Read this! I'm reading in December 2010

Since last months What I’m Reading post went so well I thought I’d write one for December.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky. I’ve been a fan of Shirky since reading his first book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, when it came out.  I watch or listen to any of his speeches I can get access to and he writes just as well. I love this section when he is talking about “finding the time”.

Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit—every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought, back when I was talking to the TV producer. (Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude.) One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it, though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television? Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. That represents about two thousand Wikipedias’ projects’ worth of free time annually. Even tiny subsets of this time are enormous: we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials. This is a pretty big surplus. People who ask “Where do they find the time?” about those who work on Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, relative to the aggregate free time we all possess.

And here is a visualization of that

Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping – As I listen to this so much of it applies to libraries that I’m writing a separate post detailing it, stay tuned! 

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, the latest report from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy written by Renee Hobbs. Note while this is a great and interesting paper it fails to fully address the role of librarians, especially school librarians.

The Knight Commission recognized that people need tools, skills and understanding to use information effectively, and that successful participation in the digital age entails two kinds of skills sets: digital literacy and media literacy. Digital literacy means learning how to work the information and communication technologies in a networked environment, as well as understanding the social, cultural and ethical issues that go along with the use of these technologies. Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, reflect upon, and act with the information products that media disseminate.

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, a new policy paper by Renee Hobbs, Professor at the School of Communications and the College of Education at Temple University and founder of its Media Education Lab, proposes a detailed plan that positions digital and media literacy as an essential life skill and outlines steps that policymakers, educators, and community advocates can take to help Americans thrive in the digital age. (Download PDF or Read online)

Use of the Internet in Higher-Income Households from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.  Given my interest in broadband and the digital divide neither of these last two should be a surprise to anyone.  Just a few stats

The relatively well-to-do are also more likely than those in lesser-income households to own a variety of information and communications gear.79% of those living in households earning $75,000 or more own desktop computers, compared with 55% of those living in less well-off homes.79% of those living in higher-income households own laptops, compared with 47% of those living in less well-off homes.70% of those living in higher-income households own iPods or other MP3 players, compared with 42% of those living in less well-off homes.54% of those living in higher-income households own game consoles, compared with 41% of those living in less well-off homes.12% of those living in higher-income households own e-book readers such as Kindles, compared with 3% of those living in less well-off homes.9% of those living in higher-income households own tablet computers such as iPads, compared with 3% of those living in less well-off homes.

Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009 (pdf) from the FCC discovered via CrunchGears article - FCC Says Two-Thirds Of Americans’ Broadband Isn’t Fast Enough To Be Considered Actual Broadband

The FCC has just released its latest report on the sate of broadband in the US of A (PDF alert), and the results are… less than encouraging, and for a number of reasons. The agency found that around two-thirds of Americans’ broadband connections don’t actually qualify as broadband under its definition. (Broadband to the FCC is 4 mbps down/1 mbps up.) What’s sorta odd is that this isn’t a result of the lack of infrastructure or anything, but a result of people choosing low speed plans.

A Great and Terrible Beauty (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy) – I read this last weekend

Rebel Angels (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy Book #2) – I’ll be reading this one next. 

I really need more time to read!

What are you reading?

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Education votes determine the top 20 books for students and read list this summer in Shmoop's first-ever summer reading

Mountain view, CA (PRWEB) June 16, 2010

Shmoop (www.shmoop.com), a publisher of digital resources that makes learning fun and relevant for students, announced today its first summer reading list to read the ranks of the top twenty books for high school and middle school students over the summer. Books on Shmoop's summer reading list were nominated and of teachers and librarians, use the Shmoop learning guides matched to their students.

The twenty best books for summer 2010, to read, vote as of educators, are intended:

1. Hunger play by Suzanne Collins

2. The book thief by Markus Zusak

3. Catching fire, by Suzanne Collins

4. To a Nightingale by Harper Lee

5. Three cups of tea: one man's mission to promote Peace… One school at a time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

6. The Guernsey literary and potato Peel pie society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie barrows

7. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

8. The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie

9. Ender's game by Orson Scott card

10. The help of Kathryn Stockett

11. The count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

12. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

13. Graceling by Kristin Cashore

14. Relax by Neal Shusterman

15. Extremely loud and incredibly close by Jonathan SAFRAN Foer

16. Thirteen reasons why, by Jay Asher

17. The omnivore's dilemma: young reader's Edition, by Michael Pollan

18. Sarah's key by Tatiana de Rosnay

19. Heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad

20. When you reach me by Rebecca stead

About Shmoop

Shmoop published digital assets, the learning fun and to make relevant for students. Shmoop content is written by master teachers and graduate students from Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley and other top universities. Shmoop learning guides and teacher resources balance a fun, accessible style with academically rigorous materials that help students understand how topics relate to your everyday life. Shmoop offers more than 3,000 titles on the Web, iPhone/iPad, Android mobile device, Kindle, nook and Sony Reader. Shmoop was an Official Honoree in the 2009 and 2010 Webby Awards and named "Best of the Internet" by PC Magazine. In the 2008 launched headquarters Shmoop is a Labradoodle patrolled Office in mountain view, California.

