Gutter Type

Print is BLANK

2011-09-12T10:24:00.000-04:00

As part of having my grad students introduce themselves at the start of the class, I asked them to fill in the blank in the following statement: Print is ______.

The classes are a mix of returning and new grad students, so I was interested in seeing if there were going to be a range of answers. What the students answered were surprising. Most of them still believe in the primacy of print. It can be "evolving" or "changing" but they don't see it going away. There were a few other students who viewed it as an essential format, but a format nonetheless.

I think my favorite response was that Print is something older people worry about. There's is a lot to unpack in that statement. Why are older people worried about it? Why aren't younger people worried about it? It doesn't hint at if there should be a worry but identifies a dividing line in different methods of thinking.

Here are the answers from my students:

Print is _______

Not going away.
Evolving.
Changing.
An art form.
Another format.
Beautiful.
My life.
Stubborn.
Something older people worry about.
Never ever, ever, ever going to die.
Everlasting.
Form, not function.
Preferred.
In flux.
Alive and well.
An amazing medium.
Addictive.
Useful.
Relevant.

A few brief thoughts on information environmentalism

2011-07-24T19:13:00.003-04:00

1.

Over the past year I have seen my consumption of information slow down. I've gone from daily visits to Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn to weekly or monthly visits. I found no real reason for the visits. It's not like I was contributing anything meaningful to a conversation, nor was I finding any useful information about friends and family.

2.
At the same time I was uncoupling from social networks, I was also reading several books that I assumed were in opposition to my general outlook, but were worthwhile books that deserved a close read. Two of those books, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age* and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, were dealing with these issues as well. Both are worth reading if you're at all interested in how our culture views it's relationship with the web. But in both books, the authors took time to talk about how they found it hard to turn off the machine and had to impose internet-free or computer-free time at home. When I was reading this it struck me as odd. I understood the parallel of limiting TV consumption, but would we feel the same about book and magazine consumption? And do adults really need these limits? I understand why boundaries must be set for children and teenagers, but adults can't power down devices? Too much of a good thing....

3.
This past weekend I was at the Chihuly exhibit at the MFA with my parents and wife. First impression- "ooh, pretty glass. Lots of pretty glass." Then we started noticing the flashes. People were trying to photograph the glass with their flashes turned on. Then we noticed that people were photographing every single display using their cameras and phones. Almost to the point where they were no longer admiring the pieces and spending their time taking photographs. It felt as if people were there to capture the art but without the experience. By the third room it was apparent no one was "being here now" and the photos were being used to capture the information so that they could process it later (I think my moment came when I noticed people were photographing the Navajo blankets that lined a wall. Blankets that can be found in thousands of homes across the United States (Been out to the Southwest? Have a blanket/ rug? A similar one was probably on the wall). The exhibit reminded me of the concept of information environmentalism, something Carr and Powers alluded to in their book, but never made a strong case for it, other than as a personal responsibility.

So what?

I guess I'm putting these thoughts down here because it's something that we need to keep in mind when writing blog posts and uploading photos and tweets. How much of this is necessary and how much is ephemera? How can we improve the signal to noise ratio? Should we improve the ratio or let more noise in? Who gets to decide and how are we going to store this in any meaningful way? And how will access be provided that cuts through the noise? If we are to take our consumption of information as part of a bigger ecology, are we destroying it with every tweet and new Facebook profile picture? Does it matter all that much? And is all this consumption actually speeding up the "process of dumbening?"

*Okay publishers, I know you can't really control Amazon's pricing on all editions, but the Kindle edition of the book is currently two dollars more than the bargain priced hardcover and almost three dollars more than the paperback. And that's with Amazon's discounts applied to list price.

iRiver Story and Google Books

2011-07-12T10:20:00.003-04:00

So Google has announced that iRiver is releasing a $140 device that will be connected to Google's E-book program.

So, is this the Google Books version of the Kindle?

Let's look at the specifications from iRiver's site:

$140 for 2 gigs (Kindle is $114 with ads, $140 without for 4 gigs)

SD card slot (Kindle no longer has SD slot)

Wifi only (same as Kindle)

6-inch display (Same as Kindle)

Keyboard (same as Kindle)

displays PDF, Epub, TXT, FB2, DJVU, MS office files and image files (Kindle right now doesn't support Epub and uses MOBI, instead. Also provides audiobook support).

Some comments:

It's only 2GB compared to 4GB for the same price

The specs page is one of the only I've seen that outlines a comics viewer, but doesn't handle CBZ and CBR files.

Using Adobe Reader Mobile so there's DRM control, but it's no different than most of the other non-Amazon devices

Here's my biggest concern- both iRiver and Google are promoting this device as the reader for their book store. It's being pitched as the easiest way to reader over 3 million books for free from the Google Book project. The epub version of those books are straight files from the OCR conversion of the PDFs. They have not been proofed and lead to a horrible reading experience. As much as I like the idea of having a reader that ties into one of the greatest online libraries in the world, that library's content is in PDF form, the text and Epub form are wretched. Geoff Nunberg has been rallying against Google's lack of quality control on these books for some time. Laura Miller also has an article in Salon from 2009 that looks at these concerns as well. I haven't seen a vast improvement in Google Books since these articles were published. Try searching for "Publisher's Weekly" in Google Books, there are several volumes that have been scanned and are available. Or just go find your favorite classic in a free version and look at the pure text version (Here's a link to the pure text version of a conversion of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, look at the table of contents in pure text form and think about how you would feel seeing this after paying for a reader to read this.)

But that's what digital does!!

2011-07-01T11:11:00.002-04:00

I worked with Peter Costanzo back when all this digital technology was a glimmer in Amazon's eye (a bit of an exaggeration, but someday they will be seen as the proto-digital days of books) so I'm interested in hearing what he has to say and what he's up to. After all he is one of the people leading the charge to make digital trade books better.

And know that he's working at F+W media with a very talented team and offering a behind-the-scenes look over at Digital Book World, I had to go over and read the article.

As interesting and enlightening as it was to see the sausage-making of digital books, there were two points I had an issue with.

The first point is just worrisome:

But here’s the thing (and why I personally have a love/hate relationship with eBooks). These enhanced versions of the Everything Learning Language books do look great, especially when the font is set to an average size. Make that font larger or smaller and all hell can break loose! If only we publishers could be present at those very moments to say to readers, “Stop, please, don’t do that, can’t you see it was perfect just the way you had it?!?” But alas, we cannot. However, thoughtful planning (and lots of programming) can go a long way to prevent most breakdowns in formatting… within reason.

As publishers and writers we don't have control over the text! We need to stop thinking like this! It will only hurt us in the long run if we continue to thing about a set page size. Want to make an e-book make sure it looks good on everything from a phone screen to an e-reader to a regular sized monitor. It's what web designers have been doing for years and there are several studies out there that argue against this kind of backwards thinking of controlling the reader. We don't. Which is why it's so important to institute quality assurance in the process of designing e-books. Something that I know Colleen Cunningham and her crew over at Adams Media are thinking about.

Oh, and lots of programming? Compared to what? Most formatting issues should be able to be handled with CSS and HTML, no programming needed (unless you're automating production, in which case, there's also lot of proofing of output.

And yes I'm a little over-sensitive about this issue in particular, since it sends up a red flag to me that the industry isn't really looking at this as a digital creation but as an offshoot of print. E-books are not the same as mass-markets where you can shrink the text and cut the margins. You need to do more!

The second point in Peter's article that got me was this line of thinking about interactivity:

Yes, we could’ve spent the programming time to include a JavaScript pop-up that would allow for some kind of entry field, but at what cost? And for which device?

I understand the real issue here- how can we make e-books interactive and still profitable? But the way the question is raised points to something else. Something very important for publishers to understand. There is not one e-book. You need to design to the device. iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Adobe Digital Editions all render things differently and have different levels of interactivity. You can not make one version and pass it off to all vendors. That's print, not digital. For a successful digital book you need to design for graceful degradation. Like a web site that handles HTML5 and IE6, e-books need to be developed the same way.

So, what do we learn? E-books are hard. E-book require more than a conversion of print into bits (and I want to emphasis Peter and Adams Media are at the forefront of this emerging way of reading, so if they are struggling with these issues, we're all struggling with these issue.) But the real highlight for me in the article is the Voltaire-ism that has become a mantra of web design and something I try to repeat as often as possible to my publishing students- Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Text that flows and rolls

2011-06-21T13:01:00.002-04:00

Last week I finished The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen by John Bryant. The book is a great introduction on how a text is not a text unto itself, but falls in a continuum of versions from the manuscript to alternative versions. For publishing folk it's a reminder of how responsible they are for culture. For metadata folk and catalogers, it is one of the clearest explanations of the relationship of a text to its manifestations, or Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item (Hello FRBR!) The book had me thinking about e-books and the different ways multiple versions of text could be displayed (specifically, I was thinking about how an e-book version of Melville's Typee could reproduce the original British edition, the expurgated American Edition, a critical edition and a genetic edition all in one linked document and still give different levels of readers the text they wanted. Vertical integration of reading experience!).

With that fresh in my mind, I started listening to This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, episode 305: This One Time at Foo Camp. The program was mostly dedicated to discussions of what was happening at Foo Camp that week. One of the guests was Ben Huh, the founder of Cheezburger network and he was talking about his new Moby Dick Project, which aims at taking a look at journalism in a new way. Like the ideas behind the fluid text, Moby Dick hopes to take journalism and recognize that events (the main fodder for journalism) evolve over time and are covered in different ways during that time. Or, as Ben puts it in one of his initial posts about the project:

The traditional methods of news-writing, such as the reverse pyramid, the various “editions” of news pose big limitation on how news is reported and consumed. Unfortunately, internet-based changes such as reverse-chronological blogging of news, inability to archive yesterday’s news, poor commenting quality, live-blogging, and others have made news consumption an even more frustrating experience.

ReadWriteWeb provides a few more details on the project in the article, Cheezburger CEO Planning WordPress-Style News 2.0 Software, including Ben Huh's wireframe of how news may be presented.

I think the idea bears investigation, but I have no idea how worthwhile it would end up being. I have had in-class discussions about digital tools and journalism and digital tools and publishing to get them thinking about how to publish smarter. And having a way to follow an event or see different views on an event could be very valuable for researchers (much like different versions of Typee are of interest to scholars like Bryant), but how many people really want to invest time and energy in tracking the creative process and how many just want the product, whatever version that product may be? I know my students are generally split on the idea. Yes they say it would be a great thing to have, as long as there was a way to just see one version. My students like to point out that their lives are filled with enough information as it is, to have each piece of information they find provide different options on interacting with the data is too much. Sometimes simplicity is more attractive than completeness.

It's one of the concerns I had about FRBR- great system for catalogers and librarians who revel in a real-world equivalent of "Spot the Difference" games, but not so good for the patron/ reader who just wants direct access to a story/ report/ idea. As information creator/ curators we need to figure out the optimal way to present this information. Going back to Melville, while an e-text of different version of Typee could provide some insight into Melville's thought process, it could also present a large block of inaccessible text to a larger audience who would feeling like K in Kafka's Castle, trying to find a way in to the text, but being blocked at every attempt because they can't interact with the gate-keepers.

For now I'm going to keep an eye on the Moby Dick Project's Twitter Feed and think a little bit more about how epub and mobi can provide more accessible and more useful critical editions (or come to the realization that it's impossible and go back to creating clean epub versions of yesterday's best-selling novels that haven't been in print for decades).

Closing the year

2011-06-16T11:55:00.004-04:00

We should start seeing more and more press releases from publishers as the either finish up analysis of last fiscal year or close the year at the end of this month. Of particular interest for those companies ending their year in June or reporting first quarter/ half reports is the effect of the bankruptcy from Borders.

It hit the industry back in February and while some panic ensued, the next few months should provide us with some more information on what it really meant for the industry.

The original filings can be found on Scribd. There's one report up that identifies the top debts owed. Which is a rich primary source to use against press releases and reports.

Let's get it started with John Wiley-

Publishers Weekly released this earnings overview today. (Thanks Iris!)

PW's article identifies two points in the earning report that identifies the disruption from Borders:

Wiley took a $9 million bad debt charge to account for Borders’s bankruptcy

Sales in the consumer category fell 7%, to $32 million, due in large part to the Borders disruption (Wiley had expected Borders to account for 5% of sales before shipments to the chain were stopped in December)

While some more in-depth research and reading is necesary to see how Borders affected the bottom line* for the company as a whole, it might be worth it if we can use this along with other companies to see where Border's bankruptcy caused the most damage.

*For example, the consumer market of the professional/ trade group dropped 7% to $32 million, but the whole of the professional/ trade division posted a 2% growth to $437.1 million which is less than half of earnings from the Scientific/Technical/Medical/Scholarly which posted sales of $998.9 million. So, in the words of Hungrybear9562, what does it mean?

Return from the wilderness...

2011-06-10T11:01:00.002-04:00

18 months since my last post.

18 months of quiet contemplation on the mountain top of digital publishing.

18 months of watching publishers stumble and trip and rise over digital publishing and changes in the market.

18 months of new devices- tablets, e-readers, phones that allow the reading of books on their screens.

18 months of new lawsuits and still no resolution to the Google lawsuit.

18 months.

Okay, maybe I haven't really been alone in the wilderness watching the world change like some monk watching the seasons change from a small window. If anything the past 18 months have been a hectic run. I got the electronic publishing concentration up and running in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department at Emerson College. Taught 8 classes, including three new ones that focused on digital publishing and e-books. Guided students in independent studies on podcasts, digitizing heavily illustrated books, creating wordpress blogs for food writers and an investigation into how these new digital tools can further some of the concepts outlined by the Oulipo school. And that was just the class stuff.

Anyway, I feel like I'm slowly coming back from the wilderness and starting to turn back on posting and sharing between this blog and my twitter feed. Figure it's better than torturing friends and family with talk about digital publishing and publishing in general

5 years!

2010-07-06T13:21:00.002-04:00

I've been too busy with redesign plans, iPhone apps and life (things that generally stop me from updating this blog) to notice that the first post on this site was just over 5 years ago! I guess that means it's time to seriously consider this little site as something more than just a spot that I can update when I have the time.

New feature: blast from the past

2010-06-10T11:51:00.003-04:00

One of my big goals this summer is to organize and archive what I've been doing at Emerson since I started teaching an Electronic Publishing Overview course there in 2007. Most of the material created for the class exists within a transparent bubble for that class. I hope to add the syllabi and class assignments that were originally posted behind the protected gates of webCT to an Emerson site for everyone to see. I will also start posting other material I can to an Emerson site so that students and other interested parties will have access to what has been developed in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson (more on that in July).

I also wanted to start reposting and saving some of the blog posts my students have contributed to the class over the years. I've decided to repost the complete text with a link to the class blog. Why? I'm not sure how long Emerson will maintain older blogs for classes. Theoretically they should exist forever as they were published documents, but realistically does Emerson want sites that haven't been updated in 3 years sitting on servers just in case someone searches for it?

Plus, it's worth it to collect these posts here to showcase what publishing students think and talk about when they are given an open forum.

The first post is from October 10, 2007 by Michelle Salzman. Michelle is currently the Web Writer/Project Coordinator at Boston University School of Public Health. Her portfolio can be found at msalz.wordpress.com.

Here's her post:

Web Two Point Uh Oh

Oh Wal-Mart, how interesting that your attempt to connect with your shoppers on a site like Facebook didn't go over so well as noted in Social Marketing Do's And Don'ts. It just goes to show how picky people are about their cheap home furnishings. Ok, what it really demonstrates is that you've got to pick your marketing channels more wisely. Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace are great venues to hook potential customers because people are already there to make connections. "A new friend? I love Target stuff! Why not?" However, you've got to be sure the audience your targeting to interact with you is your audience. I'm sure plenty of college students purchased their dorm stuff at Wal-Mart, no doubt. Still, for a company that regularly gets dogged for its business practices and how it treats its employees, Wal-Mart was really going out on a limb by opening itself up to people's comments by creating a back-to-school page for itself on Facebook:

Rather than mention the company's bargains and goods, many people—in fact, more than half who have posted—criticize the company's labor practices and corporate reputation. One posting reads: "Wal-Mart is toxic to communities and livelihoods." Another notes: "We don't support this company's use of a space for social networking to further horrendous business practices."

