Monthly Archives: September 2009

The Frankfurt Book Fair has released a summary of the results of a recent survey of 840 international publishing company representatives.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:

As a general rule, digital products still only comprise a small fraction of sales: Around 60 per cent of those polled estimate that considerably less than ten per cent [...] Continue reading →

The West Virginia University Libraries are recruiting a Library Systems Department Head.
Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Head directs technology planning and customer service, and provides hands-on support for ExLibris/Voyager online catalog, library web services, digital collections, and an institutional repository. Supervises 5 staff. . . . The Systems Department maintains a library network with [...] Continue reading →

The NSF Division of Information & Intelligent Systems has awarded a grant to the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass Amherst, the Perseus Digital Library Project at Tufts, and the Internet Archive for their "Mining a Million Scanned Books: Linguistic and Structure Analysis, Fast Expanded Search, and Improved OCR" proposal.
Here's an excerpt from the [...] Continue reading →

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries have released dmMonocle 1.0.
Here's an excerpt from the project page:

dmMonocle is a stand-alone image viewer for CONTENTdm® collections, intended as a replacement for the default image viewer provided with CONTENTdm® 4.x and 5.x. The goal of the project is to make CONTENTdm® images, such as photos, maps, and [...] Continue reading →

Ithaka has released What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization .
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Based on the expected continuing needs for print materials, this report considers the minimum time period for which access to the original will be required and assesses the number of print copies necessary to ensure that [...] Continue reading →

Yes! Another one from the series. Only two problems: 1. this one’s a paperback, and 2. it’s not mine. This is another “guest post” from my pal Sam Grawe from our day competing for Chicago’s worship-worthiest books.
Gotta love the continuing use of this basic motif. And the black and yellow. Cover designed by Toshihiro Katayama.

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This is a continuation of Reviewing the Reviewers: A Dialogue about Book Reviewing with Steven Reynolds and Carol Buchanan, which led to a very lively discussion.
Self-Publishing Review: When a self-published novel is awful, do you think the reviewer has any responsibility to spare the writer’s feelings?
Steven Reynolds: A writer will always be [...] Continue reading →

Vous cherchez une liseuse pour cet automne? Elles sont à choisir ici. Continue reading →

The more self-published books I read, the more despondent I get over the state of what now appears to pass for “writing” in general. With some (OK, most) of these books, you are sometimes forced to wonder if it isn’t a case of reader bias brought about by shoddy packaging. It seems that it would [...] Continue reading →

Trois conférences de l’Université d’Eté de Marseille qui manquaient, celle de Daniel Bourrion (Bibliothèque de l’Université d’Angers) sur les nouveaux usages en bibliothèques universitaires, Virginie Clayssen (Editis) sur les modèles économiques de l’édition numérique et Marin Dacos/Pierre Mounier (Cléo) sur… Continue reading →