Book sales follow a power law distribution.
In The long tail Chris Anderson reports on the US book market (chapter 7). Most books are flops. 1.2 million titles were published In 2004. Only ninety thousand titles - less than ten percent - sold more than a thousand copies.
Long-tailed mangabey (photo: Keven Law)
Publishing is very much a lottery.
Many library services are moving to the web.
We need to know how popular and effective these services are. Denmark is a pioneer in this area.The new Danish web index - which started in April - currently measures the web traffic to sixty-four public libraries and to six national services (web portals).
In our public libraries the demand for computer access, skills and services continues to grow.
Night games at Drammen public library.
Norway is one of the most “wired” countries in the world. But this deepens the gap between digital “haves” and “have-nots”.
Governments, employers, schools, friends and families expect us to master the web. Those that don’t, feel more and more excluded.
It is wonderful to meet librarians from all over the world. It is also quite expensive.
But our new social technologies change the economy of meetings. We can open up our physical meetings to virtual participants - and we can continue our conversations through the web - after the bodies return home.
Therefore I was happy to stumble across a blog post by my good colleague Niels Damgaard (picture) in the IFLA SL Newsletter.
The web is entering a new phase.
Production is moving from goods to texts.
Distributing music - from Edison to iPod
Industrial economies are material: they process and combine natural resources (matter) into standardized, mass produced goods. Knowledge economies deal in symbols: they process and combine textual resources into new, mass produced texts.
People have landed - and sorted through their pictures from Quebec.
Liana Quider, Frode Bakken and Sami Batrawi
Below I list ten photographers who created photo sets on flickr from IFLA 2008. There are surely more sets out there - but I only had half an hour to spend browsing through flickr.
Big conferences feel like mass media. The centre speaks and the masses listen.
Participants at poster session.
The staple menu at IFLA consists of spectacular openings, a few plenary lectures. long series of presentations, occasional panels, a few questions from the audience - time allowing, and a rousing grand finale.
Three things are required in order to understand the new knowledge society.
The role of high technology. The role of human relationships. And a set of adequate concepts.
Negroponte with OLPC prototype.
Lorcan Dempsey is the world’s best library blogger.
Constantly inventive, challenging, connecting and clarifying. Like having an extra brain.
His concept of the amplified conference is a case in point.
Like planets, meetings have atmospheres. Most library conferences are now surrounded by a steady stream of blog posts, pictures, presentations and videos on the open social web.
From today, the name is Plinius.
For the last four years, ninety percent of my library blogging has been in Norwegian - at the blog named Plinius.
Rambling librarian (Ivan Chew) and Plinius in Quebec.
Pliny the Librarian has been an occasional blog. But the world and my work is turning. After the recent IFLA meeting in Quebec, the Global statistics meeting in Montreal, and the LATINA summer course in Oslo, I have decided to “go global”.