Ouch.

Wal-Mart's response: "We recognize that we're facilitating a live conversation and we know that in any conversation, especially one happening online, there will be some positive posts and some not so favorable. We welcome them all."

I guess if you're going to take the plunge into interactive web marketing, you've got to expect drowning is an option.

Originally published at the Fall 2007 Electronic Publishing Overview Blog at Emerson College.

Academic Panel on Green Day

2010-06-09T11:08:00.002-04:00

I was looking at the recent announcements from the listserv at H-Net Online Academic announcements and after skimming through a few of the standard issue big culture CFPs, I found this call:

Title: Green Day panel
Location: Texas
Deadline: 2010-12-15
Description: Call for Papers Punk and Popular Culture PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations Joint Conference April 20-23, 2011 San Antonio, TX www.swtxpca.org.
Proposal submission deadline: December 15, 2010
Conference hotel: Marriott Rivercenter San Antonio
Contact: bryan.l.jones @ okstate.edu
URL: www.swtxpca.org

It looks like this is a panel in the punk program of the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association's conference. I shouldn't be surprised at this, but I am. Anyone want to write a paper on how Basket Case is a semiotic reflection of self-interpretation and identity while also a criticism of the rise of navel-gazing rock at the end of the 20th century?

Digital literacy and perception

2010-06-01T12:43:00.003-04:00

I'm reading Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture and Reading and Writing Online (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies) by Bronwyn T. Williams and I came across this passage at the beginning of chapter 4:

"They (students) use popular culture icons, catchphrases, music, text, and film clips in postmodern, fragmented collages that present selves that seem simultaneously sentimental and ironic. The construction of these pages illustrates how popular culture practices that predate online technologies have been adopted and flourished with new technologies that allow content to flow across media as well as increase the ease of audience participation. The intertextual nature of popular culture texts creates opportunities for multiple readings of social networking webpages in ways that destabilize the identity students believe they have created. These multiple readings create ambivalence for students who realize that their practices in composing pages online may be in conflict with how they read other pages, and how their own pages are read."

As someone who teaches students who are more immersed in cultural creation than at other colleges and universities, I find this an advanced position for my students to find themselves in- to be creating material with knowledge of audience but with an understanding of how perception on different level changes. Wasn't this one of the goals of higher education? And now our students are learning this starting in high school through social networks? This is more than rethinking copyright and terms of identity in higher education. I need to up my game and not worry about teaching students how to think about perception of content, but focus on more advanced ideas of context. So I guess this goes beyond, "What this book means" and more to "What it means when I say this is what I thought the book meant."

Summer Reading and Prep

2010-05-25T11:04:00.005-04:00

Time to set the bar.

For the Fall semester I will be teaching my graduate level Electronic Publishing Overview course, my undergraduate level Electronic Publishing Overview course and a new course on web development for grad students in the Masters in publishing program. There's a lot that need to be done over the summer since I need to update the overview classes and finalized the web development class. I also want to build web pages for all the sites as I tried it this semester and I think it worked really well.

As part of my prep, I'm giving myself a reading list to help enhance the lectures and maybe take the labs to a next level. I want to post this to keep track of the list and to offer some transparency on how I'm developing the classes. I wanted to be more transparent in my classes to help students go beyond the class, but it turns out transparency is more time consuming than I thought.

The list:

I'm hoping one of these will stand out as a possible new text as some of the feedback from students this year was that our textbook wasn't the greatest and felt a bit dated. I also need to start reading up on CS5 as they are installing it in the lab this summer (and maybe my office computer), so that my exercises are trouble-free (slight differences frustrate students as I learned from developing exercises on CS3 and seeing small differences on CS4 in class. Not the time to notice them.)

Self-Publishing's Growth

2010-05-21T10:06:00.003-04:00

Back at the end of April, Virginia Heffernan wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine about the change in attitude on self-publishing: from the view of it as some kind of vanity press to, well, a way to get published. The article is a look at the different services out there with the wrapping of looking for crackpot theories and quackery that was the primary product of these self-publishing ventures (not entirely true, but they seemed to scream louder than the rest), making sure that our view of self-publishing is still associated with pseudoscience, egotistical ramblings and conspiracy theories.

Boil the story down to the facts and you get a list of sites that are self-publishing or help people self-publish and some statistics from Bowkers. According to Bowkers, self-publishing was responsible for 764,448 titles in 2009. Compare this to Bowker's numbers of titles produced by more traditional publishers: 288,355 titles. The self-publishing titles show a 181% increase while traditional publishing is down. An interesting set of statistics. What can we glean from this? That lots of people want to self-publish their work. Not as the article states, "Book publishing is simply becoming self-publishing," unless you want to look solely at title output for the year and ignore number of copies sold, availability of titles and formats.

There has always been a large undercurrent of self-publishing that appeals to small niches, or microniche if you look at Bowker's designation of this type of publishing. They have no appeal outside their limited audience and will never sell more than a few dozen copies. This is like looking at the explosion of zines in the 1990s and claiming that journalism has gone the way of the xerox machine. It doesn't add up.

I have had several students and friends who have used these services to print anywhere from a single copy of a book to a dozen or so for class projects. They never make it to the marketplace and were never meant to be sold. These books are final project, portfolio pieces and gifts to friends and relatives. The real story is what part of these self-publishing ventures are making it out into the market. I don't mean some anecdotal evidence about a book that started life as a self-published title and then was picked up by mainstream publishing that turned it into a best-seller, since it's still the traditional publisher who adds production and promotion to the mix. As Lisa Genova states on her Still Alice blog "After being self-published for ten months, I found an agent who sold the book to Pocket Books. The Pocket Books edition of Still Alice came out on January 6, 2009. Barnes & Noble sold more in the first two days than I sold in ten months." A traditional edition of a self-published work became a best-seller not the self-published work itself. Editions matter!) What I want to see is some facts and stats about the best-selling copies from lulu.com and iUniverse and how well these are selling. Are they doing just as well as first novels and literary fiction published through traditional means? What about non-fiction and poetry?

I'm not discounting self-publishing, in some ways I think it may be a better path for some authors who won't get more support (marketing, publicity, placement, distribution) from traditional publishing houses than if they self-published. And for certain niches like poetry, literary fiction, etc. or for authors who are already known brands, it may make more sense to go this route (Hi Wil!)

Now a blogspot-hosted blog

2010-03-23T14:13:00.003-04:00

Hey, due to some changes in Blogger's terms of service, I need to change how this blog is hosted. I've moved it to a blogspot address since my posting is sporadic at best and there's no really need to have this on the guttertype domain.

Of course this means I can use guttertype for something else and that will happen over the summer. Until then, we will be juggling the ghost.

There be Pirates!

2010-01-27T10:00:00.003-05:00

The Millions posted an interview with a book pirate on January 25,2010. The interview leads off with a criticism of the Attributor study that states pirated e-books may costs the market nearly $3 billion dollars,* while The Millions questions this value, they do point our that the study did identify 3.2 million downloaded books. C Max Magee set out to find one of these pirates and found a willing interviewee with The Real Caterpillar. The interview is an eye-opening account of what happens when book-lovers start sharing texts through torrents and the reasoning behind their decisions.

The most important thing for publishers is the last question in the interview:

TM (the Millions): What changes in the e-book industry would inspire you to stop participating in e-book file sharing?

TRC (The Real Caterpillar): This is a tough question. I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle.(emphasis added) Even in this situation, I would probably still grab a book if I stumbled across the file and thought it might interest me – or if I wanted to check it out before buying a paper copy....

Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die – I don’t know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.

Sidestepping the ethical holes in the argument since the interviewee is well aware that his defense is faulty, it's important to point out that this person finds spending several hours to scan and proof text before uploading it to a site is easier than dealing with the DRM and business model publishers have constructed for the distribution of e-books. Publishers need to keep this in mind when they talk about e-book piracy as there's no financial gain for these people just financial loss for the industry.

*The report does not give a time frame for this cost nor is it exactly clear what prices they used to achieve this value. For example one of their most pirated books in the science category is Molecular Biology of the Cell which has a hardcover list price of $152.00, a paperback of $97.73 and no e-book price. Which price was used and is that price different from the one used for books that have an e-book available? More transparency on their methodology would be helpful if we are to trust their conclusions from their report.

A publishing meme I can get behind

2010-01-15T10:35:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow Museum starts their article on how self-publishing can make sense for some authors with this quote from Virginia Woolf:

Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.

The article cites it via Snarkmarket via The New Yorker. The original quote comes from a 1927 BBC radio broadcast between Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A quick search shows that the broadcast or script isn't readily available on the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or the BBC.

I once tried to propose this concept to some publishing people and they proceeded to inform me that it makes very little economic sense for the book as the first 12 months of publication are when publishers need to make back as much money as possible on the first edition of the book. Publishers need to sell hard covers at as high a price point as possible to recoup the advance and cost of labor and shipping (oh and sending out all those ARCs and finished copies for review). They also proceeded to tell me that most book buyers want the hardcover to showcase on their bookshelf after reading. A paperback or cheap edition would look horrible on a bookcase. Of course I should point out, in order to cut costs, most of the paper trade publishers use is a little better than the 3-months Woolf talks about.

Running Press Archives

2010-01-12T13:58:00.002-05:00

Where do publishing documents go when they die?

In the case of Philadelphia publisher, Running Press, all that documentation is headed off to the University of Pennsyvania. According to an article on Publishers Weekly website by Jim Milliot (January 11, 2010), former publisher, Buz Teacher has donated an "archive [that] includes a complete catalogue of Running Press titles as well as correspondence, contracts, business records and advertising and promotional brochures. This could be a potential boon to all researchers looking to research non-traditional publishers during the last 30 years of the 20th Century. Running Press's main product line included heavily illustrated books, mini editions and kits.

Harper's Index and Publishing

2010-01-12T12:06:00.002-05:00

Based on a post on Boing Boing today, I went over to the Harper's Index webpage" and input the search term "publishing".

Here are a few of the facts on publishing that have appeared in the Index over the years:

Number of science books published in the United States in 1972: 16,923.
In 1982: 7,900 (August, 1984)

Number of book publishers in the United States in 1972: 1,205
In 1982: 2,001 (March 1985)

The number of titles published in 2006, according to Bowker: 291,920

Number of books published last year in Iceland and the United States, respectively, per 100,000 residents: 212, 63 (June, 2005)

How E-Books Will Change Reading and Writing

2010-01-08T09:34:00.002-05:00

Change must be coming!

On December 30th, NPR's Morning Edition had a five-minute segment on about electronic literature. The segment covered twitter novels (well, just Rick Moody's failed attempt), phone novels from Japan and e-readers. What really turned me off from the segment was this quote from Nicholas Carr:

"Over the last couple of years, I've really noticed if I sit down with a book, after a few paragraphs, I'll say, 'You know, where's the links? Where's the e-mail? Where's all the stuff going on?' " says writer Nicholas Carr. "And it's kind of sad."

I assume he's being tongue-in-cheek here, but I still find it misdirected. It's another example of how mainstream media and our cultural critics have decided to ignore some of the foundations of information literacy and equate all formats as one.

The rest of the segment isn't any better. Rick Moody and Lev Grossman both look at new technology (twitter and mobile phones) and basically point out thier short-comings to the novel. Apples and oranges. When are we going to start hearing from people who are actually creating unique and powerful material on these new formats rather than traditional crafters who are comfortable with old media and are hesitant to really experiment. (How do you have a conversation in twitter? Easy. Two accounts and use the reply function.) At least the segment didn't end pointing to e-readers as the great innovation in this field. It just ended with the stock "woe is the novel, who knows if it will survive this latest change and still be the major cultural center it has been for the past 500 years."

Who buys books on Christmas Day?

2010-01-04T11:59:00.003-05:00

I've tried to ignore the articles for the past few days but now that academics have started to send this around en masse to their associates (and I'm sure to see this a few more times once winter break is over), I want to point out a few things about this news story from the Guardian.

Who is on the computer buying books from Amazon on Christmas Day?

There's not much to do with a Kindle after buying it other than adding books. And since you can do it on the machine, there's no need to go to the computer and isolate yourself from the family.

This article's only source of information on this is a press release Amazon sent.

Amazon isn't releasing hard data, just a statement that this happened. I would like to see the sales figures and maybe have some investigative reporting rather than reiteration from a company touting it's device.

This passes for journalism today?

To confuse things a little bit more, they waste space with descriptions that have absolutely no bearing on the story. Check out the last paragraph:

The Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury made the 2009 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack available as an e-book for the first time this year, while Penguin has been selling a range of its classics in electronic form with extra features such as contemporary recipes.

Unless Bloomsbury has changed their name to "Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury," I have no idea why they mention a series that isn't available in e-book format (and may never be) in a sentence about an almanack. Unless the journalist thought a reference to Harry Potter would add punch to the item. Also can't wait for those recipes that come with "The Picture of Dorian Gray", A Clockwork Orange, and On the Road (Chris Croissant of Penguin Digital's three favorite Penguin Classics according to the Penguin Classics UK book shop).

It's going to be an interesting year on the e-book front.

Business sense and snow

2010-01-02T13:22:00.002-05:00

I found this title on Books 24x7 today and thought it the natural conclusion to these types of business books:
Everything I Needed to Know About Business...I Learned from a Canadian 2nd Edition. Where can you go from here?

Indie Music and publishing

2009-09-01T15:26:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend I read through Bill Wasik's And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, which ended up being another title in a long line of books that try to grasp the push and pull of 21st Century culture. It expands upon the birth and growth of memes and fits on the bookshelf stocked with titles like The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Black Swan, and Here Comes Everybody.

The second chapter of the book covers Indie rock and how most new bands have become disposable. Throughout the chapter Wasik follows the hot bands of 2006 knowing full well they would disappear as quickly as people became aware of them (these bands fits the thesis of the book perfectly, and therefore, made a great case study). He follows the North Carolina group the Annuals (who it turns out have 2 albums and a handful of eps available) as well as Peter Bjorn and John. Wasik spends the chapter deep in rock snob territory, name-checking pitchfork media, SXSW, CMJ, tapes 'n tapes, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (a bands I couldn't remember why I had their MP3s until I heard them and remembered it was the band that sounded like David Byrne, but I quickly grew tired of and returned to listening to the Talking Head and David Byrne albums I have), add hip band of 2006 in here. So, why do I keep thinking back to this chapter? Is it because I've been spending time at home rearranging my music and I keep finding these odd songs here and there that I have no idea what they are (hint: I take a listen and end up filing them in the random Indie Rock folder I created. See: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah). It's funny because I can identify most of the other stray artists and put them in the right folder (and we're talking about a mix of artists I pulled from someone's 78 collection posted online as well as old country and remnants of an obsession with bollywood). But why has this happened to indie rock? It wasn't always this way. I remember bands in the 90s making at least two or three albums before disappearing (I know there were tons of bands that made a blip and left, but they still seemed to have some fan base that would listen to them for years after the fact. I still want to find a copy of Bash and Pop's album). But I digress. Maybe Bill Wasik's theory about the indie rock scene is right, it's not the bands but the audience. We've become so accustom to instant new music we don't stick around to develop a taste for any one band.

The chapter also focuses on how we treat authors the same way. All the young authors are treated as flavors of the month and not taken as seriously as established authors like John Updike and Philip Roth. I'm going to skip the issues I have with using a poll from the New York Times Book Review to show preference for older authors, and just point out that these young bucks that the author identifies are David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, William T. Vollman, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, etc. You know authors who have received some of the highest advances from publishers, have movies of their works, and have received grants awards etc over the past 10 years. Yes these authors may not be viewed on the same level as Morrison, Updike and Roth by the writers, critics and editors that the New York Times Book Review decided were prominent, but they still are well known in the literary world. We're still talking The Police, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Phish to The Beatles, Rolling Stones and the Who (we will also ignore that most of the discussion on literature, music and memes takes place in the trapping of upper class hip urban and suburban centers or what most media still considers the mainstream consumer).

