Digital Tuesday is Here

Can you believe it’s already been a week since your last dose of Internet fun? This week we’re going to look at a few things that may actually be relevant to those of you in the library/school biz before ingesting our dessert.

Library book overdue in Texas? Go directly to jail Texas, it’s a big country where the men walk tall and even the librarians are packing. Or looks that way. Because when a man in the City of Copperas Cove in Coryell County, central Texas, went three years overdue on a library book recently, they reportedly slung him in jail. Continue reading at TeleRead

Community Is Key to Successful Library Maker Spaces The most important resource for creating a successful library maker space—whether in a school or public library—is one’s own community, according to librarians Justin Hoenke, Amy Koester, and Michelle Cooper. Strong relationships and community involvement, not big budgets and high-tech gadgetry, are key to reaching children and teens, the trio of makers say. Continue reading at The Digital Shift

Amazon amps up its lures to get indies to go exclusive. Will other retailers respond? During the porn purge of 2013, much of the attention was on Kobo amongst authors even if the press was focused on Amazon. But while Kobo had pulled down the entire Draft to Digital catalog, a distribution service, Amazon had been systematically moving through the self published books and pushing books into draft mode that was erotic and had keywords like “virgin” or “child” or “father”. Continue reading at Dear Author

North Carolina School District to Return 15 Thousand Amplify Tablets Guilford County Schools announced on Tuesday that they were sending back all 15,000 Amplify tablets purchased at the beginning of the school year. The tablets had initially been acquired for use by middle school students as part of a 1:1 program but were pulled from use in early October after thousands of students reported broken screens, misfitting cases, or malfunctioning power supplies. Continue reading at The Digital Reader

Wife of Amazon founder reviews “The Everything Store”  The New York Times caught the review for “The Everything Store,” a book on Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos. MacKenzie Bezos titled her one-star review “I wanted to like this book,” but she obviously didn’t. Continue reading at TeleRead

Oklahoma’s Pioneer Library System Launches 24-Hour Vending Library Oklahoma’s Pioneer Library System (PLS) this week became the first library in the U.S. to debut Envisionware’s new 24-Hour Library. Officials plan to use two new vending units to offer 24 hour pickup for reserve materials at a small new branch near a busy shopping area, and to enhance access to materials in another location near a community center and a middle school. Continue reading at The Digital Shift

Bring on the nonsense!