Another Ebook Reader That’s Not Coming To New Zealand

Barnes & Noble have released their own Ebook reader, the Nook, in competition to Amazon’s Kindle. Off course it’s not available in New Zealand. One of the features I liked was the ability to swap ebooks with friends.

5 Reasons Why Barnes & Noble’s Nook Really Will Challenge Kindle By Chad Berndtson, ChannelWeb

The Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader is here, and now that the initial hype is subsiding, it’s even clearer that the Nook has everything it needs to challenge Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) and its Kindle. Priced at $259, the Nook was unveiled Tuesday after most of its pertinent details — including that it would run on Google Android and have a color screen in addition to a 6-inch E-Ink screen –had leaked over the past few weeks.

“Any way you slice Barnes & Noble’s announcement, the Nook is a game-changer for the current market and one that will force Amazon’s hand even with Amazon’s recent release of an international Kindle,” wrote Allen Weiner, a vice president at Gartner Research, in a Tuesday research note.

Colour Scheme

Next year the Dannevirke Library will be having a bit of a face lift. We will be having the inside freshened up with a new paint job. 

Off course this has opened up a round of debate about what colours we should use.

So we want you to tell us what colours you think would be good. And tell us what colours you wouldn’t want to see. Or what art work we should have?

A 500th Post

So, here we are. The 500th Post!

So to celebrate here is Kool & The Gang.

Melissa Martin Academy of Dance A Tribute To Godz Own New Zealand

And for our local dance fans, Melissa Martin’s Academy of Dance has a performance coming up:

Dannevirke Town Hall

Friday 4 December – 7.00pm

Saturday 5 December – 2.30pm & 7.00pm

Tickets Available From Clothing Zone

Adults $10 Children $7

Family $30 (2+2) extra children $5

Hurricanes Vs The Blues: Mangatainoka

OK rugby fans, especially Hurricanes followers. The Hurricanes will play The Blues under the Tui tower…

On the 23rd of January 2010 (Wellington Anniversary Weekend) history will be made – the Hurricanes will play the Blues at the Mangatainoka Rugby Grounds in a Super 14 Pre-season Game – yes its all true! This game also has significance – these two teams will then open the 2010 Super 14 season on the 12th Feb. It’s bring the big show to the small town! The ground is but a paddock – that is what is so beautiful about this event – its back to basics. Bring the professionals to real grass roots!

Mangatainoka is strategically placed in the centre of Hurricanes territory- within 1 hour drive you have Masterton, Palmerston North and Wanganui! Within 2 hours you have the twin Hawkes Bay cites and Wellington. This is the heart of Hurricanes country, and a game that will never be forgotten! And remember, the Hurricanes won’t be playing outside of Wellington this year so this is your only chance to see them in the heartland.

This rugby game kicks off a series of community summer events at Mangatainoka including ‘Small Town Big Sounds’ (Saturday 27th February) where Kiwi bands will entertain over 4000 visitors at Tui Brewery. Purchase your Rugby/Small Town Big Sounds COMBO ticket now!

See here for details.

Time Magazine’s 100 Best English Language Novels From 1923 To The Present

One of my co-conspirators at The Room of Infinite Diligence [The librarian blog I write for] posted on Time magazine’s 100 best English language novels from 1923 (the year that Time Magazine began) to the present, as chosen by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo. It’s an interesting list so I thought I would share it with you.

This is the start of the list:

• The Adventures of Augie March (1953) / Saul Bellow
• All the King’s Men (1946) / Robert Penn Warren
• American Pastoral (1997) / Philip Roth
• An American Tragedy (1925) / Theodore Dreiser
• Animal Farm (1946) / George Orwell
• Appointment in Samarra (1934) / John O’Hara
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) / Judy Blume
• The Assistant (1957) / Bernard Malamud
• At Swim-Two-Birds (1938) / Flann O’Brien

Read the complete list here.

The discussion of how they selected was equally fascinating:

How We Picked the List By Richard Lacayo

Welcome to the massive, anguished, exalted undertaking that is the ALL TIME 100 books list. The parameters: English language novels published anywhere in the world since 1923, the year that TIME Magazine began, which, before you ask, means that Ulysses (1922) doesn’t make the cut. In May, Time.com posted a similar list, of 100 movies picked by our film critics, Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel. This one is chosen by me, Richard Lacayo, and my colleague Lev Grossman, whom we sometimes cite as proof that you don’t need to be named Richard to be hired as a critic at TIME, though apparently it helps. Just ask our theater critic, Richard Zoglin.

