booktwo.org

Whichbook.net is such a good idea it’s surprising it hasn’t been shamelessly copied elsewhere. You move a set of sliders and get recommendations from UK library catalogues. Read the rest of this entry »

The subject of reading from electronic screens is a matter of ongoing debate. Many claim people will simply never read off screens in the way that they read off paper now. Excepting e-ink-based paper, which promises to revolutionise our understanding of “the screen”, are there simple ways to improve our reading experience on the web?

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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.

As accessibility is the watchword of the web standards movement, it’s kind of depressing to hear that traditional publishing is serving the blind and partially sighted community so badly: research for the Royal National Institute of the Blind found only twelve per cent of maths and eight per cent of science GCSE textbooks were available in a format which could be used be visually-impaired children.

The RNIB has led accessibility programmes for years - notably Daisy - and I happen to know it’s currently at work on a new XML-based standard for transferring all newly published material to accessible formats. While this represents a massive challenge - not least persuading publishers to supply data in whatever format they come up with - it also shows the massive benefits of digitisation: true access for all.

More: RNIB Web Access Centre Blog, Right to Read Campaign.

Last week, John Naughton, journalist, technologist, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and author of A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet, gave an electrifying address to the Society of Editors conference, in which he attacked their newspapers’ demonisation of youth and technology. It’s reprinted in full in The Observer, but here are some choice moments:

The novelist William Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’, and he’s as sharp as a razor. He also said: ‘The future is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed.’ As it happens, I think he’s right and I’m not sure it’s good news for those of us who work in the newspaper industry. Because if the future is already here, then the only inference one can draw is that our industry hasn’t been paying much attention to it.

‘The future is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed.’ - That should be shouted from the rooftops of the publishing world. Head over to the Mobileread forums or witness the huge take-up of Sony’s Reader, the first truly decent ebook reader, if you don’t believe it. People want this technology, and they’ll hack it themselves if good formats aren’t provided for them.

… in any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren’t interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears - still - from the newspaper industry is that there’s something wrong with the customers. And what one finds, on closer examination, is that the industry seems determined either to insult or to ignore them.

Not quite any other industry. As the publishing industry continues to churn out so-called literary works, cookie-cutter thrillers and minor celeb memoirs between hard covers and relegates alternate forms - poetry, novellas, short stories and anything genuinely challenging - to an undersold hinterland, we hear much of literacy programmes, ‘quick reads’ promotions and price-slashing, but little examination of whether the industry itself is shutting out readers.

These kids have been socially conditioned in a universe that runs parallel to the one inhabited by most folks in the media business. They’ve been playing computer games of mind-blowing complexity forever. They’re resourceful, knowledgeable and natural users of computer and communications technology. They’re Digital Natives - accustomed to creating content of their own - and publishing it. (Remember the motto of YouTube: ‘Broadcast yourself!’)

…

Now look round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

Substitute ‘publishing house’ for ‘newsroom’ and I think you can see where we’re going with this. The business of literature needs to fully engage with new platforms for writing and new opportunities for collaboration and promotion if there is not going to be a total generational divergence in literary culture. Just as newspapers are developing significant online presences as their paper sales fall, so publishers should be investigating new models for composition and acquisition.

You can read plenty more from John, our favourite kind of polymath, on his website and his blog.

With all my recent ranting about Digital Rights Management (DRM), I thought I should post some of the reasons for the unrest. Then I came across BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow advertising the course he’ll be teaching at UCLA this semester. It’s called “Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?” and the course description sums up the potential dangers of DRM better than I would:

Every garden has a snake: computers aren’t just tools for empowering their owners. They’re also tools for stripping users of agency, for controlling us individually and en masse.

It starts with “Digital Rights Management” — the anti-copying measures that computers employ to frustrate their owners desires. These technologies literally attack their owners, treating them as menaces to be thwarted through force majeure, deceit, and cunning. Incredibly, DRM gets special protection under the law, a blanket prohibition on breaking DRM or helping others to do so, even if you have the right to access the work the DRM is walling off.

But DRM’s just the tip of the iceberg. Every digital act includes an act of copying, and that means that copyright governs every relationship in the digital realm. Take a conversation to email and it’s not just culture, it’s copyright — every volley is bound by the rules set out to govern the interactions between large publishing entities.

Playing a song for a buddy with your stereo is lawful. Stream that song to your buddy’s PC and you could be facing expulsion and criminal prosecution.

Every interaction on the Web is now larded over with “agreements” — terms of service, acceptable use policies, licenses — that no one reads or negotiates. These non-negotiable terms strip you of your rights the minute you click your mouse. Transactions that would be a traditional purchase in meatspace are complex “license agreements” in cyberspace. As mere licensors, we are as feudal serfs to a lord — ownership is conferred only on those who are lucky enough to be setting the terms. Our real property interests are secondary to their “intellectual property” claims.

When the computer, the network, publishing platforms, and property can all be magicked away with the Intellectual Property wand, we’re all of us pwned, 0wnz0red, punkd. Our tools are turned against us, the law is tipped away from our favor.

Imagine, twenty years from now, you have a digital library of all your favourite books. Hundreds of titles, the fruits of two decades of collecting - entirely legally - the greatest works by the greatest writers. Then you switch brands and buy a different computer, or ereader, or whatever, and suddenly the code which these books are stored in decides that you no longer have the right to read the books - books you own, have paid for, wish to re-read. This is the situation that will present itself if DRM issues are not resolved, if we don’t consider all the possibilities right now.

Today´s Guardian ran a large picture on page six of mass-market paperbacks being laid out in Frankfurt, under the headline ´Cover Story´and bearing the strapline:

The 380,000 books displayed on stands at Frankfurt Book Fair has helped offset fears about the viability of print in the digital age.

Wishful thinking. I’m in Frankfurt this week too, for what is by far the largest and most prestigious gathering of the publishing world, and no one seems to be taking the future seriously. The facilities provided pay ample testament to this, and would shock those used to attending more modern get-togethers. Wi-fi access is conspicuous by its absence, the few computers visible being used largely for slide presentations or demos of proprietary content management systems. More on this soon.

As to public internet access, the few ´Net-c@fe´s provided consist of stand-up booths running starlingly intransigent versions of IE5 which are inadequent for running the most common webmail apps, with any kind of dynamic content blocked by uncomprehending software. In international hall 8.0, home to all the visiting English-speaking publishers, there are ten booths hidden up a flight of stairs next to the toilets. In all, Frankfurt provides perhaps 50 such points for over 200,000 visitors and 7,000 exhibitors.

Welcome to the book world.