Living in the States, I love to beat up on our indigenous pols for miserliness toward libraries despite my own feelings about library palaces, but it isn't as if we're the only ones with problems. Check out Decline in school libraries is worrisome, an old but still relevant news item on Canada's underfunded school libraries. Needless to say, a TeleRead approach could increase the number of books available--and leave more money for the hiring of school librarians. Here's an interesting excerpt from the Toronto Star article from July 6:

Dr. Ken Haycock of the University of British Columbia points out that only 10 per cent of Ontario elementary schools have a full-time teacher librarian compared with 42 per cent 25 years ago. And in British Columbia, budgets for buying books vary wildly from 80 cents to $35 per student per year, depending on the school board.

In his report, "The Crisis in Canada's School Libraries," Haycock cites research in the United States that shows a direct connection between larger collections of materials for students and higher achievement levels, higher spending on books and other materials and increased reading scores, and higher student achievement in schools where teacher-librarians use the local library.

"Increased student visits to the library correlates with higher test scores," he wrote. "Student achievement is higher in schools where the library is open all day and the teacher-librarian is on duty full-time."

He found that the relationship between the library resources and higher student achievement could not be explained away by other factors, such as teacher-student ratios, or the relative wealth of the school neighbourhoods.

If the school boards would stop pouring millions of dollars into needless annual Microsoft software licenses, do you think maybe they'd have a few extra dollars to buy some books? I'd love to see that stat: A comparison of the library expenditures per child vs the expenditure on proprietary software licenses per child.  If Munich can dump the cement-boots of Microsoft, I'm sure a few school boards could manage the switch.

Ouch. Would that the TeleBlog had J.D. Lasica, author of one of my favorite journalism blogs, as a copy editor. I meant Howard Dean, not John. Slip of the fingers, sorry, gang.

I just wish I'd been wrong about something else. J.D. e-mailed me: "I'm not sure what John Dean's position is, but I'm pretty sure Howard Dean has said on Larry Lessig's blog that he's sensitive to the digital rights community" on issues such as the DMCA. My reaction? Dean's given us nothing more than the usual mush.

Oh, sure, he is against "special interests" in the copyright wars, but so what? After all these months, Dean is still wimping out. Here's part of Wired to Wired: Dean Finds That Courting Blogocrats Means Answering Tough Questions, Anya Kamenetz's piece in the Sept. 17-23 issue of the Village Voice:

...Most appealing is the opportunity for young, wired citizens familiar with Web journals to give online feedback and thereby get excited about democracy. Lessig has referred to the Dean campaign's strategy as "open-source," a term describing free and collaboratively created software, like the original Linux.

But how committed is Dean to the principles behind the open-source idea? When the unofficial, but large, Dean Nation blog submitted a list of readers' 10 most popular questions to the Dean campaign in April, the DMCA made it, along with "9-11 Investigation" and "Cutting Gov't Spending." Yet in the five short entries that Dean posted on Lessig's blog, he managed to avoid the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Act, though hundreds of posters both during the week and later mentioned the issue or asked him to state a position.

"What is your position on the threat to the public domain? And what policies do you intend to support to address that threat?" asked Dean Nation blogger Aziz H. Poonawalla. A poster to Lessig's blog named J.B. Nicholson-Owens complained on July 21, "Dean had the opportunity to research something related to copyright issues before coming here. I see little (if any) evidence he did that. To me this comes off as profoundly disrespectful of the audience. During the (mostly one-way) discussion, he had time to compose a response that would give us some inkling of what he was thinking on any copyright-related issue (which is the main topic on this blog)."

Reached by the Voice, Dorie Clark, Dean's New Hampshire communications director, said, "Governor Dean recognizes the importance of these issues and his policy team is looking into them, but we haven't reached a policy yet."

Lessig himself seems disinclined to press Dean on the matter. "I invited Dean in particular," Lessig posted after Dean's visit, "because so much of the success of his campaign has come from those who spend time on the Internet, and I suggested that the mix who spent time at my blog had a valuable set of insights that might be useful to understanding the issues that rage on these pages. But as I've said before, these issues are not the central issues of a presidential campaign (yet, anyway). And necessarily, any attention a presidential campaign gives to these issues will be for the purpose of learning. No one launches a campaign for President in 2004 with the aim to 'free culture' or limit the excesses of creative regulation."

