People keep writing articles about how valuable libraries are, even with ebooks and the Internet. What people are overlooking is that the reason libraries are having such fits dealing with a changing environment is not that libraries are unrecognized as fountains of value, it's that libraries are so valuable that they attract voracious new…

Over 2000 participants made the daylong programming at the "Library Journal"/"School Library Journal" Virtual Ebook Summit, September 29, a robust conversation and not just within the summit interface but also in tweets with the #ebooksummit hashtag (and beyond) and in libraries across the country where participants logged in to take part. The…

Memoirs and autobiographies have been a wildly popular nonfiction genre for the past 20 years, ever since Frank McCourt and Mary Karr set the craze in motion with "Angela's Ashes" and "The Liar's Club", respectively. Memoirs have drawn fiction readers to the nonfiction shelves and elbowed their way into book discussion groups. In this confessional…

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Several social and technological developments of the 20th century, such as…

The author believes that publishers and authors will, in the digital age, benefit from freely sharing information, and that digital rights management (DRM) and other protection mechanisms are crazy. He has argued on behalf of libraries that ebooks and other digital content deserve the same First Sale rights that physical purchases have. But that…

Since the early 1990s, Carl Malamud has made it his business to return to the public what is rightfully theirs: free access to public information. Despite legislation that mandates such access to government information, some categories of information have been excluded, notable among them court opinions (with the exception of the U.S. Supreme…

Over the last 15 years, the book review landscape has changed seismically. Reviewing is no longer centralized, with a few big voices leading the way, but fractured among numerous multifarious voices found mostly on the web. In turn, readers aren't playing the captive audience any more. Undone by economics, many traditional print sources have been…

Most recently, Amazon crowed that it is selling more ebooks than hardcovers. Interestingly, the most recent figures from the Association of American Publishers indicate that new adult hardcover sales in both April and May rose by more than 40 percent over the same months last year, a rebound from last year's shopping paralysis brought on by the…

To quote "Will & Grace," the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7-10, was "a nightmare/delightful!" Five times larger than even the largest library conference, the show's 35 football field-long bazaar of technology marvels and gimmicks--along with thousands of reps hawking them--was almost enough to put a person off…

In the journal "The Chronicle of Higher Education," an article by Geoffrey Nunberg criticizes Google's Book Search (GBS), emphasizing that disturbing errors are endemic. He recognizes that for mainstream "googling" purposes, "they don't really care about metadata provided by a library catalog." In perhaps his most discouraging point, linguistics…

For the past half dozen years or so, BookExpo America (BEA) has biennially touched down in New York City, hopping to Chicago, DC, and Los Angeles in between. No more. For the next four years--at least--the annual book bonanza will call Manhattan's Jacob Javits Convention Center home. Times are hard, and publishers are hurting, so anchoring in the…

This article talks about Mormonism, which has been sensationalized more often than most other religions. Since before the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and through Mitt Romney's run for the U.S. Presidency, an unprecedented number of news stories have been published about the Mormon faith. Historian Richard Bushman has termed the last…

Though some libraries thrived in 2009, many more took a beating, and the fiscal crises that have struck many states and thousands of municipal governments in 2010 increase the odds that the effects of the new Great Recession will be felt over the long term. The decline in payroll and collections budgets have led to a loss of expertise and key…

This article discusses blogging, which has become central to communication in libraries and traditional library media in the past few years. It presents a survey of the library blogosphere which shows the mainstreaming of the medium. The survey of 839 blogging librarians depicts a much more diverse and rapidly growing population. The largest…

The Web 2.0 "buzz" starts with new technologies such as virtual worlds, cell phones and handheld devices that offer 24/7 web access, tagging, social networks, and blogs and brings together various web capabilities in unique combinations. Web 2.0, however, is about much more than the technology--it is about a change in focus to participation, user…