Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

If you’re researching which e-book reader is right for you, you’ll want to check out Justin The Librarian VS e-Book Readers. Justin Hoenke rates and reviews four popular e-book devices detailing which features he enjoyed and which he disliked as well as providing further comments.

via LibrarianinBlack

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers reviews BlogBooker, an application which will Turn Your Blog to a PDF Book. This brief posts provides a feature summary of the application and short screenshot tutorial for how to export your Blogger or WordPress blogs as XML files for use with BlogBooker.

The folks at Technology to Software have put together a helpful list of 25+ Useful Free E-books Every Blogger Should Read. If you’re a blogger, you’ll want to check out the entries here.

Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker reviews the Five Best Book Recommendation Services. Each list entry includes a review of the website features, cost, and a screenshot. I rely on Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This…” service as well as LibraryThing. What’s your favorite?

Yogesh Mankani at Save Delete rounds up the Top 10 Best And Free E-Book Reader Apps For Your iPhone. If you’re an iPhone owner, you won’t want to miss this list.

My friend Pauline Rothstein has just published a new book titled Boomers and Beyond: Reconsidering the Role of Libraries with Diantha Dow Schull. The book is “A roadmap to the trends and perspectives on the library’s role in meeting the needs of our aging population”, with perspectives from contributors such as Stephen Abram and R. David Lankes. Congrats Pauline!

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

The Huffington Post has put together a list of authors and book lovers to follow on Twitter based on readers’ suggestions. The list gives a quick bio of each bookish twitterer, their pic, and a sample tweet. Based on this list I’ll be adding Clive Barker, William Gibson, and the BookBitch to my Twitter list.

BBC News has announced that Google is set to Digitise Ancient Italian Books. According to the recent story:

“The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.

Up to one million antiquarian books – including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo – will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.”

I am very excited to announce that the book series that I’ve been working on for the past year+ has officially been published today! The Tech Set is a series of 10 practical technology books for libraries that’s been co-published by Neal-Schuman Publishers and LITA here in the US and Facet Publishing in the UK. We also have a companion Tech Set Wiki with extra content for each book and author podcast interviews.

Richard Brooks at the Times Online reports that the British Library will offer over 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from its collection as free downloads this spring.

“Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.

The library’s ebook publishing project, funded by Microsoft, the computer giant, is the latest move in the mounting online battle over the future of books.”

Did you know that the New York Public Library has Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s slippers and Charles Dickens’s favorite letter-opener in its collection? Or that they have a special collection of 40,000 restaurant menus, dating from the 1850s to the present? Robin Finn at the New York Times has written an excellent article about some of the NYPL’s more interesting items in Secrets of the Stacks.

Josh Catone at Mashable has created a useful guide for aspiring authors concerning How to Write a Novel Using the Web. He includes a discussion of various tools for organization, research, writing, connecting with other writers, and publishing.

Google has announced that it is making 1 million public domain books from Google Books available for free download in the EPUB format. “EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices”, so users will be able to view these books on their mobile devices. According to ReadWriteWeb, Google had previously made this massive EPUB collection available to partners Barnes & Noble and Sony, but never to users before last week’s announcement.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper covers some of the changes happening in today’s libraries with Louise Tickle’s Academic libraries are undergoing a quiet revolution. The article proposes that “Being a librarian these days is all about technology and customer service; no time to stick your nose in a book”.

“Applying for a job in a university library because you “love reading” isn’t going to get you very far these days. These hallowed repositories of academic knowledge have changed beyond recognition over the last decade, and the people recruited to work in them have to be willing to embrace new technologies and customer service with an alacrity that would likely horrify the shushing custodians of the past.”

Sam Dean at OStatic rounds up five free online books to help newbies get up to speed with OSS with 5 Free Online Open Source Books for Beginners. “They introduce basic concepts for getting started with Linux, Firefox, Blender (3D graphics and animation), GIMP (graphics), and the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.”