Want a good illustration of the age gap when it comes to e-books? Check out an example from the Indianpolis Star. Eventually e-books will be as easy to read as ordinary books and even offer flippable pages with the words in e-ink. But that day isn't here yet. Still, old foggies in the library establishment would do well to remember that younger readers are already eager for the new technology, even in its primitive form.p when it comes to e-books? Check out an example from the Indianpolis Star. Eventually e-books will be as easy to read as ordinary books and even offer flippable pages with the words in e-ink. But that day isn't here yet. Still, old foggies in the library establishment would do well to remember that younger readers are already eager for the new technology, even in its primitive form.
posted by David Rothman at 1:51 AM | permanent link

Well, my Win XP is falling apart. The news from Dell tech support was grim--somehow my Optiplex GX150 had corrupted a crucial file, ntoskrnl.exe. If I really wanted to be safe, the technician said, I might want to reformat my hard drive, because otherwise I might lose everything. Rightly or wrongly, he said that copying over the file with a fresh one was no sure-fire guarantee, at least not if my keyboard lockups continued. Cheery words, huh? Actually they were and are. Hey, great excuse to banish Microsoft from my main box. What's the point of XP anyway? A little over a year after the change, my system is deteriorating the same as my earlier machines did under Win 98. No more pseudo linux, I'm thinking. Give me The Real Thing. I tried TRT a few years ago but was put off by the lack of apps. This time I can look forward to goodies such as Ximian Evolution, which even comes with Red Hat 8.0.

So what does this have to do with e-books? Plenty. Luckily I'm more into plain-text e-books in the Gutenberg vein rather than commercial protected versions, but my data problem was a good example of the hassles of, say, Microsoft Reader--which of course associates your purchases with specific machines. My experience also gave me a new appreciation of the value of cracking tools to allow easy sharing of protected books on your own machines (er, fair use, that antiquated concept so loathed by the copyright establishment). Let's hope that libararians as a group can successfully lean on e-book-related companies to be more responsive to consumers and maybe even, gasp, develop business with new publishers if the standard New York conglomerates will not wake up. The ultimate solution, of course, would be a well-stocked national digital library system like TeleRead, which, at least to an extent, would reduce the financial incentives for both piracy and consumer-hostile protection schemes.

The horrors of the weekend also reminded me of the risk of Microsoft depending on e-books to bind me and other users to Windows. I myself like the Reader's feel--it's much more pleasant than the competition from Adobe, and if someday Microsoft can develop a decent operating system for consumers, I'll be back. But what's the point of XP if it imperils my ability to get my work done? Furthermore, since I'm a much heavier user of my machine than most people are of theirs, I suspect there'll be many more users giving up on XP in disgust as they "catch up" with me. Meanwhile I'm not sure how much blogging I can do in the next day or so, given this little distraction, courtesy Microsoft.

Confession: Yes, I'll still have Windows on my auxiliary desktop. But I doubt I'll be buying much right now in Microsoft Reader format--and not just because it's incompatible .

Update, Jan. 31: Actually this item and a few others appeared a little earlier--I've just revived them following some Blogger-related complications.
posted by David Rothman at 1:48 AM | permanent link

Project Gutenberg is in the cross hairs of J. Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley professor and Wired Magazine contributor, who accuses PG of failing to "achieve any form of critical mass." I'll get to Gutenberg in time. But first a few words on the DeLong column and then plenty more on his former employer, the Clinton Administration, which in so many ways tried to privatize knowledge--the antithesis of the spirit of Gutenberg and TeleRead.

In the February issue of Wired, DeLong isn't calling for the end of Project Gutenberg, but he might as well be. He thinks that its scalability is pathetic compared to linux or for that matter a closed-source project known as Microsoft. The headline nicely conveys his 'tude. "Any Text. Anytime. Anywhere. (Any Volunteers?)." He also says Gutenberg isn't "a high priority for governments," and, because the work is "boring" and without a strong "positive feedback loop," it can't attract enough volunteers. Meanwhile, sob, DeLong's own e-book needs go unmet from the library system. He begins the column with his mind-numbing search at a university library for a copy of Appendix D of Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

"So," he asks by the fourth paragraph, "why can't I just call up the text on my computer screen? Where is my universal online library?"

Good question, Professor. The Clinton Administration, where you worked as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, got off to a wonderful start when Al Glore was talking about digitizing the library of Congress, so that a little girl in Carthage, Tennessee, could dial up book after book even if Daddy worked at a backwoods gas station. Alas, however, succumbing to a massive inflow of campaign cash, the Clinton people sold out to Hollywood and the rest of the copyright establishment. A copyright lobbyist named Bruce Lehman continued to ply his trade as the White House's czar of "intellectual property" matters in cyberspace. Lehman at one point was even foreseeing a time when the average American might be able to read e-books only at the local library on computers made safe for the copyright interests. Just the opposite of TeleRead's slogan: "Bring the E-Books Home."

Lehman's infamous White Paper helped pave the way for such treats as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I suppose that a well-to-do Berkeley economist would happily pay for copyrighted materials, including Appendix D, or at least his institution would. But tell that to the schoolchild whose image Gore conjured up, albeit without the reference to the gas pumper, my own little touch.

She might fare better under TeleRead. It was and is a business model to allow many thousands of books and other copyrighted items to go online with proper compensation for copyright holders while giving the entire country--not just the elite--access to them.

The most powerful Clintonians, in character, turned out in the end to be aggressively indifferent to the plan despite the polite noises I heard at the beginning. I remember the condescending comments from a Clinton appointee when I was about to testify at a copyright hearing. "This is like Hollywood," the man said. "Not everyone can be a star. We can't use everyone's idea." William F. Buckley, Jr., however, my political opposite in many ways, could. He showed his courage with two friendly columns on TeleRead. On the positive side in the Clinton era, the Department of Education commissioned me to write a paper later called Copyright and K-12: Who Pays in the Network Era?, payment for which I donated to my local library. But TeleRead never happened. Perhaps George Bush can rise beyond the stereotypes on this issue just as Bill Buckley did.

Meanwhile, if TeleRead isn't reality yet, what can we do right now for the little girl in Tennessee? That is the glory of Project Gutenberg. While many Washington politicians and bureaucrats were evincing less concern for the commonweal on the the e-book issue than for big wheels--like Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner, both major campaign contributors--Michael Hart was keeping his promise to work toward a universal library. He is the son of a two academics who served as codebreaks during War II, and reviewing an old Wired article, I see that his father specialized in Shakespeare. Back in the 1970s, however, when Hart first started creating e-texts on a mainframe at the University of Illinois, he sensibly began with something very different but profound in its own way. The U.S. Declaration of Independence was a prescient choice, given the Stamp Tax mentality of the copyright establishment as exemplified later by Lehman.

Imagine how wacky the Gutenberg project must have seemed even to Hart's friends at the time. His donated storage space, as reported in Wired, was all of 10K. That was how advanced computers were. Even by 1988 Hart's network connection was still poking along at just 1,200 baud, but he did managed to put online 10 entire novels, starting with Alice in Wonderland. Hart at first supported himself as stereo sales rep and then becoming an adjunct professor of electronic text at a Benedictine University, a Roman Catholic school in Lisle, Illinois. The Wired article nicely noted the parallels here. Like the old monks, Hart wanted to preserve books, and the people of the seminary obviously were pleased to oblige even if they could pay him just $12,000 a year and living expenses. Along the way Hart hewed to his beliefs in free knowledge.

