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A “Pre-Announcement” for My Next Book: The Boring Patient

So what the heck is a pre-announcement? Well, it is really a call for help as I continue to explore self-publishing. I am looking for advice, help, crazy ideas, and thoughts in general from the library community on how we can best use my next book, The Boring Patient.

What’s The Boring Patient about? It is the story of my journey with cancer. Here’s a short excerpt from the first chapter:

Dear Heroic Noble Inspiring Cancer Survivor

Boring Book CoverThe first line of the first pamphlet I read after my diagnosis of cancer told me I was a survivor. I didn’t have to be cured to be a survivor, I guess just be breathing. This struck me as a pretty low threshold. But as you have probably already found out, there are a ton of stupid metaphors and assumptions around cancer.

Take “fighting cancer”…yeah, that’s what it feels like to lie in a bed asleep for 16 hours straight…fighting. Or, I love it when folks tell me I’m heroic. If anyone was given the choice to take drugs to extend their life wouldn’t they do it? That’s not heroic, it’s common sense. I hope, like me, you have made the brave decision to try not to die.

So what’s in here for you? I hope some comic relief. Seriously, humor has been the best medicine– other than, you know, actual medicine (that’s Seth MacFarlane’s joke I stole). You’re going to hear a lot about the importance of a “positive attitude.” Screw that. You have cancer and could die from it. Feel free to cry, scream, piss people off, and flip the bird to God (he can take it). I do have to tell you, however, that gets very tiresome after a while. Tiresome not for everyone else, who cares, but to yourself. So why not confuse everyone and be happy…besides they all have to laugh at your jokes now.

For those who regularly read my blog, the book is a lot more than just a compilation of my cancer related posts, but has the same spirit.

Anyway, back to my call for help.

We talk a lot about how libraries can be friends to authors. Can we use this book to demonstrate that? I don’t have the ability for a multi-city speaking tour, but I have Skype and I’m always open to good ideas. Would this be a chance to publish the book serially with a chapter a week on library websites? Maybe team up with a newspaper and a public library? Let the creative juices flow.

Right now the plan is to publish this as both a reasonably priced paperback and ebook (with possibly an audio book to follow) as I did with Expect More (more on that soon), my previous self-published book on librarianship for non-librarians. 5”x8” and 145 pages.

Thoughts? Use the comment section below, or email rdlankes@iis.syr.edu

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Kindle Unlimited

I wrote the following post for the iSchool’s Information Space Blog. Thought folks here might find it useful.

Can I tell you why I’m so excited about Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service? Because, aside from all my publications with academic presses and journals, I am an independent publisher. My book, Expect More, was published as a physical copy and digital copy through Amazon’s tools. What’s better, I’m automatically part of Kindle Unlimited, and maybe this will get me more readers. You see, the vast majority of the 600,000 titles in Kindle Unlimited are self-published books.Want the top sellers in the New York Times list? Ah, go to a library.

Surprised that a professor of library and information science isn’t all that worried about the fate of libraries (mostly public libraries) in the light of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited launching it’s “Netflix for Books?” Don’t be. Amazon joins a pretty crowded field, including Overdrive,Scribd, and Oyster. What’s more, Amazon is leading with 600,000 items, where libraries have access to tens of millions of titles…seriously.

Perhaps, you may think, I am an ivory tower academic blind to the coming disruptive change…like when the Internet was going to put libraries out of business… then Google…then Netflix…then Yahoo! Answers. Here’s the plain truth: there is a HUGE disruptive change happening in libraries, and it is facilitated by things like Google and Kindle Unlimited. Libraries are shifting from collection-focused buildings to centers of innovation focused on communities. If you think of libraries as places filled with books, you are in for a bit of a shock. Any library that can be replaced by a $10 a month subscription to stuff SHOULD be replaced.

Kids watching a 3D printer working

Kids at the Fayetteville Free Library watch a 3D Printer in action. Image via 3ders.org.

