Harry Potter ebooks

The Pottermore standalone digital book store, which Christina mentioned in her blog, is taking an innovative approach in the battle between publishers, ebook providers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and libraries. Rowling is allowing the Potter books to be available on every platform, and providing unlimited check-outs. There is also the ability to download 8 copies of each book. Matthew Ingram gives a good run-down of what's happening at Pottermore in a GigaOm article. http://gigaom.com/2012/03/27/what-book-publishers-should-learn-from-harry-potter/

Harry Potter Now on Kindle!

If (like me) you are a huge Harry Potter fan and also happen to own a Kindle, you might be interested to know that the entire series is now available for purchase.

They are being advertised on the front page of Amazon but you actually need to sign up for an account with Pottermore, which can be found here: http://shop.pottermore.com/en_US. The books are compatible with all e-readers and foreign language translations are coming soon.

I Fix it

If you have ever wondered how to fix that broken electronic device yourself, your in luck. http://www.ifixit.com/ is an online repair community that has step by step repair guides and troubleshooting tips. Their mission is for everyone to have a free repair manual for everything they own! Fixing things keeps them out of landfills and working longer. Whether you use the site to fix it yourself or contribute a guide to help others. Take a minute to read their manifesto, and see if your not convinced that repair is the way to go!
http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto

Whentowork + google calendar

Attention google calendar & when-to-work users:

Do you use google calendar frequently?

Do you rely on when-to-work to know what your work schedule is?

If you answered yes to these questions, you, my friend, are in luck.

You can sync your when-to-work calendar with google calendar so you don't have to log in to 2 places or manually put your work schedule in.

1. Log into the when-to-work program (www.whentowork.com)

2. click INFO on the top bar

3. hit the button that says "CONNECT OR REMOVE GOOGLE CALENDAR"

4.Follow directions to allow google calendar to get your when-to-work info.

Voila! Worked wonders for me!

What do you like about your ereader, revisited

I am curious as to what everyone likes and/or dislikes about their ereaders. We first talking about this in December and early January but I thought our views may have changed since then as we have become more familiar with our devices. Many of us had new ereaders then but what have we discovered now? Here is what I found....

• I love lending ebooks from the library! I had put some on hold when I first got my ereader and downloaded some just to see what it was like. At first I wasn't too impressed, but I also didn't download one of my favorite authors or books I would typically read. Once I read one I was more accustomed to reading in print, I was hooked at its convenience.


• I love the light weight and percentage read features! I typically enjoy holding a book and flipping pages so I still checkout 'real' books for this since nothing can really beat flipping real pages rather than tapping. However, another aspect of book reading that I always like is seeing how much I read in the time I have been reading. Its a vague measurement that usually consists of me seeing where my bookmark is and how long I have had the book. I love the percent read feature on the ebook for this reason. I find when I am engaged in a book, it goes super fast and I like to anticipate where I am at in relation to the entire story.


• I love browsing the free book section on my ereader! I know its a strange one, but I do. I have often used Amazon's site to see the feature "people who liked this or bought this also liked/bought....' I use this for recommendations and branching out in authors I have never tried. I also use the free book section this way. Recently I downloaded my first one and I honestly thought it probably wouldn't be very good because it was free. But I loved it! Perhaps they are being savvy in providing free books that get you hooked so you want to buy all the rest written by the author?


• I have a love-hate relationship using textbooks on my ereader -- mostly hate if I am being honest. I tried this out because I thought it I would like this method because I am a bit more tech oriented, but I definitely don't. I hate citing from my ereader. I don't know if since the ebooks are newer, citing rules are harder than for physical books, but it was an awful and time consuming experience for me. It was also harder for me to understand more complicated material on the ereader. I am more visual and I like the way textbooks lay out material rather than ereaders. Its not always as easy as just reading a regular book. After two weeks of citing and re-reading material, I gave up and bought the textbook. I used the textbook as my main source and the ereader as a back-up which I will explain more. The one aspect I did like about having a textbook on my ereader was that when I came to word I was unfamiliar with or couldn't remember the definition, I was able to tap & define. The other feature I found was instead of using an index and searching for material as one would with a physical textbook, I used the search feature which saved me some time. But these last two reasons are not enough to ever make me buy one again!This personal experiment has actually made me question all the articles I have read about schools using online textbooks and ebooks. Maybe it depends on the type of learner you are, but I can say it isn't for me!

