Ebooks readers are great and improving all the time. It’s the ebooks themselves–the DRM, the bad user experience, the complicated and wonky checkout procedures, the lack of privacy, the changing restrictions we deal with as libraries, the terrible websites our vendors create–that are not just suboptimal but at the center of a bad user experience that we’re in the awkward position of promoting as if it were our own.

via librarian.net » Blog Archive » I got a Kindle.

I love reading ebooks but the drm issues make even me reluctant to try to use my library’s

In a long-awaited leap forward for open access, the US government said today that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be made free to read after a year’s delay – expanding a policy which until now has only applied to biomedical science.

Whitehouse blog announcement

Teens are not technowizards who surf the web with abandon. And they don’t like sites laden with glitzy, blinking graphics. Teens are often stereotyped as only wanting things that are bold and different. They’re also often viewed as being fearless about technology and constantly connected to some form of media. Although this might be partially true, it’s an oversimplification and letting this steer your design can lead to disastrous outcomes.

Have a blog? With small adjustments, you can noticeably improve its typography. Your readers will thank you for it.

This guide will help you understand the typographic foundations that will improve the readability of your articles.

The Interactive Guide to Blog Typography walks you through all of the fiddly typography bits designers go on about with examples to help you understand what their talking about and help make your websites easier to read.

Here’s what I mean by potholes – on your website, if the navigation is unclear, or if that “what do I do next” thing doesn’t make sense, you have caused a customer to stumble. You have effectively placed a pothole in your customer’s path, making it harder for them to navigate towards whatever it is they wanted to do.

We have a tendency to see ourselves as educators while our patrons see us as service providers. That difference can degrade the usefulness of our services and create conflicts in the community.

So here we have a (slightly) modified version of WordPress’ 2012 theme as a child theme. I really like the clean look and beautiful typography of 2012, while the new customizer helps keep it from looking exactly like every other WordPress blog.

I’m still not completely happy, (really hate how post images look at larger screen sizes) but it’s as good as it’s going to get until I have time to do something really custom. So now I’m having too much fun playing with Google web fonts for the header and color schemes in the customizer.

According to Martin Bekkelund, a Norwegian Amazon customer identified only as Linn had her Kindle access revoked without warning or explanation. Her account was closed, and her Kindle was remotely wiped. Bekkelund has posted a string of emails that he says were sent to Linn by the company. They are a sort of Kafkaesque dumbshow of bureaucratic non-answering, culminating in the customer service version of Die in a fire, to whit, We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs and will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters, a comment signed by Michael Murphy, Executive Customer Relations, Amazon.co.uk.

I’ve suspected they could do this from the start and I’m sure I’m not alone. It turns out to possibly be a case of horrific customer disservice instead (Rights? You have no right to your eBooks), which is still a good example of a specific problem when talking about DRM with the less geeky.

So I went digging for information.

1. It looks like you can limit registration to your course using Google’s Apps for Education service so that only people from your school try to access restricted resources.
2. It’s a hosted app so the URL is “theappname.appspot.com.”
3. It won’t work for most educators I know.

The last is disappointing. Course Builder’s webpage describes several of the same options included in Blackboard except with more flexibility, making for a promising alternative. However, the problem is in the backend. These courses aren’t products of an application, they’re apps themselves.

In short, you have to be at least a minor programmer to make this work. To even start requires installing Python on your own computer which leaves most library systems out (IT departments tend to frown on that sort of thing). Creating the course needs HTML and more than light javascript knowledge at the very least.

I don’t know many educators with these kinds of  skills or the time to acquire them.

Course Builder is definitely in beta with several features already requested. It’s possible it’ll become more user-friendly in the next year but Google doesn’t have a very good track record with that.

In short,  join the community to provide much-needed feedback if you can, or check back next year to see if it’s still around.