Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Daily Thoughts 07/18/2012

Kyōka hachi taika Print shows four men (poets) looking at a scroll.
Date Created/Published: [between 1818 and 1824]
Daily Thoughts 07/18/2012

Last night on the train home, I read three short books which were given out by O'Reilly Media at Book Expo America; the first was What is EPUB3 Matt Garrishwhich is 16 pages long, the second was HTML 5 for Publishers by Sanders Kleinfeld which is 44 pages long, and the last was Breaking the Page Transforming Books and the Reading Experience which is 75 pages long by Peter Meyers which is a preview edition of a larger book.  Combined this information tells me that the ebooks we are getting are not that adequate.

Things are described like how to create an index to a book which links to every mention of a particular word, how to embed video and audio, how to make a book much more searchable, how to do better note taking which includes the ability to easily share notes, better pagination strategies, how to create timelines in books, geolocation tags, expanded annotations, and browsable sections inside an ebook.  The ebooks we are getting now are mainly containers for words with not very much else.
There is also some talk about alternate formats like novellas, short stories, and books based on timelines and collections of photographs with recipes or captions.

On the way to work, I read some more of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Social Network.  The author is describing issues of choosing content and moderating discussions.  One of the most important points made in the writing is that it is absolutely essential to create original content that cannot be found in other places.

This morning, I checked the Facebook and Twitter pages for the library.  I also checked the displays and gift books.  I have a copy of the latest New York Times Book Review to read.  The computer lab is open between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. today.

We are working on reassigning ordering.  I took some time to walk around the 900s and biography section this morning.  I was looking to see if there could be some shifting done as well as relocating some items to the mezzanine.

I put The Comic Book History of Comics by Fred Van Lente on hold.  I also put the book Energized by Edward Lerner on hold which is a near future thriller about solar power satellites.  I found it while looking at Locus Magazine online new releases list.

I had a chance to do a bit more inventory in the mezzanine as well as a bit more of the Introduction to Javascript tutorial on Lynda.com.  I am almost finished with it.  Then I have to go back and do some more of the Codecademy classes.

Web Bits

David A. Bell: The Bookless Library
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/david-bell-future-bookless-library?page=0,0

Beacon To Publish First Tweet Book: Tweet Land of Liberty
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/52977-beacon-to-publish-first-tweet-book-tweet-land-of-liberty.html

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