TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for November, 2003

By

Umberto Eco, the great Italian novelist and scholar, is clueful about ebraries’ potential for reference–but not quite up to speed on the recreational possibilities of e-books.

Look, even now, e-book are far more viewable than in the past, given the sharper PDA screens with more contrast. What’s more, dedicated e-book readers will improve, offering e-ink and flippable pages in time. And even the old Gemstar e-book readers aren’t impossible–I love my REB 1100. Besides, the issue isn’t just viewability or other physically related ones; it’s also choice.

I’m down here in Statesville, North Carolina, but can still pick among thousands of public domain e-books from Project Gutenberg, including my semi-exotic favorites of the moment, the works of George Gissing. Not exactly the usual fare at the Statesville library. And bookstores? Er, try Wal-Mart. Compare the the number of paper reading choices of typical Statesville residents with those of Eco, whose online biography says: “Currently Eco enjoys a prosperous life, dividing his time between a summer home in the hills near Rimini (a seventeenth-century manor that once served as a Jesuit’s school) and a residence in Milan (a ‘labyrinthine’ apartment complete with a library that houses over 30,000 books.)”

Yo, Eco! Here’s a Modest Proposal: Maybe you and other rich Brains can spend time in small-town North Carolina and see how library e-books could fare vs. paper books. Ideally you and the other Great Thinkers will think about children who can’t climb into the family Chevy for the 40- or 50-mile trip to Charlotte unless their not-so-well-off parents are in the right mood and aren’t too worn out from jobs at the textile mills. TeleRead, of course, not only calls for well-stocked national digital library system in the States and elsewhere, but also the integration of e-books into local libraries and schools–and would address hardware issues by popularizing the technology and driving the costs down. At the same time it would vastly increase the number of copyrighted e-books available to library users for free in Statesville and elsewhere.

As for preservation issues so properly raised by Eco, TeleRead would deal with them through standardized formats, redundant servers in many locations, media-integrity checking and other means–including the sheer spreading around of e-books. The more copies, the less chances of of a lost book, either in terms of media or human memory.

(Found via Dorothea Salo’s link to an Eco lecture reproduced in Al-Ahram. Also see a Slashdot discussion.)

Note: Blogger has apparently lost an earlier version of the item I just posted. Might pop up again. Might not. Talk about the vagaries of technology! I hope that the Proprietary Format Promoters’ Forum will understand that the archive-related fears of Eco and librarians are not frivolous. Library organizations and those serving them should consider withdrawing from the Forum if it won’t live up to its actual name and get more serious about a Universal Consumer Format, which would simplify life for future archivists. Anyone want to speak up at the Forum’s March 16 public library conference?

By

Check out new goodies from the University of California Press (on many topics) and the University of Oregon’s East Asia Digital Library. (Via LISNews and Dailywireless.)

Also don’t forget the free books from the usual places such as Project Gutenberg, the University of Virginia, the Internet Public Library, the On-Line Books Page, Memoware and other sources.

By

The secret life of tattooed and bellydancing librarians is a fun column–by Shelley Howells, in the New Zealand Herald–that pays due tribute to librarian bloggers.

Ideally now, librarians can go on to the next step–encouraging nonlibrarians to blog. One place to start might be Friends of Libraries-type groups at the local level. Imagine library-related bloggers creating political support for libraries in their own cities (although the blogging lessons could be for all kinds of purposes, not just political activism, lest this rub local politicans the wrong way). Needless to say, too, librarians could offer blogging expertise to civic groups in general and, even more importantly, to local students and teachers.

Please note that I’m not suggesting that library-housed blogs are for everyone. But do you really think local censors are going to care that much about the local Lions Club’s blog on a cornea-donations program–or a biology teacher’s blog on local plant life (backed up with p-book references, complete with Dewey Decimal numbers!)?

Jeremy Frumkin certainly has the right idea in encouraging libraries to go beyond traditional services and offer blog space, among others. As storage spaces for community memories, library servers would be far more trustworthy than the commercial variety. Perhaps Jenny Levine, an early advocate of blog-mentoring, has already posted sentiments to this effect. If nothing else, librarians have an important role to play as bridges between a many-to-many medium like blogging and the world of more formal publishing, which, although encumbered with horridly obsolete business models, often can serve up solid information not available elsewhere. Pointing bloggers in the direction of the right links–including relevant citations of local libraries’ p-books–could work magic.

The time and money angle: We know that many if not most librarians have a shortage of both. However, maybe librarians could cut back slightly on their personal blogging to spend some off-hours time acquainting schools and local civic groups with the technology. Then with a few successful demo projects, especially ones linking to library resources, efforts could be made to come up with money to make blog-nurturing an official part of a library’s mission. At least as far as K-12 blogging, a Shifted Librarian item contains handy pointers for librarians, educators and others seeking more information on the topic.

The TeleRead take: Imagine the advantages that a national digital library system in the TeleRead vein could offer bloggers with truly stable links for books and articles–with access widely available to library users, as opposed to the items being locked behind passwords. In fact, that was the very first topic of the TeleRead Web log. Agreements with database vendors, on the link front, is a good start–it’s already happening to some extent. But the real solution, from a long-term archival perspective, would be for the items to be available on library-controlled servers themselves.