So what have you discovered? Do you love it - what's your favorite part? Is it just okay - what would make it better?

DS/LMS Meeting March 20

Hi, I attended the DS/LMS meeting today at the MA library. Several of us believe it is the most important meeting of the district each month.

Padma brought up the topic of the various Tech Blogs around the district and that we are all in our own little worlds.

It was a very active and useful discussion with nearly everyone in the room participating.

The over-all consensus was that the Tech Blog is the vehicle and we as staff are to provide content.

Nearly all posts will in some way assist a patron at one time or another and that the posts need not be "Tech" content only.

Linda Maola shared at the meeting several videos on what a Danish library is doing to become more relevant.

Oli showcased the new update to the Staffbook, a Facebook type interaction.

I'd like to hear what others have to say. Blogs are to be conversations.

Draw Something!

My new favorite app for my iPhone is DrawSomething...it's like a Pictionary game that you can play with anyone else who has the app, whether they are near or far. (The app is available for both Apple and Android devices.) I have played with my daughters while we're all sitting on the same couch and I am having lots of fun playing with my colleagues from Twitter across the country!

You start by finding your friends online, and beginning a game with them. You'll need to know their username in the game or their email to track them down. Or, you can link up through Facebook.

Then you get three words to choose from: easy, medium, or hard. (My last three choices were anchor, bookmark, or Golem.) Once you choose your word, you are sent to a draw screen. Use your finger to draw a picture that represents your word. You get a few colors to start with, and can choose skinny or thick lines. You do have an eraser too!

Once your picture is complete, you send it to your friend. The fun thing about this game is that it's asynchronous. Just like with Words With Friends, you don't have to be playing at exactly the same time. You send turns back and forth to each other and play when you can.

The other thing I love about this game is it doesn't just share your finished picture with your friend. It saves a little video of the picture as you drew it, then when your friend is ready to play, the game will show it to them. They can watch your picture appear, and try to guess what it is!

There are 12 letters at the bottom of your screen as you watch the drawing. Once you know what the picture is, you use those letters to spell the name of the object. If you're wrong, you get to keep guessing. There's no time limit, and there are other helps too, such as being able to reduce the number of letters you see, or a button that rescrambles the letters in case you need some inspiration.

Once you guess correctly, you both earn 1, 2, or 3 coins, depending on the difficulty of the word you chose. You can use the coins to buy more colors, or you can add more colors by purchasing them within the app.

The game has been incredibly successful--it spread through a good chunk of my Twitter network in just under a week--and they report 12 million downloads in just a month.

It's quick, and creative, and I highly recommend it! There's a free version as well as a $1 version, but I do suggest that you go for the paid version since the free version seems a little buggier.

And if you want to play, my username is MelJean!

e-only patrons

I had a lady come in today for a library card. When I offered to help her find something she said that she just wanted to borrow books for her ipad. I am wondering if other libraries are experiencing e-only patrons. Also, after reading the article that Christina published recently, I am wondering about the Amazon lending library. For $79.00/yr. you can access their library, get free 2 day shipping, and stream thousands of t.v. shows and movies. Any speculations on how this will impact us?

Helping Teens

"Multiple studies have shown that, while young people are adept at downloading their favorite songs from the Internet or instant messaging with their friends, the majority lack critical thinking and information literacy skills."

That is a quote from this article I read about ALA's Teen Tech Week, which is this week.

(http://www.ala.org/news/pr?id=9503)

I just thought it was a good reminder that, while a teen asking a technology question might know more about ipods, webcams, or google than we do, we are the ones with the critical thinking and information literacy skills that the teen may be lacking. Just because a teen's question is about using the webcam and we may never have used one doesn't mean we won't be able to help him figure it out.

February Tech Talk Winner: Charleen Hajka

Congratulations to Sheridan's Charleen Hajka for being our NL Techie of the Month. Charleen shared her challenges with us about downloading to her Kindle. Charleen demonstrated intellectual curiosity by reading up on this problem, trying a few different things at home, checking in with another staff person and then posting her challenge on our blog to see if others' experiences could help her. While we didn't see too much discussion on this post, it did have 16 page views, so we know some of you out there were listening!

Thanks for sharing your challenge with us, Charleen. It's helps us all when you walk us through the steps you took and where you got stuck. Let us know if you solved this yet! A $10 iTunes gift card is on its way to you at Sheridan.