Tag Archives: eBooks

News: Books & Publishing, Music & Film

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News: Education & Technology, Librarianship

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Education & Technology

Librarianship

Are Digital Libraries A ‘Winner-Takes-All’ Market? OverDrive Hopes So | Forbes
“Schools and libraries in all forms are transitioning their spends from providing physical items that are being stored on shelves and branches to digital items — the fastest portion of their growth,” said Steve Potash  in a recent interview. Potash is President and CEO of OverDrive, the Cleveland-based provider of technology for managing and distributing digital content for lending libraries.

Gross: Fifty Shades of Grey goes viral – literally | theguardian
Library copies of the bestselling sadomasochistic romance were found to carry traces of herpes and cocaine.

News: Books & Publishing, Music & Film

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Books & Publishing

Amazon signs up for ‘future of streaming’ ORBX | CNET – Amazon becomes the first major partner to agree to use lightweight new technology from Mozilla and OTOY for streaming games, video, and software. More Amazon news: Amazon employee rebukes wife over Jeff Bezos biography | the guardian. Also: Amazon Offers Kindles, Cut of E-Book Sales to Indie Bookstores | PCMag – another take: Amazon’s New Kindle Offer Rejected by Indie Bookstores | WIRED.

Confessions of a Booker Prize Judge | BookRiot
Stuart Kelly…offers Book Riot some insights into the pressures and the joys of choosing a Booker winner, why a graphic novel should win it one day, why The Luminaries changes what the novel can do, and what impact the Americans will have under the redrawn eligibility criteria for the prize.

Agatha Christie and Poirot scoop best ever status from Crime Writers | Telegraph
The Crime Writers Association crowned Agatha Christie best ever author and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd best ever novel, while Scandinavian crime missed out

Music & Film

Swedish Theaters Now Using Bechdel Test To Rate Films On Gender Bias
A group of four movie theaters in Sweden have adopted a new rating system to expose gender bias–if a film passes the Bechdel Test, it gets an A rating. Qualifying films must a.) have at least two women with names, who b.) talk to each other and c.) talk about something other than a man. The paradox of this test is that it seems simple enough to meet these requirements, and yet countless films fail to do so each year.

News: Education & Technology, Librarianship

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Education & Technology

Web inventor Berners-Lee sounds alarm on mass spying | CNET
Sir Tim Berners-Lee says the activities of the NSA and its UK counterpart, the GCHQ, could warp his baby, making the Internet vulnerable to attack and depriving humanity of a “safe space” for problem solving.

The Amazingly Unlikely Story of How Minecraft Was Born | WIRED
Excerpt from new book.

Librarianship

Mom Complains About Library’s Porn Policy | NBC Chicago
A suburban mother is demanding the Orland Park Public Library ban pornography on its computers. More scandal: Library book overdue in Texas? Go directly to jail | Teleread

Links: Oyster (on iPad) Reviews

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Oyster
Image Credit: oysterbooks.com

News: Education & Technology, Librarianship

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Education & Technology

Startup Gives Free Stuff to Student Influencers | Mashable
Sumpto, a startup that identifies top social-media influencers at colleges across the country, sends students free gifts from brands in hopes that they will tweet, post and share photos of the free swag on their social-media accounts.

Twitter strives to explain itself to the public | CNET
A new “About Twitter” page attempts to describe the social network and explain how and why people tweet.

Bill Gates Believes Human Health Is More Important Than Tech | Mashable
In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, which focused primarily on his work to bring health aid to the world’s impoverished regions, Gates offers a glimpse into how much his views have changed regarding the importance of technology in our lives.

E Ink Looks Beyond E-Readers | MIT Technology Review
Facing a declining market for e-readers, E Ink’s new R&D facility is trying out some different ideas.

Lenovo pursued BlackBerry bid, but Ottawa rejected idea | Globe & Mail
[T]he Canadian government told the smartphone company it would not accept a Chinese takeover because of national security concerns.

Apple: “Our Business Does Not Depend on Collecting Personal Data” | AllThingsD
Apple published a formal report on federal government data requests and in so doing became the first tech company to disclose such inquiries by both account and device.

Librarianship

Museum of Science Fiction might be coming to DC | CNET
Trekkies and wanna-be Mars colonists might soon have a permanent brick-and-mortar site for sharing their love of all things science fiction

Illinois Library Comes Under Fire | American Libraries Magazine
“Sometimes libraries that are doing ‘all the right things’ pay a price for their excellence through uncivil attacks and attempts to dismantle their work,” Barbara Jones, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), told American Libraries. She is referring to Orland Park (Ill.) Public Library (OPPL) in south suburban Chicago, which has endured several intellectual-freedom challenges over the past few months.

