Daily Thoughts 3/11/2010

The Reader, plaster statuette by Jules Dalou, circa 1871- 1879. Petit Palais Museum Collection, Paris. Photographed between 1902 and 1904.

Daily Thoughts 3/11/2010

We had a person over from the system to explain Overdrive for us which provides a variety of ebooks and downloads. They also showed us the itouch which is a internet only version of an apple device, a sony reader, a mp3 player, and a toshiba netbook. The netbook seemed to be the most complete of the inexpensive internet devices. It ran around $300. It is a little smaller than a laptop.

We looked at a variety of formats of ebooks, varying from Adobe epub, to the propietary apple download format. We should be getting a link to ebooks fairly soon. I am looking forward to it. I might take a look and see if there is anything which is worth downloading. We are also going to do a session on Microsoft Publisher.

The one thing which impressed me most about digital rights management part of Overdrive for libraries is the amount of software which people had to download to use the ebooks as well as all the extensive agreements which you have to click accept before using a digital book. It seemed quite long and complicated. Hopefully, they will streamline this in the future. It is much easier to just download a book for free from Creative Commons or Project Gutenberg.

Today has been fairly quiet. I checked the displays and checked on the shifting of the paperbacks. They probably will be done with the paperbacks in the next couple of days. I also spent some time going over how the projector works for a film on Saturday.

There are a couple more books on my desk, The New How Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy by Nilofer Merchant and A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel. I am particular fond of Alberto Manguel's writing. I enjoyed reading his last book, The Library At Night.

I read some more of The Time Paradox. They are writing about the different advantages and disadvantages of having a future orientation, present orientation, and past focused orientation. Sometimes, I find it enjoyable to just relax and be in the present. The Time Paradox was Library Journal best book of the year in 2008.