TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for January 17th, 2008

By Ficbot

The Vancouver Sun ran a great editorial yesterday about the current ‘Fair Copyright’ debate in Canada right now.

Our minister of culture, under pressure from American big business, was due to introduce a disastrous and very restrictive new copyright amendment prepared without input or discussion from voters. Under the leadership of the fabulous Michael Geist, however, the blogosphere caught wind. Activists organized. Minister Prentice was visited by several dozen constituents during his holiday Open House, and a rapidly growing Facebook group currently stands at almost 40,000 members, with local branches springing up for more targeted activism around the issue. Now, major papers like the Vancouver Sun are bringing the issue to the attention of the public at large.

Buddy Holly book project: Legal risks galore

I had been wanting to write about this for the TeleBlog for days, ever since I read about a woman whose life apparently inspired the song “Peggy Sue Got Married” (a partial inspiration for the movie shown in the poster). Due to legal pressure from Buddy Holly’s widow, the woman can’t publish a book, titled Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue? about a claimed friendship with the late rock star without the risk of being sued. It’s already being advertised online as “in stock.” Fingers crossed.

This story, to me, summed up everything wrong about copyright law. Does a person have special protections as far as creative works go? In some cases, yes. I am not permitted to write false or untrue things about another person. If I did, they could sue me for libel or slander. Additionally, I might be governed by a confidentiality agreement in certain circumstances. For example, celebrities often ask their employees to sign such agreements prohibiting them from writing a tell-all story. But is a friendship with a VIP by definition protectable? If I were to, for example, be walking down the street and I should happen to run into Angelina Jolie, should I need her permission to write an article about it? Should she be entitled to royalties if my article becomes the hit of the blogosphere? If this woman wants to write a book about her life as the Peggy Sue of the song, should his widow be able to stop it because she ‘owns the rights’ to the mere existence of a very public figure?

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By David Rothman

Last night I was deep in Kid Mode–my head resting on a pillow leaning on a closet door, while my addictive green machine, the XO-1 from One Laptop Per Child, sat on my belly.

The Manybooks.net site offering free books is now on a Jane Austen streak, but I wasn’t reading Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion or another novel; rather, something that would have been invisible to me but for e-books: Memoir of Jane Austen, written by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh. The goal here wasn’t to turn myself into an Austen expert, which I’ll never be, but instead to find out a little more on Jane. Might that make me a better and much more enthusiastic reader of her fiction? You can’t escape Jane, who caught the fancy of The Power People of her era, at least toward the end of her life, and whose influence lingers among their counterparts today. Oh, and that’s not all. We know about plain Jane. But to her nephew she “was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation.” Is Austen lust possible? You never know.

So how does something as prosaic as a green-and-white box fit in here? Because with a small-screened PDA or a low-resolution laptop. I doubt I’d have spent time with Memoir:

• Many paragraphs are long, not the best PDA reading but doable on the XO, with its seven-and-a-half inch screen—a great size for e-reading of illustrated works without detailed illustrations. For portability? Sure–I love PDAs.
• I can choose between the tablet and laptop modes depending on my mood. Actually a bit of variety is probably best for comfort. Makes me more likely to explore books I wouldn’t otherwise–just on a whim.
• The screen is super-sharp, perhaps the most salient aspect of the XO as I noted in my 5,500-word review.
• The holes in the handle are just right for the appropriate fingers to pass through, when I’m holding the XO.
• With the third-party FBReader installed, I can easily vary the size and style of the font. I can get a nice overview of those long paragraphs, then zoom in close up if I want to focus on individual sentences. This is a great feature for any reader, but I suspect would be especially handy for those with learning difficulties.

Except for the last feature, the above wrinkles came with the machine and I suspect are no accident. I know there’s a lot of fuss over Apple’s new thin laptop and its potential for E, but beyond the price, it just lacks the same combination of inviting, book-friendly qualities that the XO does.

This is why I remain committed not just to the idea of a well-stocked national digital library system (with fair pay for content providers), but also to the idea of encouraging use of appropriate hardware–the kind suited for hour after hour of book-reading and the accompanying sustained thought. If the box can look as spiffy as the XO, so much the better.

No, book reading isn’t only form of useful reading, as if:book’s Ben Vershbow has correctly noted in his commentary on the latest literacy study from the National Endowment for the Arts. But it is a form that definitely has been on the wane in recent years, and the right mix of hardware and software would make it easier for teachers and parents to get kids hooked on books. Human side first, of course! The technology alone can’t work miracles.

