Late notice; speaking at UND
Sorry for the late notice — again, personal issues — but I’m speaking at UND tomorrow, 4PM, Merrifield 300. I’m going to talk about the DIY Book Scanner project generally, some of our newest, most exciting developments, and furthermore, I hope to engage the audience in a longer discussion about the real issues — which is to say, what this all means in a long-term sense.
Though UND doesn’t have a huge online presence with respect to this series, I did find mention here and UND’s official post courtesy Rebecca Weaver-Hightower here. There’s also an announcement on Facebook, though, since I’m not on Facebook, I can’t really share it with you.
Hope to see you there, it’s going to be an exciting talk.
Like that Rebecca Weaver-Hightower refers to you as “Reetze” throughout the article. That just might stick.
I hope you get a good conversation going with the audience. Would think the states law school would produce some good back and forth on the ethics of DIY book scanning.
Few people showed up — there might have been a dozen. But they were good people, including library folks, writers, and disability services (tasked with scanning for all kinds of people), and so we had a pretty good conversation.
Two interesting points came out. One is that academics fear the loss of small presses/print labels because they need books published to get tenure. (In other words, the problem with book piracy and digital books wrecking small publishers is actually a tenure-system problem, not necessarily a piracy problem)… two, the disability services claimed that these academic presses were by far the worst in being helpful/handing over digital copies of work for the disabled.
I don’t think any UND legal eagles were there, though. :\
After that, we had a great meal and some drinks at the Toasted Frog, which seems a bit like a Grand Forks HoDo. I had a steak and some Jameson, both of which were truly exceptional. MooM drove me up and back, and we had a great time talking about phones and Grand Forks and all kinds of stuff.
Net positive, glad I did it, very glad to meet the UND writing people.