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Related Sony Reader press releases

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I'm reading in November

I spend a lot of time reading, some of it related to libraries or work or transiteracy or the digital exist divide so I've been thinking about a way to share it then I realized, hey! This is a blog by a librarian shouldn't I be required to post what I'm reading here? This weekend I asked on Twitter and Facebook if there was any interest in what I'm reading. The answer was yes.So here it is!

Once a month I'm going to write a what I'm reading post. It will include books, reports, publications, manifestos any other number of official things, it wont include blog posts or articles found online, I already share those via Twitter and this blog.

I live in the future and here's how it works: why your world, work, and brain are being Creatively disrupted -I discovered this via Twitter from Jenny Levine.So far, two of my favorite quotes:

It wasn't about print vs. digital.It was about immediacy, details, links, interactive graphics, videos, and most important, hyperpersonalization.

Paper is still number one for reading gadget content; It's disposable, relatively inexpensive and relatively simple to create in small or large quantities and it doesn't need batteries or a power outlet.

Ask for it: How women can use negotiation to get what they really want -two things I'm thinking about right now:

Keep in mind that what you really want may not be about more more responsibility, more money, more status. Changing your life for the better isn't always about being on the fast track or moving higher up the corporate ladder, sometimes it's about slowing down or moving sideways.So forget about the typical pathways to success in your profession.Take a fresh look at every aspect of your life and figure out what suits you. Consider hiring a personal coach to help you zero in on what would make you happier or help you strike the right balance among your many interests, goals, and commitments.

I wish I could hirer a personal life coach, but mostly I'm thinking that being successful at something doesn't mean I have to keep doing it I can say ok, did that and move on to something new.

WHAT WILL YOU RAIN SONG?Researchers have found that people experience two different kinds of regret: regret about things they've done and regret about the things they didn't do overwhelmingly, people regret the things they didn't do far more.When asked to identify the biggest regret in their life, people are two to three times more likely to describe something they didn't do instead of something they did. 

Don't of think I need to elaborate on this one.

There's to app for that! Libraries and mobile technology: An introduction to public policy considerations (pdf) from the Office for information technology policy

As the information revolution continues to unfold, libraries will experiment with mobile devices and services to support the information needs of their users wherever they may be. The adoption of mobile technology age the traditional relationships between libraries and their users and introduces novel challenges to reader privacy.At the same time, the proliferation of mobile devices and services raises issues of access to information in the digital age, including content ownership and licensing, digital rights management and accessibility.This policy brief explores some of these issues and is intended to stimulate further community discussion and policy analysis.

Universal broadband: targeting investments to deliver broadband services to all Americans (pdf)A project of the Aspen Institute communications and society program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Eighty percent of the households with incomes of less than $20,000 subscribe to premium television services whose monthly fees are comparable to and often exceed, the cost of broadband.This might surprise some who view broadband as more essential than premium television, but it should come as no surprise for a variety of reasons.

First, while television brings value to the individual, broadband's value depends to a significant degree on how many people in one's social circle are so using it and how they are using it second necessary to find there is a large gap between the tools and locate trustworthy, substantive content; how to safely interact online, and how to protect personal information.Moreover, using the Internet requires its users to be literate.Fourteen percent of the adult population in the United States, or 30 million people, read at below basic literacy levels, while another 63 million read at just the basic level.Literacy levels do not interfere with television usage, but without sufficient content geared towards those with lower reading levels, the utility of the Internet for those Americans drops dramatically.In short, there is no digital literacy without basic literacy.

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Borders eBook Store goes live - BlackBerry and Android reading apps released

See eBook readers find blog eBook Reader blog reading in the digital age-HomeAbouteBook-SourceseReader user manuals and ManualsFree and cheap Kindle BooksKindle international country information about RSS feed borders eBook Store live - BlackBerry and Android reading published no CommentsPosted goes apps at 9 pm in random, eBook Store

The introduction today announced its borders

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Jakob Nielsen s reading speed is not the final word: an iPad read app tested - and the Kindle E Ink Tech is not the largest, the most recent or the screen

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Currently Reading

(Photo of Stephen King and son, Joe Hill)


I'm reading (well, one is an audio book) three very different books right now and, not unexpectedly, I find myself having very different reactions to them. As my sidebar indicates, I'm actually involved with four books at the moment but I've not picked up one of them for several weeks now, so I don't consider it to be active at this point.

