ebooks
aardvarchaeology | April 6, 2015Update 10 April: It pays to report problems like the one described below to Google's customer support. Seven weeks ago I discovered the problem. One week ago I reported it. Today the problem was suddenly gone, probably because Google updated the two ebooks involved and pushed new versions of the files to my phone.
I usually shop around for a good price when I buy e-books, and lately Google's bookstore has received my custom. It's not a very high-profile store – you see, this isn't the well-known Google Books, where they offer scanned paper books in your browser. This is something called,…
jdupuis | April 26, 2013I'll admit, I'm a bit of a book snob, a strange thing to say for a lifetime comics/science fiction/fantasy/horror/mystery fan, but there you go. Perhaps more precisely, I'm a snob about books versus other media.
But in my defense I'll maintain that I'm getting better as I get older -- more tolerant and accepting and less snobby. Perhaps not coincidentally, I think my takes in reading material are getting more diverse too.
In any case, let's all enjoy 30 things to tell a book snob.
1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will…
jdupuis | December 31, 2012OA and the UK Humanities & Social Sciences: Wrong risks and missed opportunities
One Size Fits All?: Social Science and Open Access
Statement on position in relation to open access(Institute of Historical Research)
The open access journal as a disruptive innovation
Openness, value, and scholarly societies: The Modern Language Association model
Public Library of Humanities: Envisioning a New Open Access Platform
Open Access: HEFCE, REF2020 and the Threat to Academic Freedom
More Issues in Open Access(#OA)
Open Access Publishing: Potential Unintended Consequences of the Finch Proposals…
jdupuis | July 18, 2012I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys.
This interview with Mike Morgan is from April 24, 2007.
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It's time for another in my occasional series of scitech publishing/…
jdupuis | February 17, 2012Given all the fuss and bother going on in the library world these last few days about ebooks, I thought this one would be a pretty fine choice to highlight today.
I just love me some Cracked!
8 Unexpected Downsides of the Switch to E-books
You Can't Hide a Gun in a Kindle
You Need Physical Books for Physical TasksNo More Flipbooks and Mustaches in TextbooksIt May Change the Perception of the Necronomicon and Other Mystical BooksBook Burnings Will Have Less Visual ImpactHow Will People Open Secret Passageways?Seriously, if you can't pull a cleverly titled book out of a bookcase to get it to…
jdupuis | February 15, 2012We have here what is sometimes known as a wicked problem.
On the one side, communities would like to be able to pool the resources of their members to acquire digital content that may then be shared and consumed by everyone in that community.
On the other, content creators and publishers would like to maximize their revenue from the content they produce and distribute.
Libraries want to pay the least amount possible but still have the maximum rights to share it among their communities.
Publishers want to make sure every possible reading transaction is monetized, so as a result want to…
jdupuis | February 13, 2012I was really angry riding home on the bus last Friday night. Not angry because the transit system here in Toronto is royally fudged in general or that transit to York University is fudged in particular.
No, it wasn't that particular aspect of the public sphere that had me upset.
It was the growing tendency of publishers of all sorts to try and take their works out of the public cultural commons and place them exclusively behind pay walls. It's their desire to monetize every reading transaction that had me hot under the collar.
Here's what I tweeted standing on the bus, altered a bit for…
jdupuis | February 3, 2012Well, not me, exactly, but...
Anyways, some ideas and experiences from someone out there in blogland who used to be a lawyer and somehow managed to think opening a bookstore was a good idea.
25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore
Here's a chunk from the middle:19. If you're thinking of giving someone a religious book for their graduation, rethink. It will end up unread and in pristine condition at a used book store, sometimes with the fifty dollar bill still tucked inside. (And you're off and leafing once again).
20. If you don't have an AARP card, you're apparently too young to…
jdupuis | October 28, 2011As reported here and elsewhere, Amazon is actually dipping its toes into the world of publishing.
Which of course is an interesting challenge and threat for traditional trade publishers. And who knows, maybe academic publishers too, if Amazon decides it wants to disrupt that market as well.
In any case, The New York Times has a nice set of four essays debating the topic, Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers?.
Amazon is getting a lot of heat these days over its attempts to push its way into the hearts and minds of readers, writers and the larger book culture -- even comic books. Indeed, the news…
jdupuis | October 12, 2011Waaaaay back on September 20, I flew down to New York City to take part in one of the Science Online New York City panel discussions, this one on Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils (and here).