Let me give you a small example of what I mean. My wife recently had to be out of town for 2 weeks, so I got single-father duty. The majority of those days we were at the library. We were there so the kids could 3D print iPhone cases for their friends, borrow games, and join Minecraft groups. Did they check out books? Sure, on our way out…if we had time. Why was the public library doing all of these things? To meet the library’s mission of improving their community through knowledge creation. My kids were learning through books, sure, but also video games, Do It Yourself (DIY) printing, and by interacting with other folks in the community. In the coming weeks, the same library is having DIY sessions on home improvement, including electrical work…I NEED that.

Now, this might seem a flippant response to a major technology mover. After all, was there nothing in Amazon’s move that worried me? Oh yes…hell yes if I’m allowed to swear on this blog. It terrifies me and should terrify you how Amazon is currently working to break publishers and pursue a monopoly in book sales. They are making information unavailable to their customers trying to improve their position in the market. They are making titles harder or impossible to find out of a drive to the bottom line, not the good of the people.

Comic depicting what would happen if big ISPs were allowed to charge for tiered internet access.

An example of the consequences of the end of Net Neutrality. Image via commoncause.org.

But honestly, that is nowhere near as scary as things like network neutrality, where Internet Service Providers are trying to figure out how to monetize your viewing habits and pick the winners and losers in new Internet services. And that, frankly, pales in comparison to digital sharecropping, where huge corporations get massive billion-dollar valuations based on the content and work of their “users.” I mean, who is using whom when YouTube gets bought by Google for over a billion dollars and not one video producer saw a dime?

So are there scary things going on? Yup? Thank God we have some folks who are in the information industry and base their work on century-old values.Thank goodness there are information professionals that continue to maintain an internationally-distributed network of local knowledge hubs dedicated to community engagement and free and fair access to the life blood of democracy: information. Thank goodness there are librarians who long ago realized that it is not the size of your collection, but the reach of your community that really matters.

By the way, if you have $10 a month lying around, try Marvel Unlimited. If you are a comic book fan it is fricken incredible.

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Interview with Anna Maria Tammaro

Video and audio from a short interview with Anna Maria Tammaro on New Librarianship and Italian librarians:

Interview on New Librarianship with Anna Maria Tammero from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

Audio Only: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/pod/2014/Italy.mp3

Here is a list of the questions we started with:

1. What is the value of librarians and how can it be measured? if the librarians’ value is facilitating learning in our communities, how can we measure the achievement of members, their outcomes, and our impact?

2. In the Italian context, the autonomy of librarians is very limited: how can we feel responsible of improving our society?

3. In Italy, librarians have different education levels and work in different contexts in the North and the South of Italy: how can we share a common Library model?

4. As university librarians, how can we facilitate knowledge creation? should our role be in line or in collision with our University role, that shares the same mission of knowledge creation?

5. You put forth a kind of subversive vision of our profession. The first words that come to my mind are: overall change, assertion, participation. I find your idea of a new librarianship very inspiring. As an academic librarian, I ask to myself how librarians’ mission of improving society through facilitating knowledge creation can be reconciled within the academic community we first serve, whose mission is in a way parallel or identical. Isn’t that a role our parent institution will never let us play, if not just as a second choice?

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Master Class Now Open for Enrollment

Starting at the end of June I’ll be running the New Librarianship Master Class (June 30-July 27). For those who are familiar with the MOOC I did last summer, this is a repeat of that course. For those unfamiliar, here is a description:

About the Class

Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees?

The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. New Librarianship recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

Join David Lankes for this online course that provides a foundation for practicing librarians and library science students in new librarianship. It builds on The Atlas of New Librarianship, the 2012 ABC CLIO/Greenwood Award for the Best Book in Library Literature and seeks to generate discussion about the future direction of the profession.

Course Introduction

For a brief video introduction see: https://vimeo.com/96621020

For a brief video introduction of New Librarianship see: https://vimeo.com/49680667

Join Others

Thanks to the generosity of the State Library of Illinois, the class will be open to all comers, but is targeting participants in the ILEAD USA project. To enroll, use the following instructions. Note that the class won’t start until June 30, but you can register now and get a sense of the course management system used.

