Daniel Nehring’s blog post from the end of December, “And Then There Were No Books”, brings me news that…

“it seems that Argentina has banned, or almost banned, the import of foreign books” [and, in addition] “Amazon steadfastly refused to sell me certain electronic books due to my location in Argentina”.

Seems very curious. Stories in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere appear to confirm the bizarre news. You’d think they might have better things to ban. This is a nation that still has routine mass torture endemic in its institutions.

Daniel also writes that he worries about citing page numbers in ebooks, in a Kindle-tastic world of reflowable text. But many Kindle books now have “real” page numbers…

“[Amazon are] adding real page numbers that correspond directly to a book’s print edition. We’ve already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, […] Page Numbers are only displayed when you press the Menu button.”

Even if your Kindle ereader book is obscure and doesn’t have “real” page numbers by default, simply go to Google Books and type a unique fragment of your quotation enclosed “in quote marks”. For most recent academic books you can now get a full-text image-preview of the relevant page, but even for older works Google Books should tell you the required page number and edition.

Cairn is reportedly developing…

“…an international edition which will provide an interface in English, enabling non-French speaking scholars to discover content of interest published in French.”

Although Google already handles that interface translation automatically, and in a very speedy and seamless manner. And most Cairn articles appear to have substantial abstracts in English, complete with English keywords. JURN already directly indexes the circa-239,000 open PDF articles that are freely available via Cairn.

The top 100 Wikipedia contributors are reportedly to get access to JSTOR for free.

Small Demons is a new search-engine / Pinterest mashup, allegedly for books and literature.

I tried it with the name of the British city “Stoke-on-Trent”. The top three in “People” did include musicians Lemmy and Robbie Williams (both born and raised in the city), but they can hardly be called literary giants. I would at least have expected to see Arnold Bennett up there at No.1. But he’s nowhere to be found.

The “Books” tab of the results was even worse, with nothing relevant in the first page of results. No Arnold Bennett, Charles Tomlinson, Arthur Berry, Sabine Baring-Gould, A.N. Wilson, Jonathan Taylor, Stephen Foster, or even H.G. Wells (for his macabre story “The Cone” set amid the Stoke iron furnaces).

Then I tried the “Places” tab which gave me… no results at all.

Puzzled, I tried with another term, “Charing Cross” which is a famous place in London. I would have expected to see the classic book 84, Charing Cross Road high in the results. But… nothing.

Small Demons looks very pretty, and is apparently backed by most major publishers with a huge database, but it doesn’t seem at all useful for researchers.

Google has open sourced their Linear Book Scanner.

“a fast page-turning scanner that moves a book face-down over linear sensors to capture high-resolution images of each page, and uses vacuum pressure to automatically turn pages as the book moves. Made with an ordinary vacuum cleaner, the $1,500 machine is quick to setup and can digitize a 1,000-page book in about 90 minutes or so (depending on the speed of the motor used). Unlike traditional scanning methods, the Linear Book Scanner doesn’t require someone to operate it once it’s been set in motion.”

Knode sounds like some fab tech. Imagine a Facebook with precognition. Knode’s bot crawls scientific publications, and generates “expertise profiles” for each scientist it encounters. Then it suggests who a scientist should know, rather than who they already do know. Still in beta, and currently confined to the Life Sciences.

Might be useful if it works but, as with all bot-based curation, the vital curatorial element of personal trust would be missing.

An article in today’s China Daily, written by a westerner, on academic corruption in China….

“because the government remains the principal source of funding for institutions of higher education, they are forced to compete with each other on the basis of rubrics, including the number of publications of their faculty. International rankings similarly depend on publications. All this leads to a temptation to inflate the number of publications, sometimes by repeat publications …, copying the work of others, fabricating research findings, including scientific data, and more.”

Recollect. Everything you do online: recorded, archived, and securely backed up. A little scary for most people, but it might be useful for some. Artists and writers wishing to leave a proper digital archive. Or researchers wanting to map their project’s online research paths in microscopic detail. Although I’m not sure how much success Recollect would have in auto-archiving content from behind paywalls.