info NeoGnostic

Defining e-books and publishing

2008-09-09T07:57:00.002Z

In the week in which my 'definition' article - Books in a virtual world: The evolution of the e-book and its lexicon - has finally seen the light of day (Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 40 (3): 193-206; and deposited/soon available on E-LIS & CADAIR), it was thrilling to see a post on if:book by Bob Stein in which he distilled some years of thinking into a 'definition' of publishing in the digital era - a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era. [I found his 'death of fiction' possibility less than thrilling, but the theory does not depend on that!]

Bob departs from my approach by describing the networked book, not as either a physical entity or as content delivered, but as a social activity - an interaction or dialogue:

as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed in sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications.

I think this essay may prove to be a very important piece of writing, and I hope that Bob keeps his promise to move it "into CommentPress so that the discussion can be more extensive than the blog's comment field." Of course, this is just a 'field theory' and, on closer examination, the model may not work so he is asking for comments on "which parts need deepening, fixing or wholesale reconsideration." The

key questions a unified field theory has to answer:
What are the characteristics of a successful author in the era of the digital network?
Ditto for readers: how do you account for the range of behaviors that comprise reading in the era of the digital network?
What is the role of the publisher and the editor?
What is the relationship between the professional (author) and the amateur (reader)?
Do the answers to 1–4 afford a viable economic model?

Key to the theory "is the author's commitment to engage directly with readers" - and thus - inevitably, the readers' commitment to engaging with the author. Bob says that

readers will increasingly see themselves as participants in a social process.

He acknowledges that there will be levels and levels of engagement, but I think that this may be the weakness in the theory. Will readers engage? Do any but a handful wish to engage in this way? Jumping from author-text to reference material, to images, to primary sources, to Google, to author-notes, etc? Won't most readers who are reading from pleasure either not bother or become lost in the faux-scholarly process?

But this is a theory, and I like it! I think that as a natural next stage there needs to be work done to support the theory - just as the JISC National e-Books Observatory Project is about

exploring impacts, observing behaviours and developing new models to stimulate the e-books market

- we need research - the publishers certainly need research - to see if the model is acceptable to the public at large, a public which still largely prefers books to e-books. Maybe the new reading experience will simply loose people along the way: the unconverted, the unregenerated, who just want to read! Will they ever

acknowledge the possibility of a flatter hierarchy that displaces the writer from the center or from the top of the food chain and moves the reader into a space of parallel importance and consideration ... acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between reading and writing as equally crucial elements of the same equation

The theory only works if sufficient publishers and readers buy-in to the model - even after a "transitional period (5, 10, 50 years)" - and I think that some research needs to be done now: more than just "careful listening to users/readers/authors" - indeed, some or all of Bob's thoughts/questions at the end of his essay may well be the basis of the research questions.

>>Technorati tags: publishing; publishers; e-books; networked books; society

>>IceRocket tags: publishing; publishers; e-books; networked books; society

On reading and design: more thoughts

2008-07-08T07:28:00.001Z

I have just been reading a short editorial piece by Patrick Tucker in The Futurist: The 21st Century Writer. It is a reflective piece on Tim O’Reilly’s “Tools of Change” conference, and focusses on publishing in an electronic age. Unsurprisingly.

For the serials publisher and the journalist, there is the thought that with half the world reporting and editorialising in blogs:

We’ve entered an era where the acts of thinking, writing, and to a certain extent publishing are indistinguishable, and where charging money for editorial content is becoming an ever trickier proposition.

I liked particularly the first part of this, suggesting that the act of "thinking out loud" has migrated to the Internet in the form of blogs. Especially, as in that very idea, is captured the reason why traditionally sponsored journalism should endure - it is (or should be) so much more than thinking out loud, as I am doing here, and it is distinguishable from my ramblings by its pedigree and publishing house.

For the book publisher, there is a reprise of my previous posts (one & two) on the subject:

the mission is to make an industry built on a fifteenth-century technology viable in the twenty-first century. That means reinventing the concept of the book for the digital age. There's (sic) is perhaps the biggest challenge.

>>Technorati tags: publishing; blogs; ebooks

>>IceRocket tags: publishing; blogs; ebooks

Writings about e-book publishing, 2008: update

2008-06-27T08:02:00.000Z

There has been a rush of article added to my Writings about e-book publishing, 2008 over the last 5 or 6 weeks. So much so, that it is already approaching the length of last year's page!

The last item to be added, an article by Laura Dawson in Book Business, comes from a journal newly available in electronic mode (to which you must subscribe, but which looks worth watching). It is doubly interesting as the editorial (by Noelle Skodzinski) quotes Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Marketplace, as saying

Get your mind-set out of the book business and into the reader business

... which has a ghostly echo of my last piece here, A necessary change in reading? Cader added, "Publishers have to leverage the damn book".

>>Technorati tags: books; ebooks; readers

>>IceRocket tags: books; ebooks; readers

A necessary change in reading?

2008-06-10T12:25:00.000Z

I often write about reading in this blog; it is a fairly natural - even logical - progression or collocation for anyone thinking about information, books or libraries. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr wonders if - like the

Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico [who, after Gutenberg's printing press] worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds

he should see the Internet, epitomised in Google, as destroying the possibility of immersive reading, leaving us with only the skills to scan and skim. He references both the recent Google Generation report from UCL, which spoke of

new forms of “reading” [which] are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins

and Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, who

worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

He also speaks of the plasticity of our brains which - even in adults - re-write neural pathways to re-learn skills like reading. He suggests that

the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Perhaps (I hope) he paints a black-and-white picture that is too stark, that does not allow of a possibility to skim when it is required and to read comprehensively when needed. In yesterday's post about Sara Lloyd's article on publishers and e-books, I wrote that Sara noted that the:

question really is no longer, “Will consumers read on screens in the future?”… [but] is rather, “How will consumers read on screens in the future?”

She went on to say that reading is changing "and will continue to change substantially" and to note different modes of reading, including a more exploratory style of online reading and researching that is different from 'immersive reading'. "A new generation of more consciously transliterate readers" will require more of their books - however we define these - and thus more of their publishers. The 'new book' will require "publishers to become enablers for reading, and its associated processes."

Maryanne Wolf argues that the way we read influences or dictates the way we think. If that is true the Internet is truly spawning a world of butterfly minds! Carr quoted

a recent essay, [in which] the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

But, perhaps this is not so new. Samuel Johnson wrote

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. (Samuel Johnson (Boswell's Life of Johnson)

It's just that technological progress makes it all so much easier, and quicker, and available, and automatic. Because someone, somewhere has published it on the Internet. And those same publishers

need to be at the centre of these digital conversations, driving their development and providing the tools for readers to engage with the text and with each other if they are to remain relevant... [they] had better be the ones defining what the shape of a ‘networked book’ should be ... because if they are not someone else sure as hell will be.

So, publishers - design me a new book, create me a new content with context, deliver a networked book or an e-book, amaze me with interface artifice - but please, PLEASE understand how we read and ensure that in providing the context you do not destroy my ability to enjoy the content.

The e-book must allow immersive reading as well as surface skimming; must allow my construction of my unique version of the entire heritage of the West as well as my research into that cathedral's foundations. We are told in Carr's article that reading is not an instinctive skill for human beings. If we must learn new reading skills, we must also hang on to the old. And Carr ends:

That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

>>Technorati tags: books; ebooks; reading; publishing; publishers

>>IceRocket tags: books; ebooks; reading; publishing; publishers

Patents; Google; and Re-inventions of wheels

2008-06-10T08:11:00.000Z

According to Edlyn Simmons (chapter on 'Patents' in Armstrong and Large, Manual of Online Search Strategies, Ashgate, 1992):

In most countries, no patent is granted until the application has been examined to determine whether the claimed invention is new, useful and inventive.

Which makes me wonder how - as reported in Lorcan Dempsey's Blog - Google can file a patent application for "what it calls a 'virtual bookshelf site'". As the posting points out there are over a dozen such sites, including LibraryThing (see left-hand column, here), and Google already has MyLibrary within Google Book Search.

>>Technorati tags: bookshelf; Google; LibraryThing; patents

>>IceRocket tags: bookshelf; Google; LibraryThing; patents

Is Bluster over Google Book Search = Shame that publishers didn’t get there first?

2008-06-09T15:57:00.002Z

I do not really like quoting at length in my blog entries, but the article that I am referencing here is such an important article from the house of a major publisher, that I think it is warranted. Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan Digital Publishing has written an article linked from the company blog, the digitalist: A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century (pdf).

Book. Publisher. Manifesto. Read it!

Right at the start, there is the statement which shows such a clear view of the implications of a digital future that I am awed to hear it expressed by a publisher (not because I think publishers have no vision, but because I think acceptance of this particular vision must impinge profoundly on publishing):

We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain.

Built on the thought that e-books are content with context rather than content with cover, this is a publisher looking at possibilities:

We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before.

The article looks to a future in which e-books may be written using the wisdom of crowds, or in which they can offer shared reading such as is trialed in Book Glutton.

Reading is not an activity that can be defined simply and it is all too often described as a solitary, immersive experience, as in the experience of reading a novel for hours at a time… even if a reader spends some solitary time reading, readers have always traditionally liked to swap views and ideas about the content of books, to turn over the corners of pages in which favourite passages appear to which they want to refer again, and to write notes in the margins.

To date, publishers seem to have been content to digitise their paper books, leaving the more adventurous formats, the social books, the new structures, the experimentation to those outside of the conventional publishing arena. I have always wondered how – or if – these experiments will migrate into the centre stage of ‘real publishing’ – and now we have evidence of major-league interest. This is exciting! And why?

Google Book Search set out to define 'access'; can the publishers redefine 'book'? If the:

question really is no longer, “Will consumers read on screens in the future?”… [but] is rather, “How will consumers read on screens in the future?”

…publishers had better be the ones defining what the shape of a ‘networked book’ should be … because if they are not someone else sure as hell will be.

>>Technorati tags: books; ebooks; publishing; publishers; networked books

>>IceRocket tags: books; ebooks; publishing; publishers; networked books

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine

2008-06-03T09:27:00.003Z

… but what does Ray Bradbury mean when he says that

There is no future for e-books because they are not books
Variously quoted - Kindleville, The Leary Letter, etc: at BookExpo America

When, or indeed, why is a book not a book?

If we take digitized version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, or even of his Fahrenheit 451, and present it on-screen, surely we have an electronic or digitized version of the book? It could, I suppose, be argued that that without pagination and formatting it is simple ‘text’ or ‘images’ – but paginated into ur-book form one might suppose that the neologism works.

I would guess – I hesitate to put words into his mouth, but I would guess – that Mr Bradbury may mean that robbed of sentience; unable to touch, hold, heft, weigh, smell, to generally experience the physicality of a book, we cannot experience the same pleasure and pain of reading a book. We cannot have shelves of them in our houses or libraries. We cannot pile them for reading beside our armchair or bed. We shall never be able to return to one, dog-eared with use, to have it fall open at our favourite passage. Thus, with such differing properties, they cannot be the same: we cannot call an e-book, a book. It is like comparing oranges and apples.

And, perhaps, we will never read an e-book in the same way – with the same attention, diligence and apprehension as we do a book. Indeed, there is some evidence that readers often only ‘dip’ into e-books.

So, further, Ray Bradbury may fear that, like Montag, the digitizers and the e-book purveyors are the firemen of our culture. Bradbury has said that Fahrenheit 451

is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature … His fear in 1953 [was] that television would kill books
"Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted"

It is not a long step to suppose that e-books could kill books.

“They smell of burned fuel”, indeed!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; books; reading; Bradbury

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; books; reading; Bradbury

Reader Wars! A link from Dar es Salaam!

2008-05-19T17:15:00.001Z

Thanks to Joe Wikert at Kindleville for the following:

Mobipocket for the iPhone/iTouch
Earlier this morning Kevin Tofel wrote a blog post about how there will be a Mobipocket app for the iPhone later this year. He then went on to question what sort of impact this will have on the Kindle. A couple of readers commented that a) the reading experience on a Kindle is much better than an iPhone/iTouch and b) Amazon owns Mobipocket, so they're not likely to kill their own device.

True and true, but now that I've been using Mobipocket on my Blackberry for a bit I have to admit there are many other factors that come into play. [continues]

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; Apple; iPhone; Kindle

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; Apple; iPhone; Kindle

e-Book copyright in the UK

2008-05-13T18:32:00.001Z

CILIP members will already be aware from the CILIP LIS in Politics blog that - in response to a supplementary question from Tony Baldry on the protection of copyright in relation to e-books, and on piracy - Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Andy Burnham said that with respect to e-books:

there was a genuine issue with the illegal sharing of material online that had caused particular damage to the music industry. The first step would be voluntary agreements, he explained. Furthermore, he noted that he had been disappointed by the response of the ISPs

He ended by noting that:

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that jointly with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, we will shortly publish a document that includes options for legislation if voluntary agreements cannot be secured.

There is clearly a view that ISPs have responsibility for illegal downloading - one wonders if the government believes that ISPs have responsibility for illegal copying as well. As a timely instance, only today a colleague purchased and downloaded two e-books, only to discover that the PDF files were completely unprotected, and could easily have been shared around the office (he didn't!) or, indeed the world.

>>Technorati tags: copyright; ebooks

>>IceRocket tags: copyright; ebooks

Counterpoint: On reading and design

2008-05-12T14:02:00.000Z

In a 2006 keynote paper, Michael Jon Jenson, wrote that - having previously forecast the end of paper books, he had discovered that he was wrong:

My fundamental error was in thinking that technology was the driver, rather than the human culture using the new technologies.

So are we humans really incapable of learning new tricks, of moving on, of evolving? Is our social history just too much for us to break away from? William Powers (pdf. cf, yesterday) notes that

in the literature of media studies, there is a determinist school which holds that technologies shape society

but he also reminds us that even Nicholas Negroponte was forced to explain why his treatise on Being Digital was written on paper [not practical in terms of its reach to important people; repurposing of content; and "a more personal, slightly ascetic reason. Interactive multimedia leaves very little to the imagination."]

So I am left with the question: which will evolve: us or the book?!

Or perhaps I mean which will evolve first? Will we learn to cope with technology and e-book readers, or will e-book readers evolve to resemble books and thus become acceptable to us unregenerated humans? It would be nice to think that the media studies people are right - after all, television did not kill off the radio - we can learn to handle new inputs. Or is the point that we can learn to handle new inputs IF THEY ARE GOOD or TEMPTING ENOUGH?

The current generation of e-book readers use e-ink and screen technologies which give a reading experience nearly equivalent to print on paper... but no user thinks of them as paper-based books. e-Ink comes from the same stable - MIT MediaLab - as Mr Negroponte, so it is not unreasonable to suppose that there is some urge to embrace the digital - with all its worldly pleasures; or perhaps the Negropontian ascetic urge will eventually lead to a happy medium (in both senses) that we can accept as a book despite its ability to change its content and define unrecognised words for us.

Perhaps it is better to end, where I started. Jenson also wrote:

Evolution is not survival of the strongest, or failure of the weakest. Evolution is not fair; it's not predictable; it's not kind. Nor is it cruel, or chaotic, or unfair, for that matter. It's what happens when environmental pressures change.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; reading

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; reading

On reading and design

2008-05-11T08:48:00.000Z

I was reading a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by Ezra Klein, The Future of Reading, which explores his experiences with a Kindle, and - more generally - with reading on something that is not paper-based. Klein quotes

William Powers’s brilliant essay “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,” (pdf) which considers the evolution of paper and the way it has subtly shaped not only the way we read, but what we read.

A little later he goes on to say:

The problem is that the Kindle tries to compete too directly with paper. It attempts to electronically mimic the experience of reading a book. But the book is very, very good at providing the experience of reading a book.

That is when it struck me! Clever as all the e-book reading devices are, their essential problem - which inhibits their uptake by the reading public - is that they have evolved from the computer family (laptops, personal digital assistants - PDAs and so on) and not from the book, or even from paper. They do not share a common history. They can never presume to equality. They can never expect to be viewed as a book.

John Markoff, in The New York Times, reminded us that Apple's Steve Jobs

was skeptical about the Amazon Kindle book reader because most Americans don’t read... So if he were going to reinvent reading, how would Mr. Jobs do it?

We may have moved on from re-inventing the book to reinventing reading, but the implication is the same: Jobs would shape reading to fit in with Apple's computing designs and the so-called 'Safari Pad': our understanding of reading and of the book will need to change to match the technology. Will the Safari Pad (or any next e-book reader) look and feel like a book? No. Will it succeed? The power of Apple or Amazon may move it in the right direction, but it will not replace paper and will not succeed until the designers remember what it is that they are designing. Ezra Klein suggests that:

At the end of the day, the true advances won’t come in the Kindle, but in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors shape the evolution of the device.

While I agree that authors will benefit from taking advantage of the technology, I think that this view is still too optimistic. Success will only come when the physical reader offers the same experience as the physical book - not just the screen, but the feel, use and the heft of it. As Klein says - books are very good at what they do - they have been perfected over several hundred years. The (clever) ability to place an e-bookmark, scribble notes on a screen or to read an e-book socially is not enough. You can do that with real books!

Without learning new techniques. Just plain better!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; reading

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; reading

Scholarly Communications Report: e-books

2008-05-09T12:11:00.000Z

The UK JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group commissioned a report, delivered recently (March 2008) by Key Perspectives Ltd on Key Concerns within the Scholarly Communications Process (Word doc). The report was asked to produce

a ‘big picture’ overview of scholarly communication at the present time, exploring with researchers and other stakeholders the four areas of concern, reporting on the findings and giving a series of practical recommendations for action.

As such it dealt mostly with e-journals and open access ("There is little evidence of real engagement of senior management with issues around new forms of scholarly communication, despite the profound changes that are taking place and the effect these may have on the institution"), but also looked at research data and e-books, and at copyright and quality/peer review. It is a substantial report, and well worth reading.

e-Books receive little attention, primarily because the author believes that, "Researchers in all disciplines like e-books and want more of them, but the model has not yet become mainstream." What the report does say is:

Procurement of e-books is not optimal yet. Researchers and teaching faculty would like many more books in electronic form, accessible via the library website, particularly textbooks which they can recommend for course reading lists knowing that all students have access to them and that copyright constraints have been dealt with. The practice has not yet caught up with the ideal, however: libraries would like to buy more books in digital form but publishers are not making them available in the ubiquitous way that would be seen as optimal.