"If he made some concessions," Denise Hamilton wrote in 1997 in Wired, "it's possible that Gutenberg might have 100,000 books online today--a respectable library--instead of 1,000. Indeed, Hart says, various academic institutions and even some Texas oil interests have offered to bankroll Gutenberg over the yeas, in exchange for control. One university offered him a six-figure salary, he says,to bring the project to their campus. He turned them all down flat. 'Almost everybody out there wants to charge for books, and they want real control over which books we do and which edition comes out,' Hart grouses. 'They want a bit in my mouth. I don't trust them.'" But the money could have been there. If you want to speak about Michael Hart's value in free-market terms, Professor DeLong, it looks as if The Invisible Hand could have treated him very well if he'd been as pliable as the Clintonians.

At the time of the interview, Hart had uploaded 1,000 books to the Internet, as noted, and was aiming for 10,000 by Dec. 31, 2001. The number seemed high enough for Hamilton to ask in print: "Is Hart a deluded crackpot, a high tech saint, or just another Net eccentric?" Isn't he the crazy guy who puts sugar on his pizza? Well, it turns out that as Don Quixote, not that infrequent a comparison for Hart, he actually has come close to knocking down a few windmills. Just 12 months or so after his deadline, Hart has almost 7,000 books on the Internet for Gore's mythical little girl in Tennessee. Close enough.

So what's the the problem for Gutenberg's critics. Well, considering the tens of thousands of books published annually, 7,000 isn't that big a deal even if PG has played up the classics. At least going by the information in Wired, the Internet Bookmobile Project, another worthy endeavor, offers 20,000 books and plans a million by 2005. Just how many of the 20,000 came from Gutenberg, though? Keep in mind that the questions arise about Wired-supplied stats, not the laudable Bookmobile Project, whose main page just alludes to "almost 20,000 public domain books currently available online" without mentioning the original sources. Meanwhile The Million Book Project would like to live up to its name, with the same year, 2005, as the deadline for the million books. Present number of titles? 1,091, according to the graphic accompanying the DeLong column. The International Children's Library offers 200 books and envisions 10,000 by 2007. Simply put, right now, all the collections are tiny in the grand scheme of things.

Who's to blame? Not Hart, who has dedicated his life to his cause and deserves better than a kick in the teeth from DeLong. The real villains are Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Congress and the other politicians who never followed through on the former's promise to digitize the Library of Congress.

Significantly James Billington, Librarian of Congress, has said that he worries more about the digital preservation of "rare pamphlets" than real books. But why not both? As quoted in a story in Tech Law Journal, dated April 15, 2000, Billington believes that "there is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down. There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence." Interesting. Should a paper edition of Mein Kampf enjoy more presumption than e-book editions of Homer, Dante or Shakespeare? Adding to the insult, Billington has said, "You don't want to be one of those lonely mindless futurists who sit in front of a lonely screen." A remark delivered with Hart in mind?

What's really incredible is that Billington has said that e-books are "isolating" but libraries are "a community thing"; he is totally oblivious to possibilities of e-books as vehicles for shared knowledge, especially among schoolchildren passing books on to their peers. That is what can happen now, to a limited extent, under Gutenberg and could happen in other ways under the TeleRead plan. TeleRead provides for legal file-sharing of copyrighted materials, tracking, and a national digital library fund--along with the infrastructure for private philanthropists to participate.

Well, there you have it, Professor. Now imagine if the Clinton White House, Congress and Billington, a Reagan appointee, had offered government money, without strings, for Michael Hart or a TeleRead-style national digital library? We might be much farther along.

That said, I'll also note Project Gutenberg's flaws. I totally agree with critics of Gutenberg's publishing system, which needs drastic updating. You can't search across the site for the same text in many books, for example, and, of course, the books are in ASCII alone. Even some of Gutenberg's most ardent boosters are aware of these weaknesses, and with or without the Project's actual support, they are working on potential improvements such as RaptorBook, which is the baby of James Linden, a gifted programmer in his 20s who shares Hart's penchant for the classics. For years Hart avoided graphic user interfaces. But as shown by a response to James--who happens to be a business associate of mine, as well as TeleRead's chief technical advisor--Hart is more flexible these days. My hunch is that the Gutenberg site in the near future will indeed undergo a massive makeover.

But what about Gutenberg's scalability? Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive and also the Bookmobile project, ran an item on a mailing list about "robotic page turner" the size of four refrigerators. It can turn almost 2,000 pages an hour and undoubtedly will be still faster, smaller and more affordable in the future, or some else will invent a better version. Resources like that aren't cheap. In sheer numbers alone, then, other projects may well beat Gutenberg--well, at least until the sophisticated page-turners are as inexpensive as scanners.

Still, keep in mind why Gutenberg is special. Readers can share their personal passions--say, a favorite neglected books in the public domain--with the world at large. What a contrast to Bill Gates, who bought several copies of The Great Gatsby for the private library of his $50 million mansion but refuses to pay for it to be on the Net. That is why visionary grassroots projects such as Gutenberg deserve support from public and private sources alike, including a TeleRead system if one becomes a reality.

I myself would like the system to be run by professional librarians, who, as a group, are far more clueful about the Net than when I wrote on TeleRead in Computerworld in the early 1992s. But I would hate for other choices to vanish. Until I posted The Brass Check on the Net--well, the first chapters, with more to come--no one else apparently had. Gutenberg will spread around the file I've prepared with other volunteers. PG doesn't and shouldn't replace librarians, but it addresses needs that even the best pros may not always be able to fulfill in their usual professional roles (yes, librarians are welcome participants).

If nothing else, Gutenberg is a powerful defender of the concept of public domain, which, if not used, will deteriorate. Governments can roll back copyright terms and threaten to end grants or other funding. But the more Gutenberg thrives, the harder it is for Bruce Lehman and friends to steal away the rights to the classics already online, and that resistance will benefit librarians and nonlibrarians alike.

No, Professor, I won't blame you for the copyright-related sins of the Clinton administration and the gutless retreat from Gore's hopes for the Library of Congress, but, along with the failure of Gates to be Carnegie II in a major way through e-books, they are a stark illustration of the need for Gutenberg. Perhaps you need to reconsider what you wrote. I notice toward the end of the column you even brought up the possibility of "limiting copyright." That would be a big help, thank you, but hardly a substitute for Gutenberg and TeleRead.

Update, Feb. 1: Brad DeLong is now saying that his point was that with some goverment help, Project Gutenberg could have digitized many more books by now. That is certainly contrary to the impression he left countless readers, including me. At any rate it would be great if, when he revisited the topic, he wrote about the reasons for the lack of government help.
posted by David Rothman at 2:26 PM | permanent link

IP Justice: New white hats
Going by the Verizon case, U.S. courts care more about Draconian copyright protection for Hollywood than privacy for the average American. What an appropriate time for the debut of a new group called IP Justice. Cnet interviewed Executive Director Robin Gross.

"Are there any countries that have views about intellectual properties that you like, and alternatively, which countries have the 'worst' IP laws in your view?" Cnet asked her.

