James LaRue - myliblog

Patti Thorn is co-founder of BlueInk Review , a fee-based service offering serious, unbiased reviews of self-published books. She served for 12 years as book review editor of the Rocky Mountain News, which closed in 2009. She offers her observations on the last year of reviewing in " From lizards to lit: a year of self-publishing realizations ."

ALA's Carrie Russell writes, "I was on the Diane Rehm Show yesterday to talk about libraries and e-books, along with Allan Adler from the Association of American Publishers, Jeremy Greenfield from Digital Book World and Vailey Oehlke, director of the Multnomah County Library (OR). Allan and I were live in the studio and Jeremy and Vailey called in by phone. Vailey was great! Our host, Frank Senso, was very skillful in taking the conversation in a direction that he wanted it to go. It was quite amazing to see how he managed that – no wonder radio and television hosts and spokespeople are called 'the talent.'" Hear the show: thedianerehmshow.org/audio-player?nid=16527 . Or read about it here .

Life With E-Books A great summary of issues and players. One correction: Monique Sendze has elected to stay with Douglas County Libraries. And I'm glad she did.

I tell you what. Science fiction authors get it. Connie Willis I have praised and quoted often. Here's a great blog post from another wonderful writer. Look for post # "56. Libraries and ebooks."

So here's a thought experiment. Suppose today the Executive Director of the American Library Association gets a series of calls from the CEOs of all the Big Six. "Wow, what were we thinking?" they say. "We've been looking over the research, and it's clear that libraries HELP publishers sell ebooks in all kinds of ways. Instead of trying to lock you out of the market or heaping new restrictions on you, from now on, you get things a week BEFORE street date. We have no better friend and ally than the public library when it comes to the promotion of reading!" Oh, and another thing. "We realized we were wrong about both pricing and ownership, too. We'll give you a solid 45% discount, and you get to keep and hold your copies. What a pleasure doing business with you!" In this scenario of total victory, what do we get? Here's my take: not enough. Do our patrons mostly want Big Six offerings? Look at the bestseller list for the answer. But...

Innovate. Explore. Discover.

Recently I submitted an article for the Independent Book Publishers Association in New York. As I've written elsewhere, librarians need to pay more attention to independent publishing. My article is coming out later this month, I believe, but I wanted to share part of it here. Publishers and authors have a lot of misinformation about libraries. This might be a good time to bust the myths. Myth # 1 : Libraries just want to buy one copy, then give your book away to the world . The truth: No, we don't. We do want to increase access -- getting more books in more people's hands is part of the library's mission. But we understand and adhere to copyright. We pay for multiple copies in the ebook world, just as we do with print. At Douglas County Libraries, we have our own system to manage ebook checkouts. We apply Digital Rights Management through the industry standard Adobe Content Server, and we check out books to just one person at a time. Myth # 2 . Libraries steal s...