booktwo.org

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.

Booktwo.org, always up-to-date with the latest online literary microtrends, is proud to bring you a new subgenre: Google fan fic (or should that be fear fic?). Enjoy.

Google Interiors by Sandra Niehaus:

I realized with a shock that George’s hat was a dense cluster of tiny cameras, forming a rounded beehive of angled, glittering eyes. “We’re from Google Interiors, a new venture sponsored by Google to make every home interior in the world searchable on the internet.”

Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford:

“Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google by Bruce Sterling (!):

This is Macbeth’s world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those “Three Weird Sisters”, who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great - only, in real life, it totally sucks?

The Nine Billion Names of God by Kathy Kachelries:

“Here’s the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It’s memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what’s more important, it’s memorized it’s own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It’s omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, that’s when Google realized what it was.”

And finally, the grandaddy of Google Fan Fic, EPIC 2014 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson (an oldie but still a goodie):

In 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which pays users to contribute any information they know into a central grid, allowing the system to automatically create news tailored to individuals, entirely without journalists. … At its best, EPIC is “a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before … but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue.”

(See also: Armando Ianucci’s Tesco vs. Denmark: from “Every Little Helps” to “We Control Every Aspect Of Your Lives”.)

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

In what should be the last of the round-ups of the Google Unbound conference, but probably won’t be, some more commentators:

• Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it? by Stephen Leavitt at the Freakonomics blog
• Quit Marketing By the Book - a comprehensive write-up by Rebecca Lieb at Clickz.com
• How to be Cory Doctorow - Seth Godin’s notes from the conference
• ZDNet’s Report
• “Interesting bit of media industry theater” - if:book’s Ben Vershbow at the conference

I’ll stop now.

Today’s Guardian has a short piece with more Google follow-upping:

The iPod has done it with music, Flickr has done it with photos, MySpace has done it with bands and Saatchi is doing it with paintings. The question is: can Google do the same thing with books by creating an international online market place for them enabling readers to download volumes in their entirety - at a price of course - to their iPods, Blackberrys or smartphones?

Luckily, the Guardian’s Vic Keegan is more clued-up than Bryan Appleyard - for example, he’s been trying out iCUE too. He’s also the man behind Shakespeare’s Monkey, he’s active in Second Life, and, at the risk of stalking, he uses Flickr, so he’s rather better qualified to talk about all this.

According to a Guardian column from a couple of weeks back, which I can’t locate online, he also released a book of poems (which may or may not be this one) inside Second Life recently. If anyone can find out any more about this, I’d be very grateful.

[UPDATE:] Thank you, Mr Keegan (see the comments).

Lots of recent activity in the British press concerning future books: last weekend’s Sunday Times contained not one but two pieces on the subject.

The first piece, Google plots e-books coup, reports on the Google Unbound conference we mentioned last week. Unfortunately, it’s all fairly techless, reporting that “the internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry” (er, Gutenberg?) and “commuters in Japan were already reading entire novels on their mobile phones” - something some of us have been doing for a while in this country too (see iCUE).

It does, however, contain a nice quote from if:book’s Ben Vershbow: “Google seems to be simultaneously petting the industry and saying everything is going to be all right if they just let everything go, but at the same time telling them: ‘We have you guys up against the wall’.”

Serial crank Bryan Appleyard then takes up the story in Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book? Despite some cogent analysis of the Google/Publisher fight - with special mention going to Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for his work highlighting the inherent cultural and corporate bias of Google, which makes it far less neutral an information dealer than it would like to present itself as - Appleyard can’t help the hyperbole: “We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last 500 years.”

Coming off the back of several paras about academic textbooks, this is unfortunate. Most of the debate about book digitisation is framed in terms of poor authors, starving in garrets, unable to make a penny because of evil copyright-infringers. But the vast, vast majority of digitised content is academic and/or technical; it’s being put out there to help people learn more, better, and more easily; to improve the world. Such works are pure information - their format is simply not important. The heft of a good novel may be pleasing to the bibliophile, but few would go so far as to say they must have the latest X-thousand-page volume of the International Journal of Electrical Engineering in hardback.

Appleyard draws the distinction, with John Sutherland, between the algorithmic search engine and the wisdom of the human-made index. But in the end he totally misunderstands the nature of information, arguing that it is a separate quality to ‘knowledge’, instead of its central, essential building block:

[…] David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services said, “Ultimately it’s not up to Google or the publishers to decide how books will be read.

“It’s the readers who will have the final say.”

No, it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or, ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn’t educate and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become.

“The net doesn’t educate”? If Appleyard means by the above that teachers must do more to help pupils learn to navigate the new digital libraries, to harness the flow of information themselves and to make their own judgements about the quality of information, then he is correct. But they’ve been doing that for centuries too, and as resources like Moodle (and Sloodle), the Million Book Project and the now entirely digital Open University show, they are embracing the new mediums with much more enthusiasm than doomsaying journalists.

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[Update 23/01/07] More evidence of naysaying, or just lazy journalism: Contrary to Appleyard’s assertion that Google Unbound was “an invitation-only conference”, registration was open to all, and rapidly filled up.

This looks like it should be very interesting:

Six centuries ago, a German metalworker tinkered with a wine press, metal alloys and oil based ink, perfecting one of history’s great inventions: the printing press. With the rise of mass publishing, more people than ever were able to access information. Books proliferated. Today, digital technology offers a similar opportunity, and the Internet now represents a powerful platform for promoting and distributing books. Online book sales alone account for nearly four billion dollars in annual US sales—almost 15% of the entire book business. [More]

If anyone is going, I’d love to hear more. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow is speaking, so we can hopefully expect to hear more there soon.

The latest New York Review of Books, a special edition of which is produced for the book fair, carries an article by Jason Epstein, venerable founder of the NYRB and husband of crusading refusenik Judith Miller, entitled Books@Google (it´s also available online). A flavour of Epstein´s wonderful prose can be found in the following analysis of Google´s ´Don´t Be Evil´ motto:

The confrontation of founders who wish to do only good with the complex reality of their astonishing commercial achievement is an issue of biblical scope which calls to mind the expulsion, naked and trembling, of our ancestral parents from prelapsarian Eden into a world where choice is obligatory and error inevitable, a blessing and a burden upon themselves and what Milton called, with mixed feelings, their hapless seed.

The meat of the article, however, is not Google itself, but the possibilities of future book distribution. While Epstein sees the democratisation of knowledge as a good thing, and writes without the horror that Google Book Search evinces from other commentators, he also seems to be in no doubt that the future of the book remains rosy.

Epstein envisages a future where books will be stored digitally and available worldwide, but printed on demand from ATM-type machines at the point of need. He´s putting his money where his mouth is too, founding a company called, imaginatively, Books On Demand, which has already installed such a machine in the World Bank bookstore in Washington, D.C., with others due to come online soon in the New York Public Library and the Alexandrina Library in Egypt - the latter printing books in Arabic.

This is an exciting proposition, and refreshing from someone so bound up with the old school of publishing. Nevertheless, Epstein´s assertion that “Until human beings themselves evolve as electronic receivers”, consumers will prefer their reading matter to come in a format “indistinguishable from factory-made books, to be read as books have been read for centuries” seems short-sighted. It is a strange logic that assumes, all things being equal, that readers will prefer hunks of dead tree to a lighter, more flexible but otherwise indistinguishable electronic version - and that version is coming.