Overdrive Blog. – “What has a 600-horsepower engine, an interior loaded with cutting-edge technology, and is sure to make crowds road in Indianapolis later this month? The Digital Bookmobile, of course!On May 24 and 25, while racecars are lapping the track in preparation for the Indianapolis 500, the Digital Bookmobile National Tour will be thrilling crowds at Indianapolis Public Library with “The Greatest Spectacle in Reading.” As so many of our library partners have seen firsthand over the past few years, the Digital Bookmobile is a 74-foot-long, 18-wheel tractor-trailer that tours the continent spreading awareness for digital libraries and eBooks.”

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Ars Technica – “West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette has been hopping mad this week as one of its reporters learned that the state has been sticking 1,064 high-end $22,600 routers into “little public institutions as small as rural libraries with just one computer terminal.” When reporter Eric Eyre actually called up Cisco posing as a customer, he was told by a rep that the company’s 3945 series routers were “our router solution for campus and large enterprises, so this is overkill for your network.” Instead, the rep recommended a far cheaper commercial grade router for $500. And while the 3945 series routers might be massively overkill for many of the locations to which they have been deployed, 366 of them aren’t even being used. Instead, they’re sitting in a warehouse.”

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Amazon.com – “Owning a Kindle just got a whole lot better for magic-loving Muggles. Starting June 19, Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is adding all seven Harry Potter books (in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish) to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL). Harry Potter is the all-time best-selling book series in history, and Amazon has purchased an exclusive license from J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore to make the addition of these titles possible. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a benefit of Amazon Prime membership—Prime members also enjoy free two-day shipping on millions of items and unlimited streaming of more than 17,000 movies and TV episodes. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library has now grown to over 145,000 books that can be borrowed for free as frequently as once a month, with no due dates.”

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LifeHacker – “Sorting through the Amazon store for free ebooks can be a bit of a mess. To simplify the process Zero Dollar Books is a simple webapp that aggregates all the best selling free ebooks and shows them off in a nice clean view.”

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NYT Editorial – “For over a century, New York’s majestic central library on Fifth Avenue has drawn grateful scholars and dazzled tourists. Faced with financial uncertainties and a pressing need to modernize, the president of the New York Public Library system, Anthony Marx, has put forward a $300 million proposal to renovate the flagship building. The plans, which are still evolving, sound both necessary and forward-thinking in this digital era. But the library’s overseers have to take care that they preserve the essence of this cultural landmark.”

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Goodreads Blog – “Goodreads continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. Today, we had our 300 millionth book cataloged! To give this statistic some context: It took the Goodreads community three years to catalog 100 million books (including books marked as read, to-read, or currently reading). Fourteen months later, in late September 2011, we reached 200 million books. Now, just seven months after that, we’ve hit the 300 million benchmark. Take a look at how the number of books cataloged has skyrocketed.”

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Press Release – “Thomson CompuMark, a Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science business and the global leader in trademark searching and brand protection solutions, today announced plans to launch 136 new databases for its SAEGIS® on SERION® online trademark screening solution. The addition of this content will make Thomson CompuMark the world’s largest provider of trademark screening data, covering 186 countries and registers. Thomson CompuMark made the announcement at INTA, the International Trademark Association’s annual meeting.”

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Tennessean – “A school district has deemed an awkward teen’s two-page oral sex encounter at boarding school in the coming-of-age novel “Looking for Alaska” too racy, banning the book from class reading lists.

Sumner County Schools are at least the second in the state, after Knox County in March, to keep students from reading it together in class.”

