local news
People often think that since I moved to a town of 351 people, I’ve kind of dropped out of modern civilization. I’m writing this post from my home, where I have DSL, courtesy of our excellent local...
View Articlegoogle, the new yorker, and the economics of access
This will undoubtedly be making the rounds, if it hasn’t already, but The New Yorker has an article on Google Book Search that’s currently available online. (The New Yorker, it is worth noting, is not...
View Articleit’s always a little more complicated than you think
Yesterday I was scrolling through some shared items in Google Reader when I stumbled on a post from BoingBoing about the Salvation Army requiring proof of US citizenship before they gave children...
View Articleon ways of paying for content
A long time ago, in 1999 or 2000, I wrote a story for a local alternative weekly paper about online literary magazines. I’d link to it, but the paper folded some years back, and its website folded even...
View Articlehearts and minds and ebooks
Like just about everyone else in libraryland in the past few weeks, I’ve become immersed in the HarperCollins ebook expiration outrage known on the internet as #hcod. (That stands for HarperCollins...
View Articledubs
When I was sixteen years old and a sophomore in high school, I desperately wanted a copy of the new They Might Be Giants album, Apollo 18. My difficulty was that I did not have any money for buying new...
View Articlepatron schools reference librarian
Today a patron asked for “the phone numbers for some periodicals.” I Googled (because hey, that’s how I find phone numbers) and discovered that both the titles I’d been given were for catalogs. I...
View Articlean open letter to the Edwin Mellen Press
I should have written this a long time ago. My delay comes not from hesitation or indecision but from illness, and for that, I apologize. My thoughts may be late in coming, but they are no less...
View Articleopen access rocks; Lambert Academic Publishing does not
Last April, after discovering that I could, I decided to add my MFA thesis to Iowa Research Online, the institutional repository at the University of Iowa, where I got my degree. For good measure, I...
View Articleebooks, then and now
In doing some blog maintenance today, I found this draft from a year or so ago that for some reason I never published. While things have gotten somewhat better on the ebook front — more publishers are...
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