Amazon said on April 20 that it will launch the public-library feature—which gives the Kindle the same library-borrowing abilities as competing e-reading devices such as Barnes & Noble Inc.'s Nook and Sony Corp.'s Reader—later this year. "We think customers are going to love this new library feature," said a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based retailer. The move is likely to have major repercussions for public libraries and the digital-reading market generally, since Amazon currently dominates the e-book industry and its actions in the space are closely watched. There are an estimated 7.5 million Kindles in the U.S., which gives Amazon a two-thirds share of the $1 billion digital-book market, said Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. There likely will be little immediate impact on Amazon's business since no money changes hands in borrowing digital books. But analysts said the new feature could help adoption of the Kindle in the long term, potentially leading to greater Kindle book sales. Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, which holds the second-biggest share of the e-reader market with its Nook reader, said Amazon's announcement "is not news for Nook customers who have always had access to library services." Many major public libraries, including those in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, offer free digital-book lending. A physical trip to the library isn't required. Instead, library-card holders can download books from library websites. Each library sets its own digital-book lending policy, but typical lending periods are 14 or 21 days. Libraries need to purchase digital copies of books in order to lend them out. The e-books are then loaned out as if they were physical books. Only one person can check out each digital copy at a time. The question of library lending has been thorny for publishers. A key issue is that unlike physical books, digital copies don't wear out, which means publishers and authors don't benefit from a popular title that has to be reordered because of extended use. Two of the country's largest publishers, CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster Inc., and Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, don't currently sell their digital works to libraries. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704570704576274802584356140.html

The BORDERS – GET PUBLISHED™ co-branded service allows users to create an eBook in a few simple steps using the intuitive BookBrewer tools and then make that content available for sale within a few days on Borders.com and other major eBook outlets, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks and Google Books. Users can easily load, format and have their content displayed across a number of technology platforms, including the iPhone®, iPad™, Android™-powered tablets, as well as a variety of eReaders, notably the Kobo™ Wireless eReader, Kobo™ eReader, Aluratek Libre Pro and Velocity® Micro Cruz™ Reader. BORDERS – GET PUBLISHED™ Powered by BookBrewer is the only retailer-aligned eBook self publishing service that includes an integrated Print on Demand feature, which enables users to create an automated print version of the book and allows them to buy copies for as low as $4 and mark them up to sell to others independently at a profit. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/borders-empowers-teachers-to-become-ebook-authors-119188874.html

Five years after ground was broken (and four since the economic collapse that almost thwarted the project), Iceland has opened the Harpa Reykjavík Concert Hall and Conference Center. The shimmering building was designed by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, who has made a career out of reinterpreting the earth's elements. He hung a semicircular sun composed of hundreds of lamps inside London's Tate Modern and installed four waterfalls on New York's East River. Back home, he found inspiration in the giant basalt columns formed by Iceland's volcanic substrate. See the glass-and-steel honeycomb facade of the new Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center at: http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/503662

A 10-year-old blind school girl has become the youngest interpreter to work at the European Parliament. Alexia Sloane is fluent in four languages – English, French, Spanish and Mandarin. Sloane, who lost her sight when she was 2-years-old after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, is also now in the process of learning German. http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/90045050?Blind%20girl%2C%2010%2C%20youngest%20interpreter%20for%20European%20Parliament

American Institute of Architects/American Library Association 2011 Library Building Awards
Arkansas Studies Institute
KAUST Library
Mattapan Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Harmon Library, Phoenix Public Library
William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library See pictures and find information on the buildings at: http://www.aia.org/practicing/awards/2011/library-awards/index.htm

The Wisconsin Historical Society recently acquired photographs from 1912 of AIA's Gold Medalist Frank Lloyd Wright's summer home, Taliesin, near Spring, Green, Wisconsin. See at: http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/2011/multimedia/slideshows/FLW-Taliesin/FLW-Taliesin.html

When Frank Lloyd Wright decided to construct a home in this valley, he chose the name of the Welsh bard Taliesin, whose name means "shining brow" or "radiant brow". Wright positioned the home on the "brow" of a hill, a favorite of his from childhood, rather than on the peak so that Taliesin would appear as if it arose naturally from the landscape. In his words, "...not on the land, but of the land". (And Taliesin is the earliest poet of the Welsh language whose work has survived.) The home was designed with three wings that included his living quarters, an office, and farm buildings. On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago completing a large project, Midway Gardens, Julian Carlton, a manservant whom Wright had hired two months earlier, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned. The dead were: his mistress, Mamah; her two children, John and Martha; Thomas Brunker, the foreman; Emil Brodelle, a draftsman; David Lindblom, a landscape gardener; and Ernest Weston, the son of the carpenter William Weston. Two victims survived the mêlée—William Weston and draftsman Herb Fritz—and the elder Weston helped to put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing of the house. Carlton, hiding in the unlit furnace, survived the fire but died in jail six weeks later. Wright eventually rebuilt the living quarters, naming it Taliesin II. These living quarters were again destroyed by fire on April 22, 1925. Wright began the rebuilding of Taliesin, which he now named Taliesin III, shortly afterward. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin_(studio)

Taliesin is one of the most well-known and highly-regarded early Welsh poets, as being one of a number of early poets who flourished in the late sixth century. He set the benchmark for panegyric verse - a speech or text in praise of someone or something - which remained a tradition in Welsh literature until the Middle Ages. The majority of work accredited to Taliesin has been collected in The Book of Taliesin, of which about a dozen poems are believed to be genuinely from his own hand. Dating from around the first half of the 14th century it is one of the most famous Welsh manuscripts and, along with poems written by Taliesin, contains many famous early Welsh poems such as Armes Prydein and Preiddeu Annwfn, a poem featuring Arthur. In the mid 16th century Elis Gruffydd wrote a mytholigised account of Taliesin's life, entitled Ystoria Taliesin, The Story of Taliesin. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/early-welsh-literature/pages/taliesin.shtml

Robo-signing is the process of signing complex documents without first evaluating their contents. Robocall is a term for an automated phone call that uses both a computerized autodialer and a computer-delivered pre-recorded message.

In January 2011, Aaron Titus got a robocall at 4:30 in the morning from the Prince George's County (Maryland) School District, informing him of something he'd learned the night before from the district's website - that the opening of school would be delayed by two hours, due to snow. "I picked up the phone and it said, 'You can sleep in for two hours,'" Tutus recalled, "and so I was a little perturbed." The 31-year-old lawyer from the D.C. suburb of Fort Washington, Md., says he was irate, and decided turnabout was the perfect fair play. So, he called a company that does robocalls and arranged to have one made the following morning - at 4:30 - to nine school board members as well as the district's superintendent and its general counsel. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/15/earlyshow/saturday/main7249322.shtml