Ohio is the top state in Hennen's American Public Library Ratings this year. And the branch-oriented Cuyahoga County Public Library, encompassing Cleveland suburbs and thriftily headquartered in this plain-looking building, leads the biggest library systems.

The Buckeye State's outstanding showing fits a pattern. The Midwest shines in both state ratings and the number of leading libraries on sized-based Top Ten lists from Thomas Henlen, Jr. in Wisconsin.

Hip librarians in Babbitt country

While I cherish the Sinclair Lewis satires debunking the Midwest, I can't help liking the region, too. Hey, my mother's from Kansas City, and more relevantly from a TeleRead perspective, some of the most e-book-hip librarians are Midwestern--for example, Tom Peters (Tap Information Services in beautiful Blue Springs, Missouri, some 40 miles from KC), Lori Bell (Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center), Jenny Levine (Metropolitan Chicago Library System), and Cynthia Orr (Cleveland Public LIbrary).

What's more, Project Gutenberg came out of Michael Hart's work at the University of Ilinois at Champaign-Urbana. In character, too, the Columbus, Ohio, Metropolitan Library System is the leader among big systems in use of electronic resources, as are several more Ohio libaries in their size categories. Also, OCLC is in--yes, yes--the Ohio city of Dublin, an immortal name among metadata freaks.

Other top states

Here are the other top states based on criteria ranging from physical facilities to collection size: Utah, #2; Oregon, #3; Indiana, #4; Colorado, #5; Washington, #6; Wisconsin, #7; Kansas, #8; Maryland, #9, and Nebraska, #10. Total score among the top 10: 5 midwestern states vs. 4 western states and just 1 in the Northeast.

The South disgraced itself in both state ranks and the number of stellar library systems. The lowest ten states were Mississippi, #51; Washington, D.C. (an honorary Southern state in terms of location and mediocrity), #50; Alabama, #49; Louisiana, #48; Tennessee, #47; Arkansas, 46; Georgia, #45; Texas, #44; California, #43, and West Virginia, 42. Nothing personal. I went to school in the South at a good university. But--pardon my French--the region sucks massively as library territory.

Granted, clear-cut exceptions have distinguished certain smaller places in the South. One is the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg, Virginia, just down the road from me off Route 95. Via a well-done link, Librarian.net correctly praised the system's award-winning Web site the other day. But Rappahannock is hardly the Southern norm.

More Ohio victories

In various categories for cities and other localities this year, the leading libraries were Cuyahoga County, Ohio (500,000+ category); Santa Clara County, California (250,000-499,999); Naperville, Illinois (100,000-249,999); Washington-Centerville, Ohio (50,000-99,999); and Upper Arlington, Ohio (25,000-49,999).

Except for the first-rate system in Fairfax County in Northern, Virginia (10th among the big-league libraries) near me and libraries in Chesterfield County, Virginia (6th among 250,000-499,999) and Richland County, South Carolina (9th in 250,000-499,999), not one of the leading libraries cited on the top ten lists this year is in the South. Central Rappahannock Regional ranked seventh last year in its category and surely is still going strong. It just didn't make the final '04 cut.

Dixie misers

Plainly, however, the South is a library horror story. At least that would seem the case if you're not a Rebel diehard and don't want to include Maryland, where Montgomery County's Library came in just ahead of Fairfax County's in the big-library category. Even Montgomery's showing isn't enough, actually, given the South's substandard performance as a whole.

So what does this say about Southern values vs. Northern and Midwestern ones? The South isn't quite as poor as before. Shouldn't it want to be a little less stingy toward its libraries?

Scarcity of top ten systems in West

Oh, and just four libraries in Western states have made the Top Ten lists in their categories--Santa Clara County, California (1st in 250,000-499,999), Multnomah County, Oregon (second in the big leagues), Denver Public Library (3rd among the biggest), Douglas County in Colorado (7th in 100,000-249,000).

While the Western states seem to do a good job of spreading resources around, at least if you go by state averages, they don't have the same number of stellar systems that the Midwest does.

New England worse than expected

What's more, New England, supposedly the home of culture and learning and all that, is a real loser compared to the Midwest if you're thinking about stellar libraries. The only library there to make a top ten list was in Newton, Massachusetts (third in 50,000-99,000). If you go by state averages, New England does better. Massachusetts is 16; Connecticut, 21; Maine, 24; Vermont, 35; New Hampshire, 27.

eBookwise-1150 owners can now enjoy public domain books and others in TXT, HTML or Word format. Here's an item from Phil at eBooksToolbox.com--via the Fictionwise email list:

I just wanted to let you know that the RebLibrarian supports the new devices and the future migrated devices.

Special configuration steps:

Put ebooksystem.net in the domain name field instead of softbook.net. And configure your ET2 as a GEB1150 device type.

All this is to be done in the setup tab of the reblibrarian.

