Writers

Published on: June 23, 2015

What if Readers Turned Pages for the Sake of Turning Pages?: Amazon, Taylor Swift, and Big Brother

By Laura Orr

Do writers need their own “Taylor Swift” to protect their right to be paid for their labor? (See NPR’s story about Swift, Apple, and right to be paid.)

The latest Amazon plan to pay authors based on pages turned (and presumably read?), makes me wonder if all readers shouldn’t just start turning those pages, whether you read them or not. We can only hope that the Amazon eyes “watching” you turn pages aren’t also able to tell if you have actually read the words. (No, maybe we don’t want to know that.)

“What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page?” by Peter Wayner, The Atlantic, June 20, 2015

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Published on: November 21, 2014

Ursula Le Guin Sounds the Alarm: A tribute, and call to arms, to writers and readers

By Laura Orr

If you haven’t heard or read the eloquent Ursula Le Guin speech, that brought the audience to their feet, upon accepting the distinguished contribution to American letters award at the 65th annual National Book Awards ceremony in New York this week – you must:

View the speech at NPR: “Book News: Ursula K. Le Guin Steals The Show At The National Book Awards,” November 20, 2014

Read the speech at various websites, including:

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Published on: May 3, 2012

Article: “How to Introduce an Author”

By Laura Orr

A public librarian colleague sent us the link to the excellent article on “How to Introduce an Author,” by Janet Potter, April 30, 2012, from millions dot com:

Excerpt: “The worst author introduction I ever saw is making me cringe, right now, as I remember it. The co-owner of the bookstore started by reading through the store’s upcoming events flier, pausing to extemporize on each event. This took a full 10 minutes. Then she spent 5 minutes talking about ....” [Link to full article.]

Published on: July 6, 2009

Blogger Ethical Code and Toni Morrison’s Trustworthiness

By Laura Orr

Journalists have ethical codes and so do librarians and lawyers. (Librarians also have a intellectual freedom codes, which might answer some of your question about why we can be so pigheaded).

Do Bloggers Share an Ethical Code?, posted at attorney Donald Vanarelli’s blog, is worth reading:

Excerpt: “According to a recent study published in the June 2009 edition of the New Media & Society journal entitled doing-the-right-thing-online-a-survey-of-bloggers-beliefs-and-practices, bloggers share a group of ethical principals. This first large-scale survey of blogging ethics identified four underlying ethical principles important to bloggers: truth telling, accountability, minimizing harm and attribution...” (link to full post)

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Published on: January 4, 2008

Willy-Nilly is Not a Legal Research Strategy: Public Law Librarians and Advice to Unpublished Children’s Book Authors

By Laura Orr

Pro se (aka pro per or self-represented) law library patrons have a tough time of it. If you didn’t learn in high school or college how to learn, how to study, or how to develop a research strategy, then the legal research process will be a very steep uphill battle. Some of our law library non-attorney patrons learn very quickly that Willy-Nilly is not a research strategy. Others never figure it out and public law librarians hear a lot of “I just need a yes or no answer to my question.”

We, public law librarians, are not the only ones with this problem. I just came across another group of people who are recipients of these types of questions and the answer to one person’s situation pretty much sums up what we in law libraries have had to figure out how to say tactfully (forgive the garbled syntax – it’s Friday and you know what I mean! :-):

The January 4, 2008, Library Link of the Day post on a January 1st, 2008, article in the Boston Globe, by Candice Choi, about self-publishing, “Got a Manuscript? Publishing Now a Snap.” The story sent me off on a winding road that ended up at a blog site where I found this excerpt:

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