The Kindle is one of those disruptive technologies that might save the newspaper industry. How it might impact the book publishing world, the textbook publishing world, and the library world, well that remains to be seen. A statistic they provided in the article that I find telling is that of all books that are available in dual format on Amazon (Kindle and paper), 35% are sold as Kindle books. That is huge. They also noted that Kindle buyers are not gadget people and I remember listening to a NPR program not so long ago that shared the fact that the 30 and older set are big Kindle buyers, so it isn't just a young person's fad. I personally like the idea of being able to carry my library around in one small container, and as a student, I would love being able to carry all my textbooks that way! I wonder how this will impact distance education library services? E-reserves? Library collections? Current e-books available online are not easily read/used. Maybe Amazon will allow libraries to checkout and retrieve Kindle e-content? How will the standard library ILSs manage that little trick? Times are changing!
Read the article at:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/kindle/
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Nobody "Bod" Owens lives in a graveyard with his deceased, adoptive parents and a community of the dearly departed. Bod is alive, but lives in the borderland between the dead and the living because the graveyard's inhabitants gave him the "walk of the graveyard" when he first arrived, as a toddler, with a murderer close on his heels. Bod's childhood years are delightful and filled with the macabre, but the murderer, Jack, is always waiting and as Bod grows older, Jack comes closer.
Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors. I loved the Sandman series and Coraline is one of the creepiest children's books I know. Read ANYTHING by Gaiman.
Books featuring the voices of the dead are also fascinating to me, so the Graveyard Book fits right into one of my favorite sub-genres. Other tales with dead people talking, that I would recommend, include: A Gracious Plenty by Sheri Reynolds, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors. I loved the Sandman series and Coraline is one of the creepiest children's books I know. Read ANYTHING by Gaiman.
Books featuring the voices of the dead are also fascinating to me, so the Graveyard Book fits right into one of my favorite sub-genres. Other tales with dead people talking, that I would recommend, include: A Gracious Plenty by Sheri Reynolds, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
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