From a well-done interview with O'Reilly publisher Tim O'Reilly, via Richard MacManus's Read/Write Web:

RSS is clearly, far and away the most successful web service to date. And it kind of demonstrates something that happens a lot in technology, which is that something simple and easy-to-use gets overloaded (in the sense that object oriented programming uses the term).

I mean it's the classic example of Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma. When HTML came out everybody said "Hey this is so crude, you can't build rich interfaces like you can on a PC - it'll never work". Well it did something that people wanted, it kind of grew more and more popular, became more and more powerful, people figured out ways to extend it. Yes a lot of those extensions were kludges, but HTML really took over the world. And I think RSS is very much on the same track. It started out doing a fairly simple job, people found more and more creative things to do with it, and hack by hack it has become more powerful, more useful, more important. And I don't think the story is over yet.

The consumer-hostile Tower of eBabel wasn't the only reason why Fictionwise, a major e-book retailer, set up the separate eBookwise site in promoting the eBookwise-1150 eBook Reading Device. But it certainly was among the major factors. Here's what Steve Pendergrast told customers via the Fictionwise email list:

We launched the ebookwise.com site for many reasons, not the least of which is that we anticipate thousands of former Gemstar device owners will come to get content from there, and it was important to give them a very simple user experience without all the "power user" complications of the Fictionwise site (12 different formats, micropay, etc. etc.) Many of the former Gemstar customers were used to a very simple user experience and we wanted to provide them with that kind of site. To steer them all to the Fictionwise site would, we believe, cause a lot of support issues.

Fictionwise is keeping its word to help readers get personal content on the eBookwise 1150. Not all the wrinkles have been straightened out, but Fictionwise is definitely moving forward. Here's most of an FAQ:

You can upload content right this second using a "personal content server" type feature very similar to gemstar's personal content server. You can also upload content right now using GEBLibrarian for memory card transfers, we have confirmed that this works. (Be very careful: the device must be OFF when you insert or remove the memory card.)

We are working with the folks at GEBLibrarian to get direct USB working with the ebookwise-1150 (we have confirmed it does not work and are in contact with the developer, who believes it will not be hard to fix. We have sent him a device for his testing). We expect this will be available soon.

It is also possible to transfer using memory cards and the Gemstar publishing tools (which are free) but this process is somewhat complex compared to the above options...

From LISNews:

This is a hoot--a satire in the Bentel poking fun at Adobe's reader-hostile DRM for harming the environment. A "researcher" explains the cause of the problem:

"Particularly using the Adobe scheme, we found that to download a 2 megabyte e-book required a user actively participating in various logins, registrations, and downloads for an average of 12 hours, resulting in an average of 173.2 megabytes of data transfer.

How long until we finally see the much-ballyhood, much-pooh-poohed boom in e-books?

More than 50 million e-pub "slates" will be sold annually by 2008, according to a report from UK writer-consultants Guy Kewney and Nick Hampshire. That doesn't include other devices such as SmartPhones, expected to sell a whopping 150 million by then. Already Philips is said to be preparing to produce a million flexible E Ink-style displays per year for mobile phones.

The report link above leads to just a sample. Full doc is available from AFAICS Research for £199. Among the observations in the sample:

Old formatting technologies, HMTL and PDF, may linger--but we strongly believe that XML-based formatting is preferable. Not only does it permit sophisticated design, layout and typography, and allow the inclusion of interactive multimedia content. But most importantly, XML allows content to be displayed and when necessary automatically formatted, on a very wide range of reading devices.

At the moment such reader devices typically measure about 15x19x2.5cms and weigh about 350gms, and only have standard 80dpi, 480x640pixel monochrome displays.

But many do also have stylus operated touch screens, they have simple low powered processors, and about 8MB of flash memory, and a basic USB port, but can display files in RTF, DOC, HTML and TXT that have been previously converted to e-book format using a special conversion program on a PC.

However, developments in display, and processor technology could make a lot more sophisticated without increasing the price (these manufacturers are talking about ramping up production to tens of millions of units per annum).

The QVGA (320x240pixel) 3G mobile phone is a reader device that offers enormous potential. The new phones being launched in Europe at the moment have large sharp full colour displays, some with a flip out keyboard some with a stylus, with a few MB of flash memory, and since they run the Symbian operating system and use Opera as the default browser they are XML compliant.

However, future developments here look even more interesting, the big phone manufacturers are talking about adding 2GB miniature hard disk drives into their phones by 2006.

On the display front Philips are just ramping up a production line capable of producing 1million flexible e-paper displays per annum, Using the same E-Ink display technology as the Sony Librie these are currently QVGA and monochrome, but rumoured to be VGA and colour by 2006, all destined for a couple of large mobile phone manufacturers. These displays can be rolled up into a tube no more than 2cm in diameter and will allow the manufacture of highly portable reader devices with large clear displays.

We should all be watching these developments very carefully since they will determine the future of e-publishing.

