Top four things I've learned cataloguing my own books

For several weeks now, I've been (somewhat amateurly) cataloguing my personal collection of books with LibraryThing.  I love it.  Basically I'm just ensuring the proper and well-formatted title, checking it has the right cover, including the main authors and other responsibility holders, tagging them with my own main "categories", putting  them in collections of who in my family it really belongs to, specifying where and when I got it (if I can remember or figure it out), and putting in a Dewey number.  It's fun, of course, being the librarian nerd that I am, but it's also fascinating and I was thinking about how valuable but impossible it would be to have library school students actually do some personal cataloguing of at least a hundred titles.  Here are some of the interesting things I've found:

1. I've never really thought about the categories of books I've had before.  I've collected books from many sources and over a long period of time so I've never really had a very clear personal "collection policy" so there's plenty of odd stuff in there.  It's mostly graphic novels, reference books, philosophy stuff, science stuff, and of course kid's books but there are ones that stand out:  "Sesshu's Long Scroll", a spiral bound copy of "Understanding Neural Networks", and a nicely bound copy of the Qu'ran.  In the course of cataloguing some of these works, particularly when I'm tagging them with my basic subject areas of interest -- figuring out how broad or specific to make those tags or whether to use them at all if there's only going to be one or two with that tag anyway -- it really makes me think about subject headings and how they can and/or should be used.  I initially just wanted to be able to see the numbers of certain books in a subject that I find interesting and retrieve them easily.  But then I had to add non-subject tags like ".damaged" or ".gift".  And then format tags, such as "REFERENCE" or "GRAPHIC NOVELS".  I came across my copy of "Dark side of the moon : the making of the Pink Floyd masterpiece" and realized that, although I like music, I don't really have a lot of books on the subject.  Should I get more?  Is it worth my time?  I have so many other interests.  Going through my books subject-wise is like walking through a list of my interests, both proven by past actions and potential or maybe just hinted at.
2. Dewey numbers are crap for fiction.  Ok, everybody knows that but trying to put my books into some sort of order led to using Dewey numbers which led to the hard fact that Dewey doesn't do any kind of fiction justice, especially comic strip compilations and graphic novels.  I had to invent a personal organization method to use instead, roughly based on the solutions I've seen in public library.  For example, "FIC A Smi 1997" is a work of fiction, considered an "adult" novel (not sexual, just grown-up, to differentiate it from my YA books and juvenile books, or other formats), by someone with the last name starting with "Smi" published (or originally created) in the year 1997.  It's mostly, as Dewey is supposed to do, to lump alike things together.
3. It's a lot of work.  Again, not a new discovery here but it's really hit home.  And I'm not even truly cataloguing them.  Just cleaning up a few key pieces of metadata.  I was tidying up the publication statement and ensuring it had the right ISBNs but that starting taking too long and I didn't think it was really worth it.  And besides, I think LibraryThing records include ISBNs that I can't easily see since I get records with a search for an ISBN that doesn't end up being the in field.  Odd.  Anyway, not really important, and not worrying about it made things go a little quicker.
4. Finally, although you have to "judge a book by it's cover" it's better if you don't have to.  Describing a book, or really anything, should be done with someone that has a good deal of knowledge about the work (or thing).  Some key access points may not be immediately clear to someone who hasn't read the book.  If you don't know the subject area, then how could you know the place this particular work has in it?  Ideally, cataloguing should be done slowly by a few people who love the particular work, perhaps the particular author.  Philosophy texts should be catalogued by philosphers, collections of poetry, by poets.  How can I truly describe my book on neural networks?  I know very little about cognitive science.  But cataloguers don't and can't know the subject matter to that degree.  The work is done by people who know classification and the rules of AACR2 and RDA.  But when keying in even the tiny specks of metadata about my own collection, I find it much easier and much more rewarding to work with a book I have written a review of, like "Knitting the Semantic Web", or read a million times, like "Waiting for Godot".  Sometimes it makes me think of the part of "Farhenheit 451" when the main character meets the "books", the people who have memorized entire novels and have saved them that way.  Perhaps each book should have it's own cataloguer, who gets to know the work, inside and out, and therefore is the only one qualified to know how to describe it and give access to it.  Not good for the people in those jobs though, I guess, right?

