booktwo.org

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.

The Internet Archive recently released a demo version of its new Open Library project, about which we are very excited.

We’re great fans of the IA, due to the wonderful Bookmobile and the all-encompassing awesomeness of their main site, the largest collection of its kind of publicly-available text, images, audio and video, as well as the world’s largest history of the web. So when we heard they were turning their attention to paper books, we were looking forward to seeing what they came up with.

Their mission statement is worth reading in full:

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open. [Source]

But what’s it like, beyond the rhetoric? Well, it’s a collection of listings for every edition of every book that’s ever made it into library classification (or at least, that’s what it will be), as well as scans of those editions which have already made it into the Archive’s copyright-free library.

If:Book has some quibbles about the presentation, but I’m far more interested in what this means at the level of data and metadata.

For starters, Library data is not free. The OCLC, the world’s largest supplier of library data (and recent receiver of much Charkin-praise), is a non-profit which charges for it’s data feeds. The Open Library plans to build futurelib, an open, universal book catalogue, which will contain all books, not just those which arrived recently enough for the increasingly outmoded ISBN classification, or which belong to organisations hooked in to the OCLC’s network.

Secondly, an Open Library can consolidate and clarify all these data structures, not enslaved to the horribly outdated Dewey Decimal system, the increasingly subjective and unwieldy Library of Congress Classification system, the publishers’ proprietary and unworkable BIC and ONIX systems, or even the tag-based user-generated systems of the new wave, but providing a translation point between them all, as well as serving as a rallying call to create new and better schemas.

They plan to consolidate all the information surrounding the book too - imagine a place to go and search out books that contains not only the book itself, its various classifications and summaries, but also reviews at every level, from Amazon one-stars up to scholarly monographs, references and antecedents, cover art through time, location and author data… the possibilities are almost limitless.

So too are the commercial applications, with print-on-demand of scanned titles planned, with the trade-off of open sourcing the software driving the library. It will be interesting to look back in fifty or a hundred years to see how static this project (or a similar one) has become. If ebooks take over, will a project like the OL become a true archive, indexing only the past? Even if this is the outcome, it only strengthens the case for such a project. We look forward to following its progress.

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 »

There’s been a bit of media attention in the UK lately around some children’s books which have been appearing as part of a new initiative to increase tolerance and reduce homophobic bullying in schools. Books such as And Tango Makes Three, the story of two male penguins in a committed relationship in Central Park zoo, and King & King, a new twist on the old Prince-and-Princess fairytale, introduce the concepts of same-sex love and relationships to young children.

There has been the predictable response from religious groups who view such books as ‘forcing’ alternative sexualities on children, or somehow tempting them into homosexuality themselves (see this Guardian article). The alternative case is so frequently mis-represented that it bears stating here: homosexuality, not being a choice, is a reality in the lives of many children and young adults, either by being the offspring or ward of same-sex couples, or, later, being their own experience. Homophobic bullying is so widespread that increased tolerance not only helps kids who are actually gay, but those whose lives are made miserable by homophobic taunts even if they themselves are not gay.

As Elizabeth Atkinson, director of the No Outsiders project which is promoting the books, puts it so well: “What books do not say is as important as what they do.” To deliberately leave images of gay relationships out of children’s books is to censor social reality.

This controversy - over the same books - cropped up a while back in the States, and I wrote about it then for STML, my literary blog (link contains images some consider NSFW). Look there to see the historical background to this debate.

What’s the booktwo angle on this post? Well, there’s not much of one, except to say that technology, it is hoped, can help educators and students circumvent the strictures of religious or state-sanctioned intolerance to free up debate around controversial issues. Organisations such as the ALA use the internet to raise awareness with projects such as Banned Book Week, to keep records of most challenged books, and to advise librarians on how to deal with such challenges. Libraries such as that at UPenn create online repositories of censored works, accessible to all (worth noting that that the current Swotter text, James Joyce’s Ulysses, is on that list). Think Tanks such as the Free Expression Policy Project place book censorship alongside restrictive DRM and aggressive internet filtering on their issue list. The debates will continue, but the new can stand alongside the old in our continuing quest for personal and intellectual freedom and tolerance.

Bookswim is being touted as Netflix for books (or LoveFilm if you live in the UK, like I do) - an online book loan service, membership of which provides you with a number of books for an unlimited time, and covers postage both ways. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the site looks a bit crappy (and doesn’t actually work for me, right now), I think there are two major problems with this.

Firstly, Amazon will eat you. This is a business mantra that should be kept in mind by an increasing number of online businesses - Lulu being a case in point - and even offline ones (booksellers and- I believe - publishers too). Amazon already offers DVD rentals, which, while I have no figures to back this up, must have swallowed a chunk of Netflix and LoveFilm’s business. And they did this at no cost to themselves - they simply made a new content deal, and switched over a host of their existing stock to loan instead of sell. They could do this with books overnight.

Secondly, it’s a dead-end business, just as DVD rental is. Streaming is coming. I was lucky enough to get an invite to play with Joost, the new IPTV package from the makers of Kazaa and Skype (recent Wired aticle on Joost). At the moment the content is pretty thin, and the image quality is not quite there, but the potential is obvious: any TV show, any time you want to watch it - just like music now. And soon the same for movies, and after movies, ebooks. These are all just technical challenges. The postal system is not the way to move this stuff about.

One thought: Bookswim can’t compete with Amazon on warehouse stock - at this point in time, no one can - but it could compete if it opened up the system to all the users. Joost’s strength is that it is based on a Peer 2 Peer system - that is, any viewer is potentially a broadcaster too. Bookswim could adopt this model - much in theway that Amazon exploits ts Marketplace sellers - to provide a BookCrossing-type swap shop for readers, who pay each other per book with a little off the top to the service provider. Just a thought…

The main concern of many of those commenting on Bookswim (e.g. Teleread) is that it will kill traditional libraries. Unfortunately, what is killing traditional libraries is not new technology but chronic underfunding and out-of-touch management (Book Bars, anyone?). New Technology could save libraries, something under discussion at the Emerging Libraries conference in the US, as reported over at if:book.

But all these arguments point to a need to break these dichotomies of ‘new’ and ‘old’ booksellers; online lenders and bricks-and-mortar libraries; and pool these technologies to achieve the common goals: raise literacy, increase readership, and produce more great lit. Anything that does this has to be considered a good thing.