I have amassed over 100 frog pictures and am saving them for winter when we need something to look forward to, so Find Mr. Frog will resume in a month or so.
This is a full service blog.
by John Cole| 60 Comments
This post is in: Readership Capture
I have amassed over 100 frog pictures and am saving them for winter when we need something to look forward to, so Find Mr. Frog will resume in a month or so.
This is a full service blog.
by WaterGirl| 18 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Pet Calendar
Start your engines!
Time to start going through your pet photos for the 2022 Pets of Balloon Juice Calendar!
Be sure to look for high quality photos – in terms of resolution. The really low resolution photos have to be really small in the calendar, so think big if you have them! Otherwise, low res and small beats not being in the calendar at all. :-)
All you photographers out there, let me know if you want your photo to be in the running for calendar cover(s) this year.
Some time in the next few days, I’ll put up a link where you can upload your photos.
Totally open thread.
Time to Go Through Your Pet Photos for the BJ CalendarPost + Comments (18)
This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Breakthru Covid is no joke! Got a note from Satby:
Jackal zzyzx needs some good thoughts. Can a mention be made in an open thread?
Well it’s a look. The doctors are mostly optimistic that it’s just a bad day in the worst part of Covid. Oh and by the way, I’m hooked up to a machine… pic.twitter.com/Xa3KgLnRfj
— ⏱?David Steinberg⏱? (@zzyzx) September 28, 2021
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Hold A Good Thought…Post + Comments (105)
This post is in: Books, Readership Capture
Have you checked out an ebook or audiobook from the library lately? Since COVID, record numbers of readers have. And that comes at a huge cost to your public library, because they can’t own those digital materials, only “lease” them from most publishers.https://t.co/Uo5bPsLQM7
— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) September 13, 2021
Daniel A. Gross, at the New Yorker, explains “Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do”:
Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks—i.e., “digital content.” In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as “heart-wrenching stories” from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: “The responsible thing to do—and the best way to serve our patrons right now—is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19.” The library added, “We will continue to offer access to e-books.”
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
There are a handful of popular e-book venders, including Bibliotheca, Hoopla, Axis 360, and the nonprofit Digital Public Library of America. But OverDrive is the largest. It is the company behind the popular app Libby, which, as the Apple App Store puts it, “lets you log in to your local library to access ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines, all for the reasonable price of free.” The vast majority of OverDrive’s earnings come from markups on the digital content that it licenses to libraries and schools, which is to say that these earnings come largely from American taxes. As libraries and schools have transitioned to e-books, the company has skyrocketed in value. Rakuten, the maker of the Kobo e-reader, bought OverDrive for more than four hundred million dollars, in 2015. Last year, it sold the company to K.K.R., the private-equity firm made famous by the 1989 book “Barbarians at the Gate.” The details of the sale were not made public, but Rakuten reported a profit of “about $365.6 million.”
In the first days of the lockdown, the N.Y.P.L. experienced a spike in downloads, which lengthened the wait times for popular books. In response, it limited readers to three checkouts and three waitlist requests at a time, and it shifted almost all of its multimillion-dollar acquisitions budget to digital content. By the end of March, seventy-four per cent of U.S. libraries were reporting that they had expanded their digital offerings in response to coronavirus-related library closures. During a recent interview over Zoom (another digital service that proliferated during the pandemic), Potash recalled that OverDrive quickly redirected about a hundred employees, who would normally have been at trade shows, “to help support and fortify the increase in demand in digital.” He recalled a fellow-executive telling him, “E-books aren’t just ‘a thing’ now—they’re our only thing.”…
… In 2011, HarperCollins introduced a new lending model that was capped at twenty-six checkouts, after which a library would need to purchase the book again. Publishers soon introduced other variations, from two-year licenses to copies that multiple readers could use at one time, which boosted their revenue and allowed libraries to buy different kinds of books in different ways. For a classic work, which readers were likely to check out steadily for years to come, a library might purchase a handful of expensive perpetual licenses. With a flashy best-seller, which could be expected to lose steam over time, the library might buy a large number of cheaper licenses that would expire relatively quickly. During nationwide racial-justice protests in the summer of 2020, the N.Y.P.L. licensed books about Black liberation under a pay-per-use model, which gave all library users access to the books without any waiting list; such licenses are too expensive to be used for an entire collection, but they can accommodate surges in demand. “At the time of its launch, the twenty-six-circulation model was a lightning rod,” Josh Marwell, the president of sales at HarperCollins, told me. “But, over time, the feedback we have gotten from librarians is that our model is fair and works well with their mission to provide library patrons with the books they want to read.”…
