Publishing


The Library and the Bazaar is an essay by Greer Hauptman that discusses copyright options, libraries, and the freedom to read.

Of note is his argument that with greater control being exerted by publishers over access to content (think e-journals) it becomes important to recognize how critical access to information is to the library’s mission.  Now think about this in terms of e-books where we might be ten years from now.

found via Open Access News

Stories Behind 10 Dr. Seuss Stories is a post at the Mental Floss blog with information about the inspirations (and representations) behind several of the great books by Theodor Seuss Giesel.

via LISNews

TeleRead has an excellent post dissecting the recent ruling against the author of the Harry Potter Lexicon.  It examines the Fair Use aspects of copyright as they apply to this particular case.

via LISNews

Mike Dunford writing in of The Questionable Authority has written a post that compares the business model and profits of journal publishers with oil companies.  One figure that he arrives at is shocking, to say the least, but also illustrative of the current journal market:

Gas prices are going up. You’ve been combining trips, cutting your milage as much as you can, driving a more efficient vehicle, and your fuel costs are still going up. You drive home from work, stopping along the way to put $30+ dollars worth of gas into the 10 gallon tank in your Prius. You sit on the sofa, turn on the news, and hear that Exxon-Mobil just reported quarterly profits of about $1,500 per second. The price of something that you need to buy is going through the roof, it’s making things inconvenient for you, and the people who sell it are making money faster than the mint can print it. How happy are you?

If you want to understand the anger that the major publishing houses are generating, that’s a good place to start.

Publishers don’t make money at anything close to the clip that Big Oil does, but they’re not doing badly. Elsevier is probably the biggest fish, and they come in at a respectable $1,700 per minute. That’s 60 times less than Exxon-Mobil, but it’s still a nice chunk of change.

He goes on to discuss the relationships between authors and publishers, and the reaction to the open access movement.  All in all, this is a good essay that can provide some perspective for those outside of the library and publishing worlds.

found via Open Access News

To celebrate the 100th birthday of Louis L’Amour, Bantam Books is providing a free copy of “Education of a Wandering Man : The Centennial Hardcover Edition” to any free lending library in the United States.

found via the Unshelved blog

Peter Suber at Open Access News has an excellent post on the language being used when discussing copyright infringement of textbooks. I personally prefer what I have in the title of this post; results may vary.

We have been through this with digital music. Music publishers and distributers were all up in arms about downloading music, but now they have come to see that the paradigm is shifting and what was needed was a change in their approach. People will follow the rules, generally, as long as those rules make sense to them.

Watch for the misuse of language on both sides of the argument, and remember that the movement in publishing is towards open access and digital downloading. The sooner everyone understands this and adapts, the sooner people will get what they want/need at a fair price, and publishers will make a fair profit.

Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 is the title of the preface, but also a good summary of the overall content, of the current issue of First Monday. Just from a scan of the articles (nope, I haven’t read any of them yet), it seems to be an examination of the dark side of 2.0. First Monday is always a good read, so I expect this to be up to their usual standards.

It looks interesting!

found via if:book

Recipes for a 5-Star Library is the latest “cookbook” from the MaintainIT project.  The cookbooks are pdf files that are free to use

The project focuses on public computers in libraries, and their Library Spotlight articles are drawn from real-world examples.  The resources they provide are top-notch and collaboration at their best.

If you work with your library’s public workstations, check out what they have to offer.  Tips and solutions from dozens of libraries await you!

found via Free Range Librarian

The Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service is something that I have thought would make an interesting business model:  take public domain materials and publish them using a print-on-demand service.

With the various scanning projects, there are more and more public domain works available electronically each day, and the benefits are many.  Whether out-of-print, rare, fragile or some combination of all three, many books won’t work in a circulating collection.  This can put many books back into library circulation.

This could also be a potential model for rare book and archival collections : scan everything and make the newly published version available for your public users — without risking the originals.

from LISNews

A couple of years ago I encountered some type of advertisement for a particular book. I don’t recall what the exact title was, but it was something along the lines of “The 2004 Outlook for Thingamajiggers in the United States.” I also don’t recall the price, but it was some incredible amount of money, like $500 or so. I remember being intrigued, as well as a little put off, by the ad, and was never quite able to wrap my brain around it.