Though Stanford induced Lessig to move his site to a personal server after the Dean postings because of Federal Election Commission regulations aimed at keeping school resources out of political campaigns, the guest spot does not necessarily imply an endorsement. In fact, Lessig has personally contributed only to the Edwards campaign.

Many bloggers who do support Dean believe they understand why it may be in his interest not to come out just now in favor of copyright reform, as candidate Dennis Kucinich, for example, has (also guesting on Lessig's blog). "I was encouraged by Dean's appearance on Lessig's blog, and his stated desire to learn about IP [intellectual property] issues and make an informed decision," Brian Flemming, editor of the political and culture blog Slumdance.com, told the Voice. "I'd love it if he took a stand against the DMCA, the Sonny Bono Act, etc., but I do understand that would be throwing caution to the wind politically, given the power of the media companies. Al Gore had the media against him, and he nearly lost. I'm not anticipating a radical stand from a candidate already pegged as unelectable by some."

The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America were both major supporters of the DMCA. Dean's list of individual contributors, on the other hand, already includes dozens of Hollywood names, including Warner Bros. president and COO Alan Horn, Disney producer Jeffrey Abrams, Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, and executives at Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox, HBO, and Showtime. If Dean shapes his messages to please big media, that could be a big blow to the creative commons.

"President Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam has launched the portal of Digital Library of India. The portal will have about 27,000 books in a digitized form. Speaking on the occasion, the President called upon the people to bridge digital divide. Lauding the project, Dr. Kalam said that efforts should be made to digitize our traditional knowledge. Stressing the need to take knowledge bank to every nook and corner of the country, the President said that one lakh books’ digital library should be available in every college of the country. Highlighting the positive aspects of a digital library, Dr. Kalam said it would be useful to everybody irrespective of economic and social status. They can be in touch with the research in various fields." - Cyber News Service.

The TeleRead take: Like the Chinese, the Indians just may understand the potential of e-books better than at least certain U.S. policymakers do. It'll be interesting to see what India does not just with digital libraries but also with the encouragement of (1) appropriate net connections and (2) TeleReader-style devices for reading the books. Will Simputers become common eventually? Meanwhile here are more details from insiders, along with Digital Library: Free, anytime access for all from The Hindu and A Million Books for Free, an earlier story.

On the whole, I like the philosophy as laid out in The Hindu:

Dr Raj Reddy, University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University [CM is part of the project], told newspersons here on Thursday that about 20,000 books had been digitised in the last six months. The whole project was likely to be completed by 2006, he added.

The $30-million project is mainly funded by the US Government, and supported by the Governments of India and China (in China too a similar project is going on).

In India, the digitising of books has been going on in libraries across Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and at the Allahabad University. The States' contribution was mainly by way of providing manpower, he said.

According to Dr Reddy, the Million Book project, which is likely to be named as Digital Library of India, was part of a universal digital library started by CMU a decade ago.

Globally, there are about 10 million unique book and document editions before 1900, and about 100 million since the beginning of recorded history. Preserving such a volume would be possible only with digital technology. The task was within the reach of a single concerted effort for the public good, and this effort could be distributed to libraries, museums, and other groups in all countries, he added.

According to Dr Reddy, existing archives of paper have many shortcomings. Many other works still in existence today are rare, and only accessible to a small population including scholars and collectors at specific geographic locations. Digital technology can make the works accessible to the billions of people all over the world. Any book can be downloaded free of cost, he added.

On the issue of copyright, Dr Reddy, who is Founder and Director of the Universal Digital Library (UDL), said that the online version of the books was available for free, while a fee would be collected for printer versions.

Dr Reddy said that currently in India about 40 scanning stations are scanning books at the rate of 10,000 pages per day. "Our goal is to have about 100 stations in 10 cities to scan about a million pages every day," he said. Recently, a full load of books in a container arrived from the US for scanning, he added.

Annual e-book sales of $10 million or so are just a fraction of Tom Clancy's income, as we've noted. Better technology could help. But a little commonsense from publishers and e-stores could also go a long way, especially the elimination of DRM overkill. Read eBooks Struggling by software engineer Kimbro Staken in his Inspirational Technology blog:

...eBooks have no value beyond being read, and while that should be the primary motivation behind purchasing a book, it isn't that simple.

