The Distant Librarian

RenewBot vs Library Elf

Fight!  (I looked, but couldn't find a picture of a robot fighting an elf)  I just discovered RenewBot, which will automatically renew your library books X # of days before they come due, where X is set by you.  First two months are free, then if you want to continue it'll cost $2.99 per year for each library card you run through the system.  How many days would your book have to be overdue to pay for that?!?  I was impressed at how quickly they added Calgary Public Library and the University of Calgary to their system after I requested those additions (less than 24 hours).  Turns out RenewBot also does pretty much everything my longtime fav Library Elf does too; after logging in you can see which books are checked out on that card, and which holds are still in the queue.  Here's the RenewBot privacy policy, and here's the policy for Library Elf.

RSS to PDF

Since February I've been happily using Tabbloid to receive PDFs of blog posts I want to read on paper (that's what you're getting if you view my shared posts in Google Reader - those are things I've tagged to be delivered to me by Tabbloid).  I just ran across FiveFilters.org, which offers an open-source solution you can host yourself to convert RSS feeds to PDF.  Nice bonus is a chart comparing FiveFilters.org to four other services, with PDFs you can view to compare the same content across all five.

update: just realized that the author of FiveFilters.org had left me a comment about this site on my original post back in April :-0

Harvard Business School Publishing not allowing UK libraries to build PURLs in EBSCO - are we next?

Just read a couple of deeply troubling posts at Libreaction and the library staff blog at the University of Lincoln in which librarians are crying foul over what appear to be mafia tactics by Harvard Business School Publishing.  According to the Libreaction post:

For a few years now HBSP have been requesting payments of as much as £15k pa from several UK academic business libraries simply for the privilege of making persistent links to HBR articles on reading lists and VLEs.

The links in question are being made to EBSCO's Business Source products (which provide HBR in full-text), however, it is Harvard rather than EBSCO who have approached librarians directly for additional payment.  Thus far these demands for extra monies, which are being requested on top of the EBSCO subscription, are, as mentioned above, merely part of a 'pilot scheme', however, HBSP plan to roll it out to all EBSCO subscribers in due course.

Thus far, all UK librarians who have been offered the 'opportunity' to pay this additional sum have unsurprisingly turned it down, and as a result have recently had the ability to make persistent links to HBR turned off by EBSCO.

I have the vaguest of recollections of hearing something about this a year or more ago, but it's so vague as to have possibly been a bad dream.  But seriously, what's going on here?!?  I just checked, and I can still create persistent URLs to Harvard Business Review within Business Search Complete. 

Here's a scary PDF flyer in which Harvard Business School Publishing

...is excited to offer the opportunity to upgrade your existing annual subscription to EBSCOhost to a new level that allows for use of HBR articles for course use... If you choose not to upgrade your current EBSCOhost at this time, please reiterate to your faculty and students that your license with EBSCOhost allows them to access HBSP content only for research purposes. If you choose not to upgrade, please be advised that EBSCO may disable the ability to persistent link to HBSP content at your institution.

Give me a break!  This is ridiculous!  According to both blog posts this is coming from Harvard, not EBSCO. 

What do you think about this?  Surely we're not going to let our UK colleagues get rolled, only to find that we're next!

Many libraries are lending Kindles

While we wait to see if BYU will reinstate their Kindle lending program, take a look at the list of libraries that are still lending them put together by iReaderreview.  I's not just a list; there's a fair bit of supporting content in the post.

Kindle, Libraries

BYU suspends Kindle program over legal concerns

Sometimes it's a problem pushing the envelope - seems that the BYU Library initiative to use Kindles instead of getting books via ILL has been suspended after "some buzz on library-related blogs for breaking ground in the uncertain area of lending books on the Kindle." 

"We are playing it safe," Layton said. "Two people here said we have verbal permission. But if we don't have it in writing, that's a different thing. We don't want to do anything that Amazon doesn't completely agree with."

Everyone in the comments seems to be in favour of the initiative.  Hope this forces Amazon to acquiesce!

Citations your way - beta test SiteCite

Andrew Pasterfield, one of our library programmers, has built a tool for himself that you might also find useful.  Site Cite allows you to bookmark websites with a URL of your choosing, so you can recite it to another person w/o having to look it up.  As long as you can remember the URL of the service (http://sitecite.net) your username and the short tag you gave the page, you can tell someone the site to visit from memory.  Once you've used it a few times all you'll really need to remember is the tag.  "Hey, go check out the latest information about the Perigrine falcons that nest near the library at sitecite.net/ppival/falcons"

It's got a nifty autocomplete feature that'll help you discover tags you've already used- as you begin to tag something it'll let you know if you've tagged anything else with those starting letters.

Definitely a beta right now - many features still to come according to the amusing FAQ.  Needs a bookmarklet or Firefox extension before I'll consistently use it, but I can see the potential.  Check it out!