Related: Read a great how-not-to lesson from LISNews on a clueless, purple-haired consultant who reportedly told Colleyville, TX, to toss out its paper library books. Stupidity like this is neither library evolution nor revolution. It’s library destruction.

(New Zealand column found via Library Stuff.)

By

In Sharing and Stealing, a copyright paper now in draft for comment, Wayne State law professor Jessica Litman favors a more efficient way of compensating musicians.

Litman, author of Digital Copyright and one of the country’s most respected authorities on digital intellectual property, compares the vibrancy of fact-exchange on the Net (facts per se aren’t copyright protected) with the barriers inhibiting mass enjoyment of digital music (protected).

She would like the law to require copyright owners to identify their works in special ways if they wanted copyright protection under a traditional approach rather than through payment via an otherwise compulsory licensing plan.

Not that she is anti-creator. Just the reverse! Among other things, she notes that current laws and the rigid practices of the recording studios already limit the options available to creators. Quite correctly she observes:

The proposals to enact a new license to permit peer-to-peer file sharing and compensate creators through a levy, tax, or uniform royalty have inspired heated philosophical and economic debates over the flaws in any compulsory or collective licensing system. The objections tend to ignore the fact that composers and performers of music currently receive most of their income through a combination of standardized, compulsory and collective licenses administered by intermediaries (music publishers, record companies, performing rights societies) in return for payment. From the vantage point of music creators, replacing the theoretical control they enjoy under the copyright law with an enforceable promise of payment makes them no worse off, and makes most of them better off.

The intermediaries who hold control over musical works and recordings are also in it for the money, and one might expect them to be delighted to hand over their control in return for more cash. Not a bit of it. The current dominant forces in the music and recording business may no longer need record pressing plants, CD burning plants, warehouses and trucks to distribute music, but they have a huge stake in ensuring that digital distributors be limited to those who used to rely on record pressing plants, CD burning plants, warehouses and trucks. They rest of us, however, don’t share that stake. Indeed, new distributors who never assumed those expenses may be in a position to experiment with new variations on digital distribution and still pay a larger percentage of proceeds to the creators of the material.

As is already obvious, Litman appreciates the glories of file sharing. So does TeleRead. Under TeleRead, people could share files of books and other items effortlessly and access the protected parts, not just samples, if creators qualified for compensation through a National Digital Library Fund. Net users could also enjoy the entire files if their local library districts had bought rights to the material, or if the users subscribed to an applicable service or paid for the items directly. The last two possibilities could cover people accessing the material from abroad. Indeed a TeleRead-style national digital library system, not just commercial services, could offer subscription options for those outside the States. In addition, foreign governments could arrange through an American TeleRead, or through direct dealings with U.S. publishers, for their own citizens to access TeleRead works. What’s more, both in the States and abroad, normally compulsory licensing plans with opt-out clauses would be a possible way to finance books in whole or in part and allow file sharing. The same ideas could apply to TeleReads in other countries, from which we in the States might want to enjoy books and other items. Also, to address the question of making TeleRead palatable to the entrenched interests here and abroad, we’ve proposed the possibility of large content owners gambling money up front and along the way to get around possible budget-related caps on revenues from file-sharing and direct access to library nodes. This approach could work with or without the element of compulsory licensing.

But back to the Litman paper on copyright and the music industry. My friend Jon Noring, founder of Project Gramophone, which would put online fine old recordings from the past, will surely nod when he reads the following in the Litman paper:

…in many if not most cases, it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to discover who the copyright owners of all of those rights are. One of the more disturbing revelations of the Napster litigation was that record companies insisted that they were unable to generate a list of the copyrighted works they claimed to own. (This is particularly disquieting because one would assume they kept records in order to send out those royalty checks they’re supposed to be sending out, but apparently not.)

Exactly! I hope that Jon catches up with Litman to compare notes on the complexities here, not just at the federal level but also the state one. As Jon discovered, a Web of state laws “protects” old recordings. Only with reluctance do I use the term “protect” since the practical effect of this is to keep the recordings off the Net and to allow them to fade into oblivion since they are not attractive enough commercially for the big studios to release.

Concluding her paper, Litman writes:

The recording industry appears poised to accept a world in which we agree to allow consumer downloading (either for free or for a price) but not what the recording industry is calling “uploading”–which is the state of having on your hard disk a music file that someone else can search for and copy from you. Just as the idiosyncratic interests of large numbers of individuals who want to share is directly responsible for the wealth and incredible variety of information we can find when we go looking for it, I think that consumer-to-consumer file trading has the potential to make it economically feasible to distribute a much broader variety of music to a much larger audience. I’d hate to lose that potential just because it’s strange, new, unproven, and not yet well represented by lobbyists.