When you buy a paper book you can read it, then you can loan it to your friends so that they can read it, and then you can place it on your shelf so that everyone will know how "well read" you are. Actually with a real book, you can just buy it and put it directly on the shelf and then just tell people you've read it. How do eBooks fit into this value equation? Most of them won't even allow you to loan it to your friend, and looking at a file named "War and Peace.lit" just isn't the same as having the volume War and Peace sitting on your bookshelf, especially if you've actually read it.

...In particular I'm concerned with the model for fiction or popular non-fiction. I believe different rules can apply for technical books.

I've been reading a lot of eBooks lately, and I do enjoy the experience, but so far I've only paid for one non-technical book. The book is an encrypted Palm Reader file, and while reading the book was fine, that book is completely useless to me now. I paid $11 for it, but now I have no desire to read it again, I can't sell it, can't give it away and can't even loan it to some one else to read [at least without sharing a credit card number - DR]. That is not a good value. Yes, I got to read the book, but there's more to the value proposition then that. All the other eBooks I've read have come from various free (legal) sources, in particular the Microsoft Reader promotion. Based on my feeling about the one book I purchased, I don't plan on buying anymore. It's just not worth it.

You would subscribe to the service for a flat monthly fee of $5-10 and can then have any 5 books checked out at any one time. The files could be DRM-protected downloads so that you can read them on a portable device. Since you're not buying something for long term use the DRM is acceptable. To keep things fresh you can swap the books out every two weeks or so, and the publisher is reimbursed for each time the book is checked out. This way the publisher's content is protected, you have a continuous source of new reading material and you don't have to waste money on "owning" something that's basically worthless after you've read it once.

Unfortunately, people tend to get stuck on the idea of owning the content, but in the case of eBooks I really don't know why you'd want to. With the library model you can always just check out the book again if you want to read it again.

I don't know, maybe a service like this already exists. I know Fictionwise has something kind of like it, but it's very limited and does stupid things like artificially limiting the number of "copies" of the book that's available. That's kind of stupid, because it's just trying to apply the current physical world library model to eBooks. There's no need for it when you can have infinite copies with controlled distribution and per-checkout royalty payments.

If Adobe and the like had their way, the public domain and fair use wouldn't exist or would be sharply cut back--even more so than DC already has. Via format hooks or other excuses, they wouldn't mind rights-protecting the text of the Constitution itself if they could get away with it. The companies might deny this, but their conduct does little to convince me otherwise. Under their influence, even libraries are failing to keep public-domain works apart from commercial ones--or to arrange for public-domain books to be given away, as they should be. At times Digital Rights Managment seems more of a Satanic religion than a technology.

Now Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, has introduced a bill to restrain the DRM crazies. If nothing else, it would force companies to label DRM-crippled products. I'd give you more details from the bill itself but have a little problem--the document is in Adobe format and is taking forever to digest even on a Pentium IV machine tethered to a cable modem.

May the proposed law address at least some of my concerns about oppressive DRM! Meanwhile Jenny Levine and JD's New Media Musings have done posts. An EFF summary of the bill alludes to--among other provisions--the preservation of the right to donate digital material to libraries and schoos. I like that. Jenny says:

Please be sure to voice your support for this bill to your legislators. It's critical.

So who says the last word has been written on Questia, topic of an aggressively critical piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education? Here's the take of David Moynihan of Blackmask, who, although no cheerleader for Questia, thinks the Chronicle was unfair.

Actually, Questia made Fuckedcompany.com over two years ago with the same info in that Chronicle article. The difference between then and now is they learned to market, and are in the black selling direct-to-consumer--hard!

Also, the numbers cited were completely unfair to Questia, given that they sell to college kids and such, so July numbers, in comparison to the famously unprofitable Britannica, don't pass the smell test.

I'm saying this not as a favor to Questia, but because, you know, it's interesting that they so pissed off academia that people want them to do badly. Additionally, burning through Ken Lay's money is not the worst quality a firm could have.

On a personal level, I despise Questia's CEO. The guy literally got $100 million in venture capital like a week after graduating from law school, then presented himself as a "self-made-millionaire." But the firm's in the black, ya know.