For the books project, Grossman and I each began by drawing up inventories of our nominees. Once we traded notes, it turned out that more than 80 of our separately chosen titles matched. (Even some of the less well-known ones, like At-Swim Two Birds.) We decided then that we would more or less divide the remaining slots between us. That would allow each of us to include books that the other might not have chosen. Or might not even have read. (Ubik? What’s an Ubik?) And that would extend the list into places where mere agreement wouldn’t take it.

Even so, there are many titles we couldn’t fit here that we’re still anguishing over. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood dropped in and out. Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point hovered for a while at the edges. There were writers we had to admit we love more for their short stories than their novels—Donald Barthelme, Annie Proulx, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty. We could agree that some of Gore Vidal’s novels are an essential pleasure, but it’s his non-fiction that’s essential period. Then there was the intellectual massif of Norman Mailer, indisputably one of the great writers of our time, but his supreme achievements are his headlong reconfigurations of the whole idea of non-fiction, books like Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song. Dawn Powell, Mordechai Richler, Thomas Wolfe, Peter Carey, J.F. Powers, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Larry McMurtry, Katherine Ann Porter, Amy Tan, John Dos Passos, Oscar Hijuelos—we looked over our bookcases and many more than 100 names laid down a claim. This means you, Stephen King.

This project, which got underway in January, was not just a reading effort. It was a re-reading effort. It meant revisiting a lot of novels both of us had not looked into for some time. A few titles that seemed indispensable some years ago turned out on a second tasting to be, well, dispensable. More common was the experience I had with Saul Bellow’s Herzog, about a man coming to terms with the disappointments of midlife by directing his questions everywhere. It was one of the first adult novels I attempted in late adolescence. It left its treadmarks on me even then, but this time his experienced heart spoke to me differently.

Finish reading here.

Our Neighbours Going Digital Native

Our neighbouring library Palmerston North City Libraries has broken into the world of Web2.0 by launching a blog, Twitter account and Facebook page. Being neighbourly I thought I would point you there way so you can tell your friends and relations over the hill, or just check them out.

Library Blog

Twitter

Facebook

YouTube

Tasman Libraries In The Media: Psst . . . there’s something happening at the library!

Tasman District Libraries manager Catherine Bryham wheels a trolley of books.Relevant offers

I always like to read positive stories about libraries in the media. Here is an article from the Nelson Mail.

Psst . . . there’s something happening at the library from The Nelson Mail [via Stuff]

Libraries no longer go by the book alone, but have embraced the age of digital information, as ALICE COWDREY discovers.

A teenager is leaning back in her chair, gazing intently at a computer screen. She is watching a clip of teen heart-throb Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) being interviewed by David Letterman on his Late Show. Next to her, a girl flicks from her Facebook page to a website displaying diamond rings.

It’s the dawn of the new library age and this scene is taking place all over the country – thanks to the advent of free internet access. It has helped generate increased foot traffic in provincial libraries and people are now looking at the library with new eyes.

Once stereotyped as a dusty time warp with dated carpet and surrounded in a sacred silence, the public library is now being promoted as a community centre, or living room, where people can not only read, but also chat (not whisper), use the internet free and even buy a coffee.

These changes are now happening in Richmond, with the town’s tired library undergoing a $2.2 million spruce-up that will increase the floor space by 59 per cent.

The new library’s vision statement says that the library’s “living room” will be the social heart of the venue, with spaces to relax, read, talk, email, watch TV or even just feel warm.

News will play on a television in the newsroom and there will be a small cafe, an outdoor courtyard with benches and a shade sail, a research room and a learning suite with computers. Perhaps the most hi-tech feature of all, however, will be the “multipurpose content creation pod” where people will be able to create audio recordings and multimedia oral histories, and digitise family records, photographs and other printed records.

The library’s vision statement says: “Future focused, the library will provide high-quality and rapid access to information. It will offer a range of innovative experiences and opportunities for people to connect with local and global communities.”

Every day, about 1350 people walk through the doors of the Tasman district’s four libraries in Richmond, Motueka, Takaka and Murchison. All are on a mission to boost their knowledge through a range of methods, whether picking over books, flicking through magazines or gazing at a chock-a-block noticeboard.

The Richmond Library has a dull mauve interior and is a bit disjointed at the moment. Some of the books are in storage while the renovation takes place and there’s a large plywood box where the library’s front entrance is being rebuilt.

Read the full article here.

