terman Engineering Center to the new Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center was an opportunity to do more than just haul books from one building to another – and the librarians jumped at the chance to create a state-of-the-art library. “It’s going to be gorgeous,” said Helen Josephine, head librarian for the Engineering Library. “There’s a lot of new technology going into this. “We’ve been working...

Cnet has a good interview, done by David Carnoy, with Amazon's Ian Freed, vice president of digital. Here are two excerpts. The first is about market share. Carnoy asks Freed to comment on B&N and Apple saying they each have a 20% market share: Honestly, something doesn't add up because we're pretty sure we're 70 to 80 percent of the market. So, something, somewhere isn't quite working right. I encourage you to do some more research. Obviously, from the beginning of Amazon we've been very metrics-focused and we don't typically throw out numbers we don't firmly believe in....

From a Blog Post In June, we concluded a survey, linked on 10 of our highest traffic websites, with more than 5,000 responses from patrons around urban and rural America. The survey included questions regarding demographics, computer/device usage, borrowing habits, general feedback on user experience, and suggestions for collection development. [Snip] Here Are a Few Findings: + 74% of users are female, between the ages of 30-59. + Nearly 70% have a college and/or postgraduate degree. + 60% learned about the download service from the library’s website (if our past blog posts and training sessions weren’t enough to get you ...

The NY Times has an article about Scott McNealy's online hub for free textbooks. McNealy is the former CEO of Sun Microsystems. Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago. “We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.” The...

The Kindle 3 was released to much Amazon fanfare late last week; in the sea of iPad and general tablet news at the moment I wonder how many people have even noticed. My girlfriend didn’t know what a Kindle was until tonight, and I really don’t know how this has happened. I can only assume that I’ve been right every time I thought she wasn’t really listening to me. She’s been mocking my iPad cravings for a little while now (I maintain it’s not iPad-lust (iLust?), but borderline-usable-tablet-lust, it’s just I happen to think that that’s a very narrow category...