ReadersBillofRights.info

We presented an updated version of our talk, "The Rights of Readers and the Threat of the Kindle," on July 27th for the Metropolitan New York Library Council as a Webinar. This version is perhaps the one we are the most satisfied with so far. You can view the slides below, or via the PDF attached to this post.

The full webinar (a recording of what we presented in July) is available through Metro here (via Adobe Connect).

We've re-scheduled our Metro Webinar: on July 27, we will be presenting a webinar version of "The Rights of Readers and the Threat of the Kindle," through the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Details about the event and registration are available at Metro's website.

The latest version of our talk might involve a bit more discussion of the right to read via its connection to the free software movement, or a few other updates since April. Overall, we are hoping that the webinar will foster further conversation among librarians about ebooks and that it will be an opportunity to discuss the implications that digital books present for our collections and for readers (as people, not devices).

We're wearing our "Librarians Against DRM" buttons today in solidarity with Defective By Design's annual Day Against DRM

We're just back from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 2011 conference and thought we'd share our slides from the talk.

There are five versions of the talk we're sharing here:

• Just the Images: We've shared a version of the slide show--which contains only images--via SlideShare above. The images can also be downloaded as a PDF as well (attached to this post).
• Images and Notes: The slide show along with our notes (roughly what we presented at ACRL) can be downloaded (as a Powerpoint file) below.
• Notes Only: our notes from the talk--without the images--can be downloaded as a ODT attachment.
• And finally, there is a webcast recording from the our talk in Philadelphia (which includes the Q&A) up at the ACRL site: http://www.learningtimes.net/acrl/2011/the-rights-of-readers-and-the-thr...

Nina says: "Ask and ye shall receive (when it's for a great cause, and I'm available)"

Please use these images in support of our work against DRM with the Readers' Bill of Rights for Digital Books. What is DRM?

These images are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Please cite http://readersbillofrights.info

The graphics were created for us by cartoonist and QuestionCopyright.org artist-in-residence Nina Paley. You can support Nina's work and view her amazing and Creative Commons licensed film, Sita Sings the Blues, over at her website.

Update: SVG Files are now attached (below)!

Declaración de los Derechos de Lectores de Libros Digitales:

1. Capacidad para retener, almacenar y transferir los materiales comprados
2. Capacidad de crear una copia en papel del producto en su totalidad
3. Los libros digitales deben estar en un formato abierto (por ejemplo, se podía leeren un una computadora, no sólo un dispositivo)
4. Elección del hardware para acceder a los libros (por ejemplo, en 3 años, cuando el dispositivo ya no sirva, que todavía se pueda leer el libro en otro hardware independientemente del fabricante)
5. La información del lector debe ser privada (sus datos no serán almacenados, vendidos o comercializados)

Como vemos, cuando usamos el material impreso tradicional ya tenemos estos derechos garantizados, así que es lógico esperar que no nos sean negados por el solo hecho de cambiar la manera en que leemos.

¡Muchas gracias a José Luis Zapata para este traducción!

Thanks to the suggestion of a supporter who is not a librarian, Nina created these new logos for everyone else--for all readers:

Please use these images in support of our work against DRM with the Readers' Bill of Rights for Digital Books. What is DRM?

These images are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Please cite http://readersbillofrights.info

The graphics were created for us by cartoonist and QuestionCopyright.org artist-in-residence Nina Paley. You can support Nina's work and view her amazing and Creative Commons licensed film, Sita Sings the Blues, over at her website.

Update: SVG Files are now attached (below)!

I'm sharing a copy of an email that I sent to ALA President Roberta Stevens because I worry about the profession's use of restrictive communication platforms on the web, like Facebook. I recently canceled my Facebook account, and because of this larger decision, I haven't been able to read President Stevens' recent statement on the HarperCollins situation in full (nor can I participate in the "Librarians Against DRM" group discussion any longer).

I don't think an ALA member should have to agree to Facebook's terms of service in order to read news from our president. I also think that librarians at large should understand the dangers of restricting information in this way. Let's keep our professional conversations that happen online out of walled gardens and gated communities and on the open web. I highly recommend this piece (that I also mention below) by friends dkg and jrollins: The Problem with Proprietary Social Networks

If President Stevens responds to my email, I will ask her if I can share her response here. My hope is that she will understand these issues and communicate with ALA members in an open platform.

****Please see the update below****

I am interested to know whether my colleagues also feel that this calls for some kind of resolution to be proposed to the Council--that ALA should not communicate via restricted third party sites that require a membership to view content. If there are librarians who are interested to bring this resolution to the Council, please get in touch with me, or leave a comment here. I'm interested to hear others' thoughts about this topic and to get some guidance about ALA resolutions in general.

----------------------------------------

Hello President Stevens,

Barbara Fister has again written a thoughtful piece about our current ebook situation. Barbara got me thinking (as she always does--otherwise she's publishing something that I had felt but hadn't yet been able to articulate):

I think the time has come for all of us to step back and ask if we're creating healthy conditions for the long-term survival of accessible knowledge or if, by embracing digital deals with strings to satisfy our patrons' immediate but ignorant needs, we're letting our communities down, badly.

Fister also talks about boycotts, our permanent collections, and library neutrality--all things I think about a lot these days.

Whether you agree that boycotts are a worthwhile tactic or not, there is one argument against the HarperCollins boycott that really bothers me: the stance that we, as librarians, don't matter. It might be true, in an age of conglomeritis*, that we do not represent the largest portion of a monolith like NewsCorp's overall income (who own HarperCollins, btw). As Chris Dodge has pointed out, commercial publications are often only a small part of an overall corporate empire which may include “retail stores, film and television production, and professional sports teams” (See: Dodge, Chris. "Alternative to what?" Counterpoise 2.2 (1998): 11-12).

But to say that we professionally that we are ineffectual, even if we're just claiming this about our buying power, is a particularly sad way to argue for always accepting things as they are, instead of the way they should be.

Just look at what Ann Sparanese was able to do for Micheal Moore's book Stupid White Men. Or what a few thousand people were able to do in my second hometown (Madison, Wisconsin). Or what is currently happening all over the globe with folks who have decided to voice what they want, in the face of how things are or how they have been for decades. It's not difficult right now to see how a unified group can make a difference.

This is not the most important political battle taking place in the world today. Whether ebooks are restricted, disappear or record data about what we read is not the most important topic to all people. But we can make a difference, and now is the time to do it. Choose whatever strategy you like, even if it's just talking about our options, or buying print instead. But please don't support the loss of the right to read digitally, and certainly not by claiming that we don't matter.

*I'm borrowing "conglomeritis" here from Celeste West, a library heroine who knew a thing or two about corporate publishing and its hold on libraries.