It's always nice to see librarians like Tasha Saecker blogging away, especially on institutional sites for small towns. Her tiny system in the Green Lake area of Wisconsin serves just 3,000 people; but the Web offshoot is highly functional even by big-city standards. Way to go, Tasha and colleagues! I especially like your efficiently blogged new books listings.

To make a first-rate site still better, Tasha, you might consider a home page feature spotlighting a "Library User of the Month." Then in text and maybe even audio or video, a happy user could give a library testimonial. Run a colorful still photo of the person on the home page to break up the text there. Perhaps your or Friends of the Library could do a blog where testimonials appeared, and the people with the best would be the monthly winners. K-12 students, especially, could be LUMs.

Library outreach to the Net-fixated young

This idea would be yet one more way to popularize libraries among the Net-fixated young and deal with the issue of, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?"

It wouldn't hurt, of course, if the local public school system could cooperate with a LUM campaign, but the concept just might fly even without such help. Let's hope it would come. Schools should accustom students to using public libraries, not just the K-12 variety. Will 45 year olds rely on school libraries for HR tips or Java programming tutorials? Libraries are for life, not just K-12, meaning that both schools and libraries should work together, and LUM would be one way.

Inspiration from the "pub" world

Hey, if pubs do Patrons of the Month, why can't public libraries? Maybe they are. I haven't researched this. Wait. I already see one example, though I think it would be useful to go beyond a mere photo. Oh: here's another. Of course, it'll help if LUM features pass on individual titles, not just the genres that the users prefer. LUMs should also tell how library-obtained information benefitted people in their studites or jobs. They can also point out specific forms of help that the users have received from librarians.

More Googling. Wow! Here's an obit mentioning someone's selection as a Patron of the Month: "During retirement, Bob was an avid reader until effects of stroke and heart surgery made that impossible. He was SELCO (South East Libraries Cooperating) Book Club Patron of the month, Aug. 5, 2000, often reading a book a day." Obviously this recognition meant something to family and community alike.

"User" better than "patron"

Incidentally, I prefer "user" to "patron" since most people would rather use libraries than give to them; but either way is fine with me--just so the feature is there to help connect with the community. Blogs and content management systems should make the LUM concept easier than ever to carry out. Why aren't we seeing more of it--both on the Net and in the press?
posted by David Rothman at 7:53 PM | permanent link

"Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project. She wasn't prepared for the response: 'Someone raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?"'" - Students shun search for information offline, an AP story as published by CNN.

The TeleRead take: In general the AP story is spot on and is an unwitting but powerful argument for a TeleRead-style approach. When, just when, will both public domain and still-copyrighted books go online for K-12 students and others in a massive way that is fully blended with our present schools and libraries?

You can't change educators or librarians just by tossing CD at them and saying, "Here, use these with the public." For best results, a TeleRead-style initiative must include changes in professional training and development. Also useful would be presentation of material in proper content and with appropriate forms of interactivity. When will our policymakers, er, politicians, understand the possibilities of a unified national approach that at the same time bolstered local libraries rather than replacing them?

Time for action

The basic concept of a well-integrated TeleRead approach has been around for years and has even been discussed in the Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report.

Now that the distractions of the campaign are over, maybe the politicians can get to work. They could also do worse than to repeal the Hollywood-bought Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which vastly adds to the costs of getting modern classics online, whether through a TeleRead-style approach or otherwise.

I'm not expecting immediate progress. But the fight for a TeleRead approach and more enlightened copyright law will go on; and, no, I won't write off the Bush administration despite my own liberal Democratic background. First step is to educate policymakers about the social benefits and economies of a well-stocked national digital library system blended with local libraries and schools. The second step is to make it practical, and when the true costs of the elitist Bono Act are known in a TeleRead context, perhaps Washington will act.

Irony Department: The AP story mentioned Wikis and the issue of knowing where your information came from. But guess what. At least as published by CNN, the story went out to the world without a byline. Nor did the AP provide insights into the editing process. With well-credentialed contributors and the right software, Wikis can be more factual than encyclopedias or wire services. Of course, even within a backward profession like journalism, some interesting experiments are happening--although, as expected, many of the most innovative efforts are by nonjournalists. See On Local Sites, Everyone's A Journalist by the Washington Post's Leslie Walker.

Detail: In this era of commercial search engines, some with questionable ethics, I especially appreciated the following in the AP article: "One concern is commercial influence online; some search engines run ads and accept payments to include sites in their indexes, with varying degree of disclosure. 'If I'm going to go to the library, chances are somebody hasn't paid a librarian 100 bucks to point me to a particular book,' said Beau Brendler, director of the Consumer Reports WebWatch."

Coming in the next day or so: A first-person story showing the weaknesses of the present Net for research--and the need for human librarians.

Related: IT and teachers, from Sites and Soundbytes: Libraries, Books, Technology and News--Tasha's Blog published by the Caestecker Public Library in Green Lake, Wisconsin.

