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Showing posts from June, 2013

ebooks in the US

What follows is the draft of an article I wrote for library colleagues in Bulgaria. There's not much in it that's new; but it's an attempt to provide a more comprehensive narrative of how public libraries got to where we are regarding ebooks, and what Douglas County Libraries has attempted to do about it. eBooks - an introduction For decades, librarians in the United States of America predicted the arrival of the digital book. Finally, around 2009, the Amazon Kindle, followed by the Sony ebook Reader, became popular Christmas gifts. They were soon followed by the Barnes and Noble Nook. By 2011-12, Apple's iPad became the most stylish option, followed by a host of Android-based tablets. The early adopters of this technology tended to be well-educated, upper middle class, and middle-aged. By the end of 2012, about 20% of library patrons had, and preferred, ebooks to paper books. Again by the end of 2012, roughly 50% of the sales of all popular adult fiction were e

150 resources for writers

We've been doing a lot of talking at the Douglas County Libraries about supporting local writers. I got this link to a blog with some interesting content: 150 Resources to Help You Write Better, Faster, and More Persuasively . I can't vouch for every link, but it looks helpful.

CherryTree review

Just to help myself remember this. CherryTree is a fast, two pane, hierarchical notes taking program. It looks, feels, and works very like Notecase, with a few exceptions. What it has : easy and logical commands for creating the outline (left pane) tree. wonderful commands for the editing of the text (right pane) node. In particular, I like the checklist to do option. It automatically inserts "[ ]" at the beginning of the line. Click that, and it strikes through. In Notecase pro, the to do is on the tree, and a space bar strikes it through. That might be more logical for task management with lots of things to be done on the right. Fantastic commands for quickly arranging the reordering of PARAGRAPHS. Alt-Up, Down. What it has not : spelling check word count. But it's not a bad, free alternative to Notecase Pro. And is available for Windows and Linux. I also just ran across something called Kabikaboo , a Python-based outliner. It DOES have spell check