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May 14, 2008
Coffee Break: e-book readers
At today's Coffee Break we took a look at the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle owned by DSS and available for Library staff to borrow. We talked about interfaces, book formats, and the utility of e-books. Julie from DSS mentioned that the Kindle can only be purchased with a user account, which allows items to be purchased from the Kindle store. This makes it hard for a library to loan a Kindle to patrons since you can't easily prevent them from purchasing content.
Posted by kshawkin at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2008
Coffee Talk: Second Life
The main topic of conversation at Monday's coffee break was Second Life and how it's being used in libraries and in the corporate world. Most of the people at the coffee had at least visited Second Life and some had even managed to create avatars and do a little exploration. A couple of people had attended Patricia Anderson's Enriching Scholarship session on Second Life, so had lots of information to share about what they had learned. Her presentation is available on SlideShare.
I visited Second Life once a couple of years ago and found the experience less than compelling. There seems to be a fairly steep learning curve. But, people are using it. The latest issue of Time has an article on Second Life which says that 13 million people have visited it at least once and there are about 450,000 users per week. LindenLabs, the company behind Second Life, tracks a number of statistics and is very open about sharing them. The latest statistics, through March 2008, are available here.
Posted by kfolger at 09:56 PM | Comments (1)