I think I just found out a great deal about where that book came from. Speed Writing is an article in the Guardian newspaper that details the writing and publishing of one particular author: Philip M. Parker. Take a look at the following numbers:

  • Philip M. Parker is shown as being the author of 85,747 books on Amazon.com (at this moment).
  • 9,536 of those fall into the Business and Investing category, which seems to contain a great many books like the one I encountered years ago.
  • These are not pamphlets or smallish books; one of the publications I checked weighs in at 710 pages.
  • Parker claims that his total number of published books is in the area of 200,000 (per the Guardian article), an
  • It takes him approximately 20 minutes to write each book, using a machine he invented.

The article doesn’t go into any detail about the machine; it is saving that for a follow-up article next week. As the article was published last Tuesday, I expect it will be five more days before we learn more.

found on if:book

Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use is part of the Citizen Media Law Project’s Legal Guide, scheduled to launch later this month.   It contains a great introduction/overview of what is allowed and not allowed with copyright.  Best of all, it presents the topic without lapsing into copyfraud hyperbole.

found via LISNews

Census Atlas of the United States is the first publication of a “comprehensive atlas of population and housing produced by the Census Bureau since the 1920s.” The maps are beautiful and easy to use, although I doubt that an atlas of 314 pages can be properly called “comprehensive” when it comes to mapping census data. Oh… you noticed the price tag of $165.

Well, why not try out the free online edition? You get all the maps, and you only need a decent download speed (the chapters range from 3 to 21 MB).

Actually, what I would love to see is a full-blown Web 2.0 version of this resource. Imagine picking out your criteria from drop menus, choosing the scale of maps (full country, state, county, or city), and generating a map on the fly within your browser. I could think of quite a few maps that I would love to generate with that type of web site.

For good examples of what style of mapping web sites I am talking about check out ChicagoCrime.org or Trulia.

found via ResourceShelf

Free-Reading is “an ‘open-source’ instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading.” Aimed at Kindergarten/First Grade learners, it is a collaborative means to establish an education program that combines the strengths of those who work on the project, and makes it available to teachers and organizations via a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Oh, and the State of Florida just added this program to their list of approved textbooks. Not only can they save a significant amount of funds that would otherwise be spent on texts, the class materials will be current and likely to be updated by a wide variety of professional educators.

found via Open Access News

7 Things You Should Know About Lulu (Pdf) is a two-paged pamphlet that is a great overview of what the web-based publishing company Lulu can do, especially if you are in an academic setting. I have quite a bit of respect for this company and its potential, enough that I am publishing my forthcoming book through them.

“Ahhhh… the book!” (fans of Wonder Boys might know that quote!) The book, titled “The LibrarySupportStaff.org Guide to Library 2.0″ is progressing again, after being in stasis for much of November and December. About 1/3 of it is fully written (though not fully edited), with much of the rest partially written (with notes or outlines filling in the gaps).

It was begun in August, and has been moving along in fits and starts since then.

Time has been the biggest culprit: I can do quite a bit in 15-20 minute segments at lunch, but integrating these small work blocks into the book itself requires longer amounts of time without distraction. I am now in a position to get that time once per week, and can hopefully wrap things up within a couple of months.

This has taken longer than I wanted (I was hoping to be published by November) but what I have learned in the process has been worth the frustration and delays. I’m just glad that Library 3.0 didn’t happen before I finished! However, watch the next few posts for something on that particular topic….

Lulu article found via ResourceShelf

Review : Directory of Open Access Journals (Pdf), by Heather Morrison is a very good introduction to what is becoming a top-tier collection of journals.

Although some of the statistics are a bit dated (due to a strength of the DOAJ - they are adding journals fairly rapidly, and are currently past the 3,000 mark) the review hits the mark, making a great case for libraries to connect their patrons with this excellent resource.

from ResourceShelf

If you work at an academic library, especially a school which emphasizes publication, then the issue of Institutional Repositories is critical to understand.

Even if you don’t fit the above, these repositories, combined with Open Access, will strongly effect librarianship, and the way your library accesses resources.

An excellent introduction to IRs can be found in Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite (Pdf), by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (found via Resource Shelf)

Also worth reading is Today’s Digital Information Landscape by Eric Lease Morgan (mentioned here previously), which has a section on institutional repositories.

Issue 1 of the Code4Lib Journal is now available!

