Category: pr, hype & bs

OCLC and The Library Hotel resolve their dispute like adults, finally.

It’s always nice when the “computers will replace libraries” doomsayers are funny about it. I don’t really see Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature as any real threat, but then again, I use a typewriter. I also never noticed that the word mildewey has the word dewey in it until now. [thanks all]

I just finished Al Franken’s book so I have been getting a bit more savvy about how to interpret media statements by the right wing, but this one ropes librarians in. Regarding the name of the new bill curtailing abortion — the Partial Birth Abortion Bill — conservatives defended it saying “National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine both list online in their dictionaries the term partial birth abortion and define it as it’s been defined by the government in this legislation.” Of course the link to a dictionary I found on the NLM site just leads us right back to Merriam-Webster….

There’s already been some lively debate about Amazon offering full-text searching for a good chunk of its books. My personal opinion is that it’s just going to wind up favoring big publishers over small ones because they are going to be more likely to offer these incentives to Amazon [as well as to be well-represented there to begin with, my small-press title doesn’t even have a snappy-looking book cover shot to accompany it.] They are also more over a barrel in terms of ceding to Amazon’s wishes to make this “feature” available. Of course the addition of full-text searching makes their already not-so-great search work more poorly, but then again I never did use Amazon for anything except known item searches to track down ISBNs.

The “Dangerous Reader” store is up. If you’re interested in getting a bumpersticker, baby t-shirt or other merch with the “I read therefore I’m dangerous” slogan, go to it. Jason Pettis runs it and he is donating proceeds to the ACLU to help them fight the PATRIOT Act.