Four U.S. Congressmen Want to Require Net Filters in Libraries'Net Filter Bill in Congress; Laptops in Massachusetts; and Whither Bookstores?
Massachusetts Poised to Require State College Students to Get Laptops
State officials--not clear whom or in what capacity from the article,
though presumably from the State's Board of Higher Education--are ready to
commit $123 million dollars over three years to a program designed to
require each student in state colleges and universities to come to college
with a laptop computer. Students who meet low-income guidelines will
receive laptop vouchers; others will receive loans. The article reports
that "about 70 percent of students at four-year colleges now have their
own computers and that the proportion is smaller at community colleges."
Of the $123 million, $54 million will go to aide student purchases, $27
million would go to faculty training (yea! they didn't forget this
crucial element), and $47 million to "facilities, equipment and academic
programs." Reaction to the plan among college teachers is cautiously
optimistic. Written by Patrick Healy for the Boston Globe, the
full article is available at
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/291/metro/State_is_set_to_require_laptop_use_at_its_colleges+.shtml.
Does the Coming Revolution Mean the Demise of Bookstores?
Jason Epstein ponders this question in the November 2 issue of the New York Review of Books. Digital technology, he notes,
will alter the way books are transmitted, but the author's task will remain essentially the same as when Homer sang the Odyssey and Dickens presented his novels, chapter by chapter, before enchanted listeners. So too will the experience of readers remain essentially the same as they flip their electronic pages or order their books from neighborhood kiosks where machines may soon print one copy at a time on demand. . . .In a response to Epstein's piece in the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley takes a slightly less elegiac tone when he notes that bookstores are essentially middlemen, and that the WWW and other digital technologies are changing how writers and publishers reach and deliver content to readers. Both Epstein and Yardley argue that the potential savings to readers on the price of books will come largely from the elimination of the bookstore mark up over the net cost of writing, editing, packaging, publicizing, and shipping a book. But what of bookstores--are they in peril? Or have they already been undone and transformed by the Borders and Barnes and Noble phenomenon anyway?