And there is one e-book recommendation:

It is recommended that a study is carried out on the provision and procurement of e-books in different disciplines. The study should identify where the barriers to provision lie and which business models prove most appropriate and sustainable for e-monographs and e-textbooks...

I would agree with that, in fact we (IAL) nearly did exactly that for the JISC a few years ago. Hey ho.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; publishing; scholarly communication; open access

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; publishing; scholarly communication; open access

Writings about e-book publishing, 2008

2008-05-02T08:30:00.000Z

I can't remember a previous year when I have had so many titles listed in the first 4 months. Admittedly, some are blog postings - but there's some interesting debate going on, and as regular visitors will know, I only select the more discoursive or debatable blog posts!

If you need to keep up to date with what is happening in the e-book publishing and library world, this is the place for you! Writings about e-book publishing, 2008 is updated continuously - with links to articles where possible.

As you might suppose with the JISC National e-Book Observatory taking place, there will be a number of references to this (just as there was to SuperBook in 2007), and the first report (by Ian Rowlands) is now available.

>>Technorati tags: e-books; publishing; libraries; bibliography

>>IceRocket tags: e-books; publishing; libraries; bibliography

CILIP Council Briefings

2008-05-01T15:56:00.000Z

The new-style Council met this week for the 4^th time, and now a blog and forum have been set up – as promised – so that short briefing reports on the Council's current work can be posted.

The Blog - Council Matters - can be found at:

http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/council/default.aspx

The Forum (CILIP members only) can be found at:

http://communities.cilip.org.uk/forums/117/ShowForum.aspx

In due course, members will be able to read the full Minutes on the CILIP website Council pages (again, CILIP members only)

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance; Council briefings

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance; Council briefings

Quote of the Month... or Year

2008-04-17T18:05:00.001Z

From The Register:
BT's secret Phorm trials open door to corporate eavesdropping

One was subsequently told over email by an official: "It is important to remember that private companies such as ISPs are allowed to do certain things under section 3 of [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] that Law Enforcement Agencies cannot do without permission."

I have absolutely no comment.
I am still in shock.
Or am I not really surprised?

New article on e-books

2008-04-07T07:39:00.002Z

By way of reporting myself back from working in Ghana, let me report on a new article on e-book aggregators!

My colleague, Ray Lonsdale and I recently undertook a small piece of research for an article which has just appeared in the April - 7 (4) - edition of CILIP's Library + Information Update. Our aim was to bring together an overview of e-book aggregators - we didn't have the space for a full comparision, so in a 'comparative review' we have highlighted the various strengths and described approaches.

The article, Aggre-culture: what do e-book aggregators offer, appears on pages 28 - 33...

And it is clearly my month for being published as I am quoted by Tim Buckley Owen on page 1 of Gazette (Pricing and standards hamper e-book take-up) and a re-hash of my paper from the Talis Conference has appeared in Panlibus: Total Resources are not Standard Resources (p9)!

Don't forget - to keep up to date with e-book articles, visit my Writings about e-book publishing, 2008, which has a healthy set of titles for so early in the year!

Quick Update on UK ID Cards

2008-03-06T08:25:00.001Z

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, was interviewed on ID Cards a few moments ago on Radio 4's 'Today Programme' - apparently students are going to be among the first targetted groups...

We were assured that there would be no compulsion within the life of this government, but Jacqui Smith did NOT address questions on:

bad data - what happens if data are incorrectly entered, etc - how will this inconvenience individuals having their ID checked?
the sharing of data in the National Identity Register with other government agencies

She avoided responding to a question about whether it would look suspicious if you chose not to have an ID card...

... and nobody mentioned the cost!

>>Technorati tags: NIR; ID Cards; government

>>IceRocket tags: NIR; ID Cards; government

Whither IWR?

2008-03-05T08:51:00.000Z

Or, "Withered IWR"

The latest issue of Information World Review fell through my letterbox... well, actually, drifted, feather-like to the floor beneath my letterbox... and I wondered:

Where's it all gone?

I have been a reader and fan of IWR for around 30 years, during which time it has had a half-dozen or so make-overs, each resulting in a less vibrant, less relevant, less informative product. No make-over in style this time, but seemingly a new editor, and the latest issue ran to 24 small pages... of which, eight and a half are advertising, seven are longer articles, and six offer us some - not much - news.

I have to wonder if the new slimmed-down version has any value at all - news stories already published on blogs, light-weight journalism: scholarly search - good; health information - good; profile of BL University Challenge star - what? financial/business information - too short to be worthy.

And the unintentional irony of the editorial, which talked about 'information rich content'.

Is there less information industry news these days? Or are we all assumed to know it already?

My God! I'm turning into an old man - I remember in the old days when grass was greener...

It's eBook Week again!

2008-03-03T19:30:00.004Z

... and we are reminded of this by, e.g. Epublishers Weekly, in their latest post, 30 Benefits of Ebooks. And there are 30, too!

Slightly strangely, the Benefits are copyright - © 2008 by Michael Pastore... which presumably means I can only quote 3 here! Most of them are pretty obvious: searchable, portable, update-able, "defy space" (I thought "save shelf space" but it seems that this means they can be read by many people at one time - defy the time-space continuum of StarTrek, I suppose), and so on. But all worth repeating, just so libraries, readers and publishers get the message.

But I have to take issue with number 14 - e-books are free. Some may be - like the cited Project Gutenberg - but as a generalisation, it is very 'Dumas'. As in "All generalisations are dangerous, even this one." You have to pay for some e-books. Others are licensed.

And on a day that I have discovered both Hypertextopia and the First Monday article, Open access book publishing in writing studies: A case study, number 23 - Ebooks empower individuals to write and to publish... is very apposite.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; publishing

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; publishing

Democracy, sh'mockery

2008-02-24T14:51:00.000Z

Congratulations to Phil for nailing this one: "The point really is that it's not the wisdom of the crowds, it's a gentle dictatorship of the chaperones" - which is slightly more pointed than the Chris Wilson/Slate article he cited. He only noted "the wisdom of the chaperones". He, in turn was referencing a multi-authored paper (PDF), "Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie" by Ed Chi and colleagues. To be fair, Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, is supposed to have said it first; he is quoted as saying, "most of the work on Wikipedia is done by a small number of users" in 2004 [URL no longer active].

Does this affect our view of a major Web resource? Should it?

Possibly. Those of us who have been advocating its use have mostly based our arguments on the fact that errors introduced by miscreant editors are soon remedied. Is this, CAN this still be true? What if one member of the small percent of Wikipedia users responsible for about half of the site's edits (a blog post by Ed Chi) is a rogue? What level of misinformation could this produce?

Shall I continue to use Wikipedia? Yes, certainly.

But I shall take even more care to verify anything important. After all, that is what I preach when I talk about evaluating web information!

>>Technorati tags: wikipedia; evaluation; quality

>>IceRocket tags: wikipedia; evaluation; quality

British Standard For Accessible Websites.

2008-02-19T08:30:00.002Z

Headstar's E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN, Issue 257, 18 February 2008, reports that work has begun on a British Standard For Accessible Websites. The news item begins:

Work has begun on the development of a full British Standard for developing accessible websites, E-Government Bulletin's sister publication E-Access Bulletin has learned.

The move follows the publication by the British Standards Institution (BSi) in March 2006 of initial guidance known as a 'PAS' or 'Publicly Available Specification'. This was 'PAS 78: a guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites'.

A new technical committee IST/45 is now being assembled to oversee the development of a full standard, of which the chair elect is PAS78 lead author Julie Howell, former RNIB digital access campaigner and currently head of accessibility at the digital agency Fortune Cookie. Other members of the committee are likely to be drawn from organisations represented on the PAS78 steering group such as the British Computer Society; Cabinet Office; and the former Disability Rights Commission (DRC), now part of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

When finished, the British Standard will be available for purchase from the BSi at a price comparable with other standards, usually between £30 and £100. PAS78 was made available for free download by DRC, which sponsored its development and bought a distribution licence, though this type of arrangement is not possible for full standards. The PAS has been downloaded more than 54,000 times to date.

>>Technorati tags: websites; accessibility; standards

>>IceRocket tags: websites; accessibility; standards

Big Brother is SO watching you little Bro'

2008-02-14T19:34:00.000Z

Information World Review revealed today, that in an experiment which apparently started in 2006,

The UK government is to create a database that will hold the academic achievements of every citizen from the age of 14.

The system has been under trial since 2006 and will allow colleges, universities and future employers to check whether prospective candidates have the qualifications they claim.

and of course, although no one has yet said so, this data will be linked (if the system ever works) to all that other data that the government will hold on you (medical, criminal...) and to the National Identity Register.

At least it may stop all those e-mail offering me a cheap PhD in 7 days.

>>Technorati tags: personal data; government; NIR

>>IceRocket tags: personal data; government; NIR

Are ID Cards just a little taxing?

2008-01-31T14:46:00.000Z

For those of us who have been publishing views which are anti-ID Cards, there seems to be a whiff of vindication in the air. We have said (among other things) that ID Cards:

will not provide the security that is their raison d'etre
will not work
will cost individuals real money

Information World Review (IWR) - Confusion reigns over UK ID cards - Backers jump ship and memos leak - has revealed that two 'key backers' have pulled out of the project, and that finger-print data may not now be included for cost reasons. Surely without biometrics all you have is a bit of plastic with your name on? How secure is that?

Meanwhile, sister publication VNU.com has noted that:

Academics at the London School of Economics have warned that the cost of an ID card is likely to be around £300, and could soar to as much as £500.

They estimate that the project cost may rise to a "staggering £19bn" rather than the already high published figure of £5.8bn.

So while the project may be taxing the minds of ministers now, it is obviously set to tax you and I when we are obliged to spend £500 in order to own an obligatory ID Card (remember the system is supposed to be all joined up with e.g. the NHS systems so without your £500 Card you may not be eligible for a bed and your free dose of MRSA).

The IWR story also highlights a second leaked memo, which says:

"Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK ministers (e.g. passports) are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way... There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups, e.g. young people who may be applying for their first driving licence"

IWR add that if "UK citizens still refuse to sign up to the scheme the memo allows for full enforcement of use, but states that":

"universal compulsion should not be used unless absolutely necessary"

So that's alright then! I'd hate to be forced to pay.

>>Technorati tags: ID Cards; government

>>IceRocket tags: ID Cards; government

Clarion Call for Libraries

2008-01-13T15:16:00.000Z

I'm just catching up with my (probably far too many) blogs -reminded of a David Weinberger post from 2005, "No, I'm not keeping up with your blog" (if he thought that then...) - but I have just read - nearly missed it - a posting on Kindle News: Why not Rent-A-Book for Kindle, and it struck me that libraries (public, university, whatever) could be missing a chance here. It's what we do. We lend books.

Now Kindle is clearly a lost cause for us as it's linked - without question - to buying books on Amazon and doesn't seem likely to reach the UK for a decade or so, but what about the iRex iLiad (of which I have spoken before, and which is gradually getting more press over here - it even has its own blog now: i to i blog and a wikipedia entry). I often say that I can see a time when students might arrive for their library induction and ask to have their year's reading downloaded onto their reader, and that this would require some careful licensing - lending e-books on readers' readers (if you see what I mean!) would need some careful thought by publishers, aggregators and libraries... but what a chance.

e-Books are beginning to find their place in higher and further education - public libraries haven't really explored to any great extent the huge amount of e-fiction out there... and it's time they did!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; libraries; public libraries; readers; iLiad

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; libraries; public libraries; readers; iLiad

Public Libraries

2008-01-11T08:37:00.000Z

Following on from Bob's most recent blog about the other Bob's book, which he linked to CILIP and professionalism in public libraries (he did get a bit carried away in the middle with Che Guevara and James Bond(!), but the essential message that in 2008 CILIP will make professionalism a major issue is very clear)...

I wanted to point to a Panlibus post which highlights MLA Chief Executive Roy Clare, who spoke so well at Talis Insight, appeared on yesterday's edition of the Radio 4 You and Yours programme (podcast). I missed this, but the BBC had had early sight of the CIPFA annual report of the audit of UK public libraries, which mentioned the 10% reduction in income and the (much publicised in recent newspapers, e.g. The Independent, The Telegraph) 40 libraries which closed during 2007. Roy Clare was also bullish about the importance and value of public libraries, and noted that comparisons with Amazon were a "simplistic way of looking at it".

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; MLA; public libraries

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; MLA; public libraries

Oh! For Goodness Sake!

2007-11-28T19:40:00.000Z

Well, that was my first reaction when I read David Rothman's headline - E-books will take off only when they’re free, says New York Times’ Futurist in Residence - in TeleRead.

And what is a Futurist-in-Residence? The picture of Michael Rogers in TeleRead suggested we do not take this Eric Morecambe-like figure with his suit collar turned up in a rakish way very seriously, but this was quickly dispelled by his home page which describes him as:

One of the nation's leading experts on the impact of technology on business and society, he is Futurist-in-Residence for The New York Times Company, as well an interactive media pioneer, novelist and journalist.

(Jacket collar firmly down!) But - following on so soon from my last post, I was still irritated at the quote - just one of nine predictions in a Sky news report - until I read

The TeleRead take: Ad-supported books would be helpful, given many surfers’ identification of E with “free.”

It's not the wrong prognosis, it's the right prognosis given users' misplaced view that e-books should be free on the Web. I'm not sure why there is this expectation - I don't think many reasonable people would expect books to be free on Amazon, and they certainly sell a shed-load of books!

It's just another delivery mechanism; and another way of reading. That's all. You either pay to have a book delivered by mail in a few days or you pay to have it immediately on your reader. Swings and roundabouts - you take your choice.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers

if:Book or if:e-book - arguments for and against e-book readers

2007-11-28T14:47:00.000Z

Whenever the debate turns to e-book readers – and especially, of late, the Kindle – people seem to divide sharply for or against, with few concessions. By way of clarification, as a library/information consultant I am largely ‘for’ e-book readers – I can see plenty of advantages and uses, but can also see some faults – or improvements that should be made.

Siva Vaidhyanathan (according to Wikipedia) is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. … and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. Last Friday, ben vershbow posted Thoughtful comments from Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Kindle on if:Book, being the tail end of Siva's own posting on The Googlization of Everything: Amazon's new book reader destined to fail. Among other things, Siva says (referring to the Newsweek article he quotes):

And, as Levy points out in the article, publishers are hardly playing this game smartly. They have refused to lower prices for electronic distribution.

Why should they? They are still selling the same intellectual property. If the argument is that there is the high up-front cost of the e-book reader, which should mean that the content is reduced, I don’t follow the argument. I have just paid £300+ for some bookshelves… I don’t expect Waterstones to help me out! Nor have I ever seen Microsoft reduce their software prices because it has to run on an expensive computer!

OK, so there are no “transportation, warehousing, taxes, returns, and shoplifting” costs to factor in, but there are other charges – digitization, IT, servers, network charges, and stuff like that. It is neither the publishers’ job to win people over to the readers, nor to steer sales to print-on-paper – a more-or-less neutral charging policy seems reasonable to me.

All the highfallutin' talk about a new way of reading leading to a new way of writing ignores some basic hard problems: the companies involved in this effort do not share goals. And they do not respect readers or writers.

I’m not sure what that has to do with e-book readers! Clearly they are not designed for writing. They do represent a new way of reading, but there is no suggestion that they will bring about a new way of writing – that is for if:Book and the Institute for the Future of the Book. I have blogged enthusiastically about that before.

As to whether the companies involved respect readers and writers, I am not sure that is really relevant to the debate about the merits of an e-book reader either. The excerpt from the Siva post on the if:Book blog begins:

As far as the dream of textual connectivity and annotations -- making books more "Webby" -- we don't need new devices to do that

and ends:

I say we route around them and use these here devices -- personal computers -- to forge better reading and writing processes.

It's not a case of 'routing around' e-book readers; 'Webby' books and 'Webby' reading can still be done on the Web; and will include online discussions, shared note taking, social reading, and so on. Private reading can still be done privately using a reader or paper-book. You don't have to read socially. On his own blog he prefaces this - and we come to the nub of the problem - by:

It appears that Amazon has forged its service with essential yet potentially frustrating links to Sprint for wireless connectivity and the major publishers for supplying digital text in the right formats. That means digital rights management. That means consumer frustration and massive failures.

Apart from WiFi/network problems for UK residents who may want a Kindle, again, I don’t see the problem. Surely if Amazon and publishers are to respect writers, they do need to look after their rights – digital or real – in order that they may earn them their Royalties. And if they are to respect readers, isn’t it only fair that paper-based readers are not disadvantaged by having to pay more? I accept that DRM may – at present – prevent the giving, lending or swapping onto other family-member readers, and that this is a pain, but – despite the amount of time e-books have been around – publishers, readers, libraries, distributors, bookshops and bloggers are still coming to terms with them, and working to get the model right.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; reading; Amazon; Kindle

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; reading; Amazon; Kindle

An answer to the Google Book Search conundrum?

2007-11-28T13:36:00.000Z

Frank Pasquale posted Conditions for the Digital Library of Alexandria on his blog a few days ago - it is a considered response to Google (and other) major digitisation projects.

His thesis is that, given that there are several of these major projects dividing up the world's libraries between them, and given that the terms tend to grant to the library whose stock is being digitised access only to their own books ("Those restrictive terms foreshadow potential future restrictions on and tiering of their book search services. "), a solution to the ongoing copyright/fair dealing law cases might be to accept the fair dealing argument if - and only if - the terms grant access to the whole collection.

Given the diciness of the fair use case for projects like Google Book Search, courts should condition the legality of such archiving of copyrighted content on universal access to the contents of the resulting database. Landmark cases like Sony v. Universal have set a precedent for taking such broad public interests into account in the course of copyright litigation. Given the importance of “commerciality” in the first of the four fair use factors, suspicion of tiered access could also be figured into that prong of the test. A more ambitious (if less likely) solution would require Congress to set such terms in a legislative settlement of the issue.

The full post sets out the complete argument but all of which seems quite sensible to me. I expect there are still several years of legal debate to go, but this just might be a light at the end of the tunnel!

