Marilyn Johnsons NYT book review

(Found via here). Marilyn Johnsons excellent book has her reviewed in the New York Times here.

Ebooks from the British Library....Free

(Found via here). It seems the British library is going to be offering more than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring. More information can be found here.

Digital Maoism for beginners

(Found via here). Jaron Lanier, the man who created the term digital maoism has an article in the New York Times entitled The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion discussing his new book You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.

The article notes:-

Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity.

I would think of getting it if I did not have something else to read pretty soon.

New York times aricle on Apple Islate article

As many of you may know (or ignore to know) I am an apple fan boy, I read this New York Times article discussing Apple's alleged Islate.
The article was interesting when it stated the following:-

The iSlate will do lots of that stuff too, as well as basic computing. Critically it will also act as an electronic reader, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.

Many people like their e-readers (not least because they save them from having to haul around books, newspapers and magazines) but I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves them. That’s the key. If a really great e-reader appeared, the market would explode. The e-reader is waiting for a killer product, just as the MP3 player was before Apple’s Ipod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it made such a sexy one that many more people wanted to buy it. That’s what it is promising to do again.

French look for Google alternative in digitalisation plan

(Found via here). Seems the French are not allow Google digitalise there nations artifacts, and has 'gone solo'.
Lisnews says:-

A consortium of French technology companies and government-backed I.T. research labs says it can provide the skills needed by European libraries, universities, publishers and others to scan, catalog and deliver to end-users the contents of their archives better than Google can.

he full story is here.

In a Google Planet far, far away........

(Found via here), the New York Times reports that Google, is being taken on by 'a broad array of authors, academics, librarians and public interest groups are fighting the company’s plan to create a huge digital library and bookstore.'
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a critic of Google says 'This was the first issue through which Google’s power became clearly articulated to the public.....All sorts of people — writers, researchers, librarians, academics and readers — really feel they have a stake in the world of books'.
It seems that, at long last people are noting, that in signing over our culture to Google, they maybe doing it for financial gain and not cultural gain.

Google tries to pacify libraries with piece meal offerings

(Via lisnews). The New York Times has an article entitled Google Book-Scanning Pact to Give Libraries Input on Price. In the article the author says:-


'In a move that could blunt some of the criticism of Google for its settlement of a lawsuit over its book-scanning project, the company signed an agreement with the University of Michigan that would give some libraries a degree of oversight over the prices Google could charge for its vast digital library.'

How can a company that has a monopoly of those market be 'blunting' its approach to libraries and users? Sorry, Google is a public company, out for a profit (as I said previously).

By the way, I do note the irony of using blogger in my Google bashing.

librarything and Shelfari coverage......take off in social cataloguing?

Librarything had some good coverage in the New York Times called A Cozy Book Club, in a Virtual Reading Room.
And with Shelfari getting $1million dollars investment from amazon. I like the idea of both librarything and shelfari, i'm always worried there business plan may fall down when more people suffer social networking fatigue. I suppose they'll add more features then........