Now this is more like it. A librarian in Massachusetts wants to implement a policy to ban porn in her library rather than defend it as constitutionally protected speech. The proposed policy would ban Internet porn and possibly ban Internet porn watchers from the library. The policy has a good chance of being accepted, because this librarian has the best poster boy for Internet perverts I’ve seen in a long time. Take a look at the guy pictured in that article. He was arrested for viewing Internet porn at the library. According to the police, he was using library computers to “Internet photographs of children and pornographic images of adults.” To which I can only say, yuck. If the library had been stacked full of reference librarians attuned to standard ALA policy, the poor guy wouldn’t have had to make do with clothed children. A good reference librarian should have been able to find that guy some kiddie porn. I mean, how hard it be to find kiddie ...
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Amazon is once again punishing  publishers for not bending to their nefarious will. According to this story, “Amazon has turned off the buy button on nearly 5,000 Kindle titles from distributor Independent Publishers Group after IPG refused to capitulate to Amazon’s demand for better terms.” Ahh, better terms, isn’t that what we all want? I’m sure all Amazon wants to do is buy ebooks from IPG for peanuts and sell them for slightly less than peanuts. The more Kindle books, the more need for a Kindle! Despite this wonderful deal, they refused, at the cost of not having their ebook titles listed on Amazon. This is pretty much what happened to Macmillan a while back when they told Amazon they wanted to charge whatever price they wanted for their ebooks and Amazon threw a hissy fit. You can always count on Amazon to act like a bully when they don’t get their way, just like you can always count on their excellent customer service. Maybe those two are ...
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Whether it comes to their love of Internet porn in public or their angst over the lack of popular ebook titles, librarians tend to have the same response: we can’t judge anything. With Internet porn in public, some librarians will actually resort to saying something like, “who’s to say if it’s porn?” I admit, most librarians know it’s porn, and those that defend Internet porn in public usually go for equally stupid responses, such as that since porn is “Constitutionally protected speech” library patrons have a Constitutional right to view it in public at the library. But I’m just talking about the first response for the moment. Then there’s the “good books” debate, for lack of a better term. Should libraries spend their money on really bad but popular books, or should they spend money on better books and then promote them? To that question, even more librarians than the public porn lovers would respond, “who are we to say what’s good ...
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Remember a year ago when librarians were up in arms about HarperCollins’ decision to cap library borrowing for their ebooks at 26 copies? Boy, was there a lot of uproar. There were boycotts and petitions and some earnest librarians even came up with a “ebook user’s bill of rights,” perhaps forgetting that rights aren’t much good if no one enforces them. The hostile rhetoric was hot and heavy for a while. Librarians felt good about themselves for standing up for principle and against The Man. It was collective action, baby! They were going to show those publishers just what stern stuff librarians were made of! Except nothing happened, I mean, nothing other than a lot of librarians frothing at the mouth in their condemnation of HarperCollins. As reported last week in this LJ article, even some of the libraries that joined the boycott have changed their minds and started licensing ebooks from that mean old HC again. What has prompted this betrayal of ...
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Libraries certainly are living in interesting times, and last week was no exception. We were also provided with more evidence supporting one of my hypotheses, which is that if you want to get something done, don’t involve the ALA. For example, top ALA representatives met with several major publishers a couple of weeks ago. The ALA version of the meeting was reported last week. Considering that it was reported in American Libraries and yet there was no puffery or positive spin, I can only assume the meetings didn’t go well. There was no mention of whether the discussion began with the ALA Executive Director tough talking the publishers by saying, “you need to deal with libraries and you need to do this as soon as possible.” I predicted that opening wouldn’t go well considering that libraries have no bargaining power over publishers. However, that might have been how they started, which would explain why a week after the meetings ended, Penguin - one of the ...
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Before I start talking about libraries, I want to sing Happy Birthday to myself. The Annoyed Librarian just  turned six, and for over half of those six years has been hosted by the Library Journal. This past weekend we had a huge LJ birthday party to celebrate. I barely had time to recover from all the champagne before writing this. Speaking of alcohol, a couple of kind readers sent me a link to the strangest library fundraiser I’ve ever seen: Booze for Books. Boozing for books isn’t necessarily odd in itself. The odd thing is the group sponsoring it: YALSA. For those unaware of YALSA, it stands for the Young Adult Library Services Association. We all know that “young adult” really means “older child,” and Booze for Books is a “fundraising event in support of Books for Teens.” Personally, I love the idea. Drinking martinis and buying books are two of my favorite activities, and if I could combine them into a fundraising event to to help needy teens ...
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