Publisher Confidential is a creation by the Unshelved crew that strives to convey to publishers what libraries wish they would know.  It consists of brief statements illustrated with the familiar Mallville Public Library staff.  The booklet is being distributed to the BookExpo America (BEA) mailing list, so a lot of publisher’s representative will see it and hopefully take heed.

Some of the selections I especially like upon first reading:

• Start your periodical with Vol. 1, Issue 1.
• Unusual packaging creates problems.
• In the book, tell us how to pronounce the author’s name.
• Free Ebooks from the shackles of D.R.M.
• Not all fonts are created equal.

There are many more… and all are worth reading.

via the Unshelved Blog

So you are an author.  You check your book’s entry on Amazon.com.  You see a review.  It is not good.  Someone bought a copy of your book and it was flawed.  You want to make it right.

What do you do?  You promise the reviewer that you will send a good copy via overnight delivery.  Then you realize that it is Christmas Eve, the reviewer lives in Ontario, Canada, you live in Ohio, and there is a massive snowstorm between the two locations.  The delivery services cannot deliver, bookstores are closed, and time is running out.

Then what do you do?

Perhaps what Whittenberg University professor Dan Fleisch did : You deliver it yourself.

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

Libology’s Scriblio installation.
Scriblio, the open-source Library OPAC that runs on a WordPress installation, has been installed on Libology.  Several notes about this software installation:

• The library catalog contained within this installation of Scriblio is Capital University’s, located in Columbus, Ohio.  I could have used any of dozens of libraries, but since I work there, it made sense to create something I could use on a regular basis.
• The software is fairly close to the default installation, although I plan to tweak the design over the next few weeks.  I have several projects on my plate, and I am happy to have reached a “live” status for this, so I may put it aside while I finish the book.
• Many of the links, especially the related subject and author links, do not work.  I haven’t looked into this yet, so it may be something I didn’t do, or activate, or something.
• It runs very slowly, most of the time.  I am not sure how much of this is due to my hosting service’s specs (a new service, for me), how much is due to database clutter (I have neither indexed the tables, nor adjusted the cache settings yet), or how much is due to factors in how I set it up.  The database is about 2GB, so I would imagine that it might take a bit of time to conduct a search.
• Most of the time delay over the past couple of weeks has been due to my chasing a ghost in the php code.  I had been attempting to set up the “real time status” reporting (this tells the location, call number, and availability of each item), and couldn’t get it to work.  As I am relatively new to php, I assumed that I was missing something there.  It wasn’t until I decided to try to work backwards and find the reference in the html code that I found out that it wasn’t working because it was made invisible via the style sheet.  From there it was a very quick fix.
• To see a very well implemented Scriblio installation, check out Plymouth State University’s Lampson Library’s OPAC.  They have nearly twice the number of records in their system, but their response time is much faster.  They have also done a great job with the page layout… very little wasted space.

My feeling about the software, at this particular point, is that it is an incredible demonstration of what can be done with a solid piece of software (WordPress) and some well-focused creativity.  Casey Bisson and the rest of the people who created this software have done a terrific job.

The downside is that it seemed, to me, harder than it should have been to get my installation this far.  To set things up properly one needed be comfortable working with WordPress, PHP, HTML, and CSS.  And this is only to get everything installed, imported, and configured to show the real-time status of the items.  I am not complaining… this is a young project, and what might be easy for one library (or one developer) might be tougher for others.

So, the question is : should you try to do this.  If you are interested, I say go for it!  If you have ever installed WordPress before, then there isn’t much that won’t be familiar (mostly editing URLs in PHP and editing a style sheet).  This is a great way to push your own envelope, and to learn a few things along the way.  This has certainly been a good learning experience for me….

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

isbndb.com is one of several websites that allow you to search for books by isbn, as well as the usual title/author/keyword searching. 

Give it a try:  grab a nearby book (if you are like me, there are quite a few nearby, aren’t there?) and run a few searches.  What you can get is a summary of the book’s content, links to online retailers, and even a general Dewey and LC classification.  No MARC records, unfortunately….

I have used ISBN.nu for several years, and one thing it offers that this new site doesn’t seem to is links to other versions of the book.  I am likely to use both of these sites when searching for book information in the future.

from Karen Coyle, via the OpenLibrary listserv

BookTour is a new web site devoted to author readings, signings, etc.  It is very flexible, allowing you to search by author, area, and book.  It allows you to browse by genre, and even provides a link on the authors page to initiate a request for a visit from that author.

The site also allows you to post your own events, which can add to the visibility of an author event at your library.

found on Catalogablog

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Copywrongs and The Anarchist in the Library, has an essay in the current Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), titled Copyright Jungle.

You should read it. I don’t think things are quite as bleak as he portrays (I personally think that Fair Use will be affirmed in a significant legal decision, and help to partially offset the lengthening of copyright protection) but he does present a fantastic overview of where we stand in the copyright wars.

from ResourceShelf 

(100 days, 133 posts!)

Interested in a one-hour Princeton lecture by Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics?  Here you go!  (you may want to save the .asx file to your desktop, then play it from there).

from ResourceShelf

WorldCat.org has added an Advanced Search page, allowing the user to search by Title, Author, ISBN, OCLC, Language, Format or Publication Date.  This ought to be helpful when searching for items with commonly used words.