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By David Rothman

I grew up across the Potomac from Washington and the Library of Congress, not the most kid-friendly place. Strict rules—I don’t recall the specifics—guarded against various services of the Library from being swamped by the pimple-faced hordes slaving on term papers. To what extent did William Randolph Hearst’s jingoist press cause the Spanish-American War? Such was my fixation for Ronald Savage’s history class, or maybe Bert Cohen’s; and unhappy with the pickings at my local public library, I talked the librarycrats into making me an exception.

But wouldn’t it be nice if the the Library were less aloof, not just from high school kids but from the Net as a whole? And so I’m delighted to learn that the acrobat image and some 3,000 others from the place will be available on Flickr—there to be enjoyed, picked up for other Web sites, and maybe even tagged and captioned in ways that bring new facts to light. That’s just a speck of the 14 million images at the Library, in part due to copyright restrictions, but it’s still a good start. Bravo! Would that even recent books from the library be online, too—something that would be possible, with compensation for writers and publishers, under a TeleRead-style approach.

Bookish truancy

With my high school episode in mind, I was amused early this morning to run across a somewhat similar tale, from an old school friend of my sister, Beth Wellington, the journalist-poet-activist whom Yahoo 360 dissed. Beth’s LOC item, however, provides twists going beyond my own, and here’s an excerpt from her post, which also passes on some disturbing details from the FlickR-LOC story:

“The Library of Congress is one of my favorite haunts. The first time I had to sneak in because I was still in high school. I confess this, hoping that the statute of limitations has expired. While other folks ditched classes to cruise the mall, I transgressed once by riding with Dad into the District to research a senior term paper, ‘The Effects of The Great Depression on Communist Party Membership in the United States.’ I had already tried the Richard Byrd branch library. Its only book—a 1958 tome by J. Edgar Hoover—warned that the shoe salesman peeking up my skirt might be a communist…The college libraries weren’t much better” in their selections. The truant office caught up with Mrs. Wellington, who later revealed that Beth was lucky in the wording of his question. “He asked whether I knew you were not in school and I said yes. If he had asked me if I knew you were skipping school I would have told him the same thing.”

‘Remnants of the McCarthy era’

“The shortage of books,” Beth recalls, “was my first experience with the remnants of the McCarthy era. Imagine, instead, a library where everything in print was available!”

Exactly. Or how about most everything available electronically—whether from the Library or from local systems or from the private sector, with ways to bypass the censorship that Washington might well try to impose?

The more things change…

Now, here’s the disturbing aspect of Beth’s post, something you may also see in a few other accounts of the Library-FlickR alliance. The Children’s Internet Protection Act, a godsend for vendors of filtering software, prevents certain school or library computers from accessing FlickR.

One fix could be for the Library site to mirror only “safe” parts of FlickR. A better one, though, as many have observed, would be to mitigate the legislation.

Will this happen soon? We’re not back in the McCarthy era, but the urge to repress is alive and well among no small number of voters and politicians. It’s not as if we should have kids gazing hour after hour at  porn—better for library bats to fixate instead on the causes of the Spanish-American War. But surely the act can be made less burdensome.

Donning white globes to gaze at the art of Blake

Meanwhile, three other points. First I agree with Beth that E can’t replace everything library, whether as a social gathering sport or a place to see artifacts close up. Remember Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti’s post mentioning her visit to the Morgan Collection, where she told time off Lewis Carroll’s watch? Well, Beth has her own memories—of, for example, donning white gloves “to wonder at William Blake’s original illustrations”  at the Library of Congress.

Second, how can I conclude without direct links to 1,615 color transparencies, taken in the 1920s and ’40s by the U.S. Farm Security Administration and the 1,500 black and white shots on the sometimes-overlapping topics of politics, crime, sports, and theater (as well as shots of strikes and disasters)?

Third, isn’t it ironic that the FlickR end of Yahoo is laudably helping to preserve history, while the Yahoo 360 end is doing just the opposite—by shutting down 360 without promptly providing Beth and other bloggers with the tools they need to make smooth transitions to other hosts? I suspect I’m not the only Washington-area library fan who can relate to Beth’s recollections. Same for other people who follow the blogs of friends and acquaintances, in other locations and on other topics. There is no such thing as a generic blogger, at least among those who do more than rewrite the big news stories, and Beth’s latest item is a handy reminder to me to follow up with Yahoo’s “social networking guru” on the data portability issue. One Marc Davis—that’s Mr. Guru’s real name—has been by the TeleBlog if you go by a MyBlogLog image displayed publicly, courtesy yet another Yahoo service. Same guy? Either way, I’m hoping Marc has had time to reflect on the transition problem and can get his employer to make a serious pledge to help Beth and others chroniclers of history-in-the-making. Come on, Marc. We’re rooting for Yahoo to do the right thing, just as it has in its cooperation with the Library of Congress.

(”Ruth the Acrobat” image found via Beth’s blog.)