Oh, and one more thing.  I've discovered that I'm really weird.  I take great pleasure in considering the proper capitalization of my books.  For example, in AACR2, the only title words that get capitalized are the first one and any proper nouns.  I have the graphic novel "Star trek : countdown".  Although it looks weird, "trek" doesn't get capitalized because, in the context of the title, it's not a proper noun.  It's just a "trek" through the "stars".  But I also have "Star Trek : The Next Generation : technical manual".  In this case, "Trek" is capitalized because this is a technical manual for the ship in the TV show "Star Trek : The Next Generation".  TV show names are proper nouns.  (I mean, technically, the book should have been called something like "Technical manual for the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701D" or something like that, and not had a cool cover, but publishers like to think they're tricking us into buying their crap...  which they are.)  In the first case, the work is using the term as a name for the work and isn't referring to itself.  It's just using the words as they are, as the entire "Star trek" universe does.  The second case is using the term in reference to the series, to the previous works, to the fictional universe that the TV shows, movies, comics, etc. make up.

Of course, I'm only half way through my books so far so perhaps I'll learn more (or learn better?) as I go.  And then there's my movies and video games...  I need a "LibraryThing" for those.

The connection between evolution and library science

Is there a connection?  I've been thinking about the possibility for probably the past year year now and reading chapter 10, "Life's Own Code" from Glieck's "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood" has suggested it to me.  (The following chapter -- "Into the Meme Pool" -- would have done it if I had been a little slower.)

In a way, libraries could be thought of as "anti-evolution".  Not "anti-evolutionary theory" but rather working against the force of evolution.  As it is in meme theory, ideas have a life of their own, literally not figuratively.  Concepts, plans, images, theories, etc. have "survivability" and replicate themselves and can be thought of as surviving, or better yet, thriving the more copies there are of them and the more they are replicating themselves.  The idea of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a particularly successful.  My grocery list from last week, not so much.  So what do libraries collect?  Ideas encased in containers, in a way, frozen in time.  The librarian's job is typically two-fold:  preservation and access.  We collection valuable resources to "save" them from the wilds of the information wilderness, but then also house them in such a way as to allow people to look at them and use them as they see fit.  The analogy to genetic evolution could be something like a zoo, animal conservation area, or even cryogenic lab.  We house books, journals, videos, etc. in a safe place, away from the damage that could be done to them while in the hands of the users, publishers, society in general.  And then we provide a controlled environment for the ideas inside those "idea-holders" to come out and play, or more accurately, reproduce.  When patrons read a journal article, skim through a textbook, watch a video, practice a piece of music, what they are doing is producing an inexact copy inside their mind, in effect, allowing the meme(s) to multiply and escape the confines of the collection.

So libraries are both anti-evolution, in that the organisms are stored away to ensure non-replication (or rather non-imperfect-replication) and pro-evolution, in that the organisms are allowed to reproduce, and in fact, the storage is done for the express purpose of continued and "appropriate" reproduction.

Our job as library workers is made easier and more difficult by the differences in reproduction of ideas as compared to living organisms.  Pure replication is easier of course, so that maintenance of content is made possible by the practice of perfect replication (e.g. LOCKSS).  On the other hand, any replication is easier so that more control and therefore more work is necessary to ensure that unwanted replication doesn't happen (e.g. loss of "old versions" that some shareholders such as publishers may consider valueless but may have value to others).  It's easier to "freeze" content in containers unlike cryogenically storing animals or plants (e.g. archiving old electronic journals).  On the other hand, extended storage without active involvement can involve loss of content as well (e.g. unsupported formats and/or technological failure).

What does this mean for librarians?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps thinking about the work of librarianship in this way can help us prepare for the inevitable disintegration and/or substantial alterative of content.  If we consider the ultimate goal of librarianship is to ensure a certain kind of "idea mutation" then it puts preservation and access assurance into a slightly difference light, doesn't it?

Reader survey results and responses

Just read Reader survey results by Joseph Esposito (via a Scholarly Kitchen entry).

