The ALA has released a new Quotable Facts about America’s Libraries card, presumably so library nerds can carry the cards around and annoy people by randomly quoting facts at them. It’s not always clear what the “facts” are trying to prove. For example, what can we learn from this: “Americans go to school, public and academic libraries more than three times more often than they go to the movies.” Is this supposed to show us that libraries are more popular than movie theaters? Or that if you put students of all ages in institutions where they’re likely to be in libraries relatively often that they’ll use them more than buildings where you have to go somewhere and pay a lot of money to see bad movies? And like all such lists of facts, the facts are cherry-picked to show only convenient goodness. We’re told that “A 2011 Pew study found that about 24% of library card holders had read e-books in the past year. Of them, 57% preferred borrowing ...
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It’s well known that the Librarian of Congress isn’t really a librarian. I for one am always puzzled why the job ad for Librarian of Congress doesn’t state the requirement for an ALA-accredited MLS degree. How else are they expected to find qualified candidates? But now we know that the Librarian of Congress doesn’t think like a librarian, either. Several articles report on some new DMCA copyright exemptions from the Librarian of Congress. If you were just looking at headlines, you’d think the exemptions were all about jailbreaking smartphones, since you can legally jailbreak your iPhone, but not your iPad, because they’re really different somehow. However, a big portion of the exemptions have to do with movies, especially what sort of DVD-ripping is and is not allowed. A lot of librarians might wonder what difference that makes to libraries. Well, it makes a lot of difference to academic libraries, many of which rip DVDs for streaming video on course ...
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LISNews linked to this article about a Kindle user having her Kindle account closed without warning and her Kindle remotely wiped for some alleged account offense, an offense so serious that her Kindle account was restored as soon as anyone published the story on the Internet. The alleged violation that apparently wasn’t a violation had something to do with ebook sales rights in various parts of the world and...I didn’t really follow it that carefully. If you buy a Kindle and start using it in Norway, you should expect crazy things to happen. If you want your Kindle account syncing well, you should just come over the good old U.S. of A. We may rank 38th worldwide in life expectancy, but we’re #1 in total healthcare expenditure per capita. (I can hear the chanting now, “#1! #1!) Our literacy rate is pretty darned good, too, at least for the time being. This debacle is an indication of the problems anyone faces when “licensing” ebooks rather than being ...
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The big news in libraryland last week was the story in LJ reporting that Random House says that libraries own any Random House ebooks they buy. Own, not license. If that were true, then it would be a huge change in the current ebook model. The question is, is it really true? Well, something is true, but we need to figure out what. It seems to be true that Random House executives believe that libraries own the RH ebooks they pay for. The problem is that he business model Random House uses undermines the claim that libraries own RH ebooks. From Random House: This is our business model: we sell copies of our ebooks to an approved list of library wholesalers, and those wholesalers are supposed to resell them to libraries. In our view, this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license. With physical books, there isn’t a problem with ownership. The wholesalers sell the books to retailers or to libraries and the transaction is ...
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Usually there’s nothing more enjoyable than library promotional videos except just about everything else that doesn’t involve actual physical pain. Almost every entrant in the genre is just plain bad, designed to raise a smile but prompting a snicker instead. I won’t even link to some in the past, because they’re so painful to watch that I couldn’t bring myself to do it, but you might remember some. Like the one where the two guys sing a ridiculous song they wrote themselves trying to teach us all what libraries are really like because they know so much more than us about everything. *Shudder.* Or there’s any video that has librarians dancing around the library to some currently trendy pop song, because nothing is more likely to attract people to libraries than watching librarians dance. You probably work in a library, so you know what the average librarian looks like. Now imagine five of them dancing in the stacks. Now go take some Pepto and lie ...
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At some point I speculated that if there were ever a Netflix service for ebooks, libraries as places to get books would be a thing of the past. Or at least I think I wrote that, because I’m too lazy to Google myself to find out. One possibility for such a service is the Amazon Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. This is a service where people who own a Kindle and have an Amazon Prime account can supposedly “read for free.” “Choose from over 145,000 titles, including all 7 Harry Potter books and more than 100 current and former New York Times Best Sellers, to read on your Kindle.” I saw that and thought, woo hoo, former NYT best sellers! Sign me up, baby! On the website, it says “you may borrow one book at a time,” but that’s okay, because I can only read one book at a time. I’d been resisting all this ebook hype, since I like to own the books I pay for , but I figured what the heck. Reading for free? Who can resist. Free, after you’ve paid ...
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