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- Fantasy Makes a Comeback, SF Searches for a Renaissance | Epic Journeys, an LJ Cover Story
- News: Apple/Big Six Pubs Sued, Ebooks Sales Soaring
- Event Alert: Library Journal: Ebooks, the New Normal
- Job of the Week: City of Hickory, Library Director
- Blog Spotlight: eViews
- Review of the Week: Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam
- Prepub Alert: Barbara's Picks
- Xpress Reviews for August 12, E-originals and More
- Wyatt's World: Celebrating Philip Levine as the New Poet Laureate
Neil Hollands
In a rapidly changing genre, high fantasy makes a comeback, urban fantasy expands, zombie literature mutates, and steampunk innovates, even as sf searches for a new renaissance. Librarian and sf/fantasy expert Neil Hollands looks at where the sf/fantasy publishing world stands, with houses trying to produce quality titles to meet an ever-widening audience with particular tastes. Plus there's a preview of hot books in the pipeline and a list of 20 core epic fantasy titles that have a place in every library collection. Read More...
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| Job of the Week The City of Hickory, a three-time All America City, is recruiting for the position of Library Director. Hickory is the hub of a four-county metro area in the foothills of NC, located conveniently an hour east of Asheville and an hour north of Charlotte, NC. Read More... |
| Blog Spotlight eViews Cheryl LaGuardia Cheryl LaGuardia is a Research Librarian at Harvard University. She cracked open her first CPU to install a CD-ROM card in the mid-1980's, and has been covering truth, justice, and better electronic library resources ever since. Read More... |
Apple/Big Six Publishers Sued Over Alleged Ebook Price Fixing
Michael Kelley
Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman has filed a nationwide class-action suit against Apple Inc. and five of the Big Six publishers alleging that the companies conspired to illegally fix ebook pricing in an effort to undermine Amazon's "pro-consumer, discounted pricing." The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims that Apple, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group Inc., and Simon & Schuster Inc. colluded to restrain trade and violated antitrust laws. It charges that Apple and the publishers violated a variety of state and federal laws.
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Michael Kelley
A new annual survey of the total U.S. book publishing industry shows growing revenue and, even without numbers from 2011, exponential ebook sales. The industry sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase over 2008, and publishers' net sales revenue grew to $27.94 billion in 2010, a 5.6 percent increase over 2008. Within the trade segment, ebooks, grew from 0.6 percent of the total trade market share in 2008 to 6.4 percent in 2010, which translates to a 1,274.1 percent increase in publisher net sales revenue year-over-year, with total net revenue for 2010 at $878 million.
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Michael Kelley
Twice a week Laura Moulton mounts her bicycle and trundles a small trailer stuffed with about 40 books into downtown Portland, OR. Moulton is the street librarian, and the founder of Street Books, a mobile lending library for the homeless. The library, which started up in June, works on trust: patrons can acquire a library card without providing any form of identification or proof of residence, which a regular library requires. There is no due date, but each book has a card in a pouch on the inside of the cover that Moulton uses to track circulation.Read More...
Michael Kelley
Chattanooga's library has broken from Hamilton County and is reinventing itself. The city is exploring a possible management agreement with the Lupton Library at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) to administer the downtown main facility and four branches. The library board is being completely replaced, without county representation, and possibly expanded from the seven members (required by state law) to as many as 11 members. The library will not make a decision on hiring a permanent director to succeed David Clapp, who retired last year, until the new governance structure is in place.
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David Rapp
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded a $600,000 grant to the Data to Insight Center (D2I) at Indiana University (IU), to explore ways to conduct secure "non-consumptive" research using copyrighted digital works in the HathiTrust repository. D2I will partner on the project with the University of Michigan and the multi-institutional HathiTrust Research Center. In non-consumptive research, massive data sets of text are analyzed using computerized algorithms. Such research can be freely done on public-domain works. This project, however, will focus on ways in which non-consumptive research can be done on copyrighted materials.
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EBSCO/III Deal Offers Cross-Pollination of Discovery Search Results
David Rapp
EBSCO Publishing has cut a deal with ILS company Innovative Interfaces (III) to provide the option of accessing EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) search results via III's Encore Discovery platform. The functionality will be available only for libraries already using both services. In January 2010, III announced a partnership to allow libraries integrated access to their EBSCOhost subscriptions through the Encore platform. EDS search results can draw on indexing from subscribed EBSCOhost databases, as well as various subscribed non-EBSCOhost databases such as LexisNexis, among other content.
