Contra Costa Times – “This winter local homebound seniors will have a chance to enjoy a new high-tech way of reading thanks to an innovative new Brentwood Library program that will serve as a countywide model. Under the program, they will have the opportunity to borrow Kindle Touch eReaders to access popular books and magazines through the library. “Many people could benefit from them. It can read to you and you can adjust the size of the type,” local Contra Costa County Library Commissioner Shirley Peck said. “We aren’t the first library to do it, but it is quite unique.”

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ARL – “Today, with help from our partners at the Center for Social Media at American University, and the Law School at AU, and with support from a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ARL is proud to unveil the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. Based on 36 hours of focus group deliberation with 90 academic and research librarians representing 64 institutions in meetings held all over the country, the Code is comprised of eight Principles that describe general circumstances where the groups found library uses to be fair, followed by Limitations that describe the outer bounds of the consensus and Enhancements that the groups thought represented salutary but not necessary steps to protect the interests of other stakeholders.”

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Techcrunch – “While efforts to digitize the contents of libraries has been going on for years now by organizations such as the Internet Archive and Google, the Library of Congress and, in fact, the U.S. Government, has yet to embark on its own comprehensive digitization program. There are efforts here and there, but nothing tackling all the books, film, and other content owned by the United States. While the topic didn’t make its way into President Obama’s Sate of the Union speech last night, Mr. Obama’s former transition team co-chair, John Podesta, thinks creating a “Digital Library of Congress” comprised of “the vast holdings of the federal government” deserves executive level attention.”

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Chronicle of Higher Education – “The Association of Research Libraries might have a solution to what some librarians call “the VHS-cassette problem.” Here’s the scenario: An academic library has a collection of video tapes that is slowly deteriorating, thanks to the fragile nature of analog media. A librarian would like to digitize the collection for future use, but avoids making the copies out of fear that doing so would violate copyright law. And the institution’s attorneys have advised the librarian that the fair-use principle, which might offer a way to make copies legally, is too flexible to rely on.”

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AP – “Library users searching for e-books will soon get to look through a much bigger catalog and help decide what their local branch might carry. OverDrive Inc., a major e-distributor for libraries, announced Wednesday the launch of a vastly expanded list for patrons, featuring not just e-books available for lending, but hundreds of thousands of those which include a collected of Edgar Allan Poe stories edited by Michael Connelly to foreign-language titles. Viewers can look at excerpts, purchase books from a retailer or request that their library add an e-book that wasn’t being offered.”

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VatorNews – “There has been a lot of news and innovation in the publishing industry as of late. The iPad and the Kindle have been entering houses at record rates and is bringing entire libraries into a touch screen tablet. Apple also recently released iBooks 2 and iAuthors to allow people to independently publish textbook content on the iOS platform in order to lighten the financial and physical load for students. And one other area that is growing and has room to process even further is the world of audio books. The Association of American Publishers released some data a few months ago that showed, that the net sales revenue for publishers has grown annually — with 2010 reaching $27.9 billion (a 5.6% increase over 2008) and $7 million of that came from audio books.”

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Chicago Tribune – “With the city’s public library system in transition, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is replacing longtime Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey with a technology-focused administrator from the West Coast. Brian Bannon, chief information officer for San Francisco’s public libraries, will take over in Chicago in March. The change at the top comes amid labor unrest and budget cuts at the city’s libraries under Emanuel.”

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Huffington Post – “From beloved children’s classics to bestsellers you can’t go through an airport lounge without tripping over, these surprisingly banned books have all, for a variety of surprising reasons, been outlawed.”

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PostMedia – “What if Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after, or Van Helsing decided Dracula wasn’t worth the trouble? In a high-tech twist on Choose Your Own Adventure, “active fiction” imbues readers with precisely that kind of power. Launching this month in Amazon’s Kindle Store, Coliloquy e-books are peppered with “choice points” that allow readers to take the story in the direction most appealing to them — whether it’s experiencing a critical moment through another character’s eyes, setting the protagonist on a new path, or seeing what a sex scene would look like with a different partner.”

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USA Today – “Generations of young people have thrilled to the crackling wit of Holden Caulfield, the teenage narrator of The Catcher in the Rye. But if you want to hear an authorized audiobook of J.D. Salinger’s seminal 1951 novel, you’ll need what amounts to a doctor’s prescription. Salinger died in 2010, without relinquishing the rights for an audio recording. But U.S. copyright law grants the Library of Congress permission to produce an audio recording or Braille edition of any published work for the blind and physically handicapped, provided the book is distributed free, unabridged and, in the case of recordings, on special digital playback equipment.”

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Contra Costa Times – “Protesters occupying the UC Berkeley’s anthropology library on campus claimed victory Saturday night when university administrators signed an agreement meeting the protesters’ demands for a fully restored library schedule. UC Berkeley’s Tom Leonard put his signature on the agreement about 7:30 p.m., according to an email from Ronald Cruz, an attorney for By Any Means Necessary, a coalition that defends affirmative action and immigration.”

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Chicago Sun Times – “Chicago’s branch libraries will reopen on Mondays, thanks to a political end-run engineered by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The mayor has accused the union representing library employees of blocking a scheduling change that would have averted the all-day Monday closing because they’re using libraries as a “bargaining chip” to “achieve something else.”

