Category: Books
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Is ProQuest missing the boat with mobile SafariBooksOnline?
Earlier this week, Safari Books Online launched a mobile interface to their product at http://m.safaribooksonline.com. The University of Calgary has an institutional subscription to Safari Books Online via ProQuest, and I naively assumed after we threw this new URL into our ezproxy configuration I'd be able to access the new site via my iPhone. Nope. …
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Wowbrary Notifies You of New Library Books, Movies or Music
Lifehacker points to a service called Wowbrary, which, regularly informs you by email and/or RSS about your chosen public library’s newest books, movies and music. We make it easy for you to browse through the latest additions and place a hold on a new title. This is a free user service supported by grants, donations,…
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“I want people to read my stuff”
I recently started reading the blog of the author (MCM) of The Pig and the Box (see my post from last week). He sells that title as a printed book, and as an ebook, but he also makes it available for free to download as a PDF from his website. Today he blogged about why…
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Google Unveils Cellphone Version of Digital-Book Collection
As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Google has just made 1.5 million of their scanned books and made them available in a format suitable for reading on mobile devices. Oddly, at this moment getting there is not an option from their official iPhone app, nor does visiting http://books.google.com on the iPhone automatically redirect…
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Amazon to host press event at library – new Kindle?
Engadget reports that Amazon will be hosting a press event on Monday, February 9th at the Morgan Library in NYC. According to Engadget, the last time Amazon hosted a press event at a library it was to launch the Kindle. Will an updated version be announced? Will it be available in Canada? Time will tell.
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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…
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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…
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I’m # 51,008 in the Kindle Store!
You may recall that last year I discussed some options I was considering for commercialization of this blog. I have gotten one $25 payment from Newstex in the last year, so my content's obviously trickling out there somehow. Just got a notice that I'm now available in the Amazon Kindle store, where you can now…
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Library Elf goes to subscription model
From the Library Elf website: For the past five years Library Elf has been helping library patrons keep tabs on their library material. It is an independent service and not related nor funded by libraries. Costs have gone up greatly (new server, higher bandwidth, etc.) and to help pay for the new costs, we are…