James LaRue - myliblog

I know you do. Everything changed in 2010. Patrons handed library staff their shiny Christmas present: Kindles. “Make them work!” Despite the many predictions of a paperless society, eBooks really hadn’t caught on. But suddenly it was possible to carry 15 or 20 or 100 books around with you in your preferred font type and size. That same year, 2010, also marked the beginning of a big shift in the publishing landscape. At that time, there were about 300,000 new titles published a year by “the Big Five” (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster). There were roughly 60,000 new titles per year published by small and independent publishers who just couldn’t match the distribution system of the major publishers. There were about 10,000 so-called vanity press titles a year. Today we call them “self-published,” even though the platform usually belongs to someone else — Amazon, Apple and Barnes and Noble, probably. Almost overnight regional, small and ind...

Introduction Some months back I did a webinar on Odilo , an automation vendor (including an ILS, discovery, ebook acquisitions, hosting and delivery) with its roots in Spain. It has been present and growing in North America since 2012. I’d like to revisit the company, because I think it offers some compelling advantages to some of the offerings in today’s market. Indeed, that market, with very few exceptions, has been stagnant in some important and disturbing ways. Where we are in 2015 The fundamental issues of libraries and ebooks haven’t changed much since 2010: the Big Five and a few distributors still dominate the market, and their pricing and licensing models (lack of ownership, loss of discount, poor integration) have made libraries all but inept in this new space. We buy fewer books just as the number of new volumes (especially outside the Big Five) is skyrocketing. Random House prices for many new titles - now reliably at 6-8 times greater than consumer - erode...

Recently, I read the galley proof of my friend Anne McGhee's book The Wisdom Within These Walls . You can pick it up from Amazon here . I happen to have been around when Annie first started gathering the stories that form the core of the book - interviews with real people in the area. She found some incredible people. One woman was a police dispatcher in Dallas, and on duty the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. One man actually helped get us to the moon. Another tells the heartbreaking story of the Pacific theater in WWII. Back then, Annie turned the interviews into brief, very powerful monologues. Then, she put together a readers theater group to perform them. These "plays" remain some of the most moving moments of my life. But she has continued to think about these stories, and her book is about just what wisdom means. Her definition is a gem: " Wisdom is our capacity to take in the experience of life, infuse it with intention, and return it to the world ...

Recently I was asked to read and write a blurb for a new title. It's called Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries , edited by Robert P. Holley. Purdue University Press: West Lafayette IN 2015. I wrote, " This outstanding compendium makes several important points. First, self-publishing is out of its infancy -- now accounting for over half the intellectual output of our culture. Second, this explosion of literature has finally gotten our collective attention. Self-publishing has forced us to look afresh and more critically at the value and costs of editorial processes, book design, pricing, distribution, bibliographic control, marketing, reviewing, and library relations with authors. Third, most of the pieces here are from colleagues who aren't writing from the outside anymore. Astute vendors, public librarians, academic librarians, and even librarians who are also self-published authors now are in the thick of things, ey...

A year or so ago, I wrote a series of blog entries about how would-be authors can get started at the library. These were on the Douglas County Libraries' "The Wire." When that blog was discontinued, I decided to republish the content here. Thanks to Amber DeBerry, Director of Community Relations, for passing the content along, and for her staff for many suggestions for improvement of the text. So You Want to Write a Book So you want to write a book. Good for you! Do you want to write a good one? We know from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (Little, Brown and Co., 2008) that accomplishment is more than a matter of talent. It's the result of disciplined effort over time. No one picks up an instrument and plays it perfectly the first time. Similarly, no one sits down and cranks out fine literature right off the bat. Just as musicians spend a lot of time practicing, good writers spend a lot of time writing. And if Gladwell is right, approaching mastery take...

I’ve decided to undertake a grand experiment. Using the program Gingko ( https://gingkoapp.com ), I’m going to generate a series of blog posts that will flesh out my original outline, and begin to elaborate what will eventually be chapters in a book. Do check out Gingko, by the way. It just might change the way you think about writing.   Ultimately, I will self-publish the work as an ebook. Price: $5? (Please comment below. Would you pay that for a roughly 200 page book?) The working title is “Who Needs Libraries?” I invite you along on the journey. Comments from librarians and non-librarians alike will help me write a better book. I’ll be trying to blog at least three times a week, at about 350 words per blog. Along the way, I hope to learn more about this fascinating program. And please,  do  comment. We’re in this together!

Mark Coker does a great analysis of the emerging economics of self-publishing, and what that means both for would-be authors, and legacy publishers. Recommended.

You've written a book. You want it to be in your local public library. Why? Because you want to be read, and libraries are where the readers are. After all, collecting books - gathering, organizing, and publicly presenting the intellectual content of our culture - is what libraries do. So all you should have to do is swing by the library, drop off your book (they might even buy it from you), and the next thing you know, the public will be clamoring for more copies. Wouldn't it be nice if things worked like that? The job of the library: a history Because, of course, they don't. But before I get into how you should approach your local library, let me give you a little history. When public libraries first caught on (at the end of the 19th century), they were cast by civic leaders as serious sanctuaries of learning, places where intelligent laypeople could sit quietly, contemplate Great Literature, and stay abreast of the important political issues of the day. Earl...