Daily Thoughts 6/8/2009

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer.

Daily Thoughts 6/8/2009

I am sitting at my local library. I stopped by to pick up a book to read in the laundromat. I picked up Peaks and Valleys by Spencer Johnson, M.D., he is the author of Who Moved My Cheese which is appropriate reading for a laundromat. The librarian signed me up for the adult summer reading book club and a raffle to win a digital picture frame. I also had a chance to check my email. I should be heading out to the laundromat now.

Peaks and Valleys was an entertaining, but lightweight allegory. It was a way to pass time at the laundromat. It took me about an hour to read while I was at the laundromat. I read it during the wash and dry cycle. It was about the highs and lows of life. The books premise is that you should stay focused on reality and try to make your good times last longer than your bad times. It was a feel good book with a positive, happy message. It was a pleasant break from every day things. It is the kind of book which you read if you want to feel good for a while.

This afternoon, I finished reading In The Stormy Red Sky on my computer. I don't mind reading on the computer. I have a fairly large size screen and have gotten used to reading on it. I did not really feel any eye strain and did not miss holding the book in my hand. I think I am getting used to reading things on a personal computer. I still am not sure how I will feel about reading on a device like an Iphone or a Kindle.

It looks like we will be on the Random House list to be sent advanced reading copies for my library. I am looking forward to getting an advanced reading copy of Bill Willingham's Peter and Max. It is the first novelization of the Fable graphic novel.

Web Bits

Authors@Google videos, I have watched many of them. They are embeddable in websites and can be quite interesting. http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=AtGoogleTalks&view=videos

A list of bookstores from Independent Booksellers of New York City. http://www.ibnyc.org/the-list

Daly Thoughts 6/7/2009

William Morris Age 53

Daily Thoughts 6/7/2009

Yesterday, I went to the Strand after going to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art to see if they had In The Stormy Red Sky by David Drake. They were out of stock there. They also do not have it at my local library or the library I work at. I could order it, but I decided to try it on Baen as a Webscription.

This is the first time I have spent money on an ebook online. I went to the Baen website, joined as a member, then downloaded the book. The first thing I noticed was that I needed an unzipper to make the download available. I got a new one. Then I looked at the two different formats available that I could read on my computer as an .rtf or an .html file. When I looked at the .rtf file, it looked like I was reading a Word document. This was not to my liking. I tried the HTML reader which is much better. Now, I can finish reading the book on my computer. It cost me $15.00 online versus $25.00 at the bookstore. The .html document looks like most of the books in the Baen free library which I am used to.

I also finished reading Connected The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, Ph.D. and James H. Fowler, Ph.D.. I am thinking about how I will review it. It made me a bit uncomfortable because it made me realize that I was not networking or using social networks properly. I am going to have to change my behavior if I am going to get the full use of both social networks online and in person. There is al lot for me to learn.

Twitter for libraries and librarians. http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/may09/Milstein.shtml

Daily Thoughts 5/24/2009

Richard Wright photographed by Carl von Vechten. Richard Wright wrote a book of Haiku called Haiku This Other World. As the restrictions on this collection expired in 1986, the Library of Congress believes this image is in the public domain However, the Carl Van Vechten estate has asked that use of Van Vechten's photographs "preserve the integrity" of his work, i.e, that photographs not be colorized or cropped, and that proper credit is given to the photographer.

Daily Thoughts 5/24/2009

I have been reading more of Fool's Gold by Mark Y. Herring. It is an entertaining book. I rather like some of his arguments. You pick up some of the common arguments against using the internet as a pure research tool. He reminds us that Google has a separate search engine for more scholarly articles http://www.google.scholar.com/ . Most pages with databases or deep repositories of knowledge are hidden from standard search engines. They reside in a place called the deep or invisible web. Complete Planet has a search engine specifically designed to find pages with databases built into them http://www.completeplanet.com/ Incy Wincy is another search engine which can reach into the invisible web http://www.incywincy.com/ .

As I read this book I am learning many arguments that will be useful in why we should keep a library and not just have everything put on the internet. There are many secondary uses that are not just about resisting change. Libraries are in an environment of budget cuts and have to be able to justify their existence.

Right now, I am reading the section on Google and digitization. Mark Y. Herring correctly states that the main benefit of digitization is increased access. The moment an item is put on a website in digital format it instantly becomes available to anyone who has a web connection. This will become a tremendous boon for all the classics of literature and all the works in the public domain. Suddenly they will become available all over the world. This is the real advantage of scanning, much more so than preservation. Because the information is public domain it also is public property to manipulate and build on. I look forward to seeing the creative use of this material.

I took a short break from reading serious material and tried out one of the previews on the Baen previews, In The Stormy Red Sky by David Drake. It is military space opera, part of the RCN (Royal Cinnabar Navy) series featuring Captain Leary and Adele Mundy. The story reminds me a little bit of the Master and Commander series of naval fiction written by Patrick O' Brian. There are seven free chapters. http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416591591/1416591591.htm?blurb

Web Bits

If you go to Stanza the most popular free ereader produced by Lexcycle with over a million downloads for the Iphone, one of the main highlights is places to get ebooks. Many of these books are public domain or free. http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/where_to_get_books

This is also interesting. It is in its early stages. You should be able to get many public domain books available as print on demand. http://www.publicdomainreprints.org/

There is a corollary idea that goes with giving away free books on ereaders. This cannot be proven yet. If you give away an ebook by an author, you are likely to increase demand for their books that are in print. I might even say that if you give away a free ebook, the reader is going to look for more print books for free. Libraries are places with a lot of free material. I think the increase in the availability of free material in the public domain through the internet will increase library use.