November 2011
1 post
Siri
Given how much librarians love to panic over new technology that’s going to eliminate their jobs and make libraries obsolete, I’m surprised I haven’t seen any librarian blogging/tweeting about Siri, the magic iPhone robot that can answer all your questions. Siri seems like the obvious first step to replacing reference librarians with voice-recognizing computers that can cull...
October 2011
1 post
Kindle e-books at Chicago Public Library
Overdrive and Amazon have finally teamed up to offer MOBI-formatted e-books for the Kindle through public libraries, and Chicago Public Library is one of the systems now offering Kindle e-books. I’ve been exploring the system, and generally think it’s great. It’s nice that Overdrive includes descriptions of most of the books. The checkout process is also painless, delivering the...
May 2011
1 post
Desperately Seeking DeSario: A Real-Life Literary... →
Novelist, filmmaker and bro Daniel Kraus writes for Booklist about tracking down a little-known literary hero.
April 2011
1 post
Freakonomics: Who's the Biggest Loser in E-Books? →
Stephen Dubner takes a look at the data and finds that publishers, who have complained about the growth of e-books, make more profit off of e-books than off of physical books, while authors typically make less.
March 2011
5 posts
Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books →
“A federal judge in New York rejected Google’s $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to the company’s ambitious plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.”
The Electronic Publishing Bingo Card →
Hey, it made me laugh.
Ebooks: durability is a feature, not a bug →
Cory Doctorow has the best-reasoned response to the HarperCollins e-book lending limit brouhaha so far.
“1. The world of information has always been in a constant state of flux. As...”
– Common Sense Librarianship: An Ordered List Manifesto from davidrothman.net
Independent publishing and e-books
USA Today last month published a story about Amanda Hocking, an author who has never had a “traditional” publishing deal but nonetheless sold 450,000 copies of her nine young-adult paranormal e-books in January. She charges 99 cents to $2.99 for each of her e-books, and through her deal with Kindle, she gets 30 percent of each 99-cent book sold and 70 percent of each $2.99 book sold,...
February 2011
1 post
E-Book Lending Clubs →
Last month, I posted about e-book lending service eBookFling. Now ALA Tech Source has done the dirty work of compiling a list of all of the e-book lending services that have popped up, with a short description of each. Enjoy.
January 2011
5 posts
eBookFling organizes e-book lending
PcWorld reported on a new service called eBookFling, which organizes users of lendable e-books in order to encourage more swapping of the texts. Under the free service, users simply list the e-books they have available to “lend,” and connect with users that have e-books they want to “borrow.” Interestingly, the service’s press release notes that Amazon and publishers...
Nabokov Butterfly Theory Is Vindicated →
Interesting story about how Vladimir Nabokov’s amateur theories on butterfly evolution have been validated by scientists.
““The first-ever economic impact study about the Philadelphia’s public...”
– American Libraries magazine
For the trainspotters
I am keeping a spreadsheet of every book I read in 2011. If you want to follow along, the link is here. It’s not very impressive so far but we’re only 1/24th of the way through the year.
A brief question about graphic novels and...
Probably not a particularly original question, but I’m not a huge cataloging person so maybe someone can answer this: why are all graphic novels cataloged together under nonfiction, instead of fictional graphic novels being filed with fiction and nonfictional graphic novels being filed under the relevant call number? Is there any other group of books that are lumped together based solely on...
December 2010
2 posts
Lusty Tales and Hot Sales: Romance E-Books Thrive →
Good article about how the ability of people using e-readers to obscure what they are reading has boosted sales of romance novels.
Books are still being banned →
Whereas challenges once were mostly launched by a lone parent, Caldwell-Stone says she has noticed “an uptick in organized efforts” to remove books from public and school libraries.
November 2010
4 posts
The Library as Amusement Park →
This dumb article by Daniel J. Flynn, author of A Conservative History of the American Left,for City Journal, is basically another salvo in the endlessly overanalyzed debate over whether libraries should serve to enlighten the public or just give them what they want. As a bonus, it’s also a totally uninformed piece arguing the video games are incapable of intellectual stimulation or artistic...
