LibraryPlanet.com

HarperCollins Overdrive

Michael Pate — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:05:45 +0000

In the first significant revision to lending terms for ebook circulation, HarperCollins has announced that new titles licensed from library ebook vendors will be able to circulate only 26 times before the license expires. – Library Journal

Our system has belonged to a partnership through our local MLC that has allowed us to offer EBooks to our patrons the last couple of years. I have been on the selection committee. Back when we started, which wasn’t all that long ago, it was really all about audio. I can still remember the conversations when we were trying to decide between the various ebook formats being offered. Fortunately, Overdrive settled on the right choice, and was ready for the Christmas of 2009 when things really took off.

I emailed the news to the rest of the group members but I doubt I will hear much feedback this late on a Friday. I am sure we will have much to discuss very soon.

And that’s why libraries should just stop buying DRM media for their collections. Period. It’s unsafe at any speed.Â I mean it. When HarperCollins backs down and says, “Oh, no, sorry, we didn’t mean it, you can have unlimited ebook checkouts,” the libraries’ answers should be “Not good enough. We want DRM-free or nothing.” Stop buying DRM ebooks. – Cory Doctorow

One thing you can say for Cory: He is always consistent. But then, the Publishing Companies give him plenty to work with, too.

Changes Occured

Michael Pate — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:42:34 +0000

It has taken 5 years but I finally have all the posts imported into a WordPress install. You wouldn’t think it would be quite so hard but it seems like no blogging system does well when you reach a number over 3,000.

Anyway, that part is done. Next up: coming up with a functional new design. Hopefully, that will be something on the order of less than half-a-decade.

Changes are Coming

Michael Pate — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:28:04 +0000

I have meaning to do this for a while… but no time like the present. But the site may look a little odd for a little while.

AudioBooks on the Zune

Michael Pate — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:31:51 +0000

It took them two years, but Microsoft finally figured out that the ability to support for their own DRM is an area where they might have a definitive advantage over the iPod.

One new media type that Zune is adding this time around is support for audiobooks. Although audiobooks won’t be sold on the Zune marketplace, Zune will be an available option through Audible.com, a leading purveyor of audio books, as well as through OverDrive-powered Web sites, an infrastructure provider for major booksellers and library systems. “Now you’ll be able to integrate your Zune with libraries,” Seitz says. “The Seattle and King County library systems, for example, offer loaner audiobooks. Now Zune customers can put them on their Zune for free.” – Microsoft

It is just unfortunate that it took them two years to figure it out.

The Power of the Wikipedia Editor

Michael Pate — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:26:52 +0000

I have been highly critical of Wikipedia in the past for the penchant of some self-styled Guardians of what should be allowed in Wikipedia deleting content. But since most of the time, those were issues regarding who was or not a web celebrity they didn’t matter too much in the greater scheme of things. But the potential for abuse was still there.

Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry for Naomi Oreskes. Read this version and this later one. Notice the differences. Then read the revision history. So, why the controversy?

Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I — no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone’s views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out. By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident. We don’t suspend belief when we read Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet’s cachet of making information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views with a mouse. – Lawrence Solomon

In this case, it doesn’t even matter to me who is wrong or right. What is way more disturbing is the denial that there is any controversy and the systematic manipulation to suppress any mention of it. As long as Wikipedia is subject to the whim of the individual editors who are willing to not only delete things they disagree with but lock out furthering editing to ensure they retain control, Wikipedia will remain nothing more than a group wiki for a tightly-constrained oligarchy.

TextDrive vs. Textpattern

Michael Pate — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:26:08 +0000

Once upon a time, TextDrive was started with a certain idea in mind.
bq.TextDrive was founded in 2004 by Dean Allen, and was originally conceived as a managed hosting service for users of his Textpattern content-management system. In an unusual move, Allen offered lifetime hosting accounts, at a one-time price of USD$199, to the first two hundred customers in lieu of seeking venture capital; this initial group was dubbed the “VC 200″. The scope of the company quickly moved beyond Textpattern hosting, however, and TextDrive has been a general-purpose hosting service for most of its history… Since early in its history, TextDrive has provided support to open source software projects; the company donates a portion of proceeds from each customer’s hosting services to an open source project of the customer’s choice, and has offered hosting services specifically tailored for developers of open source projects. – Wikipedia Four years later, things have changed.
bq.As a pragmatic result of our long-lasting struggle to tame the touchy Subversion host we finally gave in and moved our code repository. – Robert Wetzlmayr I still have my second round VC lifetime account so this won’t affect me directly but I still think this sort of marks the end of an era. And not in a good way.