Earlier, referring to pressures against a sensible solution, Litman says: “If I’m persuaded that politics would prevent the adoption of a Netanel/Fisher/Ku/Lunney solution, why am I bothering to articulate my own variation?” Among other things, she suggests that perhaps the music business would be open to compromises that “left current recording and music industry distributors in their market dominant position.” Ideally her legal writings can influence that debate. And who knows: maybe TeleRead’s concept of letting the megaconglomerates glamble–to qualify for the very biggest payments for books and the rest–could also help win over the entertainment giants that have outbid the rest of us in DC.

Whatever you do, Professor, don’t forget the campaign donations angle in explaining the cause of the problem. You might be interested in TeleRead’s findings on John Edwards (at least $900K from one Hollywood contributor alone) and other Presidential candidates (Howard Dean is doing just fine on the copyright-industries front). Rich campaign donors own or at least rent them, directly or through payments–er, I mean donations–encouraged by trade associations. Interestingly, however, I don’t think we should give up. Financier George Soros would be a good prospect to approach, and even in Hollywood there might be some hope. Lobby the owners, not just the politicians. Copyright law isn’t just illogical; it’s corrupt and at odds with the social causes that so many top Democratic donors favor. Activists would do well to go directly to the people involved, point out the grotesque contradictions and suggest that the donors tell Edwards and the rest to stop pandering to the worst of the copyright zealots. Even by Hollywood and Washington standards we’re talking “sleazy”; for example, the Bono extension act was passed by voice vote when the nation was preoccupied with the Clinton impeachment. So, yes, it’s possible that some of the donors would have a sense of shame.

Meanwhile it also would help to follow Jon Noring’s excellent suggestion and create a Digital Media Users Association to balance out the power of the movie and recording studios. Who knows–some of the more enlightened big-money campaign donors just might want to chip in to fill up the DMUA’s kitty once they knew the truth, including some findings from a Soros-funded project. It would be the right thing to do. As Litman herself has observed: “The fact that more than sixty million consumers are currently exchanging music over peer-to-peer networks in the U.S. gives them a stake in the building consensus and both a moral and a political claim to a seat at the copyright bargaining table.”

Related: Comments in Copyfight as well as those in the Legal Theory Blog from Lawrence Solum. Also see Prof. Litman’s 1997 paper New Copyright Paradigms, where she includes TeleRead among the examples of “how digital technology could transform the ways we read, write, gain access to, learn from and use information.”

By

Jeremy A. Frumkin is an e-library expert at the University of Arizona with some pretty neat ideas in the MyLibrary.gov vein. No, he didn’t use that label, but it sure fits. His big premise is that digital libraries should go beyond just offering the services that conventional ones do. Hear, hear–whether the library is the Library of Congress or a TeleReadized version of the library in Fossil, Oregon! Some specifics:

–Personal blog spaces.
–Researcher’s toolbar. [Jenny Levine is also keen on that one.]
–Easy, web-based citation management.
–Community areas fed by information sharing. [In LOC's case, areas could be subject-related rather than by geography. - DR.]
–Tools that allow seemless access from web-based content to desktop applications.
–Easy-to-use online annotation.

I haven’t any idea where Jeremy Frumkin stands on TeleRead, but all of the above thoughts nicely jibe with our vision of locally customizing national digital libraries for communities–and individual readers. With all the extra information available, a well-stocked national digital library system could be more responsive to the needs of communities than old-fashioned pbraries.

And speaking of “MyLibrary”: Check out something close in name, MyLibrarian.com, from long-time TeleRead supporter John Iliff, a reference desk veteran.

Correction: That’s F-r-u-m-k-i-n–no p (and no e, either–even though it’s no mystery where this guy stands on e-books). Blogger isn’t so easy with a rotten connection to distract me, a consequence of being out of town for Thanksgiving; but I, the human, will take the main rap rather than just blaming the network.

By

E-books can be a godsend for people learning special skills, not just for those interested in best-sellers, academic works, and other kinds such as classics of the Project Gutenberg variety.

Skeptics would do well to read a cogent essay by Stephen Gambuti, author of Dirty Little Secrets of Magic and other writings. He is a professional magician who has appeared in New York comedy clubs and given an off-camera performance for Robin Leech of “Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous.” In his essay below for TeleRead, Steve in effect makes a powerful case for multimedia e-books for skill-builders of all kinds. One can easily extrapolate; what applies to magicians could just as easily apply in many situations to auto mechanics, surgeons and others who rely on hands and brains. Perhaps Steve’s case history can win over a few e-book foes in the worlds of education and libraries.

An aside: Publishers and librarians might check out Steve’s work and maybe even e-mail him about his doing an e-book for young magicians (even though his present writings will also be of interest to kids). Do-it-yourself Harry Potter, anyone–with or without supernatural aids?

* * *

I’d learned magic through books and videos, finally reaching the stage where people suggested that I myself write a guide. But what about the hassle of finding a publisher or self-publishing?

Then a friend handed me a paperback on electronic publishing—and I realized what a fantastic marriage could exist between the craft of magic and the world of e-books. E-books make magic earlier to learn. Most paper guides give limited illustrations with confusing black-and-white sketches of various magic tricks. After sifting through an entire p-book, I come away with one or two tricks that I like. Videos do the same thing, except there is no way to bookmark the trick you want to learn, so I must resort to pushing the fast forward and rewind button most of the time. Again–just to study the one trick I wish to master!