This is the summary of the results of a reader survey conducted by the author and Joe Wikert.  These are my own professional librarian take-aways:

1. So there are plenty of readers directly purchasing books from the publisher?  Perhaps, as libraries, with our role firmly between the publisher and our readers, we could facilitate those transactions.  I WANT my patrons to get the information/entertainment they want and it doesn't have to always be through something actually IN our collection.  If a student wants to buy the book, I'd like to help her get the right one.  Maybe we could even convince the publisher/provider to give them a discount since the library helped out.
2. It's suggested that while readers tend to like to purchase books online, they still like to browse in print.  Great!  The library is still purchasing plenty of print, so perhaps we should be showcasing it more/better?  More displays and sprinkled liberally around our buildings, not just at the front door.  Public library tend to do it better than academic, but we could all do it more.  Of course it has to be controlled better:  searching readers need to be able to find it, not just browsing readers.  We could also make our stacks a little more browser-friendly with labels, maps, signs, etc.
3. It's mixed as to what format is more popular:  print or electronic.  There are still big numbers on both sides and plenty of overlap.  This suggests that our collection development policy of collecting either or both as appropriate seems right on the money.  I'd like to have more firm data on what "appropriate" really is but lacking that, subject expertise like we tend to have in academic libraries will do.  Not much for libraries to really improve on.
4. Finally, the author seems to bemoan the decreasing value of certain traditional sources of book reviews and opinion information.  I'm not so sure.  This kind of information has always been useful and desired but limited to the "experts".  But reviews are more important as the provider is deemed more similar to the reader.  A doctor may say a certain book is great but a librarian saying the same thing will be more influential to me.  Therefore, the more open collections of reviews are, the more likely I'll find someone that has an opinion about the book I think I may want and who is "like me" enough for me to be moved by their opinion.  Also, the more opinion info there is out there, the more options the library has for obtaining this data and adding it to the collection to help OUR readers.  We're doing this more and more, but we have to keep going.

Anything I missed?

"Directory of Open Access Books" (DOAB) review

From the press release for the launch of DOAB, the "Directory of Open Access Books" or "DOAB" is:

a discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license. DOAB provides a searchable index to the information about these books, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository. 

CONTENT

The site claims to contain "854 academic peer-reviewed books" as of April 26, 2012 but my check found only 841 (by counting the number of titles under each letter in the alphabetical browse by title list).  Perhaps I missed a number or two when adding?  Perhaps there are titles not listed in that browse by list?  Not sure.  Regardless, although this is a relatively small number for a useful collection of ebooks, the Open Access (OA) book 'industry' (if you can call it that) is still new and the resource was only launched two weeks ago so the low number is understandable.

Looking through the browse by publisher list, there are some recognizable publishers (e.g. Taylor & Francis) plus several university presses (e.g. University of Michigan Press).  And there's already a pretty wide subject coverage (pure and applied sciences, arts and humanities, social sciences, etc.).

NAVIGATION

As is common with new resources now, DOAB has a very simple navigation and interface.  The pages are very clean, being mostly white with really no clutter.  There's a Google-like single keyword-search box on the front page (which seems to search all fields except "pages").  This search does not auto-wildcard meaning that it will not find the text string entered as a part of the meta-data.  For example, it did not find a book with "Donation" in the title when searching "donati".  It also includes an advanced search which allow the combination of search boxes with a Boolean connector searching specific fields, plus date range specification.

Some search related odds and ends:

• Not all entries have subject headings which is odd.  The database does include cover images for the books, which is nice (and probably almost mandatory for today's users).
• Search results display include faceted search functionality on the right.
• Subjects (at least in the browse by subject list) are quite limited and rather high level.  This ok with only 800-900 titles but it will be increasingly painful as the directory grows.
• No author browse function.
• Not a target in the SFX Link Resolver yet.  (This is understandable.)

CONCLUSION

This is a good showing for such a new resource.  And it's certainly good for the OA book movement which needs more promotion and supporting resources.  This is made by the makers of the "Directory of Open Access Journals" (or DOAJ) which has done well so far.  Many libraries appreciate the DOAJ data and add the "collection" to their list of accessible ejournals.  Books are a different kettle of fish than journals but it's probably safe to assume a possible similar trajectory for DOAB.  IMHO, I would add this to a small-medium sized library's "collection" of eresources.

We can but we don't want to

Just read an old article about the publishing industry's problem with posting copyrighted text online from 2006 in which quotes Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs for the Association of American Publishers as saying that "[Publishers] can't compete with free."  Oh really?

