booktwo.org

One of the subjects touched on in the fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle which I linked to yesterday was the Bookmobile, an on-demand books service in the back of a van connected to the Internet Archive’s hundreds of thousands of free, digitised texts.

The set-up, which cost around $15,000 including the car (breakdown below, no pun intended), consists of a mobile satellite connection, a couple of laptops, a laser printer, a guillotine and a book binding machine. It can produce books anywhere in the world that can see a satellite, in minutes, for a cost price of $1 a book.

The Bookmobile has been touring US schools and shows for a few years now, but in 2003 IA spin-off Anywhere Books (site unresponsive; cached here) took a Bookmobile to Uganda, where they demonstrated the technology to ministers and took it to outlying areas where books are extremely scarce:

Each class - dressed in pink, blue, or yellow school uniforms, many in bare feet - took turns watching and helping Carol make books. Watching these scenes, trying to put myself in the kids’ heads. Did they see this as simply a wonderful and fun day? Or was this like a Bookmobile from Mars? It didn’t really matter: clearly, the kids were thrilled to take part in their own educations, their own futures, in a culture where passing annual exams is far more important than the joy of reading. [Link]

As more books become digitised, come out of copyright, or are released without copyright, so more become available to those whose lives will be radrically changed for the better by them. Kahle speaks of a project in India, which has also experimented with Bookmobiles, to create an “open source” textbook for schoolchildren, available everywhere, for free. We often think of projects such as the Internet Archive and Wikipedia as centralised deposits of information, but they also serve as distribution points, spreading knowledge to places where it did not exist before.

Brewster Kahle’s very rough breakdown of the cost of the Bookmobile was as follows:

• Satellite connection: $5,000
• Car (Secondhand Ford Aerostar): $3,000
• Printer: $2,500
• Binder: $1,500
• Laptops: $2,000
• Networking: $1,000

The IA’s own Bookmobile site seems quiescent for the moment, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this. And if anyone wants to finance one of these for me to drive round the world giving books to the needy, get in touch.

Photos by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge (via First Monday) and Richard Koman.

Via Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s Status-Q blog, I came across this fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, which has been working to provide universal access to all human knowledge for more than fifteen years.

Play audio file

It’s a couple of years old, but Kahle’s major point - that libraries are not important simply as repositories of knowledge, but that they make it available for research, thus expanding the sum total of that knowledge in the world and improving it - is anything but redundant. If you’ve wondered how Google Book Search, Amazon Search Inside and others obtain their content, here’s where it’s at. There’s also great stuff on the library of Alexandria, which according to some historians managed to collect 75% of all books available at the time before it was destroyed, and the historical and technological changes that had to occur before it was possible to attempt the same thing again.

At one point in the talk, Kahle calculates the cost of storing every word in the world’s current largest library, the Library of Congress, and comes up with the pretty reasonable figure of $60,000. On the same tip, Wikipedia’s currently shaking the tin for a funding drive - as if you hadn’t noticed. They’ve collected three quarters of a million dollars at time of writing - imagine. Go donate, and add your name to a slate which will definitely be around forever.

A little late for your Christmas presents, but ‘vE-”jA: Art + technology of Live Audio/Video’ is a book about the global VJ scene: creating and producing live audiovisual mixes. The standard edition of the book comes with a DVD containing hundreds of images and video clips by artists featured in the book (the accompanying and slightly confusingly side-scrolling website also contains a wealth of links to these artists, for happy holiday time-wasting).

What makes this interesting is that a special edition of the book will be, in the editor Xárene Eskander’s words, a wireless interactive touch version. Using Touchsmart technology, readers trigger images, videos and sound on the DVD by touching icons in the book itself, the aim being to tie the experience of reading the book to the concept of VJing itself.

Astute readers will remember the blueBook project we covered back in November, which used bluetooth to connect to a PC. Touchsmart appears to work with a variety of platforms including TV and mobile devices, and goes further in describing a “touch user interface” or TUI. It describes itself as an educational application, but as can be seen in the ‘vE-”jA project, it is capable of more advanced interaction than learning and testing.

There’s been a bit of a fuss recently when it was reported that an Indian engineering student had developed a new technique for data storage which not only massively outperformed the most modern competing techniques, such as DVDs, but did so using the far more ancient medium of paper.

Sainul Abideen’s “Rainbow Technology” uses multicoloured geometric shapes to store data on a printed page. This data can then be read back into a computer using a simple optical scanner. The original article claimed that text typed on 432 pages of foolscap paper could be stored on a four square inch sheet in rainbow format. The writer also watched a 45-second film which had been stored on an ordinary sheet of paper. Such a concept seems to invert the usual flow of such technology: away from the visual and tangible; toward the virtual and inscrutable.

There have been a number of counter-claims since the original article was published - the touted 90 to 450GB capacity of a single ‘disc’ or sheet has been widely debunked - but the potential is fascinating. Firstly, even a 100MB sheet (a more realistic figure suggested by the debunkers) would provide simple, recyclable storage which uses none of the hard-to-dispose plastics, metals and toxins common in contemporary storage devices. Secondly, the cost of distribution drops massively.

