eBook User's Bill of Rights -- will it work? #ebookrights #HCOD

With the restrictions on eBooks placed by hardware creators and publishers, it was only a matter of time until we would see something like this come about. The "eBook User's Bill of Rights" surfaced this week on the LIS Librarian News website. After a quick search on Google, Sarah Glassmyer filled in a bit of the background on this recent addition to the dissatisfaction with restricted rights on eBooks in her post, "HCOD, eBook User Bill of Rights, and Math".

One interesting quote from the Bill of Rights stood out as being very reminiscent of the music debate in the not so distant past. 

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

Has this held you back from joining the eBook revolution? And do you think this will work? 

'Mexican Legal Dictionary' App

From, "Thomson Reuters Rolls Out 'Mexican Legal Dictionary' App"

In response to the growing demand for information on Mexican law, Thomson Reuters recently developed a Mexican legal dictionary app. The app includes English and Spanish audio pronunciations as well as definition of legal terms from the company's Mexican Legal Dictionary. It also includes other information like sentencing guidelines and reference guides to the role of certain Mexican government advisory councils.

Here comes XOOM

The Motorola XOOM is now available for pre-order and is being hailed as the first real iPad competitor. It runs a new version of Android that is designed specifically for tablets, super fast, and a bit pricey. Is this what you've been waiting for? 


Read more about XOOM.
Visit the Motorola XOOM site.  

New citation app

A new smartphone application takes most of the grunt work out of citing books in scholarly papers. 

Quick Cite, which costs 99 cents and is available for both iPhones and Android-based phones, uses the camera on a smartphone to scan the bar code on the back of a book. It then e-mails you a bibliography-ready citation in one of four popular styles—APA, MLA, Chigaco, or IEEE.

Click to read the full article. 


We're interested in hearing how this works for you, please share your comments. 

Have you ever wanted to print from your phone?

With Gmail, now you can. 

Let’s say you need to print an important email attachment on your way to work so that it’s waiting for you when you walk in the door. With Gmail for mobile and Google Cloud Print — a service that allows printing from any app on any device, OS or browser without the need to install drivers — you can.


To get started, you’ll first need to connect your printer to Google Cloud Print. For now, this step requires a Windows PC but Linux and Mac support are coming soon. Once you’re set up, just go to gmail.com from your iPhone or Android browser and choose “Print” from the dropdown menu in the top right corner. You can also print eligible email attachments (such as .pdf or .doc) by clicking the “Print” link that appears next to them.

Read more about this at the Gmail Blog.

What does running out of IP addresses mean to you?

Have you ever thought about how many IP addresses exist, and what you would do if the world ran out of them? Me either. Thankfully, others have and with the rapid increase of internet capable devices we should be thankful for the foresight. Now we don't have to worry that our next internet capable gadget won't be able to connect. 

How will this effect you? An interview on NPR explains.  

BLOCK: So, the transition from IPV4 to IPV6, are you anticipating that that will be pretty smooth or are there lots of potential complications there?

Mr. SHANKLAND: I think it's going to be more in the area of hiccups and some unpleasantness, than catastrophe. That's why I think the word IPocalypse is a bit overblown. A lot of money is going to have to be spent, but I don't think the Internet is going to come to a screeching halt, for example.
Websites will get slow in some cases because when you're trying to get data from some server on the other side of the Internet, the data might have to get translated from IPV4 to IPV6 and then back to IPV4. That has to happen every time a little packet of information goes from one place to another.
So I think we'll see some delays in the performance of the Internet as we make this gradual transition from IPV4 to IPV6. 

Read the transcript or listen to the interview.

A new way to use your RSS Reader

"Keeping Up, 2.0 Style" introduces a useful way to utilize RSS Readers, that many may not know about. 

The majority of database vendors (such as EBSCO, ProQuest, and Elsevier) provide RSS feeds that will deliver the most recent tables of contents of journals in their database to your reader.

This means that instead of searching through databases for new search results, as well as keeping up with your RSS Reader, you can incorporate them in one place. The ease of staying up to date just got a little bit easier. While this feature may not be ubiquitous at this time, it certainly has the likelihood of becoming a sought after user request in the near future.  


Like the author of the article, I use Google Reader for my RSS Reader of choice, what do you use? 


Read the full article here.