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SF Weekly – “Jessa Crispin arrived at the 2012 Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia in March with high expectations. And by high, we mean abysmal. “Secure in the knowledge that libraries are now permanently fucked,” wrote the editor-in-Chief of the popular “litblog” Bookslut. Surely librarians would crumble before her, the harsh fiscal realities having reduced the bibliognosts into heaps of despair, wailing about furloughs and nonexistent arts grants. But Crispin is not a librarian. Once a publishing outsider, she launched Bookslut in 2002 while working at a Planned Parenthood in Texas. She now enjoys insider status, and she contributes to likes of NPR, PBS, and the Washington Post on all things books. The conference falls within the realm of the “book world,” so Crispin, donning black garb, traveled all the way from Berlin in search of heavyhearted roundtable discussions and forsaken vendor booths.”

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New York Daily News – “In a handsome new website called The Hemingway Papers, the Toronto Star has collected the columns that Ernest Hemingway wrote for that newspaper. In doing so, it sheds much-needed light on a little-known aspect of the great writer’s career, and does so in a sleek, inviting and easy-to-navigate format.”

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Associated Press – “Maurice Sendak, the children’s book author and illustrator who saw the sometimes-dark side of childhood in books like Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, has died. He was 83. Longtime friend and caretaker Lynn Caponera says she was with him when he died early Tuesday at a hospital in Danbury, Conn. She says he had a stroke on Friday.”

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LA Times – “The Book Depository is a British-based online bookseller that ships to countries around the world, for free. To bring that point home, it has built a map that shows who bought what, where, just now. The window of the map moves to reach the most recent purchase, zooming back and forth from Germany to Singapore to the United States to Australia to Norway. In each location, the title pops up. It’s hypnotic.”

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NY Daily News – “Beloved as a crown jewel of world culture, the New York Public Library’s stately main branch is up for a historic makeover that promises to well serve the city. The building, outside which the lions lounge on Fifth Ave., houses 5 million volumes, most of them on 90 miles of shelving spread across seven floors overlooking Bryant Park. It’s time to move the books, which couldn’t give a Dewey decimal about the view, to make way for people.”

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Wired – “I’m going to assume you’ve already heard the argument that comics are a great way to teach literacy, and not re-hash that here. Comics are also a pretty good way to teach other things as well: it’s a very blurry line between comics and instructional diagrams, for instance. The combination of words and pictures is something that just clicks for many readers, particularly when it’s done well. Reading With Pictures is a non-profit organization that aims to “get comics into schools and get schools into comics.” Tom Stillwell wrote about their first anthology last year, which covered a variety of subjects as their proof of concept, and was very well-received. Now, RWP is seeking funding on Kickstarter for The Graphic Textbook, a 144-page comics anthology covering Social Studies, Math, Language Arts, Science — all drawn from a list of common core standards. Their hope is to weave comics-based learning into virtually every subject by producing a book that can actually be used as a textbook, and not simply a literacy aid.”

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Florida Today – The erotic “Fifty Shades of Grey” apparently is too blue for the Brevard County Public Libraries system. The wildly popular first installment of a titillating trilogy by British author E.L. James, “Fifty Shades” is parked atop every best-seller list in the country, from Amazon to the New York Times. But the sadomasochistic saga won’t be found any longer on Space Coast library shelves. All of a “handful” of copies were removed from circulation earlier this week. “It’s quite simple — it doesn’t meet our selection criteria,” said Cathy Schweinsberg, library services director “Nobody asked us to take it off the shelves. But we bought some copies before we realized what it was. We looked at it, because it’s been called ‘mommy porn’ and ‘soft porn.’ We don’t collect porn.”

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NY Times – “Day after day, a tall, shy woman weaves her way unnoticed through the earnest and learned campus swirl of Brown University. She enters the hush of a library, then promptly vanishes from sight. Down goes Marie Malchodi, 48, who attended but never graduated from Brown, down to the library’s subterranean warrens, where she works as a “book conservation technician.” She sweeps her long dark hair into a bun, pierces it with a paint brush, and starts her day, caring for ancient books and ephemera that are sensitive to the touch.”