"I'll start with who has the worst IP laws," she said, "because that's actually the easiest. It's the United States. When it comes to the traditional balance we've had between copyright and freedom of expression, it's been completely done away with in the last couple of years. It's been replaced by a regime where the content industry has total control over what people can do with their e-books, CDs, DVDs and that sort of thing. With the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and subsequent enforcement, the United States has some of the most restrictive views on what people can do with their works."

True, true, true. With bought politicians in the U.S. so eager to cite other countries' laws in justifying sellouts to copyright holders, IP Justice should have a positive effect in the States, too. America may be the most Enronesque of nations in the IP field, but like-minded copyright greedsters are everywhere.
[edit]
posted by David Rothman at 1:31 PM | permanent link

...why not suggest the use of public-domain classics from, say, Project Gutenberg? Libraries won't suffer the same lending restrictions that they would on books from commercial sources. In fact, readers can forever keep material downloaded from Gutenberg-type sites. Libraries, moreover, are free to print out public-domain books from the Net, and as noted here earlier, the materials can cost maybe $2 a copy. Great way to fill in gaps in collections.

TeleRead, of course, would help by allowing thousands of commercial books to be online for free to libraries and users, with payments to content-providers from a national digital library fund. But that day hasn't come. And meanwhile, if your library system wants commercial e-books, it might investigate a new offering from OverDrive and Fictionwise.

"Under terms of the agreement," says a statement from the former company, "OverDrive will provide premium content and digital rights management services to Fictionwise for use in their Libwise product (www.libwise.com). Patrons of libraries using Libwise will be able to download eBooks to either a PC or any popular handheld devices such as Palm, PocketPC, WinCE, Psion, and even some Nokia cell phones. The agreement also includes a co-marketing alliance between the two companies to reach the library market." According to the companies, the main markets of the new product will be "small and independent libraries."
posted by David Rothman at 11:14 PM | permanent link

The most famous lobbyist of the music industry is leaving by year's end to devote more time to her children. Touching. Maybe Hilary Rosen can even think about the children of average families and about the taxes she helped bring about on schools and libraries and consumers--in the form of harsher copyright laws. Meanwhile, if nothing else, we know of one household where the use of .MP3s will be very carefully supervised.

The TeleRead take: Lobbyists and PR people are disposable. Family responsibilities may even be the main reason for Ms. Rosen's resignation from the Recording Industry Association of America, but as a recent Wired article shows, Ms. Rosen turned herself into a tempting punching bag for outraged Net activists, librarians, you name it. It's time for the music biz to move on to a less hated figure. Be interesting to see how long until Ms. Rosen resurfaces in another industry. Perhaps the asbestos business? Of course, the fantasy here is that she ends up like one of those former cancer-stick-pushers who did anti-smoking commercials. "And now, speaking for America's libraries and the need for fair use...." Hey, if Rosen doesn't want the job, maybe ex-child advocate Pat Schroeder of the publishers association can repent and oblige.

But back to Hilary. She earlier was known for helping to start "Rock the Vote" to engage young people in the political process. My hunch is that at RIAA her effect on the RTV cause was mixed in certain ways. On one hand, the naked purchase of Congress by the copyright interests, via campaign donations, has helped energized some of the young to vote. And on the other hand? Many more millions may eventually be thinking, if they haven't already: "Why bother?"
posted by David Rothman at 10:03 PM | permanent link

Earlier TomPaine.com caught it from us for merrily publishing Bill Gates Sr.'s arguments for the estate tax--without a reminder that neither father nor son appeared to be opposing copyright extensions, the surest path to a copyright gentry. The commonweal wins some and loses some, eh?

Now, however, to its credit, the Paine site has published a piece on the blatant ripoffs that writers are suffering from the Boston Globe, an offshoot of the New York Times' congomerate. Alas, the Massachusetts Superior Courts recently ruled in the Globe's favor. But the freelancers are appealing, and with good reason. Here is what Debra Cash, cofounder of the Boston Freelancers Association, wrote in TomPaine.com:

"The terms of the contract are complex (and we argue, deceptive), but a short summary is that, as a condition for freelancing for the Globe today, writers, photographers and illustrators have to give the newspaper rights to their entire archive of past Globe work. Then the paper can do virtually anything it wants with that past work--resell it to third parties, anthologize it, put the images on T-shirts or posters, you name it. Under the contract, the paper can also do the same thing with every new Globe contribution. The Globe’s right to do these things doesn’t run out until 70 years after the creator dies. And the Globe doesn’t have to pay an extra penny, ever."

What the useful article doesn't say is that copyright law is inherently the friend of the rich in ways far beyond the above. Copyright lawyers here in the Washington, DC, area cost in the region of $200 an hour, with the more expensive ones charging as much as $800-$900. Yes, some working-stiff writers will hit it big. But not many. So much for the protection the Founding Father's intended. A client of a writer can engage in the worst rip-offs, and the author still may have problems collecting his or her due because litigitation is so expensive. It's happened to me. It's happened to others. What modern copyright law does do, however, especially with longer copyright terms in effect, is reduce the number of free classics available for future writers to read online. And literary classics will take longer to be available for adaptations by writers without Hollywood-bloated budgets.
posted by David Rothman at 4:29 PM | permanent link

The old-fashioned library book sale has gone electronic at librarybooksales.org.

From the home page: "LibraryBookSales.org matches you with rare, collectible and quality books that have been donated to public libraries. The money you spend goes directly to the library that sells you the book. You benefit because you can find quality books at great prices. Everyone Wins!"

More details: "librarybooksales.org (and .com) has become one of the hottest spots on the web. New libraries are joining every day, and books are being uploaded as we speak. The project is open to any library. Public, private, institutional, special collections, educational, foreign or domestic. The goal is for libraries to generate much needed funds to continue serving the 'better good.' The project is not open to commercial book sellers. These libraries can now sell their better books on the web. These may be books that have been donated to the library, duplicate copies, monographs or surplus materials. We try to discourage the sale of ex-libris books, since most serious book buyers don't want to own books that look like they were permanently borrowed from their local library..." Needless to say, you can not only buy books but also donate them to particpating libraries.

The project, sponsored partly by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, is from the California State Library Foundation.
posted by David Rothman at 1:00 PM | permanent link

Try to search "ebooks" in a search engine...

Do you think that it will include the singular "ebook" in the results?

Nope. "ebooks" is a different noun from "ebook," and the search engine may still treat "ebook" like a name, not a regular noun. So an "ebooks" search will be treated totaly differently from an "ebook" search. So ebook is not the singular form of ebooks.

Additional thought from David Rothman: To add to the fun, you want to try "ebook" and "ebooks" both with and without the hyphen.
posted by Jerry Justianto at 12:02 PM | permanent link

"The nearly one million citizens of Westchester County will be able to search the library system catalog, the Internet, and more than 30 subscription-based resources with a single query using" Muse software. - EContent, Jan. 21, via Library News Daily.

The TeleRead take: Excellent. And here are a few more ideas.

How about assuring prominent display of Web links to special local resources--for example, the county's Healthy Heart Program--when search results pop up? Work on this with Muse if the feature isn't already there.

Or why not blend in Googlert or the equivalent ("Fill in your email address if you want to receive regular alerts on this topic")?