So the point of this ramble is that you know what we need a new model that allows young writers to be discovered, consumed and forgotten. The literary magazines aren't strong enough to do it themselves. We need a MySpace of literature (as much as it pains me to write that), some place all of those hundreds of MFA students in programs around the country can share ideas and stories and find an audience. Something for literary fiction the same as the resources out there for science and speculative fiction. If there is something already out there (and not livejournal or blogs or any site that keeps stories by different authors separated) then let me know. And before you sneer yes I understand that authors will never have the same model as bands because reading is no longer in fashion with most people, except for those Twillight, Harry Potter things that everyone reads. Besides we might see a revitalization in reading in the mainstream if e -reading devices and book clubs continue to be cool (or have we started to adopt "off the chain" now? I don't remember. I'm just going to go back to waiting for The Beatles to be relevant again.)

Google Codex Project?

2009-08-28T14:52:00.002-04:00

Found while reading James O'Donnell's Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. This from Nicholas of Tyre, writing in the 14th C. on those blasted printed books that were starting to be in vogue:

They have chopped up the text into so many small parts, and brought forth so many concordant passages to suit their own purpose that to some degree they confuse both the mind and the memory of the reader and distract it from understanding the literal meaning of text.

The irony is that I wanted to copy this quote and went to Google Books to highlight it and copy it but was blocked and could only see a small part of the text, so I had to pull my dead tree copy out as well to make sure I had the whole passage.

Every book is an island in a archipelago (for now)

2009-08-18T10:13:00.003-04:00

Over at the e-book test, Mike Cane had a very short post called, "The Eleven Axioms of 21st Century Book Publishing." It takes all of a minute to read and should be the signpost for any publisher starting to build an electronic infrastructure for their traditional print material.

My personal favorite is number 6. I think the first 8 axioms are key to changing the trade publishing industry.

You're talking alot...

2009-08-17T09:38:00.002-04:00

Last spring one of my students came to me with a great research idea: look at comments and online commentary with an eye towards how it relates to what we consider traditional publishing. She developed a proposal and spent the summer working on the project (as a blog, naturally).

I got an e-mail from Kerry last week to let me know that the project started getting retweeted by Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press.

The site was also picked up by Utne! I'm really glad her work has been recognized outside the small world of academia (which some days feels like 5 people).

Congratulations Kerry!

Howdy, Stranger!

2009-08-09T12:32:00.007-04:00

Silence. It's the number one problem with weblogs these days. Turns out blogs have suffered from silence this year as people have been busy doing other things. I just checked on guttertype and it's been subsisting on 3 posts since January.

So, dear reader (all two or three of you out there), I hope to start posting more here in the next few weeks, but I can't guarantee that.

Where have I been? I've been a little busy with things. Things I should have posted here while they were happening, but never got around to it. So here's the update on what I've been up to.

Simmons Library

In September, 2008 I received a professional grant to buy an Amazon Kindle to develop a pilot study to see how useful these ebooks are in an academic library. Part of the requirement of this grant was outreach to the community. During the spring semester I gave a short presentation on the Kindle to the Simmons GSLIS Graduate Student chapter of the Special Library Association and a Technology for Information Professionals (LIS 488) class. I also had a few one-on-one meetings with students and faculty about the reader and what they could mean for academics. My presentation for the LIS488 class can be found at slideshare.net.I also wrote an article for the Fall 2008 Simmons Library newsletter, "Rekindling your Interest in Ebooks" that introduced some of the issues involved with e-readers.(warning PDF format only!)

I also created my first library display in January for our DVD collection. This involved creating posters and pamphlets as well as pulling books and DVDs for the display. I have three photos of the display on flickr (yes, those are movie-size boxes of Junior Mints and Jujy Fruits as part of the display. I also wanted to try and get a popcorn machine, but stopped with the candy. I remember reading somewhere that popcorn and libraries do not mix.

Grad School

Yup. Still in grad school until the end of the year. I spent most of the spring working on an XML project that was part of a workflow to create focused Subsidiary Rights Guides using MySQL, PHP and XML. Again this is only the XML part of it. The completed project will be a dynamic webpage that take data from a database, publish it with XML tags and have it available as an HTML or PDF document for publishers interested in licensing books.

Other Library Stuff

Okay, if a job and classes weren't enough I also started to present at conferences this spring. In March I gave a Cyber Zed Shed presentation on "Tweeting in the Library: Libraries Using Twitter" at the ACRL National Convention in Seattle. (Presentation can be found on slideshare as well.). Two weeks later I was in Washington DC giving a presentation on "The Stuff We Make: Librarians using Institutional
Repositories" at Computers in Libraries. (Presentation, here.) I also started to review tech books for LS publications. I reviewed books for The Tech Static while it was publishing. (I miss that journal, what a great idea for a site for librarians). I also had a review of Bank on Yourself in the May, 1 issue of Library Journal. My first review for The Journal of Web Librarianship appeared in vol. 3, no. 2. I reviewed Virtual Worlds, Real Libraries: Librarians and Educators in Second Life and Other Multi-User Virtual Environments, edited by Lori Bell and Rhonda Trueman.

I also gave the keynote at the 2009 CET Symposium at Smith College in May. The theme of the symposium was "The digital scholar" and I discussed the intersection of copyright, ownership and community in online publishing.

Let's see, anything else.... oh yeah, starting September 1, I will be a full-time faculty member at Emerson College.

I'm also on Twitter if you want to follow me there.

Why do blog have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

2009-06-08T12:40:00.003-04:00

...and does it really matter?

And what about Twitter? You thought blogs were easy... I'm posting more but in 140 characters on Twitter, so I wonder the effects of that on blogging?

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest looks at the state of blogs as the half-finished novel in your closet or furniture in your garage that needs to be sanded and repainted. From the article:

"Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?"

If you look at blogs as an enterprise it looks horrible, but if you compare it to other creative outlets, not so bad. I mean not every person taking cooking classes wants to open a restaurant, so just want to entertain.

via Resource Shelf

A Creative Commons tale

2009-02-08T17:48:00.002-05:00

I use a lot of creative commons photos in my presentations for class. just from the creative commons search on the advanced search on Flickr I've been able to find professional photos to illustrate most of my topics. So I put most of my photos on Flickr under the same license. I follow the pay it forward with copyright credo. Well I just found out that schmap.com asked to use one of my photos for their Boston Harbor Cruises. Of course I said yes. At least it's being used. My creative commons photo is there under Boston Harbor Cruises. So there you go.

(And no, I'm not planning on changing Clare's pictures to creative commons. I thought about it, but until I can get Clare to sign a model's release, I don't think I'll be able to have her pictures out there for general use. For now you can just check out the FebruBEARy set.)

Brief discussion on Kindle at TWIM

2009-01-07T09:51:00.003-05:00

Finally catching up on the podcasts from December this week.

I caught episode 120 of This Week in Media to find that their first story was about a New York Times article on the Amazon Kindle from December 23rd by Brad Stone and Mitoko Rich. The most interesting part of the discussion is the personal opinions these early adopter/ media savvy people have about the device and how their comments are in line with a lot of what I hear from people who use the library's device. I'm beginning to think that Amazon really created a great reader to get my parents comfortable with digital books.

The discussion is only about 10 minutes long at the most. After that the show goes back to focusing on the media they usually talk about- TV, film, online video, etc.

Here's the direct link to the show- TWIM 120

Another update on Kindle

2008-11-17T20:30:00.004-05:00

This post will be mostly all about some discussions I had about starting to have people use the Kindle in the library. This may be interest for those librarians who love to create policy and want to see what others are doing with the Kindle.

So, a breakdown of the meeting.

Literature Guide- I'm at work on pulling together a guide to the literature on e-books and kindles that maybe helpful in developing a policy. My rough outline for the guide would look something like this:
- user's guides
- Blogs/sites/ forums
- sources of content
- Uses/ Issues of use in library
- Evaluation of services
- Library Policies

PDFs I've been using Stanza to convert some PDFs into ama-mobi format and they're horrible. What are our other options. I will try Amazon's service to see what it's like.

use of device within the library. Who will use it? what content will be on it? We need to investigate this further but we also want staff to start playing with the device. We have a tentative roll out of the device:
- Megan and John- original testers.
- Library staff- Thanksgiving to Jan 1 at the very least.
- Faculty and GSLIS next semester at the earliest. Arealistic push would be to have everything in place by March.
- Patron- the summer at the earliest, maybe the fall semester

Issues that still need to be discussed and researched. I will have a better understanding of some of these topics once I get deeper in to my literature review (I hope).
- Access services, including loan periods, storage/ charging, use (in library only?), fees for damage/ loss, accessibility
- Cataloging- the device and the content
- Copyright and use concerns
- Acquisition- who buys content? How do we provide content? How do we handle requests? What account should the device be attached to?
- Marketing of the device in the library- posters? announcements on the main page of the library? Mention of the availability by selectors at department meetings?
- surveys for use of the device

What happens when we de-select a device from an Amazon account? Does the content remain?

How is audio on the device? Need to add an audio book on the device.

What are other libraries doing?

Kindle- not today

2008-10-19T22:24:00.004-04:00

So no update in a while since the semester is in full swing.
I was able to finish The Story of Edgar Sawtelle on the Kindle. I found the experience about the same as reading a book. The awkwardness of holding a 1000 page tome was equal to holding a device that kept flipping forward a page based on the placement of the buttons. So it's a tie between the p-book and the e-book reader. The look on the screen was about the same as on a printed page. No feeling of fatigue like reading off a computer screen. It's pretty much the same experience between both types of books. I'll say this, the Kindle's dictionary was one of those extra bonuses I looked forward to, but I found it lacking. Edgar Sawtelle has several sections in the book that focus on etymology, and the built-in dictionary failed to define several of the words. Again I find the two types equal since the slim advantage of having a built-in dictionary is offset by the frustration of spending the time looking up words that aren't available and still having to go to another dictionary.

So my reading experience on the Kindle was pretty much the same as reading a printed book. That makes the Kindle=fail. For ~~$450~~ $359 (ed: see correction to price in comments below) plus the cost of books, the Kindle needs to offer more. Is the fact that you don't have to physically carry around books worth $450? Other than the benefit of not having to haul physical books, I don't see any compelling reason to use a Kindle.

Kindle shorthand notes

2008-10-02T19:40:00.004-04:00

I know I'll probably not get around to several full reports about the Kindle until well after I've grown bored with it. Here are some initial reactions and thoughts as I continue to use it.

-One week now and I have yet to recharge it. It could be that I don't use the whispernet.
-The experience of reading on the Kindle is like reading a printed page. Yes it's true, the e-ink page is a real improvement over previous readers. But that's not a ringing endorsement for the device. I mean it's basically saying, "Hey for $400 you can get a device that give you the same readability as a $20 book." The screen itself is not enough for me to say this is a real advance from the printed page
-The storage on the other hand is nice. I do like that I don't have to carry around an 800 page book. I like the idea that you can carry around several books on one device. That's a definite plus if you're someone who constantly carries around several books.
-I like the "buttons" that allow you to go forward a "page." When I first saw the device I thought the design was ugly (I still think it's ugly), and the buttons kinda silly. But being able to use the side of my hand to move forward is nice, especially on the T (no balancing acts while flipping a page).
-But at the same time I keep flipping pages since there's not a great way to hold the device without hitting a button.
-What happens when you deregister a device?
-Today while waiting on the T, I noticed that the text was a little pixel-y. I'm not sure if it was the battery power, the sun or the angle I was holding the device but it was strange. It wasn't that way during the commute, just those 5 minutes in that one spot.
- PDF problem. I'm going to see what Amazon's conversion does with the PDF, but so far the material I've read using Stanza.
-Questions for library policy:

Access

lending policy

loan period

billing for lost damaged items

bar code

storage

charging of device

loading content on device

Acquisitons

payment for content

accounting of payment

other financial issue

Cataloging

record for device

record for content

necessary fields for MARC records

OCLC records

same record as print?

display in OPAC

other access points

Okay, that's it for now...

Kindle- Day 1

2008-09-25T20:29:00.002-04:00

About two months ago I was asked to participate in the development of a professional staff grant for the college on getting Amazon Kindles. Earlier this month the grant committee approved our grant request for two Kindles.

The idea behind the grant was to start playing with Kindles to see what issues and problems they present to a library. We also hope to explore the opportunities electronic readers may present.

The Kindles arrived today! And we added 4 titles from Amazon as samples.

I took one of the Kindles home and used Stanza to upload some PDFs for reading on the Kindle.

I hope to start using this blog to record my experiences with the kindle.

Initial reactions:

The reading experience is really smooth. I started reading The Story of Edgar Sawtell on my ride home and quickly read through several pages. The reading experience is even better than I thought. I know e-ink provided an experience well beyond what the old e-readers did, but I'm still surprised at how nice it looks on the screen.
Converting PDF is going to be a big issue. Stanza does not do a great job and Amazon's conversion is "experimental." I'll have to try Amazon's conversion later. Stanza does provide a way to get the content on the screen but all the formatting is lost or altered. This is not a fault of Stanza as it is a beta program and I will continue to use it for the trial period, but it's still not ideal and not something I would feel comfortable using on a device I would lend out to patrons.
Staff seem interested in using the Kindle. I was surprised how many people just wanted to hold the device. There's still a strong sense of novelty about the device. I hope to quickly get beyond that response and see how the reader is as a work-horse.

I'm planning on bringing in the camera tomorrow and taking some pictures of the Kindle in it's holding area before we release it into the wild.

late news from yester year

2008-09-09T16:00:00.002-04:00

I meant to publish this last week, but never got around to it...
Anyway, some news from September 4, 1897 from the esteemed publication, Publisher's Weekly [no. 1336].

NOTES ON AUTHORS

VLADIMIR TCHERTKOFF, a disciple of Tolstoi, will soon have finished a work on "spirit Wrestlers of Russia."

MRS. CRAIGE has finished her novel, "The School of Saints," which will be published in the early autumn by T. Fisher Unwin. The story refers to political life in the middle of the century, and one of the characters is modeled, so it is said, on an eminent politician of the time.

JOURNALISTIC NOTES

BYRON'S sword, which he wore in the Greek revolution, was saved from the Chicago fire by Mrs. Keith, and now hangs in her library in Chicago. A picture of it appears in the September Scribner's, to accompany Mrs. Sanborn's article on "Lord Byron in the Greek Revolution."

ONE of the first newspapers to be started in the Klondike region will be owned and operated by a Chicago woman. Mrs. Caroline Westcott Romney, who will leave immediately for the Alaskan gold-fields, will take with her a small hand-press and an outfit comprising all the necessities of the newspaper business when conducted on a small scale.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

LAMSON, WOLFFE & CO. have just ready "Ballads of Lost Haven," a book of the sea, by Bliss Carman, whose "Low Tide on Grand Pre" proved that the waters speak to him of many things in the present and hereafter.

C. & E. LAYTON, London, announce "Fires and Public Entertainments," by Edwin O. Sachs, a study of some 1000 notable fires at theatres, music-halls, circus buildings, and temporary structures during the last 100 years.

THE AUTHORS' PUBLISHING CO., Chicago, will issue early in September "Zelma, the Mystic, or, white versus black magic," by Alwyn M. Thurber. The author offers solutions to many all-absorbing questions of the hour. The book will be illustrated.

THE J.B. LIPPINCOTT Co. call attention to two important books. "Getting Gold" by J.F.C. Johnson, is a compendium in specially concrete form of useful information respecting the processes of mining from the soil and after-treatment of gold and gold ores by a life-member of the Australasian Mine-Manager's Association; and "The Metallurgy of Gold," by T. Kirke Rose, Assistant Assayer of the Royal Mint, is ready in a second edition, revised and partly rewritten, with many additional illustrations.

FREDERICK WARNE & CO. have just ready "The Art of Conversing, or, dialogues of the day," by the author of "Manners and Rules of Good Society," in which sample conversations are given for many social occasions, such as chance meetings, dinner parties, ball-rooms, morning calls, etc. Great attention is given to charm of voice and manner, and the writer instructs carefully how it may be acquired with care and observation.

LAIRD & LEE have just ready "The Little Klondyke Nugget," a trustworthy vest-pocket companion for the gold-seeker. It contains the mining laws and regulations of Canada and the United States and a wealth of information on gold-mining in general- in California, at Cripple Creek, etc., as well as in the Klondyke region. The contents of the "Klondyke Nugget" are all well classified and every one starting for the new gold-fields will find this little book thoroughly up to date and a great help.

