Book Patrol is pleased to publish this review written by fellow bookseller Lynn Wienck of The Chisholm Trail BookstoreDarkNet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation by J. D. Lasica is an analysis of the blur in copyright laws as they pertain to media and the intrusion and influence of World Wide Web. The author's focus is principally on film; however, he leaps freely from movies to books and music and back again. Musicians, film makers, writers use a mix of many works, most of which are subject to copyright laws. The discussion covers what is black, white, gray, what is...
Another Amazon Outgrowth: The Penny Pinchers
It is no secret that Amazon and has single-handedly corrupted the entire bookselling industry.We have lost 50% of our open bookshops since the birth of online booksellingand it almost impossible for the 50% who are left to be price competitive.Interestingly enough, while the number of open bookshops have been cut in half the amount of people calling themselves booksellers has skyrocketed.Within this tornado little cottage industries have popped up trying to capitalize on the Amazon effect.There is the whole Scoutpal culture where a PDA device and the Amazon database combine to remove much of human element from handling and pricing...
Rare Books, The Bookshop and Open Access
Joseph Campana's piece, Rare Books, appeared on the Kenyon Review blog last week. The jumping off point for Campana was the New York Times article on the closing of the Heritage Book Shop, one of the premier antiquarian book shops in the world.Campana recounts his first memories of encountering a rare book at his college library and how he is as "willing to make a fetish of rare books as the next person." Yet he ends the article by professing to have more of a sense of "ambivalence, not wonder" toward rare books.He then goes on to say that the...
The Shelfari Climb
The big news in the book social networking world this week was Shelfari's announcement that it has created a branded application for Facebook.Facebook is the don of social networking sites and for Shelfari to implant their application in their playing field is a huge step in gaining market share.The recent Publisher's Weekly's article on book social networking sites placedShelfari a distant third in the marketplace behind Goodreads.com and way behind Librarything who were first in.This deal will close the gap considerably. Since the press release Shelfari has already seen record traffic and a record amount of new registrations.And while Shelfari...
Google Book Search: A Report From the "Google Five"
The first five libraries that jumped on the Google digital book train took time at the recent ALA Annual Conference to weigh in on how things are going. The Google Five are the libraries of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan and Stanford and the New York Public Library.Though all five said that they were "pleased with the progress" they also acknowledged that there have been some issues, which range from books being damaged to questions about the quality of searches being performed. One library had someone complain because some of the scans have thumbs visible! And over at Oxford's Bodleian Library they...