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I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.
—Kurt Vonnegut, in his very last interview (via Iain Tait).

Vonnegut is of course, as ever, spot on. The novel as we understand it today hasn’t been with us very long (Wikipedia has a wonderfully dense page on the subject, I prefer Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a reasonable birth date), yet it is the point on which all debates about the future of literature turn; specifically, it is what we usually mean when we talk about “the book”.

It’s also what we mean when we discuss the ebook. Take legendary book designer Chip Kidd’s response to the Kindle:

PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept? The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. [Source]

Well that’s just bullshit, frankly. Books are not born as ‘things’ either, but you can understand a designer of physical things choosing this side to shout about. Many books have already stopped being ‘things’ and migrated to the virtual: Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia is not a book, but it was, really: it’s form comes from a book, from all encyclopædias, but it has evolved off the page. Likewise many, many STM titles, likewise many journals, likewise much poetry and short fiction. But the novel as object has a stranglehold on our imaginations.

Which is fine. Novels are great. And right now, there is no device which betters the traditional book in delivering it. Except, it saddens me that a designer of Kidd’s stature can’t see that the page is a screen. The uniqueness of the novel lies in that effort, that performance of the reader that Vonnegut talks about, not in a mode of reproduction. Bar a small number of extreme experimentalists (I’m thinking B.S. Johnson, and similar), the physical book has shaped the novel for the last 300 years - we are approaching a point where this will no longer be true. And I think that’s pretty exciting - elitist, performative novel-lover that I am.

Too long and too important for a Stop Press post:

Google is throwing away information that is fundamentally characteristic of books—metadata that describe and even determine what books are, as simple and trivial as volume numbers, or artifacts of type design, editing, and artistic production. Books are not, in other words, mere bags of words, but vehicles in which ride a wide sundry of other passengers—metadata, artistic expression, whimsy, and error. Books are born and produced in a rich organizational and information-rich social and economic context, and the willing discard of that context carries with it a loss whose surface manifestation may be amusing, but whose deeper ramifications are profoundly disturbing. [Link]

Even if you don’t want to go down the route of scratch’n’sniff ebooks, we have to recognise that books aren’t just the lit. They are an experience. Google is getting it wrong. Can we do better?

Image courtesy of Bekah Stargazing, Flickr and CC. 1,265 results for photos matching book and smell.

So, what a surprise. Amazon has announced that it’s starting a Lulu-type POD system, through its wholly-owned subsidiary CreateSpace, which has been churning out self-published CDs and DVDs for several years now. The difference to Lulu being that products of said service will be searchable and buyable through the mighty Amazon.com, making them much more discoverable than stuff on Lulu, which is mostly only linked to from authors’ homepages.

There’s a bigger story here though, and it’s linked to this announcement:

The National Archives and Records Administration, the federal government’s official archivist, has entered into an agreement with CreateSpace, an Amazon.com subsidiary, to digitize the motion pictures in its collection. CreateSpace will digitize movies chosen from NARA’s collection of more than 200,000 motion picture titles, most of them public domain. Amazon.com will then make the DVDs available in a DVD-on-demand service ($19.99).

Creating better access to archives is unquestionably A Good Thing, but this way of doing things provokes a number of questions. The NARA claims they can’t possibly afford the costs of digitisation, and so getting Amazon to do it benefits everyone, as they get free, new copies for their archives. Charging for DVD hard copies on Amazon’s part is also justifiable, but what about electronic copies?

The reported trigger for the NARA’s decision was an earlier partnership with Google, which saw a trial run of 101 films made available through Google Video. From 200 requests for the hard copies in the previous year, the movies were seen over 200,000 times when available on the web - a clear indication that the interest was there, but not the availability. Hence the Createspace project. The NARA and Amazon executives have made the fascinating and fantastic statement that the material will remain in the public domain, meaning you can copy your Createspace DVD as many times as you like—but will they cut out the middleman and make the whole, Createspace-digitised archive available online through Google Video or similar?

