new developments in Google’s Book Search settlement

though we haven’t talked about it in awhile, there’s been constant developments  regarding Google’s Book Search settlement.  yesterday, the Department of Justice threw a major wrench into Google’s plans.

In a 31-page filing that could influence a federal judge’s ruling on the settlement, the department said the new agreement was much improved from an earlier version. But it said the changes were not enough to placate concerns that the deal would grant Google a monopoly over millions of orphan works, meaning books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.

The department also indicated that the revised agreement, like its predecessor, appeared to run afoul of authors’ copyrights and was too broad in scope.

the hearing is set for February 18th.

the Authors Guild disagreed with the Justice Departments findings and issued a memo to its members.

We disagree with the Justice Department’s reading of the law….  In our view, it’s best for everyone that out-of-print library books be made available through reasonable, market-based means to readers, students and scholars.  Without a settlement, that won’t happen.  It’s also best that authors have direct control of the scans that Google has made, with the power to compel Google to hide, display or remove these scans.  Without a settlement, authors have no such control.

in November, the Association of Research Libraries along with ALA and ACRL continued their efforts to help librarians understand the Google settlement with an update to “A Guide for the Perplexed III: The Amended Google Book Search.”

the battle continues.

(via Shelf Awareness)

posting by marin

New Adult Non-Fiction 000-399

February 4, 2010

Annotations from Baker & Taylor or Ingram

The Bag Lady Papers: The Priceless Experience of Losing It All

Penney, Alexandra

This inspiring, true tale follows the author’s journey from financial security to economic ruin. After investing–and losing–her life savings with Bernie Madoff, Penney is forced to confront her deepest fears.

 

Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist’s Journey Through the Hell of Divorce

Morrison, Stacy

The editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine recounts her divorce after 10 years of marriage, describing her struggles to care for a new baby and achieve balance in new life as a single woman, while meeting the demands of her career.

 

No Apology: The Case for American Greatness

Romney, Mitt

The former Republican presidential candidate asserts that both his own party and the Obama administration are failing to confront the critical issues that face the United States, and charts a course for a better future.

 

One Year to an Organized Financial Life: From Your Bills to Your Bank Account, Your Home to Your Retirement, the Week-by-Week Guide to Achieving Financial Peace of Mind

Leeds, Regina / Wild, Russell

The “New York Times”-bestselling author of “One Year to an Organized Life” delivers a weekly system to ease financial worries by getting organized.

 

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Heath, Chip / Heath, Dan

Offers insight into the difficult nature of lasting change, presenting metaphorical illustrations of the conflict between the instinctual and the intellectual areas of the brain while sharing case stories of successful individuals and organizations.

 

Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend

Jenkins, Mark Collins

A history of the vampire legend prior to Bram Stoker’s Dracula draws on myriad sources to offer insight into vampire lore from ancient civilizations, recounting key stories while describing recent archaeological findings of reputed vampire sites.

 

Why Good Kids Act Cruel: The Hidden Truth About the Pre-Teen Years

Pickhardt, Carl E.

In the tradition of “Queen Bees and Wannabes” and “Odd Girl Out,” this highly informative and useful book explains the psychology of early adolescent change, the short and long term effects of social cruelty, what parents can do, and much more.

 

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story

Gurwitch, Annabelle / Kahn, Jeff

The television host and a television writer for such shows as “Curb Your Enthusiasm” document the whimsical roles of complaining, codependence and wine in keeping their marriage and sanity intact.

Posted by Jenifer Brown

PW’s the Beat moves

One of the graphic novels online resources I regularly view is The Beat.  Until now it was part of PW.  It has now become independent. 

The new website writes:

“THE BEAT, now in its sixth year, is dedicated to providing the timeliest and most pertinent news and information about comics, the people who make them, the readers who love them and the world that shapes them.

HEIDI MacDONALD is an award-winning writer and editor and a veteran entertainment industry journalist. As an editor she has worked for Disney, Warner Bros., and Fox, among many others.”

The new url is http://www.comicsbeat.com.  Check it out.

Posted by Becky

super easy: connect your laptop to the television

Way, way back in November,  I wrote about Internet enabled television, and promised to actually experiment with hooking up my laptop to our television.  However given my prodigious inclination to procrastinate that task fell to the bottom of my to do pile until now.

If you’ve got a newer HD television I highly recommend hooking up your laptop because it is so easy to do and such a great browsing experience. The process is ridiculously simple involving just a couple cables which you can get from Best Buy (Radio Shack probably has them too) and takes a couple minutes to do.

