Popmatic Podcast January 2012
Special thanks to Adam Deane for the rad new theme song. The crew gives our unprofessional opinion on ebooks and ereaders. Tickling our fancy is (surprise, surprise) other book-themed podcasts, wizards, science fiction nonfiction on TV, and hunky men. Best of all – Jesse’s predictions!
Total recall of this episode
Ebooks! Check out the library’s tutorials on how to download them.
The Readers podcast
Two years ago around this time the Popmatic crew got Booshy.
Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain now available as a Book-Club-in-a-Bag kit.
Prophets of Science Fiction – a Science Channel show that examines lives and work SF’s best writers
Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen collected by Neil Philip; illustrated by Isabelle Brent
Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination – an upcoming show at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Next month: stuff!
Month after that: more!
- Bryan
Note: Jesse is spot-on with the ebook privacy breakdown. Private library member data is not shared with Overdrive or Amazon. All borrowing transactions occur over secure connections.
- Kyle
Themocracy
About privacy:
Here is Adobe’s privacy policy http://www.adobe.com/misc/privacy.html and the end user agreement for Digital Editions can be found here http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/#desktop but is only available a PDF, Adobe’s propriety format. Irony? Good luck.
Anyone concerned about privacy and ebooks in the commercial sphere they would probably be interested in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (a digital rights advocacy group) white paper on ebooks: Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-books-and-your-rights.
Jesse and I mention a number of librarian bloggers that had reservations about Amazon’s relationship with libraries regarding ebooks. This mostly librarian shop talk but if anyone is interested:
Librarian in Black – Sarah Houghton (NSFW – she goes off on a profanity-laced rant)
http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2011/10/wegotscrewed.html
Librarian by Day – Bobbi Newman
http://librarianbyday.net/2011/09/28/public-library-ebooks-on-the-amazon-kindle-we-got-screwed/
Agnostic Maybe – Andy Woodworth
http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/amazon-overdrive-and-other-reasons-to-be-pissed/
I can’t go as far as Jesse and say the above bloggers “just want something to be mad about” (or have something to blog about on any given day), what gets me is that two the above bloggers previously wrote about how much they loved their Kindles when doing so anathema in libraryland because Amazon had yet to enable library lending. They have valid points but were naïve to think things would play out any other way. Despite the efforts of advocacy groups like EFF, we seem to living in a post-privacy world.