Jack Kapica of the Toronto Globe and Mail is interestingly clueless about B&N's exit from e-books. He writes:

My own belief is that reading on screen is too far removed from reading printed book to succeed in more than a niche market. The reader gadgets are too expensive (especially the Tablet PCs), or too heavy, or too expensively damaged if they slip into the bathwater. Also, a recent study by printer-maker Lexmark showed that office workers print out almost every official document they receive, suggesting a reverence to paper that goes beyond differences in age.

And I also believe that reading e-books is much like delivering radio news over the telephone: It can be done, but who wants it?

It will be worth keeping an eye on the players still left in the e-book game. If even one of the big ones—Microsoft, Adobe or Amazon.com—calls it quits over the next year, it may become time to call in the undertakers.

No, in the present political climate, it isn't easy to raise money for public libraries or even PBS stations. But guess what. Public library substitutes, about which the dotcom crowd was so hyper a few years back, aren't doing well either.

Here, via the Liblicense list, are some excerpts from Andrea Foster's Sept. 12 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Questia.

The for-profit online library Questia opened in January 2001 with slogans that portrayed college libraries as irrelevant and advertisements that showed desperate students turning to Questia for all of their research needs.

Now it's Questia that looks desperate. It has drastically shrunk its work force, halted its marketing campaign, and closed offices in Los Angeles and New York, leaving only the Houston headquarters open. The company also has scaled back aspirations for its library collection and expanded its target audience to include high-school students....

The company is hanging on with a humanities and social-sciences collection of 45,000 books and 360,000 articles from journals and periodicals. That's a small fraction of what most research libraries have. The libraries at Cornell University, for example, contain 7.3 million volumes. Even modest-size Carleton College has more than 481,009 books.

Questia itself is much smaller than its founder and chief executive officer, Troy Williams, envisioned. During the heady days of the dot-com boom, he talked confidently of having 750,000 volumes in the online library. He forged ahead with an untried business plan, one that depends on selling individual subscriptions to high-school students.

Customers typically opt for the $19.95 monthly subscription, which renews itself automatically until it is canceled.

Quarterly and annual subscriptions are available as well. Users also get a variety of student-oriented services, like a list of more than 4,000 research topics, and tools to create footnotes. Questia woos subscribers with ads on many of its Web pages, by claiming that it is "the world's largest online library," and by making the text of one book available free: Helen Keller's The Story of My Life, published in 1903.

Mr. Williams says Questia is still growing and "more than covers its operating costs." But those familiar with the company say its downsized ambitions should serve as a reminder to entrepreneurs that building an online library for college students that fails to win over college librarians and scholars is likely to falter...

Questia.com attracted 517,000 visitors in July, far fewer than the 2.7 million at the Web site of Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, according to comScore. Questia ranked last among 20 research sites in the number of visitors attracted that month.

Steve Cohen, one of my favorite librarian bloggers, worried about cutting back on reading because he was fixated on Library Stuff.

Then he reflected. "Sure, I don't read any fiction, but at least I read!!"--for his blog.

Well, Steve, depends. Maybe you'd still be reading fiction if more of it, especially the contemporary variety, were online for free via a TeleRead-style library system. If fiction can't be of interest to librarians, even the legal variety, we're in pretty sad shape. Is life really just about the latest RSS miracles and Google hacks? Besides, even old public-domain classics can offer some bloggable tidbits.

Reading the right books, particularly novels, is a form of R&D--good for writers, good for people in general. Thanks to Gutenberg and the advent of affordable hardware with sharp enough screens, I'm doing that more, not less. Just which reading is better for your prose style? RSS items? Or the following from Joshua Prokop, a story-telling musician in The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, an early 20th-century author whom I mentioned this morning:

"...Isn't it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn't it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering? Don't you agree? I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn't feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house. A moment later they seemed to have calmed down, but then they were seized once more with an insane fury and raced all over the square in a mindless rage, crowding into a corner then scattering again as some new madness came over them, until finally they disappeared round a corner.

"There was just one thick newspaper that couldn't keep up with the rest. It lay there on the cobbles, full of spite and flapping spasmodically, as if it were out of breath and gasping for air.

