So, I can finally show off this utterly lovely project we’ve been working on at Apt, with the help of my awesome friends at Asylum Films.
Two weeks, never enough cash, animators sleeping in shifts in the Directors’ flat in Haringey, and almost a thousand books…
More (and bigger) video and info at 25thestate.com.
Here’s a thing someone floated at me. What if Amazon released a Kindle-reading app for the iPhone?
It’s a thought, isn’t it?
After initial doubts - why would Amazon deliberately waste all that investment in the Kindle hardware? - I did come to the conclusion that the Kindle and iPhone demographics, while they certainly overlap, are by no means mutually inclusive. I don’t have figures on this, but my presumption is that the iPhone’s younger and/or early-adopter audience is not quite the same as the Kindle’s slightly older, less techy, but more hardcore booky audience (heavy genre readers, in romance and sci-fi, reading up to several books a week, are the core Kindle audience, I’ve heard). The Kindle’s larger screen and seamless connection to Amazon speak to a different audience than the iPhone’s portability and rootlessness.
Thoughts?
A couple of months ago I was doing some research into various sources of book data, and one of the things I was interested in was seeing if it was possible to hook into local library data. For example, if I was building a site that contained lots of book info, it’s easy to point to a place to buy that book online, and there are increasing ways to find things if they’re in your local bookshop (e.g. localbookshops.co.uk and LT Local). But what about seeing if it’s in your local library?
If I want to check my local library, I can use their website, but it’s not a great service, and I have to find my local library on a host of different local government sites, which use different protocols. Surely there’s a central database of this stuff? So I called up the library, and was passed around a bit, and was finally told about OCLC, the organisation that holds all catalogue records for UK libraries. I’d come across the OCLC before in the form of WorldCat - a huge database of library holdings that, yes, does allow you to search for titles in your local library. However, its terms are quite restrictive, there’s no open API, and I didn’t use it much, preferring more free and more open services.
What I didn’t know is that the OCLC is the supplier of library data for all UK libraries, which have to pay to upload their data - and then pay to get it back out again. I spoke to someone at OCLC (briefly - they’re not that interested in individuals) and was informed that while it is possible to interact with their data at a programmable level, the fees for doing so are immense: in the thousands and thousands of pounds.
To me, this was a scandal. Why are our publicly funded libraries locked into a monopolistic relationship with a clearly greedy data supplier? Why are they paying thousands of pounds to access their own data? Why are the public, whose money is paying for this, locked out of the system?
Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only one to notice. The Open Library project was set up to provide a direct alternative to the OCLC, and yesterday Aaron Swartz, one of the people behind Open Library, posted Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab, a summary of OCLC’s monopolistic practices and their latest, most damning initative:
Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.
It’s not just Open Library that’s at risk here — LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened. Basically anything that uses information about books is going to be a victim of this unprecedented powergrab. It’s a scary thought.
Fortunately, the new rules haven’t gone into effect yet and it’s not too late to stop them. But we need your help. Please, spread the word about this disaster and share this blog post. Sign our petition demanding that they stop. And, if you’re a librarian or at a library, there’s a lot more you can do. First, you can share your library catalog now, before the new policy takes effect. Second, you put your own license on the records you contribute to OCLC, insisting that the entire catalog they appear in must be available under open terms. And third, you can use your OCLC membership status to pressure the organization to listen to libraries instead of dictating to them. Together, we can stop this thing.
I’m going to be following this up in a number of ways. I’ve started by filing a freedom of information request with my local council, to see how much they’re paying the OCLC and what, if any, efforts they’ve made to find other suppliers. Why don’t you do likewise?
It’s Remembrance Day today, 90 years since the end of the First World War, 63 since the Second, and all the others too, and it’s always been resonant in my family. On my mother’s side, there were lots of boys in the family: uncles, brothers and sons, who didn’t come back, and on my father’s side a smaller family but no less a part played.
Last year, my father gave me my Grandpa’s archive, comprising his photograph collection, some ephemera, and his memoirs, which he dictated to my Grandma, who dutifully typed them up, in the late 1980s. He had a pretty interesting life, running away from home in the East End of London aged 17 and lying about his age to join the Royal Engineers in 1924, seeing service in Egypt and the Sudan before returning home to join the Fire Service, which had always been his primary interest. He was the youngest Fire Force Commander in the Second World War, based in the West Midlands, and during and after the war he was repeatedly at the head of reform in the Fire Service, putting in place organisational practices still in use today. Among many other events, his memoirs contain a vivid recollection of the firebombing of Coventry in November 1940. Here’s his obituary in the Independent (which contains only a couple of glaring errors).
I’ve been trying to think what to do with this material, because I think something should be done. My Grandpa was no prose stylist, and it’s unlikely that his memoirs will be of interest, except in small doses, to anyone without a professional interest in the history of the period, the prewar Army or of the postwar Fire Service - and blogs like this. But it definitely has value to them, so I think I need to get some copies made and make sure they’re placed in the right archives. And while I’m doing that, I might as well get them digitised, made searchable and so on.
The photographs are quite wonderful, so I think scanning and Flickr’ing is in order for them. They haven’t been particularly well-looked after, and they’re degrading fast. There are so many stories, and so many people in here, and I’m such a geek about this stuff, it seems wrong to keep them locked up in these albums.
