Library in Transition

"Webcast of Anne R. Kenney's Distinguished Seminar Series Presentation, "Approaching an Entity Crisis: Reconceiving Research Libraries in a Multi-institutional Context," Now Available"

Doubts about the Kindle from students...

"I asked Kahle how he sees the future of libraries. "Libraries as a physical place to go, I think will continue," he said. "But if this trend continues, if we let Google make a monopoly here, then what libraries are in terms of repositories of books, places that buy books, own them, be a guardian of them, will cease to exist. Libraries, going forward, may just be subscribers to a few monopoly corporations' databases." Kahle's version of the digital library, which he and others are building collaboratively, is open and shareable, without strings attached as with Google's deal."

"The Internet Archive and various like-minded partners have launched an open architecture for selling and lending digital books online, an effort to consolidate the fledgling market for net texts - and give Google a little food for thought. Dubbed BookServer, the open platform is meant to provide a standard means for booksellers, publishers, libraries, and individual authors to serve texts onto laptops, netbooks, smartphones, game consoles, and specialized ereaders a la the Amazon Kindle. The Archive has already demonstrated an early incarnation of the architecture with the Kindle and Sony's Reader Digital Book."

"Latest figs from AAP (Association of American Publishers) put ebook sales up 173.9% through end July 2009. A caveat to this …ebook sales made up just 0.6% of overall book sales in 2008 - according to Bowker - which explains the steep growth. So - the ebook sales graph shows a lovely looking curve, but the steepness is really to do with the starting point. Growth always looks impressive from a zero base! Let's look at the ebook market another way. If you read the headline about Amazon's Kindle, this sounds a bit like a revolution. Day one of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and the Business Insider reports: "Kindle version of the book on top!" (The Business Insider 16.09.09) Steve Windwalker at the Kindle Nation blog says this could be "the biggest story of 2009 in the book trades." As he points out, the most popular book in the world is selling more copies as an electric version than a print version at the most popular bookstore in the world. Or, another version of the story - one week later - in the same news source: Kindle verdict: nothing special" The Business Insider, 22.09.09 "The Lost Symbol sold just 100,000 in e-books format according to Doubleday. Overall Doubleday sold 2 million copies. The 5% ratio of e-books to print is about in-line with the average for book sales."

Can read ebooks on desktop w/ sony

"Last week bookseller Barnes and Noble unveiled the Nook, its long-awaited eReading device. Although ill-named, the Nook is a worthy competitor to the Kindle, offering a number of features not found on the Amazon device, including LendMe, a feature that allows for controlled sharing of ebooks. While the sharing feature comes with a number of limitations, it would appear to be a small but important step towards making DRM-restricted content slightly more flexible for consumers. There's just one problem - publishers want no part of the Nook's LendMe feature."

This article is a status report of the usage of eBooks on college campuses. Here is a quote in the article, "John Barnes of Cengage (formerly Gale) told the Charleston audience that, while his company still sells more print than electronic reference, users prefer electronic. He believes libraries should "move faster away from print reference" to meet user needs and increase usage. He cited a study done by Wright State University's Sue Polanka that found much greater use of an electronic collection than a print one, even though the electronic collection was only a fraction of the size of the print one. Further, the cost per use for the electronic collection was less than one-fifth of the cost per use of the print collection." We may want to find that Wright State University study. From the above quote, it seems to point to the feasibility of an all-digital library.

"Neumont University was founded in 2002 and is an Accredited Member, ACICS. It was established to pioneer a more effective way of learning and a better way to create innovators in the computer sciences. Our mission is to unite business, technology, and creativity to educate the innovators of tomorrow. At our campus in the Salt Lake valley, we offer accelerated Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Master of Science in Computer Science degrees."

"HP, UMich deal means a "real" future for scanned books HP and the University of Michigan have inked a deal that will see HP reprinting rare and out-of-print books from Michigan's library via the printer maker's print-on-demand service. Here's why this is potentially as important as anything Google Books is doing."

"To keep track of it all, we here at TechFlash have mapped out the known universe of e-books -- spanning content, devices, mobile apps, wireless providers, acquisitions, and more. We invite you to take a look, give us feedback, and let us know if we've missed anything. We'll be updating this chart on a regular basis."

lively discussion of future of libraries

"Libraries are drenched in atoms. The physical storage of books, in one place, make less and less sense, especially when you consider that 90% of the books are not checked out in five years. My recent experience with the Boston Public Library, however, is that it is always full. It is a place to study and find quiet. It is a place to meet people. It is a way to browse information in a physical manner. Nonethess, the sheer cost of binding, shipping, storing, rearranging and replacing physical books will drive the change to virtual books in place like Boston. In places like remote Africa, they have no alternative and this change is welcome, the sooner the better."

"An erroneous report yesterday in New York University's student newspaper, Washington Square News, headlined NYUAD: All Bobst holdings will be digitized, claimed that the entire 5.1 million volumes in campus libraries would be digitized, courtesy of the government of Abu Dhabi, for use in NYU's planned Abu Dhabi campus in the Persian Gulf."

On BookServer

Peter Brantley on book server

Issued recent report on collaborative mgt of print collections

Problem Statement: As the availability of online scholarly resources grows, research institutions face increasing pressure to optimize management of their print collections. Consolidation and rationalization of holdings within and across institutions creates economies of scale that benefit individual institutions and the community as a whole by reducing costs and eliminating redundancies in system-wide holdings. While there is broad interest in achieving such economies, essential infrastructure for enabling inter-institutional cooperation in print management is lacking.

"If one clear consensus emerged from the studies that have been finalized at Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, it is this: For students who were given the Kindle DX and tried to use it for coursework, the inability to easily highlight text was the biggest lowlight of the experience."

current link just goes to First Monday; I went to the article and bookmarked it.