MELSA, 3M Develop New Ebook Sharing Feature for Consortia | The Digital Shift

The Library Vending Machine | BookRiot
Changing demographics and difficulty securing new funds for new libraries, The Pioneer Library System in Norman, Oklahoma decided to to use technology to meet its patrons needs. So last week, it opened the first 24-hour library vending machine in the United States. Built by EnvisionWare, this fully automated machine will be able to to dispense more than 400 pieces of media (books/DVDs/audiobooks) and store more than 1000 returned items.

News: Books & Publishing, Music & Film

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Books & Publishing

Jeff Bezos’ Wife And Co-Workers Call Out Brad Stone’s Amazon Book As Inaccurate…On Amazon | TechCrunch
In what can only be seen as a moment of delicious cyclical irony, a new fairly negative review of the book has been posted by none other than Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos’ wife, MacKenzie Bezos. We’ve confirmed the identity of the reviewer, the only peson to leave a one-star reaction so far.

Readmill is my new Favorite eBook Reading App [Review] | Beautiful Pixels
One of the biggest problems faced while upgrading to the paperless world — at least when it comes to reading ebooks — is that the system is horribly fragmented. Some ebooks are available on one platform while some on others. Keeping track of all your purchases and syncing them with different devices is always a pain. Readmill wants to take some of that pain away from you.

New E-Book Services Borrow a Page From Netflix [Review] | AllThingsD
Review of Oyster and Scribd e-book subscription services.

Music & Film

Can E-Books Save The Neighborhood Bookstore? | Co.Labs

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A startup called Zola Books has paired with the popular novelist Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, to try to save brick-and-mortar shops.

Read: Can E-Books Save The Neighborhood Bookstore? | Co.Labs ⚙ code + community.

Book Links: New French Bookseller Law, 11 Lessons from Jane Eyre, 10 Best Alpha Males in Lit, Drones to Deliver Textbooks, EBook App Features, 11 YA to Make You Cry

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New French Law Bars Online Booksellers to Offer Discounts With Free Shipping | GoodReader
The French parliament has passed a law that makes it illegal for online stores to deliver books for free while also offering a 5 percent discount on the price of the book. The move is being seen as a means of protecting the interests of independent booksellers as much as it is to limit Amazon’s monopoly in the segment. As Christian Kert, the conservative MP who tabled the bill puts it, the bill is aimed at ensuring “that the price of a book sold online is higher than one sold by an independent bookshop.” The government stated they look forward to “restricting predatory behaviour” with the new bill.

11 Lessons That ‘Jane Eyre’ Can Teach Every 21st Century Woman About How To Live Well | HuffPost Books
The novel was very shocking for its time. One reviewer said that the book “might be written by a woman but not by a lady.” People were scandalized that Eyre returned to Rochester. However, the first edition still sold out in six weeks. Every time I encounter a woman who hasn’t read this book, I advise reading it immediately. Women can learn so much from this great Victorian heroine. [T]here’s much to be learned from the way she chooses to live.

10 Alpha Males In Literature | Jill Shalvis (romance author) | HuffPost Books
What qualifies me to make such a list? Because I write alphas, I read alphas, heck I even married an alpha (Hi, Alpha Man!). I believe an alpha has to be lovable as well as strong.

Australian textbook delivery, care of drones | CNET
A textbook rental start-up will deliver its packages to Sydney customers by drone starting next spring. From ordering to delivery, the entire process could take as little as two minutes.

Reading Made Awesome: The Features of Ebook Apps You Should Be Using | LifeHacker
Reading books on tablets or phones is awesome. There, I said it and I’m not taking it back. While the biggest advantage of reading on a mobile device is convenience and a huge portable library, there are a ton of features that make the experience awesome.

11 Young Adult Books Sure to Make You Cry | Mashable
Book-lovers and high schoolers are celebrating Teen Read Week, but even if you’re way past adolescence, you can enjoy a tear-jerking YA novel at any age. Young adult literature sometimes receives a bad rap as a depressing genre, but a hallmark of YA books is actually a hopeful ending. That doesn’t mean some of the more emotional titles won’t leave you in a puddle of your own tears.

Oyster Brings ‘Netflix for E-Books’ App to iPad, Opens to Public | Mashable

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A little more than a month after launching an iPhone app in invitation-only beta, Oyster is making its e-book subscription service available to all users and expanding to iPad.

Oyster charges $9.95 a month for access to more than 100,000 books from big and small publishers, but it now offers users one free month with the hope of getting more people to try the app experience. The startup declined to provide data on the number of users or books read during the beta period, but noted that 1 million pages were read in the first 10 days the app was available and another million pages were read in the following six days.

Read: Oyster Brings ‘Netflix for E-Books’ App to iPad, Opens to Public | Mashable.

You may also like: Test Driving Oyster, a “Netflix for Ebooks” | The Digital Shift