Author Of The Week: November 9 – November 15

Daniel Silva

Daniel Silva: He has been placed in the same category as John le Carré and Graham Greene. He has been called his generation’s finest writer of international intrigue and one of the greatest American spy novelists ever. Compelling, passionate, haunting, brilliant: these are the words that have been used to describe the work of Daniel Silva.

Silva burst onto the scene in 1997 with his electrifying bestselling debut, The Unlikely Spy, a novel of love and deception set around the Allied invasion of France in World War II. His second and third novels, The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season, were also instant New York Times bestsellers and starred two of Silva’s most memorable characters: CIA officer Michael Osbourne and international hit man Jean-Paul Delaroche. But it was Silva’s fourth novel, The Kill Artist, that would alter the course of his career. The novel featured a character described as one of the most memorable and compelling in contemporary fiction, the art restorer and sometime Israeli secret agent Gabriel Allon, and though Silva did not realize it at the time, Gabriel’s adventures had only just begun. Gabriel Allon appears in Silva’s next nine novels, each one more successful than the last: The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, and Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, and Moscow Rules which was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller and hailed as Silva’s most exciting book yet. The latest Gabriel Allon adventure and sequel to Moscow Rules, The Defector is out now.

Silva knew from a very early age that he wanted to become a writer, but his first profession would be journalism. Born in Michigan, raised and educated in California, he was pursuing a master’s degree in international relations when he received a temporary job offer from United Press International to help cover the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Later that year Silva abandoned his studies and joined UPI fulltime, working first in San Francisco, then on the foreign desk in Washington, and finally as Middle East correspondent in Cairo and the Persian Gulf. In 1987, while covering the Iran-Iraq war, he met NBC Today National Correspondent Jamie Gangel and they were married later that year. Silva returned to Washington and went to work for CNN and became Executive Producer of its talk show unit including shows like Crossfire, Capital Gang and Reliable Sources.

In 1995 he confessed to Jamie that his true ambition was to be a novelist. With her support and encouragement he secretly began work on the manuscript that would eventually become the instant bestseller The Unlikely Spy. He left CNN in 1997 after the book’s successful publication and began writing full time. Since then all of Silva’s books have been New York Times and international bestsellers. His books have been translated in to more than 25 languages and are published around the world. Silva continues to reside in Washington with his wife and teenage twins Lily and Nicholas. When not writing he can usually be found roaming the stacks of the Georgetown University library, where he does much of the research for his books. He is currently at work on a new Gabriel Allon novel and warmly thanks all those friends and loyal readers who have helped to make the series such an amazing success.

Witi Ihimaera: What Was He thinking?

I wonder if there really is an innocent explanation? I don’t know what’s been copied and for what but plagiarism is ugly, especially from an award winning author… We shall have to see the details…

From the Herald

Iconic New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera has admitted that his latest novel includes plagiarised material.

Ihimaera’s new novel, The Torwenna Sea, is set in Tasmania during the 1840s and details the lives of Maori transported to the island off Australia as convicts.

But the novel contains passages re-printed without acknowledgement from a number of writers.

The author of the Whale Rider said he has tried to track down all the authors through his publisher Penguin New Zealand.

Penguin publishing director Geoff Walker refused to say what parts of the novel had not been attributed.

“You’ll have to read the Listener. You do your research and read the Listener. With all due respect what I have said is our stated position,” Mr Walker said.

He also declined to ask questions about how the plagiarism was identified.

“I don’t have a great deal to say,” Mr Walker said.

Mr Walker said the book would not be withdrawn from sale and the publisher was standing by the novel.

In a written statement, Ihimaera has apologised for not attributing the material.

“I am deeply sorry and take full responsibility for this oversight,” Mr Ihimaera said.

He said of the 528 page novel, less than 0.4 per cent had been published without acknowledgement.

“The authors I have managed to contact understand how it occurred and have accepted my apologies. The passages in question will be fully acknowledged in a future edition of the book,” Ihimaera said.

Ihimaera is also a Professor of English and is a Distinguished Creative Fellow in Maori Literature at the University of Auckland.

Dean of Arts, Associate Professor Jan Crosthwaite, said the plagiarism has been investigated by the university and said there was no deliberate wrong-doing.

“Though the amount of non-attributed material may seem insignificant, any failure to acknowledge the work of others is most regrettable and is of concern to the University,” Dr Crosthwaite said.

“I have been assured by Professor Ihimaera that he has taken speedy steps to remedy his unfortunate oversight,” she said.