Now consider the potential of electronic books.

Advantage One: E-books are far, far more usable for learning magic than p-books are. The most helpful parts can be easily bookmarked. Learning magic usually requires using both your hands. But with an e-book you never have to worry about the book pages constantly flipping closed as you read and simultaneously work the steps out with your hands. With certain formats you can also make a printout of a particular trick you want to learn. This is extremely convenient because you can roll the page up and take it anywhere. If you like one or two things in the e-book, you do not need to carry around the whole book.

Advantage Two: Animated GIFS are better for magic than the regular paperbacks or videos are. One can still insert videos into e-books for demonstration purposes, but animated GIFS require a lot less memory. They also make download times go faster. How many times has someone wanted to learn something practical and wished to see it demonstrated? E-books can do that. Writing a magic e-book, I can load it up with color pictures to help in the step- by-step instructions of each trick. I can create a book without the extreme cost of paper. My readers will also benefit from better demonstrations, illustrations and details of each trick sequence.

Advantage Three: E-Books don’t take up space and can be easier to find. I own more than fifty some odd paper titles on the craft of magic, but I’ve packed them away because my children needed space for their books. Whenever I must reference something, it’s off to the back room in the basement. There I waste time rummaging in and out of boxes trying to find that stupid book. But I can now store my e-books on my desktop or on CD-ROMs that I can bring them with me and use on any computer. Looking for a particular trick is a click away–no more boxes in the dusty basement.

There are many different formats that one can use for e-books. For the best experience in learning the craft of magic, I recommend HTML and PDF. Both will support animated GIFS and allow printouts of pages. (I cannot see people learning magic on handhelds so palm-style reading devices and readers would seem impractical to me.) The second choice is the LIT format. I have enjoyed many e-books on magic with Microsoft Reader on my Tablet PC.

My final assessment of the marriage between e-books and magic is that they are a match made in heaven. E-books are an inexpensive route that magicians can take to share their craft. They will provide future magicians opportunities to learn beyond the normal paper and video products. E-books offer a perfect blend of both. I believe that the future of e-books has only just begun to blossom.

By

“Many companies mistakenly focus on the technology when trying to understand DRM and fail to consider the real social issues that managing content involves. For example, DRM schemes that tie content to a single PC fail to address the needs of, say, a child of divorced parents who lives in two homes. Even more common is the person who wants to play music at home, at work, in the car, on a portable player, and at a friend’s house. The killer app for digital content is the connected home, yet most DRM schemes undermine consumers’ ability to easily move content between devices. Protection isn’t just about security; you need to consider convenience, as well.” – The war on copying, published at EDN.com and referenced by Slashdot.

The TeleRead take: Yep, that’s the root of the problem–the fact that engineers and lawyers are often so far removed from the real-world situations of users.

(Found via Jon Noring, moderator of the eBook Community List.)

By

“Back-end scanning and OCR done on the cheap and not even slightly proofread. And libraries are paying how much for these resources?” – Dorothea Salo on full-text databases of articles.

The TeleRead take: Dorothea says: “It occurs to me that this might be one way that open-access trumps the for-fee competition. Believe me, it ain’t that hard to do better than this!” Not to mention the possibilities for a TeleRead-style library model–with a preference for well-presented material. Meanwhile, via Distributed Proofreaders, the venerable Project Gutenberg. one of the Net’s premier free sites, is working to upgrade its e-book-proofing standards. Time for cash-strapped libraries to grow closer to PG? A no-brainer.

By

How to help libraries enter the e-book era? LISNews should start an E-Book Clinic, a bulletin board area that would also be blended in with other sites ranging from Chris Rippel’s to Project Gutenberg and TeleRead. The E-Book Clinic could explore nuts-and-bolts issues such as how to avoid DRMing public domain books and, of course, how to popularize e-books in a library context.

The E-Book Clinic ideally would be involved with LISNews–to be in the library mainstream rather than isolated. E-books sooner or later will be genuinely in the commercial mainstream, via Amazon and Google, and the same concept should apply to libraries, at least if they want to avoid the Philadelphia Weekly scenario. A new Pew survey says 31 percent of Americans are “tech savvy.” Do libraries really want to be left behind when Gen Net finally latches on to e-books in a big way?

Why LISNews rather than an ALA E-Book Clinic or an OeBF one: Alas, with certain exceptions, ALA hasn’t been very open to new ideas, especially from nonlibrarians. While LISNews has its share of e-book haters, the site seems more receptive to thoughts from outside the profession. At the same time LISNews exists for the benefit of libraries. The Open eBook Forum, despite its library special interest group, is for vendors rather than libraries or the public at large.

By

Philip Dick’s children are now rich, according to a new Wired article referenced in Slashdot, and from afar I’m glad–considering all the penury they endured in their youth. Then again, do we really want his copyrights to be in effect 70 years after his 1982 death, as opposed to 50 years, the pre-Sonny Bono Act duration?

