It seems that I'm not the only one with issues this week. To my surprise, when I was reviewing my flight information I discovered, to my horror, that my flight was not for 9:04 am but 9:04 PM. I tried to get on an earlier flight on standby, but that failed. Then my already late flight was delayed, and delayed again, and delayed again, finally flying away from Chicago around 11:40, an hour later than it was supposed to have originally arrived in D.C. I finally checked into my hotel at 3:00 AM. Nonetheless I pulled myself out of bed to make it to the keynote, which I was looking forward to, featuring James Crawford from Google where he was supposed to be discussing Google Books. I arrived at the ballroom, grabbed some breakfast, and then discovered that Mr. Crawford's flight had been delayed 3 hours and he was just arriving at Dulles Airport. So an impromptu panel discussed the digital book landscape instead while waiting for Mr. Crawford.
This actually went pretty well and was interesting, although probably not exactly what Mr. Crawford would have preferred, let alone done. An early comment exemplifying this mood was made by Marshall Breeding when he commented that the situation shows that you can't count on Google for everything. Although not filled with Google hate, by any means, the general feeling from this panel was that libraries need to be concerned with a situation where corporate interests which may run counter to the best interest of libraries. Stephen Abram made an impassioned plea that libraries need to be concerned and take action in a world were companies (specifically referencing Amazon and Apple) lock down their devices under the name of patent, and by doing so limit the kinds of content that can be placed on them. A good, although entirely unplanned, keynote.
At the end an announcement was made that Mr. Crawford was horribly sorry about how things turned out and that something would be done so that his keynote could be heard, likely a recording that would be available to be streamed.
2 comments:
Wow, well, that is a very rough start! I hope the rest of the week gets better. Sounds like it already has. I hope you sleep well tonight!
You only crossed over into one time zone and still had jet lag. Can't win for losing. I'll bet you made up for it, and I hope it goes much better.
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