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I’m still sort of annoyed at Amazon’s self-serving press release about more ebooks being sold for the Kindle on Christmas Day than “real” books. I feel a few things

1. they’re creating a distinction that isn’t necessary, between ebooks and paper books
2. at the same time they’re obscuring the very very real distinction that exists and is terribly important: you do not own an ebook, you license or lease it

Plus I just plain old don’t believe it. I mean maybe it’s true for the narrowly sliced timeframe they’ve outlined but really? This isn’t a trend, it’s a blip. Want me to think otherwise? Release some actual numbers. Amazon makes more money off of ebooks than paper books. They’d like to keep doing that. So.

I’ve been meaning to link to this talk for a while, a transcribed talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the National Reading Summit in November. The title of his talk was How to Destroy the Book. I think you’ll enjoy it.

[T]he most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].

Having your books there like an old friend, following you from house to house for all the days and long nights of your life: this is the invaluable asset that is in publishing’s hands today. But for some reason publishing has set out to convince readers that they have no business reading their books as property—that they shouldn’t get attached to them. The worst part of this is that they may in fact succeed.

A few links that have been keeping me from inbox zero for the past few weeks.

• “…the increased popularity of the Internet in America has not been correlated with an overall increase in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gone steadily down in the last 18 years” Note: this does not say “oh the internet is safe!” It just says that the internet getting more popular doesn’t correlate with sexual offenses against children. More from the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
• Speaking of Berkman people, I’ll be hanging out in the Boston area over the turkey weekend and likely going to this event that Saturday. Anyone in the area should consider going, it looks like fun.
• Evergreen is gaining traction as an ILS that works even for big/complicated systems. The Traverse Area just went live with their Evergreen implementation. Doesn’t that look nice? More about Michigan’s open source ILS project.
• I’ve been reading more lately. I read Cory Doctorow’s book Content (my review) and think it should be required reading for librarians or anyone else in the various digital content industries. If you’d like a copy, you can read it for free online, or if you’re a librarian or a teacher, you can request a donated copy from the website. I already gave mine away.
• FCC broadband bill passed. This might help Farmer Bob [my generic term for the people over on this side of the digital divide] get broadband.
• Pew Report “When Technology Fails” (and even really great technology sometimes does). The results will likely not surprise the librarians. “15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices” and “48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.”

Having a multicultural background can be a kind of disability for kids. Thus PaperTigers focuses on children’s books in English that, through their multicultural perspectives, are liberating and informative for children of all cultures. But kids with disabilities, whether otherwise multicultural or not, often feel like they’re from another country, if not planet. It’s natural, say the people at Bookbird, to link “the representation of disabled people with multiculturalism and the issue of bias-free books.”

Today’s tour of resources for children’s books about disabilities begins in New Zealand, where the wonderful website Storylines has an extensive annotated list of books for and about children with disabilities, from blindness to paralysis to Asperger’s.

An annotated list of children’s books about special needs is here, and here’s an excellent Amazon list of best children’s books on disabilities. An old (2001) but comprehensive list of books, organized by disability and followed by a list of publishers, with contact info and links, comes from the U.S.-based National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities. The American Library Association presents the Schneider Awards, honoring authors or illustrators for a book that “embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.” Click here for current winners.

PaperTigers has more personal perspectives: Suzanne Gervay discusses her book, Butterflies (scroll down here for a mini-review), about a girl growing up with severe burns. Author Ann Bowler talks about her own learning disability. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part Time Indian, about a kid with multiple disabilities who’s negotiating multiple cultures as well, is reviewed here.

In Australia, I had the opportunity to meet a phenomenal woman who helps children who can’t speak to communicate in other ways. While not for kids, Rosemary Crossley’s book Speechless, about her work with children, offers insight and inspiration for us all, whatever our culture or disability.