Categories
Digital Culture

BookMooch

BookMooch

Hey all you book-borrowers? There’s a new toy in town, and it’s called BookMooch.

Think: Netflix for the book set. You pay shipping, and trade books with people around the world, with BookMooch as the connector.

Bonus points for all the librarians out there: how many of their talking points below sound like Ranganathan? Is this an example of a distributed library? Is the phrase “distributed library” even meaningful? I suggested almost a year ago that LibraryThing institute something like this…and while yes, I understand that paper isn’t going anywhere…boy, can you imagine a system like this for digital books.

BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books.

BookMooch lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.

  • Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
  • No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.
  • Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every two you receive.
  • Help charities: you can also give your points to charities we work with, such as children’s hospitals (so a sick kid can get a free book delivered to their bed), Library fund, African literacy, or to us to thank us for running this web site .
  • World wide: BookMooch is not just for Americans. You can request books from other countries, in other languages. You receive 2 points when you send a book out of your country, to help compensate you for the greater mailing cost. John Buckman, who runs BookMooch, lives both in California and London, England, and was frustrated by the vast number of books that were printed in just one country but not any another, or only after several years. Translations into French, German and other languages are planned, and we already work fine with the various Amazon worldwide databases.
  • Wishlist: you can keep a “book wish list” that will automatically arrive to you when you have the points and/or the book becomes available in our catalog. Others earn 2 points if they supply a book on your wishlist, so everyone is highly motivated to help find books others are looking for.
  • All books: our goal is to make more use out of all books, to help keep books from becoming unavailable. The worst thing that can happen to a book is for no-one to be able to read it.
  • Feedback score: each time you receive a book, you can leave feedback with the sender, just like how eBay does it. If you keep your feedback score up, people are most likely to help you out when you ask for a book.
  • How we pay our bills: We tap into Amazon’s book database, and if you follow an Amazon link from our web site, we receive a commission from Amazon if you buy that book instead of getting it free from BookMooch.
Categories
Digital Culture

On my mind

ALA annual, my presentation, and what the hell I’m going to attend other than it. I’ve not had the chance to do any real planning, so I’m expecting I’ll probably be sitting in the van on the way to NOLA with the schedule on my lap trying to figure out what I’m doing while I’m there. If anyone is interested in saying “hey”, I’ll be attending at least the LITA BIGWIG meeting, as well as the LITA happy hour. I’d love to meet anyone and everyone, so come say hello!

Website redesign. Consuming nearly my every conscious thought are the issues related to the new website for my library\. Evaluating CMS’s is one thing, but the truth is that I don’t really know what I think of them until I actually build a test site…which I just barely might have time to do before I actually have to build the real site. Add on top of that information architecture (boy do we need a patron-centered rethinking), and the idiosyncrasies of templating for each CMS…I’m torn between reading everything I can, and just jumping in a getting my hands dirty.

On top of all this, Betsy is currently still in Costa Rica, which doesn’t improve things any. Talk about distraction!

No wonder I haven’t had much time for writing. I need to try harder on the “blog daily” thing. I find that if I miss a day or two, it becomes easier to not do it, and I hate not blogging.

Categories
Digital Culture

Religious? Litigious?

Parody is Protected

My good buddy Justin gets served with a Cease and Desist because of the parody billboard he created in photoshop.

Parody is protected

Anyone else want to mirror the image in protest? Or perhaps download a blank photoshop file (right click and save as) and make your own?

As Justin noted, I got my wires crossed on the directionality of my particular parody. Corrected version now in place. Sorry about my initial image, ACLU! I had the best intentions…directing people towards you as a relief mechanism, not a cause.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Post-post addendum

And after my discussion below, this seems a necessary addition:

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.

The meat of the story is:

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

The average number of errors per article in each? 3 per article reviewed in Britannica, 4 per article in Wikipedia. “AHA!” say critics. “The Wikipedia is worse!” Except, of course…the wikipedia can be fixed. Brittanica is wrong forever.