I'm about 25% of the way through the audio book version of Paul Doiron's The Poacher's Son, a book about a Maine game warden whose poaching father is on the run in the Maine woods, suspected of having played a part in the gunning down of a policeman and a businessman. The story is interesting so far, though certainly not exceptional to this point, but I am really taking a dislike to the voice and delivery of the book's reader, John Bedford Lloyd. Lloyd's monotone delivery is fine for short periods but is dull and annoying for anything more than ten or fifteen minutes at a go. Lloyd's tone changed so drastically from the end of Disc 1 to the beginning of Disc 2 that, for a few seconds, I thought a new narrator had taken over the job. It turns out, though, that some anonymous sound engineer failed to keep the recordings set at the same parameters. I'm hoping this one gets better - and there's still lots of time for that to happen.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. This is an interesting look at the marriages of three men: one suspected of having murdered his wife by forcing her to eat something she was extremely allergic to and the two detectives trying to build a case against him. An interesting twist to this one is that one of the detectives is Sam Sheppard, the former doctor who had once been convicted of the murder of his own wife (based on the real Sam Sheppard's story). This is a well written novel and it is, by far, the most "literary" of the three books. I have a pretty high opinion of it so far and, depending on how the book plays out, this one should receive a high rating. It is, by the way, a debut novel, one apparently in the works for more than eight years.

And then there's Joe Hill's Horns, a horror novel about a young man who suddenly sprouts a nice set of devil's horns atop his head. The horns cause those exposed to them to share their innermost thoughts and wishes with the young man, often leading to disgusting admissions and truths he really does not want to hear about. Most of you know that Joe Hill is Stephen King's son and I'm starting to think that Joe has analyzed his father's work to the extent that his own writing is almost indistinguishable from his father's anymore. This is an ebook I downloaded from my library or I probably would not be reading it. As it is, at 50% of the way through the book, I'm still wondering why I'm bothering with it. Frankly, I'm finding that it is aimed at a whole different reading audience than the one I'm part of - and that "horror" has long since ceased to horrify or scare me at all. There's just too much content of the "gross out" variety to impress me that the book has much merit, and I'm only continuing it to find out the origin of the horns and whether the main character will finally shed them. At most, this will probably earn a 3.0 rating, maybe even a bit less.

I haven't abandoned a book in a good while, and seldom abandon them when at least 25% of the way through them, but Horns and The Poacher's Son are testing me.Posted bySam Sattlerat12:02 PM

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Reading Ebooks Against the Clock

I've been reading at a frantic pace all afternoon - but not for a reason I like.

For the second time in the past few months, I've had to rush through an ebook so that I could finish it before it disappeared from my Sony Reader. It's not the Reader's fault; it's a fluke in the way the Harris County public library system regulates the use of its ebooks. Keep in mind that there are about 4 million people in this county (almost one of every six Texans lives in Harris County, in fact), so it almost always takes at least two weeks to gain access to one of the system's electronic books.

Because of the high demand for what seems to be a rather limited number of ebook copies, the library does not allow an extension of time for downloaded ebooks. That means the clock begins ticking as soon as a patron's download is finished and, after fourteen 24-hour periods, the book is killed regardless of what page a reader might be on. I get that and I undertand why it has to be that way right now. But, for at least the third time now, I have gone weeks with no checked-out ebooks only to have two or three of them become available to me simultaneously. Because the ebooks are available for just three days after patron notification, that means they have to be read within 16 or 17 days, at most.

I'm not a great fan of ebooks but I do enjoy the opportunity to download books from my library. Unfortunately, demand seems to be outpacing supply of ebooks in the Harris County system at a time when libraries are struggling to balance budgets while putting books, CDs and DVDs on the shelves.

I have mixed emotions about the whole thing, I have to admit. If the supply of ebooks can be increased only by cutting the number of real books on the shelves, is this a good thing? My vote is a definite NO.

As it turns out, I am not particularly thrilled by Mexico City Noir, a short story collection of crime fiction set in that city, and I wonder if my opinion was tainted by my rushed reading of the dozen stories in the collection. Reading against the clock is not an experience I want to repeat any time soon.Posted bySam Sattlerat3:53 PM

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