The Digital Reader |
- The Morning Coffee – 23 December 2013
- New Update to Google Play Books App Removes Option to Upload PDFs
- New Review: the Medion LifeTab E7312 is Good But Not Great
- eBooks and Public Libraries vs. Cruise Ship Subsidies in Miami-Dade County, FL
| The Morning Coffee – 23 December 2013 Posted: 22 Dec 2013 09:30 PM PST Top stories this morning include a look at Amazon’s ongoing effort to ghettoize erotica (link), a set of 10 not so bold predictions (link), alove note to audiobooks (link), and more.
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| New Update to Google Play Books App Removes Option to Upload PDFs Posted: 22 Dec 2013 04:18 PM PST The ever The new version of the GPB app (3.1.23) reportedly doesn’t have any new features. In fact, the only change that has been identified is that readers can no longer upload PDFs from the app. They can still upload Epub from the app and they can upload both PDF and Epub via the Google Play website, but for some reason Google has disabled this one feature. Google added the upload feature a couple weeks ago, and that’s what has everyone puzzled. Why add a feature just to remove it 11 days later? This is just a guess, but perhaps the feature wasn’t working too well? I haven’t tested this feature myself but I have been reading user reports. A number of people have reported that tyhey cannot upload ebooks. There was a comment left on this blog, and there also several reviews which complained about this option:
I would bet that the upload function is more likely to choke on large files than small files, and since Epubs average significantly smaller than PDF the latter format was probably the source of a greater volume of complaints (or error messages returned from Google’s servers). It would not surprise anyone to see PDFs that hit 50MB in size (or more), but a 50MB Epub file is still the exception (textbooks, mainly, and other enhanced ebooks). You can find the app in Google Play. But I wouldn’t download it; there’s no need. Instead I suggest that you wait until the next update. The post New Update to Google Play Books App Removes Option to Upload PDFs appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| New Review: the Medion LifeTab E7312 is Good But Not Great Posted: 22 Dec 2013 09:01 AM PST All I’ve just posted my latest tablet review and this time I am doing something different. I am now posting the review as a separate page on the blog and not as a blog post. This is going to thin out the blog posts and give me better control over where the review is placed. This last could be useful if I ever have to move the review to another site. Having a separate post is also going to make it easier to critique the review (as opposed to the device being reviewed.) And while I’m on the topic of reviews, my next couple reviews will be posted at about the same time in the last few days before CES 2014. I’ll be reviewing the Nook HD+ (the one that came out in 2012, yes) and the HP Slate 7 Plus. I picked these 2 tablets because I already owned the one and because the other launched recently with a lot of coverage but has not been extensively reviewed. After I post those 2 reviews I plan to take a hiatus and attend a couple conferences. And after that my review schedule will continue with Kobo’s 2 Android tablets, the Arc 7 and Arc7HD. Neither device represents a great value so I would not normally buy them. But they were fairly high profile launches and haven’t been reviewed in very many places, which makes them excellent candidates. Thoughts?
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| eBooks and Public Libraries vs. Cruise Ship Subsidies in Miami-Dade County, FL Posted: 22 Dec 2013 08:54 AM PST
"A lot of parents don't have computers at home or they can't afford 'em," she told a TV interviewer in September after the besieged Miami-Dade library system won a temporary reprieve from massive cuts in hours and jobs. Ms. Nunez herself is among the millions of cash-strapped Americans counting on public libraries to help them. But will Miami-Dade come through for the Nunezes? That remains to be seen, as the public officials ponder how to deal with the library system's $20-million budget deficit projected for the next fiscal year. One idea is to put bookstores in libraries. But how much will that help finance them? It's a little like the library director in my own hometown—Alexandria, VA, bizarrely labeled "the most well-read city in the U.S.," based on Amazon purchases—dreaming of making serious money from Amazon-related affiliate fees. Here's a more efficacious remedy for Miami-Dade. Get your priorities straight. The locality's annual budget is more than $4 billion, so the $20 million is a grain of sand in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't help that the government has reduced the library millage rate, creating an artificial fiscal crisis. Meanwhile, as noted by Elaine de Valle ("a.k.a. 'Ladra'"), a former Miami Herald reporter, writing in a different context, Miami-Dade officials have voted to give away $3 million in "marketing incentives" to bring cruise passengers to Miami. Huh? Isn't that what Norwegian Cruise Line would do naturally? Perhaps even more significantly, Ladra has raised questions about the county's oft-costly fondness for outsourcing contracts. Any possible corruption, any possible quid pro quos between political donors and public officials, would be in the best local and state traditions.
But how about local donations in Miami-Dade to make up for public funding shortages, aggravated by the state of Florida's cutbacks in library aid? Forget it. "Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 4," Ms. Mazzei says of an effort to collect them via envelopes set out with tax bills, "the library had received 247 donations totaling $6,573.49. The library budget: about $50 million." Granted, not every city, county or state is frittering away money for purposes like cruise line subsidies. Countless governments are truly, truly frugal, as opposed to caving into well-connected business people keen on sticking their snouts into the public trough; and I salute the many honest politicians who are in fact friends of libraries. But whatever the reason, America's public libraries in fiscal year 2010 could spend just $4.22 per capita on paper and digital books books and other kinds of content, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Libraries can respond in several ways, starting with advocacy aimed at politicians and others controlling their budgets. More focus on e-books and other digital content, along with laws to discourage price gouging by publishers, would help as well. E is the most efficient way to distribute items, while also opening up new possibilities in areas such as interactivity and book-to-book linking. Many patrons now demanding paper books would be open to e-books if the hardware and tech support were available to the extent they are in Bexar County, Texas, another heavily Hispanic locality, which has made hundreds and hundreds of loanable e-readers available, along with friendly guidance from young, gung-ho staffers. Give the underfunded libraries of Miami all the resources they need to build on their existing digital efforts! E-book-capable gadgets are like hearing aids: you need to consider the needs of different users and help them befriend the technology. Of course, libraries are about much more than books, as I keep emphasizing. But they are their main calling card, and with shrunken collections, libraries could lose some support among voters expecting enough back in return for their taxes. Miami's per capita spending on library content, in all formats, is less than half the national average. Yes, in the end, it all boils down to money. Given that the super-rich own so much of the country, is it not fair to suggest that they finance a publicly run national digital library endowment? I use the P word deliberately, since a public endowment would be more transparent and more responsive than alternatives. The endowment would be far, far from a full solution to America's library crisis, but it could do a lot more good more than bookstores in libraries, even though I'm certainly game on libraries trying the store route as well, especially if private bookstores aren't nearby. Every little bit helps. But just ask private bookstores about their own profit margins, The fiscal woes of the Miami-Dade libraries are deeply systematic and are not likely to go away soon, and the same can be said of countless other libraries victimized by myopic local governments. Jessica Nunez shouldn't have to wait. How can we not create both the endowment and intertwined public and academic library systems online to respond better to America's library needs? reposted under a CC license from Library City The post eBooks and Public Libraries vs. Cruise Ship Subsidies in Miami-Dade County, FL appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
![MiamiJessicaNunez1[1]](http://www.the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/MiamiJessicaNunez11.jpg)
![MiamiCruiseShip_thumb1[1]](http://www.the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/MiamiCruiseShip_thumb11.jpg)
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