Here’s the full list of errors from each article…it would be interesting to revisit these and see if the wikipedia has been corrected.

Entry Encyclopaedia Britannica inaccuracies Wikipedia inaccuracies
Acheulean industry 1 7
Agent Orange 2 2
Aldol reaction 4 3
Archimedes’ principle 2 2
Australopithecus africanus 1 1
Bethe, Hans 1 2
Cambrian explosion 10 11
Cavity magnetron 2 2
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 4 0
CJD 2 5
Cloud 3 5
Colloid 3 6
Dirac, Paul 10 9
Dolly 1 4
Epitaxy 5 2
Ethanol 3 5
Field effect transistor 3 3
Haber process 1 2
Kinetic isotope effect 1 2
Kin selection 3 3
Lipid 3 0
Lomborg, Bjorn 1 1
Lymphocyte 1 2
Mayr, Ernst 0 3
Meliaceae 1 3
Mendeleev, Dmitry 8 19
Mutation 8 6
Neural network 2 7
Nobel prize 4 5
Pheromone 3 2
Prion 3 7
Punctuated equilibrium 1 0
Pythagoras’ theorem 1 1
Quark 5 0
Royal Greenwich Observatory 3 5
Royal Society 6 2
Synchrotron 2 2
Thyroid 4 7
Vesalius, Andreas 2 4
West Nile Virus 1 5
Wolfram, Stephen 2 2
Woodward, Robert Burns 0 3
Categories
Digital Culture Media Music

Second verse, same as the first…

A phenomenal new service launched yesterday: Mp3Tunes.com…unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how long it will stick around. Seems a bit…like mp3.com, and the lawsuit that effectively bankrupted them.

* YOUR ENTIRE MUSIC COLLECTION ONLINE
o All functions of the MP3tunes Locker work inside iTunes!
o You can store your entire music collection online with a Premium MP3tunes Locker ? unlimited storage!
o Sync your entire collection to any of your computers or devices with a Premium MP3tunes Locker
o Play your music inside iTunes or anywhere you have an Internet connection with a Basic or Premium MP3tunes Locker
o Back-up your playlists and create new ones online with a Premium MP3tunes Locker
o Webload and Sideload free music on the net directly into your Basic or Premium MP3tunes Locker
o The MP3tunes Oboe Software Suite required for backing up, syncing and playing your music in iTunes free and compatible with Windows, Mac & Linux.
o The MP3tunes Locker works with any web browser on Microsoft Windows, Apple or Linux computers.
o MP3, MP4, M4A, M4P, AAC, WMA, OGG, AIF, AIFF and MIDI files are compatible with a MP3tunes Locker

It’s an AMAZING service, though. I’d pay $40 a year just to ensure a safe backup of my music (currently over 100 gigs or so…). The streaming to any computer is just gravy. I’m tempted to try it out, and just pray when the inevitable lawsuits occur.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues

Become a Commoner


Become A Commoner

I’ve added a couple of image links to my sidebars in support of the Creative Commons fundraising effort…they are trying to raise $250K before Dec 31st, and are 1/5 or so of the way there. If you do any giving over the holiday season, this is a great cause to give to, since their work benefits everyone by making information and media easier to access. So if you’ve got $5, send it along to Creative Commons.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

MP3’s, audiobooks, and libraries

So I got an email yesterday from Shel, asking me my thoughts on ripping audiobooks from a library:

..I was wondering the other day though – I checked out a Jimmy Buffet audio CD from the library and ripped it to listen to my iPod. I then, honestly, felt guilty. Like I was somehow cheating the library or something – or more accurately, using the library inappropriately when the library had always been my friend. Have the Powers That Be just not thought about all the media sitting on library shelves, there for the taking/ripping/copying? Have libraries somehow slipped through the cracks? Just curious on your take on the situation.