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USA Today – “Undergraduates trying to look up Bob Dole’s birthday (July 22, 1923), the population of Mauritius (about 1.2 million) or the state insect of South Dakota (the honeybee) had to do so Wednesday without the only encyclopedia many of them have ever known. Wikipedia blacked-out their website Wednesday announcing a 24-hour protest against proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress. With Wikipedia blacked out for 24 hours in protest of a pair of anti-piracy bills under review in the U.S. Congress, students scrambling to write early-semester research papers without the open-source encyclopedia posted panicked remarks to Twitter. And just as fast as the 18-22-year-old cohort tweeted about their plight, 30-somethings nostalgic for late nights spent poring over Encyclopedia Britannica sent snarky retorts.”

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LOC – “The Library of Congress, at the initiative of House Leadership and under the guidance of the Committee on House Administration, today announced it has made the Congressional Record available as an app to users of iPad tablet devices. The Congressional Record delivered through the app is a PDF document that can be shared via email and be able to be browsed by date and searchable by keyword within an individual document or section; documents can also be saved to the iPad. Content includes Congressional Record issues dating from January 4, 1995 through the present.”

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Cleveland Plain Dealer - “They’re ready to roll at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s Library and Archives. The new addition to Cuyahoga Community College’s Metropolitan Campus will be officially dedicated during a ceremony Monday, April 9, as part of the festivities leading up to the Rock Hall inductions April 14 at Public Auditorium. But as of Tuesday, this unique repository will be open to the public.”

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LTN – “A mobile application for finding legal ethics opinions is now available from the New York State Bar Association, and two other applications are being developed. Mobile Ethics is free and available to the public on Apple iOS, Google Android, and Research In Motion BlackBerry devices, officials said Wednesday. “Maybe not every attorney is going to view the ethics app as something worthwhile, but certainly for those who work in the ethics field or those who have questions, it is very convenient. I’ve utilized it a few times,” association president Vincent Doyle III said, at Connors & Vilardo, in Buffalo. That kind of search is also accessible through paid services like Lexis Advance and WestLaw Next, but they can be cumbersome, he noted.”

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AP – “Jerome Rubin, who helped bring to market the commercial online research database today known as LexisNexis and the display technology behind millions of Amazon Kindles and other e-readers, has died in New York. He was 86…. Rubin was trained as a physicist and attorney, but in the 1970s was hired by an Ohio-based company to make commercially viable what was then a novel product — a computer “search and retrieval system” or database of state case law.”

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PaidContent – “Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Publishing is launching a new series, “Book Lust Rediscoveries,” curated by librarian and NPR commentator Nancy Pearl. Pearl will select a handful of out-of-print books each year to be republished by Amazon in print and digital formats.”

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WSJ – “A legal battle between HarperCollins Publishers Inc. and a company run by one of its former chief executives is putting the spotlight on a key issue in book publishing today: Who owns the e-book rights to decades-old titles? Two days before Christmas, HarperCollins filed a copyright-infringement suit against Open Road Integrated Media Inc. in federal court in New York, seeking to block Open Road from selling an e-book edition of Jean Craighead George’s 1972 children’s novel “Julie of the Wolves.”

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Melville House Books – “One of the slower-burning arguments in the digital realm concerns the role of ebooks within the public library system. Much of this argument has centered around DRM use. Librarians and their patrons hate DRM. Publishers and writers reluctantly need it. Part of this is the obvious issue over shelf-life. A physical book that is popular, perhaps a perennial favorite, will have to be replaced from time to time. The wear and tear of being a library book is substantial. This means additional sales for writers and publishers. If it is a very popular book, whether in the stacks or at the front of the library on display, the library might end up stocking multiple copies of that title to better serve the demand from readers. Again, boon for writers and publishers.”

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Mashable – “FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced Monday that he will be ordering sweeping changes to the Lifeline low-income telecommunications connectivity program. The Lifeline program was formed to help low-income Americans pay for telephone connectivity. Lifeline subscribers have been able to receive as much as $10 off their monthly telephone bills for either a landline or mobile phone. But high-speed Internet has been replacing the telephone as the main connectivity choice for Americans, and the FCC recognizes that shift.”

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Techdirt- “Against the background of today’s war on sharing, exemplified by SOPA and PIPA, traditional libraries underline an inconvenient truth: allowing people to share things – principally books in the case of libraries – does not lead to the collapse of the industry trying to sell those same things. But publishers really don’t seem to have learned that lesson, judging by this article in the New York Times about the nonsensical attitude they have to libraries lending out ebooks:”

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ABA Journal – “Budget-minded lawyers who think they can hire law students for their free access to Lexis and Westlaw should think again, according to a Utah ethics opinion. A lawyer who uses law students to access free online research violates ethical rules, according to the Nov. 15 opinion by the Utah State Bar Ethics Opinion Advisory Committee. The Legal Skills Prof Blog has the story. According to the opinion, numerous students have reported that their employment is conditioned on providing free research for their employers. Such research amounts to theft of services because students have signed user agreements restricting free research to educational and nonprofit purposes, the opinion says.”

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