(AP article found via a recent post by Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart to the eBook Community List. At least one other list member pointed out the obvious--that K-12 students need to know about Gutenberg. True. But PG, though valuable, is hardly a substitute for a TeleRead-style approach. The students' ignorance of Gutenberg is one of many examples of the poor integration of existing online resources with the school and library systems.)
posted by David Rothman at 5:09 PM | permanent link

Go to Circuit City or the Sports Authority, and clerks may approach you to see if you need help.

Now, what if librarians could be as responsive to patrons who look as if they're in need of assistance? In fact, suppose they could help them in the stacks while using a Wi-Fi-enhanced tablet to call up information directly from catalogs and other resources.

That's exactly what is happening at the Salem-South Lyon District Library in South Lyon, Michigan, which, via two Acer TravelMate tablet PC's, is letting reference staffers go mobile. Cool. Details via the New York Times. (Thanks, Rochelle and LISNews.)
posted by David Rothman at 1:19 PM | permanent link

E-books are "in" again for the moment. In the wake of a semi-clueful story in the book section, the New York Times has followed up with a second mention of our little industry--in Libraries Reach Out, Online. Writer Tim Gnatek is correctly upbeat on the New York Public Library's e-book efforts.

While I'm not the biggest fan of OverDrive, which has abused small publishers and is an enabler for the DRM Mafia, the company deserves credit for its role in the NYPL site and other well-presented online libraries elsewhere.

Coming attraction

That said, I wonder what will happen in the future when library patrons are able to borrow movies online--a development briefly mentioned in the Times.

Will OverDrive and similar companies see library movies as major revenue sources and eventually push them at the expense of books? Already OverDrive has plans in the works to enable library patrons to borrow whole movies online.

The Times does not raise the budget issue deliberately, but how can one read today's article without that thought coming to mind?

DVDs vs. books: Online movies another threat?

Online movies from libraries could get expensive. Correctly or not--I haven't checked--I hear that one major library system in a western state is spending as much on DVDs as on books. Will the new technological capabilities end up diverting more money from actual books?

If so, it would be wrong to single out OverDrive as the main villain. Instead it will be the libraries themselves. I'm a big fan of multimeda, including movies, especially multimedia for people with learning disabilities but hopefully libraries won't overdo it.

They could do worse than to explore OverDrive alternatives such as the Internet Archive, which, although no substitute for sources of modern films, can provide patrons with a rich assortment of films beyond Hollywood's offerings.

Now, if only the Archive can prevail in court in the end in its campaign against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act--an anti-taxpayer, anti-consumer measure whose damage will just be magnified if libraries OD on movies.

Yes, the issue isn't just movies vs. p- and e-books but also, "Which movies?" Will libraries help spread around the works of independent film makers and grassroots types--or just try to compete against Blockbuster?

Related: Ebooks coming to local libraries, in the Johnson County Sun in Kanasas, as well a District library goes digital with eBooks lending program in the Grand Rapids Press in Michigan.
posted by David Rothman at 1:26 AM | permanent link

Hollywood's anti-consumer copyright proposals are like Freddy Krueger--they could be back in the next serial on Capitol Hill. But as a Los Angeles Times article makes clear, the MPAA has suffered some major defeats. Among my favorites: the failure of Induce-style legislation.
posted by David Rothman at 1:21 AM | permanent link

The economics of the REB1200 mentioned below--once a $700 luxury--have changed greatly since the unit came out a few years ago.

Earlier this week I bought a used REB1200 on eBay for $135, and I'm hoping that just like the monochrome machines from RCA, Gemstar and the others, the REB1200 will eventually be rebranded in a low-cost version. No guarantees of that happening. But even a mere equivalent of the REB1200 would be welcome.

Beyond the lower cost of old technology, keep in mind the potential of the $15 GEB eBook Librarian program and the rival RebLibrarian to open up a wealth of public domain content. What's more, the Fictionwise/eBookwise bookstore hopes to be able to help REB1200 owners update their machines so they can enjoy new commercial titles from major publishers. Also see the eBookwise FAQ page on migration.

Related: The super-informative REB1200 for Dummies site, which addresses such issues as how to convert books to a 1200-friendly format and transfer them to the 1200 from your PC. Also check out the official REB1200 support center.
posted by David Rothman at 1:47 AM | permanent link

Hartmut Verfürden in Germany--a regular reader of this blog--was nice enough to write in and tell me that those e-books with simulated flippable pages are created with help from the Desktop Author program. Thanks.
posted by David Rothman at 1:22 AM | permanent link

The wait is over for eBookwise-1150 owners wanting almost-instant importation of Project Gutenberg books and others in TXT, HTML, Word and RTF formats--without any need to use eBookwise's server.

The GEB eBook Librarian, which I'd been testing in beta and which also works on other machines in the Rocket/Gemstar family, is now available for real. Steve Breen's trial version is free; registration costs $15 (not the $30 given in an earlier version of this post).

