TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for November, 2003

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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?

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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.

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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.)

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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.”

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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.

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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?

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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.

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“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.)

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.