librarian.net

I’m going to be on the road at SXSW for the next week. People who are also going should come to my panel on Friday at 5, or attend one of the librarian meetups. And say hi if you see me, here is my schedule. In the meantime I’ll be keeping an eye on the #HMOD debacle and polishing up places to put this logo. The site, ReadersBillofRights.info, says “Please use these images in support of our work against DRM with the Readers’ Bill of Rights for Digital Books.” Nice list of associated things to read down the righthand side there.

“The Mod-Mod Read-In Paperback Book List was produced in 1970, under the auspices of the Young Adult Services Division, the precursor of the Young Adult Library Services Association. From the titles, it seems to be an ancestor of both Popular Paperbacks and Quick Picks. It was part of a project called “Operation Opportunity;” apparently the Jaycees’ response to the Great Society.”

Read the whole post over at Sara Ryan’s terrific blog.

I made an effort to make time for reading this year. The combination of this and a lot of airplane time meant more good books read. Here are previous year end lists: 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. My booklist lives in a separate blog and it has its own RSS feed.Here’s the wrap-up of what I read in 2010.

number of books read in 2010: 48
number of books read in 2009: 39
number of books read in 2008: 31
number of books read in 2007: 53
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78

average read per month: 4

average read per week: .92
number read in worst month: 2 (Jan/June)
number read in best month: 7 (July)
percentage by male authors: 73
percentage by female authors: 27
fiction as percentage of total: 60
non-fiction as percentage of total: 40
percentage of total liked: 90
percentage of total ambivalent: 9
percentage of total disliked: 1

I read a lot of books on a few topics this year: art history/theft/discovery, cybercrime novels and a few victorian mysteries and some graphic novels. Still not really on the ebook bandwagon. Still enjoying reading paper books in bed. Still finishing a few books I started in 2010, I expect this trend to continue. Wish me luck, and happy reading in 2011!

Ebooks aren’t just electronic books. They are a combination of certain file types, certain readers and certain software designed to keep people from migrating away from the approved file type and reader combinations. Confused? Jason Griffey explains.

“By introducing the book as a material in the garden, Jardin de la Connaissance offers an evocative cultural frame to examine transformational processes inherent in nature. Invoking the mythic relation between knowledge and nature, integral to the concept of ‘paradise’, we invite the emotional involvement of the visitor by exposing these fragile and supposedly timeless cultural artefacts to the processes of decomposition. ” More. [thanks greg!]

There’s an interesting little article in the New York Times today about whether the prison reading list of a prisoner can be used against them in a trial. The case involves a 2007 home invasion and murder in Connecticut. The defense has indicated that the books that one of the accused men had checked out of the prison library prior to the crime were “criminally malevolent in the extreme.”

In a motion last month, the defense lawyers referred to “Department of Correction library books.” They noted that Mr. Hayes, who spent much of his life in Connecticut jails, had borrowed “one or more books of fiction whose plots can fairly be described as salacious and criminally malevolent in the extreme.” The lawyers were trying to block any reference to Mr. Hayes’s prison reading before the Cheshire crime at his trial. They said a mention of the books would be “highly inflammatory and very prejudicial to the defendant.”

In a strange twist, there have been two books already published about the murders that residents are trying to have banned from the local library. More on this from Library Journal recounting a program from ALA Annual.

Peter Hirtle looks into licensing and whether libraries can legally lend e-book readers on the LibraryLaw blog.

Rebecca’s Pocket always collects summer reading lists from various sources and puts them all together in one place. Here is a link to her ever-expanding Summer Reading List 2010. I’m intrigued by the first link: Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read from 1934. I believe I have read one of them. If you like that sort of thing you may also enjoy the entire Neglected Books Page.

“The L!brary Book takes readers behind the scenes of fifty groundbreaking library projects to show how widely varied fields and communities – corporate underwriters, children’s book publishers, architects, graphic designers, product manufacturers, library associations, teachers, and students – can join forces to make a difference in the lives of children.” [thanks matt!]

Before there was Braille, there was Moon. Check out these photos from some antiquarian Moon books. More on Moon. This post was made the same day that the Internet Archive announced that they have one million books available in DAISY format for blind and visually disabled folks. Not just talk, here’s the list of them. Image is from this book. [via]