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Webitz - April 2011

Borrowing Kindle ebooks - from your library

April 26th 2011 01:02

On the 20th April, Amazon announced a new format: Kindle Library Lending. It will be launched later this year and will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States. [Which probably means we New Zealanders won't be able to borrow.]

Kindle Library Lending will be available for all generations of Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps.

"We're excited that millions of Kindle customers will be able to borrow Kindle books from their local libraries," said Jay Marine, Director, Amazon Kindle.

Customers will be able to check out a Kindle book from their local library and, just as with the normal approach to Kindle, start reading on any Kindle device or free Kindle app for Android, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone. And readers will be able to annotate the library copy just as if it was their own.

If a Kindle book is checked out again or that book is purchased from Amazon, all of a customer's annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.

"We're doing a little something extra here," Marine says. "Normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. [It may be a no-no, but an awful lot of people do it. ] But we're extending our Whispersync technology so that you can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library.

"Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced."

Now that's quite an impressive little piece of technological thinking.

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Posted By: Mike Crowl - Category: No Category

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Viral Power

April 16th 2011 07:36

The viral power of Facebook and Twitter is in evidence again in two more particular situations.

The lesser one is recorded in an article in The Guardian, which discusses the various causes celebrities have got behind and in doing so have managed to change minds, hearts, and occasional annoy people who want to do things to make money and find they can't.

Here's the relevant paragraph in the article:
Social media has also played a crucial part in increasing famous people's influence – even if they do not use it. [Philip] Pullman's emergence as a figurehead in the defence of libraries, for instance, came about quite fortuitously. "It still puzzles me," he admits, when I speak to him. "Some of the people who were concerned about the closure of Oxfordshire's libraries asked if I'd speak at a public meeting, and I said yes I would, because I feel strongly about this." This small event went viral, as a transcript of Pullman's words was linked more than 25,000 times on Facebook and Twitter. "I didn't think it was a particularly good speech," he says, bemused. "But suddenly people were quoting it."

The second instance is rather more intriguing, and the end result has been the production of a book (an ebook at this stage, but due to be published in hardcopy later this year) which includes the stories of a range of people caught up in the March 11 earthquake in Japan.

In just over a week, a group of unpaid professional and citizen journalists who met on Twitter created a book to raise money for Japanese Red Cross earthquake and tsunami relief efforts. In addition to essays, artwork and photographs submitted by people around the world, including people who endured the disaster and journalists who covered it, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake contains a piece by Yoko Ono, and work created specifically for the book by authors William Gibson, Barry Eisler and Jake Adelstein.

One of the great values of this book is that all the proceeds go directly to the Japanese Red Cross.

Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view

Webitz - April 2011

Borrowing Kindle ebooks - from your library

Viral Power

Mike Crowl's Blogs