Speaking of books, I am very much looking forward to reading Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy once I can get my hands on a copy. Check out the rest of the latest issue of Progressive Librarian including a [deservedly?] lukewarm review of Revolting Librarians Redux
Author: jessamyn
Lynne Cheneyvp’s wife tells department of ed how to do their job, has educational pamphlets destroyed
While I despair of ever getting decent headlines on newspaper stories about books, the words A modern book burning did catch my eye. The story is about Lynne Cheney, wife of the current VP who objected to the content in a pamphlet being published by the Department of Ed. The pamphlet entitled “Helping Your Child Learn History” [old version here, currently out of stock] apparently refers to the National Standards for History Guidelines which advocates a more “lumps and all” approach to history which encourages expanding the history focus to include the contributions of women, minorities, radicals and other less-popular figures of their times. Good news as well as bad news. As a result of her criticism, the Department of Ed, destroyed 300,000 of the pamphlets.
At the time, Lynne Cheney, the wife of now-Vice President Cheney, led a vociferous campaign complaining that the standards were not positive enough about America’s achievements and paid too little attention to figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere and Thomas Edison. At one point in the initial controversy, Cheney denounced the standards as “politicized history.” [thanks lee]
graphic novel removed from CA public library
Stockton [CA] City Council is giving close scrutiny to the library focussing on age-appropriateness of unfiltered internet access and graphic novels like Phoebe Glockner’s A Child’s Life which they called a “how-to book for pedophiles” while at the same time objecting to its being available to children. Librarians agreed and removed the book from library shelves entirely. Glockner, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, has a few words to say about this on her own blog, and asks for advice. [thanks dan]
hi – 14oct
Hi. Welcome Seven Days readers! I’m taking my folks on some last-gasp foliage tours this weekend so don’t expect to hear much from me for a few days.
the rundown on Google Print
I am feeling better so I am messing with Google Print. Andrea inquired whether, in addition to showing us places where we could buy these books, Google Print might use its comfy relationship with OCLC Worldcat to also show us where we could borrow these books. The reply she received was not encouraging. Tara has more info on Google Print from a discussion with a Google rep. Google does specifically say they are not a library in their FAQ.
Google Print is a book marketing program, as opposed to an online library, and as such your entire book will not be made available online unless you expressly permit it.
A few other things you might want to know about Google Print…
- Publishers can join for free. Google serves their “relevant” ads next to publisher’s content & splits the ad revenue with the publisher. I was pleasantly surprised to see a book by McFarland [my publisher] available.
- Google print currently only accepts — and dismantles — print copies of books and cannot currently accept pdfs or other digital formats. This will be a great bar trivia question a few years from now “which company destroys the most books? Google!”
- Google claims that “pages displaying your content have print, cut, copy, and save functionality disabled in order to protect your content.” and yet that’s not strictly true [see figure 1 and figure 2] The page image actually displays as a background image in a weird inline stylesheet, but it’s just a jpg with a URL like any other image on the web. More explanation here.
- Tara has a few more tricks up her sleeve. Can’t afford Library Journal? Read it via Google Print.
- According to Jason Kottke’s non-scientific method, Google Print had about 8,000 titles on December 2003. This was back when you could search for the acronym ISBN in the URL, limit results to Google Print, and get a title list. There’s no longer a handy ISBN in the URL, you’ll notice his title links from that entry no longer work.
- Once you’re looking at a book, searching for a word like “the” can give you a rough idea of how much of the book’s content is available
- scary line in publishers terms: “Google may retain and use for its own purposes all information You provide”