Interestingly, Westchester County's system is run by Maurice (Mitch) Freedman, president of the American Library Association. Nice going on the uber-search wrinkle, Mitch. Perhaps ALA itself will think strategically in another way and come out explicitly for a TeleRead-style approach someday--complete with an ample national digital library fund and user-to-user file sharing of library items (with provisions for fair payments to copyright holders).

E-book get-togethers at ALA gatherings, like this year's Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, are a good start. But in the end they should be just tools toward major goals in the TeleRead vein.

Right now, of course, too many librarians seem worried about their turfs, as opposed to fighting for a truly integrated national plan that would greatly expand the resources available to neighborhood libraries and their users. Yes, as Steve Cohen is laudably documenting, public officials are up to some Stupid Budget Cutting Tricks. But local, state and national politicians might be a little more receptive to the pleas of the library community if its leaders showed more guts and imagination. A TeleRead-style system would be a very cost-effective way to help spread books around and reduce the famous savage inequalities. It would strengthen, not replace, existing libraries--especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Outrage in favor of extended copyright terms. The smaller the public domain, the more need, alas, for TeleRead.

How about it, Mitch? So far you've been deaf to uppity nonlibrarians. Hey, take a stand on TeleRead. John Iliff did, and other librarians might speak out if you yourself showed some courage here. As indicated by the your adoption of Muse's one-search approach, it isn't as if you're a Luddite. Now act. What a great way for future generations of librarians to remember you. Time to speak out in Philadelphia?
posted by David Rothman at 4:02 AM | permanent link

TeleRead would greatly expand the range of library books available in small towns and in urban ghettos and lower the cost of distribution. But it is no substitute for resistance to anti-library budget cuts in the here and now. For an overview, see an ALA news release on the Campaign to Save America's Libraries. Then check Steve Cohen's new Web log, Save Our Libraries.

As many librarians would argue, the economic slowdown has increased the need for library services as people upgrade their skills to compete in an increasingly mean economy. But politicians are cutting back. As noted in the SOL log, America's Libraries has reported:

"In order to close what he estimates as a $34.6-billion budget shortfall, California Gov. Gray Davis has proposed cutting statewide support of local libraries from the current $52 million to about $24 million. The measures, part of a budget proposal released January 10, are among $20.7 billion in total cuts over the next two years, including $4.5 billion taken from education programs."

Meanwhile, down in south Florida, the SunSentinel.com site says one middle school in Florida doesn't even carry Harry Potter. Nice way to get the children to read, huh?
posted by David Rothman at 10:10 AM | permanent link

TeleRead is a plan to aid society, via a well-stocked national digital library system, and would offer new business options for pubishers of all sizes--as opposed to regulating their present activites. What's more, if given a chance, new technologies could help open up the way for all kinds of diversity in media. That said, if today's media biggies have their way, innovation could be killed off before it has a chance. Things have reached the point where even conservative Bill Safire worries about Media Giantism. In today's New York Times he writes:

"Take a listen to what's happened to local radio in one short wave of deregulation: the great cacophony of different sounds and voices is being amalgamated and homogenized. (The following figures were published by Gannett's USA Today, which kind of blunts my point about big-media squeamishness, but its account of the F.C.C.'s ruination of independent radio is damning.)

"Back in 1996, the two largest radio chains owned 115 stations; today, those two own more than 1,400. A handful of leading owners used to generate only a fifth of industry revenue; now these top five rake in 55 percent of all money spent on local radio. The number of station owners has plummeted by a third. Yesterday's programming diversity on the public's airwaves has degenerated to the Top 40, as today's consolidating commodores borrowing public property say 'the public interest be damned.'"

More and more, books are becoming like radio. Yes, zillions of small publishers are out there. But the big boys claim the bulk of the sales, abetted by the giant chains.
posted by David Rothman at 12:52 PM | permanent link

Memo to Bill Gates: The best way to reduce piracy of Microsoft Reader files is to make the format friendlier to users. Here are comments by George Czajkowski on Usenet--via Pocket PC eBooks Watch:

"Why use something so user unfriendly and unsuitable for mobile reading (Pocket PC, Palm, etc.) as Adobe e-book, when there is so much better, user friendly and secure system available in the form of Palm Reader?

"Did you notice that nobody is bothering with cracking Palm Reader DRM system? Could it be because it is so much more user friendly (unlimited activations on unlimited number of devices, no need to beg anyone for additional activations, etc.) and therefore ensures that all those e-books we spent our money on will be still accessible years from now, even if we upgrade/replace our devices dozens of times?

"...My advice - stay away from draconian device specific DRM systems like MS Reader or Adobe and you are guaranteed to enjoy your e-books for years to come."
posted by David Rothman at 11:02 AM | permanent link

"For Godoff's allies, the question of 'What Now' comes closely followed by 'Why'. Olson was remarkably up front about his reasons--finances, which many read as pressure from the Bertelsmann highers, who have their eyes on an IPO. As for why revenues weren't higher, many pointed to a decision made too recently to create a Little Random paperback division; it is Vintage, after all, that many feel makes Knopf untouchable." - Publishers Weekly, Jan. 16..

The TeleRead take: An IPO? Jeeze. Yes, publishers can turn nice profits, and it wouldn't hurt to trim back some of the outlandish advances for the biggest megastars or be cautious about creating new divisions. But does Bertelsmann really think that Wall Street and European equivalents will be happy with normal rates of return for prestige-pubishing, when even genre books can be unpredictable? Is book publishing going the way of commercial radio--where cash has unabashedly won out over quality? Remember, anyone in theory can start or buy a radio station, but the Clear Channel people dominate. Time to consider new business models for book publishing, music and the rest? Reports continue to come out about the book industry's woes--check out today's piece in the New York York Times on the continued disappointments of even best-selling authors.
posted by David Rothman at 10:11 AM | permanent link

TeleRead for years has pushed for a distributed national digital library system managed day to day by many librarians in many locations--as opposed to a Washington or New York elite--even if certain administrative functions could be centralized and national resources could be used and adapted at the local level.

Meanwhile, in certain other media and technological areas, the decentralizational movement is gaining strength. Check out David Weinberg's recent essay Why Open Spectrum Matters The End of the Broadcast Nation--the topic of a recent post from Dan Gillmor.

In the essay, Weinberg lays out the three big lessons of the Internet, and they could well apply to library systems, too:

"(a) Open standards work. Rather than building a network that connects A to B to C by touching copper to copper, the creators of the Internet built a network by establishing standards for how information is to be moved. It is because the Internet was not built as a thing that it has been able to bring the world many orders of magnitude more bandwidth than any previous network. Our current policy, however, treats spectrum as if it were a physical thing to be carved up. By focusing on open standards rather than on spectrum-as-thing, the medium can become far more efficient and offer far greater capacity.

"(b) Decentralization works. Keep the architecture clean and simple. Put the 'smarts' in the devices communicating across the network rather than in centralized computers. In fact, central control and regulation would have kept the Internet from becoming the force that it has.

"(c) Lowering the cost of access and connection unleashes innovation beyond any reasonable expectation."

Thoughts for library and publishing people to ponder? Especially on issues such as grassroots file-sharing? TeleRead would spread the smarts and the goodies around, so that even individual users could even store books permanently on their own machines and share them, whenever they wanted--with privacy-respecting tracking mechanisms in place to provide for payments to content-providers from a national digital library fund or from the users themselves. Thousand and thousands of copyrighted works--those covered by the fund--could be free to users without cheating the writers and publishers or impeding the ability of schoolchildren and others to share the whole books.