More diversion titles

2008-09-02T21:31:00.004-04:00

So, here are a second group of potential titles for the Simmons College Diversion Collection. This list is of more books that just came out that I think would be perfect additions to the collection:

Straight from the Source by Kim Osorio

Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston

When I Grow Up by Juliana Hatfield

Janes in Love by Cecil Castellucci

Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

Click by Bill Tancer

Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

The Necklace by Cheryl Jarvis

So many books. Feel free to add any additional titles to the comments.

I miss those "smokers"

2008-08-26T12:52:00.003-04:00

I'm back from vacation with a bunch of news from last century. This week's report will be from the August 27, 1898 issue of Publishers' Weekly, No. 1387.

NOTES IN SEASON

CHARLES SCRIBNER's Sons will pubish during September "The Goede Vrouw of Mana Hata," by Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, an exhaustive history of the manners and social life in New York City from the time it was founded until the death of the last of the Dutch matrons... Several new juveniles are also ready, including three new books by Henty, and a new edition of Amelia B. Beard's "Girl's Handy Book" and Mary White's "The Book of Games," the latter greatly enlarged.

PERSONAL NOTES

JAMES BOWDEN has just arrived in this country for a short visit by the steamer Teutonic. He comes upon his own account and also in the interest of George Routledge & Sons, and hopes the trade will take notice of his stay among them.

NOTES ON AUTHORS

THE late Gustave Freytag left valuable manuscripts, but unhappy litigation has sprung up between his widow and a son by a former wife as to their possession.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

P. BLAKISTON & SON, Philadelphia, publish a timely monograph by W.C. Hollopeter upon not only "Hay Fever," the growing plague, but upon "Its Successful Treatment," a claim which many would be happy to believe justified.

AT the next meeting of the Booksellers' League, in September, it is proposed to amend Article 4, Section 1, of the Constitution by increasing dues to such an amount as may be necessary to meet the additional cost in making the monthly meetings informal dinners instead of "smokers." Notice of the day and place of the meeting will be given later.

FIRE was discovered on the top floor of the five-story building at 25 Park Place a little before 5 o'clock, August 23. Two alarms were sounded, and the firemen had the flames under control within half an hour. The fire was confined to the fifth floor, which was burned out. The second, fourth and fifth floors are occupied by E. Steiger & Co. , publishers of kindergarten matter in German and other foreign languages. At the time of the fire half a dozen girls and about twenty men, employed as compositors and bookbinders, were on the top floor. They all escaped safely by the stairs.

"MORALS OF THE MIDLANDS" is the title of a new sporting novel which will be published next spring by Messrs. Hutchinson & Co. It is by Mrs. Kennard, whose busy pen has already produced five-and-twenty novels of sporting interest.

A LIFE of the late C.L. Dodgson, including specimens of some of his earlier compositions and drawings is being prepared by his nephew, S.D. Collingwood. The personality of the author of "Alice in Wonderland" was not well known in his lifetime beyond a narrow circle, but it was one of considerable interest.

When Publishing was a Dangerous Game...

2008-08-13T12:44:00.002-04:00

I'm away from the library for the next week so here's a double-sized portion of news from the wonderful world of Victorian publishing.

From Publishers Weekly, August 16, 1890 [No. 968].

NOT IMMORAL, ONLY TRASH

The Grand Jury, on Tuesday, we learn from the New York Times, refused to indict Manager Patrick Farrelly and two clerks of the American News Company, charged with selling obscene books. Acting District Attorney Bradford and Assistant District Attorney Lindsay sat down one day and read the books- "L'Affaire Clemenceau," "An Actor's Wife," "The Devil's Daughter," "Speaking of Ellen," and "Thou Shalt Not." They marked several passages for the instruction of the Grand Jury and said the books were nothing but trash. The Grand Jury could not find anything in them that would be considered obscene or lascivious.

NOTES ON AUTHORS

A MELANCHOLY AUTHOR went to Dumas and moaned that if he did not raise 300 francs he was afraid he would have to charcoal-smoke himself and his two children. Dumas rummaged his coffers at once, but could only find 200 francs. "But I must have three, or I and the little loves are lost," said the author. "Suppose you only suffocate yourself and one of them, then," said Dumas.

"THE little red house near Lenox, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne lived forty years ago, and wrote some of his best-known works, has been burned. Hawthorne," says Harper's Weekly, "was visited here by Longfellow, his classmate at Bowdoin College, Herman Melville, G. P. R. James, and Fannie Kemble, who lived in the vicinity. There are residents of Lenox who remember the novelist well, and are able to tell of the rambles which he and his literary friends used to take over the country. Hawthorne loved Lenox in the summer, but grew tired of the boisterous Berkshire winters, and soon after returned to the eastern part of the State."

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

WARD & DRUMMOND will publish, Sept. 1, a new book by Col. Thos. W. Knox, entitled, "Tetotlar Dick."

ISAAC PITMAN & SONS, 3 East 14th St., N.Y., will issue, September 1, the "Complete Bible in Phonography." It is now 20 years since the last edition was published.

THE Lew Vanderpoole Publishing Co. have just published what they rightly denominate "a literary wonder"- a story by a thirteen-year-old child, Jessie Agnes Andrews. Its name is "Eteocles, a Tale of Antioch," and it is said to be "a picture of the stirring times of persecution."

D. VAN NOSTRAND CO. have just published "Electrical Light Fitting," by John W. Urquhart, an excellent handbook for electrical engineers; "The Naval Annual for 1890," edited by Thomas A. Brassey; and in their Science Series, Frederick Waller's "Practical Dynamo Building for Amateurs."

WARD, LOCK & CO. have just issued "A Dead Man's Diary," by a writer who prefers to remain anonymous, but who is said already to have published essays and stories "that have been received with high appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic." This record of experience in which he was believed to be dead, is written with a serious moral purpose, and the author's teaching, if put into practice, would conduce greatly to the happiness of the world.

NOVELS dealing with the outdoor life are welcome at this season, and a special interest will be felt in the graphic sketches of yachting and of a Canadian athletic contest which appear in the new novel, "Geoffrey Hampstead," just published in the Town and Country Library by D. Appleton & Co. The Author, Thomas Stinson Jarvis, a barrister of Toronto, evidently knows from actual experience the excitement and the perils which he describes so vividly that he should have a sympathetic audience even among those whose interest in outdoor life in indirect.

C.S. PRATT, 155 Sixth Avenue, reports that his bookstore opened a short time ago is proving a successful enterprise. Mr. Pratt firmly believes that the book business can still be made to pay if a bookseller knows his business and is not afraid of hard work. He has little patience with those who sell everything else along with books, and is determined to make his bookstore pay without doing any catering except to the literary tastes of his patrons. We heartily wish him success, and hope his capital of hope and energy will not be too severely drawn upon.

Potential diversion titles

2008-08-10T18:20:00.000-04:00

The library at Simmons has a special borrowing collection called the Diversion Collection. The idea behind the collection is that the library should not only provide the necessary support for academic research but it can supply a few fun reads for students and staff. The Diversion Committee convenes every semester and chooses about 90 books per semester to add to the collection. Everyone on the council gets to suggest about 9 book to add to the collection. In preparation for the coming semester, I've listed the titles I am thinking about submitting to the collection:

The History of Anonymity by Jennifer Chang

Hiding in Hip Hop by Terrance Dean

Grace After Midnight by Felicia Pearson

Soldier's Heart by Elizabeth Samet

Wonder Woman: Love and Murder by Jodi Picoult

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin

One Perfect Day by Rebecca Mead

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Farewell, My Subaru by Doug Fine

Waiter Rant by Waiter

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

The Night of the Gun by David Carr

Lifehacker by Gina Trapani

Million Dollar Deception by RM Johnson

Free-Range Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

As you can see there are quite a few titles on this list, so I'll need to start narrowing it down to a select 9. Feel free to add any additional titles to the comments.

Free baby, but not open source

2008-08-08T20:18:00.001-04:00

So, someone shared a link with me for Richard Laermer's new book, 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade. It mentioned that McGraw-Hill was offering a free copy of the e-book. Intrigued, I went to freebabyfree and found this posted on the site:

Just fill in the form below and you'll get a link to the e-book. The whole book. Not excerpts. There are 77 chapters ~ bound to be something you love~!~

No tricks, no gimmicks, no spam. In 2008, this is the way to publish a groundbreaking book about the future.

Fill in below. We are being as open-source as possible here. Oh and to buy this book as a hardback then log on to Laermer.com.

In order to gain access to the book, you need to provide an e-mail address and they will send you the link to access the book (not necessarily a trick, but why aren't you just providing online access to the thing directly? Why do you need my e-mail address?), so I did so, I got the link e-mailed to me and. . . . the experience was horrible. Why?

Let me count the ways:

I have limited access to the book. Sure I can read the whole book- as long as I do it in a week in their format. (I would define this as a trick).
I need to read the book on the site so I'm stuck reading it on my computer screen thanks to the hosting by zmags.
The page layout make the book unreadable unless you zoom in.
The zoom is so sensitive as to make you feel sick.
The scroll wheel is used to zoom in and out and it's always active. In other words, you can't use a scroll wheel to scroll down a page.
I feel duped because some marketeer misused the term open source to describe the material (Open source means you're giving everyone access to the material in a format that is open for them to manipulate. You want to offer this material locked down in a specific format, fine, it's a valid method of providing access, but don't call it open source).

Did anyone do any usability on this e-book to see what the actual experience of reading it?

I would like to ask Cory Doctorow, Suze Orman, Charles Bock and the various groups working on the epub standard if this is indeed "the way to publish a groundbreaking book about the future" because I certainly thought the rest of the world was getting rid of DRM and freely sharing content with others.

If you want an example of a publishing company really publishing for today, check out Joe Wikert's entry on Thomas Nelson.

Soy Milk at Starbucks

2008-08-05T20:30:00.004-04:00

While Jim Cramer may only see Starbucks as a investment opportunity and the newspapers report on the 600 closings around the US, the local Starbucks near my college has made a slight change that I think is worth pointing out.

So, here's the deal- The Starbucks on Longwood Ave. in Boston has soy milk out in a little carafe along with the other milks. This makes me happy as I would prefer to use soy milk over real milk for almost everything. No other Starbucks that I know of in or around Boston has soy milk this readily available. Every other store has it behind the counter where it is generally used for decaf soy lattes. Yes, I have the distinct impression that the conventional wisdom in cafes is that soy milk falls in to the same category of decaf (something that gets enough use to be needed but not readily available, i.e. one pot of decaf to every 3-4 pots of regular).

Let me explain why this small change in one store has made me like it above all other Starbucks in the greater Boston region: most Starbucks shops generally equates soy milk with the higher-priced espresso drinks. In all cafes, ordering a regular black coffee at Starbucks is one of the most efficient transactions there is:

Me: "medium coffee" (notice "medium" this Starbucks has dropped the pretense of only serving "Grande")
Barista at register: "Room for milk?"
Me: "Yup."
Barista at register turns around, pours coffee, turns back.
I pay and walk away with coffee.

If I add one small change to that transaction by asking for soy milk, I'm spending twice as long in the cafe with two people waiting on me- one to take my order/ pour the coffee, another to get the soy milk and hand it and the coffee to me at the other end of the counter. This workflow makes sense for a drink that needs espresso, flavor shots, whipped cream, foam, etc., but not for a regular coffee.

By doing something as simple as putting the soy milk out on the self-service counter with the other add-ins to the coffee, the Longwood Ave. Starbucks has basically modified themselves to deal with people like me. I'm sure that the number of people who ask for soy milk for their coffee (not lattes) is minuscule, but at this location (perhaps due to the proximity of several hospitals) it appears as if someone noticed that enough people were ordering soy milk to identify it as a problem ("Gee, it looks like a lot more people are ordering soy milk and slowing down our rush hour lines") and found a very simple solution to the increased requests.

So what impresses me about this?

A simple and effective solution to the perceived problem.

They identified a potential customer base that might appreciate the change (I certainly never asked for soy milk and always used skim milk or half and half, but now...)

They kept the focus on a streamlined workflow.

Customers don't feel like soy milk is some special ingredient that they keep hidden behind the counter.

They did something different than other Starbucks. This makes this particular store stand out from the other Starbucks down the street.

The problem of some cafes not honoring the "free soy milk with your registered card" disappears.

I still get my coffee quickly.

What are potential benefits I see from this?

Dedicated customers (I now wait until I'm at work to get coffee instead of stopping at one along the way).

Costs- how much additional soy milk does this Starbucks go through and how does that compare to the reduction in drinks being added to the queue (this will differ at every cafe based on the customer profile).

Customer satisfaction: I get soy milk and I don't have to wait.

And why am I writing about this in such detail? Because I'm a library geek who work at a library where our circulation and reference desk have a lot in common with Starbucks: we have people who need different levels of help and there may be something as simple as putting out whatever our soy milk may be to help improve the experience in the library.

The Dangers of Drinking, Biking and Tramps...

2008-08-05T12:42:00.003-04:00

... hot topics for August, 1899.

Here are some of the top tidbits from the world of publishing as reported by Publishers Weekly, no. 1436, from August 5, 1899.

Literary and Trade notes

THOMAS WHITTAKER will publish immediately a volume on "The Temperance Problem and Social Reform," by Joseph Roundtree and Arthur Sherwell, of which three editions were quickly taken up in London.

DODD, MEAD & CO. have in press "Wine on the Lees," by J.A. Steuart, a story that turns upon certain phases of the drink question.

MISS MARGARET LEE of 344 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y., intends, with others, to petition Congress to remove all limitations of time as they exist in the copyright law of the United States, and to make the rights of the author and his heirs perpetual.

"AT last," says the New York Evening Post, "a publisher has been found to bless the bicycle. A couple of years ago bicycle riding was made responsible for the falling off of so many persons (no pun intended) in literary enthusiasm. The wheel took them away from books, and overcame the allurements of the library. Now, however, one publisher has discovered that the bicycle has at least been the means of awakening an interest in natural history, and reports as a direct result an increased demand for books on the subject."

THE CENTURY COMPANY has in preparation a volume entitled "Tramping with the Tramps," a collection of articles by Josiah Flynt, who has made a special study of the tramp question. The book will have an introductory note by Dr. Andrew D. White, Ambassador to Germany, who speaks of the work as one of great importance and fascinating interest. Mr. Flynt has lived for many months among the tramps at home and abroad, and knows them more intimately, perhaps, than any other living man. His work will be illustrated.

Jetstreams

2008-08-04T21:23:00.004-04:00

Hey, look over there--> Yeah there's some new stuff in the sidebar (if you somehow figured out how to add this as an RSS feed from the sidebar, you're missing out on some new ways to obsessively read about me).

I'm starting to really get into this whole Twitter thing so you can follow me there. I also have another account where I'm posting all the new titles that are processed through our Collection Services department. It's another experiment that let's me test how microblogging works as a delivery device for a lot of information. It's not ideal but neither is the RSS feeds that I see from the ILS vendors.

An experiment

2008-08-03T15:56:00.006-04:00

This blog for me is more of my personal sandbox to try different things out. I don't see this as my soapbox where I can flex some imagined journalistic skills. Nor do I see this as my private journal that's open to everyone. I think those are the two main reasons people blog and I'm not really here for either of those reasons. I'm hear to see what you can post on this platform and how difficult/ time-consuming it is to post different things in this format.

The purpose of this post is to see how well a post on new titles works on a blog. Listed below are the new titles that our School of Management ordered for the Fall semester. On Monday I'll be downloading the bibliographic records from OCLC, updating OCLC to say our library has these books (you know for ILL and general searches in Worldcat), and setting up orders for the book. Before I do that I also wanted to take the list and post it in a blog format to see:

how much work it would take to write this post
how useful it is to have the information gathered in one place
if this would work as some form of marketing that collection services could provide to the selectors
the benefits of having this list in electronic form with links for others to purchase
to see if I'm missing any other benefits of putting this kind of information online for anyone to find

If this isn't too much work and seems to have value I might start posting more lists of new titles that I am ordering for our library.