RGB cable

When you go to get the cables, Tech-Boy at the store is going to use spew initials out faster than the stock market ticker  HDMI, RGB, DVI and so forth.  You’ll need a RGB cable  and audio cable.  Once you get them home plug them into your laptop and television, then turn your television on and boot up your laptop.  Your television will then recognize your laptop as an video source.  Use your remote control to scroll through the video sources the way you do when you want to watch a DVD, only select RGB and your desktop should appear on the screen, and away you go.

Now you can watch Hulu, YouTube, view photos from Flickr or Picasa, or just browse the web.

posting by jim.

New Adult Non-Fiction 500-699

February 1, 2010

Annotations from Baker & Taylor or Ingram

The $5 Dollar Dinner Mom Cookbook: 200 Recipes for Quick, Delicious, and Nourishing Meals That Are Easy on the Budget and a Snap to Prepare

Chase, Erin

A food-budget blogger provides an array of 200 recipes–including Lemon Dill Fish with Red Potatoes and Baked Chicken and Acorn Squash–each of which costs five dollars or less to feed a family of four, in a book with a price breakdown for each recipe, as well as savvy shopping tips.

 

Better Homes and Gardens the Ultimate Slow Cooker Book

Better Homes and Gardens Books (COR)

Features 400 slow-cooker recipes–including main dishes, appetizers, sides, desserts, breakfast and beverages–augmented by 200 full-color photos.

 

Cook Yourself Thin Faster: Have Your Cake and Eat It Too With over 75 New Recipes You Can Make in a Flash!

Deen, Lauren / Sung, Evan (PHT)

Lifetime Television serves up a new set of healthy recipes, a tempting array of dishes that are quick and easy to prepare and will help readers realize their potential to be thin again.

 

Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual

Pollan, Michael

Presents a set of rules for eating wisely in accordance with a variety of ethnic and cultural traditions, sharing guidelines for making grocery choices and dining out.

 

The Kitchen Garden: Month by Month

Buckingham, Alan

In tune with the popular move toward fresh, local and homegrown food, a refreshing gardening guide aims to let the reader get the most from his or her garden and to help dramatically reduce the amount one spends on produce in the supermarket.

 

The Little Big Things: 179 Ways to Pursue Excellence at Work

Peters, Thomas J.

Offers a collection of business success tips that encourages a back-to-basics approach in order to learn to excel at the people side of business.

 

Marie Claire Gorgeous Face & Beautiful Body: A Guide to Total Skin Care

Milgram, Josette (CON) / Gleed, Kim Allen (TRN)

Outlines comprehensive holistic approaches to beauty care and fitness, drawing on expert recommendations from a broad range of disciplines to include coverage of skin care, exercise and therapeutic treatments.

 

The Mayo Clinic Diet: Eat Well, Enjoy Life, Lose Weight

Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research (COR)

A simple healthy diet from a leading authority in health and nutrition is divided into two phases–”Lose It!”, where the readers can lose 6 to 10 pounds in two weeks, and “Live It!”, where readers learn how to keep the pounds off through healthy living–in a book that includes meal planners, recipes, exercise tips and more.

 

The Most Successful Small Business in the World: The Ten Principles

Gerber, Michael E.

Offers 10 critical steps–which every business should go through before it even opens its doors–that define the meaning of a company, teach business owners how to think about systems, train the people within a new business, acquire clients and much more.

 

The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life

Whitman, Meg / Hamilton, Joan O’C

Identifies 10 core values for living a successful life, in a personal account by a former eBay CEO that interweaves stories from her career and upbringing, in an account that includes coverage of such topics as personal accountability, confidence and idea sharing.

 

Sneaky Fitness: Fun, Foolproof Ways to Slip Fitness into Your Child’s Everyday Life

Lapine, Missy Chase / Didio, Larysa

Provides parents with “sneaky strategies” for fitting more exercise and calorie-burning activities into their child’s daily routine, in a book that includes tips on specific toys and games that encourage exercise and healthy recipes for active kids.

Amy Bloom on books that are pro and con happiness

Amy Bloom does a “rap on happiness” in the New Yorks Times on Sunday, January 31st.

On the pro side, Gretchine Craft Rubin tries many happiness techniques in “The happiness project : or why I spent a year trying to trying to sing in the morning, clean my closets, fight right, read Aristotle, and generally have more fun”.

On the con side, Barbara Ehrenereich has a new book called “Bright-sided : how relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America”. 

