eReader news

Some news today about eReaders

• OverDrive and Amazon launch Kindle® compatibility with Library eBooks
• Public and school libraries to reach millions of new readers with industry-leading eBook reader
• One in 6 Americans owns an eReader
• Full data - Harris Interactive
• Amazon announces 11,000 ebooks available from public libraries
• Amazon press release

When did the library die?

The Futurelawyer blog poses the question: when did the library die? The gist of the post is that the author couldn't cracking open a book for research instead of jumping on the computer. Greg Lambert already has a comment up about the library being a service, not just a place. As our collections seem to be slowly migrating to electronic versions, are we posing Library as a service (verb) or a place (noun)?

Friday Fun

The secret is revealed! J.K. Rowling's Pottermore website will be a platform for selling all seven Harry Potter books in ebook format. Read all about it in this Ars Technica article.

Print and electronic resources

Greg Lambert has a post over at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog titled "Tying Print & Electronic Resources - Is It Too Late To Save Print?" dated 8/3/2010.

In his post, Greg wonders if more researchers would use print resources if there were some sort of link or icon in our favorite online legal resources showing that the print version were available in the library collection. This is an interesting twist to current practices of linking our catalog records to electronic versions of treatises, periodicals, etc.

Interesting.

Free Shipping!

Reminder...free shipping day is Thursday, Dec. 17th on products bought online.

Some 700 of them, will ship orders for free and vow to get them delivered to you by December 24.

Consumer Reports
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/money/2009/12/free-shipping-day-is-a-week-away.html

Manual of Patent Examining Procedure

Did you know that all editions of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure is now available on the USPTO web site?

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/old/index.htm
PDF Copies of MPEP Editions and Revisions 1948 - 2006

Some thoughts on the Amazon Kindle

Mary Minow over at the LibraryLaw Blog has some posts with her thoughts on the Amazon Kindle. A few excerpts:

November 29, 2007
Quick Kindle Review - a TEN STRIKE
I'm trying out an AMAZON KINDLE. Love it.
It's clearly designed by people who READ. Delightful to read the newspaper, magazines, books, your own documents. You can read for hours comfortably...Virtual reference - an experimental feature I like. (cont.)

December 06, 2007
How to transfer and convert lots of documents to the KINDLE
I stumbled upon a convenient way to transfer lots of documents to my KINDLE. I had a zipped folder of 28 student papers and tried to email the folder to my KINDLE address, just to see if it would magically unzip and convert each item for me. It did ... each item is ready to read. (cont.)

The blog is located at http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/.

Comments on the library digitization article

We blogged about the New York Times article concerning libraries and digitization yesterday and I just noticed a blog entry from LibraryLaw Blog concerning how preemptive digitization could affect ILL operations.

Selected snippets from LibraryLaw Blog:

Digital
ILL and the Open Library
October 23, 2007
LibraryLaw Blog

...The idea of libraries getting funding to make digitized books freely available is a wonderful idea. ...According to the paper, the Boston Consortium is going to spend $850,000 of their own money to digitize books. At the $30/book figure quoted in the article, that is at most 30,000 books over two years. Some of the Google partners are doing that many books in two weeks.
What I found scary in Peter's post [Peter Brantley, O'Reilly blog ]was the suggestion that the group is going to try to re-invent ILL...