Movable Type vs. WordPress

Michael Pate — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:04:48 +0000

bq.Movable Type 3.0 and on will not be the solution for everyone, and that’s okay. For some users, TypePad makes more sense. For others, non-Six Apart tools make more sense. – Mena Trott Many of us at the time and many more since have made the choice to use “non-Six Apart tools.” Six Apart is making an effort to change that.
bq.As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type. – Anil Dash As you might expect, there was a response.
bq.Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page. For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community. – Matt Mullenweg I consider myself semi-neutral in this since, at this point, I don’t use either product much although I still have sites that are running both. Six Apart made a strategic mistake four years ago and the open sourcing of the product is a good first step toward a remedy. But just like Leo Laporte noted recently, it isn’t that Twitter is better than Pownce or Jaiku (most of them have more features), it is where the community resides. What Six Apart is going to have to do to make Movable Type a force once again is restore the user community that once surrounded it. And that, I think, is going to prove very difficult to do.

Don’t Call the Magic Attic

Michael Pate — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:58:16 +0000

Just to be the safe side, you might want to check your local library and see if they have any of these titles.
bq.Hillsborough County librarians spent much of Tuesday tracking down a series of children’s books that referred readers to a telephone sex line. Patricia MacMartin discovered the faulty phone number when her 9-year-old daughter asked to dial the 800 number in the back of her Magic Attic Club book. She notified library officials and when they didn’t remove the books, she checked out every Magic Attic book available from her local branch, the New Tampa Regional Library. – Laura Kinsler I first head about this last night during one of those sensationalized news breaks our local stations love so much: something about “Librarians failing to remove books from their shelves.” As it turned out, that actually wasn’t necessary. When we looked into things this morning, it only required removing a pre-perforated card. Nothing sensational at all, but then is sweeps month…

Distribution Costs and the Long Tail

Michael Pate — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:19:45 +0000

bq.In lieu of more flexibility on pricing, NBC U sought a cut of Apple’s hardware sales. “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money,” Zucker said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.” NBC Universal programming accounted for 40% of iTunes’ video sales. Zucker used iTunes as an example of the kind of digital business model that, he asserted, is corrosive to the media business. “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side,” he said. Apple did not return calls for comment. – Michael Learmonth When you make a purchase in a brick and mortar store, there are a certain amount of costs that accrue in producing the item and getting onto the store shelf in order for you to make a purchase. And one cost that has to be considered: no one will ever actually buy that item. When you purchase something, you are also paying the store for everything that will never be. Their goal is to offer the maximum numbers of items at the highest price possible that they can survive and, hopefully, make a profit. Contrast that with iTunes. Inventory costs: there is only one copy of the item. Storage concerns are not existent as well as keeping the item in stock. Distribution costs: These are minuscule and only incurred after an item is sold, not before. And many other costs from above (promotion, packaging, salaries for sales staff) don’t even figure in. A Heroes DVD set will retail for $59.99 for 23 episodes ($2.61 per episode if full price is paid, which is doubtful) but NBC Universal will only see a small portion of that overall cost (otherwise Amazon couldn’t sell it for $39.99 or $1.74). On iTunes, the episode cost is $1.99; we don’t know how much Apple gets to keep but judging from music reports, it is probably around $.60 leaving Universal with $1.39 of profit per episode. It just sounds to me that Zucker is trying to make a case he is deserved money for profits he lost when he never actually had them in first place.

NBC v. Apple

Michael Pate — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 19:49:38 +0000

One questions that arose the other day in the Apple-NBC Kerfluffle was the demand that NBC wanted more copy protection.
bq.NBC Universal also wants iTunes to stiffen anti-piracy provisions so computer users would not have easy access to illegal downloads. – Associated Press Most people were quite what that meant.
bq.NBC apparently wants even tighter DRM on its videos than already provided by Apple, which allows users to authorize up to five computers to play back the video but has no DVD burning capabilities (unless the user wants to back up the file itself to a DVD). And as we know from the private admissions of Hollywood, stricter DRM restrictions aren’t about piracy-they’re about control. – Jacqui Cheng Good guess… but not quite.
bq.In addition, we asked Apple to take concrete steps to protect content from piracy, since it is estimated that the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material. – Cory Shields Apparently, NBC wants Apple to force users to only be able to download preapproved material onto their iPod. That sound bizarre, but is actually exactly what CableLabs forced TiVo to do. Which is probably another reason you won’t ever see an Apple TV with CableCard Support.