This is the exact opposite of the very argument publishers are currently using to argue that Open Access (OA) can never truly replace the traditional scholarly publishing process since it fails to sustainably provide all the competitive benefits that publishers have been providing for centuries, not to mention all the digital services available now.  If the publishing model that we are using now, i.e. anything in the industry except for OA, provides so much unique value (such as their contributions in editing, managing peer review, filtering, etc.) then how can you argue, at the same time, that a few professors posting longer-than-typical excepts online for free on functionless web pages are substantial competition?

I'm not arguing that we should all have the right to post whatever we want, however much we want.  It's just that the publishers' argument in this case is a little silly.  They don't need to make an argument for why it shouldn't be allowed.  The law already doesn't allow it.  And we all know why the law is there.  (Of course the issue involves the quantity allowed through US fair use which is a little vague but still, the point is that there IS a line that should not be crossed though it may be difficult to find the line.)

Review of "Good Dog. Stay." by Anna Quidlen

Good dog. Stay. by Anna Quindlen [View on Amazon]

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not a bad little book. I was just looking for something short in non-fiction and came across this in my small local library branch.

Maybe 40 pages in total (a lot of pictures of random dogs), this book is an extremely short read, and the message is quite simple. But it's a good "pick me up" for anyone who likes dogs to even the slightest degree. It tells of the acquisition of various dogs by the author, their relationships (with each other and with the family), and the end of life for one of them. As the author says, it is really about the people since dog-ownership involves a lot of anthropomorphism and projection of one's self onto the animals.

View all my reviews

We get no respect, no respect at all.

"Without effective communication, some institutions will just see the library as a repository for books or as a supermarket: they think if you put self-checkout machines that's an automatic librarian which, of course, it's not. Further down the line when the collections gone to pot and the machine can do nothing about it, the institution recognises that the librarian's job is more than just stamping books."

Age old problem. But how to other professionals and/or academics handle it? Well, usually they don't care. Everyone knows what doctors do. We don't know how but we do know what. Same with lawyers and nurses and teachers and professors. Why not librarians? Well, mostly because people don't really understand the THING that our profession revolves around: Information. Nothing's really changed about our bodies, the law, learning, research, etc. But information, or rather the information containers, which are the things that most people think about when they think about information, have changed. Drastically.

Books are still books but not when they are ebooks. And books don't play the role they used to play in learning and entertainment. And newcomers to the post-secondary environment are shocked to learn about all the new info containers there are.

These changes are what librarianship is responsible for managing but it's hard to explain the changes and their effects on users when it's hard to understand them yourself. It would be as if the human body started evolving inside at an incredible rate into something most people don't recognize as what it was before. The difficulties doctors and nurses would have to deal with would be just as difficult to explain as to deal with. Increased failure rate would translate, in the user's mind, as incompetence on the professional's part. Anything new promising success would be very appealing even if it didn't deliver.

What do you think? How do librarians convince everyone else of our worth? Does the analogy work? How do you see the predicament librarians face?

[ Inspired by "Behind the job title: university librarian" from guardian.co.uk ]

"The Great Karoo" by Fred Stenson (review)

I'm not a big fan of historical fiction. Actually, I avoid it like the plague. I'm thinking that from my years working in book stores and then as a librarian, I have questioned and been a bit frustrated by the curiously vast numbers of history books in the world. I'm not a history fan and I guess this has unfairly set my sights away from history and anything historical.

But I selected this among many others through the Early Reviewers List way back in 2008 primarily because it was a work of fiction about Canadians. And I received it. This has been the only work that I've received (so far).

Although I read it right away, I put off writing a review for a long time mostly because I wasn't sure what to make of the book. Then, recently, I thought to myself, "I wish I could get another 'Early Reviewer' book. I'd better write that review." So I read it again.

I was pleasantly surprised. This is a very good book. Although it is a work of historical fiction (starting in 1899, following a Canadian soldier sent to Africa to support Britain in the Boer War), this is a character study of Frank Adams, a naive young cowboy who makes and breaks connections to people during his time in Africa, for good or for bad. But, as with most stories about war, it is a commentary on our fascination with war, with the dangers of thinking too highly of being a soldier, and how painfully gruesome and wearing war really is. I think the moral of the story is, "Don't go to war. And if you have to, keep your head down and stay out of war's way as best you can."

I'm glad I read it. And I'm glad I own it. I may read it a third time. So I guess I'm going to have to rethink my stance on historical fiction.

