The Hidden Link between E-Readers and Sheep

The Wired article was inspired by a post on the Got Medieval blog.  I like the look and feel of vellum, although it is a bit squeem-inducing to think about what it is made from.

Exactly How Much Are The Times A-Changin’?

The categories that are in decline speak volumes:

• The US Postal Service is seeing a decline of 15% in mail deliveries.  Since much of their service is “fixed” (i.e. daily home delivery, regular blue box pickup), this trend will translate into an increased cost per letter.
• Newspapers are still struggling to find ways to adapt.  Many are taking an irrational track by attempting to limit services like Google News from crawling their sites.  The ironic part of this is that they could simply set up a Robots.txt file that would stop Google from indexing their news pages.  They want it both ways, apparently.
• CD Sales are declining.  Easy legal downloads and a plethora of streaming services are providing music publishers with happy customers and new revenue streams.  They have stopped fighting against the revolution.

Otherwise, only two things stand out.  Commenting on the clowns statistic is beyond the scope of my expertise, but I have to say that the books stat is impressive.  We have more than tripled the number of published books.  I wonder how many are print-on-demand vs. traditional publishing, and whether e-books are counted in the total (and whether they count in addition to the printed edition).

Oh, and if you have ever wanted to be a reality tv star, go ahead and claim that you are.  With 320 shows, who could prove you wrong?

found via Stephen’s Lighthouse

The issue seems to revolve around the fact that Pulse is a paid-for app, and having the New York Times RSS feed pre-installed amounted to charging people for the feed.  As far as that goes, I think the Times is only hurting themselves… the purpose of the feed is to get more people to visit their site and read their content (as well as view their ads).

I was curious, however, and looked up the Terms of Service.  Here is the relevant section:

2.2 The Service and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.

2.3 You may download or copy the Content and other downloadable items displayed on the Service for personal use only, provided that you maintain all copyright and other notices contained therein….

Having read this, I now suggest that you take a look at their Home Page RSS feed.  I have viewed this link using Firefox 3.6, IE 8, Chrome 5, and Safari 5.  No sign of the copyright information.  It is there, if you download the page and view it with a text editor, but it doesn’t appear to be visible using the most common web browsers, and most feed readers won’t display the copyright information, as it is encased in metadata tags.

This isn’t unusual; it isn’t even uncommon.  Terms of Service tend to be all-encompassing in their language, and if you were to take the above literally, you would be able to “download or copy the Content”, but not “display” the content.  Does “display” also include having the content appear on a computer screen, or does it only come into play when someone puts an article on their refrigerator or bulletin board?

I am a proponent of respecting copyright and licensing, but I am an even bigger proponent of respecting Fair Use and reasonable expectations.  If I print out an article from the Times because I think it will benefit someone else, why should the Times consider this an infringement?  If they don’t want us reading, discussing and sharing their content, they should reconsider their business model.  I suspect that timely, interesting articles may not be the best fit for their website and newsfeeds.

found via Nicole’s FaceBook post.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American Psychological Association has decided to offer copies of the second printing of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th ed as replacements for July’s first printing, which was found to contain a significant number of errors.

A quick search of the APA website hasn’t found any announcements or instructions, but a quick search of the social networks has turned up the following:

• A notice on the Inside Higher Ed Quick Takes site, linking to…
• A posting on the Boycott the APA Manual, 6th Edition Facebook page (membership required to view) by John Foubert, a faculty member from Oklahoma State, which states the following:

“I have just received word that After November 2, call APA at 1-800-374-2721, ext. 5510. Ask for instructions on how to go on-line and print a mailing label you can use to return your copy and receive a corrected copy.”

Whether this is all correct remains to be seen (and any incorrect information will be changed or removed as I learn more), but it appears that there is a window between November 2nd and November 15th to initiate replacing copies of the manuals.

found via Bill Drew on Facebook (more of that social networking)

The American Psychological Association’s current style book, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th ed., contains dozens of errors, several of them in examples and sample papers.  Needless to say, this is causing quite a stir among those who rely on the manual for defining the rules used for papers.

(It also makes me want to write a new verse for a certain Alanis Morissette song, but that isn’t the point…)

The APA has posted a pdf with links to other pdf files with categories of corrections.  Those categories are:

1. Errors in APA Style Rules
2. Errors in Examples
3. Clarifications
4. Nonsignificant Typos

Complete versions of the corrected sample papers can be found here.

Those libraries that serve students who use this style guide should decide how to handle the corrections.  Whether to include the correction pages with the book, or even to indicate the changes within the books themselves, are possibilities.  We should, as we ought to be prepared to do for any resource, inform users that there are known errors in the manual.

One option that we don’t have is the ability to exchange the error-containing manuals for corrected versions.  The APA will be correcting the errors in the second printing, and states that

The first printing was carefully proofed and vetted at multiple stages. The guidance provided in the book is accurate and sound.

I am not sure if I would recommend that a student use that approach when appealing a marked-down grade for typographical errors within a paper.  Of course, I wouldn’t recommend myself as a source for error-free work, as any careful reader of this blog could attest.

found via American Libraries Direct

Additional note:  it seems that the errors are not the only controversy surrounding the manual.  Many users are upset that the manual has changed the spacing recommendation after a period back to two spaces.  I learned to type on a typewriter (and still own the cast-iron glass-key Royal KMM typewriter (photo not my actual typewriter) I bought from the Brookfield Public Library’s book sale when I was a Page), and two spaces are a habit I haven’t even tried to break.  I still see it as a way to differentiate between an abbreviation and the end of a sentence.  I suspect that this will be a generational behavior.  It will be easy enough to search and replace two spaces with one, if it becomes necessary.

PLOS Currents : Influenza is built utilizing Google Knol and a new service from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) called Rapid Research Notes.  This service allows the user an easy way to follow current research and search for relevant scientific information.

As we approach influenza season, expect greater levels of concern and interest in H1N1.

found via the Official Google Blog

• New Metaphysics
• Critical Climate Change
• Global Conversations
• Unidentified Theoretical Objects

and my favorite…

• Liquid Books

According to the site, Liquid Books will be

“a series of experimental digital books published under the conditions of both open editing and free content. As such, you are free to annotate, tag, edit, add to, remix, reformat, reversion, reinvent and reuse any of the books in the series – and what’s more you are encouraged to do so. The most interesting results of such open editing and writing… will be ‘frozen’ and published by OHP”

This looks to be a great mix of scholarly publishing combined with open access, with some remixing thrown into the vat!  Also check out the press release (pdf).

thanks to Karen Schneiderman for the link

Without knowing the cost/profit information for each of these, I do wonder how  they are affected by the various pressures in the publishing world as well as the shifting of library information to the web (including social media such as blogging and Twitter).

found via LISNews

• The act of assigning a copyright to something already in the public domain is the issue; taking a Project Gutenberg text, formatting it, and publishing it is of great benefit to people, as long as one doesn’t claim protection that doesn’t actually exist for the material.
• The Creative Commons Public Domain Tools is not a license, nor is it  an attempt “to become the arbiter of  public domain licensing”, but a way to allow people to have an easy and effective way to display that a work belongs to the Public Domain.

found via LISNews