Just as the radio establishment is resisting, and will resist, the new technology, many in the library and publishing fields will resist the TeleRead approach despite its financial potential. So be it. But eventually, technology will win out, and the winners will be those who adjust.
posted by David Rothman at 5:26 PM | permanent link

"Apparently, they spent less than half of the money that other schools spent on new computer labs, and got better hardware to boot." - SlashDot post about a private school in Maine, via Google Technology News.

The TeleRead take: A great reason for schools to try to favor e-book formats that are not tied to specific operating systems! Earth to Microsoft: You were quick enough with that stock dividend despite earlier statements to the contrary. So when are you going to get into linux for e-books and other apps rather than just do the expected? You'd actually have been better off if the feds had forced you to split up your app and OS parts into separate companies.
posted by David Rothman at 4:03 PM | permanent link

Know how to write? Want do a p-book and invest virtually nothing--and avoid the vanity-press scams? A zillion books exist on the subject of self-publishing. Also read an SFgate piece about CafePress:

Early this year, says SFgate, "the company's media-services division will offer print-on-demand books, audio CDs and DVDs. Using the same general principle, it'll produce, to order, your novel, album or film with glossy covers and jewel-box inserts, a move that has revolutionary possibilities. And though self-publishing already exists on the Web, CafePress has honed the production-and-fulfillment process to make it far more viable...

"Such publications could be available through links on the specific Web sites, while books might even be purchased on mega sites such as Amazon.com and printed to order at CaféPress. The only requirement to sell through bookstore venues is to have an ISBN number, which CaféPress will provide its fledgling and perhaps even established authors.

"'Vanity publishers tend to load the price up on the top'," SFgate quotes Maheesh Jain, the company's cofounder. "If you know how to format, we'll print it with no fee."

While the big publishers love to knock self-published books--and yes, they do so rather justifiably in many cases--there is a long, honorable tradition here. Upton Sinclair published The Brass Check and a bunch of other works himself.

Given the dominance of a few publishing conglomerates here in the States, self-pubishing is a "must" as an option for author and society at large. In fact, conglomerates are picking up a few self-published books in popular genres. Just don't depend on it. Publish because you have something to do, not because you're sure they'll be money in it.

The TeleRead take: Print on the demand, as we've noted, could also be used for library books. But in many cases it's a transitional technology. Sooner or later, electronic books will have screens sharp enough to make reading perhaps even less difficult than off paper.

SFgate link via Boing Boing
posted by David Rothman at 3:42 PM | permanent link

An abstract from an article by Donald King and Carol Hansen Montgomery in the December issue of D-Lib Magazine:

An October 2002 D-Lib Magazine article by the authors described the changes in the Drexel University W.W. Hagerty Library's operational costs associated with the migration to a (mostly) all-electronic journal collection. The present article gives the use perspective to determine whether the migration to the electronic collection has had an effect on the number of journal readings, outcomes from reading and information-seeking and reading patterns. Key findings are that amount of reading remains high; outcomes from reading continue to be favorable, particularly from library-provided articles; while 42 percent of faculty reading is from library-provided articles, faculty still rely heavily on readings from personal subscriptions; most of the library-provided reading is from electronic articles; and readers spend much less time locating and obtaining library-provided articles when they are available electronically.

The TeleRead take: Not bad, eh? And remember, this is before the perfection of e-text readers. Just wait until e-ink arrives.
posted by David Rothman at 2:35 PM | permanent link

Just a reminder of the losers in the Eldred case. Not just schoolchildren, library-users and net-surfers--but also ISPs offering broadband. Not to mention network-hardware companies such as Cisco. Plus, PC vendors. The sooner works go into the public domain, the more free content will be online to entice people to sign up for broadband or upgrade their hardware. Strange, isn't it? The tech bust took place around the same time it became clear that the copyright interests would be winning in the short term. No, that wasn't the only reason for the bust--hardly. But the jihad didn't help.
posted by David Rothman at 11:45 AM | permanent link

Belatedly here are some New York Time links: Protecting Mickey Mouse at Art's Expense (Larry Lessig) and The Owners of Culture vs. the Free Agents (Edward Rothstein). Oh, and check out the neat cartoon that J.D. Lassica used from the Waxy.org site to accompany the links.

The TeleRead take: I especially like Larry Lessig's proposal that copyright owners pay a small tax 50 years after publication--one way for their identities to be known to artists seeking to use the work in one form or another. Yes, Lessig's real goal will be to shorten copyright terms. But meanwhile, yes, we need ways at least to mitigate the damage.

As for the Rothstein column, it admits that the two-decade extension may be too long. But it then goes on to say that "the recurring argument that culture is now 'owned' and must be freed and that creativity is being stifled as a result is overwrought. What innovations, for example, are being thwarted by corporate control over Mickey Mouse?" I can think of plenty--such as use by nonDisney artists, the very stuff of understandable concern to Lessign. Above all, what about everyday use of Mickey in, say, schools?

Simpy put, the ruling was more a triumph for lawyers and permissions departments--and rich heirs--than for society at large.

posted by David Rothman at 11:12 AM | permanent link

From the Inquirer, via Pocket PC eBooks Watch:

Hilary Rosen--Jack Valenti's RIAA female clone--has now gone on record saying that as part of the fight against music piracy, ISPs should be held accountable for the actions of their users and charged a fee for giving their customer's access to services such as Kazaa or Morpheus.

The result of holding ISPs liable for the ways their customers use them would be catastrophic. Should ISPs be held accountable for the actions of pedophiles? How about members of racist groups? How about groups that are legal but we wish weren't, like the KKK, Aryan Nation, and the American Polka Dancing Society?

While ISPs are held accountable for removing illegal materials when detected, the idea that they should be held accountable for what their users might do is ridiculous.

It's astonishing that after so many months the RIAA continues to ignore what its consumers have been screaming in its face. We don't see the recording industry moving to address problems of overwhelming same-ness in music, high CD prices, or low artist compensation.

The TeleRead take: Just about all of the above observations would apply to much of the book industry. Sameness, high prices and underpaid creative folks. What's more, Pat Schrodeder, head of the publishers association, is much like Hilary Rosen in fearing technology and insisting on a continuation of outmoded business models. Hey, ladies, the idea is to spread books around and make money--not act as if DMCA and the like should be immortal. The RIAA and the publishers certainly haven't felt that way about copyright terms or the concept of fair use. And as the ISP proposal shows, the RIAA isn't afraid to suggest other new outrages.
posted by David Rothman at 9:40 AM | permanent link

"Ann Godoff, one of the most influential publishers in the book industry, was forced out yesterday as president of the Random House Trade Group. Her division, home to authors like Salman Rushdie, E. L. Doctorow and William Styron, was merged with an imprint better known for mass market paperback editions of thrillers, romances and science fiction." - New York Times, Jan. 17.

The TeleRead take: What's interesting is that Random House is owned by Bertelsmann, perhaps the classiest of the publishing conglomerates. Imagine what is happening elsewhere in the book-publishing industry. Time for a better business model?


posted by David Rothman at 9:26 AM | permanent link

From an OCLC press release, via Library Stuff:

The Taiwan eBooks Network (TEBNET) now has access to more than 11,000 eBook titles from netLibrary. It is the first netLibrary eBooks consortium in the Asia Pacific region.

