TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Quinn Anya Carey’ Category

By Quinn Anya Carey

Librarians and book-lovers have a community going on Second Life, and real-world library science programs are taking notice. The Library Science program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be offering a course on Second Life librarianship, with class meetings held in Second Life.

Meetings on-line are held for two hours on Friday mornings (May 25 - July 13) with further discussion and assignments taking place through forums. More info and registration are available on the course webpage.

Disclaimer: As of this summer, I will be a UIUC library science student through their on-line program.

Book-loving avatar image by Travelin’ Librarian, as seen on Flickr.

By David Rothman

The TeleBlog’s daily readership often surpasses that of LibraryJournal.com and normally exceeds the audience of The Book Industry Standard if you go by Alexa.com. Would you believe, the TeleBlog even beats Publishers Weekly on rare occasions. Check out the numbers yourself.

We may well be the most popular Web blog dedicated to e-book industry news and views, as opposed to, say, mobile news in general. Whether the topic is DRM or Iraq, we’ll generally cover it from an e-book angle, and this focus has helped put us on the map. At various times we’ve drawn links from major sites ranging from Wired News and Slashdot to the New York Times, NPR and the Chronicle of High Education, where we’re on the blogroll of the Wired Campus blog. Boing Boing and the Yale LawMeme have praised us, and if:book and MobileRead also have been gracious.

Problem is, I’ve ended up writing at least 90 percent of the TeleBlog’s posts, and to continue at this rate without an adequate revenue stream is out of the question. Google ads would not do the trick. And with a zillion free news sources out there, a subscription plan doesn’t make sense.

Bottom line: Less of David and ideally more of you

So here’s the deal. Effective immediately, I’ll post only when the muses drive me to it—maybe once or twice a week. I hope other contributors will fill the vacuum. I’ll provide editorial assistance if need be so people can appear here at their best, writing in the TeleBlog’s informal style. So feel free to pitch in with your own articles on relevant topics for a global audience.

Who knows? Maybe in the end the number of posts will increase. I’d love that. My goal is not to be indispensable. (more…)

By Quinn Anya Carey

Ever noticed how e-book features—like web links and multimedia—are creeping into p-books?

This is nothing new in the history of books. While the printing press quickly replaced the manuscript in Western Europe, printed books in Russia played a minor role for over a century after their introduction. Instead, manuscripts adopted certain characteristics of printed books. And that’s not the only parallel between early Russian printing and modern e-books. (more…)

By David Rothman

“A Moscow court has found Maxim Moshkov, owner of the biggest and most popular Russian on-line library, lib.ru, guilty of breaching copyright law. The court ordered Moshkov to pay a 3,000-ruble ($107.7) fine to the plaintiff, writer Eduard Gevorkyan.” - Moscow News, via war systems.

The TeleRead take: We’re pleased that Warsystems picked up TeleBlog contributor Quinn Anya Carey’s fascinating interview with Maxim Moshkov. No copyright suit from us! He’s appealing the ruling, by the way. Meanwhile best of luck to Maxim, who’s appealing. Update, 6:22 p.m. It appears someone was catching up with trackbacks. This is months-old news.

By Quinn Anya Carey

How many episodes of “Law & Order” does it take to scan a 400 page book? With my clunky old scanner, the answer is 3 1/3. That’s a third of the time I spend in class each week.

It’s time to get a new scanner, but I’m faced with a predicament: I want something better than the $100-$300 models that are out there, but can’t afford a multi-thousand dollar model that costs more than a year’s worth of rent. I’m looking for a flatbed that can give me grayscale scans at 300-400 dpi, and the largest possible size to accommodate scanning two pages of larger-size books at once. The faster the better. Any suggestions?

Some of the models I’ve looked at are below:
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By Quinn Anya Carey

“Will eBooks replace print? Well, when’s the last time you unfurled a freshly scribed scroll?” asks Ruth Beal. “All libraries will one day simply be websites for virtual visitation,” says David W. Boles. Even Bill Gates predicts the death of the p-book: “[P]aper is only the latest in a long line of reading ‘technologies’ that were made obsolete each time an improved solution emerged.”

But p-books and e-books are not complete equivalents. They each have different optimal functions that are suited to different kinds of reading. It’s time for a truce in the battle of p-book vs. e-book in favor of specialized coexistance.
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By Quinn Anya Carey

When you think of the people adamantly opposed to digitization, and their motivation for that position, who comes to mind? Greedy corporate executives, perhaps?

Talking with people at the Hilandar Research Library at The Ohio State University about attitudes among curators, however, I have learned of a surprising group of people just as staunchly opposed to digitization, on very different grounds.

Unlike most in their profession, some librarians in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe are opposed not only to digitization of medieval Slavic manuscripts, but any form of distribution. (more…)

By Quinn Anya Carey

The upcoming University of Chicago colloquium, “What to Do With a Million Books?” (held in November, submission deadline in August) now has a website with the updated announcement and submission guidelines.

By Quinn Anya Carey

It’s a student’s nightmare: a professor with 38 years in the field is retiring. What’s worse, without an inclination for self-promotion, a significant number of his best works have never been published. A paper copy of some of these works has been handed out in classes, but paper is so easily lost. What happens to all of his papers once he’s gone? This is the dilemma I’ve faced this week. My solution? You guessed it: e-books.
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By Quinn Anya Carey

The University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology have put out a call for papers for a colloquium entitled “What to Do With a Million Books,” to be held November 5th and 6th at the University of Chicago.

The goal of this colloquium is to bring together scholars and researchers in the Humanities and Computer Sciences to examine the current state of Digital Humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry, and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research.

Proposals for paper presentations, poster sessions, and software demonstrations are due August 15th. The full call for papers is posted below. If anyone attending wants advice on sleeping/eating/getting around in the Hyde Park neighborhood, just get in touch with me.
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By David Rothman

Here’s when e-books will finally be a serious medium–when University of Chicago students can snag awards for collections of digital books, not just the paper variety.

That’s no hypothetical matter here at the TeleBlog, where we can all congratulate Quinn Anya Carey for winning the prestigious Brooker Prize for undergraduates with superior book collections. Hers has 1,500 titles (around 150 similarly-themed books were submitted for the contest), although the contest also took into account rare and unique individual books. Quinn won $1,000 and another student won $500, thereby inspiring a headline in a U of C publication: “On what will they spend their prize? On more books, of course.” The photo shows Quinn at the Brooker ceremony.

Now we return to the e-book angle and the TeleRead goal of spreading the books around, not just the classics but also those serving all kinds of academic, professional and personal needs. The university news bureau wrote of Quinn, a specialist in Slavic languages: (more…)

By Quinn Anya Carey

At BookExpo, in 3 days, my boyfriend and I picked up 290 books, in 16 tote bags, before driving 694 miles back to Chicago. After taking 5 trips up 2 flights of stairs, we filled 6 shelves.

Did I mention we have to move in 20 days?

I dream of a BookExpo where anyone registered can log onto a website and download publishers’ pre-release books, and post feedback through annotation. If only because 290 books in the back of a minivan don’t do good things for gas mileage.