“This project is a response to the serious threats to privacy, free speech and civil liberties raised by proposed lawful access legislation. To understand what is at stake in this invasive and costly bill, Canada’s leading privacy and surveillance experts offer their anaylsis in the hopes of stirring debate on these critical issues.”

To find out more about surveillance in Canada, check out the links below;

• The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting
• Digitally Mediated Surveillance
• OpenMedia.ca

“Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magick by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.”

If you would like to read some of this classic library literature, I suggest buying an ereader. Apparently it is all the rage…

(Hat tip to Melissa Gira Grant)

“Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor….
‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore‘ is one of five animated short films that will be considered for outstanding film achievements of 2011 in the 84th Academy Awards”

“Imagine a world where the simple act of reading turned deadly.”

A short film from Beto Gomez.