Amy Bloom writes

“Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries — just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it. The fashion is to bemoan happiness studies and positive psychology as being the work not of the Devil (the Devil is kind of cool), but of morons. “No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness,” Charlotte Brontë wrote in 1853. “What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould and tilled with manure.”

For the full article, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/books/review/Bloom-t.html?ref=books

Sno-Isle readers seem to fall firmly in the happiness camp.  “Happiness project “has 107 holds. “Bright-sided” has 59 holds.

Posted by Becky

The cost of E-books, Amazon vs. Macmillan

Over the weekend, Macmillan told Amazon that it wouldn’t accept the $9.99 price for all E-books and Amazon responded by banning all Macmillan titles (print and e versions from their website).  Much discussion ensued and there has been some resolution, Shelf Awareness: Amazon vs. Macmillan “Ultimately” resolved and PW: Macmillan: Amazon Dispute Nearing Resolution.  Amazon conceded in a letter to the Kindle Community yesterday:

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books

Two authors wrote helpful blog posts about all of this.  Scott Westerfeld wrote: Zinc Blinked and Tobias Buckell wrote a (long) but excellent overview in: Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon.

Buckell wrote about the differing prices of books.  The first level for him is for authors he will pay whatever it takes for the next book.

The next level is someone I want to read. I try to read them in paperback or eBook priced at roughly paperback equivalent prices. But sometimes the convenience of reading right away on my iPhone triggers a buy between $9-12. $14.95 is a mental trigger for me, at that price I’ll wait for the book to come down in price (which it always does), or find a cheap print copy.

Of course, I’ve been in some financial hard times in my life. Right after I was laid off the $4 difference between $9 and $14.95 was a bit much. For those times I use the US’s amazing library system, and get the book on loan. I understand if people are hard enough up they can’t afford the $4 difference. It’s mac and cheese time, ramen noodle time.

Smart Bitch Sara of Smart Bitches Trashy Books wrote Brand Loyalty and Book Loyalty stating that she didn’t become upset over all of the ire over the weekend.  She feels no “particular feeling of loyalty toward Amazon or toward Mamillan.”  What is important is the author and the book, not who publishes it or who sells it.

More coverage:

• New York Times: Amazon Removes Mamillan Books
• Digital Book World: Authors’ Reactions to the Amazon/Macmillan Battle
• Seattle Times: Amazon.com to capitulate to Macmillan price demand
• EW Shelf Life: Amazon capitulates to Macmillan’s e-book pricing demands

via Shelf Awarness, EarlyWord, PW, Smart Bitches Trashy Books

posting by Lorraine

are you searching for LOST season 5?

now found

Are you wondering why the library hasn’t ordered LOST the complete 5th season yet?

Well we have and it’s been on order since January 14th, it’s just been well, lost in our catalog until today.  Our intrepid Catalog Services staff have expanded the record to make it more easily searchable.

You can now find it by using a title browse search on the terms  “lost the complete”, which will drop you into a list of all the available seasons.

OR simply do a keyword search LOST season 5.

Television series can be difficult to locate in our catalog because only a brief record is entered into the catalog at the time of order.  These temporary records are only searchable by an exact title search.  We use a brief record supplied by our vendors for books, movies, music that are on order because sometimes the title changes or the publication is delayed or canceled.

A tip of the big sombrero to Diana in Catalog Services for jumping in and editing the record for this popular television series.

posting by jim

BBYA list ends

Every January, YALSA publishes the Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA) list at ALA midwinter.  This year’s list will be the last.  The 15-member board of YALSA unanimously voted to restructure the organizations lists starting January 2011.  BBYA will no longer be around, but a new list called “Best Fiction for Young Adults” will begin.

School Library Journal posted in YALSA axes Venerable BBYA List many viewpoints on the end of the BBYA era.  Our own Teen Services Coordinator Dawn Rutherford is included in the article:

… [T]he new arrangement comes with lots of benefits: publishers can more easily promote their titles; authors will have experts to judge their books; small libraries will no longer feel overwhelmed by the massive BBYA list; middle school librarians won’t have to worry about the adult titles on the list; and YALSA members can talk about teen fiction and still have something resembling a social life.

via SLJ’s Extra Helping

posting by Lorraine

r.i.p. J. D. Salinger

a man who had an enormous impact on teens and adults alike has died of a heart attack at the age of 91.

Enraged by all the “phonies” who make “me so depressed I go crazy,” Holden soon became American literature’s most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel’s sales are astonishing – more than 60 million copies worldwide – and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.

Salinger spent most of his life in isolation in his New Hampshire home building quite the reputation as an eccentric recluse.

posting by marin