Can Open Source software be sustainable? Can anyone make money? That question is relevant to the eBook Community List's discussion of OpenReader. Well, via extrapolation, here's one answer from the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

Venture Capital: Investors see open-source software potential
By JOHN COOK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

By its very nature, open-source software would appear to run counter to the goals of venture capitalists. Not only is it distributed and developed for free by a loose-knit group of techies from around the world, but it lacks the sort of proprietary protection that VCs typically crave.

Despite those obvious challenges, a growing number of venture capital firms, including several in the Pacific Northwest, believe that there are ways to profit from the open-source movement.

So far this year, seven open-source companies have scored initial rounds of financing from deep-pocketed investors such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Intel Capital and Matrix Partners, according to VentureOne.

They include companies such as Atlanta-based JBoss Inc., which provides technical support for open-source software programs, and Cupertino, Calif.-based SugarCRM, whose customer-relationship management system has been downloaded by more than 50,000 users.

In the Seattle area, SourceLabs recently landed $3.5 million from Ignition Partners and Index Ventures to provide testing, support and maintenance of open-source systems.

Yesterday, Seattle-based Voyager Capital became the first venture capital firm to join the Open Source Development Labs--a 4-year-old Portland organization founded by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The non-profit organization is attempting to promote the development and adoption of the Linux operating system.

Many venture capitalists view open-source software as a rising technological wave that can't be ignored. The numbers bear this out. Research firm Gartner says that Linux will power more than 20 percent of corporate servers in the next three years...

Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft's chief software architect, is a new board member at the conglomerate owning the Washington Post, but journalistic life goes on unimpeded in the Post business section today.

Alll in all, it's Bloody Sunday at the Post for two Microsoft products, with a third also getting less than loving attention.

Web Watch Columnist Leslie Walker complains that Microsoft's Search Falls Far Short of Google, while Fast Forward Columnist Rob Pegaro's latest appears under the headline Firefore Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer. A third reviewer complains of an "inexplicable omission" in an Microsoft photo editor and is friendlier to Adobe, "No. 1," even if he isn't quite as brutal to MSFT as the other writers.

Search laggard

"While both sites do fine on many queries," Walker writes, "our comparison of roughly two dozen search phrases gave the eddge to Google at least two of three times." When Walker typed "history of photography" into MSN search's trial site, for example, the main result was a natural history photographer's personal site. Google, on the other hand, simply led her to "the site of a natural history photographer."

In another gripe, Walker complains: "While the home page for MSN's new search is simple and easy to use, its 'Search Builder' may confuse people. Clicking on this button displays an annoying pop-down box, stuffed with too many ways to revise your query." That's typical of the sendoff the so-called Google killer gets. Walker even tells how a localization feature confused Washington state with Washington, D.C.

Outfoxed

"Internet Explorer, you're fired," Pegaro's review begins.

Pegaro recommends the new Mozilla Firefox browser over the creaky Internet Explorer and complains: "After Microsoft cemented a monopoly in the Web-browser market, it let Internet Internet Explorer go stale, parceling out ho-hum updates that neglected vulnerabilities exploited by hostile Web sites."

He describes the Open Source Mozilla an "unlikely rival" that has "grown into a remarkable product" with great naviation features, not just fewer security vulnerabilities.

Photo editor loses out to Adobe rival

A third Microsoft product, Digital Image Suite 10, gets praised in the Post's Closer Look feature, for being easier in one respect for beginners than Adobe's Photoshop Elements. But freelance reviewer Daniel Greenberg complains that "there's no built-in uploading of photos to Web sites, an inexplicable omission that puts Elements ahead." He also writes: "Suite's Library program is not nearly as flexible as Adobe's Organizer, with fewer sorting options, no timeline view and no way to put the same photo in multiple albums."

Details: Yes, the Post is just one newspaper, but isn't it fascinating how Microsoft struck out in all three product mentions? Could the company be slipping? My own read: "Don't count Microsoft out." Consider all the billions in spare cash that Microsoft can lavish on R&D and for other purposes, not to mention the wimpiness of the Bush Administration in taking on Microsoft's business practices.

If I ruled Microsoft: I would experiment with a variety of business models and split the damn thing up--with far less of the monolithic approach that drives end users crazy when they find they cannot use Product X without also running Product Y. Also, I would be more receptive to open standards that would help rivals but help MSFT even more, given its vast array of products. With a kinder, gentler business model, with the company being less of a monolith, Microsoft could more successfully venture into areas such as content without worrying so much about regulators. We're talking long range here. The Bushies won't be around forever.

The Melinda media angle: Meanwhile, isn't it interesting that Melinda finds time to serve on the Washington Post Company's board even through in May she left the Duke University Board for time reasons? The Post reported on September 10:

The mother of three resigned from the Duke board in May, telling fellow trustees in a letter that traveling from Seattle to Durham, N.C., for board meetings four times a year was no longer "feasible" given her extensive overseas travels for the foundation.

The Post Co. board meets six times a year, five times in Washington and once in New York.