Buy "The Great Karoo" by Fred Stenson through Amazon or read about it through LibraryThing.

[ Reviewed for LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program ]

Be the bandwagon everyone jumps on

Just read an article about a school librarian who has realized that the secret to getting her students in the library and excited about reading is to quantity not variety. Buy more copies of the titles they want to read, sometimes up to 10 or more. She's found that they are excited about the books, are in the library more, and tell her what books they like since she listens and does something about it.

As I usually do, I think about this concept in my own context or similar contexts. Could this work in an academic library? Could this work in a public library? Well, I think it already does in public libraries. Most public library systems I know buy multiple copies of the "bestsellers". But they seem to be based on more official definitions of such, turning to the NYT list or critics or whatnot. It would be interesting to hear about a system more like what this school librarian has done: becoming responsive to the wishes of the local users. Creating a community of communication around what is cool and what is popular.

And academic libraries? Well, unlike school and public libraries, a good portion of the information accessed in an academic library is not "for fun" or an "impulse buy". It's directed. They're looking up specific information or studying a specific topic often with a specific goal in mind, an exam, a paper, etc. They're not looking for what they want but what they need and what they need is easier to identify and quantify. There does not seem to be the need for a large quantity of single titles. There's enough variety in the goals of students and faculty most of the time, and even if there isn't, no one's coming in to access it at the same time.

There's also the e-solution. Academic libraries use more e-resources (ebooks, ejournals, databases, etc.) than public or school libraries. With e-resources, the option to allow access to more than one person at a time is almost a default and the cost for adding more "seats" is not usually the same as the first.

Also, a big factor in the reading habits of school and public library patrons is the popularity of material. Popularity, although a part of what is chosen in an academic library collection, is a minor part. In fact, many academic users are trying to do something unique to either set themselves apart from others or in direct competition to others.

[ Response to Give Them What They Want: Shake up your selection policy with multiple copies of popular books by Kristine Chen from the School Library Journal, discovered through my "collection development" Google News search feed ]

Reading for dummies

Peter Rukavina has a new e-book reader. No, it’s not an iPad, or a Kindle. It’s not a Kobo, or a Sony Reader. Rather, Peter’s new ebook reader is a human being named Shawn, who runs a local copy shop.

In the interview of Peter, he explains that he has tried several e-reading methods but, at least for now, cannot get past the need for a visceral connection to the physical book itself, i.e. page turning. Not even the sweeping motion used on his iPod Touch is good enough. So he's printing out ebooks at a copy centre and reading them that way.

As soon as I heard this I thought of an analogy to show the silliness of these kind of argument. Scribes writing out texts by hand by candlelight complaining that authors today typing their work on a computer just doesn't have the same feel. No one would argue that we should go back to hand-writing as the primary method of book
production. (This example is somewhat coincidental: I thought of it during the interview before Peter said that he was a printer by trade. Printing. The necessary middle step between manuscript and "compu-type". I used a computer keyboard as a bigger contrast to hand-scripting but I could have used the printing press and the argument would have been the same. It may actually be ironic in the true sense since he claims his bias against ereaders is based on his love of printing.) And we're not trying to replace typing with some sort of light-pen writing simulator (although many mobile devices have hand-writing translation tools, they're usually for quick notes not trilogies).

Too often people make these snap, emotive judgments about new ways and new technologies. The argument "it's not what I'm used to" may be ok for some, but isn't missing out on a new way worse? It's one thing to "triage" change so you can actually get on with your life, but it's another to consciously use that as an argument to do things the old way.

[ Initiated by Full Interview: Peter Rukavina on paper e-books from CBC Radio's Spark ]

Turning textbooks into wikis

From an article in The New York Times recently, "Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes."

Although the article describes it as "a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks", it seems like it's more like turning each textbook into a wiki itself, with the publisher and/or author as moderator, allowing good suggestions to improve the work much faster than through the current print publication process, while easily avoiding unwanted alterations.

One comment about this article is that the author explains that textbook prices are so high usually because "students usually resell them in the used market for several years before a new edition is released." That is probably true but part of the reason why students don't see the price as being worth paying for is that too often textbooks are not read by the student. Textbooks are purchased on the off chance that they are needed in class, not because the student honestly believes that the content is valuable. Why spend more money on something you don't want inherently in the first place? Hopefully, making the textbooks and their changes more "dynamic", content will improve, or rather student-perceived content will improve and buyers will see them as investments instead of necessary but "rentable" evils.

