… publishers are not really all that interested in authors or readers; they are interested in consolidating control of distribution channels so that the only participants in culture are creators who work for little or nothing and consumers who can only play if they can pay. These corporate publishers’ actions are intended not just to [...]

The interesting thing about the movement to mobile technology is in many ways it is simply an extension of the changes brought about by the Internet, just made greatly more complicated by the larger variety of devices and the almost infinite number of physical contexts (in the car, sitting in front of the TV, walking [...]

“Historically, we had a centralized librarian — a filter for the organization,” [Merkle] says. “In the past decade, there’s a trend to decentralize research and the role of the corporate library. Many consulting companies, for example, are asking people to do their own work [research]. This adds another level of noise around consistency of how we [...]

Amazon has started the library lending program and it’s gotten some attention outside library circles. Amazon launches Kindle integration with public libraries | Macworld. Borrowing Kindle ebooks: Hands-on guide | Macworld. I haven’t been a library user for years, to be honest. I think that’s just changed. — Peter Smith in Borrowing Kindle ebooks: Hands-on [...]

Libraries Abandon Expensive ‘Big Deal’ Subscription Packages to Multiple Journals – Libraries – The Chronicle of Higher Education. The comments are fascinating.

Library Juice » Turning the Reference Desk into a Reference Bureau. It’s been an idea on my mind for some time that libraries need to evolve their services. The traditional ones are still useful for our patrons but they don’t think so. We’ve made some progress by advertising and making them available through new means [...]

Darien Library is live on the Polaris ILS — [Library Technology Guides]. “Thanks to our staff and the team at Polaris, this has been the smoothest migration I have seen anywhere,” said Darien’s Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience, John Blyberg. “What’s more, Polaris’s open database and fully documented API have made it incredibly [...]

…a local news story skeptically questioning whether libraries are “necessary” set off a response from Vanity Fair, and a later counterpunch by Chicago’s Public Library Commissioner won her support from such diverse, non-library-specific outlets as The A.V. Club and Metafilter, and from as far away as The Guardian. Call it a hunch, but it seems [...]

Closing libraries would be “a terrible, terrible mistake” akin to “stealing from the future”, according to one of the countrys leading childrens authors. “Children want stories. They want information. They want knowledge about the strange world they’re in. Saying that the internet can be that is like setting a child free in a jungle and [...]

The rise in popularity of ebooks has started a debate on how they should be priced versus the print editions. I’ve been interested hearing the viewpoints from the authors themselves (see the article below). But publishers also say consumers exaggerate the savings and have developed unrealistic expectations about how low the prices of e-books can [...]