Consider a statement from Russ Galena, his literary agent, quoted in Wired:

As for film deals, the estate has become increasingly choosy. “We sort of feel like we have to protect Philip K. Dick’s brand image,” says Galen. “So we set very, very high prices, and we’ll only do business with people who are established. It’s ironic, because the films that created the phenomenon started with options that were granted to struggling filmmakers. Today, we shun people like that.”

Hats off to Galen for his candor. I don’t know where he would stand on Bono, but consider the insistence on “brand names.” High-tech has driven driven down the cost of film-making and is likely to do so even more in the furure–when actors can be credibly conjured up in full detail from a computer. That is horrifying to the traditionalists but perhaps not appalling at all to many of Dick’s staunchest fans. Now, thanks to the Bono legislation, creative but underfinanced producers, whether of traditional films or the computer-synthesized kind, will apparently have to wait until 2052.

If Hollywood really cares about a vibrant film industry, then it will roll back Bono–and perhaps even go so far as to pay writers and other creators fairly while they are alive. Whoops. Did I say Hollywood? I meant Washington, but given the venality of fund-raising politicians, I might as well let the sentence stand.

Related: The VCR played a key role in the popularization of Dick; yes, the very gadget that Jack Valenti predicted would be the death of Hollywood.

By

More children will learn to love books if they can find just the right one at an early enough age. TeleRead is about much more than e-books for K-12, but that’s Reason One for the plan–and a key topic of the 1992 Computerworld article on the idea. From USA Today comes this wonderful and highly relevant anecdote in an article headlined Why won’t Johnny read?:

Adam Cobert taught himself to read in first grade, but it took two more years to find a book he liked.

Most books were “kind of disappointing,” says Adam, now a fifth-grader at Isaac Fox Elementary School in Lake Zurich, Ill. But he stumbled upon a copy of The Squire’s Tale by Gerald Morris at a school book fair in third grade and fell in love with the humorous adventure story of a boy who becomes squire to a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. Adam has read the book three times and thinks he’ll read it again.

Some kids never find their Squire’s Tale, and educators say that’s eating away at reading skills nationwide.

Scores out last week show that U.S. students’ reading skills barely have improved since 1992, despite a decade-long effort. While few children are illiterate, experts say “aliteracy,” or lack of interest in reading, is contributing to low skills across the board.

TeleRead, anyone? By vastly increasing the supply of books, and by “bringing the e-books home,” TeleRead could be a godsend for kids like Adam. He was lucky enough to find the right p-book, but what about e-books? Meanwhile the International Children’s Digital Library is definitely a step in the right direction.

Additional thought: Needless to say, TeleRead could be used to spread around reading-related software, not just actual books. The software could reflect different philosophies, so local educators would have a choice.

Reminder: TeleRead would be well blended in with local library systems and schools. It is not a plan to replace the former. Local librarians, for example, could use linking and customized search engines to help adapt the national system to community needs. What’s more, TeleRead would not instantly replace all p-books–and especially not the fold-out ones that kids enjoy. But it would free more resources for, say, story-telling hours, research-related mentoring of students, and other child-oriented activities.

By

LISNews founder Blake Carver has further thoughts on the Slashdot moderation system as applied to LISNews, where a poster and I believe that TeleRead has received unfair treatment.

Meanwhile, as I wrote in a LISNews message today, there are some specific things that LISNews could do to help libraries and e-books, and I hope that Blake takes me up on my friendly suggestions. The right e-book approach could reduce the chances of the Philadelphia satire becoming reality.

Ideally everyone can move on now from the moderation controversy to further discussion of the issues that TeleRead and others have raised about Philly.

By

The Chinese government should throw the book, so to speak, at a piracy site called BookClub About I.T.

Again and again TeleRead has taken on greedy copyright zealots and called for the replacement of the DMCA with a more sensible approach. But what about professional book thieves who use the medium of e-books to steal brazenly from writers and publishers? That’s a different question entirely from Fair Use-style sharing; and the BookClub About I.T. is a good example. Here we’re not talking about browsing in the Amazon vein or about file-sharing in the context of promoting obscure writers or musicians–but rather about rip-offs for cheapsakes who in most cases couldn’t care less about buying legal copies.

Rather misleadingly the $10-month, 700-book site says: “We didn’t sell any books, book’s CopyRight belongs to Author.” But tell that to tech writer Nicholas Chase, who correctly wrote on Studio B’s list for computer book authors and publishers:

Does it get any more blatant than this?  I wrote to ask them to remove XML Primer Plus just to see if they would. (I’ll give you three guesses.)

Lest publishers and writers think that Draconian copy-protection technology is the answer, here’s a rather insightful passage from NerdBooks’ Dave Henley:

Book publishers sell “overseas rights” as most of you know. It’s not that difficult to obtain a copy of Java: How to Program in India for $8, for example, and then to cut off the spine of the book using a hydraulic paper cutter and to feed the loose pages into an production/commercial scanner. One doesn’t have to use Amazon’s PDF files at all.

More than piracy, says Henley, many writers should worry about publishers undercutting retailers through sales of still-in-print books “to the ‘hurt & remainder’ marketplace.”

