OWL: Librarian's Place

"A group of artists has manufactured 40 books previously only available in imaginary form" - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Via Jill O'Neill. - Maxine

(typo in title at source post) - Maxine

Quote: "Last week, I created a Kindle version of my indie crime thriller novel, Felonious Jazz, using the tools at Amazon's Digital Text Platform. It took about nine minutes, a "why-not" side project alongside my trade paperback, which I published using Amazon's print-on-demand company, CreateSpace." He goes on to claim that he got into the top 25 by reducing his price to 1.99. Hmm. - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "SAN FRANCISCO — Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it. The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail. In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory (article, book, blog) predicts that digital distribution will lead to a jump in demand for niche content" - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "At Booklist, we review a lot of post-apocalyptic books—but what happens to a book reviewer after the apocalypse? Here’s the short, fictional answer." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "Twitter has produced its first work of literature" - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "Venetia, on the fateful day that Pluto popped into her head, was having breakfast with her mother and her grandfather, Falconer Madan, retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He had exciting news to tell. Scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., had just photographed a planet lying beyond Neptune. Its existence had been postulated since the late 19th century, and astronomers working under Percival Lowell, the observatory’s founder, had been chasing it photographically since 1906. Now theory had become fact. “He wondered what it should be called,” Mrs. Phair recalled in the documentary film, “Naming Pluto,” released last month. “We all wondered, and then I said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?’ And the whole thing stemmed from that.”" - Maxine via Bookmarklet

So interesting. Came to this post searching for the word "librarian." - David Damore

Quote: "Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file. What’s more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version. Now, with publishers producing more digital editions, it is potentially easier for hackers to copy files. And the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like the Kindle from Amazon or the Reader from Sony make it easier to read in digital form. Many of the unauthorized editions are uploaded as PDFs, which can be easily e-mailed to a Kindle or the Sony device." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back. Mr. Helprin is the author, most recently, of "Digital Barbarism," just published by HarperCollins." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "I've long called on the publishing industry to negotiate with Google. Now I'm calling on the publishing industry to negotiate with Google's competitors. Authors and publishers should be forced—either by the court, or through legislation—to grant rival companies like Amazon and Microsoft the same rights that they're giving Google. Not only would this likely satisfy the government's antitrust concerns, it would create a truly vibrant market for books. Google didn't create a great Web search engine because it alone had access to everything published online; it created a great Web search engine because all its rivals had access, too, and Google was forced to think of an entirely new way to approach searching the Web. The story is no different for books: No s! ingle company should be given exclusive legal access to the printed word. That would be a disaster for authors. More importantly, it would be a disaster for readers as well." - Maxine

Quote: "Amazon.com has launched a version of its Kindle e-book store for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The retailer launched its Kindle iPhone application to customers in the US in March. Now when customers click on "Get Books" in the app, they are taken to a specially tailored version of the Kindle store for users of Apple devices on the Safari web browser." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "Depression, truth be told, is both boring and threatening as a subject of conversation. In the end there is no one to intervene on your behalf when you disappear again into what feels like a psychological dungeon — a place that has a familiar musky smell, a familiar lack of light and excess of enclosure — except the people you’ve paid large sums of money to talk to over the years. I have sat in shrinks’ offices going on four decades now and talked about my wish to die the way other people might talk about their wish to find a lover." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "The Hobbit Motel on the North Island A hotel in the Waitomo region invokes the spirit of 'The Lord of the Rings' author, J.R.R. Tolkien. By Kelsey Ramos May 10, 2009 Who knows how J.R.R. Tolkien would have designed a motel, but the Hobbit Motel in New Zealand seems to have real fantasy appeal. The strange little building with porthole-style windows is built into the side of a hill in Waitomo, a region on North Island known for its caves and waterfalls" - Maxine via Bookmarklet

"A sociology student placed a fake quote on Wikipedia, only to see it show up in prominent newspapers, revealing that a lot of the press doesn't go much further than most 'Net users when it comes to researching a story" - Maxine via Bookmarklet

More on the Maurice Jarre "hoax". - Maxine

Quote: "Both aim to put books and readers together By Barbara Fister -- Library Journal, 5/1/2009 For two professions so committed to meeting the needs of readers, publishers and librarians have distinct cultures. Put simply, one culture is all about developing and selling books; the other is about sharing them and fostering a culture of reading. But there's another basic difference, too. Publishers work closely with authors and use sales figures to tell them what readers want, interpreting those figures like tea leaves. Librarians work closely with readers, using them as informants to help them select books that will satisfy the diverse tastes of a community." - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: "Our exclusive test shows how the two Web engines compare when given the same queries" - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Quote: A tragic tale of Free going horribly wrong, from Chris Anderson's long tail blog. "Short form: the attempt by a half-dozen newspaper publishers to “out-free” a free Icelandic paper that entered the market (backed by Morten Lund, who made a fortune as an early investor in Skype) ended up costing the collective newspaper industry in Denmark more than $150 million dollars and the bankruptcy of three newspapers. Morten Lund has also been chronicling this disaster, confessional style, on his blog (see here and here). And yes, this all started with the same Icelandic investors who helped take down the world economy." - Maxine via Bookmarklet