No Shelf Required

Nicolas Baker, famous within libraries for Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001),  has written an article about the Kindle for the New Yorker.  Not much surprising, general kvetching: the Kindle doesn’t work well with images, text to speach is not an audiobook, not every book is available, etc.  but I think it […]

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Listened in on a Kindle Loan program at the Handheld Librarian conference today.  Panelists from university and public libraries discussed their current Kindle loan programs.  Some highlights included:

Each school had between 4 and 8 Kindles for loan, mostly Kindle 1 and 2
Circulation staff handled the loan/fines and the downloading of titles
Program started as an ILL […]

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Great article in the EduCause Quarterly “A Campus-Wide E-textbook Initiative.”  Authors,  Jon T. Rickman, Roger Von Holzen, Paul G. Klute, and Teri Tobin describes the process that Northwest Missouri State University followed to transition from a textbook rental program to an eTextbook rental program.  eBook Readers, Laptops, and the NMSU implementation plan are discussed in […]

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Attended a virtual conference today, “The Handheld Librarian.”  There were two presentations on ebooks, one related to Kindles in libraries and the other on ebook devices.  The latter, presented by Charlotte Johnson of Southern Illinois University, highlighted the resourceful LibGuide she has developed on ebook reading devices.  It is available from the SIU Edwardsville site.  […]

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iFactory is an web development company in Boston.  They have developed Sage Reference Online, Rosen’s Teen Health & Wellness, and several Oxford University Press products.  NSR got to talk with Tom Beyer, Director of Publishing at iFactory about eBook interfaces and the future of eBooks.  Tom and 15 other interviews are listed on the NSR interviews page.Â

addthis_url […]

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Articles linked from my delicious account this week include:
University Presses Stepping Up e-Book Efforts - 7/17/2009 1:56:00 PM - Publishers Weekly
Barnes & Noble partners with Plastic Logic; Opens up; Targets Kindle
Amazon Charts Course Toward E-Book Advertising
Release E ahead of P? Might be the future, says pub guru Mike Shatzkin
Giving away free books online helps academic […]

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NSR has a great new interview posted with Andy Weissberg, VP of Identifier Services and Corporate Marketing at Bowker.  One of Andy’s tasks at Bowker is the ISTC, the International Standard Text Code.  This interview discusses the ISTC, ISBN, and other standards which relate to the publishing industry (for ordering/selling/tracking) and for libraries.  It’s a […]

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Britannica’s Michael Ross (also on the NSR Advisory Board), has an interesting blog post of the future of the book.  It is a summary of his thoughts and impressions from attending two book related conferences “down under.”  The article appears on the Britannica blog.  Michael discusses some eBook readers and devices, copyright, green thinking, and […]

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First Google, now Amazon, UM has certainly got connections.  They announced this week a plan to offer book reprints for sale on Amazon as reprints on demand.  According to their press release,”The University of Michigan will make thousands of books that are no longer in copyright — including rare and one-of-a-kind titles — available as reprints […]

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Infobase Publishing (Facts on File, Chelsea House, Ferguson Publishing) has just launched search widgets for their eBook platform.  See the press release here.
The widgets search only the eBook content that your institution has access to.  From the press release, “Infobase Publishing is pleased to
announce the launch of our new account-specific eBook Search Widgets, designed to […]

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