Nation's Archivists Rise Up Against the CIA →
The National Archives and Records Administration does what the Justice Department won’t.
An event for Chicago people: "Reading Under the... →
I don’t think I’m going to make it to this but it sounds epic:
Part interactive theater, part Día de los Muertos festival, part celebration of alcohol: come experience the hot music of Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” in a 12 hour group marathon reading.
On the Day of the Dead, 1938, Yvonne returns to her husband, a British Consul in Mexico, a year after...
“The International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL), which says it is the...”
– DNA Barcoding Aims to Protect Species And Food - NYTimes.com
September 2010
3 posts
The Last Story of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre -... →
A fascinating obituary of sci-fi author and general weirdo F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre.
Response: "Music in Libraries: We're Doing It...
Librarian in Black published a very interesting post yesterday on the state of music in libraries. Overall, I agree with her thesis that libraries are lagging as a source for music in their communities. I don’t really know enough about digital music vendors to respond to her points, other than to say that what she describes sounds like a very frustrating system with lots of restrictions.
I...
The controversy over library jobs
American Libraries magazine, an American Libraries Association publication, recently published an article containing this statement: “As the library profession “grays,” many academic libraries anticipate staff shortages as older employees retire within the next 10 years.” This drew a scathing response from Closed Stacks, which criticized the ALA for perpetuating the myth that there...
August 2010
2 posts
Inside Google Books: Books of the world, stand up... →
According to Google, there are 129,864,880 books in the world.
Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy
I took advantage of my paternity leave and reduced sleeping time (thanks to our newborn baby Evelyn) to finish reading Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, consisting of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The series was intended to consist of ten novels, but Larsson only completed three before his untimely death in...
July 2010
3 posts
Recent readings
Between waiting for the baby to come (one week until our due date) and the disgusting heat outside, I have been spending a lot of time sitting inside in the living room, our one room equipped with an a/c unit. On the positive side, this has meant I’ve gotten a lot of reading done over the past couple of weeks (I was especially glad about this when I had a job interview this week and they...
Libraries focus on convenience with mall locations... →
I found this on Gawker, which was making fun of the idea, but I think it seems pretty smart, although not particularly revolutionary. It is similar to Chicago’s storefront branch libraries, which are also a good idea in theory but suffer in practice due to a very limited selection. If the mall libraries can actually stock a wide enough array of books and DVDs, they could effectively draw in...
June 2010
5 posts
Illinois Budget Crisis | Are Libraries Necessary,... →
This is pretty typically awful local news “reporting”: a controversial headline, obviously biased “man on the street” quotes, a gratuitous Seinfeld clip (guess which channel runs Seinfeld reruns in Chicago?), the use of an undercover camera for no apparent reason, cut to PRO and CON talking heads to avoid actually making a definitive statement about anything, and end with...
LibraryLaw Blog: May a library lend e-book... →
An interesting post on whether it’s illegal for libraries to lend out e-readers.
Chicago library closing because landlord is... →
A scofflaw? A scofflaw? That’s total 19th-century vocabulary right there.
Readers' block
I haven’t been reading many books over the past month. There are a couple of reasons for this: I had been reading a lot of dense history books, and I think I eventually burned myself out on the subject for a while. Then I couldn’t decide what I felt like reading; I haven’t been keeping up with new novels and I didn’t have any subjects in mind for nonfiction reading. Finally, I was on vacation for...
Gallery: Digitizing the past and present at the... →
May 2010
6 posts
Audio books
Until recently, I had never listened to an audiobook. I work from home, so I don’t have a commute where I would be sitting in front of a CD/MP3 player for an extended period of time just listening. In addition, I read pretty quickly, so I thought being forced to listen to a book at the pace of someone else’s reading instead of my own reading pace could be frustrating. However, my wife...
In Pictures: Worst Master's Degrees For Jobs - No.... →
I’m not sure if this makes me feel better or worse about not having a library job yet.
Maximum Rocknroll: Kick-Ass Photos From Iconic... →
I briefly mentioned Maximum Rock’n’Roll as an important music magazine in my life a couple of weeks ago. Wired’s Raw File blog has just posted a selection of awesome punk show photos from MRR with commentary. I haven’t read MRR for years and it was never really a “good” magazine in terms of stellar writing or commentary, but it covered (covers?) a lot of music...