Another program also exists now for importing popular formats, including for use with the 1150, although the GEB eBook Librarian seems to be the more popular of the two.
posted by David Rothman at 9:40 PM | permanent link

At least for now, you can't run eReader or Microsoft Reader on a Smartphone. That's what happens when the members of the Proprietry Format Mafia waste time and money on separate formats rather than on more important matters--such as more platforms for their software. Check out Now Where's eReader and Spb Finance for My Smartphone? in Smartphone Thoughts. OpenReader, anyone?
posted by David Rothman at 4:37 AM | permanent link

"Currently, Digital Flip is probably the only software that is able to simulate a real book closely. With it, you can quickly flip through dozens of digital pages and be able to catch a glimpse of what is on each page--much like browsing through a magazine. A page can also be turned back and forth slowly if you want to compare the content on either side." - Wow, just like the real thing in The Electric New Paper, via eBookAd.

Related: Interactive Digital Flip Books, seen on Hiero Web Interactive. Not sure if it's the same product mentioned in the Electric New Paper. At any rate, beware of possible spyware from the free download of the DNL Reader mentioned on Hiero. The picture is from the Hiero page; I wonder what the hardware is.

The real issue: Will digitally simulated flipping pages add to the user experience? Yes, you can "catch a glimpse of what is on each page--much like browsing through a magazine," as the New Paper describes it. But you can preview a book's pages quickly via a mix of a scroll-navigation line and the forward-backward buttons even on an old Gemstar-type machine. Still, if the flip feature can help bring people into the e-book fold, perhaps the technology can justify itself--especially for picture books.
posted by David Rothman at 2:28 AM | permanent link

Detail: An LISNews reader in Canada wrote: "I just finished reading The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald. This book is brilliant, and very popular. My local public library has thirty-six copies, and there are 108 holds outstanding on the next available copy. The book is over a year old." To the extent possible--publishers can be backwards about these things, even with provisions for fair compensation--TeleRead would allow simultaneous accesses.

Good tinfoil: I found the L.A. Times article via Rochelle and LISNews. The name of her blog, by the way, is Tinfoil + Raccoon, and she has a fun explanation of it. Tinfoil is one of the best-written of the library-related blogs and at times uses Rochelle's personal experiences in discussing such issues as "teachers who don't get IT." That's a mere cat in the picture with Rochelle, incidentally, but perhaps she'll reproduce racoon photos at some point. Who knows? A raccoon logo for Rochelle down the line? Decades ago the smart set loved raccoon coats. And now--raccoon blogs? Actually I can even imagine a blog by a raccoon in a way, a real one. Imagine strapping a mike and wireless Webcam to one of the critters and doing a blog page with both real-time viewing and audio and video highlights.
posted by David Rothman at 6:58 AM | permanent link

At $100, the eBookwise-1150 is a bargain--and it's a still better one now that people are figuring out ways to make books more viewable on the LCD screen. The display is usable for most e-book readers. But it could be better for some aging eyes if the words on the screen were bigger or in boldface.

The answer, at least for public domain texts and changeable commercial books, is as easy as the editor you use for Web pages. (1) Get the book you want in HTML format if possible--Blackmask is a convenient source of public domain texts in the format. (2) Make a backup copy. (3) Insert boldface and, if you want, specify a large font size. Yes, even FrontPage will work.

Works well with conversion

(4) Use online conversion via Fictionwise/eBookwise to prepare the file for importation into the eBookwise-1150. This also works fine with a beta of Steve Breen's GEB eBook Librarian program for the 1150. (5) Once you have the file loaded as described in the conversion instructions, you can use your 1150 to choose between the smaller and larger sizes as specified in the Quick Start Guide. The text displayed best for me if I simply added boldface rather than changing the font size via book files. But at least the size-changing capability is there for me if I want it.

If you're really knowledgeable about the 1150 and formats, you can tweak files in more sophisticated ways such as through a style sheet--a possibility mentioned on the Fictionwise e-mail list.

Better fix ahead?

Let's hope we won't need a workaround in the future. Fictionwise, in character with its rep as customer friendly, is investigating solutions such as firmware modifications. I believe that it would be rather classy of eBook Technologies, Inc, which supplies Fictionwise with the hardware, if ETI made the firmware changes for free. Ideally the revised firmware will include all the font-changing capabilities of the old Gemstar GEB1100, which lets you download fonts from your desktop PC. Why can't the ETI machine? In addition, it would be helpful if ETI give us a landscape mode. While the 1150 is a great buy for the money, I'm amazed that the ETI team let the present machine reach Fictionwise without more thoughtful treatment of the font isssue. How about it, ETI?

Detail: Feedback welcomed on the above how-to. If you have a better way, e-mail me.
posted by David Rothman at 4:50 AM | permanent link