Author: Paul R. Pival
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Do you love books or do you love reading?
Ann Kirschner has a thought-provoking piece in the Chronicle describing how she read a 1,000 page novel across four different formats; paperback, audiobook, iPhone and Kindle. You might be surprised at what she decided was the best format, at least for her. As an aside, I'm now reading my fourth book in the Stanza iPhone…
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EFF Teaching Copyright Curriculum
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently launched a website called Teaching Copyright "to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way." In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law.…
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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…
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This time we mean it! – Google to sell e-books
The New York Times is reporting that Google plans to begin selling ebooks by the end of 2009. "In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct…
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Metrics on mobile web usage
The Making mobile web sites with Drupal blog points to a report showing some surprising statistics on mobile usage. The report comes from a company (AdMob) that serves ads on mobile websites, and shows, among other things, that "The iPhone OS had 8% market share of handset sales in 2008, but generated 43% share of…
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Screencasting tool roundups
I've never seen so many bookmark a single site in such numbers as 10 Free Screen Recording Softwares For Creating Attractive Screencasts – must be a pretty popular site – maybe I'll subscribe… And from much earlier this year, Library Journal netConnect has a two-post series from Melissa Rethlefsen on screencasting tools (free and fee),…
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Digi-Man and Interrobangs
Another winning episode of the CBC Spark podcast. Episode 79 talks with Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto about digital preservation, and I also learned about the interrobang (‽). Here’s a goofy non-library example of the importance of digital preservation: