Teenage Wildlife

I was tapped as one of the young "guybrarians" (man, I really don't like that combo word. Worst. Portmanteau. Ever.) to do some outreach to the local polytechnical high school. Together, myself and two others made a presentation to several classes over the course of the last two days. My piece of the show was a demonstration on how to download audiobooks; showing them the OverDrive iPhone app actually seemed to get many of them interested and engaged. When several of the kids whipped out their iPhones to try it, you could see how it made the teacher, clearly from the old school of confiscated devices, a little twitchy.

There were a lot of cool kids in the group. One of the girls was wearing a faux vintage Labyrinth t-shirt, which I commented on after the presentation was over. She says to me "Oh yeah, I love David Bowie, even though he's, like, 70 YEARS OLD."  Ha!

I know it's popular to bag on Hot Topic, but I tell you, when I was in high school, there seemed to be absolutely zero pop cultural memory (outside of the rare punk), so I think it's pretty awesome that contemporary 14 year olds are sporting Bowie and Velvet Underground tees.

OverDrive comes to the iPhone

For all of Apple's alienating practices (inaccessible batteries, devices locked down with crippling DRM, stifling authoritarian control of their app store, partnering with a liberty-trampling and generally crummy telcom), I still love me some iPhone.

I also love me some library services, including OverDrive, which allows patrons to download audiobooks to their computers and portable devices. Sarasota rolled this service out last year, and an app for the iPhone has finally hit the iTunes app store.

Hoorah!

Update - 05/12/10

I'm reviewing OverDrive for a presentation at a high school next week, and as part of that, I just downloaded the iPhone app.  Works pretty nicely: upon checkout of a title at your library's OverDrive site, the app is automatically launched, where you have the option to download individual parts (or the whole) of your audiobook.  I selected The Sword Thief, part six of the 39 Clues series.