Designed by a group called KARO, the library started out as an art installation consisting of beer crates stacked up in an abandoned district center in Magdeburg, Germany. Now sheltered seating areas and extra cozy nooks constructed out of wood from an old warehouse have been added to complete this crazy design. I've got no clue how they keep books dry when it rains, but I definitely wanna snuggle up with a novel in one of those corners. [Dezeen]

There aren't an unlimited number of ebooks—each library has an actual "stock" of ebooks (because the library had to pay for each copy). So, if they have a stock of 5 books, and they're all checked out, you have to wait in a queue for somebody else's book to expire when they hit the 21-day mark (when they automatically expire). When it's available, you get an email, and then you can check it out. You also need a valid library card, BTW, so you (theoretically) can't check out books from the New York Public Library—who's launching their stuff with the service today—if you live in Montana.

But overall, it's pretty great if it works as advertised—free books from your library for your ebook reader.

Today also marks the launch of Sony's Library Finder application. Sony, working with OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), the leading global digital distributor of eBooks and to libraries, will now offer visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library's collection of eBooks. Thousands of libraries in the OverDrive network offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library's download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader. At the end of the library's lending period, eBooks simply expire, so there are never any late fees.

Image via Hibino/Flickr

The Hathi Trust—named in the spirit of wisdom, memory and strength after the Hindu word for "elephant"—will be an amazing repository of data. Currently its bibliography, containing the physical equivalent of 1,703 tons of literature, is only partially searchable by University of Michigan and University of Chicago library sites, but "there is currently no single global interface to the body of content in HathiTrust repository."

This highlights the real strains of safely storing the world's intellectual property—while being able to serve it up for public consumption. The Hathi website laments that it's still working on "a way that takes into account the large number of different sources of metadata and the different strategies each of the partners has for managing that information." It's the reason that library science can be as complex as rocket science. To put it another way, "Growing the world's largest library won’t happen overnight." [Hathi Trust via Wired]

*Here's the whole list, in case you want to see if your uni is part of the elephantine operation:
Indiana University
Michigan State University
Northwestern University
The Ohio State University
Penn State University
Purdue University
University of California Berkeley
University of California Davis
University of California Irvine
University of California Los Angeles
University of California Merced
University of California Riverside
University of California San Diego
University of California San Francisco
University of California Santa Barbara
University of California Santa Cruz
The University of Chicago
University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Iowa
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Virginia

We'd totally want one of these around the house until we realized that most of our day is spent sitting on something or other anyway, so this robot would just spin around getting jealous before pitifully running out of power.

Gamer Busted for Using Library Wi-Fi [TechEBlog]

This may be a small detail, but it's something that's nice to have if your hard drive ever gets corrupted. – Jason Chen