Even so, e-book-related piracy is indeed a problem and likely to grow far worse in the future as reading devices improve and more people grow comfortable with the technology. Under a TeleRead-style national digital library approach, Americans would have less incentive to pirate since so many books would be online for free–with provisions for fair compensation to copyright holders from a National Library Fund. Tech books could be a big priority, given their importance to readers interested in upgrading their job skills.

Overseas, we could encourage countries to set up TeleReads of their own and work with U.S. publishers to make American titles more affordable than they are now. I’m sure that many in the book business would disagree, but in countries with salaries a fraction of ours, publishers should not be charging as much as in the States–something that in fact is happening to an extent already. That would help grow the market in developing countries and lead to sales where none might be made before.

Similarly, U.S. policymakers could encourage publishers to follow the lead of O’Reilly and work with writers to put obsolete tech books in the public domain ahead of time. In some cases, as the experience of National Academies Press and writers such as Cory Doctorow show, it may even be to the advantage of publishers and authors to have new books on the Net for free.

The more reasonable are American business practices, the stronger the case can be made against thieves like those at the BookClub.

Detail: Shanghai, China, is the location of the BookClub, based on the whois information for billing, technical and administrative contacts. Even if the BookClub is elsewhere, the same concepts would apply. Piracy is piracy.

By

The intellectual property sections of the FTAA treaty are still a threat and will be discussed by delegates at a special meeting in 2004. We’ll look forward to more details from IP Justice in the wake of the latest round of negotiations. Meanwhile IP Justice’s Robin Gross writes in Infoshop News:

One of the most controversial sections of the IPR chapter requires countries to outlaw the circumvention of technological restrictions. Similarly to US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), FTAA would require all other countries to outlaw the bypassing of technological restrictions controlling copyrighted works, such as DVDs, CDs, and eBooks. It would also forbid anyone from helping another to bypass these controls, including outlawing tools, software, and technical information. One proposed FTAA clause contains an explicit basis against the development of free and open source software development by creating greater liability for those programmers than for proprietary programmers who write software capable of bypassing digital controls. These anti-circumvention measures have been widely used in the US to threaten freedom of expression and chill scientific research in the critical field of information security. Anti-circumvention laws have also served to prevent competition for after-market replacement parts and interoperability between systems.

According to IP Justice:

…Ministers had to set a special meeting in 2004 in the Dominican Republic specifically to discuss intellectual property rights.

Negotiations over the terms for providing market access on the new sliding scale basis are to conclude by September 30, 2004. The final FTAA Treaty is supposed to be complete by December 2004 in Brazil, but many believe that goal is unrealistic and Venezuela has reiterated its reservation that the treaty will enter into force in 2005.

The FTAA Third Draft Agreement has been released to the public and contains little difference from the previous draft that expands intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights will continue to be one of the most hotly contested chapters in the FTAA Agreement with pressure from the US to increase rights. However, the US is the only country in the Western Hemisphere that is a net-exporter of intellectual property. All 33 other countries are overwhelmingly net-importers of intellectual property from the US. It makes little sense for these countries to enact laws that will only send scarce domestic resources to Hollywood and Redmond.

One of the big questions I have is, “What concessions will the U.S. make to win better clauses for Jack Valenti, Bill Gates and the rest? Are certain industries being sold down the river to favor the big copyright-related industries?” And how about this same concept in the context of other treaties? Have North Carolina textile towns suffered in discussions with Asian countries, for example, because Hollywood ranked ahead in the priorities of U.S. negotiators?

By

An LISNews reader has called attention to our item on library bullies–Luddite librarians who absolutely can’t stand e-books and go into a Doberman mode when the topic arises. Thanks.

Of course, our frustration is more with a particular moderator than with LISNews founder Blake Carver, who has promised more thoughts on the topic. In fact, overall, my personal Karma score as of this writing seems to be just fine over at LISNews. A sign of progress? Let’s hope so. I’d like to think that e-books do have quiet supporters among librarians, and that the Dobermans are simply discouraging the white hats from speaking their minds.

For Blake, I have a friendly suggestion–that he invite Tom Peters, Lori Bell, Jenny Levine and other clueful librarians to co-moderate an e-book section within LISNews, an expanded version of EPublications. At the same time, within reason, those interested in the topic should be able to post elsewhere within LISNews boards, just so their comments fit the natural flow of the discussion. From time to time, for example–not constantly–it seems only right to mention e-books when LISNews folks discuss book-starved communities.

By

Thoughts kindly shared by Terry Frazier in Atlanta:

Have a look at LaGrange, Georgia. The city is its own CLEC and has provided high-speed access to every citizen. They have full electronic access to city government and some excellent educational initiatives. I don’t live there, haven’t even been there, but I follow LaGrange in the news because the whole idea is so intriguing. Last I heard BellSouth was fighting such locally-owned CLECs in the Georgia state house under the guise of unfair competition.

I need to get offline now–I’ve tied up my in-laws’ phone long enough and actually should return to The Vacation Routine–but you can bet I’ll check this one out later on.

