Looking for a book? 

BookFinder.com

BookFinder.com connects readers to over 40,000 booksellers from around the world with an open marketplace for all their online book shopping needs.

BookFinder.com, the open marketplace for books online is produced by 13th Generation Media, of Berkeley, California. The company was founded by a couple of recent University of California grads with a taste for grassroots-driven ecommerce, and afflicted with severe cases of bibliophilia. BookFinder.com's goal is to provide fellow readers unbiased real-time information about books available online.

Rather than selling books ourselves, our team of high-tech book geeks has worked to create a truly useful free book search tool for all kinds of readers. BookFinder.com is a one-stop search site that lets users view the collections of over 40,000 sellers of new, used, rare, and out-of-print books. The forty million titles available comprise the largest book catalog available anywhere, either online or offline. [check it out]

Thanks to Library Juice! 

Thank you to Library Juice for the recognition.

But it is a library, isn't it? 

Carrollton libraries shed bookish image by Micharel A. Lindenberger

Ask Joel Lunde what he remembers about the libraries he frequented as a youth, and he doesn't have to think long: "Old, dirty, dungy and dated."

"What I remember most were the rules: No chewing gum. No food. And no beverages in the library," he said.

But finding himself with a few hours between meetings last week, the 37-year-old salesman popped into the newest branch of the Carrollton Public Library. His jaw dropped.

"I was shocked," Mr. Lunde said. "It was like I walked into a Barnes & Noble ‚ with the computers, comfortable chairs and even a coffee shop. I've never seen anything like this before." [read more]

One step forward, four steps back? 

On January 10, 2002, First Lady Laura Bush proposed a $10 million dollar initiative to recruit a new generation of librarians.

Yet, in his first year in office, President George Bush cut federal funding to libraries by $39 million dollars.

There's a hole in the bucket... 

Major privacy hole in Window/MSN Messenger by Thomas C. Greene

A nifty feature in MSN and Windows Messenger which apparently was intended to identify IE users (without their knowledge or consent) on Microsoft Web sites can easily be abused by any Webmaster with a bit of Javascript or VBscript, a clever empiricist has discovered.

The feature allows anyone to obtain a surfer's Messenger username and those of his contacts, according to Richard Burton in a post Monday to the BugTraq mailing list.

Worse, if a username is not available, the e-mail address of the surfer and those of his contacts are displayed instead. [read more]

It's dangerous out there!

Privatize Libraries? 

The Corporate Takeover of Libraries by Ruth Rikowski

The expansion of capitalism is rapidly accelerating throughout the world. This is 'global capitalism'. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) need to be seen within this context. These areas have been explored in other articles in this journal. GATS functions to open up public services to corporate capital. This has direct implications for libraries and information, which I shall explore in this article, focusing in particular on public libraries (although many of the arguments can be applied to other types of libraries as well). As Angela Watson in the Best Returns report on Best Value in public libraries says:

"Government does not believe that it is in the public interest for any single supplier to dominate service provision, either locally or nationally. It is looking for variety in the way services are delivered, and a mix of service providers from the public, private and voluntary sectors. The aim is to improve the performance and competitiveness of services, not create a particular mode of provision." (2001, p.8)

Where will the logic of global capitalism take us? It would appear that it leads to the commodification of all that surrounds us. Within this context, the privatisation and commodification of libraries and information will be a small part in the overall trajectory; yet a vital part nonetheless. [read more]

Newsstand 

Vol. 7, Number 2 - February 4th 2002 First Monday