We've seen big announcements recently about unlimited cloud storage offerings for a flat monthly or fee. Dropbox offers it for subscribers to its Business plan. Similarly, Google has unlimited storage for Google Apps for Business customers. In both cases, though, you have to be part of a business group of …

I've been away from DLTJ Thursday Threads for a while, but that doesn't mean the fun hasn't stopped. This week there are stories about the beginning and the end of the Research Works Act (again, one might add), Amazon's continuing shifts in the ebook marketplace, and an announcement of beta …

Welcome to the new year! Threads this week include a brief analysis of the legal problems in store if SOPA and PROTECT-IP become law, what an analysis of the problems with Best Buy might teach libraries, and why open source licensing of clinical tools is important.

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This week brought news of the Kindle-based e-book lending program through Overdrive, and Peter Brantley has an opinion piece on what this means for Amazon, publishers, and even libraries. From the other e-book powerhouse -- Google -- is a TED talk presentation about the Google Books ngram Viewer. Finally, there is a …

Legal action against the digitization and limited distribution of orphan works unexpectedly hit the news again this week. This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads starts with an overview of the lawsuit filed by authors organizations and authors against Hathi Trust over plans to make digital versions of orphan works available to …

DLTJ Thursday Threads for two weeks in a row! I'm getting back in the groove. This week has pointers to geeky things (learning about structured data on the web) and not quite so geeky things (thoughts about indexes in ebooks and Amazon's tactics for end-to-end control of book publishing). Well …

This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads is about data centers -- those dark rooms with all of the blinking lights of computers doing our bidding. Data centers hit the mainstream news this week with the outage at one of Amazon's cloud computing clusters. And since computers and their associated peripherals consume a …

I tried to stay away from ebooks again, in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads (I managed to do so last week), but the threads of announcements and conversations are too crucial to ignore. Just yesterday Amazon and OverDrive announced plans to lend library ebooks to Kindle users. The press …

This week Amazon takes center stage of DLTJ Thursday Threads with a report of their new Kindle Singles program for medium-form digital content and a screen-reader-aware version of the Kindle reader application for PCs. After that is a look at how scholarly discourse is changing -- radically! -- with the availability and …

With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher's view of Amazon's strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon's Mechanical Turk drives …

This is definitely becoming a habit...welcome to the fourth edition of DLTJ's Thursday Threads. Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like …

If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of "disruptive innovation" in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to …

Did you know that Amazon offers a facility to make corrections to its catalog? Somewhere in the past few months someone mentioned this to me and I tried it out. (Unfortunately, it has been long enough now that I've forgotten who told me; if you are the one, please fess …

Ah, it is the beginning of September when thoughts turn to going back to school, the days turn a little colder (in the northern hemisphere) and the smell of lawsuit briefs is in the air. Well, okay -- the latter might not be what you expect, but this is a special …

At ALA Midwinter, ALCTS sponsored a panel discussion about sharing library-created data inside and outside the library community, with a particular focus on cataloging data. I was honored to be ask to speak on the topic from the perspective of a consortial office. This is the first in a series …

Last month OCLC announced a new service offering for long-term storage of libraries' digital collections. Called Digital Archive™, it provides "a secure storage environment for you to easily manage and monitor the health of your master files and digital originals." Barbara Quint has an article in Information Today called "OCLC …

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 …

What of a service existed where the patrons selected an item they needed out of our library catalog and that item was delivered to the patron even when the library did not yet own the item? Would that be useful? With the growth of online bookstores, our users do have …

I have been heard to remark to other librarians on occasion a comment along the lines of "Don't fear Google; Don't Chase Google; Let's Out-Google Google!" After allowing the confused stare linger for a moment or the hysterical laughter die down, I explain my thesis: we have something Google doesn't …