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Libraries and Riots | Annoyed Librarian
Facebook: One page for all or each their own? | Bubble Room
Freedom From Desks With the iPad | Tennant: Digital Libraries
News and Entertainment in the Digital Age: A Vast Wasteland Revisited | E-Views
AP Releases 9/11 Stylebook | In the Bookroom
Michael Kelley
EnvisionWare and 3M agreed to a confidential settlement of the lawsuit that was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on June 22, 2009. In the suit, 3M had alleged that EnvisionWare's sale of self-service circulation systems and handheld radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices infringed upon 3M's patents. EnvisionWare contested the claims. In particular, 3M had alleged that EnvisionWare's LibraryPDA, which is a portable device for reading RFID tags and barcodes, and its All-in-One desktop systems, OneStop desktop systems and kiosks, and Renaissance kiosks were infringing on the 3M patents. 3M originally sought injunctive relief and damages.
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Shorter cooler days ahead, kids going back to school, work and home schedules returning to normal—sounds like just the perfect time to present your adult readers with an array of new and forthcoming titles to consider. Our four participating publishers will not only give you a sneak peek of their early 2012 titles, you'll hear about what is hot now and will be coming out in the closing months of this year. Featuring fiction and nonfiction, the Tuesday, August 23 webcast, hosted by LJ Book Review Editor Heather McCormack, will especially appeal to collection development, adult programming, and reader's advisory staff. Register here.
| Last call for early birds! This year on October 12, the library community will gather to discuss ebooks and their role in the future of libraries. Where will you be? | |
 | For our one-day virtual conference we're calling in the experts to address how libraries are leveraging the ebook opportunity, and our line up just keeps getting better! Featured speakers include M.T. Anderson, Lawrence Block, Karin Slaughter, and many more! |
| But hurry... Today is your last chance to register at the early bird discount rates. Visit www.ebook-summit.com for more information and to register today! | |
Review of the Week
Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam. color & b/w. 72 min. Tammy Nguyen Lee, Against the Grain Prods., www.againstthegrainproductions.com. 2010. DVD UPC 705105757476. $150; acad. libs. $250. Public performance. int affairs/histIn April 1975, more than 2500 orphans were airlifted from Vietnam, chiefly for adoption by families in the United States. Though mostly ethnic Vietnamese, some orphans were of mixed heritage: Vietnamese American or Afro-Amerasian. As they were not adopted into expatriate Vietnamese families, the children growing up were separated from Vietnamese culture, language, and traditions. Consequently, they cannot self-identify as Vietnamese, Vietnamese Americans, or African American Vietnamese. They now form a unique subculture, subject to ethnic and racial prejudice and only well understood by other Operation Babylift adoptees. This well-made, well-researched documentary by a first-generation Vietnamese American is highly recommended for those interested in the legacy of the social and cultural consequences of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.—Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH
[For additional reviews, roundups, and collection development and RA advice, subscribe to BookSmack!].
Barbara Hoffert
Remember Watergate? Nearly 40 years ago, that scandal rocked the nation and ended a presidency. Lots of books on the break-in have appeared since then, but Thomas Mallon (Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman) has taken on the challenge of writing a novel on the subject. There's more historical fiction in Prepub Alert this week, from Tatiana de Rosnay's The House I Loved, set in Haussmann-era Paris, to Richard Mason's History of a Pleasure-Seeker, about Belle Epoque Amsterdam, to Jonathan Odell's The Healing, the story of a plantation mistress who takes over a slave child as her own. All at Prepub Alert...Read More Prepub Alert...
More e-original romances, including Katies Reus's suspenseful, "well written" Deadly Obsession. In fiction, Julie Drew's "haunting, mesmerizing, atmospheric, and compelling historical tale" Daughter of Providence; along with Carrie Hagen's true crime "must read" We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping that Changed America; Geoff Dyer's starred The Missing of the Somme; the first volume in Emi Lenox's epic graphic novel memoir Emitown: A Sketch Diary; and more reviews just in.Read More...
Blackbird – A Reading by Philip Levine
The Mercy: Poems (Knopf)
News of the World: Poems (Knopf)
The Simple Truth: Poems (Knopf)
What Work Is: Poems (Knopf)
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