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Tag Archives: commerce

Drive-Thru Textbook Buy-Back

I continue to be astonished by how efficient the used textbook market has become. This week, at the end of the spring quarter at Ohio State University, a drive-thru textbook buy-back service popped up on the site of a long-closed gas station. It is a tent on a parking lot that truly does allow someone to drive through to drop off books (see the third image down). The operation is run by Budgetext, a national textbook wholesaler from Fayetteville, AR. I spoke with company representative Jerry Mohr about the service.

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2009 06 11 Comments (6)

Selling Placement in Library Search Results

This morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog has a story with the title “Should Colleges Sell Ads to Pay for New Technology?” that links to a blog posting by Martin Weller of the Open University in the U.K. As it happens, a colleague and I were talking about a strikingly similar topic at lunch yesterday: not just that advertisements could pay for new technology but that ads could pay for content in the libraries. I felt strangely uncomfortable with the concept, and I still do, so (in jester fashion) what better way to explore the discomfort than in a posting here on DLTJ.

This is a preview of Selling Placement in Library Search Results. Read the full post (849 words, 3:24 minutes estimated reading time)
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2008 06 04 Comments (4)

Out of Print Books Get New Life via Amazon and Participating Libraries

Why settle for mere digital copies of books (a la the Google Book Search project and the Open Content Alliance) when you can have an edition printed, bound and sent to you in the mail? That’s the twist behind a recent partnership announced by Amazon.com, Kirtas Technologies, Emory University, University of Maine, Toronto Public Library, and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

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2007 06 24 Comments (12)

How US Airways Became My Airline-of-Last-Resort (And Why You Should Never Fly With Them, Too)

I will never fly U.S. Airways again, if I have a choice. A competing airline’s ticket is going to have to be substantially more expensive for me to even consider U.S. Airways as an alternative.

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2007 05 21 Comments (34)

Stereotypical Vendors?

Recent posts by Richard Wallis and Paul Miller, both of Talis (a 40-year-old company in the U.K. specializing in information and metadata management), question a perceived division of library automation vendor technical staff with that of open source solution technical staff. I wasn’t at Code4Lib this year (I’m going to try to get there next year), but from the context of the blog postings and comments it seems like the Talis developers were showing some really cool stuff and concern was expressed by participants that they don’t want to see Code4Lib turned into a vendor forum.

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2007 03 31 Comments (4)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Sunday the 14th of March 2010 at 5:33:57 AM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/tag/commerce/

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