100MB is more than enough to store hundreds of full-length novels. An entire library could be printed on a sheet of paper, posted by regular mail, and scanned by the recipient. The week’s news would fit on the postage stamp. The technology inhabits a strange hinterland: paper-based, requiring the intervention of a computer to be read, like old mainframe punched cards.

CDs and DVDs are not reliable storage mediums: vast tracts of human knowledge are now maintained only by constant rereading and re-encoding. We have not yet developed a medium to rival the book - nothing now in use could be relied upon for anything like a thousand years: the world’s oldest book is some way past this. Might we need to resort to printing our data onto physical sheets?

Such minglings of low- and hi-tech, of contemporary and ancient technologies bring to mind projects such as the Long Now Foundation’s Millennium Clock, which seeks to design a clock that will run for a thousand years, or the strange artefacts proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada to communicate with unknown visitors in an unknowable future.

Perhaps we should be working not only on new books, but on new languages: languages with 64, or 128 letters; languages which condense more information smaller signals. Computer languages have built-in error-checking and correcting protocols to prevent errors of communication. Perhaps we need to learn the language of computers, in order to communicate better with one another.

I recently talked about ICUE, a company developing a reader application for mobile phones. One of the presentation modes used in the ICUE applications, alongside manual and ticker-tape scrolling, was Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP.

RSVP has been around for a while but is only now on the point of becoming widespread. A simple RSVP example is shown here, courtesy of flashreader.com.

Studies at the University of Wichita, among others, have shown that readers attain the same level of comprehension using RSVP at 250 WPM as they do at their own speed on traditionally-presented text. Admittedly, most readers report that they don’t enjoy the experience, but if their comprehension is at the same level, it’s a matter of getting used to the new format.

Devices and programs for reading ebooks have so far stuck closely to the old model: make it look enough like a pbook and hopefully people will get used to it. But this is technologically and philosophically unnecessary: the core of a literary work is the words it is composed of: the way in which these words are presented is not (usually) part of that information (concrete poetry and certain experimental literary works aside). So RSVP presents an equally valid means of reading - one which can reduce the need for page-sized, blocky ereaders (an RSVP reader would work well on the screen of an iPod, or, as shown by ICUE, on a mobile phone).

Conceptually, RSVP text moves more towards film: a continual stream, in which it is harder to go back, simpler to go with the flow, to forge ahead in the torrent of words. One might not wish to read a textbook or a complex work in such a way, but simple stories can carry us along. Different literary techniques might evolve through RSVP technology: repetition becomes harder for the eye to skip over so emphasis and ennui are easier for author to enforce on the reader [repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition see?].

Try it for yourself - there are a wealth of free downloads out there to experiment with the technology: RocketReader, BookMuncher, RapidReader among them. A comparison table is available here.

One of the many things we missed while we were away was the appearance of Forbes Magazine’s special Books edition. It’s right on the ball, with a number of fascinating articles from the people who really know what they’re talking about, so you’ve got the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Ben Vershbow on The Networked Book, Boingboing’s Cory Doctorow on giving books away for free, and UC’s Jonathan Enfield on new challenges to copyright. It’s a really good selection, and all the commentators seem to be saying the same thing: technology is coming, but books aren’t going away.

Cory Doctorow’s piece is possibly the most interesting - not just from how assured he is of his model, which he has every right to be, having released three novels for free online, but because of his analysis of the link between social networking and the social book:

The thing about an e-book is that it’s a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation–when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were “My friend suggested I pick up….” The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.

If ebooks do take over (and, Doctorow believes, this is by no means certain), we’ve got to think of new ways to monetise them, because you just can’t charge for easy-copy bits like you can for physical paper. But creatives have wethered these kinds of changes before:

This isn’t the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don’t buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day’s equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn’t easy. Who could have foreseen that radio’s great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it?

This description of the e-shift is much like my humble own previously, comparing it to the move from chamber to recorded music. But the essential point here is that more readers must be, by definition, a good thing. It’s an honour to be pirated: it’s a sign of recognition. And,

There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers.

The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property is published today as part of the UK’s pre-Budget report, and is now available as a downloadable pdf from the Treasury website (which, it must be said, is a joy to use, right down to the lovely red box favicon).

The Gowers review is a year-long independent review of intellectual property rights in the United Kingdom commissioned by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and lead by former FT-editor Andrew Gowers. It’s the first action in some time on Britain’s somewhat untypical copyright laws, and is particularly interesting when various parties are seeking to increase the UK term of copyright, introduce stronger DRM measures in their products, and potentially to enforce rules that mean all music on iPods is currently illegal.

Many of the recommendations seem promising:

• “introducing a limited private copying exception, which will allow consumers to format shift legitimately purchased content, for example music from a CD to an MP3 player” - or indeed, ebooks from PC to reader.
• “proposing an ‘orphan works’ provision to the European Commission. This will make it easier for creative artists to re-use ‘orphan’ copyright protected material (for which no author can be found), thus unlocking previously unusable material” - including books which have remained out of print due to contested copyright [example].
• “The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.” - particularly interesting, and a conclusion reached after comparison with US law which, while it gives sound rights up to 75 years, has not made any noticeable difference to the creative industries.

For more discussion of the issues involved, see Tom Coates’ thoughts at plasticbag.org.