I’m about to head off to the wilds (okay, the farms) of Saskatchewan to relax with family on a much-welcomed break. I’ve got to the point in packing where we’re trying to figure out which books to bring. (Which involves some careful selection to narrow it down to the number of books we can bring on the ever-more-limited-space airlines without excess baggage problems.)

I leave the ILS-Discovery Interface work in good hands, and there should be good news shortly (hopefully, quite shortly, and well before I return) for folks who are interested in this initiative. I’ll have more to say on what comes next after I get back. Also after I come back, a couple of weeks from now, I’ll be picking up on the repositories series I started last month, with a review of the what-why-who-and-where of the various kinds of repositories that libraries may find of use.

Online book fans may also be interested in following a debate going on now about ebook publishing, business models, and piracy. Author David Pogue had a Times Blog post a couple of weeks ago giving his reasons for not issuing electronic editions of his titles, that drew a long set of reader comments. Now Adam Engst has posted an interesting and detailed rebuttal, where he describes his own sales successes with his ebooks (piracy notwithstanding).

You might also enjoy “Reading sets you free”, an article posted about a month ago by K. G. Schneider (who I had the pleasure of meeting in person recently at a NISO discovery forum.) I was reminded of it again just now as I was trying to think of what books the kids might bring. As in the picture accompanying her article, both of them are very much read-under-the-covers kids at this point, as were both their parents. We’re all looking forward to spending a lot of time conversing with each other and with our books these next couple of weeks.