She also pointed towards a BoingBoing post, originally from Neil Gaiman’s blog where a reader asks for Neil’s take on the copying of audiobooks from a library to an iPod or other MP3 player. His response:

What a wonderful ethical question. I feel almost rabbinical pondering it. No, I don’t believe you’ve broken any law. If you’d checked out the MP3 CD from your library you’d be expected to put it onto your iPod, after all. There’s a weird sort of ethical fogginess, in that I suspect that part of the idea of libraries is that when you’re done with something you return it, and of course once you have your MP3 on your computer and iPod you can keep it forever. But I think this is just one of those places where changes in technology move faster than the rules.

If you’re listening to it, and you’ve got an iPod or suchlike MP3 player, you’re almost definitely going to listen to it on your iPod. That’s how things are, and it’s a good thing (it’s why I got Harper Collins to release American Gods and Anansi Boys on MP3 CD, after all).

Probably wisest not to pull it off your iPod and give it to other people, though. Let them at least take it out of the library themselves.

I’m so happy to see an author who at least understands the perception of his readers…of course we’ll copy the files to our portable devices. My take on it? Well…it’s not to hard to figure out that I’m a copyright liberal. I feel like the consolidation of the media companies and their lobbying power in Congress has created a copyright situation that is completely out of control. And I do think that copying audiobooks that you have checked out of a library to a portable media device (MP3 player, mini disc, etc) counts as fair use. It’s format shifting. I can’t currently get a lot of audiobooks in a purely digital format (ie..downloadable), and I certainly can’t check them out of a library that way! There have been some experiments with digital audio books in libraries, but I don’t think they are widespread, nor do I think they are going to crop up across the country.

Categories
Digital Culture

Oh yeah, it’s April Fools Day

Quick roundup of the geek April Fool’s tradition for the year…posting fake articles/sites.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues Library Issues

Reading aloud allowed

Just days after Jessamyn’s post regarding DRM, my good friend Catherine emails me this DRM Rights statement from an e-book that she was helping a patron with.

———————————————————–
Adsorption: Theory, Modeling, and Analysis. By: Jozsef Toth
File Size: 6825KB
Published: 05/10/2002
E-ISBN: 0824744497

DRM Rights:
Copy 25 selections every 1 day(s)
Print 25 pages every 1 day(s)
Reading aloud allowed
Book expires 150 day(s) after download
Note that Adobe eBooks cannot be shared.
———————————————————–

I think the insanity speaks for itself. Oh how I hate thee, DRM…stupid, stupid media companies. I know that eventually the reasonable, intelligent media will overcome the stupid, dinosaur media, but I’m no longer confident it will happen in my lifetime. DRM does nothing to stop theft of IP, nor to delay or dissuade those who would traffic in media in infringing ways. It only prevents the average user from using media in the ways they wish.

I had a conversation with my good friend Barron just the other day about why it was that he couldn’t listen to his Velvet Revolver album on his shiny new iPod. After I explained to him that in order to do so he would have to break the law, his response was basically: That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

Indeed it is.

Note: I am giving explicit permission for the reading aloud of this post.

Categories
Digital Culture

Language distribution in the US

So the site us-english.com is, in my not so humble opinion, idealogically flawed…they appear to not be terribly agressive about their professed goal of English as a National language, but it’s still a goal. But the actual data that they present is really fascinating. You can search the US at a ton of levels of granularity: State, County, Metro area, and get all sorts of interesting information about the languages spoken around the country.

For instance…Orange County, North Carolina, where Carrboro and Chapel Hill reside (and where Bets and I moved to TN from) has residents that speak 45 different languages. 45 different languages in one county…ranging from Spanish (5,880 speakers) to Urdu (135 speakers) to Tagalog (115 speakers).

Franklin County, TN, where we currently live? 10 languages, with such interesting ones as Swahili (10 speakers) and Pennsylvania Dutch (105 speakers).

Carter County, KY, where I grew up? 4 languages: English, Spanish, French, German.

The listing for the US as a whole [PDF] is really interesting…I had no idea that Tagalog was the 6th most spoken language in the US.