>>Technorati tags: Google; digitization

>>IceRocket tags: Google; digitization

Comparison of e-Book readers

2007-11-27T13:22:00.000Z

Thanks to Ben for pointing this out, over on Wired's blog: E-Book Readers At A Glance - it says "Old crappy ones not included", but provides a useful quick comparison by size, weight, file types, storage capacity, DRM, battery life, price and special features.

Included are the Amazon Kindle; HanLin eReader v3; Sony Reader PRS-505; iRex iLiad; Booken Cybook Gen3; Seiko Epson (no details, not yet out); Fujitsu (no details, not yet out); and the NUUT NO601 (possibly Korea only).

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers

Does anyone really read in the bath?

2007-11-23T19:37:00.000Z

or: "The most amazing thing about e-book readers"

... is?

Yes, you've guessed it - the scared, defensive attitudes of reviewers, almost all of whom say or write "... but would you want to read it in the bath?"

What?!!

Listen.

No one is suggesting that e-book readers will replace paper books. Now, or soon, or ever! No one wants to read them in the bath. No one thinks that they are better than - or even as good as - paper books. No one thinks that bookshelves are doomed to end up on the bonfire. Libraries are not dead.

e-Book readers are simply another tool of the digital age. Like the iPod. Another way to listen to music; to carry a lot of music around with you. Another way to carry books (well, a small library, actually) around with you... in what is really a very accessible, readable, usable, useful format.

e-Book readers - Amazon's Kindle, for example - can hold a library of around 200 titles (as well as personal documents) in a format that can be easily used, is VERY portable, and allows the kind of access that computers usually offer - you can search across the entire library, for example, and take notes, and book mark, and highlight text. This is a 'Wow!' product in a pocket!

Not as touchy-feely as a book: no library-old-paper smell, no beautiful bindings, no beautiful fonts, no holding lovingly... that still remains in the the still-extant paper book. THIS is something else. Consider, for example, students at the beginning of their year loading all that year's readings onto their personal reader. Consider arriving in your public library and collecting a month's readings. One reviewer (Western Mail, 21 November) wrote "But I can't see people using them to store, say, reference books." Short sighted, or what? Of course they will! And they will be able to search for an answer across the whole collection, and read it, in seconds.

You may gather, I'm a convert! But that is because I have actually used one! Not a Kindle, but the similarly-spec'd but more pricey iLiad from iRex. The eInk screen does deliver a good and non-tiring reading experience. It is a device worth owning, although I have no intention of throwing out all my library of real books. It does one job - particularly when I'm travelling, and they do another.

The best description of the Kindle can be found on the Amazon site, read it and lust after a Kindle! A pity then that no launch date has been announced for the UK! And one reason for this lies in the wireless puchase of new titles, which does not require a linked PC and offers one-minute downloads of purchased titles:

Wireless Access with Whispernet™
Whispernet utilizes Amazon's optimized technology plus Sprint's national high-speed (EVDO) data network to enable you to wirelessly search, discover, download, and read content on the go.
Unlike WiFi, you don't have to find a hotspot. Amazon pays for Kindle's wireless connectivity so you will never see a monthly wireless bill for shopping the Kindle Store. There is no wireless setup—you are ready to shop, purchase and read right out of the box.
Check Wireless Coverage

Yes - national - as in US-national. And if you look at the map, even that is pretty patchy!

So - here in the UK - get real, stop worrying, and hope you can get your hands on one soon! Don't throw out the books, but do think of the possibilities.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; Amazon; Kindle; eInk; iLiad

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; Amazon; Kindle; eInk; iLiad

Kindling enthusiasm: the Amazon reader

2007-11-22T13:50:00.000Z

Walt at Random is known for its incisive comment - today's post, Food pills and the Kindle, notes that while thankful for many things,

I’m also thankful that I’m not really writing about ebooks and ebook devices these days. ‘Cause then, you know, I’d probably want to write something about the Kindle (do you really need a link?).

and then enjoys himself commenting on the commenting on the Kindle! Meanwhile, if:book in of razors and blades, also borrows from others (as do I... and as will we all in the UK, if the Kindle doesn't get here soon!). There is concern in some quarters that Amazon haven't gone down the standards route and embraced .epub [the International Digital Publishing Forum's new standard format] -but why should they? It is a standard in name only and Amazon surely don't need its imprimatur with c.90,000 titles already available.

TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home has excerpts from some of the many US Kindle owner’s reports - naturally there are happy owners and some not-so-happy owners: there are now 547 customer reviews (so sales can't be too bad despite what some regard as a high price!) on the Amazon page... and I'm not going to summarise them here! There is also a response to the posting I had a go at in my last Kindle post about the failure of Kindle meaning the failure of e-books: Kindle failure would mean biz failure of obnoxious DRM lockups, Evan—not E-BOOK failure.

Oh, and there is also a Wikipedia page already! But of course there is.

And if Amazon is reading this, what about the UK market???

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; Amazon; Kindle

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; Amazon; Kindle

If you are the Government...

2007-11-22T08:36:00.000Z

... it seems that 'might is right' - of course, this isn't news, but in the light of the HMRC embarrassment, it is interesting to see just how far tunnel vision and supreme confidence in your actions (which might also be seen as ignorance and arrogance) can take you. (Obviously the ultimate answer is 'to war' but lets not go down that route now.)

Thanks to The Open Rights Group for their post yesterday: HMRC fiasco: Government “not interested” in expert warnings, which reported on Professor Ross Anderson's (UK computer security expert and Chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research) appearance on Newsnight . ORG say:

He labelled the fiasco “an accident waiting to happen”, and calmly, methodically, indicted the Government for brushing aside the advice of security experts who have been warning them against the centralised, top-down approach they have been taking to electronic government

... and go on to provide the details.

I seem to remember that ID cards and the NIR have attracted a few negative official reports as well. Isn't it time that the government heeded professional advice?

>>Technorati tags: HMRC; government

>>IceRocket tags: HMRC; government

e-Book Reader in the news

2007-11-19T19:34:00.000Z

Slightly delayed (just to keep us guessing!), but now on nearly every blog, Amazon's offering - the Kindle - is set to launch on Monday (and, I presume, in the UK shortly after that...).

TeleRead has several offerings: Amazon-sized ego? Kindle to shun .epub? And, yes, the ugly box is the FINAL design (IS it that ugly? Not sure it needs the keyboard, but...); PDF capabilities in Kindle: Newsweek puff job reveals more details (yes the Newsweek article IS worth reading - it extends to 7 pages and moves on to discuss more than the Kindle) and - again - Huh? The Kindle e-reader ISN’T ugly? So says Steve Levy, author of Newsweek puff piece—in response to my Publishers Weekly blog. Print is Dead offers Amazon’s Next of Kindle: new eBook device debuts and if:Book offers amazon kindle due out monday and another reference to the Newsweek article: newsweek covers the future of reading (as does iLibrarian: Amazon’s E-Book Reader). Even Talis' panlibus is a little bit excited with Amazon Kindle book reader interest, and (like me!) DigitalKoans has brought some of this together at Light My Fire? Amazon's Kindle E-Book Reader Launched. And from Ellen Hage: Ugly is the new cute, while Joe Wikert (A Hands-On Review of Amazon's Kindle) points to a review from someone who has a Kindle. Verdict: this is the first generation product - promising, but...

I think Amazon are really going to have to produce a Kindle or two in the UK!

TeleRead also has an interesting twist - E-books to go ’straight to the deadpool’ if Amazon Kindle fails? - which seems to be placing just a little more power to Amazon's elbow than might be reasonable. There is no doubt that Amazon weild a lot of power, but there are some other big players in the e-book market - certainly, outside of the personal user market, and selling to libraries, but aggregators such as NetLibrary have captured a fair share of the market while the reference collections of Oxford Reference Online, Credo Reference and Knovel are very attractive to libraries too.

My view of the Kindle - judged from what I have read (I don't have one yet!) - is that it is a pretty good product with a lot going for it. Amazon have done their research and seem to have got it more or less right (keyboard aside) - the Kindle is reported to:

carry up to 200 books
have a good eInk screen and a reasonable battery life
need no PC in order to download e-books
accept user files loaded easily via a private e-mail
search across all e-books
take notes
download quickly...

and so on.

But this is a fast-moving area. Even before the Kindle is launched, Seiko Epson are announcing a very smart - and light - new product. Granted it is only at the display stage, but it's not going to be long - I guess - before we have another e-book reader on the market.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; Amazon; Kindle; eInk

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; Amazon; Kindle; eInk

CILIP: new governance - new Council

2007-11-12T20:03:00.000Z

Those of you who have followed the story over the last two years, can at last find a resolution as CILIP moves into an era of new governance. During the remainder of November, members are asked to vote for 12 of the 14 nominated prospective Councillors who will take up their posts on January 1st 2008. The 14 possible Trustees are:

Chris Armstrong
Judy Broady-Preston
Paul Clarke
Veronica Fraser
Isabel Hood
Ayub Khan
Dion Lindsay
Nigel Macartney
Liz MacLachlan
Caroline Moss-Gibbons
Diana Nutting
Caroline Oades
Bruce Royan
Edwina Smart

and their Manifestos and supporting statements from their nominators are
all at

http://www.cilip.org.uk/... /nominations/

Furthermore, all the candidates are involved in a special debate within the 'CILIP - the organisation' forum, at:

http://communities.cilip.org.uk/forums/thread/7287.aspx

This is your chance to find out about the candidates, raise issues, and ask them questions.

As Bruce Royan said in LIS-Profession, Do get involved - and especially - do vote!!

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance

Electronic paper and e-book readers

2007-11-12T19:43:00.000Z

Just a little bit slow in catching up with this ... but I was away last week at the Talis Insight Conference in Birmingham, of which, more later.

Have you ever wondered what makes the latest generation of e-book readers different from earlier versions? Well, apart from increased storage capacity that coul doffer up to 200 titles in a device the size of a paperback book... it's the e-paper / e-ink technology that offers readers book pages that come close - quite close, really - to a print-on-paper reading experience. And what does that mean? Well, iRex - makers of the iLiad - explain all in their blog: What makes our electronic paper displays different?

To understand the difference we first need to take a closer look at the different components of an EPD and for simplicity sake we will separate the following components...

EPD? That's electronic paper display to you and me! A useful read (in fact, the iRex blog is always worth watching) for anyone pondering on the possibilities of e-book readers.

As it happens, e-books have been in the news quite a bit over the last few days, and the latest article to be added to the IAL bibliography, Writings about e-book publishing, 2007, is one by Monica Landoni and colleague on e-books in public libraries.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; public libraries; eInk; e-paper

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; public libraries; eInk; e-paper

Is this how we'll read soon?

2007-10-30T08:12:00.000Z

Recently, I noted that I thought some of the social e-books sites (such as The Institute for the Future of the Book's 'Gamer Theory' e-book site) are more about the writing process than the reading of a published book.

Now I have discovered (thanks to an if:book post, unbound reader) that another organisation has been working on an e-book model which is both ALL about reading and about reading socially. The Book Glutton blog, Frontmatters, has announced the beta version of Book Glutton with a short 'How it Works' YouTube video. And very impressive it looks too... at a glance, I would suggest that they have got at least some of the visual semiotics right.

The Unbound Reader... has a web-based format where users can read and discuss the book right inside the text... It also has shared annotations, so people can leave a comment on any paragraph and other readers can respond.

Centre-screen is a facsimile book page with simple and straightforward tools for navigation from book section to section or from page to page; to left and right of the page are slide-out bars which transform into a discussion tool linked to the page being read (left) and a note taker (right). You can share your notes or have your discussion with anyone and everyone reading or with friends or groups. A group could consist of your class mates; a reading group; or strangers brought together by th ebook and a particular interest. Book Glutton note that they are:

working to facilitate adoption of on-line reading. Book design is an important aspect of the reader, and it incorporates design elements, like dynamic dropcaps. Moreover, the works presented in the catalog are standards-based (BookGlutton is an early adopter of the International Digital Publishing Forum's .epub format for ebooks), and allows users to download a copy of anything they upload in this format for use elsewhere.

I think we might be getting there! Watch the video! This is - assuming that it makes it out of beta - certainly something to watch. It seems to be easy to use and rich in user tools that match the way the Google-/Facebook-generation work on the web. My only adverse comment so far is the need to scroll within each page.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; reading; communities; Book Glutton

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; reading; communities; Book Glutton

Prime Minister and the private sector non sequitur

2007-10-29T23:25:00.000Z

IWR reported today on Gordon Brown's "talks tough on data sharing" - behind his curious non-sequitur:

"We should not fear the advent of the information age, and it should not lead us to abandon or fear for our values,"

lay some good news (possibly). Only half a dozen years after a consultancy exercise about the sharing of public data, which came with the message that while we would be listened to, it was unlikely that anything we said would make a jot of difference, it seems that there may be hope that our data (as in: data ABOUT us) could be used and stored responsibility... perhaps even applying the Data Protection Act (although the prime minister's talk didn't seem to go quite that far):

The prime minister called for a review on the way data is held in the public and private spheres.

"I believe we need a wider debate across the public and private sectors about the right form of independent oversight and parliamentary scrutiny and safeguards," he said.

IWR went on:

Parliamentary legislation must draw on British tradition to ensure data protection for all citizens, according to Brown.

"It is the British way to insist that we do all we can to protect individual citizens and their rights," he stated.

Which should mean that we have the right to see what data is held about us, to ensure that it is correct and accurate, and to insist that errors are corrected. I suspect that we shall not have the right to do so freely, and I bet getting errors corrected is easier said than done, but - let's not be unduly cynical - it's a step in the right direction!

>>Technorati tags: personal information; government; data protection; NIR

>>IceRocket tags: personal information; government; data protection; NIR

Whither bookness

2007-10-26T10:32:00.000Z

The Kathleen Fitzpatrick article I referred to in my last posting, talks about "the tyranny of the book" (Stallybrass) and "bookness" - her word for what I have called 'book-like'. She notes:

Stallybrass suggested, almost as an aside, that the book is a production, finally, of the binder. This is a point I’d like to dwell on a bit, as it suggests that the bookness of the book derives less from its material composition — ink-on-paper — than from its organization, the sequenced, bound, and cut leaves... Turning our material focus from print to binding as the source of bookness holds significant implications for scholars working on new, electronic modes of textuality, and in particular, on the future of the book. For if this is the case — that the formal properties of the book that have the greatest impact on our reading experience are derived not from print, but rather from the codex — one might suggest that researchers working on new ways of transforming ink-on-paper to pixels-on-screens may be working on the wrong problem, or at least the wrong aspect of a knottier problem than it has at moments appeared.

The problem, in other words, may not be one that is material, about the differing properties of bit versus atom, but instead structural, organizational.

Thus far, I would agree. But Stallybrass went on to suggest that the primary focus is the page - an idea that would seem to suggest that textual scholars (and readers) are left with a series of dis-jointed extracts without discoursive continuity. I have argued (Armstrong, JOLIS, 2008) that the content is the primary element of a book, as opposed to any of its physical (or virtual) properties.

But what makes something book-like; wherein lies its bookness? It is not a question easily answered, so I am looking for responses here. Please respond with a comment and a view - I'll try and bring them together in a future post.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; books; reading

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; books; reading

Scrolling the Scroll: e-Books beyond 2007

2007-10-25T15:43:00.000Z

Following on from my last posting on the definition of e-books, and the appropriateness of my term ‘book-like’, I was struck by a sentence in an article by Kathleen Fitzpatrick: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts. She wrote,

[Peter] Stallybrass notes the irony in digital textuality’s regression from the kinds of manipulation that the codex made possible, reimposing the limitations of the scroll on our reading practices.

It is not the first time that I have noted that so-called added-value features, much-vaunted by publishers, struggle to maintain the functionality of print-on-paper books.

The 600-year old book model has served us very well, but that does not mean that its look-and-feel should be replicated in some way on the screen: this simply leads to something that is neither fish nor fowl. The model may be so familiar that we do not need instructions in its use, but copy that model to the screen and – instantly – the visual clues and automatic responses are lost. Change it to a web page and the bookness has gone!

When it passes from the codex to the monitor screen the ‘same’ text is no longer truly the same because the new formal mechanisms that deliver it to the reader modify the conditions of its reception and its comprehension (Chartier, quoted by Fitzpatrick)

Books… moved within a set of social and communal structures that greatly affected their reception and comprehension

Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggests another model – the CommentPress of McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY, for example, and we are beginning to get to a model that is fit for purpose – except that I would argue that the purpose is about the writing process rather than the reading of a published book. Web 2.0 theory would suggest that today’s readers want participation, want to be able to write as well as read, want the social networking, but I am not sure that this is true when they come to reading a novel, a textbook or a scholarly monograph – at least, not at the level offered by CommentPress.

In my last posting I pointed readers to the visual de-constructed text model also offered for Wark’s work: if a screen facsimile of a book offers too few visual clues, this certainly leaves the user/reader floundering. It may work for textual analysis, but it does not lend itself to any greater understanding or deeper reading; users would not emerge with a holistic view of the book or any of its (quite short) chapters.

Unable to propose a better model than a PDF-like facsimile of the printed page, or CommentPress – described as “one example of a fruitful avenue of development” – I sense that the e-book, if it is to be truly successful must move on; it is still a technology in its infancy, something on the verge of a great development.

Most existing books – and there are a lot of them – a designed to be read laterally. What can we add in the transition to e-book? Kathleen Fitzpatrick has little praise for hypertext, but to follow Minsky’s lead ("Can you imagine that they used to have libraries where the books didn't talk to each other?”), perhaps – along with some formatting that fits whole pages on a screen without scrolling, the task is to link concepts and terms both in-book and cross-library so that readers could, for example, change viewpoint within a book and read all of one character’s action contiguously without the other characters’ interruptions, while – at the same time – automatically picking up textual analysis or word meanings from other books. All of which is to ignore the author’s original intent, of course!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; reading

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; reading

What will a book be? What CAN a book be?

2007-10-22T16:05:00.000Z

In an upcoming article (Journal of Librarianship and Information Scicence, 2008), I have suggested a "definitive definition" of the term e-book. Mostly because I encounter so many misunderstandings, but also because there seems to be no accepted definition. My definition is:

Any content that is recognisably ‘book-like’, regardless of size, origin or composition, but excluding serial publications, made available electronically for reference or reading on any device (handheld or desk-bound) that includes a screen.

