Rochelle asks and Amazon answers: is loaning the Kindle (by libraries) a violation of Amazon.com’s terms of service. Answer: yes.
Author: jessamyn
books that make you dumb
Booksthatmakeyoudumb is a small site by Virgil Griffith that tries to look at the relationship between favorite books of students at colleges and the average SAT score at those colleges, “cross referencing the 10 most popular books at every college, as given by Facebook, and the average SAT score.” It’s amusing and it’s fun to look at and Lolita is not where you’d think. [lisnews]
speaking of Worldcat
Slow reading points me to the Not in WorldCat blog, showcasing weird funky and obscure books that you can’t find in one of the many libraries Worldcat covers.
Worldcat.org is the public face of the largest combined (or “unionâ€) library catalog in the world. Library folks usually refer to it as OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). Currently OCLC/WorldCat catalogs over 1 billion items from over 60,000 libraries around the world. This blog is not affiliated with OCLC/Worldcat in any way. It’s just an outlet for one bookseller/librarian (me) to feature unusual, rare and interesting items that exist outside of WorldCat’s vast reach.
Celeste West’s obit in the SFGate
Celeste West’s obituary is up on the SFGate website with a link about who to contact about the memorial, noting “If you cannot donate, no worries, you can creatively agitate for peace and justice, and follow your bliss.”
Help Pew be Pew with this future scenario survey
I was asked to fill out a Predictions Survey by the Pew folks. In it, they describe the modern-day status quo of technology and ask for predictions on where these technologies are going and how society uses them. At the end, they ask if anyone has friends or colleagues whose input might be useful. My input was along the lines of “I don’t even agree with your status quo statements” so I figure it might be useful for them to get other opinions. The link to the survey is http://www.psra.com/experts and you have to use the pin 9000 to log in to it.