So here's the list of titles that you will be able to borrow from the Simmons School of Management Library at the beginning of the Fall 2008 semester.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

A Global Summary of Common Body of Knowledge 2006 from the IIA Research Foundation

Gender and Diversity in Management: A Concise Introduction by Caroline Gatrell and Elaine Swan

Women in Management and Life Cycle: Aspects that Limit or Promote Getting to the Top by Alicia Kaufmann

Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People into Extraordinary Performers by Erika Andersen

The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas by Robert Frank

Making Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development by Benjamin Powell

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker

Science Lessons: What the Business of Biotech Taught Me About Management by Gordon Binder and Philip Bashe

Culturally Sensitive Models of Family Businesses Worldwide by Vipin Gupta, Nancy Levenburg, Lynda Moore, Jaideep Motwani, and Thomas Schwartz

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

Brand Engagement by Ian Buckingham

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means by George Soros

Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information by Anna Rubino

Fundraising Analytics: Using Data to Guide Strategy by Joshua M. Birkholz

What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Your Attention Please : How to Appeal to Today's Distracted, Disinterested, Disengaged, Disenchanted, and Busy Consumer by Paul B. Brown and Alison Davis

Bet You Didn't Know by Cheryl Russell

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Keep Your Donors: The Guide to Better Communications & Stronger Relationships by Tom Ahern and Simone Joyaux

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price

Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our next Economic Revolution by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland

Megacommunities : How Leaders of Government, Business and Non-Profits Can Tackle Today's Global Challenges Together by Reginald Van Lee, Mark Gerencser, Fernando Napolitano, and Christopher Kelly

Billions of Entrepreneurs : How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures--and Yours byTarun Khanna

Small Loans, Big Dreams : How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance are Changing the World by Alex Counts

A Mother's Work : How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life by Neil Gilbert

Keys to Reading an Annual Report by Ralph E. Welton Ph. D., G. Thomas Friedlob, and George T. Friedlob Ph. D.

An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata by Christopher Baum

Data Analysis Using Stata by Ulrich Kohlerand Frauke Kreuter

The Coming China Wars : Where They Will Be Fought and how They Can Be Won by Peter Navarro

A Class with Drucker : The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher by William Cohen

Tupperware Unsealed by Bob Keeling

High Performance with High Integrity by Ben W. Heineman, Jr.

Good Guys and Bad Guys : Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business (and Everything in Between) by Joe Nocera

When Markets Collide : Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change by Mohamed El-Erian

Latino Talent: Effective Strategies to Recruit, Retain and Develop Hispanic Professionals by Robert Rodriguez

Reference Titles

American Attitudes : What Americans Think about the Issues That Shape Their Lives

Demographics of the United States by Cheryl Russell

Who's Buying Apparel

Who's Buying Alcoholic and Nonalcoholic Beverages

Who's Buying Household Furnishings, Services and Supplies

Who's Buying Information

American Incomes

Household Spending

Millennials: Americans Born 1977 to 1994

Generation X: Americans Born 1965 to 1976

Baby Boom: Americans Born 1946 to 1964

Older Americans:A Changing Market

Talking bout my g-g-generation? Wait which one?

2008-08-03T15:16:00.005-04:00

One of the hot trends in Library Science literature is to write about the needs of the various generations using the library. Some of them discuss the special needs of retirees (understandable), grade school students (of course) and high school students (again, a nature group to focus on), but more and more articles have moved away from the specific needs of these groups to frame the discussion in terms of generations. There are the Baby Boomers (my parents), Gen X (myself and my siblings, well, I thought my sisters were Gen X as we're 2 and 4 years apart in the mid 70s) and this new generations (Gen Y or the Millennials). This Friday the librarians for the School of Management ordered the American Generations series which included:

Older Americans:A Changing Market

Baby Boom: Americans Born 1946 to 1964

Generation X: Americans Born 1965 to 1976

Millennials: Americans Born 1977 to 1994

What I find interesting is that the New Strategist has put the demarcation of generations right on the birth year of my family's middle child. According to this series I am a different generation from my sisters and anyone else who started school after I was in third grade.

I understand that generations are for statistical and marketing purposes and really have no bearing on reality, but I think cutting the generation so fine really proves how outdated our thinking about age groups has become. In some ways I have a lot more in common with those born in the mid 80s than those in the mid 60s, but marketers see me as the same core audience as someone who may have been a baby or toddler at Woodstock.

The good news is that I can complain about these new Millennials with their computers and e-mail and ignorance of news from newspapers with my boss all the while texting with those same Millennials about the Baby Boomer manager who whines about how it's so hard to use a photocopier (because he's old and this is new-fangled technology, not because, you know, copiers tend to be confusing and counter-intuitive for everyone).

Publishers Weekly yesteryear

2008-07-17T13:32:00.003-04:00

Do you know what the second/third week of August tradition was for Publishers Weekly throughout the last few decades of the 19th Century? Why to publish long list of academic books for schools of course.

What does that mean?

No news from the 19th century this week since the magazines were just giant listings and ads.

Go read a book instead.

Death and Thievery in the 1890s

2008-07-10T12:31:00.002-04:00

Here are some of the top stories about the publishing world for June 7, 1888.

From Publishers Weekly, issue 858.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

THE announcement that the home of the late Louisa M. Alcott, of Concord, Mass., is to be sold, leads to the suggestion that it be bought by subscription and appropriately converted into a home for poor children as a memorial to the authoress so well beloved by young readers.

MONDAY, June 25, in the afternoon, while several customers were in the store of William Evarts Benjamin, 6 Astor Place, and the clerks at the rear, a respectably appearing person took from the shelf a copy of the large-paper edition in two volumes of the "Book of the Sonnet," by Leigh Hunt, finely bound in half brown crushed levant morocco, gilt tops, uncut. Price $12.50. The thief afterwards offered the books to J. Shea of 75 Nassau St. who refused to buy at the price asked, $5. The trade are requested to detain any person offering the books until an officer can be called. Mr. Benjamin expresses his intention of prosecuting if the thief is caught. It is a singular fact that, owing to mutual good feeling and a familiar knowledge of one another, the book-trade has of late years succeeded in apprehending and convicting all the thieves who have attempted to dispose of their booty.

The Orphans are going to take the Orphanage- copyright and orphan works

2008-07-09T13:08:00.006-04:00

Are you keeping up with the latest news on the Orphan Works Act of 2008?

I think we need a little respite from the craziness with this editorial note from Publishers Weekly, July 7, 1888 [No. 858]

One of the most amusing features of the present copyright movement- and there are not a few- is the agitation that has worked the "bone and sinew" of the British Isles into a fevered heat, which to the most cool-headed must cause positive alarm. The "British workman," that is the "printers, printers' engineers, engravers, book-sellers, compositors, pressmen, machinemen, machineboys, printers' devils, paper-makers, paper-makers' engineers, paper-stockmen, publishers, book binders, type founders, ink-makers, lithographers, etc.," - to quote a list displayed in large type down the columns of the British Printer- have combined to protest against the Chance Bill for no other reason than that they object to having the "headquarters of literature transferred, either gradually or suddenly, from England to America." Their great fear seems to be that "America is likely to become sole manufacturer of the best English books," and the London houses would become mere branches of the American ones." Among other alarmists, the Paper Trade Review seriously considers this "a question of extreme gravity concerning alike the vital necessities of the printing and auxiliary trades, and there is a danger of its being merged into a question of general commercial policy. That must not be! We feel that it is no fiscal question whatever. Free trade and protection have nothing to do with the matter." Truly, the "Dutch are going to take Holland." The interests of English authors, by the way, are quite overlooked by these gentlemen.

Too good to add to my weekly update of news.

What's hot in publishing, circa June 1902

2008-06-30T13:45:00.002-04:00

A short one for the short week.

From Publishers Weekly June 28, 1902, No. 1587.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

We regret to hear that W.B. Perkins, the well-known and popular bookman, is threatened with complete loss of sight.

LAIRD & LEE, Chicago, will publish next month a new story by Opie Read, entitled "The Starbucks," which is said to contain many unusually clever bits of philosophy.

THE so-called "book-fair" will be held in the Palmer House, Chicago, beginning with July 5. About fifty prominent publishing houses will be represented, and buyers are expected from leading points in the West.

THE POSTMASTER-GENERAL on the 19th inst. issued an order denying the use of the mails to the Empire Fountain Pen Company of Massena, New York. The concern was engaged in the operation of a chain-letter scheme.

HERBERT S. STONE & CO. hav published "The Book of a Hundred Houses." A score of writers contribute the text, treating of dwellings large and small, but mostly small, in existence here or abroad or proposed by a designer. The text is accompanied by a number of illustrations from photographs and drawings.

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. will follow up their work of "American College Sororities" by a volume on "American college Greek-Letter Societies," by Reuel Linus Jason. The volume will be fully illustrated with group pictures and portraits. While the text is written by Mr. Jason, who is a recognized authority on the subject, he will receive material assistance from a board of advisory editors, consisting of one representative officially appointed by the government of each National society. The book will have the endorsement of this official board of advisory editors, who are for the most part the heads of various societies.

OLD-BOOK NOTES

MR. VOYNICH is exhibiting at his rooms, 1 Soho Square, London, 150 unknown and lost books. Though the collection does not include many books that can be described as of general interest, or of a very high order of importance, nevertheless, as every edition of a book has its place in the science of bibliography, the exhibition may be regarded as unique in the annals of bibliography, as is an incontrovertible argument in proof of the theory that there is no finality in bibliography.

No. 1639 June 27, 1903

2008-06-23T13:17:00.002-04:00

While perusing the Publishers Weekly shelves for material, it struck me that almost every year I picked up published on June 27th. Coincidence?

Most of the news wasn't worth reporting (again), but I found some interesting tidbits from 1903.

So, here we go, some publishing news from Publishers Weekly, June 27th, 1903 [No. 1639]:

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

THE AINSLEE PUBLISHING COMPANY, New York, have just published a new novel by edgar Saltus, entitled "Purple and Fine Women."

It may be necessary or not to pass the word along to the careless author who left a mysterious manuscript of a historical novel of the seventeenth century period, packed in a red box, at John Lane's London office, omitting to leave his address, that if he will but communicate with the "anxious publisher" he will hear something to his advantage.

A.C. MCCLURG & Co. are making arrangements to bring out during the autumn, in portfolio form, reproductions of some of the delightful sketches of girls' heads, drawn in red chalk and charcoal, by Miss Hazel Martyn, a well-known Chicago society woman. these sketched when exhibited this spring won great praise from the professional critics for their clever and original treatment.

CLEOPAS KUNENE, of Natal, South Africa, has applied to Doubleday, Page & co. for permission to translate Booker T. Washington's autobiography, "Up from Slavery,' into the Zulu language for the benefit of those who read the language and are trying to better the condition of the masses of their countrymen, who, the author says, "are still lolling and weltering in darkness and ignorance and poverty."

ALBERT F. BROWN, a clerk in the employ of Charles Scribner's Sons, was arrested on June 23, charged with stealing books. According to the police, he confessed that he had been taking books for the last five weeks. He said that he got into fast company soon after his arrival in this city, about six weeks ago, and needed money to "keep his end up." he then began taking a few books at a time, which he easily disposed of.

H.M. CALDWELL COMPANY will publish shortly a little book with the catchy title, "Reflections of the Morning After," which will contain clever maxims, epigrams, and sayings appealing to the gentler sex as well as to club men. . .

Victorian Pub weekly is back!!

2008-06-17T12:52:00.003-04:00

It's been a few months, but there are still decades of Publishers Weekly waiting for me downstairs. Let's resume the review.

Again, all of this is real and from the pages of Publishers Weekly from the late 19th/ Early 20th Century.

This week- Publishers Weekly, June 16, 1900 [No. 1481]

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

"HILDA WADE," it appears is not the only unpublished novel left by Grant Allen. There is another, entitled "The Linnet," which is said to contain some graceful love making, with the Tyrol for a background.

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE, & CO. have in press a volume entitled "The Lawyer's Alcove," a collection of "poems by the lawyer, for the lawyer, about the lawyer," edited by Ina Russelle Warren, with an introduction by Chauncey M. Depew.

P. BLACKISTON'S SON & CO., of Philadelphia, have secured the balance of the edition of "American Spiders and Their Spinning Work," by Rev. Henry C. McCook, Vice President of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. This work contains a large number of colored illustrations and is a standard among entomologists.

R.H. RUSSELL announces a new book by L. Frank Baum, whose "Father Goose," of last year, had such an encouraging reception. The book will be entitled "A New Wonderland," in which the author will introduce his young readers to a new and charming country. Frank Ver Beck has made a number of colored pictures for the book, which will be gotten up in a very attractive style. Mr. Russell has decided to postpone until the fall the publication of Ver Beck's new book of burlesque drawings entitled, "A Handbook of Golf for Bears."

This is a description?!

2008-06-05T14:46:00.002-04:00

Subject matter aside, I just ordered a copy of Paul Ruditis's Rainbow Party for the library, and what struck me was the brief description in Worldcat:

Rainbow parties. Are they real? Who's going? Gin and Sandy-one's been with all the guys, one's terrified of them. It's Gin's party: she invited everyone. Alison-President of the celibacy club. What's she thinkin? Hunter and Perry-friends...with benefits. Jade-hanging on to it for the right guy. Skye and Rod-totally doing it, totally curious. Vi-Skye's best friend who has it for Rod. The party could change everything. Rusty and Brick-one thinks he's a playah. One's built like it. Neither's getting any. Ash and Rose-the class couple, not ready yet. So why are they going?

I want to believe the book is either a realistic look at teens exploring sexuality or an exploitative look at teens, but the description makes it sound like a naughty Sweet Valley High with bad grammar.

I'm sure I'm late to the party on this one (bad cliché intended) since Oprah had a special on this and the myth has been discredited, but this description is so bad it needed a comment.

look what goodreads now offers

2008-06-04T20:53:00.000-04:00

The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Franz Kafka

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

View all my reviews.

Follow-up to MARC, OPACs, and Podcasts

2008-04-30T12:15:00.002-04:00

It's going to be a topic of discussion on Uncontrolled Vocabulary tonight! I'm teaching my last e-Pub class at Emerson tonight so I'm going to be in class or on the T for most of the broadcast. I'll have to download it and listen tomorrow to hear the group's sage advice.

Laurie Sabol at the Tisch Library at Tuft University sent out a post to several listsevs today asking for others who have had discussions about the pros and cons of cataloging podcasts to share their decisions and discussions. I received the post from fellow librarians who saw it through the ACRL-NEC News mailing list.

And I've started original cataloging on the first podcast in the GSLIS series. Not only is a podcast, but it has a PDF of a Powerpoint as well (can you say subfield e in a MARC 300 field with a bunch of notes?)

MARC, OPACs, and Podcasts

2008-04-27T22:24:00.003-04:00

I've been reading up on the history of descriptive cataloging of electronic resources for a presentation I need to do and I thought it would be fun to look at how catalogers are dealing with podcasts in their OPACs. Our tech lab has been asking us to catalog some of the podcasts they've created. My plan was to catalog one of the podcasts and use it as a sample in the presentation. Here's how that idea rapidly unfurled today:

Read through the OLAC Cataloging Policy Committee's Streaming Media Best Practices Task Force at about noon, thinking this would be a great resource. And I didn't stop to think that podcasts aren't streaming media. D'oh.
This paper is specifically for all the streaming media that we should probably catalog from the Library of Congress (RealPlayer?! really?). Okay, okay, okay, Jay Weitz must have something on podcasts somewhere else.

Did a search through OLAC's website and checked out their Useful website page but didn't find much of anything on podcasts.

I then did a few simple literature searches on Proquest, Haworth and LISTA. Plenty of articles on making podcasts, none on cataloging them.

Maybe I'm over-thinking it and I should just see what other people have done in their OPACS. Learn through example if I can't locate a best practices.

Got to Worldcat. STOP. How do you search for podcasts in OPACS? I wouldn't type in "book" or "magazine" or even "electronic resource." Have other catalogers used podcast in their 245s? I wouldn't since it's redundant. Ah what the heck- Worldcat, show me electronic resources that have a keyword of podcast! Hurrah. 80 podcasts, most of them from the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction. It's a start.

Okay, on to Google. Deep breath- I don't want to spend all day fiddling with delimiters so let's hope I have the right combination...

Success! A library in Orange County, Florida is cataloging their podcasts, but they don't seem to appear in Worldcat, let's put this as a bookmark in del.icio.us.

Now that I have some hope, let's try to find more. Library of Congress. Nope. Doesn't even look like they've cataloged their webcasts.