"As I watched, I was filled with an ominous foreboding. What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Could there not be a similar unseeable, unfathomable 'wind' blowing us from place to place and determining our actions, whilst we, in our simplicity, believe we are driven by our own free will? What if the life within us were nothing other than some mysterious whirlwind? The wind of which it says in the Bible, 'Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth'? Do we not sometimes dream we have plunged our hands into deep water and caught silvery fish, when all that has happened is that our hands have been in a cold draught?"

In the aftermath of the B&N retreat from e-books, here's still more context. Remember, this was really a battle over bread crumbs. In a generally upbeat story, Franklin Paul of Reuters reminds us of the small role that e-books now play in the book industry at large:

E-books are an afterthought in the publishing world. Less than 500,000 electronic books were sold in the United States in 2002, compared with more than 1.5 billion printed books, estimates research firm Ipsos-Insight in Chicago.

Demand for e-books has been growing, but remains relatively tiny. According to the Open eBook Forum, a trade organization, e-book sales totaled about $5 million in the first half of 2003, compared to $3.8 million in the first half of 2002. An Open eBook Forum representative said he believes barnesandnoble.com had just a small percentage of sales...

As with digital music, multiple books--say, Shakespeare's collected works--can be stored on a memory card the size of a stick of gum, making them popular with travelers, students and professionals. They are read on hand-held devices running operating systems by Palm or Microsoft, or on a PC or notebook computer.

E-books may find their niche with tech-savvy youth unfazed by the notion of browsing literature on a screen, and the growing legion of retirement-age readers, according to Richard Doherty, research director at Envisioneering Group.

"Two audiences that will benefit best are young people who loathe the idea of a library ... and aging people who want the convenience of large type on demand," or freedom from lugging heavy hardcover tomes.

Amazon isn't the only outfit keen on full-text searching.

So is Gale. Wide-ranging searches across different magazines, professional journals and other publications have long been a part of library-oriented reference collections from Gale and others. But now the company is offering libraries a powerful new database interface to make searches more precise. Too, it's providing libraries with more content choices. As described in EContent:

Gale Virtual Reference Library is accessed from a common menu that integrates the library's Gale databases, eBooks, resource centers, periodical databases, and electronic journals from Ingenta. Users can search a single eBook or search across the entire collection. Hyperlinks are used throughout, allowing users to travel to related content within the collection, from the table of contents and indexes to appropriate text, as well as to relevant external Web sites.

While the titles have a variety of typical eBook navigation features, such as tables of content and hyper-linked indexes, search functionality is more typical of databases, with basic and advanced options that allow users to broaden or narrow their searches. Results screens look much like an InfoTrac search, with opportunities to mark, download, email or view relevant articles and essays. HTML formatting is used for navigation and results displays, but users can click on a PDF link to see the page in a traditional page layout.

Suppose publishers slashed their bureaucracies and focused on e-books.

Just what kind of book might we see more of?

Well, Stephen King in effect provides a few clues in Entertainment Weekly, where he writes about a quirky work out in audio format but unavailable in print.

My gig at EW isn't writing book reviews, but I can still state with a fair degree of certainty that Ron McLarty's ''The Memory of Running'' is the best novel you won't read this year. But you can experience it, and I'm all but positive that you'll thank me for the tip if you do.

"Memory'' is the story of 279-pound Smithson Ide, a smokes-too-much, drinks-too-much, eats-too-much heart attack waiting to happen. I mean, this guy is a mess--a lovely, addled mess. And then one day, Smithy finds himself riding across America with his ''fat ass'' hanging over the seat of his boyhood bicycle. He's on his way from Rhode Island to L.A.--where he aims to retrieve his sister's body from the county morgue--and along the road he meets a parade of colorful characters. Unlike Huck Finn's adventures, Smithy's don't amount to literature, but they are always entertaining and sometimes wildly funny...

So why can't you read it? Because--so far, at least--no publisher will touch it with a 10-foot pole. Publishing houses, once proudly independent, are today little more than corporate wampum beads, their cultural clout all but gone. Novels that were neither dopey best-sellers (think James Patterson) nor dull ''serious fiction'' (think William Gaddis, Paul Auster, and their overpraised ilk) were one of the first things to go when the conglomerates took over. Dull or dopey: These days that's pretty much your choice at the bookstore.