Library Stuff

Overdrive Blog. – “What has a 600-horsepower engine, an interior loaded with cutting-edge technology, and is sure to make crowds road in Indianapolis later this month? The Digital Bookmobile, of course!On May 24 and 25, while racecars are lapping the track in preparation for the Indianapolis 500, the Digital Bookmobile National Tour will be thrilling crowds at Indianapolis Public Library with “The Greatest Spectacle in Reading.” As so many of our library partners have seen firsthand over the past few years, the Digital Bookmobile is a 74-foot-long, 18-wheel tractor-trailer that tours the continent spreading awareness for digital libraries and eBooks.”

Ars Technica – “West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette has been hopping mad this week as one of its reporters learned that the state has been sticking 1,064 high-end $22,600 routers into “little public institutions as small as rural libraries with just one computer terminal.” When reporter Eric Eyre actually called up Cisco posing as a customer, he was told by a rep that the company’s 3945 series routers were “our router solution for campus and large enterprises, so this is overkill for your network.” Instead, the rep recommended a far cheaper commercial grade router for $500. And while the 3945 series routers might be massively overkill for many of the locations to which they have been deployed, 366 of them aren’t even being used. Instead, they’re sitting in a warehouse.”

Amazon.com – “Owning a Kindle just got a whole lot better for magic-loving Muggles. Starting June 19, Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is adding all seven Harry Potter books (in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish) to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL). Harry Potter is the all-time best-selling book series in history, and Amazon has purchased an exclusive license from J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore to make the addition of these titles possible. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a benefit of Amazon Prime membership—Prime members also enjoy free two-day shipping on millions of items and unlimited streaming of more than 17,000 movies and TV episodes. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library has now grown to over 145,000 books that can be borrowed for free as frequently as once a month, with no due dates.”

LifeHacker – “Sorting through the Amazon store for free ebooks can be a bit of a mess. To simplify the process Zero Dollar Books is a simple webapp that aggregates all the best selling free ebooks and shows them off in a nice clean view.”

NYT Editorial – “For over a century, New York’s majestic central library on Fifth Avenue has drawn grateful scholars and dazzled tourists. Faced with financial uncertainties and a pressing need to modernize, the president of the New York Public Library system, Anthony Marx, has put forward a $300 million proposal to renovate the flagship building. The plans, which are still evolving, sound both necessary and forward-thinking in this digital era. But the library’s overseers have to take care that they preserve the essence of this cultural landmark.”

Goodreads Blog – “Goodreads continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. Today, we had our 300 millionth book cataloged! To give this statistic some context: It took the Goodreads community three years to catalog 100 million books (including books marked as read, to-read, or currently reading). Fourteen months later, in late September 2011, we reached 200 million books. Now, just seven months after that, we’ve hit the 300 million benchmark. Take a look at how the number of books cataloged has skyrocketed.”

Press Release – “Thomson CompuMark, a Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science business and the global leader in trademark searching and brand protection solutions, today announced plans to launch 136 new databases for its SAEGIS® on SERION® online trademark screening solution. The addition of this content will make Thomson CompuMark the world’s largest provider of trademark screening data, covering 186 countries and registers. Thomson CompuMark made the announcement at INTA, the International Trademark Association’s annual meeting.”

Tennessean – “A school district has deemed an awkward teen’s two-page oral sex encounter at boarding school in the coming-of-age novel “Looking for Alaska” too racy, banning the book from class reading lists.

Sumner County Schools are at least the second in the state, after Knox County in March, to keep students from reading it together in class.”

SF Weekly – “Jessa Crispin arrived at the 2012 Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia in March with high expectations. And by high, we mean abysmal. “Secure in the knowledge that libraries are now permanently fucked,” wrote the editor-in-Chief of the popular “litblog” Bookslut. Surely librarians would crumble before her, the harsh fiscal realities having reduced the bibliognosts into heaps of despair, wailing about furloughs and nonexistent arts grants. But Crispin is not a librarian. Once a publishing outsider, she launched Bookslut in 2002 while working at a Planned Parenthood in Texas. She now enjoys insider status, and she contributes to likes of NPR, PBS, and the Washington Post on all things books. The conference falls within the realm of the “book world,” so Crispin, donning black garb, traveled all the way from Berlin in search of heavyhearted roundtable discussions and forsaken vendor booths.”

New York Daily News – “In a handsome new website called The Hemingway Papers, the Toronto Star has collected the columns that Ernest Hemingway wrote for that newspaper. In doing so, it sheds much-needed light on a little-known aspect of the great writer’s career, and does so in a sleek, inviting and easy-to-navigate format.”