The Church of "Copy-Me-ism," which holds file sharing as a sacred rite. Rather than having a dogma they have values. I'm unclear how much this is a sort of in-joke like the "Church of the Subgenius" or if it intends more cynically to circumvent copyright laws and rulings by declaring them against their religious sacraments.

A blog, appears largely inactive, about the Digital Public Library of America and other topics. Notable as it was co-found by Tom Peters, the new Dean of University Libraries at MSU.

The Project Gutenberg Text Encoding Initiative is intended to create a machine readable (not intended for human eyes) file that encodes markup and formatting data. When processed by a conversion script it outputs usable formats including PDF and UTF-8, keeping the same formatting across all. While an interesting idea I've heard little about it, and there doesn't seem to be a converted effort to make PGTEI a standard for eBooks.

With eBooks having taken off in the past few years I was curious about the current status of Project Gutenberg, the original resource of online books. Starting in 1971 with the Declaration of Independence Gutenberg initially relied on manually typing in royalty free books into a text format. The project is still continuing, but the founder died last year and as of July 8th the archive is only 40,000 books, an almost miniscule number compared to the digitization efforts of Google.

The Internet Archice is now offering over one million items as peer to peer BitTorrent downloads. While in one sense it is only a different download method for materials that are copyright and royalty free, it is Torrents have been controversial as they are often used to download pirated movies and software. However, the Internet Archive does have a point in that it improves access for users with limited bandwidth. Downloads include 1.2 million books and 9,000 videos and movies.

An interesting page from an interactive News Museum that shows the daily front pages from approximately 900 newspapers worldwide. While not as useful as Google as it doesn't include full articles and the archive is only selected "of interest" topics it does give a quick view of what is important in the world today.

An interesting article about drumming up interest and using a response and feedback to refine a book before it is published, a process that libraries could help authors with.

While not a particularly well written or informative article, it is relevant that that debates about eBooks and libraries have now reached journal like The Economist where libraries are rarely mentioned.

An article about a Maker Space at the Westport, Connecticut library, which includes a 3D printing project. 3-D printing is one of the waves of the future and I know the MST library looked at one; hosting the Maker Space in the middle of the library is a good way to promote it but I wonder if the noise and activity will end up distracting to the other patrons.

An article that notes the dwindling demand for general information specialists at the Free Library of Phildadelphia, which used to field 400 phone calls a day among a rotating staff of 14 librarians, and is now done to 1 librarian and 9 assistants who deal with only a handful of phone calls and more often do front line customer service and technical support work, with many information requests now handled by online chat.

A positive four part blog entry about how libraries are evolving to meet new needs, strengthen communities during bad economic times, and are centers for sharing. Overall I think this article is the most realistic one I've read in some time. It still acknowledges that libraries are doing more with less, and that perceptions of libraries are slow to change.

In France eBooks are only 1.8% of the general market, and total sales of books have actually increased by 6.5% from 2003 to 2011. Some interesting conclusions are drawn from this, namely that prices for French language books are fixed by government decree and set by publishers--not by price discounters such as Amazon, and last year the publishers lobbied to do the same for eBooks. The French government is also friendly to booksellers, offering grants and help with rent. The result is French language bookstores are doing well, while some such English language bookstore such as the 30 year old Village Voice are closing because of the competition from resellers like Amazon and eBooks. The article surmises that the French are really only delaying the inevitable, but I find it curious that nothing is really stopping them from turning entirely to eBooks now, the main factor is cost rather than convenience or access.

This probably isn't the tipping point for ebooks over print--but is very close to it. Ebooks outsold adult hardcover fiction for the first time in 2011, nearly tripling their marketshare to 15%. However, the overall book market declined by 2.5% and the total revenue of ebooks (2 billion) was still much less than that of all print books (11.1 billion).

An interesting resource about Public Domain works leaning towards art/historical material. Works vary from Ebooks to images and articles are well written it not up to scholarly review standards.

The Library of Congress has decided the start date for implementation of RDA will be March 31, 2013. More information is here: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/news_rda_implementation_date.html

An abandoned Wal-Mart store in McAllen, Texas, has been transformed into a functioning library. The interior space is the size of 2 1/2 football fields making the library the largest single story library in the U.S. Since the building opened user registration has increased by 23% While a great idea for reusing a building--incorporating everything a library needs except aesthetic appeal, I wonder about the heating and cooling costs of the building, which can be monumental.

The state budget for the upcoming year eliminates all funding for public libraries. Commissioner of administration Paul Rainwater stated the libraries could be supported by local, not state dollars. There are two Federal grants within the budget, but they do not cover things such as desktop computer support. Rural libraries with the least amount of property tax are going to be among those most hard hit.

The benefits of this are pretty clear, and allow some realistic limits, letting prisoners read up to 12 books to take 48 days off of their sentence each year.

Yoshitaka Fujii is accused of faking 172 out of 249 published papers. Many of his papers were considered "low impact," noticed and published but not heavily cited, and therefore not closely looked at. However, Fujii appeared to be highly productive and and as a result was able to get new jobs, research funding, and and public speaking fees. This is a concern for libraries and the validity of research as now it's easier than ever to self publish papers to online journals, and I have some questions how the retractions are handled--would the databases the articles are in simply delete them, or note they are officially retracted to anyone who did cite them?

On the one hand this is nothing new, several entertainment industries are using deep analytics to see how customers use their products. However, many Ebook readers may not be aware that how long they take to read a book or what they read is being tracked. Customers may avoid books on controversial or personal subjects out of privacy concerns, and publishing may being taking a by-the-numbers approach where they depend more on analytics than market experience and become less willing to try new ideas and authors.