Neil Gaiman talks to the Open Rights Group about the impact of the Internet on the publishing industry.
Archive for the 'Books' category
Libraries, ebooks, and The Kindle Lending Club
A new startup, called The Kindle Lending Club, has been developed to meet the needs of Kindle owners in response to the new lending capability.
The Kindle Lending Club is the brainchild of Catherine MacDonald, who said that when she heard Amazon announce on December 30 that it was finally adding a lending option for Kindle, she decided to set up a Facebook group – a way to help people find others who were willing to share their e-books. But as interest in the group exploded, MacDonald realized that Facebook just didn’t offer the scalability needed for such an undertaking. “I had no idea how viral the idea was,” she says.
What is most interesting is how quickly she made this happen (emphases added).
So in less than two weeks’ time, she has pulled together the resources – about $12,500 in angel investment and a Web development team – to launch the Kindle Lending Club.
Two weeks!
This site brought a few questions to mind and I want to throw them out there and hope I get a response or two.
- I’ll say it again: two weeks. Why don’t libraries have this sort of turn around from idea to implementation? Can your library move this fast to grasp hold of an idea and get it past the gate? In light of the speed that the world now moves at, shouldn’t we be able to move this quickly? Do we have the option not to?
- Why didn’t a library step in to fill this need? If ebook downloads are rising, shouldn’t we be facilitating our users in getting ebooks for devices our vendors can’t/don’t/won’t support.
- Due to the ease with which ebooks can be created and shared online (for example, see my previous post on the upcoming Book Saver) will libraries just be pushed out of the ebook lending business? As we are wedded to vendor applications that are often slow and difficult for first time users to understand and use, will library users just take matters into their own hands, stop waiting for us and simply create the means to get what they want?
I’m looking forward to your feedback!
(Thanks to Nicole Hennig for the link)
Librarians, we have a manga…
A few days ago the manga Library Wars: Love & War came across my desk at work. And yes, librarians are the heroes and we are armed to the teeth.
The manga is based on the light novel series Toshokan Senso by Hiro Arikawa. The novels also gave rise to another manga, an internet radio series and an anime series.
What are we fighting for? Well, what have we always fought for?
In the near future, the federal government creates a committee to rid society of books it deems unsuitable. The libraries vow to protect their collections, and with the help of local governments, form a military group to defend themselves–the Library Forces!
Check it out, I’m sure you will enjoy it. Meanwhile, I’m off to brush up on my rappelling, just in case…
Update (Sept 9, 2010): A review of the manga by librarian LeAnn Suchy is available at Minnesota Reads. Thanks LeAnn for passing this along!
Visual search and the future of the book
A new technology from Ricoh Innovations called Visual Search may revolutionize the relationship between print and digital content.
At Ricoh Innovations we are developing visual search technology for paper documents. Our mobile visual search algorithms create “clickable paper” — documents that have the interactivity of web pages and can be used anywhere a camera phone can connect to the Internet. Our full-page visual search techniques instantaneously find documents that match what’s scanned on a copier.
This means that any page of text can have digital content added to it, without the use of QR codes or similar technology. Continue Reading »
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