Library Stuff

PC World – “College students could soon be able to ditch their backpacks and put their textbooks into their shirt pockets thanks to a new program that will let them read their books using iPhones or iPod Touch devices.”

GalleyCat – “Publisher W.W. Norton has launched Chapter Select e-Books program for schools, allowing teachers and students to choose which school book chapters they want to buy–building a customized online textbook for the classroom.”

csmonitor.com – “About 45 million books – a total value of $15.4 million, paid for by the United Nations and the aid agencies of the US and Danish governments – were scheduled to arrive before classes started in Afghanistan last March. But according to the AP, millions of those books have still not been delivered.”

Michelle Slatalla – “With this year’s news about the ways some unscrupulous colleges make an extra buck off students’ naïveté — from loan officers who accepted lenders’ kickbacks to schools that got cash incentives to steer students to expensive study-abroad programs — I felt it was expedient to warn my daughter about a big expense that looms before her. Textbooks.” (via)

Webware – “Here’s a concept for textbooks that’s almost as cool as library checkouts.”

AP – “To hold costs down, students who once shopped for texts only at the campus bookstore are casting wider nets, searching for new and used textbooks at online bookstores, seeking out student book exchanges, investing in e-books, sharing books with fellow students – even borrowing books from public libraries.”

Book Patrol – “If the open access movement or the digitization crowd ever needed something to rally around the textbook trade would be the place to start.”