Holmes:  I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in your sleep? Miss Stoner:  Certainly not.  But why? … Watson:  My God, I whispered; did you see it? Holmes: That is the baboon. Tap to start; swipe to turn pages; tap to start/stop audio; double tab to sync your reading position with audio; adjust your audio layer volumes; tap to adjust your reading speed…  Ingenious, Watson. Finally, a Holmes rendition worthy of Holmes.  “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” on the iPad by Booktrack: “Booktrack represents a new chapter in the evolution of...

I wrote this review for my personal blog, but liked this app so much that I thought I would add some material to the post and bring it to the more general audience of this blog. I ran across a great app for iPad today.  It’s called “Free Books” and is just what it says, a free interface to 23,469 public domain books from Project Gutenberg.  In fact, I liked it so much that I purchased (for all of 99 cents) it’s companion app called “Classicly HD,” which is the same app with access to the same collection of free books, but also access to 2,947 audiobooks from...

In an interesting article in Today’s NY Times, “Publisher Limits Shelf Life for Library E-Books” Julie Bosman discusses HarperCollins’ recent decision to limit the number of times an eBook can be checked out from a public library to 26 times–that’s 1 year assuming a 2-week checkout period without renewal rights.  Heretofore libraries that check out eBooks have not been limited to total number of checkouts. As with the rest of the movement to abandon analog media in favor of digital–though a good ways behind music and movies–book publishers are probing...

Today Google’s long touted eBookstore has opened in the US.  It will open in Europe in early 2011.  Now books.google.com no longer links to a reader’s wonderland, but something much more–well, not ominous, but “commercial,” in all its negative associations, seems more the word.  You can still gain access to public domain, free scanned volumes, but without some of the impressive features of the old Google Books.  With the new eBookstore the for sale sign is definitely front and center in the display window.  You’ll have to hunt for the freebees.  Here is the...

I love books.  I also supervise a large computer lab at Palomar College, the largest, in fact.  We are located on the ground floor, more like the semi-detached basement, of the library building.  Right now the lab is jammed.  Every computer is occupied and there is a line of about 40 people waiting to get on a computer–this after expanding the lab several times over the years.  I have just read the New York Times article “Do School Libraries Need Books?“, so I was struck with the idea of going up to the third floor of our library building, the area called the “stacks,”...