MIT? Main page has a link to libraries under "research" and a special section for videos, but videos are not in the catalog as far as I could tell. (This was the ace up my sleeve since I was sure MIT would have cataloged their videos).

My next attempt- Yale. The other university that I know has quite a few podcasts in ITunesU. Nope. Well, maybe somewhere buried but I couldn't find podcasts from August 2007 in either Orbis or the LibraryWeb.

U of Michigan, I'm looking at you. Let's see what Mirlyn has for me. I chose "Trail of Snails" from the list at ITunesU. Nothing.

Okay now I'm getting paranoid. Have I completely lost my ability to search an OPAC to find these items? Or are they really not there?

I could go through the rest of ITunesU but how much more time am I going to spend searching dead ends in different OPACs.

10:30 at night, I've found about 10 other things I should look at but I still have very little idea on special considerations for cataloging a podcast.

One last search through Autocat's archives. About 30 matches, most of them from 2006 and 2007 asking if anyone has added podcasts to their OPAC. Glad I didn't ask that question again. I think I found three catalogers who provide links to catalogs with podcasts, one of which is the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia. This is one of the few libraries I was able to read about in my literature search but the article did not have a link to the library's catalog. I also found a link to sunlibrary from Sun Microsystems, but that link is dead.

The best post I found on AUTOCAT was from Patricia Sayre McCoy who provided an OCLC number to one of her cataloged podcasts. I feel like I have a key to the locked door and I'll try it tomorrow.

So what have I learned from my initial search?

Everyone's talking about 'em but I don't see a whole lot of cataloging going on.

I'm going to really go out on a limb this week and attempt a catalog record using the different sources and samples I was able to find.

I'm really scared to do a search to see if any weblogs are being cataloged out there. (They must right? They're older that podcasts.)

Most of the podcasts I used as search samples are found on library websites, just not as part of their OPAC. How can we convince users that the OPAC can be so much more than an electronic card catalog if we're not adding the material to it? I thought the addition of creative commons PDFs to the Nebraska Library Commision's catalog are a brilliant example of how we can add accessible content to the OPAC.

This whole trek brings up the specter of a digital repository and that's like handing a loaded gun to a small technical services.

At this point I'm back to thinking that the easiest way to catalog podcasts would be to treat them as digital audio files and sound recording.
BUT there is a continuing resource angle to their production.
BUT podcasts also fit the definition of an electronic resource.
BUT podcasts aren't direct electronic resources (unless you copy them to CDs which seems to be a cataloging nightmare).
So maybe they're remotely accessed electronic resources.
Yes, I'm now thinking that podcasts are remotely-accessed electronic resources and can be cataloged using good old chapter 9 from AACR2.

....
Next morning I have a few more things to check out and I was able to look at Patricia Sayre McCoy's record to see how she catalogs podcasts. I think I'm ready to get my hands dirty in some MARC.

Jelly Beans

2008-04-16T12:46:00.003-04:00

If only these were real flavors.

*sigh*

From steviegirl who found it on Candy Addict.

Sure he snubbed Boston, but he's the Pontiff

2008-04-15T09:07:00.003-04:00

so I wanted to post this on our library's internal blog, but then I thought better of it because of the sheer religiousity of the subject matter. And I wasn't sure what category this would go under. Our blog has defined categories and it didn't fit anything about reorgs or eresources or patron requests. It was basically between two topic choices and it's definitely not "for fun," so "cool site/source" it is, but only in the sense that it's a source. Slate published a short article on the Pope's visit with some sources that might come in handy for all those Pope trivia contests around town. (Wait, there really are Pope trivia tournaments happening).

On not keeping our opinions to ourself

2008-04-14T13:11:00.004-04:00

From the April 16, 1989 edition of Publishers' Weekly [No. 1368]

NOTES ON AUTHORS

ROBERT BARR, the novelist, on the 12th inst. recovered a verdict of $1000 damages in a libel suit against the New York Sun in the United States Circuit Court. The suit has been pending for some time. On May 17, 1896, the Sun published a paragraph in its London cable news saying that "Robert Barr, the novelist" had been sent to an asylum for inebriates. It turned out that the Robert Barr who was sent to the institution mentioned was a former Canadian politician, and not the novelist. A retraction was demanded, but it was not forthcoming until the following November, when the Sun in the course of a review of on of Mr. Barr's books, alluded jokingly to its mistake and explained how it occurred. In the meantime many papers throughout the country had published the Sun's story as fact and commented on it editorially.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

RAND, MCNALLY & Co. have just issued "a Valuable Life," by Adeline Sergeant, who is possessed of the almost lost art- good storytelling. The love histories embodied in the romance runs through three generations. The scene is rural England and the interest centers in the transmitting of a great inheritance.

MRS. WRIGGINS vivacious story, "Penelope's Progress," will be published shortly, and as it relates wholly to Scotland, it is to be bound in Scotch plaid. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., in order to procure precisely the plaid which seemed most fitting, have had it made specially for the book at the famous Anderson factory in Glasglow. The result promises to be eminently satisfactory; a volume somewhat rare in American bookmaking.

Follow-up to last week

2008-04-08T12:41:00.003-04:00

You didn't think I could just leave you with a dead Mr. Donoghue lying at his wife's feet, did you? Well, Publishers Weekly made sure to follow-up and so will I.

Some choice cuts from Publishers Weekly, April 8, 1893 (No.1106):

Business Notes

CHICAGO, ILL.- It is feared that the death of Horace P. Donoghue, noted in the last issue of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, will seriously affect the financial standing of several publishing houses. He had been floating accommodation paper of half a dozen publishing concerns in Chicago, four of which may collapse- indeed that of H.J. Smith & Co. is already reported. Two of the concerns in questions will very likely pay their creditors in full and resume business as soon as arrangements can be made with the banks holding their paper.

Literary and Trade Notes

JOHN KNOX MCAFREE, representing A.L. Burt, will leave for the far West on April 17.

EUGENE FIELD is said to be preparing a book about books, one intended for the lover of books.

E.B. GAY, of the Warren School, Charlestown, Mass., was arrested on the 4th inst., charged with stealing valuable books from Brentano's. He is also suspected of of having stolen $95 worth of books from Charles Scribner's Sons. He was held on $1,000 bail for trial.

J.H. MASON, senior member of the J.H. Mason Publishing Co., of St. Louis, met with a horrible death in the Commerce Building in Louisville, Ky., on the 1st inst. Attempting to get out of the elevator on the ninth floor, the car started upward and caught Mr. Mason, catching his head between the rim of the floor of the car and the top of the gate. Before the elevator could be stopped Mr. Mason's body, horribly mutilated, was dashed to the pavement in the basement ten stories below.

LAST week Mark Lewin and Max Windlin, of 345 W. 43rd Street, New York, who keep a newsstand at the corner of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue, were arrested by Anthony Comstock on the charge of having sold books of an improper character to boys. On March 29 Comstock went to the stand and asked for a certain book. He was taken into a basement near by, where the book was sold to him for $1. Comstock obtained a warrant for the men's arrest, and in the Yorkville Police Court the prisoners were held in $500 each for trial.

And one last trade note-

W.H. LOWDERMILK & CO., Washington D.C., have just ready the third volume of the "Digest of Decisions of the Second Comptroller of the Treasury," Compiled by J.Q. Kern. These are the decisions which control all the payments made by the Treasury in the matters which pass the second, third, and fourth auditors, brought down to date in continuation of vol. 2 and covering ten years, 1884-1893,

Foreign Notes

WITH a view to enjoying a holiday at the Chicago Fair, Octave Uzanne, editor of the monthly magazine L'Art et L'Idee, announces that he will suspend its publication for one year. Happy M. Uzanne!

THE proprietor of the famous London bookshop, "Hatchard's," notes a marked advance in bookishness among English women. Asked to what he attributes this, he answered that he thought it to some extent a result of the American woman in English society- the fair American leading her English sister. 'I take it as generally accepted,' he added, "that the average American woman of education is the more bookish- cares more for books as books- than the average educated English woman, although she does not, it may be, read more."

PICK-UPS

THE CLIMAX AHEAD.- "I've written a novel for school-girls, and they'll never know the climax until they've read it through." "How have you arranged it?" "I've printed the conclusion in the first chapter."- Harper's Bazar.

NOT IN THE SAME SET.- The Parvenu: "Are you fond of belle-lettres?" The Chump: "Belle Letters? Don't know. Never met her." - Chicago News Record.

humourless news from1893

2008-03-31T13:08:00.002-04:00

Once again we're back with news from Publishers Weekly of long ago.

This time we're "reporting" the news from April 1, 1893 (PW no. 1105)

NOTES ON AUTHORS

MISS HELEN AINSLEE SMITH, of Newark N.J., a well-known writer of children's books, has been married for three years, and is the wife of James Elliott, a New York lawyer.

FOREIGN NOTES

THE Russian publishers do not intend to allow author to interfere with their business. They have petitioned the Minister of the Interior to impose a special tax on the works of all authors who acts as their own publishers.

IN Japan it has just been decided by a committee of the peers that the discharge of the work of editors or publishers is neither becoming nor desirable for women and that these offices shall be reserved to men of, or over, twenty-one years of age.

A "LOVER OF BOOKS," writing to an English journal makes a vigorous and much-needed protest against what he calls the ridiculous practice of allowing some modern litterateur to advertise his name as "editor" upon every reprint of a standard work offered to the public. He asks why these modern editors should be allowed to annoy in this impertinent fashion a classic read and beloved before they were born, and he scorns the "ridiculous, fussy and artificial ceremony of editing things which only require to be left alone to the care of any sensible publisher." Here is a slap for Andrew Lang: "Of Mr. Lang- Editor-in-Chief to the British Nation- it is too late to speak. The 'admirable and exhaustive index' now to be appended to Sir Walter's novels give one only more stimulus to the prevalent vices of the age- aimless quotation and a pretence of familiarity with our great classics."
LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

HORACE C. DONOGHUE, a well-known Chicago publisher, committed suicide on the 27th of March. While he was standing before his dressing-case his wife took up a newspaper and began reading about Elliott F. Shepard's death in New York. Suddenly she heard her husband fall with a peculiar gurgling sound, and rushing to his side she found that he had cut his throat from ear to ear with a razor. The cause for the suicide is a mystery. Mr. Donoghue leaves a large estate.

*sigh* I wonder how many sites will be rick-rolled tomorrow.

Housekeeping, March 24th, 1900

2008-03-24T12:47:00.003-04:00

Yes sir, it's Monday, time to see what Publishers Weekly was reporting on 108 years ago today.

For those playing along at home, the articles below are from issue no. 1469.

NOTES ON AUTHORS

R.D. BLACKMORE left instructions in his will that no biography or memoir of him was to be published.

MRS. FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT was married to Stephen Townsend, in London, on the 14th inst. The bridegroom is a son of the late Rev. George Tyler Townsend, once chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland, and also to the Bishop of Tasmania. He is a physician, and has won the degree of Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, but never cared for this profession, and several years ago abandoned it for the stage.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

HORACE S. RIDINGS, of J.B. Lippincott Co., will sail for England on the 28th inst. by the Teutonic.

EX-QUEEN LILIUOKALANI, the former ruler of the Hawaiian Islands, has published for private circulation a book entitled "The Hawaiian Traditions of the Creation."

HARPER & BROTHERS will publish on the 28th inst. under the title of "Woman and Artist," an amusing tale , by Max O'Rell, (Paul Blouet,) of a London artist who invents a rifle which he attempts to sell to both the French and Russian governments. Some amusing complications ensue.

COLONEL G.B.M. HARVEY, the director of the affairs of Harper & Brothers, sailed for Europe on the 21st inst. He will be gone five weeks, and all the time of his stay in Europe will be spent in London and Paris. In these cities Harper & Brothers have branch houses-- that is Paris have recently opened, the London branch of long standing and large business. Te publishing company maintains a complete organization in both these cities, and it is to get a thorough knowledge, both of the business and the organization, that Col. Harvey will make this visit. While abroad Col. Harvey will cast out lines for writers for the several Harpers publications.

Day late, dollar short

2008-03-18T12:59:00.002-04:00

Let's travel back in time once again. The date- March 19,1898.

Selected articles from Publishers Weekly, no. 1360:

NOTES IN SEASON

CLIFFORD HOWARD, P.O. Box 633, Washington DC., has published a new and considerably enlarged edition of his work on "Sex Worship: an exposition of the Phallic origin of religion." This edition is virtually a new publication, and the increased size has necessitated an increase of price to $1.50.

BRETANO'S announce as nearly ready "The Handbook of Solo Whist" by A.S. Wilkes, a recognized authority on card games. The book contains the rules for a new variety of "dummy solo," the advantage of which is that it is the only variety of solo whist for three players that embodies the proposal and acceptance call.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN & CO. publish to-day "Cheerful Yesterdays," in which the author, Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginston, gives an account of interesting experiences in the most attractive manner; "Satchel Guide" for 1898 ...

NEWS HEADLINE

for full article hunt down your own copy!

[R]EVOLUTIONARY BOOKSELLING

LETTERING ALONG THE BACKS

RULES FOR TITLE-PAGES

BOOKS IN THE POSTAL UNION

NOTES ON AUTHORS

RUDYARD KIPLING and his family, last month reached Capetown, Africa. They were very warmly received, and the author was presented with a set of verses addressed to himself by a private in the ranks called "An Experiment in Imitation." these appeared in Commercial Advertiser for February 28.

KARL HUYSMANS, the hysterial, pessimistic writers of "La-Bas," "En Route," and 'La Cathedrale," has abandoned his faith in his message of despair to a world out of joint, and has gone into a monastery.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

BENZINGER BROTHERS announce a new story by Ella Loraine Dorsey, entitled "Pickle and Pepper." The scene of the story is laid at the national capital.

MISS BELLE BERRY, known as the "Belle of Claysburg," book agent, will oppose Mayonr Isaac F. Whitesides for the nomination for the office now held by him.

THE FOWLER & WELLS Co. will publish next month "L.N. & J. Fowler's Chart," with original tables, specially designed for this work for marking. The scope of the chart will entitle it to the consideration of teachers and the general reader, whether already interested in phrenology or not.

FRANK L. ARMSTRONG, of Tarrytown, N.Y., was held for trial in a New York police court on the charge of swindling publishers and booksellers by means of worthless checks. He was held on complaint made by Peter Eckler and Bowers & Loy, but it is likely that when his case comes to trial he will be confronted by other members of the trade.

Dear used booksellers of America,

2008-03-11T13:33:00.002-04:00

Saran Wrap is not an effective method of packing your books. Saran Wrap does not magically protect the book the same way that bubble-wrap protects books. It does not count as anything other than annoying and wasteful when I receive a book that has 5 layers of the stuff wrapped around a book. I don't understand why you continue to be such cheap bastards who refuse to purchase some more effective protection when mailing books to people. Please stop.

Really just stop.

I mean how much time does it take to wrap that book that way? And I can only imagine Saran Wrap in the kitchen. Is that where you wrap your books? A Pall Mall dangling from your lips (I can smell the tobacco on the book) and a roll of Saran Wrap in your hand staring down at the next book to be shipped out? Please I don't want to think about the books I have to process as being in any way related to the leftover casserole in your fridge. but both are wrapped in the same stuff on the same counter.

You need to go to the UPS store or Staples and buy some bubble-wrap. At least for those packages you send to the library.

Extra Extra

2008-03-10T12:34:00.002-04:00

As to not interfere with news of amputation, I'm adding this personal note from the March 9, 1889 issue of Publishers Weekly as it's own post:

PERSONAL NOTES

CHARLES W. BURROWS, President and Harris B. Burrows, General Manager of the Burrows Brothers Co., Cleveland, are in the city for a few days, making the Murray Hill Hotel their headquarters.

All Amputation Post

2008-03-10T12:21:00.002-04:00

From Publishers Weekly, March 9, 1889:

GEORGE S. BLANCHARD, a well-known book dealer in Cincinnati, died at that city February 21 from the effect of amputation of one of his arms.

We regret to learn that "Bob" Wright, a well-known clerk at Robert Clarke's book-store, met with a frightful accident while stepping from a train at his home, in Maplewood, a week ago. In some manner Wright slipped, and his left foot got under the wheels. The member was fearfully mangled, and it was found necessary to amputate the limb at the knee in order to save his life. The accident will incapacitate him for duty for several months.