The question is particularly pertinent because this is exactly what concerns me about Google Book Search: entering into partnership with libraries and archives to digitise public domain content, but not honouring the spirit of that public domain status by making the texts fully available and downloadable (including, particularly, being indexable by other agents). The Amazon/NARA partnership seems almost too good to be true, but public-private partnerships make me nervous (if you live in London, like I do, you’ll know exactly what I mean), and when rights and digital access are involved, I get very nervous indeed.

Citing the crucial need to access records on nuclear waste storage, or census returns, in five, 10 or even 100 years’ time, [Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives] said: “This is a critical issue for us, and for UK society as a whole. We assume our personal records are secure, we expect our pensions to be paid, but anyone with a floppy disc even three or four years old is already having a hard time finding a computer that will open it.” [Source]

This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and pertinent articles I’ve seen in the papers for a while: National Archive project to avert digital dark age.

First of all, it makes me nervous that Microsoft is a verbose partner in this. Isn’t the reliance on one or two companies’ proprietary formats what got us into this mess in the first place? MS are renowned for their distaste for open and accessible formats (witness their approach to web standards embodied in Internet Explorer, or the furore over the BBC’s MS-powered iPlayer), so while it is probably necessary that they should be involved to rescue these files, let’s hope the Archives have learnt their lesson and are moving towards the use of open, extensible, standards-based code.

I’m going to point again to this article about validation, because I think it says a lot of things very well about the importance of using this kind of code:

This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out it’s early versions. Because that’s what we need the code to do: this code is for recording what we think. There are no paper backups of the web. Every day we put more on it that we’re not putting in our traditional medias. If we don’t use extensible code, then our current history evaporates with the next minor tech change. We’ve never had this problem before. Before a mark on a page could go centuries; there’d always be daylight to read it by. This is a new problem and it required a new solution. [Source]

This is as important in publishing as it is in other fields. As we move inevitably towards ebooks and beyond, it’s very easy to imagine a situation, twenty, thirty years from now when a decade-old literary work becomes inaccessible because it was composed on a computer, revised on others, and encoded in an obsolete, proprietary format for distribution - and never once written down on paper.

The solution, I’m afraid, is not to write everything down on paper - there’s too much of it now, and it’s wasteful and irresponsible to boot - but to make sure that we use the best, most open, most public formats right now, for everything we do.

Large sections of the music industry are already moving away from DRM-based systems (e.g. the latest version of iTunes) and publishers should take note, and not go down the bad old routes, which, experience is beginning to show, don’t help anyone in the long run. The International Digital Publishing Forum published the latest version of their XML-based Open eBook Publication Structure Specification at the end of last year, and it scored its first victory a few weeks back with its inclusion in the new Adobe Digital Editions (although this still lays open the possibility of DRM).

Yes, we need to find ways to make sure that authors and others are paid for their work, but we also need to make sure that their works - as well as those pension records and that nuclear waste data - are accessible to future generations. We owe them that.

Image detail from Illuminated by Chronicity, reproduced under CC Licence.

I’ve written about Google Book Search before, but it’s time to do so again - particularly after their PR barrage at the London Book Fair, some aspects of which I wrote up at the time.

For a while now, I’ve been broadly in favour of GBS, at least in as much as it’s forcing publishers to look seriously at digitisation strategies and becoming the driving force for change within the industry. Google’s PR drive has also stepped up a notch, with their flacks becoming increasingly informed about the book trade, a number of high-profile panels at book events, and a rapidly growing number of publishers coming on board. At the LBF, they convinced a fair number more.

So now, as is my wont, I’m the one getting nervous. This isn’t contrariness. I want digitisation to succeed, but I’ve got some worries about GBS, based on two main observations: Google Book Search isn’t the same as Google Web Search, and Google, if not actually, intentionally lying, is certainly wilfully misleading publishers about its intentions.

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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.