LibraryPlanet.com

bq.We’d be closing libraries. That’s what we’re talking about here. – Carl Cool When I wrote about the library funding last week, I had no thought that they could possibly get worse. But that is the reality if the plan by our new governor were to go into effect.
bq.Crist told residents that help would come this year and said warnings from local government that essential services would be cut were just “scare tactics.” Counties, he said, must spend more responsibly. – Dianna Cahn Of course, not everyone is going to agree with me.
bq.Dont fall for the scare tactics when the counties say services will collapse. They said the same thing in California for prop 13 and it didnt happen. In California, property taxes are based on a max of 1 percent of the assessed value. In Florida it is up to 2.8 percent. We should do the same. Most county spending is padded with top heavy pay for their consultants and high brass. Plus waste is epidemic. They need to tighten their belts like everyone else does facing leaner times. – wacahootaman I guess I can hope that the Governor and his supporter are correct and everyone else is just engaged in scare tactics, but I am not quite as confident. Oh, and the first quote above, the one that refers to libraries… those are actually the libraries in which I just happen to work.

What many would consider a good day for Apple…
bq.Generally, Apple has very little use for anniversaries. Recent milestones-like 2006′s 30th anniversary of the company’s founding, the Mac’s 20th anniversary in 2004, and the iPod’s fifth anniversary last fall-passed without much official to-do from the company. But when Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod recently, the company made sure not to let the occasion go by without comment. And for good reason, tech industry analysts say: “Obviously it’s a big threshold for Apple and industry,” said Tim Bajarin, president of high-tech consulting firm Creative Strategies. “This clearly reinforces Apple’s dominance in the market.” – Jim Dalrymple is perhaps a sad day for Libraries.
bq.I realize it isn’t 100% the fault of libraries, but it is a bit telling that libraries haven’t responded with more vigor to the ipod by attempting to integrate them into library services. If more libraries would have copied the homegrown ipod audiobook program of the South Huntington Public Library instead of throwing money at vendors for inferior (in some ways, and to be fair, better in a few ways) products, maybe this would have exerted pressure on vendors to work something out. – Aaron Schmidt I have written about this issue before several times: what drm choices the vendors were making, how Cory Doctorow felt about the Fairfax County Public Libraries choices, whether Apple should license PlaysForSure, how PlaysforSure was not compatible with the Zune, and even whether it was likely that Microsoft would license either of their DRM technologies to Apple if asked. It would seem to me that the stumbling block is not the audiobook vendors themselves, but the publishers. Let’s face it, publishers (not all of them, but a lot of them) have hated Libraries for a long time because every time someone reads a book from us, that is one less sale. They would much rather sell books for iPods through Audible directly to consumers and cut libraries out of the equation entirely. I doubt many of them are very upset over this whole situation. In my system, we initially tried the NetLibrary/Recorded Books plan but found that the use didn’t match up with the cost. Now we are using Overdrive as part of a consortial purchase and supplementing that with a pretty good selection of Playaways. Personally, I think that when and if everyone realizes that DRM is not a solution, we will all benefit. But as long as too many business are desperately trying to protect business models they don’t even understand, we are going to just have to do the best we can.