- Change Rhetoric: Good and Bad
- Three challenges: Engaging, rightscaling and innovating
- Time for a little dissent
- To Be Or Not To Be A Library Director
- How to Answer “So You Need a Degree to Do That?”
- Putting Things in Perspective
- Here’s how Amazon self-destructs
- Amazon vs. your public library
- Small Pieces Loosely Kludged: Peer Review and Publication in Math Scholarly Communication
- The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life
- If We Share Data, Will Anyone Use Them? Data Sharing and Reuse in the Long Tail of Science and Technology
- Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy
- Re-thinking Twitter in the Classroom
- Recently published : Incorporating Online Instruction in Academic Libraries
- New Report from EDUCAUSE and Internet2: Understanding What Higher Education Needs From E-Textbooks + Roundup
- Students Prefer Print for Serious Academic Reading (actual study here)
- Jaron Lanier: We’re Being Enslaved by Free Information
- Welcome to the Palace of Ambiguity and Talking About Information Literacy: the Mediating Role of Discourse in a College Writing Classroom
Categories
- Log in to post comments
More like this
A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I can answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca.
Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant LibrarianDiscipline/Field:…
I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries and higher education. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here.
Of…
I'm starting to think that maybe I need to add "Work-life Balance" to the tagline of this blog, given all the recent posting about such things (but then, one of the benefits of having done this blogging thing for eleven years is that I know this is just a phase, and I'll drift on to the next…
The Patent System Is The World's Biggest Threat To Innovation Today
How Google Dominates Us
The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves
Resilience vs. Sustainability: The Future of Libraries
Getting first sale wrong
College Students: The Gadget Generation
Our kids' glorious new age…
re the amazon self destruct Idea. I suspect the long term model is just a step further from where Amazon is today (a lot of books can be gotten in physical or Kindle form). Why not in the future, move to print on demand where no physical inventory is kept (I know of one classical music online CD store that does this). Amazon would present you with a menu for a book, that has the read on reader or print on demand version. (Likley these would not be hard bound but spiral bound but...) Then if the licensing were set up right one could also envision a single location book store with no inventory, several browsing stations to let one hunt, and then an on demand printer. (likely would grow out of a print shop imagine the UPS store in the book business for example).
Back in the old days even the big box stores did not have all of books in print in inventory, I recall back when it took 6 weeks to get a special order book.
I agree that the issue of how people find out about books is Amazon's Achilles heel. I rarely, if ever, find out about a book from Amazon. Their suggestions, at least in my case, are often attempts to sell me versions of books or CDs that I already own; once in a while, it will be a title by an author/artist I already know, or something by another famous author/artist. So to learn of new authors or artists, I must rely on other sources. One of those sources, historically, has been the bookstore, whether a local place or a Barnes and Noble (it never was Borders, since they never opened a store in my area). I am fortunate to have local bookstores to fall back on,* but Barnes and Noble has been my main source. I'll still have referrals from friends and bloggers, but that just pushes the problem one step back: how do they hear about it?
*Coincidentally, as I was typing this comment I got an e-mail from a local bookstore with the subject line "Why I'm not going to complain about Amazon anymore".
Nah. Online is a MUCH better way of finding good books than roaming around a bookstore picking things up at random. Amazon just doesn't do it well... yet.