Click my link -- December 30, 2011

By -
Fascinating list comparing the top sellers in ebook and in print from Amazon. This raises all sorts of interesting questions for libraries and reinforces what I said at the LJ ebook summit in October: your digital collection doesn't have to be a mirror of the print collection.

Great discussion about copyright. Very accessible discussion, and Patry's response to the comments are equally good.

From the Telegraph: Charles Dicken: Good on paper, great on screen! 

Just one of a multitude of preview 2012 lists.

NPR's bestseller list for week of December 29, 2011.

USA Today says George R.R. Martin is THE author of the year. (+1 for the obligatory Sean Bean pic)

"Swords and Sandal" novel. Enough, already, with the cute names for genre fiction. 

The Annooyed Librarian (no, not me!) comes across with some 2012 predictions. Agree? Disagree? The comments are good too.

Amazon's lending library currently has more than 66k ebooks. Still, the idea of only getting one book a month seems ludicrous.

Happy Friday!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tips for Weeding Your Reference Collection

By -
If you are responsible for collection development in just about any size or kind of library, the chances are good that there's been a recent push to reduce the size of your print reference collection.* Print reference materials are, to use a regional expression, wicked expensive. They are also being used less and less as librarians turn to databases and patrons turn to the immediate gratification of the internet. As budgets decline and libraries look to use their space in new and creative ways, physical reference collections are obvious targets for heavy weeding. Here at my library, we are reducing our reference collection by 50%. At our branches, reference collections will be cut by 75% . . . this time around. So where do you start when you are lucky enough to get the assignment to chop chop chop? Before You Begin Get a firm idea of how much the administration wants to reduce the reference collection. Survey the collection and determine how much you're going to have to weed
Read more

What the Heck is Denewing?

By -
Image
"Denewing" is the term I invented for the process of taking books from the new shelf and changing their status to, for lack of a better word, "not-new." Sure, I could farm the work out to other people in my library, but it's never been clear to me why I would when denewing presents the perfect opportunity to see what has been circulating, how many times, and (thanks to Evergreen, our new ILS) the last library at which an item was checked out. Plus, peeling stickers = therapeutic. Denewing is something I can do on desk while I help people with their various computer issues. Denewing also makes your new shelves look better. Because space is at such a premium in most public libraries (although regular weeding could help with that-- cough ), the New Shelf is the place where we have the best opportunity to showcase what we're buying and catch people's attention. The new shelf should be positioned somewhere where it will catch patrons' eyes and shout (it
Read more

The black shelves are over there.......

By -
Speaking of collection maintenance... A question that has come up time and time again (in the real world, in the twitter world, on blogs, at conferences...) is the idea of separate shelving for African American books. If you follow me on twitter, you've heard this rant before. Why do we segregate books by skin color, blah blah blah. And, really, it isn't even the skin color of the character that matters, but the skin color of the author . You won't find the Derek Strange books (by Pelecanos...go read them now!) the AF-AM section. I've tried to trace this back to see where it began because it wasn't always this way. Books used to be shelved by genre in fiction, and by Dewey in non-fiction. My guess (and it's only a guess) is that once upon a time there wasn't much in the way of current, popular fiction written about black people by black people. There was Terry McMillan...and there were others, but she was the big household name. Lots of people came int
Read more