Libraries now pay OverDrive and its peers for a wide range of digital services, from negotiating prices with publishers to managing an increasingly complex system of digital rights. During our video call, Potash showed me OverDrive’s e-book marketplace for librarians, which can sort titles by price, popularity, release date, language, topic, license type, and more. About fifty librarians work for OverDrive, Potash said, and “each week they curate the best ways each community can maximize their taxpayers’ dollar.” The company offers rotating discounts and generates statistics that public libraries can use to project their future budgets. When I noted that OverDrive’s portal looked a bit like Amazon.com, Potash didn’t respond. Later, he said, with a touch of pride, “This is like coming into the front door of Costco.”…
To illustrate the economics of e-book lending, the N.Y.P.L. sent me its January, 2021, figures for “A Promised Land,” the memoir by Barack Obama that had been published a few months earlier by Penguin Random House. At that point, the library system had purchased three hundred and ten perpetual audiobook licenses at ninety-five dollars each, for a total of $29,450, and had bought six hundred and thirty-nine one- and two-year licenses for the e-book, for a total of $22,512. Taken together, these digital rights cost about as much as three thousand copies of the consumer e-book, which sells for about eighteen dollars per copy. As of August, 2021, the library has spent less than ten thousand dollars on two hundred and twenty-six copies of the hardcover edition, which has a list price of forty-five dollars but sells for $23.23 on Amazon. A few thousand people had checked out digital copies in the book’s first three months, and thousands more were on the waiting list. (Several librarians told me that they monitor hold requests, including for books that have not yet been released, to decide how many licenses to acquire.)
The high prices of e-book rights could become untenable for libraries in the long run, according to several librarians and advocates I spoke to—libraries, venders, and publishers will probably need to negotiate a new way forward. “It’s not a good system,” Inouye said. “There needs to be some kind of change in the law, to reinstate public rights that we have for analog materials.” Maria Bustillos, a founding editor of the publishing coöperative Brick House, argued recently in The Nation that libraries should pay just once for each copy of an e-book. “The point of a library is to preserve, and in order to preserve, a library must own,” Bustillos wrote. When I asked Potash about libraries and their growing digital budgets, he argued that “digital will always be better value,” but he acknowledged that, if current trends continue, “Yes, there is a challenge.”…
Don’t know enough about the topic to have an opinion, but here’s a suggestion from the Internet Archive:
4/ Library coalition leader @LibraryFutures says there is a better way forward. It’s released a new paper on #ControlledDigitalLending outlining #libraries‘ right to own & lend digital materials.
This matters to every library user:https://t.co/bLk8Hb5aM6#empoweringlibraries— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) September 13, 2021
Weekend Read: ‘The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books’Post + Comments (65)
This post is in: Open Threads, President Biden, Readership Capture
How Trump endangered democracy, and how Biden hopes to repair it https://t.co/FdiCyBCv9v
— Post Outlook (@PostOutlook) September 18, 2021
I *still* don’t trust any otherwise unverified information from Troutmouth Bob Woodward, but this is an interesting Peril review. Eric Rauchway, professor of history:
… [T]he danger Trump posed during the waning months of his presidency is only half the story of “Peril.” Even if you already know the outlines, the details — many of which have already found their way into the press — deepen one’s sense of how serious, even global, that danger was and how thoroughly Republicans enabled it.
The other half of the book is an account of Joe Biden’s campaign and early presidency, and as the authors shift between narratives, the reader must reckon with wildly differing realities. In one, Trump is the center of gravity; everyone works toward him; nothing matters except insofar as it fulfills his psychological needs. In the other, Biden is an ambitious politician leading a team of dedicated public servants trying to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic and its economic effects, endeavoring by sheer competence and energy to move the nation beyond Trumpism…
For Biden, his mission became clear after Trump’s 2017 defense of the Nazi- and Confederate-flag-carrying protesters chanting anti-Semitic slogans in Charlottesville. He said Trump was promoting “the darkest, worst impulses in the country.” Biden believed that the nation was in a struggle for its “soul” — a theme he repeated thereafter. “Who thinks democracy is a given?” he asked at a private event. “If you do, think again.”
