In the past year or so, there has been considerable discussion here in libraryland about ebook readers. Still, the actual personal ownership of them is still reasonably low. So we don't have a lot of actual user feedback on how people like the devices, what they find useful, and what users really experience when reading on one. I thought I'd make an attempt to remedy that as much as one person on one blog can. Read more »

Yesterday Princeton University announced it has joined Google's mass digitization project, adding another million volumes to the maw. I reckon people will begin speculating what former president (of both Princeton and the U.S.) Woodrow Wilson would have made of Princeton's participation in Google's project. At least the speculative heat will be off Thomas Jefferson for awhile, who was invoked by University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman to defend this project from beyond the grave.

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After playing around for an hour or so with the recently released public beta version of Microsoft's Live Search Books (LSB), I have to admit—against some vague sense that my better judgment is failing me—that I like it.

Sure, others have reported that LSB does not work well—or at all—when using browser software other than Internet Explorer, but if you stick to the straight-and-narrow Microsoft path, the service works and shows potential.

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Last Sunday I traveled out to California to attend the Internet Librarian Conference—ITI's tenth, my first. I managed to fly to San Jose with nary a directional question, then took a shuttle bus past fields of artichokes and garlic, and dry brown hills mad in the October sun, down to Monterey on the coast.
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Wowio, an LLC based in York, Pennsylvania, recently launched a free downloadable e-book service. The company's collection at launch is pretty sparse, but it does include both public domain and copyright-protected e-books. During my first use of the collection, I downloaded both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—if for no other reason than to relish Emmeline Grangerford's mournful Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots—and Slaughterhouse Five.

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Soon after Google announced in late 2004 the collaborative project—currently called the "Google Books Library Project," involving the five research libraries of Stanford, Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library—to scan millions of books, the five libraries became known as the "G5 Group."

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Just when we thought it was safe to return to the snippet-infested digital content pool, HarperCollins came along and launched today its own snippet-dangling service that tries to lure readers, especially "young-adult readers" (is that phrase becoming an oxymoron?) to buy more books (primarily) and read more (coincidentally).

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This week it's hot as a pistol across the United States, and as I sit in my office without A/C, a feeble fan drying the sweat on my face, I'm grumpy. Grumpy enough to line up a few peeves against the wall and slap them around.

Open-source software
Yes, I know, open source is a saint and you'd let your sister or brother marry it. But I hate the idea that for some librarians if a particular software is open source, hands down, it's the right choice. The right choice is the software that meets the mission. While the principles behind open source are admirable, when an open-source product doesn't meet your library's needs, your first obligation is to your users.

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Two news items that scurried across my attention in July have led me to conclude that, in this era of overlapping eras, we have entered yet another age.

The first item was an industry report that Apple shipped more than eight million iPod devices in the second quarter of 2006. That's almost three million per month or 100,000 per day, and the second quarter is not a big gift-giving quarter, unless Apple packaged all those iPods in large plastic Easter eggs. (Remember, you read it here first.)

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It's already mid-July and I'm still thinking about the programs, news, and events from the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans three weeks ago. This means either that it was an unusually important conference, or that I'm slow on the uptake and/or have serious conference closure issues.

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