The journal is an open-access journal dealing with, well, the more techie aspects of libraries. Even if you aren’t into systems and web coding, you should still look this over. The articles give a snapshot of creative technical solutions for libraries, and include:

  • Beyond OPAC 2.0, an overview of CatalogWS, an application programming interface (API) for library catalogs. The idea behind the software is to create a universal way to access library catalog information across different Integrated Library Systems (ILS).
  • Book Review : The Success of Open Source, by Steven Weber, which is actually a fantastic brief overview of what Open Source is, from a library perspective.
  • 700 Dollars and a Dream, which is a column about a small library that installed and implemented Koha, an open-source Integrated Library System (ILS).

Even if you aren’t into the tech aspects of libraries, check out this journal. It never hurts to look into the leading edge of the profession, and you might encounter a new solution for your own library!

found nearly simultaneously via Catalogablog and a Web4Lib list posting by Tom Keays

Three items have caught my eye this past week, and they all point in the same direction, even though they each are about something fairly specific:

  1. First was an article about a bill working its way through the Ohio General Assembly. If passed as is, it would mandate that all state schools must provide via. their libraries two copies of every textbook used in their classes. The cost, in todays textbook market, would start in the hundreds of thousands. (received via the OhioLink-gen listserv)
  2. Next was an article in ars technica about the federal education bill that would require colleges and universities to police their networks in order to prevent file sharing. (I wonder if universities will be able to allow legal file sharing at the same time? Some don’t, apparently.) The bill would also mandate that colleges and universities provide an alternate means of acquiring copyrighted files… meaning that they would need to partner with music subscription services. (found on The Patry Copyright blog )
  3. Last was an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education detailing a project that works to provide textbooks to people in developing countries. These include donated used texts, but the focus is increasingly moving towards free and open textbooks available online. (found on Open Access News )

Put these together and what do you get? An incredible amount of pressure, financially and legally, placed on educational institutions to move towards open access. If a significant number of texts in use on a campus are available as open access, the issue of providing them becomes more a matter of format (print vs. screen) than of anything else. Look at the costs involved for policing and providing copyrighted materials. Open texts, as well as other open access media, will look very attractive to those who have to implement these laws (assuming they pass).

Think of squeezing a watermelon seed between two fingers… at some point it will move in a particular direction, and very quickly. Be prepared….

Writing at Five Miles per Hour is a post by the always interesting Karen G. Schneider. Reading it makes me feel as though I have been given a glimpse at a piece of my future.

Let me explain: in writing, as with any project, finding the time, energy, and correct frame of mind is all-important. I have moments, even days, where all three come together and I am, as I like to say, Productive.

However, some days, even weeks, just won’t give the time that is needed for proper writing. On top of that, one needs to have enough energy left over from the other demands of the day. And finally, the phrase that I often use for the frame of mind is “the ability to wrap my brain around” whatever I am creating.

Hitting that trifecta is tough unless one’s environment can be adjusted. I have been working on making such an environment for myself over the past year. It hasn’t happened more often than it has, but it is getting better. Oftentimes there are things left undone in other areas (”Hey… there’s a floor under this stuff!”) and there always seems to be stress. I understand why so many books are dedicated to significant others… if they don’t help make the environment happen, the environment oftentimes won’t.

And so the book gets written slowly but surely, and blog entries continue to be posted. And it is good to know that other people struggle to make this work, as well.

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting as much over the past few weeks.  This is likely to continue, for a couple of reasons:

  • I am becoming more interested in posting less often, perhaps two or three times weekly, and putting more of my own thoughts and ideas into those posts.  I have occasionally joked to people that this blog is my online-interactive-annotated-shared-bookmarks list, and while it does serve that purpose, I have always wanted to see it do more than be a place to share links.
  • In the past couple of weeks, I have begun a new project.  Simply put:  I am writing a book.  I will announce it in more detail in a future post, but I will say that it’s a book in which there is 1) a select, but definite audience for, 2) there isn’t another book that fulfills that particular need, and 3) it fits the subject matter of this blog very well.  I have one chapter written, another three fully outlined, and only another three or so after that.  If all goes well, it will be the first book of several that I will publish over the next couple of years.

So please bear with me over the next few weeks or so while I focus on the book project.  I will continue to post, just not as often, and likely not in as much detail as will happen once I can stop “putting my brain around” the book’s topic.  I promise that both the book, and this blog, will be better for this experience.

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