While reading an entry - ted nelson is still on the job - in if:book, I had pause to wonder whether that phrase of mine, "book-like" was such a good idea, whether it would withstand the tests of time.

Ted Nelson's ideas are essential to engage with if we're thinking seriously about how we compose and read using computers. His central thesis (which is strangely echoed by Gary Frost's comments on this blog) is that from Xerox PARC on, electronic documents have been designed to mimic their paper antecedents. In Nelson's view, this is where everything went wrong: electronic documents could and should behave entirely differently from paper ones.

Of course, the final suggestion is mildly contentious - because paper books have proved very good at what they do: transferring information from the writer or writers to the readers. And, as yet, we have no way of knowing whether a new-model book - whether an e-book which mimics its paper parent or something completely new like a 3-D virtual model of a text can even approach the same level of success. The current SuperBook and JISC e-Book Observatory projects at UCL are designed to discover just this for this generation of e-books.

The if:book entry goes on to show some images of Ted Nelson's ideas, and one of the links in the right-hand column takes you to a part of its 'Gamer Theory' e-book site, which in turn leads to TextArc:

by W. Bradford Paley. A TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning.

If you click the "Open TextArc in a window (recommended)" an interactive Java representation of the Gamer Theory book opens. The big questions are:

Do you get more from this than from reading straight text?
Is this what books should aspire to?

and perhaps, "Is your computer screen big enough?" My view - at this particular point in time - is that we have a long way to go before books will be like this; before users - strike that, I meant readers - will accept that kind of communication. It's very exciting; and my view, also, is that the e-book should evolve into something on the screen that does more than ape (often badly) a printed book, but there is a lot of work to be done before such virtual books or plastic texts become common place. Much of it will be to do with visual semiotics and visual rhetoric.

And so - for now and for the near future - I think that those who want a definition for 'e-book' can safely accept the term 'book-like', and know what they (and I) mean!

>>Technorati tags: e-books; definition

>>IceRocket tags: e-books; definition

Aberystwyth University news

2007-10-22T15:56:00.000Z

Since I gained my degree at the College of Librarianship Wales (CLW), that institution has become the Department of Library and Information Studies and the Department of Information Studies of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Now, even that staid organisation has changed! As Aber News Online, says:

Henceforth The University of Wales Aberystwyth will be known as Aberystwyth University (Prifysgol Aberystwyth in Welsh). The new name and corporate identity are formally launched today, 1st October 2007.

The Privy Council has approved Aberystwyth University’s new charter and statutes which includes powers to award its own degrees.

Professor Noel Lloyd, Vice Chancellor of Aberystwyth University said: “The name change signifies a hugely important milestone in the University’s distinguished history. It demonstrates our ambition and our commitment to continuing to provide a high quality experience for students and staff. This is clearly demonstrated by Aberystwyth’s position as one of the top ten UK universities in the 2007 National Student Satisfaction Survey.”

>>Technorati tags: universities; Aberystwyth

>>IceRocket tags: universities; Aberystwyth

Accessibility Ultimatum Proposed for UK Government Websites

2007-10-22T13:04:00.000Z

The e-Government Bulletin - ISSUE 249, 17 October 2007, and blog reports [quoted here in full]:

Government websites may be stripped of their 'gov.uk' domain names if they fail to meet tough new standards of accessibility to web users with disabilities, according to confidential draft proposals seen by E-Government Bulletin.

The guidelines, entitled 'Delivering inclusive websites: user-centred accessibility', are being drafted by the Central Office of Information, the Whitehall agency which assists public bodies with communications campaigns.

If approved, they would mean that existing government sites would have until December 2008 to meet the 'AA' standard set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. All new sites would have to confirm immediately.
"Any new site approved by the Cabinet Sub-Committee on Public Engagement and the Delivery of Service.must conform to these guidelines from the point of publication," the draft guidelines state. "Continuing standalone sites must achieve this level of accessibility by December 2008. Websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names, as set out in Naming and Registering Websites."

Government will have a mountain to climb in order to comply with these standards, according to the best available evidence. No government websites achieved the 'AA' standard, according to the most comprehensive research in this area, published by the Cabinet Office in 2005 as part of the UK Presidency of the EU. Just 3 per cent of government websites in the EU reached the minimum 'A' standard (http://fastlink.headstar.com/coi2)

The CoI document includes guidance on how to achieve the required standards when commissioning new websites, such as how to check compliance with WCAG; and how to involve people with disabilities in planning and testing the website. Many of the essential elements are set out in the Publicly Available Specification (PAS 78:2006) 'Guide To Good Practice In Commissioning Accessible Website,' says CoI (http://fastlink.headstar.com/pas3).

However, the CoI acknowledges that modifying existing websites to improve their accessibility will be more difficult and expensive.

>>Technorati tags: websites; government; W3C

>>IceRocket tags: websites; government; W3C

The Wiley View of e-books

2007-10-15T18:34:00.000Z

Following on from my last post, The Bookseller has just published "Wiley: publishers must push e-books" by Information World Review journalist, Mark Chillingworth. The article begins:

Publishers must help to drive consumer adoption of e-book readers from the likes of Sony and iRex, according to John Wiley chairman Peter Wiley and his colleague, Stephen Smith, senior vice-president for Europe and international development at Wiley.
Wiley, speaking to The Bookseller Daily, predicted the demise of printed textbooks in higher education—but was bullish about their future as digital editions. Smith said, "Textbooks will be digital, but I'm not sure when."

As was hinted at in the previous post, Wiley sees the success of e-text books and e-book readers as intertwined - each will aid the success of the other. Wiley also believes that publishers have a role in driving forward e-books: the company has already been "educating the educators in the US". Online textbooks - e-books - can offer so much more than a print equivalent and while e-book readers will mean growth for textbooks, "technology will bring the price of textbooks down."

The fact that Wiley is re-assessing its business model for textbooks has to be good news for students and educators, not to mention the educators' libraries.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; publishers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; publishers

Frankfurt - Publishers - e-Books - e-Book Readers

2007-10-14T14:47:00.000Z

Information World Review - in a further report from the Frankfurt Book Fair - reports that Wiley Chairman Peter Wiley and Stephen Smith, Wiley senior VP for Europe & International Development, are claiming that textbooks will soon be available digitally and that publishers will "drive the adoption of e-book readers". Stephen Smith noted that e-Book Readers are the key to the success of electronic text books. Is this textbooks on every student's personal reader (something I've been forecasting for a while)?

"We may have to try to influence the tipping point of eBook readers," Smith said. "The ability of government and teachers to keep pace with technology is difficult. Anything that comes along to help learning is critical, and it is important that publishers play a part."

Meanwhile TeleRead notes that 44% of 'biz pros' (whatever they are?!) surveyed at Frankfurt

identified the use of e-books as a key area of growth for the industry.

So that's pretty good news from Frankfurt for the e-book industry. The latest title added to my Writings about e-book publishing, 2007 is Terje Hillesund's recent First Monday article. I have always been a 'fan' of his pieces on e-books and, as this one, in which he takes apart John Thompson's Books in the Digital Age: The transformation of academic and higher publishing in Britain and the United States - principally because of its mistaken suggestion that the e-book industry is going nowhere despite the great expectations of the 1990s, supports both my own view... AND NOW the view from Frankfurt, I cannot but recommend it too.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; publishers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; publishers

e-Book Reader news from Frankfurt

2007-10-11T22:28:00.000Z

The iwr Blog reported that e-book readers are big news at the Frankfurt Book Fair. While the expected Amazon and Sony were "conspiquous in their absence", there was much talk about e-book readers. According to iwr, Wiley hinted that they and other specialist publishers may get involved in driving the adoption of e-Book readers forward.

iRex Technologies were there with the iLiad... but where was Amazon's Kindle?

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers

Home Office Minister responsible for Identity adds more power to her arm

2007-10-11T15:34:00.000Z

And yes that mouthful really is Home Office Minister Meg Hillier's full title.

This blog has constantly warned against the dangers of ID Cards with biometrics, the National Identity Register (NIR) and the sharing of data by government departments. Now you know why!

The Register, today in an article entitled "UK ID card service mounts birth, marriage, death landgrab: A big hello to whole-life logging" announced that:

The UK Identity & Passport Service (IPS) has staged an identity landgrab on birth, marriage and death records. From April 2008 the General Register Office, which is responsible for recording these matters and is currently a directorate of the Office of National Statistics, is to become part of IPS, meaning that IPS will be logging you from the moment you're born until the moment you die.
The logic of the move is chilling. The UK ID card scheme itself only requires registration for an ID card from age 16...

but whole-life records - as well as biometrics - will all be accessible to, and looked after by, one directorate. The neat government spin is that

"In order to... fully realise the benefits of combining registration of life events in England and Wales and the issuing of passports, it is sensible that the IPS and GRO should be part of the same organisation"

which makes no reference to the negative (well, it wouldn't would it?) aspects. Like mis-matches, or the increased and increasing chances of error migration that go with sharing data. Now - or at least from early next year - we shall all be tracked from birth to death (those of us already born find ourselves that one small step ahead of the system!), and I wonder how long it will be before those nice little subcutaneous RFID tags they use for pets cross the Minister's mind?

>>Technorati tags: NIR; IDcards; personal information; biometric data; passports

>>IceRocket tags: NIR; IDcards; personal information; biometric data; passports

iNG in minority over DNA database

2007-09-25T07:21:00.000Z

BBC's Panorama dealt with the DNA database yesterday and this post was intended to be simply a link to the programme -

Give us your DNA: Someone is added to the UK DNA database every minute, including people who have not been charged with any offence.

And to note that the British database is larger by an order of magnitude than any other in the world - I think it is around 100 times larger (by percentage of the population) than its US equivalent. But I was surprised to learn that two-thirds of the British public is in favour of the project, which stores the DNA of the innocent as well as that of criminals.

A specially commissioned opinion poll for Panorama has revealed that two thirds of people would be in favour of a national DNA database. Sixty-six percent of those questioned by ICM said they would approve of a new law requiring all adults to give a sample of their DNA to help with the prevention and detection of crime.

>>Technorati tags: DNA; personal information

>>IceRocket tags: DNA; personal information

New social book

2007-09-25T06:57:00.000Z

A new social e-book - The Googlization of Everything by Siva Vaidhyanathan - has been announced. A social book is one in which society - you and I - take part in the writing; in this case it is being developed on a blog. It is the latest project of The Institute for the Future of the Book:

This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google's ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?

Writing a book is normally a slow process, arguably the social interaction will slow the process down, and one has to wonder whether this is such a book of the moment that its immediacy will be lost over an overly protracted writing process. But it is an experiment. The blog begins:

Hi. Welcome to my new book. Well, it’s not a book yet. In fact, it will not be a real book for a long time... I have never tried to write a book this way. Few have. Writing has been a lonely, selfish pursuit for my (sic) so far... As I compose bits and pieces of work, I will post them here. They might be very brief bits. They might never make it into the manuscript. But they will be up here for you to rip up or smooth over.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; social books; blogs; Google

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; social books; blogs; Google

e-Book reader (iLiad) news

2007-09-24T18:41:00.000Z

iRex Technologies has news of advances (both financial and publishing) for its powerful e-book reader, the iLiad. iRex has secured funding - to the tune of € 6M, which will be used to"acceleration of the Company's business, R&D and the development of the next generation product." We can presumably look forward to Visplex screens, improved software and power management, and a greater range of available titles.

At the same time, iRex has signed a contract with Les Echos (a major French business newspaper) which means that Les Echos will be the first newspaper published using e-Ink. Not just e-books but e-newspapers!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; iLiad

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; iLiad

Books (and magazines) as e-editions

2007-09-24T07:45:00.000Z

Exact Editions has offered e-magazines, or electronic versions of print magazines since early 2006; as they say:

Exact Editions is bringing magazines into the digital age. It turns out that if you treat them right, magazines work fine on the web pretty much exactly the way they are. This means that we can read a magazine as a sequence of web pages, or we can browse it rapidly by viewing a section of 16 pages in a browse mode, individual web pages can be bookmarked or referenced, and we can print out a page if it particularly interests us or we want to take a recipe into the kitchen.

As a part of the process, they also add value. Visit their website and you can view trial issues of any of the titles they handle or subscribe for regular monthly issues of one or more titles.

Now, they have moved into the book arena - new titles from Berkshire Publishing are being made available, complete, for a short period after their launch. Exact Editions will work work as a promotional service for book publishers and Berkshire is their first customisation. Berkshire Exact Editions inlcude just four titles, but these include two multi-volume works Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport and Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History - over 2,000 pages), as well as Global Perspectives on the United States and the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports). While they are available, the entire text is also searchable.

There are several interesting aspects to this. Firstly, this is an experiment in promotion: how does that work? Exact Editions has in a short period made a name for itself as a magazine e-publisher, but why will their site produce more sales than the publisher's own? They (and Berkshire!) are going to have to work hard to drive traffic to the new site. Secondly, this is an experiment in open access. The WHOLE text of the book is available, FREE for reading and research. How can that improve sales? But, writers who have used the web in this way have for some time found that far from reducing sales (because readers can read it for free on the web), it has tended to increase sales (presumably because those readers still crave a physical book).

This is going to prove interesting: not the least, because - if it works - other publishers may go down the same route and make whole books available as loss leaders or for promotion. A whole new concept - the transitory e-book - has arrived. Imagine the problems of bibliographical control!

>>Technorati tags: open access; ebooks; publishers

>>IceRocket tags: open access; ebooks; publishers

The Open Access Debate Revisited

2007-09-21T07:49:00.000Z

I have always worried about the logic behind the push for open access repositories, while supporting the principle. Clearly, it is desirable to have access to scholarly literature either free or at a reasonable price, and clearly this can be achieved through institutional or subject repositories. Less clear is whether this will bring down (as has been suggested in the past) the price of journals, or whether these repositories are, or will become, a useful and seriously-used resource.

My worries centred (and centre) on version control and authority - the two fundamental and incontrovertible benefits of formal, journal-based, scholarly publishing. To have an article published in a peer-review and possibly ISI-badged journal is to mark it as worthy, meritorious and accepted by the author's peers; at the same time, it becomes - without question - the copy of record: it IS the published version, and thus the version to which others refer and which they cite. Because multiple versions can be deposited in multiple repositories, open access poses problems; the publisher's imprimatur is missing - or at least, obscure. Clearly, as repositories bed down, these issues can be assessed and dealt with, and the JISC already have underway a project to examine the issues around version control, although if the methodology posted on the JISC website is the result, it is too simplistic.

DigitalKoans reported that

The leaked text of Eric Dezenhall's anti-open-access proposal to the Association of American Publishers has been made available as part of a NewScientist article by Jim Giles, who broke the Dezenhall story in January.

... and it is not surprising that he makes the same points, I suppose - the publishing industry genuinely adds value in the production of scientific journals; "peer-reviewed journals are the only reliable source for sound science."

He goes on to list strategies and six tactics for - it is not quite clear, but probably a coalition against open access. An interesting read, and one of which all those who support open access should be aware.

>>Technorati tags: open access; repositories

>>IceRocket tags: open access; repositories

Should your DNA be archived for ever?

2007-09-18T21:30:00.000Z

The Open Rights Group (ORG) and Sky News both reports calls from "Boffins" (Sky News) or - more precisely, "the Nuffield Council on Bioethics" for a change in the law to stop the police keeping DNA samples from innocent people. As ORG says,

The authors emphasised balancing ethical values, such as liberty, autonomy and privacy, against the database’s benefits to law-enforcement. The headlines echo our own submission to the review:
Only people convicted of a crime should be permanently recorded, except those charged with serious violent or sexual offences.
Police should not be given powers to sample and store DNA, without consent, from people arrested for ‘non-recordable’ offences.
Those who volunteer their DNA (e.g. witnesses) should be able to request - without providing a reason - the removal of their DNA.
Unless there is a good reason to preserve it, children’s DNA should be removed from the NDNAD on request.
Lawyers and juries should be given more help to understand the meaning of DNA evidence.
Familial searching should not be practiced unless it is necessary and proportionate.
Ethnic inferences should not be part of routine procedure.
The NDNAD should have an independent ethics and governance framework.
The regulation of all forensic databases, including oversight of research and other access requests, should be given statutory basis.

While Nuffield accept that the database fulfills a valuable function in the fight against crime, they believe that only the DNA from the convicted should be archived. Others feel that their report does not go far enough:

Terri Dowty (ARCH) argued that children must be given the right to exclude their own DNA from the register, rather than depending on their - not always reliable - guardians and the courts to aid in the removal of their genetic make-up. Helen Wallace (Genewatch) argued, in line with the Human Genetics Commission, against costly preservation of samples once the necessary profiles are extracted.

The Home Office is evaluating the situation and will pronounce on the issue in December 2007.

>>Technorati tags: DNA; government; personal information

>>IceRocket tags: DNA; government; personal information

And another...

2007-09-18T21:07:00.000Z

As Tech From an E-booker's Viewpoint says, "When it rains it pours." I suppose that it suggests that someone has faith in the e-book marketplace, despite the continuous negative thoughts from the publishers and the writers. Another e-book reader has been announced.

By the end of the year there will be another E-ink device on the block. It is Jinke’s Hanlin V9 .This reader will have a flexible plastic screen measuring 10 inches. Formats supported include PDF, DOC, HTML, TXT, and CHM.

This is the Chinese offering, coming from Tianjin Jinke Electronics. No touch screen; no WiFi; the V9 is the fourth in the family (V3, V8, V2b) and the one with the largest screen -

We have successfully designed more than 20 model products for customers in the field of e-book reader product.

Release date for this model is 31 December 2007, and it looks as if a further model with a touch-screen will be available sometime after that date.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers

e-Book Readers

2007-09-18T07:23:00.000Z

While we wait for the launch of Amazon's Kindle, review copies have been mailed:

NAEB Cybook sample: Favorable first reaction from blogger, impressed by brighter screen than Sony’s “It arrived! Yes, the engineering samples from Bookeen, of their new Cybook Gen3 ebook reader, have arrived at NAEB LLC and I got my sample/review unit this morning!

and the '2nd edition' of iRex Technologies' iRex reader has been launched. The press release notes (and TeleRead shows) that the old curves are gone (Good!) in favour of a more stable book-shaped housing, the battery life is 20% better, and the software is an updated version of the already powerful software:

The iLiad 2nd edition comes with the latest software version 2.11. This version of the software is part of the continuous software updates that are offered to all iLiad users. Just like in the previous versions support for reading PDF, HTML, Text and Mobipocket files is included and with the complementary PC Companion Software you can easily convert almost any document on your PC to an iLiad readable format.

