Category: Books
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HarperCollins online
Two months ago I posted about how HarperCollins was going to go it alone, scanning their own titles and making them available to search engines, but keeping the content themselves instead of having Google or Yahoo scan the books. The first title in this experiment seems to have hit the web – The aptly titled,…
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The Search
I’ve been home sick much of this week, and the only good thing to come of it is that I finally had enough time to finish John Battelle’s book The Search, which is about web searching in general, but mostly about Google. I quite enjoyed it; lots of interesting background on the evolution of search…
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Thoughts on textbook use in distance education
Rebecca has a good post with lots of links and thoughts about whether textbooks are the best way to go in higher education.
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Gun-toting Librarian
My campus comix shop has been good enough to order in a few copies of the first two issues of Rex Libris for me (first mentioned here last August), and I’ll continue to patronize them, but good news for the rest of you – according to this press release, Slave Labor Graphics is re-releasing issue…
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The Future of Electronic Texbooks
Stephen posts about a Bill Gates quote in which Bill claims students will all be using electronic textbooks within 4-5 years. Stephen thinks not, at least not that quickly, and I agree. Just too many different formats and DRM non-standards out there to make this work even within 5 years, IMHO. I can see some…
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Canada’s Version of the Google Book Search Fight – Michael Geist
Canadian copyright legal scholar Michael Geist writes about a mini version of the Google Book Search copyfight happening in Newfoundland. "The President of the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador has expressed concern that the plan will make it harder to sell books." Sigh. Michael points out that it’s more likely people will find out…
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HarperCollins Plans to Control Its Digital Books
I wonder if they’re going to ask permission of all their authors first 😉 Seriously though, as long as this collection is openly available to the standard search engines I think this is a great idea that they’re taking matters into their own hands. Said the HarperCollins CEO "We didn’t like being seen as Luddites,"…
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Triangulation 1: Google Print
One of my favourite podcasts is Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWiT). Very high production values and good, current topics. Leo and John C. Dvorak (not my favourite) have started a new podcast called Triangulation, in which they have three experts (presumably they will always be two of the three?) discuss a given topic. …
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Amazon Tag Cloud
Hey, Amazon does tag clouds (aka concordance) – I hadn’t seen this before! (click for full size). Interesting text stats too…
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A Risky Gamble with Google
Siva Vaidhyanathan, friend to librarians, has a lengthy piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education called A Risky Gamble with Google (the link goes to his blog where the full text of the article is reproduced). The piece is mostly a discussion about the copyright implications of the Google Book Search project (this post describes…