We have a digital concierge at the publisher and now we have an information concierge at the library. The Chronicle looks into it:At the start of each class session, the professor, Gardner Campbell, asked the 11 students to open their laptops, fire up Twitter, and say hello to their librarian, who was following the discussion from her office. During the hourlong class, the librarian, Ellen...
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
News from Google about their use of Micro formats reminded me of something Yahoo announced over two years ago. First here is a snip from the Google announcement:That’s a tough problem with the current web, according to Google’s Jack Menzel, the company’s product management director for search, despite the apparent ease that Watson had besting human Jeopardy opponents.“We are still grasping for...
Monday, February 21, 2011
From The Chronicle of Higher Education on the demise of higher ed as we know it (Chronicle):There are more than 150 former normal schools like Winona, educating hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Nearly all followed an identical progression: They became teachers colleges, then dropped the "teachers," then dropped the "college." Usually, they are medium-size, relatively obscure, and...
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Girl in the Klong: Thailand 1969A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.In Bangkok, the river is the plumbing and the highway. This young woman has been sent out to do the laundry and will probably catch up on some personal hygiene. She's clearly less than impressed by the tourist...
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
So Borders capitulates, and thus begins the inevitable transition we have all long anticipated to become smaller, leaner and possibly profitable. The company is now embarking on the third phase of its' existence which has seen it pass through the innovative, entrepreneurial, mercurial phase represented by the founders Tom and Louis Borders to the second kicked off by their IPO and subsequent purchase...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Beyond the book interviewed me last week about the eBook ISBN study that I conducted for BISG:Not so long ago, a book was an unmistakable object. Then someone came along and started digitizing content, and very soon, books were something else, something much more than ink on dead trees. That transformation, indeed the redefinition of books, matters enormously to readers and publishers, as well...
Pearson's John Makinson gives an interview to Livemint (India) on the company's business strategy in that country where he also comments on Pearson's recent purchase of Indian education company TutorVista (LiveMint):Pearson Plc, which recently bought a controlling stake of Indian education company TutorVista,...
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Professors are not rushing to adopt the newest eBooks features (Chronicle):Publishers studying the effectiveness of their latest interactive e-textbooks are finding that the biggest challenge is getting professors to use the new features of the digital texts. “On the instructor side, that’s where the inertia is,” says Jay Chakrapani, McGraw-Hill’s digital general manager for higher education. ...
Friday, February 11, 2011
With the imminent crash of Borders into bankruptcy I was reminded of this post from December 3rd, 2008.Travel up Route 17 in northern New Jersey and you traverse the spectrum of retailing. These stores - from Ikea to K-mart - represent the shop windows on late 20th century retailing but, in contrast to their apparent ubiquity, the days of the stand-alone big box may be numbered. A number of years...
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Orpheum Los Angeles in NeonA weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.A few years ago when BookExpo was in Los Angeles, I had some time to walk around the downtown area and put together this collection of neon theater facades.I like neon and in walking along Broadway in Los Angeles...
Monday, February 7, 2011
The day before we went live with our first web product at Bowker, customer service were fielding the typical customer complaints. One customer in Cleveland was missing volume two of a three-volume set and another in Jacksonville was questioning their standing order discount. These queries and many more like them were synonymous with moving physical units to customers but all that changed the day...
Sunday, February 6, 2011
A fascinating review of Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change at the San Francisco Museum of Art (The Smart Set):This thought struck me while walking through the recent exhibit of Muybride’s work at London’s Tate Britain. The retrospective opened amidst new austerity programs in the U.K. The right-leaning coalition government announced drastic cuts in public spending, slashing budgets for cultural...
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Istanbul 1972: From the airA weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.In the PND family archive there are many, many 'from the air' photos and most of the locations are virtually impossible to identify. That is not the case with this image however as it looks to me to be Istanbul...
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
From the False Economy blog which has produced Pullman's speech about why libraries shouldn't be victims of the wider economic difficulties the UK economy is facing (Blog):Sample: The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He...
From Beyond the Book, Chris Kenneally takes a look at what's happening to digital books in France (Interview): At Editis, one of France’s leading publishers, Virginia Clayssen oversees digital development. In an interview with CCC’s Chris Kenneally, she accounts for why France has not yet had its ebook moment, but is about to this year. “We didn’t have in France the Kindle effect, because connected...
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