And I’ve just listened to an excellent webinar by Wesley Blakeslee from Johns Hopkins about fair use which has me thinking about things in a different light. Policies will be reviewed. But next week.

I am so sick of being held hostage by these companies…and it’s even worse that huge library systems with multi-million dollar budgets kow-tow to these companies! I’d prefer to have nothing than foist an inferior product onto my customers, as if they are too stupid to know the difference!

Thank-you again.

NetLibrary is on a new platform and still (as of last week, anyway) partnering with RecordedBooks to deliver good public library content. RecordedBooks may or may not be going with their own platform as well; they’ve been dodgey lately when I ask them. Ingram Digital is coming out with their own product, but they keep pushing it back (they’re shooting for ALA Midwinter now).

Maybe OverDrive will start playing nicer when they’re not the only kid in the pond anymore, too. You never know.

Part of my job is to help people who want to reprint some of my work’s reports/charts/data etc. We don’t charge for reprint permissions, and it’s generally a rubber-stamp process. But I see an increasing number of emails from college students that say “Please, can I have permissions to quote a paragraph from report [Name]?” And I write them back and say, you don’t need reprint permission for this, it’s fair use, and here’s the title, publication number etc. so you can cite it properly. Then they write me back and say “But my professor said I have to ask for reprint permission.”

Then I want to tear my hair out.

PS- as an aside, why doesn’t itunes have special library deals for their audiobooks? I thought they were all pro-education and shit.