If you or your library own, or are considering buying, an ebook reader, you should take a look at this great article from Gizmodo about ebook formats, DRM, e-readers and a lot of the factors that affect how those things interact.

The idea of an open ebook format that works on any reader sounds nice. Buy it from any source, read it on any device. In a few cases, it’s true, and that open format thing can work for you. But, in reality, right now? You’re pretty much going to be stuck reading books you buy for one device or ecosystem in that same little puddle, thanks to DRM. And well, Amazon.

I’ve been following the e-reader wars with half an eye for a while now, and I learned some new stuff.

Giz Explains: How You’re Gonna Get Screwed By Ebook Formats (thanks, Michael Sauers, for tweeting this)

Catherine Pellegrino has a great post over at Spurious Tuples called “Why I’m a teaching wimp” about teaching fatigue that pretty well sums up how I feel this semester:

“What do you mean, only three preps per week?” you’re probably howling. “I do three preps per day some terms.  What a total wimp!”

Yep, I admit it.  But here’s the thing:  every class I teach is the first day of class.

I did ten classes in January and eight in February, so I’m right there with you, Catherine. Spring break is coming wooo!

Link: “Why I’m a teaching wimp“

In which we discuss assessment with my friend and GSU colleague Sarah Steiner. Listen if you want to!

"Protecting my money maker" by jonlesser (not me)

This is a quick post about some tidbits I learned today from one of the Zotero developers. She was able to share with me some of the development plans for the coming year or so:

1. Zotero API to give it interactivity with webapps. (I’m thinking I’d love to be able to save items into Zotero and have them appear in a formatted bibliography in a Libguide. I hope something like that will be possible.) This will start with a bridge between Zotero and the Center for History and New Media’s open source web publishing project Omeka.

2. A web-based client, which would do two things: Make the Firefox add-in optional, and allow Zotero use from other browsers!

3. Zotero Commons, a drag-and-drop interface to a scholarly repository hosted by the Internet Archive. I know the least about this one. A friend has already asked me about how they’ll address copyright, to which I answer “I have no idea.”

Audio Books by Playful Librarian via Flickr

I wrote a short article about free audio books for Georgia Library Quarterly’s Winter 2010 issue. It’s for a regular column called “My own private library,” in which librarians write about the books in their home libraries.

GLQ isn’t online yet, but they’ve given me permission to post the article here:

My library — at least this part of it — occupies a space the size of a credit card, replenishes itself automatically with new fiction, surprises me constantly, and costs nothing.

I’m a huge fan of podcast fiction. I rarely leave the house without my portable media player in my pocket, and at any given time I usually have several different podcasts loaded onto it. In case you’re not familiar, podcasting uses RSS, the web mechanism that powers blogging, to automatically deliver audio files to listeners as they’re published. Many authors, aspiring and famous and in between, are using podcasting as a tool to publish free audio versions of their work.

I subscribe using a free “podcatcher” program, and every time a new chapter is published it turns up in a folder on my computer. Authors like Scott Sigler, Seth Harwood and Cory Doctorow simply use their own blogs to self-publish, and podiobooks.com has hundreds of titles available.  I’m an enthusiastic fan of science fiction and fantasy, and I’m happy that authors in these genres seem particularly willing to experiment with this new form of self-publishing.

The fiction magazine, dying out in print, is undergoing a renaissance in podcast form. I’m always happy to see a new episode of Escape Pod (SF, at escapepod.org), Podcastle (fantasy, podcastle.org) or Pseudopod (horror, pseudopod.org) appear in my podcast feed. These three are the cream of the crop for podcast genre fiction. They publish fiction by authors ranging from the unknown to the legendary. Escape Pod is the world’s second-largest market for short science fiction.

If these podcast magazines are the Beatles and Rolling Stones (or at least Pearl Jam or Coldplay) of podcast fiction, then Drabblecast (drabblecast.org) is perhaps the equivalent of King Missile: brilliant but confusing and sometimes disturbing. Their tagline is “strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners,” and they deliver. Some of my personal favorites have centered around pie hunters, clown eggs and demon oranges. Some of my real favorites I’d have trouble summarizing in this space, and a few of them are too rude for this venue.

Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite authors of both science fiction and non-fiction (as I hope all librarians know, he writes brilliant commentary on technology, copyright, information access — and libraries, among other things) has been podcasting his own fiction for years via his blog at craphound.com/podcast.php. I first discovered this fact, to my delight, just before a long solo car trip.