Lost skills

2008-03-02T15:58:00.002-05:00

I should be doing something else, but I want to master all the obsolete skills listed here.

Some skills I already possess*:

Adjusting rabbit ears on top of a TV

Adjusting tracking on a VCR

Balance tonearm on a turntable

Changing the ball or ribbon on your Selectric Typewriter

Darning a sock

Formatting a floppy

Rewinding a cassette tape using a Bic pen

*Instructions for all tasks listed on site. Go look now.

found on Boing Boing

Monday, Monday

2008-02-25T12:37:00.002-05:00

That means time for news reports from long ago . . .

This time we'll be quoting from the Feb 29, 1896

HENRY HOLT & Co. announce "Emma Lou, Her book," edited by Mis Mary M Mears. It is the diary, during her sixteenth year, of an ingenious Western girl, who by her highly serious and lofty views of life supplies an unconscious element of humor.

MR. AUSTIN, assistant librarian, in cataloguing the fine Dante collection presented to Cornell University b Prof. Willard Fiske, found some live bookworms in an edition of the "Divine Comedy" bearing the date MDXXXVI. "This is the third time only," according to the New York Evening Post, "that these rare insects have been found in an American library. Carefully removing the worms, which were eating from front to back, and had only reached the front pages of the 'Inferno,' Mr. Austin took them to Prof. Comstock of the entomological department. There, after making sure that they were genuine bookworms, they were developed, and, having secured the beetles, they were bred from until there were sufficient eggs, bookworms and beetles for the university museum, and enough more to make Mr. Austin a present of a good-sized vial of each."

And on the news that Reed Elsevier is looking to sell Reed Information and that our beloved Publishers Weekly may go completely online. . . we will accept it as rumor until we hear otherwise.

Until next week. . .

How to do the how to do things that you do

2008-02-25T09:05:00.002-05:00

Via Shelf Awareness, which you should be reading every day-

The Bookseller magazine has announced the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year:

I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen

How to Write a How to Write Book

Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues

Cheese Problems Solved

If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs

People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

want more? Including short descriptions of the book mentioned above, and a chance to vote? Go here.

Pure print

2008-02-20T09:11:00.002-05:00

From the current issue of Shelf Awareness:

"Ah, the smell of pure print."--Spoken after a deep breath by a 10-year-old boy as he came into the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop in Mequon, Wis., on Monday. The moment "made me smile along with the customers and booksellers who saw and heard him," Pattie Cox of Schwartz wrote, adding that Monday was the boy's birthday, and his parents had brought him to the store for a treat.

It has that "hang in there" feeling to it. And sometimes we need to see that kitten urging us to stay the course.

Feel like a librarian

2008-02-14T09:06:00.004-05:00

Even though I've been here close to a year(!), this announcement is the first time I feel like an honest-to-goodness librarian.

Marketing.

For me.

The questionable characters news from long ago

2008-02-11T12:59:00.000-05:00

it's Monday and that means time for some news from long ago.

Today's entry was part of Publishers Weekly #1620, the Valentine's Day edition from 1903.

PUBLISHING DIFFICULTIES IN TURKEY

ALL printing establishments in Turkey according to a new law just passed, may have only one door, and that opening on to the street. Windows must be covered with close-meshed wire netting, so that no papers can be handed through. A statement must be made a year in advance of the amount of ink required, which will be supplied by the state. A specimen of everything printed is to be kept, and must be shown at any time to a police inspector on pain of a fine.

NOTES ON AUTHORS

"ANGUS McNEILL," whose nationality and identity have been questioned, is said to come of a hunting family and lives near Evesham, in Worcestershire. He is said to be a sportsman himself, and to have been for a number of years a resident of England.

LITERARY AND TRADE NOTES

THE order of arrest obtained by David Belasco for Mrs. Bertram Babcock ("Onoto Watanna") was vacated on the 6th inst. by Justice Leventritt, in the Supreme Court, because of proof of affidavit that a sufficient cause of action existed was defective.

E.P. DUTTON & Co. have just published "The Truth and Error of Christian Science," by M. Carta Sturge, a Cambridge graduate, with a preface by Canon Scott Holland. Some of the conclusions are not altogether flattering to the cause of Christian Science, but they are of undoubted significance as they author has given the matter very serious study.

PICK-UPS

THE impression is certainly bound to grow that there exists some wag in the remote regions of the undefined West who amuses himself by sending in unconscionable orders to staid publishers in the East. The latest instance is the receipt by Harper & Bros. of an order for "Napoleon, the Last Faze of Rosenberg," and :Heroine of Affection," by Howls.

Thought organization

2008-02-10T19:49:00.000-05:00

Taking a break from creating ISBDs for my Descriptive Cataloging class.
Switch windows from Cataloger's Desktop to Google reader.
Cleaned out most of the reference posts.
"Unread" some of the articles I wanted to look at later on FRBR, copyright (have first copyright class for WP690a on Thursday), and e-books.
Then I read an article on Publishing 2.0 that I looked at earlier and decided I didn't have the headspace to sit and read the whole article. Decided the looks of 1,000 word entry was just too much earlier in the day.

But then I stopped, focused on the article and read the whole thing through.

The article was on a change from linear thought to networked thoughts. The article is a really short essay by Scott Karp on how he no longer reads linear literature and relates it to Evan Schnittman's article from earlier this week about using an e-reader on a plane and how convenient it is, but still gave Evan something to think about in terms of the publishing biz and e-readers. he also goes in to the recent NEA study that people aren't reading (books) anymore.

At least with the NEA article he points out that the NEA is only considering printed. complete books.

I was passive in my reading of the article, since I read 1-3 articles from publishing/ content bloggers (sorry, I can't think of a better descriptor right now, but it is only there to define the point of publication, in comparison to a reprint of an article from paper media), until I came upon this:

We still retain an 18th Century bias towards linear thought. Non-linear thought — like online media consumption — is still typically characterized in the pejorative: scattered, unfocused, undisciplined.

And that's when I had to respond here as things began clicking for me.

This is something that's I've been thinking about, especially when talking to my students in my e-publishing class. In the surveys they fill out at the beginning of the semester they admitted they don't read online. This is the second semester I've used the survey and the students have responded that they don't read online. I always read the results as the students saying they don't read complete books online. But after going over the basic expectations for class, it turns out most of the students weren't using any kind of RSS reader or bookmarking sites.

Jump:

So here are my students- graduate students for an esteemed publishing program who were eager to learn about e-publishing and I was feeling a giant disconnect with them. It wasn't until reading Scott's article that I realized I've been working on "networked" thought for the past 5 years and I have this preconceived notion that most digital natives have had the same kind of training, but it's become apparent to me that linear reading/ linear thought is more than the predominant method of "learning." Even for students who have always know e-mail, online library catalogs, online articles, blogs, they still generally view this material in a linear fashion.

And there's the rub. How many people have left behind linear thought? It's a hard jump to make as we spend most of our schooling training to be linear. I don't think it's something natural, but necessary as all our information was constructed in a line for the past few hundred years. Now that we no longer rely on linear construction, we need to start thinking about learning in a non-linear fashion and I don't think it's as easy as the internet would have us believe.

Back to simpler times . . .

2008-02-04T12:46:00.000-05:00

It's Monday and that means time to look at some breaking stories from the 19th Century, courtesy of Publishers Weekly.

This week's news comes from issue 1358, February 5, 1898.

LAIRD & LEE, Chicago, have issued a useful "Combination Memorandum Book" for the vest-pocket. It contains a calendar for 1898 and 1899, identification card, reminders for daily use, help in accidents, weather signals, poison antidotes, postal rates, interest laws and tables, population of States and cities, value of foreign coins, electoral votes, presidents, States and territories, wars of the United States, weights and measures, cash book, etc.

A MAN who gives himself all sorts of famous names and represents himself as the son of any number of distinguished men, but who has lately appeared as Edward Epps, and has described himself as the brother-in-law of Alma Tadema, has been swindling New Yorkers prominent in literature or art out of all sorts of commodities, ranging from a good square meal to considerable sums of money. Mr. Epps is a young man, slight in build, with a pale complexion and blond hair and moustache. Sometimes a consumptive cough forms part of his stock in trade.

FRANCIS P. HARPER, New York, has in press an illustrated work of considerable interest to book-lovers, librarians, and naturalists, entitled "Facts about Bookworms, their history in literature and work in libraries," by rev. J.F. O'Conor, S.J., former librarian of Georgetown College. The author has gathered a vast amount of curious information about these destructive little creatures and skillfully interwoven them with anecdotes and quotations from ancient and modern writers. No less that 72 specimens of various kinds of bookworms have been discovered and studied under the microscope. The appendix consists of entomological notes. The entire edition is limited to 750 numbered copies.

SCRANTON, PA.- W.H. Anderson, bookseller, is selling out.

What's in a name?

2008-02-04T11:54:00.000-05:00

Lolita Midsleeper Combi

It's not everyday that furniture manufacturers use literature to name their product lines, and that seems to upset some parents. Silly parents, the furniture won't act like some kind of osmotic Cliff Notes, your child will still need to read Nabokov to know how to act like Loli.

I think I'm more upset about this quote than I am about the unfortunate decision to name some furniture after a fictional character- "Am I being particularly sensitive, or does anyone else out there think it’s bad taste for Woolies to have a kiddy bed range named ‘Lolita’?"

Woolies? Maybe if you stopped abbreviating everything to make it sound cute. . .

If only Ikea started a line based on famous literary characters. Sign me up for the Raskolnikov night stand and the Anna Karenina wardrobe.

They could always rename the furniture as the Naomi midsleeper combi, at least that way most parents wouldn't even have a clue. . .

And now I'm sure I've doomed myself to countless hits from less-than-reputible Humbert Humberts.

Quick someone call Chris Hansen.

Publishing notes from the Turn of the Century

2008-01-28T12:54:00.000-05:00

This week's PW news comes from issue 1460, Jan 20, 1900:

NEW YORK CITY- the sheriff last week received an execution against the Club Woman's magazine Publishing Co., of 384 Fifth Avenue, for $824, in favor of William T. Payton, and he levied upon the office furniture. Mr. Payton applied for an injunction to restrain the sheriff.

TRUSLOVE, HANSON, and COMBA, New York, have published a neat edition of "Saunterings in Bookland with Gleanings by the Way," selected and edited by Joseph Shaylor, cmpiler of 'The Pleasures of Literature," and "The Solace of Books."

So much has been said about Tolstoi's "Resurrection," the novel on which he is now at work, that we are glad to learn from the publishers, Dodd, Mead, & co., that it will probably see light before next autumn. Tolstoi (although he has not fully regained his health) is at work completing the story. Much criticism will doubtless be heard concerning the morals of the characters in the story, but those who have read it as far as written pronounce it a terrible arraignment of European morals, and say that it should exert a tremendous influence for good.

A second revised edition, in two volumes, is ready of O.N. Nelson's "History of the Scandinavian in the United States," of which the first volume appeared in 1893, and has now been brought down to 1900, with much new material and several articles entirely rewritten. The bibliography has been increased by 125 titles. The second volume was of such recent issue that the required changes are not so noteworthy. A very important chapter in this work relates to the nationality of criminal and insane persons in the United States. It has been thoroughly approved by experts.

The fact that there were literally several millions of signatures to the protest against admitting Congressman-elect Roberts, of Utah, to a seat in the House of Representatives, shows how keen an interest there still is in the "Morman (sic) question." Believing it to be yet unsolved, and thus vital and timely, Fords, Howard and Hubert are reprinting Mrs. A.S. Paddock's graphic story, "The Fate of Madame La Tour." Already in its tenth thousand, this strange romance of thinly veiled fact depicts the origin, ideas, principles, and methods of Mormon life from the inside in an alluring narrative, but with reasonable accuracy. It should lay hold on a new and larger public.

Amy Winehouse smoked some FRBR too!

2008-01-28T00:13:00.000-05:00

First off, this post by Karen Schneider sums up my brain for the past two days. She merges the latest ear-worm to take up residence in my head with FRBR, something I've been trying to really understand before the semester starts (I received 2 books on FRBR for the library that will be used as reference in my class this spring. So I know I'm going to be dealing with it more and more in the next few months). I actually ended up using the FRBR description of the Work entity in my rights class as an analogy to help understand the publisher's place in the creation of a published work. (I'm sorry class that was very wrong of me, but it was the only way I could visualize things at that point in time.)

Is it wrong that I've started to filter things through LS concepts?

For those of you who are reading this because you saw or searched FRBR. Stop go to The Free Range Librarian and read the post already. Don't for get to click on the link to Dan Chudnov.

Lawrence Clark Powell

2008-01-26T11:53:00.000-05:00

Over Christmas I was doing some research for my Spring classes and I started down the road of Book Studies. Why didn't anyone tell me about this specialized program?

To think there's a bigger theoretical model out there on how publishing, library science, literature and history work together. I found Book Studies while looking for books on author contracts! While searching for other books I re/discovered the work of Lawrence Clark Powell. I must have known about him/ read him at some point and completely forgotten about it.

His writing is so familiar; maybe it's just one of those moments when I've found an author who has managed to nail down the thoughts I have as I prepare class notes, sit in cataloging class, work on some periodicals. . .

I'm slowly making my way through Clark's oeuvre. This week ILL hand-delivered one of the books I requested (talk about service!). The thin volume was Books are Basic: The Essential Lawrence Clark Powell which is actually a collection of memorable aphorisms. At first I was less than enthralled. Silly me, in my rush to request a selection of Clark's work I overlooked the LCSH for the book which identified it as maxims. But then on the train ride home I needed something to read for the last 10 minutes of my commute and cracked open the book.

There are some great morsels that I probably would not have found in his other writing since the book also collects quotes from his articles for Library Journal and his writing on California and travel, books I probably would have ignored.

Some of my favorites:

Read by sunlight, lamplight, or as Lincoln did, firelight, the books is still the best way man has found to record and transmit his knowledge."~ A Passion For Books (1958)

One good book leads to a dozen others.~ Books in My Baggage (1960)

If you want to maintain your security and self-assurance, stay away from certain books. Don't open that Little Package, if you are afraid of being blown sky-high, or lulled to dreams, or dazzled by beauty. Pandora's box had nothing on a book.~ The Little Package (1964)

Bookmen know that the really rare books are the ones nobody wants but you.~ Books in My Baggage (1960)

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been, since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandria.~ Books in My Baggage (1960)

We rarely discover a book on own own. We read about it, or are told of it by a friend, a librarian, a bookseller, or a reviewer. Help is needed to discern the pearls of literature in the trash-heap of our age of permissive print.~ California Classics (1971)

A library should have as few rules as possible, someone (not a librarian) once said, and break them all whenever necessary.~ The Little Package (1964)

More to come as I make my way through the literature. . .

110 years ago today

2008-01-22T12:51:00.000-05:00

Some news from the distant past:

JOAQUIN MILLER is now on a little steamer Weare on the Yukon, frozen in and cannot reach home until the ice thaws next July.

EATON & MAINS have just issued "How to Make Sunday-School Go," by A.T. Brewer, superintendent of the Epworth Memorial Sunday School, Cleveland, Ohio. The little practical volume consists of contributions by various successful Sunday-school workers who cover thirty-nine problems of successful Sunday-school work.

~Publishers Weekly, No. 1356, January 22, 1898

Words of Comfort

2008-01-22T12:37:00.000-05:00

While looking for news of the day from 2 centuries ago, I found this little tidbit.

From Publishers Weekly #1043, January 23, 1892:

SOME WELL-KNOWN BOOK CANVASSERS

Napoleaon Bonaparte, when a poor lieutenant took the agency for a work entitled "L'Histoire de la Revolution." in the foyer of the great palace of the Louvre can be seen to-day the great emperor's canvassing outfit with the long list of subscribers he secured.

George Washington, when young canvassed around Alexandria, Va., and sold over 200 copies of a work entitled "Bydell's American Savage."

Mark Twain was a book agent.

Longfellow sold books by subscription.

Jay Gould, when starting in life, was a canvasser.

Daniel Webster paid his second term's tuition at Dartmouth by handling "De Tocqueville's America," in Merrimac County, New Hampshire.

General U. S. Grant canvassed for "Irving's Columbus."