Twenty-one university libraries came together to form TEBNET under the leadership of Hsianghoo S. Ching, library director, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan. Dr. Ching currently serves as chairperson for the National Committee of Distance Education Evaluation, nominated by the Minister of Education in Taiwan.
posted by David Rothman at 5:10 AM | permanent link

A PBS transcript lays out some of the issues to be discussed in Copyright in America. It's apparently complements or is from part of the NOW--with Bill Moyers show that will air tonight at 9 EST on many PBS stations.

Not too much new here from Pat Schroeder, the child-welfare advocate turned publishing lobbyist--who at one time was on a rather vocal jihad against librarians over the fair use issue (and continues to distort the facts even if she is more polite about it). "Now, if suddenly you say when a library buys one digital copy they can then give it to the world and they can go out and make their own copy," Schroeder says, "we can visualize a world where you would sell one digital copy and that would be it."

What a crock. Via a TeleRead-style approach, a national digital library system could pay publishers by the number of accesses. Yes, for the sake of sane budgets, there might be caps on these payments. But megapublishers could gamble up front, and along the way, to increase the caps. It's what's known as investment--except it would be in higher caps rather than in ink and paper. Capitalism, anyone? Another tack possible under TeleRead would be to offer decreasing royalty rates on megasales rather than the increasing ones in the world of paper publishing. The economics are different. Bits are much cheaper to move around than paper and ink, and the publishing system should adjust in the name of fairness. That $1M+ advance due Clarence Thomas--er, yes, the oh-so-detached Justice, the same guy who voted for copyright extension--is the equivalent of upfront payments on more than 100 first novels.

But back to the PBS transcript. While Schroeder and fellow copyright zealot Jack Valenti make their appearances, as they should, if the show is to be balanced, the program also offers excellent analysis from fair-use advocates. Eben Moglen, a copyright expert at Columbia University, paints a dark picture of the threat from the copyright lobby and what it could mean to the average American. "She can get an E-book delivered to her pocket, the newest Robert Ludlum novel," Moglen says. "And it will be there until she's read it once or twice or five times. But she can't lend it to anybody. She can't even print a page of it on a photocopier to show somebody to say, 'Here, you'd really love this novel.'

"And not only d-- has she lost rights that we take for granted, to make a private copy, to share, she's also lost privacy, because somebody knows about everything she reads and everything she watches and everything she listens to.

"I call this giving people everything they want without letting them keep it. And it seems to me a pretty insidious form of culture.

"It adds up to media companies controlling what you do and how you access culture. And it's already happening."

For example, as PBS's Rick Karr points out, even today you may not be able fast-forward through the commercials at the start of DVDs. Yes, the copycrats want control.

Meanwhile a message to PBS: Is this transcript new? The transcript page on the Web bears the phrase "Tollbooths on the Information Superhighway," a different title from "Copyright in America," and those are rather familiar words. Just wonderin' if you've already aired a segment like this. Apparently not, since I don't see a date other than January 17--so I'll assume that the transcript is from part of "Copyright in America." Oh, well, judging from the thoroughness with which the copyright industry has bribed Congress with campaign donations, the "Tollbooths" title will work out for a long time. Feel free to recycle.
posted by David Rothman at 3:22 AM | permanent link

"Copyright holders stand to collect about $400 million more a year from older creations under the extension, he said. The limit on the use of information 'threatens to interfere with efforts to preserve our nation's historical and cultural heritage' and to educate children, Breyer added." - AP story quoting Justice Stephen Breyer.
posted by David Rothman at 9:24 PM | permanent link

"To the dismay of scholars, the publishing giant quietly purges articles from its database." - Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 10.

The TeleRead take: So what else is now? Public and academic librarians should set the tone for the preservation of knowledge. That would happen under TeleRead.

Our favorite two paragraphs in the Chronicle article--or actually the most alarming--follow:

"Some say there are dangers associated with expunging material that goes beyond stymied scholarship or the cloaking of plagiarists.

"Drummond Rennie, a deputy editor at The Journal of the American Medical Association who is a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, says pulling a fraudulent article from a database could lead to poor treatment for patients. Physicians, unaware that the article was yanked, might remember reading it and act upon it. For example, he says, a physician might prescribe medication based on an article that incorrectly states the drug's effects."

While just a tiny fraction of the articles in the database have been pulled, people could die because of Elsevier's deletions. Something to think about if you're using a PocketPC, Palm or another hand-held for medical purposes?

posted by David Rothman at 5:45 PM | permanent link

The item below, apparently from PBS, reached us via Project Gutenberg. It will be interesting to see if Bill Moyers and crew simply rehash old issues or add something new to the Eldred-related debate. As you'd expect, an uppity little group like TeleRead was not contacted even though for the past decade we've been proposing specific solutions to many of the very issues that Moyers presumably will discuss.

Public libraries embody the American ideal that anybody can read, watch or listen to just about anything they want to. With publications and broadcasting delivered free by the Internet directly to homes, is the information revolution making libraries obsolete? As more people can access this content, the copyright owners--in many cases large corporate publishing entities are looking for ways to charge fees. A growing chorus of lawyers, librarians, and educators fear the implications of losing free access to information for everyone. "Our information and communication infrastructure is so central to everything we do," says former American Library Association president Nancy Kranich. "But what's really underlying that is the free flow of ideas which is essential to democracy."

On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 9 P.M., on PBS NOW with Bill Moyers (check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html) takes a look into the digital future of intellectual property and the debate that has pitted private control against the public domain.

Tune in and share you views on the issues by joining the post-broadcast online discussion at www.pbs.org/now.

posted by David Rothman at 4:53 PM | permanent link

If all goes well, TeleRead and I will be moving on in the next month or so to another blogging tool. Like many Blogger users, I'm endlessly frustrated by the system's penchant for being unavailable for updates just when people need access the most. Got a glitch on a breaking story? Well, tough luck if the Blogger server is busy. It's surely the virtual equivalent of being in a old-time Soviet food line.
posted by David Rothman at 12:21 PM | permanent link

"The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Wednesday a 1998 law extending copyright protection by 20 years, delaying when creative works such as Walt Disney Co.'s Mickey Mouse cartoons, F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels and George Gershwin's songs become public property." - Reuters.

The TeleRead take: Well, here's another victory for the copyright gentry, as Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart has called those people. And oh what a day to take in the news, given what else I was reading this morning. Thoroughly oblivious to the ironies, TomPaine.com is publishing excerpts from Wealth and Commonwealth by Bill Gates Sr. (father of the Gates) and Chuck Collins, cofounder and program director of a group called United for a Fair Economy. Chapter II is titled The Very Soul of the Republic: The Roots of The Estate Tax.

A little disconnect? Here Gates Sr. is posing as a democrat, small d, but, at least in the online excerpt, he apparently can't draw the parallel between the copyright elite and the old landed aristocrats against whom Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and, yes, Tom Paine, revolted. I'll never believe that Gates Sr. or Jr. is truly in favor of economic fairness until I see it reflected in the policies by which Jr. runs his business and has his people lobby on Capitol Hill. This is the man who wants to be Andrew Carnegie II? Bill Jr., you bought several rare early copies of The Great Gatsby for the library of your $50-million mansion. Time to pay your fellow copyrightcrats to put Gatsby on the Net--now that the Supremes have said it needn't be in the public domain for many more years? And to speak out against the Supreme Court decision in Eldred et al. v. Ashcroft?