Ably organized and moderated by David Dobbs, the other panelists were Evan Ratliff, Amanda Moon, Carl Zimmer and Dean Johnson.
Here's a description of the panel:
Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly…
jdupuis | October 8, 2011Inspired by John Scalzi, I thought I'd poll all my readers out there and see what you are reading this weekend.
Books, magazines, blogs, whatever.
I'm reading Ross Macdonald's Meet Me at the Morgue for fiction, Gotham Central Book 1: In the Line of Duty by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark in the graphic novel category and since I'm leading a book club session on it in a couple of weeks, I'm planning on spending a fair bit of time wth Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Magazine-wise, I'll be taking a look at the most recent issue of The New York Review of Science…
jdupuis | August 29, 2011The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the other participants on the panel.
This session and my role as skeptic comes out of the Science Online session on ebooks in North Carolina this past January. I believe I may have refereed to the emerging ebooks app ecosystem as "The Dark Side."
My point was not to explicitly demonize app developers or…
jdupuis | August 17, 2011I'll be speaking at the upcoming Science Online NYC event on September 20th.
Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (ET)
New York, NY
Weiss 305
Rockefeller University
E66th and York Ave.
New York, NY
Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly to librarians, archivists, and future users. How can authors, designers, and publishers best exploit these…
jdupuis | July 14, 2011As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL:
Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York
E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman, Indiana University, Bloomington
Look Beyond Textbooks: Information Literacy for First-Year Science Students by Gabrielle K.W. Wong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination by Laksamee Putnam, Towson University
Life Science Data…
jdupuis | May 2, 2011A while back I posted some semi-coherent ramblings inspired by the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess concerning how libraries were able to license ebook collections for their patrons.
I'm not sure my ideas have changed or solidified or evolved or what, but I've certainly come to a slightly different way of articulating them.
Here goes.
At a certain level, libraries -- public, academic, institutional, special, whatever -- lending ebooks makes no sense at all.
If a library acquires a digital copy of a book there is no good reason why every person in that library's community (school, town, city,…
jdupuis | March 17, 2011For my own purposes I've been collecting various ebook-related posts for a while now and in particular the whole HarperCollins/library/ebook/Overdrive thing is a valuable source of lots of speculation and information. What I have below no doubt only represents a fairly small percentage of the total number of posts and articles about the issue.
My attention over the last few weeks has been a bit inconsistent too say the least so I'm sure I've missed a bunch of important posts. Please let me know in the comments about ones I should include. And I encourage people not to be modest and to let…
jdupuis | March 4, 2011Over on the Tor.com blog, mysterious librarian blogger RuthX tells us the story of how she created a free ebook (downloaded!) with all the public domain stories that were published by noted horror author H.P. Lovecraft.
In the course of compiling the book, she was able to analyze the word usage patterns of the famously overwrought and verbose Lovecraft. And it's hysterically predictable what she came up with.
The post on the Tor blog is here: H.P. Lovecraft's 10 Favorite Words and a Free Lovecraft eBook.
A more complete analysis is here: Free Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft for Nook and…
jdupuis | March 3, 2011I saw this just after I published my previous post and think it really encompasses what I'd like to say to HarperCollins and its fellow travelers.
This is from The Capitalist's Paradox by Umair Haque.
So here's my question: Does what you're doing have a point -- one that matters to people, society, nature, and the future?
Beancounters, listen up. To paraphrase Shakespeare, I come not to praise you, but to bury you. I don't care about your "strategy," "business model," "campaign," "product," or "deliverables" (sorry). All that stuff is focused on outputs. What matters to people, in contrast,…
jdupuis | March 3, 2011Over the last week or so a huge issue has sprung up in the library and publishing world, which I touch on in my eBook Users' Bill of Rights post.
The publisher HarperCollins has restricting the number of checkouts an ebook version of one of their books can have before the library needs to pay for it again. The number of checkouts is 26 per year. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested.
There was a comment on my post by William Dix:
Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot on this issue. As well as alienating a lot of the potential market with idiotic…
jdupuis | February 28, 2011This one is via Christina Pikas, Bobbi Newman and Sarah-Houghton-Jan, who originated it.
It's released under a CC0 license, so please feel free to repost, remix and whatever else strikes your fancy.
This arises from the current controversy in the library world (and beyond) about a particular publisher restricting the number of checkouts a library ebook can have before the library needs to pay for it again. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested. I may post about the situation in more detail later this week.
The eBook Users Bill of Rights:
Every eBook user…