Rutherford B. Hayes canvassed for "Baxter's saints' Rest."

James G. Blaine began life as a canvasser for a "Life of Henry Clay."

Bismark, when at Heidelberg, spent a vacation canvassing for one of Blumenbach's handbooks.

(Imagine the above read by Sam Elliott and you have your inspiration of the week.)

News from 115 years ago

2008-01-15T12:37:00.001-05:00

Some highlights from the world of publishing as reported by Publishers weekly, Jan. 16, 1892.

"in consequence of the recent verdict in the case of Pinnock vs. Chapman & Hall, it is said that some London publishers talk of requiring an indemnity from authors against proceedings for libel."

"F.J. Schulte & co., Chicago, announce for immediate publication in their Ariel Series 'An Honest Lawyer' by Alvah Milton Kerr; and 'Better Days, or millionaire of to-morrow,' by Thomas Fitch and his wife, Mrs. Anna M. Fitch. Both of these novels, like the large majority of the Ariel Series, are books with a purpose. The central idea in 'An Honest Lawyer' is that, as it is impossible to conceive of a millionaire Christ, so the accumulation of wealth beyond a reasonable limit is inconsistent with true Christianity. 'Better Days' is dedicated to the millionaires of America. The hero, a mining expert, discovers a vein of gold so rich and so vast that the great problem arises how to dispose of the enormous yield of the yellow metal without destroying its value for coinage or unsettling the monetary markets of the world. In the course of the story many of the most important problems now confronting the world are touched upon. They have just published 'Francis Bacon and His Secret Society,' by Mrs. Henry Pott of London, who has devoted years to the preparation of the work."

Nothing else of much note for the oughts, but there is this from the Journalistic Notes of the same issue:
"The February Atlantic will contain an article of great interest by Professor Shaler, of Harvard, a native Kentuckian, giving the reasons which led him to join the Union army in the War of the Rebellion. Professor Rodolfo Lanciani, author of 'Ancient Rome in Light of Recent Discoveries' will contribute to the same issue a very remarkable paper on 'the Pageant at Rome in the Year 17 B.C.,' giving the details of some inscriptions very recently discovered commemorating the celebration of secular games under Augustus, for which Horace wrote his famous, 'Carmen Seculare.'"

Boring, yes. Different than today, not really.

She got half my posts

2008-01-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

". . . so then I walk in on the b***h and she's on all fours engaged in some of that crazy-a** tentacle s**t with this giant space alien who does a mind-meld with me so i suffer from synesthesia."

So one of the feed on my reader pointed me to this story in the New York Times about a man, a wife, their divorce and a blog. Sounds like a great TV pilot. Oh wait. . .

All kidding aside, there's some free speech issues here, especially if the fictionalized account is as ridiculous as above. Of course if it isn't it won't be just a divorce but a potential libel suit as well. So many legal avenues, hurts brain.

Why read when you can play a game about reading instead

2008-01-08T13:11:00.000-05:00

I wanted to like Bookchase, but I can't tell how it's unique or different enough from a certain game on pursuing trivia to make it stand out. I also get the feeling that the questions might not all be about books but about general trivia. Make this a chase for some antiquarian books and everyone has to answer different levels of questions on books and libraries. I'm there (probably alone, because who really wants to play a game focused only on books instead of, say, actually sitting down and reading one.) I get the concept, get people interested in reading, but it doesn't seem different enough.

Publishing News, January 4, 1890

2008-01-07T12:47:00.000-05:00

Some highlights of the publishing trade from the week of January 4, 1890 as reported by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

LITERARY & TRADE NOTES

The POPE MFG. CO. have issues a useful desk calendar as an advertisement of their Columbia bicycles.

SAMPSON LOW & CO. have published a second revised edition of P.H. Emerson's charming "English Idyls," a series of prose poems on various subjects.

We are pleased to note that Burrows Brothers Company's handsome edition of "Lorna Doone" has met with a sale far beyond the anticipation of the publishers.

METHUEN & CO., London, will publish shortly a new book by Baring Gould, entitled "old Country Life," treating od the country customs of the last century, old houses, old roads, old country parsons, and old musicians. The book will be fully illustrated.

THE AUTHORS COOPERATIVE PUBLISHING CO., London, have recently published a neat and artistic volume entitled "A book of Vagrom Men and Vagrant Thoughts," by Alfred T. Story. The author in a pleasing and entertaining manner treats of tramp musicians, peddlers, ballad-singers, tinkers, sparrows, and a host of other vagrants. the volume reflects creditably upon publisher and author.

The book trade of Atlanta, Ga., is enjoying a little fun caused by a "tug-of-war" in progress between the dry-goods bazaar and a book and stationery concern. It would seem, according to the American stationer, "that last winter Thornton & Grubb, of Atlanta, were able to handle a very good line of books at the phenomenally low price of twenty-five cents per volume, and consequently they made so good a drive on them that the greed of one of the big big dry-goods houses was aroused to the extent of making heavy purchases of the books in New York, and a short time ago it displayed them on its counters at nineteen cents a volume. Having a pretty good supply on hand, Thornton & Grubb announced the next day the same book at eighteen cents. The next morning the bazaar dropped a cent below that, to be followed by Thornton & Grubb posting the books at sixteen cents. The bazaar saw them one better, at which point the sinews of war gave out and, at last report, both belligerents were resting on their oars awaiting a large consignment of books, on receipt of which the contest will undoubtedly be resumed. Other booksellers, with one exception, have remained simply spectators of the fray, as they do not handle the books. The exception is W.B. Burke, the 'Old Bookstore Man,' who on the 4th inst. hung up a lot of handkerchiefs, striped hosiery, etc., in front of his store, and announced 'cut rates in dry-goods.' What other lines of feminine apparel Mr. Burke will add to his display is not known, but no doubt the ladies of Atlanta, purses in hand, are keeping a sharp eye on his movements, and stand ready to crowd the store the moment he spreads out a genuine bargain counter of hooks and eyes, whalebones, dress braids, gloves, tapes, laces, embroidery, and other things dear to the female heart. We hope he will sail in courageously. Meanwhile the legitimate book trade is getting another punch in the ribs.

2008-01-03T10:12:00.000-05:00

No indication on cover which photo house is offering this image for covers. Imagine the release forms for the models.

The copyright? 2004.

Ever see a 4 million dollar book?

2008-01-02T14:17:00.000-05:00

Here.

More from Amazon on their latest acquisition.

I really like the look of the think. Not crazy about the blue ink destroys the allure of it being some artifact from long ago. I'm a little disappointed in the book once it's opened. It looks mysterious and old on the outside but almost like a rough cut moleskine once it's opened.

Oh well . . .

"Hands off book titles as cheap descriptors!"

2008-01-02T12:48:00.000-05:00

Aside from Public Domain Day (except for here in America- 1936 4EVA!), the start of January also means it's time for the 2008 List of Banished Words from Lake Superior State University.

Highlights:

They've come to accept what everyone else knows about truthiness: it's awesome.

On "perfect storm"- "Hands off book titles as cheap descriptors!" – David Hollis, Hamilton, New York.

Pop via decorators

It is what it is

Insert witty phrase using "random," "sweet," and "Back in the day." wait we're just banning them this year?

Still surfing?

2008-01-01T14:49:00.001-05:00

As it's the first of the year and I'm trying to clean up my Google reader (reread the starred stuff and either transferring it to my del.icio.us page or deleting it) I have organization on the mind.

So this little bit from Ryan Holiday stuck out from this post:

Here a general rule of thumb – The 70% Surfing Rule: if you surf vs. subscribe, assume you will spend at least 70% of your online time consuming interesting instead of actionable information, and 70% of the time, you won’t return to the task you initially set out to complete.

For anyone who relies on RSS readers and del.icio.us to keep moving, there are some good reinforcements and reminders on how to use these tools. Ryan also breaks down Stumbled Upon for anyone interested. I'll stick to my RSS feeds and del.icio.us.

2008, 100 posts need a redesign

2008-01-01T14:44:00.000-05:00

Let's see how often I'll post this year- maybe not too often.

What's up in the next few months: teaching and studenting.

I'll be teaching two classes in Emerson this semester: one on electronic publishing and one on rights. . . Miles to go before I sleep . ..

And only one class: descriptive cataloging, but what a class.

Okay on with the show. . .

blowin up

2007-12-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

From Regret the Error's wrap-up of this year's media errors:

Runner Up
The Sentinel-Review (Woodstock, Ontario):

In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to shoot guns and blow things up.
The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.

Thank you Regret the Error. thank you.

Internet People

2007-09-09T22:27:00.000-04:00

What? You expected me not to wait for forever to post this?

I'm hoping that I'm posting this after the blogosphere has linked it everywhere

Frustration and blogs

2007-08-29T14:45:00.000-04:00

So I was going to blog about this article from Robert Gray when it appeared in the Shelf Awareness newsletter last Tuesday, but I completely forgot why it was so interesting. . . .

*sigh*

I guess that's what comes from having a newsletter that refers to site before said site has updated the articles.

I will leave with this quote from the article on why bookstores may want to make a blog. Good advice for libraries as well:

If someone who had never been to your store called you (or emailed you) and asked why they should shop your store rather than buying a book at Barnes & Noble or even Wal-Mart, what would you tell them? No, no, not the four-letter expletive, I mean what makes your store YOUR store? What makes you get up in the morning and do the often thankless job of bookselling? Okay, that answer? That's your blog. That's your direction. Every bookstore is unique, and all that uniqueness makes for an interesting read. Whether it's fascinating to you writing it or not is really secondary. The things we view as mundane can be, to others, the most interesting stuff in the world.

Fall Preview

2007-08-27T14:00:00.000-04:00

The San Francisco Chronicle has a list of what we should be reading this fall. There's a lot of worthwhile stuff coming out in the next few months. Personally, I've been waiting since the last millennium for the next Junot Diaz book.

Jewels

2007-08-24T11:15:00.001-04:00

Damien Hirst's skull may be pretty and worth close to $100 million, but it has nothing on this book. Talk about knowing your market.

University Publishing in a Digital Age

2007-08-23T12:45:00.000-04:00

"Publishing in the future will look very different than it has looked in the past. Consumption patterns have already changed dramatically, as many scholars have increasingly begun to rely on electronic resources to get information that is useful to their research and teaching. Transformation on the creation and production sides is taking longer, but ultimately may have an even more profound impact on the way scholars work. Publishers have made progress putting their legacy content online, especially with journals. We believe the next stage will be the creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies, ultimately allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media."

There's 60 more pages on publishing goodness found within University Publishing In A Digital Age, an Ithaka Report, by Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, and Matthew Rascoff.

I've started to read it and find it a start to understanding what publishing is going to need to do to stay relevant.

Lunch!!

2007-08-22T16:08:00.000-04:00

Found via BoingBoing, a little mash-up site that helps you find lunch using yelp and Google maps. May I never go hungry again.

Favorite new book of the day

2007-08-07T14:34:00.000-04:00

American Salaries and Wages Survey, 9th Edition. great resource to see how well you are doing in your area of expertise in your geographical area with a low, mid and high range. and for all you editor types out there, the mid-range for an Editor in the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy area is $58,870.

Galleys Galleys Galleys

2007-08-07T12:03:00.000-04:00

I've tried to ignore the rise of the galleys for too long.

Let's see how these marketing tools have clawed their way out of the piled inboxes at Oprah and into the hands of common people everywhere.

LibraryThing's Early Reviewers started the belief that common people should be allowed access to galleys.
Amazon decided to pay homage to LibraryThing's great idea with Amazon Vine, which is essentially the same program with a wittier name.
Unshelved recently took a look at what happens when you let loose the galleys of war. Start here.
And now there's a class* that may have actually found a way to get people to read the galley and provide feedback!

I will say in defense of the class that galleys really are the only way most people get a chance to see what's next from their favorite author. It's not like most publishers, agents, and authors work to put pipelines online for people to see. We're used to the IMDB telling us what a director or actor is working on for the next three years, why not an author? Why the secrecy? **

With that out of the way, I don't see how this class helps anyone. Yes, it's market research but research based on an artificial setting. Liking a book and liking a book because you paid $95.00 and discussed it in class are very different. For the students I'm not sure what they get out of it other than reading badly proofed galleys. I would think it would be much easier and a little less expensive to start a blog and send a request for the galley to a publicist. I'm sure they're thrilled to find someone who might actually review the thing.

*Found on Galley Cat who was told about it by the Millions.

**Rhetorical. I know how much the pipeline changes from season to season and how much confusion this could bring to the marketplace as a book undergoes it's transformation from a manuscript called "I Shot the President" to a book in the marketplace called "You Talking to Me?: Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster, Ronald Reagan and Me, a Memoir."

OMG, Claire Danes and I have the same tastes in books!

2007-07-31T13:00:00.000-04:00

Forget about Oprah's book picks, I want to know what her famous friends are reading. Please Oprah, stop telling us what to read and let us see what other famous people are reading.

The Kids Are Alright

2007-07-26T19:42:00.001-04:00

Last week was atwitter about this Boston Globe article that had a few choice quotes from NEA Chairman Dana Gioia about how kids aren't reading. . . . books.

Today's O'Reilly Radar has a guest blog from two of their summer high school interns about the state of reading.

This is a great entry and something I think most librarians and publisher need to read and think about it. It offers some real thoughts from two people who are a) interested in books and b) interested in publishing. What can we learn from this entry?

Advertising books in the insular community of bookstores and book reviews can not compete with billboards and commercials and online ads for everything from video games to movies to web sites to TV shows.
Books are not considered more important than other media. That cultural hierarchy is gone.
Cultural literacy is not as important as information literacy.
Web 2.0 isn't connecting everyone together, it's allowing those with like interests to connect. These new tools aren't to get the Lowest Common Denominator. The LCD can't be targeted the same way as small groups can be on the web.

And Elizabeth and Cristina are only high school seniors. Can you imagine when they get to college and there are new resources from Proquest and ScienceDirect to virtual campuses in Second Life and distance learning?

What will your books service look like in 5-6 years? What will Elizabeth, Cristina expect from you once they leave the University?

When Hip Librarians Attack!

2007-07-08T19:48:00.000-04:00

I guess I forgot that I'm not a hipster librarian and therefore missed the entire point of the NYT article. It wasn't about what I do in the library every day. It was about librarians from Williamsburg, which has a minimum level of hip to live there, or so I've been told.

Anyway, here's more coverage of the article:

Information Wants To Be Free points out how limiting the article is and also use the journalist's viewpoint back on journalism.

Pop Goes the Library focuses on how this reinforces stereotypes, although a different kind of stereotype.

Free Range Librarian takes on the sexist attitude and has a few responses from people who tell the librarians upset with the article to get over themselves. Apparently making a profession seem cute and charming to the general public is okay. I'd love to see how people would react if this was about the business world. Oh wait. They probably already did that article in association with web 2.0 startups. "With a tattoo and nose ring, Sean McGillicutty is not what you picture when someone says 'CEO'."

The Gothamist at least reminds us that Party Girl covered the same topics (DJing, drinking, funky-clothes wearing) years ago.

It's all good rounds up the three articles from NYC this week and talks a little about the Desk Set, who are the main focus of the articles.

Informationatrix hits the nail on the head about why this article bothered me. It's not about librarians, but the librarian pose that some people strike.

"It smacked of the same attitude of people who listen to movies only long enough to parse out their favorite quotes and repeat them ad nauseum to their friends, or who listen to indie rock only long enough to figure out which bands are acceptably underground, solely for the purpose of buying that band’s t-shirt and impressing the emo hottie that they’ve been scoping all week at the bar."

And then there's Snufkin who sums it all up with "MLIS is the new Barrista."

You can call me a guybrarian if I can call you a girl reporter

2007-07-08T12:58:00.000-04:00

This is why I really don't like to read MSM. Way to make vapid assumptions about librarians in order to do some cool hunting. Remember that news article about Seattle in the 90's where someone gave bunch of nonsense and claimed it was the new lingo? Well, thank you NYT for attempting to reach that level with a look at hipster librarians.

Imagine, people in their 20s and 30s wanting to be cool like all the other people with these crazy tattoos and funny haircuts. Can you believe it?

And yes I take offense to the tone about men in the library profession. If you're going to continue believing that professions have a traditional gender that should be assigned to them, at least be more tongue-in-cheek about it.