Unfortunately, the 2nd edition does not use the newish ‘Visplex’ version of e-Ink... although my use of the iLiad has suggested that the screen doesn't really need to be improved; others have thought it needs a brighter background.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; iLiad

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; iLiad

e-Book Standards (yes, in the plural)

2007-09-17T15:35:00.000Z

The Register had an amusing item on Saturday: Adobe captures ebook standard. What now?, which tells the story behind the new 'standard' format for e-books. You really need to read the original article, but New York-located International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) announced about 6 months ago that agreement had been reached on a new electronic books standard. This format, .epub, was to be an XML-based, multi-device, and reflowable universal format, which would also support PDF.

Adobe says its Digital Editions and InDesign will read and create .epub... It may be worth mentioning, there is one gold sponsor of the IDPF, Adobe, and the IDPF's sole employee, has announced he's leaving the position. To go work at Adobe.

Meanwhile, Amazon is launching it's own e-book reader - the Kindle - in October, which is linked to Mobipocket - probably the largest e-book seller around.

Mobi also figured out years ago the wisdom of not charging for software that creates ebooks in its format, and converting anything from Word Documents to simple HTML to PDF (Mobi will support .epub as an input...eventually).

So we have at least one other de facto standard, and not a lot of reason to worry about the .epub format.

Addendum (some 8 hours later):
Teleread reports:

Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, says he’s open to creation of .epub files on the fly, via the main Gutenberg site. And he is also willing to consider links to sites that store IDPF-standard files in ready-to-go form.

At the same time, however, Greg writes on a Gutenberg list that he needs convincing evidence that .epub will indeed be an open, honest standard without gotchas coming in from Adobe or any other company. He’ll also need the right software tools—free and open source.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; standards

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; standards

Google Book Search as an e-book library

2007-09-06T14:01:00.000Z

The New York Times reported yesterday that

Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database, according to people with knowledge of its plans. Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google.

Up until now, Google has only been able to allow full access to the out-of-copyright books in its digitised collection. There has been an ongoing 'debate' in which publishers disputed Google's right to include their books, seeing it as a breach of copyright despite the fact that search results only showed short extracts surrounding the search terms. This move may well signal a way forward such that - at least for participating publishers - Google can be seen as an e-book library as well as a book-text search engine.

The same article also reports on progress on Amazon's entry into the e-book reader market - the Kindle, which is expected to have reference works packaged with it. The Kindle also has its own wireless network access to enable Mobipocket-format e-books to be downloaded directly without the need of a PC.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; ebook-reader; Google

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; ebook-reader; Google

DNA - the Sedley medley

2007-09-06T08:06:00.000Z

Yesterday's news stories on Lord Justice Sedley's suggestion that the state of the UK DNA databases - currently biased against UK ethnic minorities in terms of its coverage - was indefensible and could only be set to rights by including every UK citizen and visitor has raised much debate (he said, mildly). The Guardian headlines 'Anger over call to widen DNA database' and notes that

The UK's 12-year-old DNA database has 4m profiles and is the largest in the world, growing by 30,000 samples a month. According to the Home Office website, 5.2% of the UK population is on the database, compared with 0.5% in the US

while BBC News also has the full story - All UK 'must be on DNA database' - and the World Service's Have Your Say has produced a flurry of responses on the web site.

I think we can draw some comfort from the fact - unconsciously echoing my thought, yesterday - that

A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said to expand the database would create "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" and civil liberty concerns.

Which being translated, probably means it can't be done! A grain of further comfort in that this has been acknowledged before the spending of some few millions trying to do it! The BBC News story added:

Professor Stephen Bain, a member of the national DNA database strategy board, warned expansion would be expensive and make mistakes more likely.
"The DNA genie can't be put back in the bottle," he said.
"If the information about you is exposed due to illegal or perhaps even legalised use of the database, in a way that is not currently anticipated, then it's a very difficult situation." ...
Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights organisation Liberty, said a database for every man, woman and child in the country was "a chilling proposal, ripe for indignity, error and abuse".

The Guardian story adds:

The information commissioner, Richard Thomas, said a universal database would be "highly intrusive, and the more information collected about us, the greater the risk of false matches and other mistakes." David Davis, the shadow home secretary, called for a parliamentary debate on the issue. "The erratic nature of this database means that some criminals have escaped having their DNA recorded whilst a third of those people on the database - over a million people - have never been convicted of a crime," he said.

This is selective quoting, by way of balance - Keith Jarrett, president of the Black Police Association, backed the Sedley plan; Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, did not; and Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said there were

no plans to introduce DNA profiling for everyone in the UK, but "no-one ever says never".

In comments to the web Have Your Say story, James O'Hare, Leeds wrote:

"Yes but only if it is kept secure" Please enlighten me as to how any database can be kept fully secure. People regularly access CIA, MI5 etc. secure networks not even knowing what they are looking for. This will be the prize of every hacker in the world and it will be breached, no network is fully secure.

and Anna from Gateshead wrote:

I used to extract DNA profiles for a living and although the technology is 99.9% accurate, database systems can be easily hacked into and/or forged. Your DNA profile could be associated with someone else's name and details.

Z - from London, added:

It's not a question of whether your government can trust you. Can you trust your government?

which pretty much sums up the tenor of the debate.

I use computers all the time for my work and would be lost without them; on my return from Africa my laptop refused to start up. Computers can fail in all sorts of ways; they can also be attacked in ever more sophisticated ways by hackers who are ALWAYS one step ahead of the detection software. Another BBC story notes that

some hacking groups offer boutique virus writing services that produce malicious programs that security software will not spot.

Isn't it time that UK governments stopped relying on huge, vulnerable, uncontrolled databases to solve their problems?

>>Technorati tags: DNA; biometric data; personal information

>>IceRocket tags: DNA; biometric data; personal information

DNA-UK brings me back to earth and on the Blog!

2007-09-05T11:34:00.000Z

OK - I'm back from Africa and back on the case.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) began today's post:

This morning, the news media are reporting a startling recommendation by one of the UK’s most senior judges: that the Police National DNA Database (NDNAD) should cover every citizen in the UK, and every person who visits the UK. You can listen to Lord Justice Sedley talking with the Information Commissioner on the BBC’s Today programme here.

I also heard this longish Today programme item. While - like ORG - I thought that

Lord Justice Sedley’s recommendation does highlight the urgent need to address the regulations governing the NDNAD. Currently, DNA records of innocent people, including thousands of children, are kept indefinitely.

... I could not believe that he was suggesting that the logical response was to capture the DNA of every citizen of, and visitor to, the UK. Very 'Big Brother'. ORG again:

Bioinformation can reveal extremely private information about an individual’s family relationships and physical health. As we wrote in our submission to the Nuffield Council of Bioethics consultation on the forensic use of bioinformation, the Open Rights Group opposes the DNA sampling of the entire population, and can see no circumstances under which it should be considered.

Here, here. Of course, we all know that there isn't a UK government IT response that could begin to do what Lord Justice Sedley suggests, but sadly this also suggests that the government will be unable to find a way of removing the DNA records of the innocent from the database.

>>Technorati tags: biometric data; personal information; NIR; DNA

>>IceRocket tags: biometric data; personal information; NIR; DNA

Ordnance Survey and Virtual London

2007-08-16T22:22:00.000Z

Less than a couple of weeks since I reported on the Guardian's latest article on Freeing Our Data and the fact that the Ordnance Survey was 'under fire' from another government body (DEFRA), the Guardian is on the attack again. And the target? Well, the Ordnance Survey, again. In the latest from the 'Free Our Data' campaign, they report that OS has decided to withhold its licence for data for the Virtual London project, which was meant to act as a useful visualisation tool including three million of the city's buildings.

As Information World Review says,

The question everyone is asking is why can’t the public access information that they have already paid for and help fund the development of?
The OS say that they were unable to issue the licences for the project the way Google wanted because it wouldn’t fit into their current framework.

In the Technology Guardian, it is reported that negotiations have been going on for a year, the

stumbling point is understood to be that Google wanted to make a one-off payment for the use of the MasterMap data, while OS wanted a per-user charge. .. But last month the Virtual London team formally admitted defeat. The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis reported on its blog that "our Virtual London model will not be appearing in Google Earth due to data licensing issues". The decision "puts a stop to six years of research to openly inform the public about changes to London's built form via a publicly accessible model"... Virtual London's chief developer, Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, said the blame lay with Ordnance Survey's licensing practices, which he described as "quite frankly arcane in the digital world". He called for the government's Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information to look urgently at the issue.

Given that Virtual London is a government project (Office of the Mayor of London), the situation is very close to the DEFRA case previously reported. They may all three be separate cost centres, but the fact remains that it is the citizenry who pays for the data collection in the first place and is now called upon to pay for it again.

>>Technorati tags: public information; government

>>IceRocket tags: public information; government

Quieten-iNG while travelling!

2007-08-16T14:11:00.000Z

I'm off to Durban tomorrow, where following the IFLA Congress, I am - with colleagues - offering a one-week workshop in the Focus on Access series: the Africa International Workshop on Building Digital Collections and Services. Some 30 senior librarians from South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda will be attending to begin working on their Collection Development Policies for e-resources. The workshop itself, is followed by a period during which we support their work, both electronically and through a visit to each library.

The real point of this posting is to note that I am away and likely to be posting at even less than my usual level. Back again in September... when the summer can begin properly. Please!

>>Technorati tags: training; workshops

>>IceRocket tags: training; workshops

MLA: Not an original thought...

2007-08-14T22:08:00.000Z

Where America leads, it seems, we are bound to follow.

I know it is a while since Tim Coates published and publicised Yinnon Ezra, board member of the MLA and head of leisure services in Hampshire, who publicly questioned the need for fiction in public libraries

"we have to ask whether fiction should remain in libraries when most people buy books"..... he is quoted in the Portsmouth News

but TeleRead has uncovered a possible source for that thought. In the 19th century it was relatively unusual for libraries to offer fiction; indeed, libraries were debating the issue in the 1890s:

William Stevenson, the head librarian for the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, went to great lengths to remove popular fiction titles from his library.

“It is certainly not the function of the public library to foster the mind-weakening habit of novel-reading among the very classes—the uneducated, busy or idle—whom it is the duty of the public library to lift to a higher plane of thinking,” he said.

Although most thinking has moved on since then to accept reader choice and the value of leisure reading, Yinnon Ezra is not the only one to question its worth in libraries. In American Libraries, David Isaacson

“question[s] the argument that libraries should go out of their way to acquire romance novels, thrillers, and other kinds of literature whose primary purpose is escape and titillation.”

So, we seem not to have moved forward at all in the library world. And history has provided us with a perfect excuse for the public library crisis: buying books for the masses to read is just plain bad for them!

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too" (Voltaire)

>>Technorati tags: fiction; public libraries; books; book selection; reading

>>IceRocket tags: fiction; public libraries; books; book selection; reading

e-Books: Hyperlinking sensibly?

2007-08-09T22:31:00.000Z

Following on from my Tail wags Dog posting earlier today, I came across a good example of entirely sensible hyperlinking in an e-book. David Rothman (TeleRead) in Packaging the traditional novel for E: A few musings on forewords and links in e-books says:

Do you always read the forewords of novels, particularly e-books? Or the epilogues?... Many editors and readers hate forewords and the like... Whoops. Both a foreword and epilogue are built into the plot of a novel I’m polishing. How to satisfy both groups—the foreword-lovers and -haters? On paper, the reader can easily flip ahead a few pages, but E’s harder, if, for example, you’re trying not to overshoot... But what if the e-version of my novel contained links to (1) the foreword or something similar, (2) the main story and (3) epilogue-type material. Suppose that catchy blurbs accompanied the links for the foreword and the epilogue. Then, I suspect, more people might actually read the “extras” than in the case of a paper book.
No, I don’t want to see traditional novels dumbed down or needlessly complicated. But mightn’t they be presented more skillfully in E than they often are now?

'Born-digital' e-books can offer so much more than paper books or even the digitised versions of p-books, so why not? This is moving towards some of the things that The Institute for the Future of the Book is experimenting with. If you are going to use a medium, you may as well use it properly! The difference between this hyperlinking to structure the book or the plot and hyperlinking used simply to shorten, keep facts out of the body text, and make the book more acceptable is considerable. If nothing else it lies in the motive.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; authorship; structure

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; authorship; structure

e-Books: Definitions

2007-08-09T19:19:00.000Z

Having just praised Ellen Hage for her coverage of e-book readers, I find I have to take issue with her over her definition of an e-book. In her latest Tech From an E-booker's Viewpoint post,
You could already be an e-booker, she says:

I think that when we talk about e-books in our daily conversations, we need to simplify the definition. I define e-books simply as digital text. It can be a book, but it can also be an article, an email, RSS feed, even a web page.

I'm sorry, but 'No'. I have in the past complained about the tendency to use the term 'e-content', thus blurring the lines between the various forms: journal article, book, web page, etc and I stand by that view, and this is one step further on a very slippery path. So far as I can tell the term originated about four years ago and found credence with e-book aggregators such as NetLibrary who found it convenient as a marketing ploy - their content databases thus able to add value by including journal articles and reports linked to the books. OCLC, who own NetLibrary, stated that “content consumers are format-agnostic” and ebrary and Questia followed suite. It may be that the Google-led content consumer is format-agnostic, but scholars distinguish quite clearly between a whole variety of e-content: textbooks are different from scholarly monographs which are different from fiction which is different from a scholarly journal article which is different from a magazine article or a newspaper column...

Each has differing degrees of authority, bias, consistency, timeliness and so on. It is important for students and scholars to be aware of these differences when they use and (hopefully) cite some e-content, and publishers would be the first to note the value that they add (see last post here) to author's content - their stamp of quality on a scholarly monograph or journal article which is completely missing from a web site or a weblog.

Fortunately, I suspect that William Savage, claiming that

The article is also where it’s at, academically speaking... The article, therefore, has become the new book...

in Articles vs. Books: An Editor Divides the Laurels (Journal of Scholarly Publishing - Volume 38, Number 4, July 2007, pp. 249-254) is not blurring any distinctions between the two, but simply making a case for articles as the prime communications medium. [There is plenty of room for debate on this issue too, as it is based on the premise that books will not be published for much longer by university presses, and that articles are - unlike books - archived electronically. I would suggest that e-books may well be one route through which university presses are able to maintain their role, and that the second statement is just plain wrong.] I accept Ellen Hage's contention that, in terms of reading on an e-book reader, there is little (except perhaps length - but that's another issue from the last posting!) to distinguish one form of text from another, but I cannot accept her simplification of the definition. Although it is a little early to be announcing it, I have an article due to appear in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JOLIS) - probably at the end of this year or the beginning of 2008 - entitled 'Books in a virtual world: The evolution of the e-book and its lexicon' which, in the words of the abstract,

examines the variety of definitions used to date while proposing a definitive construct. Beginning by examining the definitions of ‘book’, the paper moves on to consider the essential element of a book – the content, and to examine publishing and structural aspects of e-books, as well as their place in libraries, before arriving at a final definition. The definition and its derivation embrace all of the issues that affect the way in which e-books are understood and used today.

What it does not do is conflate web sites, books and journals into an amorphous mass of e-content!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; publishers; university-presses; definitions

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; publishers; university-presses; definitions

Newsflash: Tail wags Dog - shorten e-books for success

2007-08-09T07:56:00.000Z

A strange comment in the middle of the strangely entitled What if cats were the only ones watching Seinfeld reruns? on TeleRead suggests that:

...editors had better sharpen their real and virtual pencils and help writers be succinct in books—well, at least in utilitarian and popular writings, as opposed to literary works. Good use of hyperlinks could help consumers go directly to facts of most interest.

At least literary works are spared - I had a momentary vision of War and Peace in txting form! The comment comes on the back of a report from MediaDailyNews that "digital media can more efficiently convey information" and that consumers spend 3 or 4 times as long engaging with cable or broadcast television than with consumer-generated video such as YouTube. The link - supplied by TeleRead's David Rothman is that:

the signal-to-noise ratio of a YouTube mashup [is not] the same as that of one of a well-done PBS documentary.

But surely - surely - he isn't suggesting that in order to make e-books successful we will have to breed a new generation of down-sized, scaled-down, format-ready, simplified books? With real content (information, facts, knowledge...) largely replaced by hyperlinks? I would be the first to agree the worth of adding value to e-books by linking, but not at the expense of their own, original intellectual content. (I have, of course, also praised the social e-book, written and edited collaboratively - but that is another beast completely, and my comments here are not aimed at that model!)

And how would publishers cope with this new hybrid e-book? I cannot see an editorial process expanding - from reviewing and correcting the text, to that plus checking the validity and authority and quality of all the links. So the traditional role of publishing houses - in which they 'badge' the quality of the book vanishes. And reviewing - how many reviewers...? No, this would be the end of scholarly book reviews as we know them!

The danger with relying on hyperlinks to 'complete' a book lies in their untried and untested success: as I have said before: no user studies. Perhaps the UCL SuperBook and e-Book Observatory projects can provide some information here - otherwise it's baby and bathwater time: throwing out scholarly worthiness with real content, and replacing it with a few possibly out-of-date links.

I hope that the TeleRead posting wasn't suggesting that e-books - as they are now - cannot succeed. In partial response, and as a sort of addendum to the last post here, let me point you to an article in today's New York Times: An Entire Bookshelf, in Your Hands (full reference in Writings about e-book publishing, 2007 - under Wayner), which also reviews a number of e-book readers.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; user-studies

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; user-studies

e-Book Readers for e-book readers

2007-08-07T18:33:00.000Z

If there is anyone with more experience of e-book readers than Ellen Hage, I have yet to find him/her! Look at Ellen's blog, Tech from an E-booker's Viewpoint, and you will find a wealth of information about e-book readers, past and present. She apparently owns over 20! So this is the place to go for comparative views.

In her latest post, Looking forward to future E-book devices, she discusses Bookeen's new offering, the CyBook 2, due out in September. It will apparently use a Vizplex screen, which is faster than the Sony Reader so readers who find the slow page turns an irritation should be pleased; and like me, Ellen welcomes the Mobipocket compatibility.