Mur Lafferty (murverse.com) publishes a startling number of podcasts. Her fiction is fantasy of all kinds; I’m a fan of her recently completed epic series Heaven, which starts with the death of the protagonists and ends with a war among the gods. Playing for Keeps is a fun superhero novel about a group of friends with superpowers that aren’t useful enough to make them heroes. In addition to Lafferty’s fiction, I also sometimes listen to her I Should Be Writing podcast for fiction writers (the motivational and technical advice is sometimes useful even for aspiring writers of non-fiction, and I’ve discovered authors I like from her interviews).

Seth Harwood’s (sethharwood.com) crime novel Jack Wakes Up is a pulp noir loser-in-over-his-head thrill ride that I enjoyed start to finish. It reminded me of Elmore Leonard, or maybe a San Franciscan James Lee Burke. His semi-autobiographical A Long Way From Disney surprised me by showing Harwood’s range; it’s a short story collection that follows his fictional alter ego as he grows up in Boston.

These are a sampling of some of my favorite indie artists of the podcast fiction world. Podiobooks (podiobooks.com) is a great repository of these and other works; it’s organized by genre and includes staff recommendations. One of the nicest features of Podiobooks is its custom RSS feeds, allowing you to set up auto-delivery of chapters at regular intervals or on demand.

Librivox (librivox.org) does offer a fiction podcast, but is really more useful as an online library of audio books. Their collection is all in the public domain so it’s freely shareable, and their goal is to record audio editions of all available public domain works. Earlier this year, a group of friends and I all agreed to read Moby Dick together (a book I’d never managed to finish before), and I participated by listening to the Librivox audio version on the train and at the gym.

My public library offers free downloadable audio books, but I have to admit I don’t use them much. We — “we” being libraries in general — are stuck dealing with vendors that provide audiobooks in proprietary formats that only work with particular devices, which makes them harder to use and far less useful. I’m a lot happier just following the indie artists.

The February 2010 issue of College and Research Library News includes my article  “Superpower your browser with LibX and Zotero: Open source tools for research.” It’s an overview of these two research tools and my ideas about how and why they’re valuable resources for academic libraries. If you’re interested in my March 23 ACRL webcast, this article gives you a good idea of the kind of thing I’ll be covering, but of course with live demos and discussion.

Superpower your browser with LibX and Zotero: Open source tools for research via C&RL News

For a couple of years now my friend Beth Gallaway has been asking me to submit a proposal with her for a Simmons College LIS continuing education class. We finally did it this year, and I’m pleased to say we’re co-teaching an online workshop together this spring:

They’re Googling You: Online Identity for LIS Professionals

May 1 – 31, 2010

Should you separate your professional online identity from the personal, and if so, how? Self-promotion and branding is becoming increasingly important as library professionals face dwindling traditional employment opportunities, due to layoffs, downsizing, budget cuts, and library closings. On a more positive note, library staff wishing to contribute back to the profession may want to hone a professional identity that makes one marketable for teaching and training purposes, conference speaking or consulting. Developing a professional online identity for either purpose may be a challenging and rewarding endeavor.

More info on the Simmons site, and you can register here. If you’ve never set up a blog or personal website, you’ll learn how — if you have, we’ll talk about how to use it and how to augment it. Topics will include privacy, professional development, personal branding, and technology how-to.

Hi! I still live here. Busy month. We did a podcast! Here it is:

Or, you know, go listen to it on the Adventures in Library Instruction site.

Have a good weekend!

I’m teaching a webcast for ACRL: “Superpower Your Browser: Open Source Research Tools.” I’ll cover the search and discovery tool LibX and the citation and bibliography tool Zotero. Learn the essentials of both programs, ideas for supporting them at your library, and a little about how open source is good for libraries and library users.

The session is March 23 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern. More details and registration info on the ACRL site.

If you saw the Chronicle of Higher Ed article this week about Mellon closing its Research in IT grant program, you may have been concerned (as I was) about its impact on Zotero. This grant was a major contributor to Zotero’s funding.

Happily, Dan Cohen reports that Zotero and the Center for History and New Media is in no danger of folding, and has diverse enough funding to continue actively. It sounds like they have ambitious plans for new projects in the future. Whew!