Update, 2:51 a.m., Nov. 23: In a follow-up note written yesterday, Terry adds:

Hmm. I wasn’t aware of this, but there are apparently a bunch of Georgia communities in on this deal, and some of them are doing really well at it. No wonder the telcos are fighting this. If communities figure out they don’t need telcos as regulated monopolies, all kinds of good things can happen to access, but they’re all bad for the telcos. This idea of publicly-provided access fits well with your idea of a National Digital Library. If you combine locally-controlled backbones with good wireless last-mile connectivity we start to get some exciting possibilities for schools, businesses, and regular citizens. I’m going to follow this further.

Me, too, Terry, within the limits of my time, and I hope you’ll send further updates of your own. From the start back in the early 1990s, TeleRead was raising the local access issue in an e-book context (the original solution was to have been something called TRnet).

The big question is whether the CLEC question will be like copyright. Will politicians care more about corporate fat cats and political donations than about letting local communities help themselves? Can compromises be struck to make this politically possible? To what extent will DC provide local people with advice and other help to do the CLEC act? The idea seems so temptingly logical that I wonder if someone in Washington isn’t quietly doing this even now, despite the corporate orientation of the Bush Administration. But keep reading on. As you’ll see, the public and private sectors can find some neat synergies even if the idea may be a threat to certain phone companies (albeit apparently not all).

Braving my slow Net connection here in Statesville, NC, I wandered over to an overview page for Georgia Public Web, Inc., and found the following:

A non-profit provider of Internet and telecommunications services, Georgia Public Web, Inc. is bridging the digital divide by offering cost-effective, fiber-optic Internet, private line and web solutions throughout Georgia. GPW utilizes a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network that incorporates digital ” on-ramps” and “off-ramps” in many Georgia Communities.

Through our service offerings, we strive to improve education, economic development and other vital aspects of Georgia’s rural and small town communities.

Operational Network
–155 Mbps IP Backbone
–OC-48 SONET Backbone
–Multi-homed to the Internet
–High capacity, scalable connections
–24×7 Network Operations Center

Reading Marietta’s Backbone, an article to which Terry pointed me from Public Power Magazine, I learned that Marietta FiberNet had carefully surveyed the needs of potential customers and then had built the backbone. What’s more, it partnered with telecoms, including none other than LecStar, the company from which my in-laws obtain phone service here in Statesville, North Carolina. That way, much of the financial burden was spread around. At the same time Marietta will be using the profits from the venture to help keep down tax rates.

As for LaGrange, there, too, I found some public-private partnerships going on–and even with a slow connection I was able to check out some slimmed-down multimedia laying out the benefits. The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard has recognized LaGrange’s efforts. Turns out that free Net service is indeed available in LaGrange via a partnership with Charter Communications, which offers a Web-TV-style approach for cable subscribers interested in it. The connection speed for free access, as of 2001 anyway, wasn’t anything to write home about. But at least LaGrange was trying to make the Net a truly universal experience. “Our goal is to help people who are afraid and feel discomforted to learn or do new things,” Wired News quoted Joe Maltese, LaGrange director of Community and Economic Development. The article said that “A wireless keyboard supplied with the service allows LaGrange citizens to simply turn on their cable channels in order to get online. The city also provides neophyte users with around-the-clock training through cable for the Internet, keyboard and e-mail.” Just the ticket for my in-laws who are so uncomfortable with technology? And who knows, maybe the freebie service will go high speed soon if it isn’t already.

Yo, all the politicians running for President! What do you think would do the country the most good–just subsidies for more of the usual cable and DSL service and the rest? Or something imaginative like the new business models in Georgia and Vermont, efforts that Washington could encourage? And oh, do you notice the strong theme of public-private cooperation? That’s much of what TeleRead is about.

By David Rothman

(Update, Nov. 12, 2004: Statesville now has both cable and DSL available. – D.R.)

Carly and I are visiting her parents in Statesville, North Carolina (pop. 23,320) at the junction of Interstates 40 and 77, north of Charlotte. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of textile jobs have fled Iredell County, of which Statesville is the seat. Almost seven percent of workers are unemployed.

Just imagine the boost that better Net connections–and content via TeleRead, including vocational training materials in both text and multimedia forms–could offer business and education. The business leaders of Statesville, as the promotional magazine at the left shows, are trying some PR to woo new employers. And I wish them luck. People here are indeed hardworking and friendly, and Statesville has even won honors in the past for its business climate. For me, however, spoiled by a cable modem back home, and perhaps also for some executives mulling over Statesville as a possible new plant location, this is Internet Hell.

Right now, due to a Third World phone connection, I can’t get more than 28K through either of the two national Net providers that I use for dialup–even though the network nodes supposedly are 56K. This is another reminder of the need for universal and affordable high-speed Net access. DSL and cable and other forms of broadband aren’t just godsends for multimedia. They’re also helpful for serious issue-oriented blogging and many other consumer-related uses. Just as importantly, broadband can speed up the exchange of large Computer Aided Design files and other applications, especially for small businesses that can’t afford satellite links to bypass the sorry terrestrial connections I’m suffering right now.