I am trying to locate a copy of Ellen Hage's PhD dissertation from the Capella University ~~of LaVerne~~, which is on on e-book self-efficacy and usage levels across age and gender. As I have said here before there has not been much in the way of e-book user studies.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; user-studies

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; user-studies

CILIP Governance - further update

2007-08-07T08:20:00.000Z

The GiG web pages have been updated again and more documents have been made available.

We have loaded the following:

Specifications for the Policy Forum
Questions and answers relating to the Policy Forum
Specifications for the Remuneration Panel

and also

Notes of the GiG meetings thus far during 2007.

With such important and far-reaching changes to the way CILIP is run in the pipeline, the GiG feels that it is important for members to have the opportunity both to scrutinise our work and to examine the new governance structure. Of course, in Governance Principles, we specify transparency as being of paramount importance... so we have to look to our laurels!

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; GiG; governance

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; GiG; governance

Bookstores that only sell blue books!

2007-08-07T07:02:00.000Z

When Sony lauched the CONNECT™ eBook online store as the only source from which purchasers of the Sony® Reader could obtain the e-books to read on their new device, and locked users in to this by the BBeB format, I suggested that this was just a little limiting - rather like having a bookshop that only sold titles with blue covers! As TeleRead notes in the middle of Sony Reader and e-book biz spotlighted in mostly upbeat Washington Post column,

we’re not quite in a digital nirvana. For example, the Sony Connect store now carries a mere 15,000 e-books compared to 200,000 titles available from a typical Barnes & Noble store.

or, compared with the 50,000 Mobipocket titles which will be available to purchasers of the Bookeen CyBook (reported in Another e-Ink e-book reader announced).

Washington Post tech columnist Mike Musgrove also noted in the TeleRead entry,

that prices of e-books could be lower, too. “I bought three books for my vacation reading and saved about $4 off the cost at http://Amazon.com, not including shipping,” he wrote of his Sony Reader adventures.
“In other words, this device is more attractive for people looking to save shelf space rather than money.”

He saved money, but not enough - I think he is saying - to tempt new users to the Reader (or to e-books?). Should e-books be cheaper?

The old arguments are that publishers are saving on paper, printing, storage and shipping costs vs. the intellectual property idea stating that, no matter in whatever form you purchase it, you are buying the same intellectual effort on the part of the author... which has the same value. Should we expect publishers to treat e-books as a 'loss leader' in order to swing the market to e-books? Is this the only way to generate mass e-book sales? If it is, are we saying that there is nothing intrinsically worthwhile about e-books?

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; publishers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; publishers

What other people have been saying...

2007-08-05T11:29:00.000Z

if:book, in ideal ulysses and ideal ulysses, part two, has been listing the possible advantages of a social or wiki version of great works such as those by Joyce or Dostoevsky. These might include a "thorough word and phrase glossary with a snappy and intuitive mechanism for getting to it directly from the text"; and "the explanation of references — literary, linguistical, historical, personal, social, political. ideally each of these categories would be represented in some unique way, so that readers can turn specific layers on or off at will" (both of these with a mechanism for people to 'question and challenge'). This is not necessarily what all books should look like (!) - but it would be a wonderful resource for those who want to read a difficult book with a degree of understanding.

In the future of print?, if:book report on their experiences of a print-on-demand espresso machine - not great, if I read their comments correctly. It took about 20 minutes to produce a crudely-bound 160-page book, which looked, well, cheap:

like a cheap paperback. My copy wasn't quite cut right and there's a little spur of excess paper rising from the top right corner, which gives it a modicum of uniqueness. Like the other Open Content-printed books that I've seen, the print isn't wonderful: they seem to be working from screen-resolution scans of the books, and they appear notably grainy when printed. It looks very much like a book that someone photocopied on a copier with the contrast set a bit too high. But like a photocopied book, it's certainly legible. It's worth pointing out that this grainy quality is a function of the scan rather than the machine.

In Bourne Again: If an author can be dead, why can’t print?, Print is Dead noted that despite his death in 2001, Robert Ludlum continues to produce novels - 12 since 2001! The point they made is that

if consumers don’t seem to care that an author is dead, which proves that they only want the content — the characters, the stories, the experience — then they also won’t care how that content is delivered. After all, if they don’t mind the missing presence of the actual Robert Ludlum (a living, breathing person) then they certainly won’t miss the presence of the book itself...

... which is an interesting thought, although perhaps not one yet bourne out (sorry) by experience.

TeleRead has a review of the Nokia N800 as an e-book reader: A review and some FBReader tips, and also, in ‘Your Cheatin’ Listenin’ Ways’: Audio books vs. text, asks whether it is

cheating to hear a book rather than read it? That’s grist for a New York Times article on audio books vs. the text variety.

Finally, Panlibus looks at "The idea of allowing ordinary people to edit library catalogues". Richard Wallis notes that the BBC's Giles Turnbull has picked up on the launch of the Open Library, which has the

goal to build the world's greatest library, then put it up on the Internet free for all to use and edit. Books are the place you go when you have something you want to share with the world -- our planet's cultural legacy. And never has there been a bigger attempt to bring them all together.

However, Turnbull is not so sure:

There are tons of books out there and tons of information about those books. There's no way even a large group of librarians is going to be able to collect it all.

and Stephen Bury, Head of European and American Collections at the British Library, whom he interviewed, is not so sure about it either:

"In the short term, I don't think we will send them a copy of our catalogue. We only have limited resources and we need them to concentrate their efforts on our own digitisation projects,"

Faced with a BL head who is "not keen on the idea of allowing ordinary people to edit library catalogues themselves". Richard Wallis adds:

The fear of ordinary people changing things - it is a good job Jimmy Wales, Tim Spalding and others didn't let that stop them.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; PoD; publishing

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; PoD; publishing

Paying twice for information

2007-08-05T07:41:00.000Z

Both I - in this blog, most recently at It's our data, we want it, gi'sit mister! - and Information World Review have regularly highlighted the fact that often we - the public - have to pay twice for information. In a new blog entry, The liberation of public information, IWR demonstrate that they are still on the case:

Imagine yourself in a government department that is custodian of some public information and you are rewarded according to how much you can extract from others for the privilege of sharing it. How would you feel if someone came along and said "hey, the taxpayer has already paid for this information, you should be giving it back at no more than the cost of delivery." Gulp.

In the Guardian (it seems to be a week for linking to the Guardian!) - Free out data: Ordnance Survey under fire from inside the government - there is an example:

Government efforts to protect the environment are being hampered by the difficulty in obtaining data from the government's own mapping agency... one government body has to negotiate commercial contracts to use Crown Copyright information generated by another. The body in question is Ordnance Survey (OS), the largest trader in public-sector information. In a remarkably forthright memorandum to the committee, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said that OS's licensing terms restrict its ability to distribute data to other European governments and to partner organisations.Victims include a map of land cover of Britain, where the need to pay royalties "undermines Defra's business case for continued investment"

The Power of Information is an independent review, commissioned by the Cabinet Office, into “state- and citizen-generated information” and authored by Tom Steinberg (MySociety) and Ed Mayo (National Consumer Council), which calls for the government to examine the economic case for keeping some public sector information linked with fund raising. The Government has made much of sharing personal identity data (that's stuff about you and me!) between departments and agencies in the interests of efficiency... I wonder if we are now to understand that 'efficiency' means making money out of our data?

As IWR says:

Watch these people closely. They claim they will have a set of proposals ready for public comment by the end of this year. We should all be poised to scrutinise this and give our feedback. It will be a good test of whether they really want to listen or just try and put off the evil (to them) day when they have to give us back what was ours in the first place.

I seem to remember that, at the original consultancy exercise about the sharing of personal information, we were told that our ideas and thoughts would be listened to but not acted on (Good old democratic principles of government!) What goes around, comes around - and here we are ten years down the line STILL debating the same issues but, this time, because of the internal revenue generation that goes on around public information.

See also the Free Our Data blog.

>>Technorati tags: public information; government

>>IceRocket tags: public information; government

A tax on books: Fahrenheit 451 next?

2007-08-04T17:49:00.000Z

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan
"Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Richard Charkin has reported in VAT on print that the European Commission is trying to bring the UK into line with most other EU countries and place a tax on books. He goes on to highlight an existing oddity in UK VAT:

If it is important not to tax reading (which I support) why does the Government think that taxing on-line reading makes sense? Readers have to pay VAT on on-line subscriptions and purchases of digital downloads.

His point is that we should remove the tax from e-books rather than place it on books... but I can't help wonder if this comes under the category of shooting oneself in the foot - faced with the choice of moving one way or the other to create a level playing field, which way do you think the government might move? I know where I'd put my money!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; books; VAT; taxes

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; books; VAT; taxes

Classic Guardian stereotyping

2007-08-04T16:39:00.000Z

Admittedly the article in Thursday's Guardian begins by talking about "people in the early stages of their careers" but it goes on to generalise about "The most high-pressured jobs were not necessarily held by white-collar workers in city firms, the researchers found. Head chefs in large restaurants..." and then points out that Librarians have one of the least stressful jobs. As Katherine Rushton in theBookseller blog says

On the one hand you would expect the life of a librarian to be pretty stress free: All those hushed environments and walls lined with books, without the nuisance of sales targets or profit margin worries. Plus there’s the position at the heart of a community, and the tremendous sense of satisfaction when a user tells you they’ve loved the book you recommended.
But for all those with any knowledge of the change and controversy that beleaguers the library sector, this low stress-rating comes as a great surprise indeed.

Professionally qualified librarians in Dorset and Kent face having both their pay and status downgraded as the councils find ways to meet budget cuts. In Hampshire, librarians must work in the knowledge that the man running the service, director of recreation and heritage Yinnon Ezra, thinks there may be no need for libraries to indulge in fiction at all. And all across the country library staff face cuts to their pay as councils slash library opening hours; criticism as book stocks and lending figures fall each year; and an uphill struggle if they want to pioneer any change.

I wonder where the report places journalists in the grand stress scale?? Or writers of reports on stress in the workplace? That warm feeling of a job well done - column penned, report written, factoid published - has to be up there with aromatherapy and Shirobyanga when it comes to de-stressing people. Or do I mean distressing people?

>>Technorati tags: librarians; journalists; stress

>>IceRocket tags: librarians; journalists; stress

CILIP Governance: New regulations available

2007-08-03T16:03:00.000Z

The Governance Implementation Group Web pages have been updated with the proposed Regulations, as approved by Council in July, which will come into force with the new governance structure on 1 January 2008, providing that the CILIP AGM in October approves the necessary changes to the Bye-laws. (The proposed Bye-laws and Charter are also available.)

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance; regulations

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Identity cards: "broken" and now "doomed to fail"

2007-08-01T07:44:00.000Z

I reported in February the item on broken biometric passports in The Register, which noted that

"we were told by our consultants that the use of current facial recognition technology with two dimensional images (as is the case for ePassports) is not sufficiently reliable to enable fully automated searches even in relatively small databases, and performance is known to decline as database size increases..."

The use of the iris scan in the ID card biometrics were put on hold by the government last December, which left the good old fingerprint. Now - via 'File on 4' (31 July 2007) - we learn that fingerprint matching suffers from virtually the same problem as facial recognition:

the government's ID card system will give thousands of "false matches" when more than six million people are registered on its database.

A leading academic, Professor John Daugman, said 'using fingerprints as a key biometric measure will cause major problems' although the Identity and Passport Service has denied this. According to Professor Daugman,

using a biometric scan of the iris - the coloured part of the eye controlling the amount of light that gets through to the retina - would give better accuracy than a fingerprint... I don't want to be very pessimistic and say this whole system is doomed to fail but I will say that just from analysing the mathematical requirements, if it is just fingerprint, it is unlikely to be able to succeed.

He esimates that

by the time the UK system had enrolled say six million people, which means two or three years into the roll-out, about one new person in a 1,000 will be making false matches against the database.

And how much are we paying for this scheme that offers little and is apparently doomed to fail? The figure (see Function creep = Budget creep) romps ever upwards.

>>Technorati tags: personal information; ID cards; passports; biometric data; NIR; governance

>>IceRocket tags: personal information; ID cards; passports; biometric data; NIR; e-passports

e-Books: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

2007-07-30T22:55:00.000Z

Richard Stallman describes himself as someone who devotes his efforts to progressive activism (such as the free software movement). The largest part of his website has to do with US politics. David Rothman at TeleRead has a transcript of Rothman's July 5th presentation on copyright (taken from Slashdot and verified from watching the ogg-theora video) and has reprinted parts of it.

The interesting bit is Stallman's rant against e-books as an evil device of publishers designed to take away the public's freedom to use books. In 'What is it about e-books?' I published Richard Charkin's (and he's a publisher) speculations about why e-books were not an over-night success in the scholarly arena; if Richard Stallman (obviously NOT a publisher!) continues to spread his message, it is going to be very hard for e-books to be accepted at all. Which would be a pity, as they clearly have much to offer - searching across a library of books in seconds has to be some sort of a bonus - and publishers, in the UK at least, are working to understand the needs of the academic and library communities in terms of copyright/DRM/licences, etc.

And what of the rant? Here is the beginning and end of it:

And what about … what about books? Book publishers are trying to do the same kind of thing. You might remember a few years ago, there was a lot of hype for e-Books. Supposedly we were all gonna start reading e-Books. And guess what? Those e-Books came with DRM. Readers of books traditionally enjoy a range of freedoms under copyright law, which did not give publishers total power over all use of a published work. For instance, there is the freedom to borrow a book from the Public Library, and the freedom to sell a book to a used book store, and the freedom to lend a book to a friend, and the freedom to buy a book anonymously by paying cash, and there’s even the freedom to keep the book for years and read it as many times as you’d like, and pass it on, perhaps to your children, who might read it as many times as they like... All these freedoms, the publishers want to take away from us... So we’d better spread the word now: we’d better get … we better build up the opposition to this repeat attempt to make us accept e-Books. We’ve got to value our freedom.

I should note that this is an unofficial transcript and that David Rothman has made it very clear that he is willing to remove/edit/correct it should he be asked to do so. But he is also confident of its accuracy and asks to reprint the talk in its entirety.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; copyright; DRM

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; copyright; DRM

The importance of the book metaphor for e-books

2007-07-30T21:48:00.000Z

On YouTube, there is a Google Tech Talk video entitled Turning the Pages on an E-Book—Realistic Electronic Books, by Veronica Liesaputra, PhD candidate at the University of Waikato, in which she discusses her research on realistic e-books. Beginning with a definition of e-books, she goes on to look at the mental model that readers use to make sense of what they are viewing:

An electronic book is defined as a digital book that not only captures the affordances of a physical book, but also transcends the limitations of its paper counterpart. There is much debate as to whether the use of the book metaphor is appropriate for an electronic document. User studies suggest that current popular document presentations (HTML and PDF) are not always the most convenient, or the most comfortable, for the reader. On the other hand, while realistic physically-based computer models of books have been around for years, they are rarely deployed in practice.

The talk reviewed computer graphics models for page-turning, from complex physical models based on the finite element method to 3-D geometric models and simple light-weight programmed models involving reflection and rotation. Linking to The British Library's 'Turning the Pages' project, the talk also described and demonstrated her

realistic book implementation that allows a document to be automatically presented with quick and easy-to-use animated page turning, while still providing readers with many advantages of electronic documents, such as hyperlinks and multimedia.

Functionality can be added to books very simply while the page-turning model is simulated so that users remain familiar with how the book 'works'. It is important for users to have a model for what is being viewed so that they understand how it is used, the symbols or icons used, and how the communication process functions.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; page-turning; semiotics

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; page-turning; semiotics

e-books - Special issues of Program

2007-07-30T15:04:00.000Z

The Emerald journal, Program, has produced an issue dedicated to e-books, with several articles about managing e-book collections in UK libraries - case studies, etc. The table of contents for Volume 41, Issue 3 can be found at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/....

As usual all the articles (plus a load of other recently added stuff) can be found on Writings about e-book publishing, 2007.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; publishing; libraries; collection management

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; publishing; libraries; collection management

What is it about e-books...

2007-07-27T14:49:00.000Z

Despite some ten years' availability, e-books in the scholarly domain seem stubornly reluctant to 'take off'... or at least to take off in the same way that e-journals have. Novels - and the kind of books bought by individuals for leisure reading - seem to be doing fairly well, and many university libraries have small collections of e-books - mostly furnished by one or other aggregator - which are used to some (as yet unknown) extent.

e-Journals are a bit further down the road, more established, than e-books but the take-up was and is much stronger. Some further light may be shed on this by the SuperBook project (and here) and the up-coming e-Book Observatory project of UCL's Centre for Publishing, but - meanwhile - others are also wondering. Richard Charkin responding to Adam Hodgkin's Exact Editions blog, suggests:

1. Scientists are by their nature early adopters of technology and thus have had no problems moving from communicating in print to communicating digitally.

2. Scientific publishing has been intrinsically more profitable than trade book publishing. This allowed the major publishers and societies to invest the significant sums needed to create electronic delivery and storage platforms for scientific information. These platforms are a cornerstone for the creation of a new business and communication model.

3. Budgets for the acquisition of scientific information already existed and coud be readily transferred from print to digital acquisitions. These budgets were and are controlled by a professional cadre of librarians whose job is to ensure the best and most economic retrieval of information. They are the key partners to ensure highest standards.

4. The people who work in scientific publishing are by and large fascinated by the challenges of delivering often obscure information to a global audience and have embraced digital technology.

Trade book publishing has very different characteristics.

1. The general public has adopted some new technologies very quickly but to most people a book is a book - sheets of paper between covers, usable without batteries and readily portable.

2. Trade book publishing is usually a low-margin business and any spare cash has tended to be spent on investing in new authors and new marketing campaigns rather than long-term technological platforms. This is changing now with the emergence of solutions such as BookStore but this late movement hasn't helped a business model to develop.

3. Apart from the less-than-healthy public library market, there are no institutional budgets for the purchase of trade books and so no easy way of pump-priming the market.

4. The people who work in trade publishing are driven by the desire to find a great new author, to mix in the world of literature, to win literary prizes. Delivery mechanisms and complex technology are simply not high on their agendas. This is also changing but it will take time.

