The AcqWeblog Archives

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: a particularly useful site for Acquisitions and Collection Development

Book Spending Lowest for 10 years Bookseller.com reports that spending in British public libraries is at an all-time low.

October 26, 1999

Poll Shows Continuing Strong American Reading Habits according to the Gallup Organization. Among other statistics: 26% choose books by browsing a bookstore or library.

October 25, 1999

The ACQNET Archives maintained by Eric Lease Morgan (a.k.a. Mr. Serials) have been moved. These archives are particularly important because they include a search engine. Our heartfelt thanks go to Mr. S for this invaluable service.

AcqWeb Site: ACQNET

October 18, 1999

The buzz from this year's Frankfurt Book Fair is the Internet. While there have of course been many stories, the ones grabbing the most media attention are on Microsoft and eBooks.

October 15, 1999

Books Out-Of-Print - Internet Edition is no longer free. Bowker's free registration pages are still there, but one can only assume they are not long for this world. Thus we have deleted this resource from the U.S. verification section of AcqWeb.

October 13, 1999

Demand for Librarians Hits an All-Time High: the National Business Employment Weekly calls it "a job-seeker's market" for us.

October 11, 1999

BookZone is one of those mega-book-sites you can wander around for hours. It's a book publishers' community on the Internet, focused on independent presses in particular. It includes Literary Leaps, a large set of links to book-related sites, and BookZone Pro, with articles and resources for publishers and writers.

A third area, BookFlash Bulletin, is an email service for new titles and other publishing news. They have wisely chosen to limit their output, sending no more than one bulletin per day -- each bulletin containing at most six brief announcements.

AcqWeb Site #1: Publishers : Links to Publishers & Books

AcqWeb Site #2: Publishers : New Title Notifications

October 8, 1999

Publishers Seek to Conquer Readers' Sales Resistance: another article from the New York Times, this time looking at the publishing industry's heroic struggles with e-commerce.

October 7, 1999

The Literary Myth Updated With High-Tech Presentation: the New York Times likens computer games to the mythological hero of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces."

October 6, 1999

Six days a week, Arts & Letters Daily is "sifting through endless streams of verbose, under-edited, often self-indulgent prose" found on the Net and extracting "precious nuggets of real content." In other words, they look at a hefty variety of online newspapers, journals and books reviews, then link to selected articles and reviews. See in particular their "New Books" column.

AcqWeb Site: Library Science :
Collection Development : Book Reviews

September 29, 1999

Digital Bibliophile Community joins the growing list of antiquarian book agents -- one of those Web sites which searches multiple catalogs of other antiquarian dealers. From our admittedly limited tests, it doesn't seem to have as large a database as most. However, it's very new and has the best sorting capabilities yet. It's possible to have two sorting levels, according to author, title, date, book condition and price. In addition, it can sort by when an item was added to their database -- the default sort method for most agents. Also, in a time when antiquarian agents are being bought out (e.g. Bibliofind is now owned by Amazon) they are independent.

AcqWeb Site: Verification: Antiquarian

September 28, 1999

Google, one of our favorite search engines, is finally official. Stanford has been testing and researching it for three years. It was worth the wait. It's ultra-simple, quick, cookie-free, and astonishingly good at finding what you need.

Their press release also notes the release of GoogleScout. Once you have searched a term, every item in the list Google generates will have a "Try out GoogleScout" link (in small print, towards the right side of the page). They say GoogleScout lists "a company's competitors, or ... high-quality sites related to the fan page of your favorite actor or athlete." While we don't think we classify as a company, actor or athlete, we tried searching AcqWeb, and it returned a remarkably pertinent list of sites, including ACQNET, Tools for Serials Catalogers, ALA and OCLC.

AcqWeb Site: Searching the Web

September 27, 1999

NetRead: the Publishing Portal is a new site, primarily for aspiring writers and publishers, and still under construction, with some non-functional links. However, their How-To section has an excellent overview of the publishing industry, with descriptions of types of publishers, the publishing process, printing, marketing, etc.

AcqWeb Site: Referral Resources

September 24, 1999

ForeWord Online is the Web site of the trade publication for booksellers and librarians, reviewing books from university and independent presses. Their electronic version includes partial content, with a searchable database of reviews, plus news, articles, features, guest op-ed pieces and essays. In addition, there is a free weekly email, ForeWord This Week, which currently has 8,000 subscribers.

AcqWeb Site: Library Science :
Collection Development : Book Reviews

September 16, 1999

New Title Notifications: a new page for AcqWeb

Buried in a few publishers Web sites is a service which can be particularly helpful for collection development: email notifications of new titles. In this section of AcqWeb, we list the few we are aware of. We hope you will tell us of others.

AcqWeb Site: Publishers: New Title Notifications

September 15, 1999

Peanut Press isn't really a press, in the original sense of the word. Rather, they are a cutting-edge publisher, selling electronic books for handheld computers. It's worth taking a quick look, as they tackle the standard objections to digital books. For example, they say "because your hand-held device has a backlight, you can read in bed without waking your partner." We highlight Peanut Press today because Handspring has just launched Visor, a major competitor to the Palm Pilot, the best-selling handheld.

AcqWeb Site: Publishers: Electronic

September 10, 1999

Evaluating Web Resources, by Jan Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate, is primarily an advertisement for their book (Web Wisdom), but it also includes valuable checklists for five major types of Web sites: advocacy, business/marketing, news, informational, and personal Web pages.

AcqWeb Site: Library Science:
Collection Development: Selecting Web Resources

September 9, 1999

The new Library of Congress Online Catalog, which uses Endeavor's Voyager software, is now on the Web. Meanwhile, LOCIS (LC's telnet access to online catalogs and databases) and the Experimental Library of Congress Catalog are being phased out.

AcqWeb Site: Verification: Catalogs

September 7, 1999

Translators Are Critical To Web Understanding gives a brief TechWeb overview of the current state of translating Web sites and predicts an explosion of international e-commerce. "French, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Chinese are the leading languages targeted for translation from English, with Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, and Korean forming the next tier," according to the article.

September 3, 1999

Countrybookstore.co.uk may be relatively new to the Web, but this English bookseller is making a significant dent in the market. For our purposes, it has one of the more sophisticated search engines we have seen, with fields such as series and publisher. In addition, according to PW Daily, it too uses Whitaker's for its database.

AcqWeb Site: Verification: In Print -- U.K.

Until next time, wishing you all a pleasant cyber-day,