Genres of fiction and perceived masculinity, pt....
(This is part two of a two-part summary of informal research I conducted on men and genre fiction. For part one, please click here.)
One of the factors raised by the online survey that I tried to examine closer in my paper was the apparent contradiction between the stereotype that “men don’t read” (an opinion with which many of the survey respondents agreed) and the finding that only 2.3 percent...
5 tags
Genres of fiction and perceived masculinity, pt. I
Last year, I wrote a paper for one of my last classes in library school examining issues related to men, reading, and genre. In completing this paper, I conducted an online survey relating to various questions raised by my topic. Since then, numerous people who were kind enough to take the survey have asked what my findings were. Due to issues related to ethical and privacy concerns with student...
Jason Pinter: Why Men Don't Read: How Publishing... →
This is a mostly terrible article, full of boring stereotypes about what men like, what men want to read about, and how to market books to men. It also contains the bizarre idea that there aren’t more books marketed at men because the publishing industry is dominated by female executives (what, don’t women want to make money too?). However, I agree with Pinter’s conclusion that...
April 2010
8 posts
Fresh Air Interview: Ken Auletta - 'Can The iPad... →
I heard most of this interview while driving out to O’Hare yesterday afternoon. Terry Gross’ interviewing skills leave something to be desired (as usual), especially her tendency to ask questions that were basically already answered in the interviewee’s previous answer. However, Auletta seems knowledgeable about the potential impact of e-books on the publishing industry, and he...
“In time, the little group hired a room to meet in and [Benjamin] Franklin...”
– Benson Bobrick, in his awesome Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution, on how Benjamin Franklin turned a book club into the first public libraries in the American colonies
2 tags
Reading about music; childhood
Music has been a very important part of my identity since I was 13 or 14 years old. It was around then that I, on a whim, started my first band with some friends, which led to me playing guitar, which led to me being involved in various bands and musical projects through the rest of my life, which is how I’ve met most of my best friends, as well as my wife. However, until I moved to Chicago, I...
The public library from outer space
I was thinking about the Hyattsville, Md., branch public library, which was my family’s primary library from 1985 to 1988 and 1995 to 1997, and wondering if the bizarre structure in from the library looked as much like a UFO as I remembered. So I did a quick Google image search, and:
Yes, it looks pretty much exactly like a giant UFO just landed outside the library. I guess if you had...
How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter... →
File this under frightening/awesome: “Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress.” The only posts on my Twitter are the automatic reprints from Tumblr when I update this blog, so now the Library of Congress will archive the automatic update on Twitter that Tumblr makes when I publish this post, which is a...
Chicago Deskset holds first event →
Yesterday, I attended the first get-together for Chicago Deskset. It was primarily a social event and at this point there wasn’t really a lot of information about what the group hopes to achieve other than make connections between librarians and friends of libraries to work together in support of libraries in the Chicago area. However, it was a really fun event, everyone seemed nice and easy...
Review: "This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and...
I was originally planning to write a pretty extensive review of “This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All” by Marilyn Johnson, as a) it’s a book about librarians, and b) it’s been getting a significant publicity push, especially in the library community (though it was also featured prominently in a front-of-store display the last time I went in...
and now the book jargon - a grammar →
Nitsuh Abebe, one of the most consistently thought-provoking bloggers out there (and a straight-out cool dude), has been running a series of posts about the utility of cliches in music writing. His most recent post takes a similar look at cliches in book reviews. You might need to go back and read the earlier posts about music writing to see where he’s going with this one, but it’s...
March 2010
11 posts
6 tags
Societal canon vs. personal canon
Every few years, one organization or another will release a list of “The Greatest 100 Novels of All Time” or “The Books You Have to Read Before You Die.” These lists, although occasionally including a few surprises, tend to reflect the literary canon of the society that produce them; they include the same “great books” that are taught in high school and college, the same books that get handsome...
“Nearly one-third of Americans age 14 or older – roughly 77 million people – used...”
– First-ever National Study: Millions of People Rely on Library Computers for Employment, Health, and Education | U.S. IMPACT Studies