And I suppose the final reason why trade books will find it harder to establish a digital model than scientific journals is that not all books are purchased simply to be read. They are purchased as gifts, as furniture, as status symbol, as insurance against boredom. None of these reasons is adequately solved by a digital version. A scientific paper is only purchased for its content.

His final thought aligns with my own findings - and hopefully in due course with those of SuperBook! - the gap is narrowing, and more scholarly monographs are being published eletronically. Although an economist at MIT thinks that there is an "increasing tendency of high-profile scholars to bypass the traditional peer-review system" (at least in economics) - so, perhaps the entire scholarly publishing model is about to implode, sucking most traditional forms of writing into an open access black hole!

Added a couple of hours later: At the time of writing the original entry, I had not read Walt Crawford's latest Cites & Insights (v7, i9). He begins:

I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today

and goes on to quote Eric Schnell comments in a May 31, 2006 post at The medium is the message (ericschnell.blogspot.com), “Is blogging scholarly communication?”

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; ejournals; publishing; scholarship

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; ejournals; publishing; scholarship

Schools and biometric data

2007-07-27T08:24:00.000Z

The Times Online (July 24) had a brief news item:

Pupils fingerprinted
Schools will be able to fingerprint pupils for the dinner queue, library and registration, in accordance with data protection guidance issued yesterday. Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said the move would clarify matters for head teachers. Parents will be able to exclude their children from the system.

... and Guidance on how the Data Protection Act 1998 applies to the use of biometric data in schools has been published by Becta, the Government's schools ICT agency. Crucially, Becta's press release states:

It advises schools to fully involve parents in any decision to introduce biometric or fingerprint technology to run cashless lunch queues, school libraries and attendance systems.

And the guidance underlines that headteachers and governing bodies should be clear and open with all parents and pupils about this and all aspects of their education.

>>Technorati tags: biometric data; schools; NIR

>>IceRocket tags: biometric data; schools; NIR

Another e-Ink e-book reader announced

2007-07-27T07:25:00.000Z

Bookeen has announced that its latest e-book reader will be based around e-Ink technology AND will offer Mobipocket titles - about 50,000 available - as well as offering "a true freedom of use regarding supported documents formats. CyBook owners are free to read personal and public domain content." The new CyBook may not offer as many bells and whistles as other readers (it is rumoured that it does not support annotating or searching) and there are still those around - possibly those who haven't tried e-Ink - who cannot conceive of a reader without backlighting ("No backlighting? No sale! Heck, give me the old original CyBook, I was about to buy one..." as one commentor on TeleRead wrote), but this slim, light-weight offering may well be THE e-book reader to have - simply because of its flexibility over e-book and document formats.

It’s official: New Cybook will offer Mobipocket and improved E Ink in Sept.—with 50,000 titles available as TeleRead put it, before quoting the press release in full. The important points made are:

Paris, France – July 26, 2007 – Bookeen is proud to announce its new Generation 3 Cybook. Based on the latest groundbreaking Vizplex™ epaper technology from E Ink, this ebook reading device offers an impressive 6” screen showing off a 166 dpi resolution.
Bookeen’s new product looks stunningly thin: it is the size of a paperback, the thickness of a magazine, for a weight of only 6.1 ounces (174 g). It boasts an impressive battery life of 8,000 page flips, allowing for an average reading time of 1 month without recharging... Concerning content availability, Bookeen also announces an agreement with Mobipocket, an Amazon company, to license and distribute the Mobipocket™ leading ebook format on the Cybook... The Cybook Gen3 has entered production and will be directly available next September from Bookeen online web store at bookeen.com, in different packs starting at $350. It will be the first product to include the new E Ink Vizplex™ technology, offering the brightest and fastest switching epaper display of the market...

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; e-ink

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; e-ink

University Publishing in a Digital Age

2007-07-26T19:39:00.000Z

Ithaka, an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide, has published the report "University Publishing in a Digital Age" - it is available in PDF at the Ithaka website. The abstract on the opening page states:

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing”. Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.

University presses have been struggling to maintain their role and status as open access, institutional repositories, e-publishing and rising costs force them to revaluate their mission. The report “argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs” - but scholarly monograph publishing may look very different in the next decade. Universities have to accept the realities of alternative approaches: print on demand, e-books, Web 2.0, and the increasingly granular needs of the student body.

>>Technorati tags: universities; publishing

>>IceRocket tags: universities; publishing

Function creep = Budget creep...

2007-07-26T18:38:00.000Z

... or perhaps not creep as much as 'romp'; or 'gallop' for the UK ID card scheme costs.

The inestimable IWR Blog links to an article in its sister publication, Computing: ID card consultancy hits £50m. I have blogged here (and also here and here ...) in the past about the gradually extending role of the ID cards and the concomitant rise in costs. IWR picks up the point that the ID cards aren't worth the plastic they are printed on:

There are various reasons why a national ID card won't do what the government thinks it will do. At present, we rely on multiple forms of ID, which create a patchwork of different points of contact with officialdom, both commercial and governmental. This appears to work quite well. Single ID cards, as used by Spain, for example, don't. Every one of the bombers who attacked Madrid had a valid national ID.
Identity Fraud isn't necessarily a case in point, either. LSE estimates that, rather than preventing £1.3bn of fraud a year, an ID card will hit, at most, £35m.
Finally, it won't be compulsory to carry a card. One wonders if a nation that has alread sleepwalked into a surveillance society will refuse cards if they provide notional convenience...

Computing points out that:

The government has spent £53m on consultants for the national biometric identity card scheme, and continues to use 83 external contractors at a cost of nearly £50,000 per day.
The figures are more than double the value of the original £19m pre-procurement consultancy contract signed in 2004, according to data released to Computing by the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act.

That's quite a gallop! But then the whole project has changed shape too:

The ID scheme has been substantially re-shaped in the past 18 months – changing from a standalone card system using entirely new IT systems to a broader identity management programme that will reuse existing government databases and is closely allied with international requirements for biometric passports.

An identity management programme. That has a chillingly Orwellian sound. And, as you have read here before, it makes free with data about YOU. And, apparently, to no good effect.

I may be wrong, but I see the government as the servant of the people; running the country as we would like, for our advancement and benefit (Sorry! that was just a tad too Utopian, wasn't it?), but you know what I mean. Should our new Prime Minister allow such pointless expenditure of our money? Is there a (sinister) alternative agenda? Shouldn't the Information Commissioner - or a non-governmental body - oversee the project? Shouldn't the public know what is going on? Why do government agencies really need to know so much about each of us? Do we really need Dystopia?

Come back Winston Smith: the last man in Europe with no identity!

>>Technorati tags: NIR; ID cards; personal information; government

>>IceRocket tags: NIR; ID cards; personal information; government

CILIP Governance and Privy Council

2007-07-25T16:30:00.001Z

Colleagues will be pleased to read the following e-mail from Bruce Madge, Chair of the Governance Implementation Group:

We have had the very good news that the Privy Council have accepted our revised Charter and Byelaws with a couple of very minor amendments mainly of a confirmatory nature. These will be amended by our solicitor on his return from holiday. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of GIG who worked very hard to achieve this.
Bruce - Chair of GIG

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance

CILIP Governance and Privy Council

2007-07-25T16:30:00.000Z

Colleagues will be pleased to read the following e-mail from Bruce Madge, Chair of the Governance Implementation Group:

We have had the very good news that the Privy Council have accepted our revised Charter and Byelaws with a couple of very minor amendments mainly of a confirmatory nature. These will be amended by our solicitor on his return from holiday. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of GIG who worked very hard to achieve this.
Bruce - Chair of GIG

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance

MLA name new Chief Executive

2007-07-19T07:44:00.000Z

Yesterday, the MLA announced that it had selected a worthy successor to Chris Batt from the museums sector:

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has announced that its new Chief Executive is to be Roy Clare CBE. Roy was previously Director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich from 2000 to 2007.

A long and distinguished career in the Navy has been followed by seven years in museums for which he was awarded the CBE this year. The press release states:

Mark Wood, Chairman of MLA, said: “It is great news for the MLA and the whole cultural sector to have someone of Roy’s calibre; experience and energy take over the leadership of the organisation. Roy has a very clear vision of what the MLA can and should achieve and he will ensure it makes a reverberating impact in the years ahead.

In turn, Roy Clare commented on the challenging opportunities for the MLA in responding to a wide audience base in an age of new technologies and rising professional standards. He noted particularly the need to

build up the capacities of the loyal and creative workforce and seek efficiencies in line with government policies... This is a tough agenda at the heart of learning for all, sharpened by the forthcoming 2012 Cultural Olympiad and I am greatly looking forward to working on behalf of the MLA Board and the staff in the MLA Council to help achieve this transformation for the sector as a whole

Roy Clare takes up his post in September, replacing Chris Batt OBE, who is retiring after four years as Chief Executive.

>>Technorati tags: MLA; libraries; museums

>>IceRocket tags: MLA; libraries; museums

e-books in the press!

2007-07-18T09:52:00.000Z

If the iPhone has done nothing else it has engendered a lot of debate about e-books! Obviously this has centred on how they can or may be displayed on the iPhone, the adequacy of the iPhone for this job. It has also produced a flurry of information about alternate platforms. Much of this discussion has taken place at TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.

But other publications have appreared too! And these can be found from the usual place - my Writings about e-book publishing, 2007 page. I think the last item added was Bonita Wilson's editorial in D-Lib Magazine, Book Digitization Options for Libraries.

Do visit the page if you get a chance - there is a lot there, and I add to it regularly!

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; iPhone; readers

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; iPhone; readers

CILIP Governance - further update

2007-07-18T08:57:00.000Z

Council on Monday agreed the revised text of the General Regulations, which will thus come into effect with the rest of the governance arrangements on 1st January 2008, assuming that the Privy Council approve the Royal Charter and Byelaws (we should hear from them by the end of July). Council also agreed that minor amendments resulting from the deliberations of Privy

Council may be made by the GiG. With one minor amendment, Council also approved the specification for the Policy Forum, and for a Remuneration Panel.

Council also approved GiG's endorsement of the Scrutineers' Board with respect to the Annual Election to the new Council and for the Office of Vice President.

Advance notice of the Election will appear in Gazette on 27 July.

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance; GiG

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance; GiG

Big Brother (and his sisters and his aunts, probably) is watching you

2007-07-15T13:57:00.000Z

The 'personal information' issues that crops up from time to time on this blog concern ID Cards and the National Identity Register; or the sharing of data between government agencies. However, I have mentioned the excessive collecting of data before - particularly with regard to fingerprinting our children. Most readers will be aware that as they go about their daily business in the UK, they will be recorded on video - perhaps as many as 300 times a day, depending on where you live.

O'Reilly Radar reported yesterday that UK Rolls Out Police Headcams. The story comes from the Canadian Globe and Mail, which reports:

Britain is not the first country to use such cameras, versions of which have been tested in Denmark. But the national rollout will tighten Britain's web of video surveillance, already the most extensive in the world. The country is watched over by a network of some 4 million closed-circuit cameras, and privacy advocates complain the average Briton is recorded as many as 300 times a day.

The O'Reilly commentator's response was much as mine:

Given various incidents of police brutality, you can see the additional upside that police might be more restrained if they knew someone was watching -- or they might just turn off the camera.

As the catalogue of data recorded and kept about British citizens increases (just read this blog!), there has to be a need for more controls. I know, I know - if you're innocent you've got nothing to worry about... but what about people like the guy stopped by US immigration recently because they thought he was someone else, or the UK student who was TWICE wrongly turned down for jobs because her data was mixed up with someone else's on the security database?

>>Technorati tags: personalinformation; idcards; police; videocams

>>IceRocket tags: personalinformation; idcards; police; videocams

MLA: Reducing the library profession's professionalism?

2007-07-12T22:14:00.000Z

BSBL - Heard of it?
e4libraries?
You will!

Collection Management is what librarians do. Manage their collections. It's part of what distinguishes us from the shelving: we don't just have books, we develop collections, select titles, even - some would have it - organise knowledge. It is an art and science taught in schools and departments of information/library studies on CILIP-accredited courses (e.g. at UWA). If you want a definition, there are several to choose from, but this one serves well:

Collection Management [i]ncludes setting and coordinating selection policies; assessing user needs and studying use; selection, evaluation, and weeding; planning for resource sharing. (School of Information Resources & Library Science, the University of Arizona).

Peggy Johnson listed the basic skills as including a "knowledge of the subject, formats and users... a basic understanding of the targeted user community" and (in a later chapter) quoted Dennis Carrigan, "the essence of collection development is choice" (Peggy Johnson:
Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, 2004). Emphasis is on the Collection Development Policy (CDP) or Selection Policy, and assessing the needs of the users or institutions.

And so back to the MLA and BSBL (Better Stock, Better Libraries, launched in 2006) and the e4libraries project to "promote e-commerce and supply chain efficiencies in the library sector" (MLA Press Release 3 July 2007).

It is said that BSBL will "help public libraries buy cheaper books, better matched to customer needs" (MLA Press Release 3 July 2007, again). This sounds suspiciously like the MLA writing a global CDP in a 'one-size fits all' approach. How can a centralised body know customer needs in Falmouth, or Swansea, or Aberdeen? Perhaps someone should re-visit the 1985 Proceedings of the Conference on "Coordinating Cooperative Collection Development: a National Perspective," in which David Farrell wrote:

"I think that coordinated collection management is, by definition, distributed collection management."

Tim Coates (in MLA takes the plunge- but is it legal?) makes two points:

It misses the central point to me-- the law says that it is local councils who are responsible for the public library service- not the MLA or any "partner" they may employ.

and

Library suppliers must be wondering how legal it would be for Andrew Stevens [of the MLA] and his gang to destroy their livelihood, in the act of providing a service for which he is neither accountable nor responsible.

Indeed. And librarians must be wondering what they trained for.

>>Technorati tags: MLA; public libraries; collection management; book selection; BSBL

>>IceRocket tags: MLA; public libraries; collection management; book selection; BSBL

Changing needs and a responsive profession

2007-07-12T07:16:00.000Z

There is a thoughtful piece in the SINTO blog, on the two staples of our profession: books and electronic resources. Perhaps the writer's choice of title - 'Battle lines' - was unfortunate, especially as it notes:

On reflection however, I feel that this image of a direct conflict is misleading.

A shame then that it sustains the metaphor and ends with reference to a "bar-room brawl".

The battle ground is defined by the problems facing libraries of all sorts. Update reported on the Laser Foundation report that claims that England has a failing public library service, and on a conference with the title Do researchers still need libraries? ... libraries must embrace the new technologies [vs.] the web sceptics [whose] battle cry is "Libraries are synonymous with books and reading. They always have been and they always will be".

The debate, as SINTO points out, is critical to libraries. Libraries must respond to the informational and cultural needs of their users, and - within reason - should use any means so to do. Hopefully, on the one hand, we can ignore

Yinnon Ezra, board member of the MLA and head of leisure services in Hampshire [who] has publicly questioned the need for fiction in public libraries
"we have to ask whether fiction should remain in libraries when most people buy books" (Quoted in Good Library Blog)

and, on the other, ignore the view that libraries are exclusively about books. But the way forward is in doubt. There IS a debate. Roger C. Schonfeld, Manager of Research for Ithaka, and Kevin M. Guthrie, writing in Educause Review (The Changing Information Services Needs of Faculty), note that

most faculty members expect the library to become less relevant for them in the next years ... Faculty understand the importance of having libraries pay for research and teaching resources and support the idea of the library's preservation function. Librarians also view the purchase of electronic resources as a critically important function of the library, with over four-fifths believing that the library plays a more important role than any other source in providing this service. ... In the future, faculty expect to be less dependent on the library and increasingly dependent on electronic materials. By contrast, librarians generally think their role will remain unchanged and their responsibilities will only grow in the future.

The debate, however, is not 'do we need libraries?' but 'what do we need from libraries?' And this is not - as suggested by SINTO - a battle between the electronic and the paper from which can emerge only one winner. It is a debate about priorities - perhaps based on

what marketing people call a "Usage and Attitude" survey...These are methodical and professional studies which help to define the objectives of an operation and then the most meaningful measures they can use to see if they are doing the right things. When used properly they are incredibly valuable. (Attitudes to libraries)

One thing we must remember is the value of the library in society. As founder of Greenwood Press, Jack Stauffacher, said:

Without this working library, I would have no compass, no map, to guide me through the density of our human condition.

>>Technorati tags: libraries; society

>>IceRocket tags: libraries; society

It's data about you! But is it safe?

2007-07-11T22:02:00.000Z

One of the repeated themes in this blog has been abuses of personal information, lapses of security, and incorrectly held data: to put it bluntly, contraventions of the Data Protection Act. The last post on the topic followed the debacle over UK doctors' personal records being made public. ORG reports - in a clearly-headed blog post, Information Commissioner Horrified - that the Information Commissioner’s Annual Report is launched today. And what is he horrified by? The amount of "serious security lapses" involving personal data.

However, in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme (audio file), Richard Thomas appeared to disagree with the idea that members of the public should retain ownership of their own data. He wants more power for his office which is "all about protecting people and their privacy" in an age where our footprints are spread all over the Internet. He is aware that more and more people are aware of the Act and that people "really do demand strong controls over how information is being used" but feels that "ownership is not quite the issue... it's how [data] is used... for its intended purpose" that matters. Companies should not be able to sell it on.

But surely ownership is the issue? It's not just about selling data on, it's about the accuracy of the data in the first place - particularly when the data is to be legitimately shared. Way back in May 2006, I last blogged about this in A new angle on national identity registers and ID cards. Government agencies can share data about you. I won't repeat the whole story of the consultancy exercise where most people could see the sense of such sharing, providing that there were checks in place. And the check they wanted was the ability to monitor and correct their own personal data. I have family experience of a failed credit check (for a mobile phone) simply because the address on the credit report had the post code from one house and the address of another - which did not match the address given to the phone company. Unsurprisingly!

Data accuracy is important. And getting these silly errors corrected at the moment is surprisingly difficult. I think the Information Commissioner should have the powers he wants, but I also think that he should be working to give us control over our own data.

