Riot Librarian

Category: books

  • Et tu, brute?

    Other people have said more insightful and salient things about Penguin’s recent defection from Overdrive, but I didn’t want to let this one go without saying something. Penguin’s decision to pull all ebooks from Overdrive’s lending program is a huge disappointment (especially when you consider it in light of the fact that they make a…

  • What I read in 2011

    Another year, another lamentation that I didn’t write as much as I wanted. I did, however, read a lot last year. Here’s the list of books I read in 2011. Asterisks indicate my favorite book in each month, and (RR) indicates that it was a re-read. January “In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female…

  • Standards for Social Reading

    On Wednesday, I had the privilege of attending a NISO working meeting on creating a standard for Open Ebook Annotations. The meeting was held the day before the Books in Browsers conference, and was the third such working meeting, after meetings held in New York and Frankfurt. The purpose was to brainstorm around what the…

  • Banned Books Week: A Defense

    Another Banned Books Week is coming to a close, and once again, my RSS feed has been filled with arguments for and against this most well-known library tradition. I’ve always been a supporter of Banned Books Week, even organizing events around it for the Simmons College community when I was chair of the Simmons Progressive…

  • Another Big Deal? Working with Publishers

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ebooks and digital content, and about what libraries have to do to get publishers and other content providers to work with us and play nice. I’ve been trying to think of what we can offer them in exchange for favorable terms on digital content, and my mind has…

  • Michael Porter on Library Renewal and eResources

    Michael Porter presented a session with a nice, attention-grabbing title at ALA Annual: “You Mean Libraries Will Be Able to Deliver Content Better than iTunes and Netflix?” The session wasn’t really about how libraries will deliver content better than commercial providers; it was more like a rousing exhortation to libraries to start re-thinking how we…

  • More thoughts on ebooks, and preservation

    I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and write up a polished piece on ebooks and my growing reservations, but I wanted to get a few thoughts out of my head in the midst of the madness that is my life these days. My growing reservations are really around one of the…

  • eBook User’s Bill of Rights

    The question of ebook access rights kind of exploded last Friday in the biblio-blogosphere, when HarperCollins, through ebook vendor Overdrive, announced their intention to have library ebooks expire after 26 uses (that equates to about a year of constant lending). Their rationale is that print books physically deteriorate and have to be replaced, which is…

  • Another year of readin’ books

    Two years ago I decided to keep track of what I read over the course of a year, because I never seemed to be able to remember back more than a month or two on my own. With the aid of a simple Google document, I can look back over 2010 and remember every book…

  • A New Year, a New Start

    Whooooa. So much for posting more last year. I expected to have so much to say about my first job as a bona fide librarian, but as it turned out, I was so busy getting my bearings and learning how to do my job that I didn’t have much energy left to formulate sentences about…