New York Public Library Does YouTube Livestream

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Screensnap taken minutes ago.

I was surprised at how smooth the video was, unlike my regular atrocious experience with YouTube.

If you want to tune in, click.

MS FND IN A LBRY

My first full-time boss gave me a copy of this story to read back in 1981. Whoa. Talk about an eye-opener!

I managed to lose my copy long ago. And couldn’t remember the title. And couldn’t remember the writer. Neither could he. Keening ensued.

Today, thanks to Mathematical Fiction, I was finally reunited with MS FND IN A LBRY.

Which is something every single one of you should read!

How I love the Internet!!

Rejecting A Carnegie Library

From a 1903 issue of Appleton’s Magazine:

Free Libraries Equal Free Minds

I found this in a 1905 issue of Every Where Magazine:

It Burns Books For Fuel

First Look: New High-Tech NYPD Helicopter Takes The Fight To The Terrorists

The helicopter, a Bell 412EP, was funded with federal port security money and can carry up to 10 people, including a pilot, co-pilot, crew chief, NYPD SCUBA divers or Emergency Services Unit officers. It weighs 7,000 pounds, can travel 150 mph and costs $9.8 million, plus it carries another $4 million worth of sensitive equipment.

What’s not being told: How much fuel does that eat every day?

… the counter-terrorism patrol executed several times a day by the NYPD takes them off the beaten path.

While our bastard Mayor slowly strangles the budget of the New York Public Library, the NYPD gets a new toy to play with and children have access to fewer books.

Damn right it burns books for fuel!

What the hell is going to be left to protect in New York City when all of the budget is going to “protecting” it?

Once Again It’s Time To Defend The New York Public Library

The NYPL makes it easy to send a letter to a local representative at its site.

They also provide form letter text.

But I would have none of that. I deleted it and wrote this:

So once again the Mayor is trying to destroy the New York Public Library system.

After all, what does he care? He’s a rich old man who can buy anything he wants.

But for the rest of us who don’t have more than a billion dollars in the bank, the NYPL is the lifeblood of our civil society.

It provides an assortment of media for free lending and is also the place to turn to for information — because contrary to popular perception, the Internet does not have everything.

And, believe it or not, it’s also a place someone can quickly pop into when restroom facilities are needed (until CitiCorp does CitiToilet and charges five bucks for such relief).

Cutting the budget of the NYPL is an act of Bloomberg’s egobaggery that once again should be defeated.

Mayors come and go — and I will be so glad to see this one go! — but the NYPL is forever.

The sooner Prickberg is gone from office, the better.

We go through this every year now.

Meanwhile, I’d like to know what new Police State toys the NYPD will be getting in its new budget so it can continue to suppress dissent.

1915: The Third Bookmobile

The Square Deal from 1915:

This one made it into Wikipedia too.

Unglue.it Could Save Public Libraries

Unglue.it Crowdfunds Unlimited Licenses for Beloved E-books

This, for example, is what he means by “unglue,” the concept that lies at the heart of Gluejar: “unglue (v.t.) For an author or publisher to accept a fixed amount of money from the public for its unlimited use of an e-book.”

Hellman wants us to consider, in other words, a world in which those who hold the rights to books agree to license them through a Creative Commons arrangement that protects author/publisher copyrights, enables the rights holders to maintain or pursue additional licensing agreements, and at the same time creates an environment in which public funding helps “unglue” the books for digital distribution.

Crowdfunding — something already in play within organizations as diverse as the Nature Conservancy, NPR, and Kickstarter — provides the fiscal fuel, making sure that both the creators of the book and Gluejar get compensated for their efforts.

1) Print publishing now has a cash-out Exit Strategy if this comes to pass.

2) Writers dumped by their publishers could have a new way to reach new readers. Think of their books so freely available, not locked into any one format, free from all public libraries too.

3) What if all public libraries pooled into one fund each year 1-2% of their budgets for this? They could compile a list of books they’d like to get and have their patrons vote for them. Also, patrons could also add to the fund out of their own pockets. Such active participation in public libraries could save them.

4) Those who hold rights to currently not-in-e and out-of-print books could have a way to bring them back to life by having the market decide their value up-front.

There are many, many more implications to this. Those are off the top of my head. But this has to be the most exciting books-related proposal I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s the first thing that has given me hope for both books and especially for public libraries.

I’d like to see this happen.

Publishers Who Screw Public Libraries Should Die

No More New Penguin Digital Audiobooks For Libraries, Either

The latest restrictions come about two months after Penguin announced that it would no longer offer any new e-books through libraries.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

This isn’t the only publisher screwing with public libraries:

HarperCollins Puts 26 Loan Cap on Ebook Circulations

While HarperCollins is the first major publisher to amend the terms of loan for its titles, two other members of the publishing “big six”—Macmillan and Simon & Schuster—still do not allow ebooks to be circulated in libraries, much to the consternation of librarians.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

When publishers get up on their hind legs and bray about how they contribute to the culture, you can now tell them they’re nothing but greedy bastards who are full of themselves and totally full of shit.

They are enemies of the culture!

Public libraries create the culture — and create their future writers!

Here are just three very prominent examples:

The State Of Reading In 2011

I forgot I had the following picture. Found it on an SD Card today. This is the Midtown Branch of the NY Public Library on August 17th:

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That’s looks bleak. What I hope is going on there is that the shelves are near-empty because a lot of people took out Summer loans on books.

However …