Reviews and comparisons of ebook readers - Link Dump

All this week I've noticed a large number of other bloggers posting their thoughts on various things related to ebooks; Kindle for the iPhone, other iPhone readers, dedicated ebook readers, etc.  Here's the list that I've got:

• Further thoughts on the Kindle iPhone experience
  "As the market opens up, more choices will appear. That's all for the good. A few years ago it would have been hard to conceive of reading Dostoyevsky on my cell phone, but it has come to pass. Imagine what the next 5 to 10 years will bring."
• iPhone App Watch - Are you ready for some eBooks? (Iceberg Reader, Kindle)
  "And that's really the important thing: I'm reading again."
• Comparing Ebook Readers (Sony, Kindle, iPhone/Touch)
  "Overall, I feel like we are with ebooks at the place we were with digital music a few years ago."
• Common Craft Kindle Books: Better on the iPhone
  "We were excited to see that our Kindle Books are in color look better on the iPhone than on the Kindle, thanks to the nice iPhone screen."
• Ebooks in Your Pocket (iPhone readers)
  "I wouldn’t dare try to guess the exact future, device, platform, or timeline, but I think it is pretty clear that we’re nearing some kind of tipping point for ebooks."
• PALINET Leadership Network wiki - Kindle experiences
• Scrollmotion eBooks for iPhone

Second thoughts on Shortcovers

Yesterday I blogged about the new Shortcovers service. 

Last night I read a short  story and have the following observations.  I like how I can browse the website from my desktop, bookmark titles, and then have them appear on my iPhone for reading.  (I can also, of course, browse and bookmark from the iPhone). 

I don't like having to scroll down to read, then click next page, then repeat.  I'd much prefer something that would present a screen at a time, and advance each time I tap the screen, or something that would scroll the text at a pre-set speed or something. 

And finally, I really hate the overlay of bars at the top and bottom of the screen - those just have to be hidden while I'm reading.  Still got some potential here though, so far so good.

Shortcovers - mixing traditional and local publishing

I've only just started to play with it myself, but early today, Shortcovers.com opened for business.  Run by Canada's Chapters/Indigo book chain (though oddly not mentioned on their homepage), Shortcovers is the first solution for buying e-books on the go outside of the Kindle platform.  They have apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry, with Android in the works, and you can also read on their website.

The idea is to be able to buy either entire books to download to your mobile device, or in some cases a chapter at a time.  The first chapter is always free. 

You can upload content as well, though I haven't explored how that all works, or whether you can set the content to be free or charge whatever you want. 

I'm puzzled as to why books seem more expensive through Shortcovers than through traditional channels.  Outliers, for example, costs $17.04 on the Chapters/Indigo website, but $19.09 on Shortcovers (though only $15.50 on Amazon.ca, sigh).  I guess I'm paying for the convenience of getting it right now (though I don't know how long the book would take to download, or if I'd want to pay for it to arrive over the air as opposed to wifi).  I dunno, I think I would've launched with some sort of deep discount, or subscription plan maybe. 

They have options for subscribing to all content by a certain author, and lots of social networking sharing options, so it seems as though they're trying hard to build community around the product.  They've got a blog, and they tweet; doing all the Web 2.0 stuff right, but I don't like that overpricing...

My virtual buddy MCM has just posted his thoughts from the small author's point of view.

So I'll keep playing with it and let you know if it really grabs me.  I sure like the idea though!  If you're in the States, and if they're charging Cdn dollars, as it appears, it's gonna be a great deal for you folks in the US, so try it out from there, eh!

Not sure yet what, if any, implications there are for libraries yet, but if the booksellers can adapt to the mobile platform, surely we can too!  Maybe offer a digitization program where the content is optimized for mobile devices on the fly?

Anyhoo, check it out.

Followup on New Media into Old

Last week I mentioned a couple of interviews that had tweaked my interest in a solution for automatically creating a printed "newspaper" of individual blog postings that I wanted to devote more time to.  Clint Lalonde left a comment suggesting FeedJournal, so I went to take a peek, and it's almost perfect for what I want to do.  FeedJournal allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed(s) and then spits out a nicely formatted PDF for you to read.  You can specify the number of columns and whether it's justified or not - looks pretty good.  But I didn't want to subscribe to entire feeds - just individual posts.  Well, the tool's author suggests subscribing to a specific tag within Google Reader; any other filtering mechanism should work as well.  Last step for me though is that the RSS reader I use on my iPhone doesn't allow me to re-tag articles, so I decided to just grab the feed for my shared items, which I then fed to FeedJournal and voila!

Except I don't want to have to visit FeedJournal each time I want to generate my "newspaper", and FeedJournal doesn't have any scheduling options.  Well, they do with a different version of the product that costs $59/month.

So I found this comparison of FeedJournal of Tabbloid, an HP project (isn't that brilliant for a printer company?)  Does the same thing as FeedJournal, though with fewer options for customization.  But it allows me to schedule delivery of the PDF created by the feed I gave them.  I just received the first delivery, so it seems to work well!  oops, except it has all the items in the feed, not just the most recent.  No problem, I just printed the first few pages, and perhaps the next delivery will only include new stuff.