>>Technorati tags: personal information; government; data protection

>>IceRocket tags: personal information; government; data protection

CILIP Governance - update

2007-07-11T08:40:00.000Z

It doesn't sound like much(!), but it really implies a lot of work behind the scenes: at our last meeting the GiG finalised the CILIP Regulations with the CILIP legal advisers, and these will be presented to Council next week. [ Note of explanation: CILIP has a Royal Charter which essentially sets out our aims and purpose, and then there is a set of Byelaws which dictate how the Institute is to be run. Both of these have to be approved by Privy Council, and we are in the middle of this process now - hoping for an agreement in principal before Council. 'Beneath' the Byelaws sit the Regulations, which set out in more detail what is and is not acceptable or expected practice. These do not need external validation and are consequentially easier to change from time to time as need dictates. ]

I can also report here that the promised FAQ on the Policy Forum - the response to Group and Branch questions in the earlier consultation - will be available on the GiG web pages within the week. This has taken slightly longer than we might have wished, but the process of finalising the text between the members of the GiG took place over a particularly busy period - Umbrella, the Scottish Conference, etc - and this has resulted in the delays. Sorry about that - but it IS on the way!

Other items from last week's agenda included the agreeing of both the report for Council which will go out with the final set of papers this week; and a reply to a detailed query received by the GiG; and discussions on our schedule of work for the rest of the year and the governance implementation schedule.

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance; GiG; regulations

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance; GiG; regulations

2 Updates: Gorman's Ludd revisited and Kelaidis’s blueBook

2007-07-09T22:51:00.000Z

I responded to Michael Gorman's Siren Song of the Internet comments in Gorman and the missing Good; now - following a conversation with Andrew Keen - Many-to-Many has posted Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites, which responds to both Luddite views.

In e-Books: first e-ink and now e-paper, I reported on a new e-book variation. Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age has an interview with Manolis Kelaidis following his keynote presentation at the O'Reilly TOC conference, “bLink: Completing the Connection Between the Analog and Digital Worlds: bLink Tank: a conversation with Manolis Kelaidis.

>>Technorati tags: Internet; web2; ebooks; eInk; ePaper

>>IceRocket tags: Internet; web2; ebooks; eInk; ePaper

It's our data, we want it, gi'sit mister!

2007-07-05T19:29:00.000Z

I have blogged here before about the Guardian's campaign to Free our Data. That is, data which we - as tax payers - have paid for to be collected, and then either have had to pay for again to see, or to which we have been refused access. Now, as IWR Blog reports, the Guardian

reveals how the Environment Agency forced an online information provider to remove flood information from its service which the company had gained from the Environment Agency... OnOneMap.com uses Google maps to offer a mash-up service that over lays information onto the maps such as properties for sale and let, the location of schools, supermarkets and mobile phones. To improve its service further, OnOneMap carried out a data scrape of the Environment Agency and collated together a layer of flood information, which, with no surprise created massive interest.
Just days before the heavens opened and flooded large parts of the UK, the Environment Agency demanded that the data be removed because of an infringement of "database copyright".

Let me say no more than that the data might have been quite useful to some. More power to the Guardian's campaign, say I - it's time government agencies remembered who they all serve.

>>Technorati tags: data; government; floods; Google; maps

>>IceRocket tags: data; government; floods; Google; maps

Is CILIP virtually there?

2007-07-05T18:45:00.000Z

Well, the answer is: "Not yet"! But - following on from debates at CILIP’s bi-annual conference, Umbrella 2007, where library professionals also met online to discuss the potential value of Second Life to library services - CILIP will open an office in the Second Life virtual world on 19th July at noon. A press release today announced:

Representatives at the virtual conference were positive about the potential Second Life holds for library services, “at present Second Life really reminds me of the net in the mid-90s. It needs some time to develop as a reliable platform, but once it does, its potential is enormous!”... Future sessions on the value of Second Life to library services are planned and a virtual office for CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals will open at 12.00pm on the 19 July. Anyone with an interest in libraries on Second Life who wants to find out more should contact Rheinallt Jones on rheinallt.jones@wales.gsi.gov.uk or by searching his online name ‘Welshman Humphreys’ through Second Life.

As a CILIP Councillor, I can only applaud the initiative. CILIP is keen to be seen moving into a Web2.0 / Library2.0 age, to be a real (or virtually-real!) force for the new, knowledge economy and the new young professional. As Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, in the opening plenary talk urged us all: ‘just go and do’.
But, on a more light-hearted note, is this a new grade of member we are talking about? Will there be new post-nominals (SLiMCLIP)? And, more importantly, if CILIP has a virtual office, who will staff it and what services will it offer?

>>Technorati tags: CILIP; SecondLife; governance

>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; SecondLife; governance

Prime Minister's Petitions: School Libraries

2007-07-05T07:25:00.000Z

I have publicly supported three petitions on the Prime Minister's epetitions web site... and none of them have succeeded. That is, all of them have been rejected with a formal response - there is no record on the site of successful petitions, I note. (Can we draw some sort of conclusion from that, do you think?)

The last petition -

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make the provision of professionally staffed libraries within all schools, both secondary and primary, statutory."

- received a disappointingly low level of support (1,794 signatures) so it is unsurprising that it failed. However, the level of misleading verbiage in the response is disappointing (I assume that it doesn't actually demonstrate ignorance), and I reproduce the response in full below:

The provision of a school library is not a statutory requirement and there are no current plans to alter this situation and change the legislation. It is the Government's policy to put as much money as possible directly into schools' budgets, allowing schools to target resources appropriately and to make their own choices about their school library provision and book resourcing.
At their best school libraries are an invaluable asset to teachers and a source of great enjoyment, and learning, for children. There are various models of library provision in schools. Schools may have an on-site school library managed by a librarian, the collection may be managed by teachers and/or volunteers; or the onsite library may be run with or without the support of a Schools Library Service.
Schools Library Services are optional services run by local authorities. Where there is no school library, book loans and professional advice are usually provided by a Schools Library Service. The Ofsted report 2006 'Good School Libraries' states that "Schools Library Services provided good support for schools, including specialist audits and advice, additional resources, training and opportunities for networking".
The Department for Education and Skills is supporting various initiatives that promote reading and provide books for schools. These include:
working with The Reading Agency and key partners such as the School Library Association and the National Literacy Trust to improve links with schools, school libraries and public libraries.
'Booked up', a scheme that will enable every 11 year old in England in Autumn 2007 to choose their own free book from a list sent to their school. The scheme will also provide an accompanying website, children's magazine and a range of add-on activities.
The 'Boys into Books' scheme, launched in May 2007 and administered by the School Library association, that will enable every secondary school to choose 20 books from a list for their school library.
In 2008 the Government will launch a National Year of Reading (NYR). The aim of the NYR is to encourage more people to read and people to read more, by promoting a culture of reading for purpose and pleasure.

For the avoidance of doubt about "misleading verbiage",

I understand the sentence "At their best school libraries are an invaluable asset to teachers and a source of great enjoyment, and learning, for children" to imply an unspoken 'At worst...' suggestion;
I see "Where there is no school library, book loans and professional advice are usually provided by a Schools Library Service" as misleading, as it implies that - even without a school library - there is adequate provision;
I regard "The Department for Education and Skills is supporting various initiatives..." as largely irrelevant to the issue.

>>Technorati tags: schools; libraries; government

>>IceRocket tags: schools; libraries; government

Literacies, schmliteries, 2

2007-07-04T07:17:00.000Z

On June 16th, I wrote 'Literacies, Schmliteries' - a sort of frustrated hiccup about the birth of yet another type of literacy.

“Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression” Pablo Picasso, 1923

I mentioned that I had developed a taxonomy of literacies for a lecture given a couple of years previously. At that time, I understood the literacy map like this:

Visual literacy / audio /reading /writing
IT, ICT and ‘ECDL’
Technological literacy
Media literacy
Independent learning skills
Research skills / research methodology
Library skills
Information literacy

... and now there is also 'transliteracy'.

Sheila Webber recently spoke at Umbrella and offered an excellent map of information literacy research, which she has now made available on the Internet. Mind mapping has never been something that comes easily to me, but I know Sheila uses this technique a lot in her teaching and is thus an expert in both information literacy and in mapping concepts. It would be useful (I think) if she were to produce a second map of literacies, and their ownership, definitions and skills.

(Expression of interest: Sheila and I worked together on the CILIP definition of Information Literacy, which is displayed on the front page of my website.)

>>Technorati tags: information literacy; mind mapping

>>IceRocket tags: information literacy; mind mapping

US School Children e-book reader usability study

2007-07-03T22:17:00.000Z

Professor Richard Bellaver of Ball State University - an expert in software usability - has been conducting a series of usability studies with children in a local school (see Richard Bellaver Current Endeavors). They are reported in TeleRead - the first report was Kids and e-books: Good news from Ball State’s e-dictionary studies and the repeat study is Students favor e-books over paper books in yet another BSU study: Lesson for K-12 and publishers?

The first report was published in September 2006, and covers comparison dictionary studies conducted at the Huffer Memorial Children’s Center in Muncie Indiana and Kennard Elementary School in Kennard Indiana in the Spring of 2006. A third comparison dictionary study was conducted with adult users at Ball State University. All three studies showed that experience in using eBooks is the key to speed of usage.

All adults (college students) with much experience in conventional hard copy look-up and no eBook experience had slower times using eBooks [i.e. e-Book Readers. cja]. They also didn’t think much of the overall efficiency of eBooks. Children who had some experience (reading books and doing markups and drawing over the past year) consistently had faster look-ups on the eBook than the conventional dictionary. Children who didn’t have any previous experience had mixed results, but half had at least one look-up faster on eBook that on the hard copy dictionary. The children consistently had favorable opinions about using eBooks.

In his commentary, Professor Bellaver notes:

We can be very optimistic of the potential of these students proving that there will be no detriment to learning using eBooks.

The second report covers a study of the use of e-book readers containing a dictionary and the one reading book by elementary school children:

The difference this year was that all students had used the WHDs [Wireless Hand-Held Devices or e-books readers. cja] for reading purposes and were much more familiar with the content and the "feel" of the electronic platform. Our hypothesis was that based on that exposure the students would have better look-up times using the eBooks. Twenty students were tested using only three words to look-up. On the average, two-thirds of the words were found faster by all students on the WHDs rather than in the conventional dictionary.

There was also a reading study - the goal of which was:

to allow disinterested fourth grade students to read from a WHD and find out if they might be stimulated to do more reading. The graduate students talked to the students about the WHDs and found that they were very eager to listen and to try something new. They didn’t need explanation of the features; they had them figured out pretty well on their own.

The overall conclusion is that:

Almost 50 third and fourth grade students were exposed to electronic reading on a hand held platform. ... The small scale of the effort won’t impress many people. My hope is that with better devices (I am now have a prototype of the Australian built QuokkaPad [RB had previously failed to gain the loan of either a Sony Reader or an iLiad. cja]), publisher cooperation, and more research to discover whether learning is enhanced through the use of technology we can get the backpacks off our children and maybe improve their education.

A full report on this study is available at: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=6787.

There were also earlier studies: 'Usability of eBooks Fall 2003 and 2004' (research at Huffer Children’s Center) and 'Human Factors Testing of eBooks Spring 2002' on "learning with eBooks".

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; user studies; schools

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; user studies; schools

Mass digitization: Good Thing or Bad Thing?

2007-07-03T08:02:00.000Z

Publishers are noticeably nervous about the mass digitization projects such as Google Book Search, and - as reported earlier - Richard Charkin dines out on his laptop heist, which was designed to demonstrate to Google staff the difference between opting out (as publishers must, of Google Book Search) and opt in (which publishers would like the chance to do re GBS).

The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.

OK, so publishers (generally) are against it; but what of society?

O'Reilly Radar recently pointed to the

Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), [which] has just received a small grant from the Mellon Foundation to study the utility of major mass digitization projects such as Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Book Search, and the Open Content Alliance for scholarship.

The CLIR proposal reads:

[O]bservers variously contend that large-scale projects such as Google's and Microsoft's will enable new discovery of literary and other works not currently accessible to the public, will democratize knowledge, and will contribute to the public good in unprecedented ways. Others fear that the information held in these projects will be eventually sold as a commodity, decreasing access to it for the less affluent. Given the extraordinary costs associated with these projects, there may not emerge any competition to Google or Microsoft, and the market will be thus tightly held as a near monopoly.

CLIR aim to look at digitization and scholarship - in the light of open access and thus with reference to IPR and copyright. The report, and the Collegium to act as a 'long-term advisory group to mass digitization efforts', should be an important arbiter of good (and acceptable by all parties) practice.

>>Technorati tags: digitization; Google; research; publishers

>>IceRocket tags: digitization; Google; research; publishers

The mobile 'phone/e-book debate

2007-07-03T07:31:00.000Z

Many of us who write and talk about the use of e-books see e-book readers such as the Sony Reader or the iRex iLiad as one market with huge potential that is still largely in its infancy (PDAs notwithstanding). At the same time the regular travellers amongst us worry about the amont of kit(and its associated chargers) we are forced to carry - laptops, readers, iPod, mobile phone, etc - and look forward to the day when convergent technologies wrap it all up in one neat (and smallish) box! I wrote of this here when the iPhone was launched as its screen and applications seemed ideal for the e-book market. Now TeleRead has reported that a reader did 'a little testing' and can read the Web versions of e-books that are available online at Manybooks. TeleRead (iPhone works with Manybooks.net, says new phone owner) say:

But he’ll still use his Palm TX as his favorite e-book reader. Read Brad’s post for details... When/if will Digital Editions work on the iPhone, which already comes with a PDF reader? DE would allow files in the IDPF’s reflowable new format to be read on the iPhone, at least if the DRM were of the Adobe veriety or the files were unencrypted. Alas, DE is Flash-based, and that technology is not (yet) included in the iPhone.

Meanwhile Michael Hart - possibly one of the earliest e-book advocates, as he founded Project Gutenberg - wrote in the Kennebec Journal (thanks again to TeleRead):

In many countries, eBooks are like cell phones, just a skip over one technology to another and for those who prefer to avoid the expense of hardware. Only a small percentage of the world population can afford books the way we do, or can afford land line telephones. By end of the year, half of the potential world market will have a working cell phone, while the majority of the world will still never have made a land line phone call. It is going to be a similar story with paper books vs. eBooks.

Especially if you can read e-books on a cell phone (mobile phone).

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; readers; Apple; iPhone; iLiad

>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; readers; Apple; iPhone; iLiad

Publishing, e-publishing, social publishing, self-publishing...

2007-07-02T21:17:00.000Z

On the heels of a conference about publishing which explored what publishers and libraries each feel about publishing in an electronic/digital/virtual/open environment - and with my last post, Is e-publishing THE solution? in mind - we come to piece in Guardian Unlimited by Beth Webb. Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age post, Books? Who needs books? Some writers just like to write…, quotes Webb:

“the world is already stuffed with books that no one will read.” But Webb’s not being pessimistic. What she’s saying is that playing the publishing game has little if anything to do with art or self-expression. It shouldn’t be just about physical objects sitting inert on shelves. Instead, she encourages authors to use the Internet to spread their work...

And for those of us who heard Geoffrey Bilder talk about social publishing and Web 2.0, or understood the possibilities of open access journals and institutional repositories, or have investigated Internet self-publishing-print-on-demand companies like Lulu, Webb suggests:

Why bother to go through all the heartache and hassle of fighting to get your precious memories or thoughts into mainstream publication?...
Getting published by a mainstream company is great, but in all honesty, how many of us can really afford to give up the day job, even when we've signed that contract? Such a long, heartbreaking haul for what? The joy of writing should be just that - the writing.

Define your audience and publish yourself. Get your books and anthologies into the hands of people who really want to hear from you - whether it's one copy, or a couple of dozen through print on demand.

Scholarly publishing, this isn't - but it is an example of an electronic alternative to the traditional route.

>>Technorati tags: books; ebooks; PoD; publishing

>>IceRocket tags: books; ebooks; PoD; publishing

info NeoGnostic

Defining e-books and publishing

On reading and design: more thoughts

Writings about e-book publishing, 2008: update

A necessary change in reading?

Patents; Google; and Re-inventions of wheels

Is Bluster over Google Book Search = Shame that publishers didn’t get there first?

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine

Reader Wars! A link from Dar es Salaam!

e-Book copyright in the UK

Counterpoint: On reading and design

On reading and design

Scholarly Communications Report: e-books

Writings about e-book publishing, 2008

CILIP Council Briefings

Quote of the Month... or Year

New article on e-books

Quick Update on UK ID Cards

Whither IWR?

It's eBook Week again!

Democracy, sh'mockery

British Standard For Accessible Websites.

Big Brother is SO watching you little Bro'

Are ID Cards just a little taxing?

Clarion Call for Libraries

Public Libraries

Oh! For Goodness Sake!

if:Book or if:e-book - arguments for and against e-book readers

An answer to the Google Book Search conundrum?

Comparison of e-Book readers

Does anyone really read in the bath?

Wireless Access with Whispernet™

Kindling enthusiasm: the Amazon reader

If you are the Government...

e-Book Reader in the news

CILIP: new governance - new Council

Electronic paper and e-book readers

Is this how we'll read soon?

Prime Minister and the private sector non sequitur

Whither bookness

Scrolling the Scroll: e-Books beyond 2007

What will a book be? What CAN a book be?

Aberystwyth University news

Accessibility Ultimatum Proposed for UK Government Websites

The Wiley View of e-books

Frankfurt - Publishers - e-Books - e-Book Readers

e-Book Reader news from Frankfurt

Home Office Minister responsible for Identity adds more power to her arm

iNG in minority over DNA database

New social book

e-Book reader (iLiad) news

Books (and magazines) as e-editions

The Open Access Debate Revisited

Should your DNA be archived for ever?

And another...

e-Book Readers

e-Book Standards (yes, in the plural)

Google Book Search as an e-book library

DNA - the Sedley medley

DNA-UK brings me back to earth and on the Blog!

Ordnance Survey and Virtual London

Quieten-iNG while travelling!

MLA: Not an original thought...

e-Books: Hyperlinking sensibly?

e-Books: Definitions

Newsflash: Tail wags Dog - shorten e-books for success

e-Book Readers for e-book readers

CILIP Governance - further update

Bookstores that only sell blue books!

What other people have been saying...

Paying twice for information

A tax on books: Fahrenheit 451 next?

Classic Guardian stereotyping

CILIP Governance: New regulations available

Identity cards: "broken" and now "doomed to fail"

e-Books: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

The importance of the book metaphor for e-books

e-books - Special issues of Program

What is it about e-books...

Schools and biometric data