Library YouTube Break #16:
Check it Out! (But only 26 times.)
You gotta love this Library YouTube Break! It’s a video produced by Oklahoma’s Pioneer Library System and it’s sweeping through the global library world. It’s shown up on BoingBoing, and lots of other places. It’s even on the French site iD Boox! (How cool is that?)
Libraries and taxpayers are stewing over publisher HarperCollins plans to limit the check-out of e-books to library customers. After 26 check outs, the library would have to buy a new copy, cause, like, that’s about when the library would have to replace a popular print title. Considering the traditional two-week check out time at libraries, that’s a year’s worth of circulation.
We talked about this in our earlier post, The E-Book Headache. And now we found out about this great video.
Watch, enjoy, and then continue down for more comments:
Can you believe it!? One of those books has been checked out 120 times! And it looks pretty darn good. (Makes me wonder about the copy of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest that I’ve been reading. It looks like it’s traveled through a war zone! Wonder how many times it’s been checked out?)
Look, we get it. The economy’s bad and this new format threatens the bottom line, demanding that book publishers find ways to make a buck and prevent book piracy. The economy’s bad, and in this age of austerity, libraries and taxpayers need to save a buck.
Obviously, what’s called for is a new, fair and reasonable business model for libraries to acquire e-books for their community.
It’s getting pretty nasty out there as the debate continues, and one blogger with The Atlantic is even calling for a HarperCollins boycott.
You can follow the developing story, and all the news and views on this Google news page.
The E-Book Headache
This post isn’t about a new E-Book titled “Headache.” Nope! This is about the format itself, and how authors, publishers, booksellers and libraries are trying to figure out this brave new world.
With that in mind, let’s go!
• Sony is oh, so serious about this. Sony Corp. expands their digital Reader Library program to 30 more libraries across the country. Notice in the press release that Oklahoma’s Pioneer Library System is set to join the program.
• Harper-Collins is way too serious about this. Meanwhile, Harper-Collins and OverDrive are facing a backlash after announcing they will limit the number of times an e-book may be lent to 26. The reasoning: print copies wear out and have to be replaced, so e-books should have a planned obsolescence. (Really?! Wow, what Vance Packard could do with this!) The Pioneer Library System takes the publisher to task in this open letter, calling the plan, forced obsolescence.
• The New York Times tries to make it simple with this graphic showing the economics of producing a book.
• CJ Cherryh and fellow authors have their own plan! One of our favorite Oklahoma authors, Cherryh (now a Washington state resident), has joined with authors Jane Fancher and Lynn Abbey to offer e-book versions of their out-of-print titles on the website Closed Circle. You go, girls!!
We’re sure there’s much more out there, but all of this E-book talk is really giving us a headache!
On Grief and Grieving
For my generation, this is the time of our lives—the time we must say goodbye to our parents, aunts and uncles. This happens to all of us who live long enough, but still we stand a little stunned to have suddenly become part of the oldest generation in our families.
Over the last six weeks, I have suffered the death of my father and I have watched the grieving of three friends who have also lost a parent. Four funerals. In all cases, the deceased had lived a long and fulfilling life. That’s a blessing to be sure, but it’s still hard for those left alive. Not only do we miss our loved ones, we know that we’re next in line. That Mortality Gorilla in the room is getting harder and harder to ignore.
A couple of days after my father’s funeral, Time magazine arrived in my postal box with a very appropriate article: New Ways to Think About Grief. In recent decades. psychology practitioners have used the five stages of dying (denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross‘s On Death and Dying, and applied it to the grief process. Kubler-Ross, herself, got in on the action with On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss.
Today the psychology community is saying, “Not so fast!” As with all advice that attempts to package human experiences into nice little boxes wrapped with a bow, we instinctively know that one size does not fit all. There can be vast differences in how individuals experience these universal experiences.
The article busts through the wall of certain myths about the grieving process (i.e. We Grieve in Stages, and Grieving is Harder on Women than Men) to communicate the truths we’ve always known, and what science is confirming: grieving is different for different people; some can benefit from the stages approach to grief, while others (indeed, most of us) are resilient enough to get through loss on their own without stages or phases or tasks.
There may be traditional, religious and cultural scripts we follow when we grieve the loss of our loved ones, but in the end we take our own paths. Grieving is for the living.
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Want to read what others have to say about grief and grieving? Well, this wouldn’t be Okie Reads if we didn’t point you toward some titles. Amazon’s page on Death, Grief and Bereavement is a good place to start, as is your local bookstore or Oklahoma Public Library