But do you think this will really improve textbooks? And how many instructors/professors will take or even have the time to make the needed and/or suggested improvements. Some will, yes. But will there be enough?

[ From "Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally" by Motoko Rich from The New York Times Media & Advertising section. Discovered via "The new new textbook?" from Against-the-Grain.com ]

"Amazon remotely deleted... books from the Kindle devices of readers..."

The New York Times online has an interesting article about "Animal Farm" and "1984" being deleted from Kindle users after Amazon realized they did not have the right to have sold it in the first place. This is interesting in two ways, IMHO:

1. "Owning" something digital is not always clear cut: This is something that librarians have come to realize with the advent of online content. In the past, we have purchased journals and books comfortably knowing that whatever we bought we would have until it was destroyed beyond repair which, if care was taken, would be quite a long time. With electronic journals and books, ownership of content disappeared, to be replaced with something more like renting the works. We can purchase a whole run of a journal with back files and everything, often for not much less than the print would have cost, but if the distributor decides that something needs to be changed, anything from a typo to our access to it at all, we have very little control and sometimes no knowledge of it even. My suggestion: we should refuse to "buy" anything that we don't have actual control over. If it's digital, we need to factor in the cost of hosting it on our sites if we want to ensure future access at all.
2. Our concept of rights is confused: In this Amazon case, the reason for the deletions was that Amazon had mistakenly sold something they should not have sold. Do we really think we have the right to something just because we spent money on it? What if someone stole your TV, then sold it off the back of their truck to your neighbour? If you COULD get it back, wouldn't you think it was your RIGHT to have it back? Just because we haven't been able to return "stolen" merchandise to its rightful owner in the past, doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do so in the future. And they got their money back. No one lost anything (except the poor shmuck who lost his notes saved in the ebook - remember, keep control of your digital property). There are millions of copies of these books, some you can get for free, say, at your public library for example.

Both of these issues are summed up in a great quote from the article:

"I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased."

So either accept other's rights along with yours or hold on tighter to your stuff. Or maybe I'm wrong... What do you think?

[ From Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices by Brad Stone at NYTimes.com ]

"Tell me what you are looking for."

Any librarian having spent more than a month or so at a reference desk in a public library (or any library really) has had to deal with questions with too little information to really answer. Seattlepi.com published a short piece with an excellent real example of such a transaction. Here's a taste:

Librarian: ...Would you have any idea the name of the author?
Caller: No. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. The lady's name is... oh, I can't read her writing. It's impossible. Um... My wife said the cover of the book is a really neat picture.

The hope is always for either an eventual (sometimes accidental) break-through, such as the one in the example article from seattlepi, or to show that you can help them but that they may have to take some time to come up with another detail or two before the item can be found.

[ From Hello, Reference Desk? at seattlepi.com ]

Free for the price of one

Library Journal has reported on a new deal between the University of Michigan and Amazon where hundreds of thousands of digitized public domain books will be made available through their print on demand business.

Sounds good. Hopefully UMich is getting tons of moolah for the deal. And it's good to see efforts made to support the interests of the long tail, those people looking for works otherwise out of print and therefore much more difficult to obtain. I only have two problems with this. One, I see nowhere in this article any mention of any efforts to make this huge pile of etexts available to or through other academic or public libraries. They said that a lot of them are already available through UMich's catalog and Google Book Search but that limits the potential discoverers to those at UMich (and maybe a bit of the outlying area) and those who actually know that Google Book Search exists (I'm always amazed that people don't even try there). Make it easy to link through or host the content elsewhere and make those works supposedly owned by the public available for use by the public.

My other problem is in regards to Roy Tennant's comment that this is a sign that print is not dead. Well, no it's not but this doesn't suggest that it's going to live any longer than we thought before. Print's got it's place but speaking for myself, if it's a choice between paying for something in print and getting it for free online, I'm taking the latter. Even if the fee is nominal. But I'm a geek, so... All this will do it delay print's demise for certain otherwise doomed genres because the majority of those searching for books will pay Amazon not knowing that it could be free somewhere else.

[ From Michigan Deal A New Twist on Access to Scanned Book Content at Library Journal 7/23/2009 ]