E-Books

I have been playing around with e-books for about a week or so - Even though we have had e-books for a couple of years I had no experience with them. The audio books from Overdrive are a great idea, and I am sure this will be the wave of the future with dvds, also - its so simple to download and burn these. I had no problems downloading the software from Overdrive, but I made the mistake of upgrading to Adobe 8 before I read the directions - so I had to backtrack and downgrade. Using the Adobe reader didn't seem quite as user friendly as Overdrive, but it wasn't difficult. I think its a great idea for Reference books, and this is something everyone might need to do at some point, when they need a manual or instructions for something they can't find anywhere else. I will definitely be looking at the e-book spot on our website more often to see what's new. I do have a question - Can you "return" your E-book if you finish before the due date? I tried deleting it from my downloads, and this doesn't work, and there is no option to do this from "My bookshelf". If anyone knows the answer to this please let me know.

Thing 21

Happy St. Lawrence Day (Aug 10) - the patron saint of libraries and librarians - also the Perseid meteor showers are called "St. Lawrence's fiery tears" (they occur between Aug 8 and Aug 13) - just something I learned when I was supposed to be learning about podcasts - oh well...

As with all things internet - there is a plethora of podcasts (forgive me - its Friday). My personal favorite Excerpts from the Constitution - with comments by the faculty of Yale (no really, it was extremely informative).

I was also happy to see some of my favorite NPR people have podcasts - Krista Tippett always has such an interesting program - sometimes I only catch a little of her program when I'm in the car and I subscribed to her podcast and Prairie Home Companion with my Bloglines account. It is good to know that there are directories for podcasts that can be searched for things that are of interest to you.

You Tube

I had looked at videos on YouTube before, so I was aware of the site, but I was surprised how easy it was to post a video to your blog. I chose Gore Vidal because I had listened to his latest memoir, Point to Point Navigation on CD. He was someone I knew very little about, but I enjoyed listening to the book. I found him to be a very intelligent voice for his generation - it inspired me to learn more about him and read his other memoirs.

Gore Vidal on the future