Tag Archives: digital divide

Amazon’s book city #1 avoids cuts in library hours but still might reduce its library book budget—already below the U.S. per-capita average

Update, May 7: The missing $56K for materials was restored in the final version of the budget last night. Kudos to all the library advocates who spoke up! See, it’s worth the time! – D.R. Now it’s definite. Alexandria, VA—honored as Amazon’s “most well-read” city in the U.S. despite ample evidence to the contrary, especially [...]

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Amazon’s book city #1, Alexandria, VA, may cut library hours: Time for a digital-era national endowment to help ease U.S. libraries’ financial woes?

Update: We won! Library advocates successfully fought cuts in hours and the materials budget. Leaving us in the dark about the source of this tidbit, a Washington Post headline in the Style section blog says: “Alexandria, Virginia: the most well-read city in America.” Similar words show up elsewhere in the media about my hometown, the [...]

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A national digital library endowment: How America’s billionaires could be modern Carnegies for real

Update: James Fallows’s blog on The Atlantic’s site reproduced part of this proposal, and the long version appeared in Sabrina Pacifici’s award-winning LLRX library journal. More details and an FAQ on the proposal are here. Warren Buffett was on CBS Sunday Morning. The interviewer, Rebecca Jarvis, asked if he owned an iPad. No. iPhone. No. [...]

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Toward a Library-Publisher Complex for the digital era: Where the money is for both sides

The Military-Industrial Complex in Alexandria… I live in the Washington suburbs, where “Military-Industrial Complex” is more than just rhetoric in an Eisenhower speech from 1961. Just across 1-395 from me, here in Alexandria, Virginia, loom the twin towers of the $1+ billion Quarter Pentagon, featured in this Army Corps of Engineers video bragging of its [...]

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Not enough library e-books to feed your new gadget properly? Well-stocked national digital library systems could help

If you can’t find the right library e-books for your new Kindle, Nook, iPad or other gizmo, you’re not alone. More than 100 patrons of the District of Columbia Public Library were lined up electronically today for 10 e-book copies of The Racketeer, John Grisham’s new novel about the murder of a federal judge. Some [...]

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Southern librarian’s thoughtful criticism of Gates Foundation survey unwittingly shows need for TWO national digital library systems—one public, one academic

Mindful of the record number of poor Americans, a thoughtful “Front Line Librarian” in a Southern state is asking an essential question in effect: Why care so much about library e-books and the rest when millions of low-income people lack computers or at least the skills to use them? Front Line says more reliance on [...]

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Amazon – IPG battle shows need for libraries to buy OverDrive and control their own destinies

More than 4,400 e-books—from the Independent Publishers Group—have vanished from the Amazon site. Why? Pressured by Wall Street, Amazon wants to jack up its profits at IPG’s expense while still keeping e-book prices low enough to entice people to buy Kindles. If Amazon succeeds with IPG, then Jeff Bezos and friends will move on to [...]

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E-book strategies for Rockford, Illinois: LibraryCity’s guest column in local daily

The Rockford (Illinois) Register Star, the local daily, has just published LibraryCity’s guest column: How to Make Rockford an E-Book Leader. Rockford’s library planners are right that e-books deserve a higher percentage of their budget than now. But the city should take care to digitize properly before going on a major e-book spree. How about [...]

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Novel helped young thief turn into judge: Case history for library system in Rockford, Illinois, to consider in mapping out e-book plans

Olly Neal was a hell-raiser of a teenager and a habitual shoplifter. He applied his talents to stealing a book from his high school library—a novel with a sexy lady on the cover. Mildred Grady, a teacher-librarian, spotted him. But she was savvy enough not to let him know at the time, and Neal himself [...]

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Low-income people vs. e-books? Illinois controversy shows why the Harvard-based e-library initiative must not downplay nonelite’s needs

Welcome, Rockford visitors! Also check out Novel helped young thief turn into judge. – D.R. The e-book debate in Rockford, Illinois, was bound to happen somewhere. And, as a way of spotlighting the need for a national digital library system for all Americans, not just the affluent, I’m glad it did. The local NAACP and [...]

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