I'm a happy reader!

New media into old

I just finished listening to episode 64 of CBC's Spark, and it began with a couple of really interesting interviews with people who are turning new media into old (ie. newspapers or magazines). 

Ben Terret and his friend Russell collected their favourite blog posts from 2008 and arranged to have them printed on actual newsprint in a project called Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008.  But what struck me was his idea of how this could be personalized.  Imagine tagging blog posts during the week or month and saving them to delicious.  On Sunday morning, delivered to your house would be a newspaper containing the text of all those blog posts.  I would pay good money for something like that!  There are a bunch of bloggers who write lengthy posts that I don't give enough time to fully digest.  The screen is bite-sized media - I always have to move on to something else.  But if I had something printed, laid out by a graphic designer, I think I would spend a lot more time on these thoughtful posts.  Actually, there must be some utility that will do something similar to this and allow me to print on my home printer - anyone?  Oh wait, read on...

The second interview was with Dan Pacheco, who has a similar idea in a website / service called Printcasting.  This time the print format is a newspaper, magazine or newsletter, but locally targeted.  It will be supported by local advertising, and "they'll only pay for the ads that run in Printcasts that we know are delivered."  Here's the full FAQ on the service, which is scheduled to launch in Bakersfield, CA in March.  Looks like they'll take some time before it's available worldwide - guess they're really sticking with that local angle.  Oooh, but at the very end of the FAQ they mention that "Printcasting will be developed as an open source product, meaning anyone will be able to download and use the software for free."  Cool.

Read my feed for free (on the Kindle)

And more Kindle news.  Earlier this month I found out my blog was available for purchase via the Kindle store.  MakeUseOf.com has a post about how you can subscribe to RSS feeds on the Kindle for free using Kindlefeeder.com.

Act fast though, as the following notice appears on the kindlefeeder home page:

Someone has brought it to my attention that scheduling feed delivery on kindlefeeder.com may violate the Amazon Kindle's terms of service. Please read this blog post on TeleRead for details.

I've written Amazon's legal department for clarification. Until I receive a response, kindlefeeder.com's automated delivery feature will remain available.

SerialsSolutions Summon

Got a press release from SerialsSolutions yesterday about a new product they're announcing - Summon Unified Discovery Service.  A list of features can be found here.  Sounds an awful lot like their current Federated Search product, 360 Search; I wonder if this product is the result of their acquisition of WebFeat early last year?

From their press release:

Information retrieval is light years ahead– and yet, we still have barriers. Library  collections continue to intimidate users – a problem that’s compounded by the lure of easy searching on the open Web.  Today’s users see all information as the same. They go to Google for everything and often spend too much time finding what they need or can’t find what they are looking for at all.

But, today we’re removing those barriers. Today, we’re making library collections as easily searched as Google makes the worldwide web. I’m so proud to introduce to you a new service that allows researchers to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content. Through one simple search, patrons can find instant access to the breadth of authoritative content that’s the hallmark of great libraries – digital and print, audio and video, single articles to entire e-journals, and every format in between. 

The Serials Solutions Summon™ unified discovery service is a leap forward that furthers our mission of helping libraries be the best partner for research. It’s simple, easy and fast – and made for libraries.

We are previewing the Serials Solutions Summon™ service this week at ALIA Information Online in Sydney, later this week at ALA Midwinter in Denver, next week at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference in Toronto, and in two weeks at the 9th Annual Bielefeld Conference in Bielefeld, Germany.

If you see it in action at any of these conferences, would you post your impressions as a comment?

DC Public Library launches iPhone app for their catalog

Aaron Schmidt blogs that the DC Public Library iPhone app is now available for download.  So I downloaded it and gave it a quick run through.  No bells and whistles, but it gets the job done.  Seems to only allow keyword searching at the moment - can't search by author, etc.  You can place holds though, which is great.  I would love to have something like this for the Calgary Public Library, and hope to take a stab at developing something similar over the summer for the UofC.

Nice work Aaron! (and way to sneak the bike onto the labs page). 

Here's a series of screenshots showing what's available.  I wonder if the interface sets a limit on searches though, as when I went back in to grab a shot of the holds page I kept getting a "no results" message even on searches I had previously run.

Near as I can tell from the iTunes store, this is the first library application available.  Oh, and now I see Aaron's confirmed that on his personal blog as well.

O'Reilly starting to offer DRM-free PDFs

O'Reilly Press is now offering a small number of titles as print, DRM-free PDF, or both.  They've got 30 titles where you can choose your medium, and a dozen of those are also available on the Kindle.  Interesting comments, including a brief discussion of why electronic books aren't 90% cheaper than print even though there's no printing and binding and shipping costs involved, and some discussion of the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Digital Rights Management.