S&L Podcast - #396 - Antsy with Mars
/How to make The Watch series not feel so bad maybe? Also, some great lists of top fantasy and sci-fi and a few more award winners. Plus, we kick off the November pick and wrap up Finder By Suzanne Palmer.
Download directly here!
QUICK BURNS
The trailer for the new "The Watch" TV series from the BBC
Rhianna Pratchett
Neil Gaiman
Expanse season 5 trailer: Out December 16
Season 2 of His Dark Materials starts on Nov. 16 on HBO.
Conan the barbarian series coming to Netflix
Netflix has ordered a YA Vampire drama adaptation of V.E. Schwab's short story “First Kill” published in September.
Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin & The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
The 1st Ignyte Award winners
TIME Magazine has released a list of what they call. ""The 100 Best Fanatasy Books of All Time"
Polygon has picked the 15 most influential SciFi novels of the past 15 years
BARE YOUR SWORD
"Hello!
The way that libraries provide their patrons with ebooks varies greatly from library to library, and consortium to consortium. It’s a pretty complicated can of worms, so I mostly can only speak from my own experience at the library where I work.
There are two main models of ebook lending for libraries. In the first, the one that you discussed on the show, libraries purchase a license for the ebook and that license allows the library to lend the ebook out to a set number of users. Libraries can have the option to purchase more “copies”. I’m on the fiction buying committee, and if we see that an ebook has a large number of holds, and thus a really long waiting time, we will purchase additional ”copies”. What we are really doing is purchasing licensing that allows more patrons to borrow that ebook at once. This is how Overdrive (Libby is the name of one of the Overdrive apps) works.
The second model is a pay-per-use model. This is where the library is charged a certain amount of money each time a patron downloads the ebook file. Usually, to be able to have some idea of a budget, patrons are limited to a certain number of downloads per month with this model. Resources such as Hoopla follow this model of eResource lending.
I hope that this was helpful, and feel free to ask any further questions!
~Chaos Librarian"
—-
"Hello again!
Here here are a couple more details that occurred to me during a fiction buying meeting this morning, where I was helping to
select titles to purchase through Overdrive.
-Usually the license will be for a specific number of users (usually 1) and last for a certain amount of time (12 or 24 months). After the set period of time, the library would have to purchase the ebook again. For example: a common model for a new, high-demand title seems to be $55-$60 for a 24 month period, with one user able to download the title at a time.
-A less common model was a set price for a certain number of checkouts. The cost varied, but one example that we purchased today was $16.99 for 24 checkouts. After the 24 checkouts have been reached, we will have to decide whether we want to purchase the ebook again.
-the format of the ebook was also a variable; not all titles were available for kindle.
As you can see, it’s all convoluted and rather expensive. I hope that this helps to clarify slightly!
~Chaos Librarian "
—-
"Hi Veronica and Tom
You might be interested in the Panorama Project, leading multiple studies in the public library ebooks world. I will add it's funded by Overdrive so it is likely they have a slight bias, but hey, so do publishers.
I will add that not only do public libraries pay more for eBooks, they never ""own"" them. So even as a book goes out of style, the cost per use remains the same. If I were a publisher, I'd be more concerned about print, where libraries buy the book one time and never have to pay again, no matter how many people check it out or how many years it lingers in the stacks. I feel their loss argument is a strawman argument to make them justify charging more for eBooks.
I'm on the academic library side, and not only are eBooks much more clunky than the public library options, publishers are even more restrictive. We buy most of our books with what show up to users as "unlimited use,"" which allows for multiple users. This is great when it's required for a class, etc. Behind the scenes is a complex formula charging us per use, but not for the first five minutes. So a person can go in and poke around and decide the book isn't what they need. So we actually load records into the catalog of books we haven't purchased, until someone finds them and uses them. We call this model ""demand driven acquisition."
Sadly many non-academic titles aren't even available to us in digital form, which was a big challenge when we went remote in the spring!
The more you know,
Jenny"
——
"Ben's Blurb @BensBlurb
Looking for new podcasts. Give me 2 podcasts you enjoy. 1 must be book related.
Book: @swordandlaser hands down the best SFF podcast about books.
Other: Fake Doctors, Real Friends hosted by the duo @zachbraff & @donald_faison which is a Scrubs rewatch podcast. AMAZING!"
"Tamahome @tamahome02000
.@swordandlaser Finder was a fast space opera read. I got antsy for more progression on Mars. Fergus gets beat up a lot. I like his crazy schemes. More on the aliens please. Mari needs to chill. I like the Shielders. Humorous tone and high body count. I hear book 2 is better."
BOOK OF THE MONTH DISCUSSION
KICKOFF
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Book briefing
WRAP UP
Finder by Suzanne Palmer
Fin: Scene Change
Fin: First Contact with the Enemy
FIN: Well, that was quick
ADDENDUMS
Our show is currently entirely funded by our patrons. Thank you to all the folks who back our show and if you would like to support the show that way head to patreon.com/swordandlaser
You can also support the show by buying books through our links! Find links to the books we talk about and some of our favorites at swordandlaser.com/picks