From research to proofing (whoops–I noticed some repeat paragraphs in the “Apathy” item and have just cleaned up the mess), everything suffers with a slow connection. I won’t even think of downloading new software. While high-speed access is available commercially in small towns like this one, some people are thoroughly disgusted, if the user reviews at BroadBandrank.com are any indication. The reviews come from all over the country but are not a large, scientific sample. Still, they vividly show that to have high-speed DSL or cable access promised on a contract isn’t always the same as having it in reality. It isn’t just dialup users who can suffer in Statesville and elsewhere.

But what if our Statesvilles could enjoy advanced-fiber speeds, not just cable and DSL speeds–and perhaps a big Wi-Fi bubble, too? I’m highly intrigued by Larry Lessig’s fiber-related column in Wired, Fiber to the People: When customers own the network, everyone wins. The column isn’t just about theory–it’s about an actual project underway in Burlington, Vermont. Who knows, if high-speed costs were low enough for even casual users, my elderly Carolina relatives might finally hook up to the Net, and then my modem wouldn’t have to journey back to the 1990s. Imagine, too, the benefits for high-tech entrepreneurs who just might want to avoid Charlotte’s higher real estate prices. If nothing else, Statesville should think of business executives as residential users, too. Do high-tech CEOs–and, yes, Statesville and Iredell want tech businesses, not just more chicken pens–really want their children to grow up in a Net-backwards area?

Compared to test scores from many other districts, by the way, those of the Iredell-Statesville schools aren’t a disaster. But they could be better with faster net connections and a wider variety of content online, given the close relationship between achievement in school and the number of books available at home (which TeleRead could vastly increase, especially for lower-income householders, where this really matters). At the same time Iredell-Statesville could blend those new national resources into existing community efforts and encourage whole families to read. Books online aren’t worth squat to typical students if the right local backup isn’t there. As with telecom, we’re talking about coordinated local, state and national efforts. Interestingly, 67 percent of the 2001-2002 expenditures of North Carolina schools came from state rather than local taxpayers. So North Carolina, at least, already Gets It in terms of the needs to spread the resources around to reduce the famous Savage Inequalities. At the same time, compared to wealthier states, the money isn’t there–hence, the appeal of a national approach such as TeleRead, which, by driving down the costs of books, could benefit even Beverly Hills and Bethesda.

With or without the Net or local benefits from a well-stocked national digital library system in the TeleRead vein, Statesville has much to offer in terms of its people and its strategic location at the I-40/I-77 intersection. Imagine, though, how much better the town could do if it were as convenient on the electronic superhighway as it is on the concrete varieties. We’re not just talking about high-tech jobs, but also the old-fashioned kind in this era of highly networked, just-in-time manufacturing–and the accompanying need for well-prepared workers.

Needed for Statesville: a modern home page for the city government: Take a look at the page. Hardly any graphics. Like my modem, this site is trapped in the 1990s–perhaps in part due to the low speeds that so many people around here must suffer. Statesville is keen on luring new industry, and one wonders: Just what kind of an impression does this functional but primitive Web site make on the Fortune 500 outfits that the city and its business people are trying to lure? A slick magazine is good, but no replacement for a modern official Web site–and, more importantly, a good electronic infrastructure to go along with all the ballyhoo.

One encouraging detail: Either on its own or because of a Media General policy, the Statesville Record and Landmark publishes the e-mail addresses of reporters along with their bylines (at least in the printed version). It isn’t as if no one around here uses the Net. But the issue is quality of access, not just quantity. Don’t average Statesville citizens deserve more than merely e-mail and s-l-o-w Web browsing?

Telecom specifics: My in-laws’ local phone service is from LecStar, presumably relying on BellSouth’s infrastructure. In the past I’ve actually enjoyed better dialup Net connections in Statesville than right now, but even then they’ve lagged behind the equivalents in the Washington, DC, area. While high-speed access is the real solution in the long run, Statesville would do well to worry about the here and now. It and other places in North Carolina should force phone companies to think of of Internet access as the norm. With the hassles involved in getting good service, it’s no wonder that Statesville-like towns are behind large cities and suburbs in Net usage. The Vermont approach isn’t a panacea–but could help where sufficient local interest existed among civic leaders, business people and educators.

Something nice about N.C. Sen. John Edwards: While he’s still wimping out on net copyright, like just about all the Democratic candidates and certainly George Bush, I’m delighted to see him depict rural broadband as a priority, just so he’ll indeed stand up against the likes of Bell South and consider innovative approaches such as the Vermont one advocated by Prof. Lessig. The federal government should encourage cities that, like Burlington, Vermont, want to take infrastructure issues into their own hands while at the same time creating opportunities for the private sector. Knowing the realities of PACs, I’m thinking that perhaps arrangements could be made with the Bells and the like to pay ‘em off one way or another so they wouldn’t feel threatened. Yes, the Bells have plenty invested in existing infrastructure. But if Statesville and the rest of America are to thrive in the 21st century, we move to on to fiber optics, wi-fi, voice-over-the-Net and TeleRead. Ideally Edwards and other policymakers can come up with enough specifics, and actions, to back up their broadband rhetoric and related promises on issues such as jobs and education.