Good Reads Added

I've added the Good Reads widget to the sidebar so you can see what I've been reading. I'm glad I have a lot of time to read now that I'm finished with school.

I've been doing a lot of weeding of the YA fiction section here and working on an essay about how I came to love weeding. I choose my possesions carefully and hate to get rid of anything, so methodically removing items from the collection is somewhat fun. I might actually be ready to weed my LP collection soon. It would be amazing to take it down to "only albums I've listened to in the past year" or "only albums where I can sing along to at least one song with most of the words right" (thereby saving Redd Kross AND the NKOTB).

Also, I have a printer/scanner/copier coming, so I'm looking forward to scanning my zines and making them available online, a project I have been putting off for ten years. To be super ambitious, I'd like to use CS3 and have them in PDFs so that you can print them at home (or your library) and read them as they were intended to be and donate copies to all the awesome zine libraries that are still active.

Kindle

Okay, I'm going out on a limb here. I'm making a MAJOR prediction for the future of computing and I only wish there was a way I could make a million off of this. Simply,
the computer and the screen need a divorce. What is the suckiest thing about portable computers? THE SCREEN! We need computing devices that DO NOT tether us to the online world 24/7, but are portable memory and computing units that can be projected onto any surface, or a receivable surface. No one wants to buy another screen! They want a gadget that does a lot of stuff!

Sue the Libraries?

An interesting article ran in the Guardian recently with the headline Sue the libraries - they're letting people get content on the cheap. Now, because libraries are loaning the original items there are no further copyright fees to be paid on physical items. Databases may have limits to the number of users that may be logged in at the same time or may be billed based on the number of users the library serves. Yet I love the idea that the library may be a legal source of copyrighted electronic content and want to work to make this a reality. I'm afraid current projects are not showing the public's true level of interest in the project because the downloadable audio and video content available through libraries is PC only and not iPod compadable due to digital rights management (DRM) technology. I do think librarians are very aware of copyright issues such as in the wonderful book Complete Copyright for Librarians. Yet this is exactly the kind of reference information that, while published with a Creative Commons license, is not available for free on the web. I wonder if they will ever make this book available in an electronic form for free while the information is still relevant?