Over a long campaign to the nomination, Biden wooed supporters. He stumbled, gaffed; recovered. Woodward and Costa show him responding to criticism — about, for example, his retrograde and unacceptable attitudes toward women — and changing, without altering his core conviction that the nation must transcend Trumpism.
And here the book is most illuminating: Biden regards the -ism, not the man, as the real threat; Trump put the nation in peril because he evoked and organized a darkness that was already there. And his behavior is more shocking because it serves no purpose greater than salving his own obscure hurts; he is no historic visionary but simply someone who wants the perks of the presidency. Biden observes, on surveying the golf toys that Trump assembled in the White House, including a wall-size video screen so he could play virtual courses, “What a f—ing —hole.”
Biden, by contrast, has an understanding of history born of his half-century in public life as well as from his consultations with historian Jon Meacham. Belief in the better angels of our nature implies an understanding that we have worse. He has convictions about politics: Meetings, especially long ones, can change people’s minds; small, graceful gestures can earn great good will. He knows, as the book’s sections on his consultations with Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) show, how much he owes Black voters and how much they expect of him. He calls out “systemic racism . . . economic inequality . . . the denial of the promise of this nation to so many.”…
Biden’s team did learn from Franklin Roosevelt, who also faced an intransigent predecessor, albeit not one who sought to overturn an election. Herbert Hoover was more like Republican Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio), who here tells Biden to discard his hopes for transformative legislation and advises him to say: “It’s our campaign agenda. We believe in it. But . . . we’re going to stop.” Roosevelt didn’t stop, no matter how much Hoover tried to make him, and so far, Biden hasn’t either, pushing his one-vote majority in the Senate to pass the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and using existing federal power to acquire and roll out coronavirus vaccines with alacrity…
At Biden’s inauguration, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, thought to himself with satisfaction, “It looked like another peaceful transfer of power.” However peaceful it looked in the end, it was not. Blood was shed to support the belief that retaining power by mob rule against the law would be almost cool.
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Did We Ever Dodge A Bullet…Post + Comments (191)
This post is in: Readership Capture, Something Good Open Thread
Thank you, Yutsano, for the link!
From her brother:
My dad and I visited Minna this afternoon. She is doing so much better than yesterday or two days ago. She is mostly in the chair, and walking down the hall and back. Only in bed for sleeping.
Her vitals are mostly back to normal and they are talking about discharging her tomorrow (friday) or the next day (saturday) directly home with no rehab center. Tomorrow marks 2 weeks in the hospital of which 1 week she wasn’t conscious.
I think she wants to break out of the hospital and get back home. They would be sending a few people over to help her with a few last rehab tasks, mostly speech rehab. She has also been prescribed to play video games! I don’t think that’ll be hard for her to accomplish.
(Sometimes it’s good to be the night shift.)
Late Night Happy News: Minna (Asiangrrrrl) Is Making Great ProgressPost + Comments (23)
This post is in: Music, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Hello to all of us who will be atoning, and hoping that we find mercy, not justice through that process. (Boy, do I need all the kindness I can get, and I suspect I’m not alone.) And a big hiya! to everyone just going about their daily business. We’ll raise a glass to you tomorrow evening (after three stars have come out)
As most (all?) may know, Yom Kippur begins with the Kol Nidre chant: a ritual statement in Aramaic dating back at least to the early Middle Ages, sixth century or a little later. It formally annuls all vows or oaths to God taken in the prior year. Its inclusion at the start of a day dedicated to the atonement for all our misdeeds, whether known to us or not, has a complicated and not fully known origin, and was the subject of some controversy (surprise! Jews argue over stuff!) from very early days.
But it is a powerful ritual: the cantor chants it three times as two members of the congregation hold Torah scrolls on either side of the singer–thus turning the synagogue into a formal court. And it demarcates the day and its thoughts to come from the secular time that congregants are leaving behind for a piece. Here’s the Wikipedia entry if you want a bit more.
It has a melody that is absolutely recognizable to those who’ve spent any Yom Kippurs in Ashkenazi synagogues, and that melody has been turned into a score that can be played with great power. And that’s the reason for this post: here’s Yo-Yo Ma’s rendition of it from last night, performed in honor of a recent Harvard undergraduate cellist who also served as the Harvard Hillel student president:
If I have offended anyone here, whether explicitly or by implication, consciously or by accident, I ask your forgiveness.
May everyone who observes have an easy fast.
As We Enter Yom Kippur, A Musical IntroductionPost + Comments (30)