Self Enroll

This course is being taught using CourseSites by Blackboard, an online platform for organizing and securely sharing course materials, online lectures, discussion and other learning activities. To request enrollment into my course, follow the steps below:

1. Launch a browser and enter the following URL to the course home page:

https://www.coursesites.com/s/_ILEADUSA

2. Once at the course home page, click the “Self Enroll” button.

When signing up, take note that you can register using existing account information from popular web services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo and Windows Live to make it easier to login.

Questions

If you have any questions please let me know at rdlankes@iis.syr.edu, or use the Discussion board under “Overview and Introduction.”

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EveryLibrary Rapid Response Fund

I love this idea. I have been a big fan of EveryLibrary since it started. They are doing good work for a good cause (libraries) and they are doing it in a smart way. Their latest effort, Rapid Response Fund, will allow them to help libraries at the 11th hour:

“Our Rapid Response Fund is designed to amplify the voices of local library advocates during a crisis by supporting paid ads for outreach and action. “

I urge you to take a look: http://everylibrary.org/rapid-response-fund/

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A Good PET Scan

If there is one thing that cancer has not taught me it is patience, so here’s the punch line: Had my first PET scan since the stem cell (bone marrow) transplant on Wednesday. Got the results today. The results: no indication of cancer at this time.

Now for more nuance than Twitter will allow. My oncologist sees no indications of lymphoma on the scan and is comfortable waiting 3 to 6 months for another scan. This is clearly good news. I don’t (and probably never shall) use the word cure. The cancer can come back, that’s why I’ll be monitored for the next several years (remember that the stem cell transplant procedure has a 50% success rate).

So. Great news. A great reason to have a great summer. I still have a compromised immune system, so I watch what I eat, stay away from sick folks, and off of airplanes (and cruise ships).

One scan down – a bunch more to go!

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Day 100

Today my bone marrow turns 100 days old. In stem cell transplant circles that’s a milestone. To celebrate my wife and friends have organized a blood drive and I’m hoping there will be cake. Earlier I posted a video of the effects of chemo. Today I post the “completed” video that shows the changes from the start of the transplant process to today. I’m no prettier, but at least I have eyebrows.

For those who have asked about how I’m feeling, an update: I am feeling very good. My energy (and beard) is back. My stomach is back to what it was before the treatments (which was never good, but at least manageable). My toes still tingle and hurt from peripheral neuropathy –likely a reminder of chemo I will have for the foreseeable future.

My white blood cells, an indication of my immune system’s strength, are in the normal range. So I still need to be very careful of what I eat, I need to stay away from sick folks, and avoid recycled air in airplanes. However, as many have noted, I am able to get out and about.

My platelets – their precipitous drop started the whole Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis – are over 100 and approaching normal. The doctor even gave me the all clear to start rollerblading again (with a helmet and all the pads).

I put the word completed above in quotes because, of course, I’m not done. Next week I have another PET scan to see if there are any remnants of the cancer. The hope, of course, is that the scan will be clean. The reality is that it will probably have some ambiguity. The possibility is that the cancer is not gone and there will be more treatments (radiation, chemo). Here’s the thing, even if the scan comes back clean, those three possibilities – clean, ambiguous, and bad – will be with me for years to come.

Still, in the face of the old Yiddish saying “Man plans and God laughs,” I’m taking my own advice, and continuing on. I go to work, I write grants, I schedule appointments past one month. Every time I put something on the calendar more than a month away I have this feeling that I’m setting myself up, but I do it anyway. Maybe after the PET Scan I’ll do it with a feeling of “screw you cancer,” but we shall see.

From biopsy to 100 days after stem cell transplant. from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

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New Librarianship Master Class to be Offered Again

Last summer I offered a MOOC on the basics of New Librarianship. Over 2,300 people enrolled. However, many said they couldn’t participate at the time, or had to drop out for other obligations. Now, thanks to the State Library of Illinois’ ILEAD USA project, I’m offering it again.

Starting June 30th and running through July 27th, I’ll be re-running the MOOC. To be clear, this is the same course as last summer, not a follow-on. Also, unlike last summer, there will be no Continuing Education or College Credit options (though I will send out a delightful certificate of completion for those who want it).

Another important to note, the original site for the Master Class will remain up as an archive. There will be a new URL for this MOOC with fresh new discussion boards and such.

So, more details to come.