Author Archive for emily

From Jon Kalish at NPR on Mind/Shift…

As information becomes more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create “hackerspaces,” where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise.

The Allen County Public Library, which serves the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., has a modest hackerspace inside a trailer in its parking lot. Library director Jeff Krull says hosting it is consistent with the library’s mission.

“We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business,” he says. “We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own.”

The 50-foot trailer is known as the Maker Station and belongs to TekVenture, an educational nonprofit that had struggled to find a building it could afford before it was approached by the library. TekVenture signed an agreement with the library to operate in its parking lot for a year. TekVenture President Greg Jacobs says this partnership made sense. More…

(Christophe Boisvieux/Corbis)

From Robert Darnton at The New York Review of Books…

In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of ideas to the way people light one candle from another: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

The eighteenth-century ideal of spreading light may seem archaic today, but it can acquire a twenty-first-century luster if one associates it with the Internet, which transmits messages at virtually no cost. And if Internet enthusiasm sounds suspiciously idealistic, one can extend the chain of associations to a key concept of modern economics—that of a public good. Public goods such as clean air, efficient roads, hygienic sewage disposal, and adequate schooling benefit the entire citizenry, and one citizen’s benefit does not diminish that of another. Public goods are not assets in a zero-sum game, but they do carry costs—up-front costs, usually paid through taxation, at the production end of the services and facilities that the public enjoys as users. The Jeffersonian ideal of access to knowledge as a public good does not mean that knowledge has no cost. We enjoy freedom of information, but information is not free. Someone had to pay for Jefferson’s taper. More…

Credit: Roy Carruthers/Getty

From Times Higher Education…

Access to the Cambridge college libraries is generally limited to members – undergraduates, postgraduates and Fellows – so the security of collections has never been a particularly grave concern. This is not to say that college librarians don’t worry about the illicit removal of books. The secret all librarians jealously guard – that a small part of every open collection will inevitably go missing, never to return – is as true of Cambridge as anywhere. We employ various technical and administrative measures to prevent book theft, but until a recent move from one college to another, I had never considered the book curse.

I read it on my first day, printed dot-matrix style on a piece of card. It was left next to a self-issue computer as a warning to those who might think of attempting to bypass the technology.

“For him that Stealeth a Book from this Library/Let it change into a Serpent in his hand & rend him/Let him be struck with Palsy, & all his Members blasted.”

To Read More…

From Vinutha Mallya at PublishingPerspectives…

Ranked as the sixth-largest publishing industry in the world, India has its entire gamut of publishing activities and services available in-house. An annual output of 90,000 books, with 19,000 publishers publishing them, has put the book market in India in the spotlight over the last few years.

The combined advantage of being the third-largest publisher of books in English and having competitive rates for publishing and printing technologies has made India a formidable player in the international publishing scene. The industry has been boosted by an infusion of capital since the year 2000, when the government of India allowed 100% equity in the publishing industry. The result has been several new opportunities and challenges for the Indian publishing industry.

With literacy rates improving each year (currently the rate is 65% out of a population of 1.1 billion people) and with the expansion of the middle class, Indians are reading more than ever, with a particular focus on skill development and self improvement. Little wonder, then, that management books, cookbooks, self-help, and self-improvement books sold very well in 2009–2010. A recent nationwide survey revealed that one-fourth of the youth population, a staggering figure of 83 million, identify themselves as book readers. Of these, 58% are either at or below university matriculation level, spelling a demand for school and academic books. More…

From Kathleen Sweeney at PublishingPerspectives…

Well, there’s certainly no shortage of opportunities to talk about e-books…So, curious about what is the newest of the new in e-publication trending, I attended the Center for Communication’s recent collaborative event with The New School, “eBooks: New Trends for a New Decade.”

Prepping myself for a multimedia presentation with the latest offerings in handheld wizardry, I found a room full of curiosity-seekers unexpectedly listening to three panelists onstage, old-style. Where were the gadgets? No iPads zipping around the room? What about a Nokia cell phone interface projecting a how-to for novel-reader usage? Or recent dazzle-worthy additions to the Institute for the Future of the Book? Alas, no gizmos.

Richard Eoin Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull Press and founder of Red Lemonade (and no stranger to these e-pages), offered witty repartee, including an observation that the “supply of content is currently infinite.” Bob Stein, Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book evoked Marshall McLuhan’s predictions from the 60s, while Matt Shatz, Head of Content Relations at Nokia, foresees that globally, cell phones will be the e-reader to rule them all. Moderator Lisa Gallagher, an Agent at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, queried these e-pros on the best and the brightest in the e-field but met with many minimal response instances of “let me reframe the question…” More…