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Associated Press – “Google Inc. urged a judge Thursday to toss The Authors Guild and an organization representing photographers out of 6-year-old litigation over the future of the world’s largest digital library, a move that would force authors and photographers to individually fight the online search engine giant. Google attorney Daralyn Durie told Judge Denny Chin in federal court in Manhattan that authors and photographers would be better off fending for themselves because their circumstances varied so widely.”

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Google Inside Search – “In the interest of creating more of these magical moments for students, we’re pleased to announce our new Search Education website, bringing educators the tools they need to help students become savvy searchers and independent learners Learning to tap the full potential of Google Search empowers students in both their academic and daily pursuits. Search education provides the technical tools and critical thinking skills crucial to preparing today’s students to be technologically self-reliant, independent learners.”

Direct to the site

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PBS – “Public libraries are a major hub through which Americans gain access to e-books and other digital resources, but these institutions’ role in the digital transition hasn’t been made easy by the nation’s recent economic troubles. On April 9, the American Library Association released its annual State of America’s Libraries Report, and many of its findings were grim. “Public libraries continue to be battered by a national economy whose recovery from the Great Recession is proving to be sluggish at best,” the report concluded. Twenty-three of the 49 chief officers of state libraries surveyed indicated that their library systems faced budget cuts over the past two years. According to the report, “For three years in a row, more than 40 percent of participating states have reported decreased public library funding.”

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LA Times – “Since 2002, at first in secret and later with great fanfare, Google has been working to create a digital collection of all the world’s books, a library that it hopes will last forever and make knowledge far more universally accessible. But from the beginning, there has been an obstacle even more daunting than the project’s many technical challenges: copyright law. Ideally, a digital library would provide access not only to books free from copyright constraints (those published before 1923), but also to the tens of millions of books that are still in copyright but no longer in print.”

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Portsmouth, RI Patch – “In a declining economy and time when libraries are closing their doors, is it acceptable to charge patrons to read books?”

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BBC – “Ben Hur and Casablanca are among the film scripts to be released as e-books for the first time by Warner Bros. Other movies in the Inside the Script series will include An American in Paris and North by Northwest. The e-books include items such as the shooting script, production notes, storyboards and on-set photographs. “Now we can give fans rarely seen details of how these stories came together,” said Thomas Gewecke, Warner Bros president of digital distribution. The Ben Hur e-book includes excerpts from Charlton Heston’s performance and shooting journals from the film sets.”

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The Tribune – “Connected Texas, in partnership with the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) and Intel, announced Tuesday the launch of the Every Community Online (ECO) program. The program offers free computer and Internet training and leaves participants eligible for free computer giveaways as well as discounted home broadband services. “The Every Community Online program focuses on improving broadband access, adoption, and use across the entire state,” said Connected Texas Executive Director Don Shirley. “One million, four-hundred thousand Texas adults say a lack of digital skills and knowledge of how to use a computer and broadband is the main reason they don’t have broadband at home. The ECO program promises to change that by offering Texans a free way to learn life-changing digital skills through their local library and then be rewarded with discounted broadband services and a chance at a free computer.”

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via Associated Press – “Barnes & Noble Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are teaming up to create a new Barnes & Noble subsidiary that will house the digital and college businesses of the bookseller and include a Nook application for Windows 8. The companies said Monday that they are exploring separating those businesses entirely. That could mean a stock offering, sale, or other deal could happen.”

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Voxy – “Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, announced that it has launched Westlaw NZ, the latest development in online research for legal professionals in New Zealand. Westlaw NZ offers unrivaled content from case law and journals, legislation and commentary to precedents and news, as well as tax information. The technology behind the intuitive search capability within Westlaw NZ helps direct users to precise points of law and extends a new level of confidence that information is authoritative, current and the results are comprehensive. Built upon state-of-the-art Westlaw technology, Westlaw NZ was developed specifically for New Zealand customers and modeled after Thomson Reuters online legal information services in the United Kingdom, United States, Asia, India and South America.”

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