Wired magazine ran a great piece on why is important to advocate for net neutrality and the potential dangers of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling on January 14th. From Wired magazine: Three Dangers of Losing Net Neutrality That Nobody’s Talking About 1. No matter how things play out with net neutrality, the outcome is likely to hurt the poor. 2. Whether we want to admit it or not, we continue to give more control over the internet to the government. 3. The problem isn’t the ISPs, it’s the FCC.
Libraries Continue to Expand Beyond Traditional Services
This week Gale announced that it would start to offer high school diplomas through Career Online High School (COHS) at Los Angeles Public Library. Read more here. Cleveland Public Library officially launched it’s TechCentral Makerspace on January 10.
Judge Favors Google over Authors Guild in Lawsuit
On November 14, Judge Chin dismissed the Authors Guild website in favor of Google stating that Google Books provided “significant public benefits”. This ruling is great news of libraries and researchers. More information is available here.
EPUB 3 Implementation White Paper Now Available
From the IDPF: As part of the ongoing EPUB 3 Implementation Project the Association for American Publishers (AAP) has made available a white paper that documents several outcomes of the cross-industry initiative, including the top 10 features deemed most critical for immediate implementation by participating publishers and reading system developers, as well as the top 13 tips for content publishers to create accessible EPUB 3 publications. For more information and to download the white paper, visit: http://publishers.org/press/117/ .
Mozilla Releases New Web Literacy Standard
The Mozilla Corporation released version 1.0 of the Web Literacy Standard on October 23. The standard is broken down into three core skill categories: explore, build, and connect. Mozilla hopes to train a generation of webmakers – users that not only consume information and media on the web but also generate it. The standard is useful for those who want to teach web skills. It is ideally suited to serve as a backbone in curriculum creation for technology classes offered in public libraries and university libraries. The standard is a work in progress and can viewed here: https://webmaker.org/standard.
What’s Different? Moving from EPUB 2 to EPUB 3 – Navigation
One of the key differences in EPUB 3 is with how navigation is treated within the file. Gone is the XML based Navigation Control file (NCX) format in favor of a subset of HTML5. This move helps align EPUB with current web standards. There is no tradeoff with functionality and the HTML5 is less work than the cumbersome XML tagging. An important concept to grasp is that the new navigational document serves two distinct roles: one is to allow reading systems to render the nav doc as a specialized table of contents and the other is presented within the content.…