So, I’m looking for suggestions of what to do with this material, beyond what I’ve suggested. Are there accepted formats and channels for this sort of thing? Are there good precedents of how to do it that you can think of? And how should I go about getting the typeset digitised? I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear yours.
I’m very pleased to announce that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between my employer Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live.
Several months ago we heard that the Institute was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book London on a joint project. The result of this was the realisation of a long-cherished idea from Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute. Bob had recently reread Doris Lessing’s classic novel The Golden Notebook, and wanted to bring it to a new audience by creating a public reading group, composed of younger readers.
With Lessing the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, it seemed an appropriate time. We approached HarperCollins, Lessing’s publisher, and persuaded them to allow us to use the full text of the novel online, in the most accessible format we could. We built a website which allows the text to be read, bookmarked and commented on, page by page; a blog for the readers; and a forum where the public could discuss the novel, and the reading of it - all built on free, open-source software.
This Monday, November 10th, the reading begins. Seven readers, invited by the institute and including novelists, screenwriters, critics, and journalists, will read and comment on the book, and everyone is invited to join in. We’re very proud to be a part of this collaboration, and hope it’s a great success.
Over at Times Emit, I’ve just posted my notes from last night’s talk by Vicky Barnsley at LSE, where she talked about the changing publishing landscape, and some of the things HarperCollins is doing to expand the role of the publihser in the 21st Centure. It was a good talk, with a number of interesting points made and a couple of announcements. Go read it.
I’m pleased to tell you that bkkeepr, my project to create a Last.fm-alike for reading (and more besides) now has an API.
An Application Programming Interface (API) is essentially a machine-readable version of an application, and more specifically, the data in contains. bkkeepr is first and foremost an application that does stuff with data, and bkkeepr.com is the human-readable version of that application. What an API does is allow third parties to build small applications, widgets and so on that utilise that data in new and different ways. (This is another post, but I pretty much believe that everything should have an API. And not just everything on the web. E.G.)
bkkeepr is itself built on Twitter’s API, and uses data from a wide variety of other web services, including LibraryThing, Google, Amazon and others, via their APIs. So opening up bkkeepr’s data in turn is something I’ve intended to do from the beginning.
The bkkeepr API is very basic at the moment, allowing you to do two things: get all of a particular reader’s reading data, and get all the reading data about a particular book. There’s more information about it here.
The most important function of the API, to my mind, is that it gives users control over their own data. It’s not locked up in a database over which they have no control, and they can pull it out and store it elsewhere any time they like. I’ll say that again: it’s their data, not mine, and they should have control.
It also gives people the opportunity to build cool things. Here are some examples, some dull, some fun, that I’ve been thinking about:
There are a tonne of possibilities, and I’d love to see people do interesting stuff. bkkeepr currently has just over 500 users - not many, but I’m hoping adding features like the API and its results will draw more in. To those who say that an API is just a way to outsource the development of an application to those with more time on their hands, I say: yes. Yes, it is. Have fun.
Two years ago, I co-founded London Lit Plus, an open literary festival for London. We’ve had two excellent years, but with all kinds of commitments, it would in no way be right to attempt to keep running it in my somewhat useless and slapdash fashion, to the inevitable detriment of the events.
But it’s a wonderful thing, and I still believe in the concept of the open festival, and I’d love to see it continue. So I’m appealing for someone or someones to take it on, with full blessing and support.
If you’re interested, read this for more info, and spread the word!
I recently bought one of the Tikitag starter kits, and have been playing with it. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed, but here’s a nice application with a bunch of Ifs attached.
IF everyone had RFID readers (like tikitags’) and IF the tags were dirt cheap (mass-produced, they wuld be, but no idea of actual figures), inserting them in books would mean you could do nice things like the above. Excuse the self-promotion (or get used to it, I’m afraid), but as well as the paperback of Bookkake’s edition of Venus In Furs, there are also free ebook editions available. So you can stick a linked RFID tag in the back of the book, and tapping it on the reader takes you to a page of free ebook editions of the same book.
Yup, I know it’s not very thrilling. The same could have been achieved with a QR code, a cuecat, or, yes, just by typing in the URL. But it’s something to play with. The idea of the tikitags is to use RFID to create an “internet of things”, linking physical objects to data and communication, as suggested by Bruce Sterling’s “spime” concept, in which objects with pervasive RFID and GPS tracking can record their history of use and interact with the world. There’s definitely something here, but haven’t thought of the best application yet. Something neat for bkkeepr? Stay tuned.
Books Published: The size of each territory shows the number of new book titles published each year.*
“Each new book published is counted only once on this map, regardless of how many copies it sells… A book is defined as having at least 50 pages; a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages. Publications with fewer than 5 pages are not shown on this map. Worldwide, about a million new book titles were published in 1999, with the largest numbers published in the United Kingdom, China and Germany. Overall, the map is dominated by Western Europe, which is home to a number of well established publishing houses. [ * Books titles published, number per million people, 1999.]”
The data is over a decade old, but I’d wager the proportions are still reasonably accurate, despite the massive growth of publishing in India and other developing nations. Europe, and particularly Britain still publishes too many books.
From The Atlas of the Real World, via Creative Review.
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