Guess what the justices really voted for, Bill--beyond more expensive books. Less purchasing power for the libraries you're supposed to be helping, even though they've received just a smidgen of your wealth so far. More expensive movies. Less opportunity for directors and writers without Hollywood-sized budgets to do new adaptations of classics. Fewer chances for musicians and artists to rearrange old material in striking new ways. More chances of potential classics actually being lost because the MBAs didn't see the point of preserving them. Remember, too, that preservation isn't just a physical phenomenon. It also means being kept in the public consciousness. Never mind the silly excuse from the Supremes that the Court shouldn't intrude on the domain of Congress. How about Congress itself intruding on something else: the spirit of The Founding Fathers? And yet most of the Supremes don't care.

Don't forget that the justices voted 7-2 for the copyright extension. Kinda lets you know how much we can depend on the Court for a Jeffersonian approach to these matters. Remember who chose the Supremes. Politicians who were elected as much by the highest bidders--campaign contributors--as by the voters. If Bill Gates Jr. really is a small-d democrat, he and his people should start outbidding the enemies of Jeffersonian democracy.

Troublesome, too, is the overall trend of the Washington power elite, in recent years, to extend intellectual property protection to an obnoxious degree when there is a growing income gap in the United States, which, in the worst way, is becoming more third worldish. Not to mention the lost opportunities for the future if the trend continues. As Michael Hart has pointed out, the time may come when machine can replicate objects with astounding cheapness and fidelity. Imagine the possibilities of these 3D copying machines for driving down the cost of manufacturing--whether of cars or refrigerators. So what happens when or if this sci-fi becomes reality? Will the usual suspects engage in further perversions of IP laws to deny average people the full benefits of technology?

If nothing else, today's sellout of a ruling may newly embolden Washington's swarm of lobbyists to dream up further conspiracies against the populace in the near future. Here in Virginia, the state of Thomas Jefferson, that most American of gadgeteers and political thinkers, a certain ghost must be cursing the Supremes and wondering what the real Tom Paine would have thought of the foolishness committed in the Paine name.

More links and commentary available via InfoAnarchy and J.D. Lasica's blog. And also the usual reminder. I'm not into anti-Microsoft jihads and am simply judging the Gates family by Carnegie-style standards. If father and son grow more sensible about digital libraries and the need for fairer copyright law, I'll say so.
posted by David Rothman at 11:12 AM | permanent link

Well-stocked national digital libraries should include free software, not just e-books. Of course, many of the same concepts apply to software as to books. The poorer the person or the country, the more likely will be piracy. And accusations of piracy, in turn, whether true or not, can be used for political purposes.

In Simson Garfinkel's first-rate column in the February issue of the Technology Review magazine from MIT, he writes of an appeal from Patrick Ball, deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As reported by Garfinkel, Ball is "telling the world's 10,000 human-rights groups to stop using pirated copies of Microsoft Widows and Microsoft Office" and "use free software instead." And now the related economic and political angles...

"Illegal software copies are particularly common in poor countries," Garfinkel says. "The rate is highest in Vietnam, where the Business Software Alliance estimates 94 percent of all software used in 2001 was illicitly copied. But bootlegging is common in disadvantaged parts of the United States too. In Mississippi, 49 percent of the software now in use runs afoul of copyright laws." Believable. See Copyright and K-12: Who Pays in the Network Era?--reporting common use of pirated software in a cash-strapped area of American life: our public schools.

In his human rights article, Garfinkel goes on to say: "Such copying poses a risk to human rights organizations: U.S. companies and the U.S. government are working hard to make this practice a go-to-jail offense worldwide, as it is in the United States. Although the world frowns on countries that lock up their citizens for crimes of conscience, it's easy to imagine that some repressive third-world regime could invoke antipiracy laws as grounds for shutting down a meddlesome human-rights organization. And if U.S. or other Western governments object, the regime might logically respond, 'You are always telling us we should ge more aggressive in the protection of intellectual property. And now when we are, you criticize us.'"

Alas, even Amnesty International uses Microsoft Office. And a confession: we use Word and other Microsoft programs at TeleRead. But we also use OpenOffice and are pleased to work with files in that format. If anything, the OpenOffice suite's word-processing program is more stable than Microsoft Word, and it can translate the Microsoft format closely enough for most purposes. But not for everything. So at least in communications with human rights activists in poorer countries, Amnesty International should go out of its way to use OpenOffice or an equivalent.

Hey, no mean irony intended (we know that the Review needs income from subscribers, of whom we're gladly one), but the Garfinkel article itself is available online as "premium content."

posted by David Rothman at 1:19 AM | permanent link

From a University of California news release--with links added to individual titles:

More than 500 University of California Press books are available online free of charge through an ongoing partnership between UC Press and the California Digital Library. The University of California Press eScholarship Editions can be searched and browsed at http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ucpress/ .

Over 300 of the University of California Press eScholarship Editions are available to the public. The other titles are currently only available to UC faculty, students and staff. Readers outside the UC system may view citations, abstracts and tables of contents, but not the full texts.

Titles available to all readers include Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California, Understanding Heart Disease; AIDS: The Burdens of History, Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad; and A History of Wine in America.

By fall 2003, 1,500 UC Press eScholarship Editions will be available. More than 400 titles will be available to the public; owing to licensing restrictions, the rest will be limited to the UC community.

The full collection will represent about a third of the UC Press books in print, plus over 300 out-of-print titles. The books cover a wide range of topics of interest to the general public as well as to scholars, including art, science, history, music, religion, natural history, and fiction. Many titles are currently used in courses, and University of California students are particularly excited about their free, online availability.

Additional comments from TeleRead: Completely in character, the UC Press will publish Culture, Inc.: How Greed and Carelessness Are Destroying the Arts In America, by Bill Ivey, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts. In the words of the Publishers Lunch e-mail list, the book will explain "how copyright law and corporate practice have separated Americans from our cultural heritage" and tell "what we can do today to preserve a vibrant artistic legacy for the future." Significantly, Ivey is a folklorist and musician--and thus highly aware of the damage that copyright zealots can do to the culture of future generations.
posted by David Rothman at 12:15 AM | permanent link

An Exclusive Interview with Libwise / Fictionwise's Scott Pendergrast

What is your vision regarding elibrary in the next 2 years?

Scott: The library market is very important to us. Not only is it a viable market to sell to -- but it's also a way to grow the number of people who READ ebooks overall. Our Libwise product (www.libwise.com) is getting a very good response from libraries so far. We're going to our first library conference in a few weeks, and it will be interesting to get a lot more feedback.

Fictionwise in the beginning was known for its mutli-format ebooks without Digital Rights Management protection. Why are most of Fictionwise's ebooks today are using DRM protection (mobipocket-, Palm-, and MS Reader-secured formats)?

Early in 2000 in became clear to us that the major trade publishers were never going to try selling e-books without encryption. That presented us with a problem because each week we were getting requests from our members for the current best-sellers. They were telling us they would prefer to buy from us but were going elsewhere. So in the Spring of 2002, we introduced encrypted formats to meet demand. The reason we now have more encrypted titles than unencrypted is because there are simply so many more available in encrypted formats. We have thousands waiting to go online. We still publish as many MultiFormat ebooks as possible each week--but they are getting harder to find. We still sell more unencrypted titles than encrypted ones--and the smaller publisher who are coming to us are taking advantage of that by selling unencrypted.
posted by Jerry Justianto at 10:03 AM | permanent link

So reports E-Content xtra. - Via Pocket PC eBooks Watch.

