• Coming Soon: A Floating Library

      On reading this, I immediately had two questions. First, why has this never been a thing in NYC? The second is, how do I apply for a job there? From the Gothamist: The announcement of a floating library makes us wonder why there has never been a library on a boat in one of

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  • METRO Digitization Docs Released to Commons

      From the Metropolitan Library Council (METRO): Two library-related publications written and edited within the METRO community have been released under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution licenses. Digitization in the Real World (2010) and The Global Librarian (2013) are now freely available for download and Internet Archive and unglue.it. Both books highlight the innovative work our colleagues

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  • Dingo Librarian

      Dave Mauzy and I made a thing. Dave is my backboard for nearly everything I come up with because he’s good at poking holes in the sillier ideas and offers useful observation on the stuff that has potential. He was instrumental in helping me through the rough patches while writing Article 9. But sometimes

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  • A New Book Cover

    I’ve been pontificating about a project of mine here for years. I’ve called it the Blockade series because it is a planned hard Sci-fi series about a ring of thingies surrounding the solar system. The first book is titled Article 9, and I’m almost ready to hit the publish button on it.

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  • Digital Book Day

      Something that should absolutely, positively concern you–besides the fact that I am trying to do my job on only three hours’ sleep, and the fact that German sports fans will likely be insufferable for the next four years after their team’s crushing defeat of Argentina in the world Cup finals yesterday, and besides the

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  • Book Announcement

      And now, another book announcement. You may remember my plug for Theme-Thology: New Myths I shared a few weeks ago. That was a cool book. Even better, I’m actually in this one. It’s the fourth book in HDWP Books’ Theme-Thology series of anthologies, titled Real Worlds Unreal, where each story takes place in a

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  • Hachette Discovers DRM Is A Bad Idea

      Hachette insisted that Amazon sell its books with “Digital Rights Management” that only Amazon is allowed to remove, and now Hachette can’t afford to pull its books from Amazon, because its customers can only read their books with Amazon’s technology. So now, Hachette has reduced itself to a commodity supplier to Amazon, and has

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  • Inaugural Poem

      A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Marked the mastodon. The dinosaur, who left dry tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly,

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  • Libraries: The Dream of Civilization

      Add this to the Quote of Note file: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz: To destroy a library is to destroy the dream of civilization. To destroy the NY Public Library is to destroy our sixth and best borough; that beautiful corner of New York City where all are welcome and all are equals, and

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  • Cell Phone Etiquette

      Namely, it should be turned off from the time you enter the library to the time you leave it. That is all. Or I’ll kill you. My Books [author_books amount=”3″ size=”150″ type=”random” name=”jonfrater”]

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