The TeleRead take: That's an impressive number on the surface, but still just a fraction of the annual output of U.S. publishers--and an even smaller one of the books in print. At least Palm, to its great credit, is taking care for its wares to be readable on PCs, Macs and PocketPCs, not just Palm machines. Hint, hint, Microsoft.
posted by David Rothman at 8:05 AM | permanent link

"Major players in the entertainment and technology industries plan to announce a measure of detente today in what are increasingly contentious battles over the best way to prevent digital piracy of music and video." - Washington Post, Jan. 14.

The TeleRead take: The Recording Industry Association of America worked out agreements with the Business Software Alliance and the Computer Systems Policy Project. Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Dell Computer Corp. and International Business Machines Corp are among the members of the BSA and the Policy Project. Memo to Bill Gates: If you go along with this malarkey, what better argument for your customers to switch to linux?

Granted, the Post says the RIAA will avoid support of Sen. Ernest Hollin's atrocious proposal to require that computers include anti-piracy gizmos, which could compromise performance. But the paper also reports: "A technology industry insider said that without saying so directly, the agreement also means that technology companies will oppose efforts to relax existing copyright laws or to clarify user's digital rights." That's not the best news for opponents of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Let's hope that the Consumer Electronics Association, Intel, Sun Systems, Gateway and other important players will continue to support Rep. Rick Boucher's legislation to reduce the damage from the DMCA.
posted by David Rothman at 7:36 AM | permanent link

Half of Colorado's school library books are more than 15 years old, according to the Library Research Service. Forget about the Berlin Wall, the bombing of the World Trade Center, Dolly The Cloned Sheep and other little trivia. You'll find ancient books to be oblivious to such trifles. E-books, anyone? Especially with regular updating possible, via links? Children aren't different from the rest of us--why insult them with the obsolete? This isn't to say that a schoolbook should be like a newspaper. But current events can serve as hooks to interest children in matters of perennial importance.

Separately, another report from LRS suggests that "technology have-nots are not limited to the poor or under-educated." TeleRead, of course, would simplify the use of the technology through promotion of easy-to-use hardware and a national digital library system that would be well integrated with local libraries and schools.
posted by David Rothman at 7:09 AM | permanent link

The following short item appeared on the National Literacy Trust site for the UK. From a TeleRead perspective, it's tremendously relevant since the plan would greatly increase the number of books available to children in K-12. Meanwhile you can read some more recent thoughts from Keith Curry Lance, the American literacy expert whose work the Trust cited. Not reproduced below from the UK site is some accompanying discussion on the importance of book-rich homes and family involvement in literacy--one of TeleRead's key precepts. In fact, the Trust site offers an entire section for parents

Until recently, there was no evidence to support the supposition that school libraries have a positive impact on educational achievement. An American study undertaken in 1992 has demonstrated that school libraries do affect reading scores.

The Colorado study, led by Keith Curry Lance and funded by the US Office of Education, was based on a “value-added” survey in the state schools in Colorado. The researcher examined a small sample of schools from all stages in both urban and rural areas using standardised tests. Although the sample was small, the study reflected distribution in the US as a whole...

The study found that:

--School investment in libraries affect educational attainment. Students at schools with better funded school libraries tend to achieve higher than average test scores regardless of whether the schools or communities are rich or poor, or whether adults in the community are well or poorly educated.

--The size of the library staff and the size and variety of the collection are also relevant. The overall level of funding is significant, but only with regard to expenditure on staffing and resources.

--Students whose school librarian plays an instructional role tend to achieve higher than average test scores. This is also dependent on collaboration between school librarians and teachers and the inclusion of the library materials in the curriculum.
posted by David Rothman at 6:25 AM | permanent link

"The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is spending nearly $200,000 to create a single 'national file format' that will be used to make textbooks accessible to blind or disabled students. Adopting the standard will be voluntary, which is contrary to legislation introduced last spring that would have required textbook publishers to submit electronic files of all textbooks sold to schools nationwide according to a universal standard. That bill, dubbed the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act of 2002 (H.R. 4582 and S. 2246), has been held up in committee. In the meantime, ED is taking the initiative to create a voluntary standard to coordinate the efforts of publishers and educators." - eSchool News, December 16, 2002.

The TeleRead take: It'll be interesting to see how close the ED textbook standards come to the general standards of groups such as Open eBook. Right now, as eSchool News notes, formats in various states can range from ASCII to HTML to Microsoft Word. Needless to say, the greater the standardization of formats, the easier it will be to develop well-stocked national digital libraries and blend them in with local schools and libraries.

Unrelated and also worth reading: eSchool News' upbeat article on the mass use of laptops in Maine schools.

posted by David Rothman at 1:23 PM | permanent link

"Prentice Hall is publishing a line of computer books, the 'Bruce Perens' Open Source Series.' The first titles have already arrived for sale in bookstores like Barnes & Noble, and the electronic versions are expected to be available online soon afterward--and to be free. All the books--a total of six are planned for this year--will be published not under a traditional copyright but under the Open Publication License, which was created in 1999 by David Wiley, an assistant professor at Utah State University. The license allows people to copy, modify and redistribute works. It is modeled after the General Public License for software, which sets the rules for information-sharing and reuse of code for the GNU Linux operating system (www.opencontent.org). 'If you want to take one these books, put it on a photocopy machine and make copies, that's cool,' said Mr. Perens, a leading open-source advocate." - New York Times, Jan. 13.

The TeleRead take: Way to go, Prentice Hall. The idea is for the publisher to earn goodwill among open-source advocates, and methinks they'll be successful--as long as PH doesn't suddenly slam the door on such innovations lickety-split, once the buyers are already reeled in. The other caveat is the same as expressed about Cory Doctorow's similarly laudable experiment. What happens when technology makes e-books easier to read, and there's less incentive to buy the p-books? By the way, it would have been nice if the New York Times had used a different headline from "Steal This Book? A Publisher is Making It Easy." Open source is sharing, not stealing, and while the headline writer meant to be entertaining, certain readers just might take it the wrong way.
posted by David Rothman at 8:33 AM | permanent link

Cory Doctorow, blogger and EFF activist extraordinaire and enemy of copyright greedsters everywhere, is giving away his first novel for free--thereby "walking the walk," as Wired News aptly puts it.

Fittingly the title is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (yes, this is a download link--with various formats, including HTML beautifully served up by Dorothea Salo). We know all about The Mouse and Copywrongs.

If Cory's rep is any clue, you'll get a lot more than you pay for. Cory in 2000 snared the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer.

Needless to say, with e-book machines far from perfected, you just might want to buy the p-version of Cory's book, which I'm about to do.

Of course, as I've noted before, and as novelist Peter Watts told Wired News, e-books someday will be as just as easy to read as p-books--they'll even have flippable pages with e-ink. Hence the case for a TeleRead kind of solution to reconcile the needs of both budget-crimped readers and authors with grocery bills to pay.
posted by David Rothman at 7:14 PM | permanent link