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Katie Day

The Future of Reading - 11/1/2009 - Library Journal - 0 views

www.libraryjournal.com/...CA6703852.html

reading ebooks future libraries books rights digitalgist articles

shared by Katie Day on 02 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Clearly something important and fundamental is happening to books and reading. Libraries need to be part of this reading revolution, supporting and defending the rights of digital readers, experimenting with new reader services, collecting new genres and media formats, and providing access for all readers to the devices, networks, content, and online communities that will continue to emerge.
  • To that end, I suggest that libraries and library associations develop, promulgate, and defend a Reader Bill of Rights for the Digital Era. Here are a few draft planks: • The reader should be empowered and able to control the mode of reading on his or her e-reading appliance of choice. Specifically, a TTS feature should be available for all books. TTS is not an audio performance. It enables auditory reading, a mode of reading gaining in popularity. Readers should be able to switch quickly from visual to auditory or tactile reading and back, with olfactory and gustatory options if/when they are developed. • The reader should be empowered and able to control the presentation aspects of the ebook. For visual reading, this includes factors such as font size, font type, font color, and background color. For TTS audiobooks, this includes factors such as a male or female voice, playback speed (sans Alvin and the Chipmunks), choice of accents (e.g., British, Australian, American Midwest, American Southern for English), with similar accent choices for other languages. • Readers, individually and in groups, have the right to add to and embellish a text, as long as the embellishments (e.g., notes, highlighting, marginalia, new characters, new episodes) are clearly distinguishable from the primary text. • The reader has a right to save and share these embellishments, or keep them private.
  • Librarians should encourage—nay, aid and abet—experimentation in reading. We need to cleave to the needs and wants of readers. We must continue to study their reading habits, then design and redesign our content collections, systems, and services to help them improve and maximize their reading experiences. We are in a long-term commitment with readers.
beth gourley

Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/22281

google libraries accessibility books ebooks

shared by beth gourley on 17 Sep 09 - Cached
  • After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future.
  • The only workable tactic may be vigilance
  • When I look backward
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent
  • the Republic of Letters was democratic only in principle
  • dominated by the wellborn and the rich
  • the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege
  • Republic of Letters, as it actually operated, was a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged
  • invoke the Enlightenment in an argument for openness in general and for open access in particular.
  • the present, do we see a similar contradiction between principle and practice
  • Our republic was founded on faith in the central principle of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters: the diffusion of light
  • For Jefferson, enlightenment took place by means of writers and readers, books and libraries—especially libraries,
  • The Founding Fathers acknowledged authors' rights to a fair return on their intellectual labor, but they put public welfare before private profit.
  • Twenty-eight years seemed long enough to protect the interests of authors and publishers
  • "the Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because Mickey was about to fall into the public domain), it lasts as long as the life of the author plus seventy years. In practice, that normally would mean more than a century.
  • When it comes to digitization, access to our cultural heritage generally ends on January 1, 1923, the date from which great numbers of books are subject to copyright laws.
  • for example, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, published in 1922, is in the public domain, whereas Lewis's Elmer Gantry, published in 1927, will not enter the public domain until 2022.
  • we would see that we live in a world designed by Mickey Mouse, red in tooth and claw.
  • professional journals sprouted throughout the fields,
  • he learned societies produced them, and the libraries bought them
  • Then commercial publishers discovered that they could make a fortune by selling subscriptions to the journals
  • the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490
  • Fortunately, this picture of the hard facts of life in the world of learning is already going out of date.
  • Openness is operating everywhere, thanks to "open access" repositories of digitized articles available free of charge,
  • When businesses like Google look at libraries, they do not merely see temples of learning. They see potential assets or what they call "content," ready to be mined. Built up over centuries at an enormous expenditure of money and labor, library collections can be digitized en masse at relatively little cost
  • Libraries exist to promote a public good:
  • To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale,
  • You cannot legislate Enlightenmen
  • "Digitize we must." But not on any terms. We must do it in the interest of the public, and that means holding the digitizers responsible to the citizenry.
  • Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize.
  • By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.
  • The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders
  • A "public access license" will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal.
  • And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a "consumer license" from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders
  • Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business—not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon.
  • a single terminal will hardly satisfy the demand in large libraries.
  • a boon to the small-town,
  • The eighteenth-century philosophers saw monopoly as a main obstacle to the diffusion of knowledge
  • Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly.
  • a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.
  • We could have created a National Digital Library
  • It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit.
  • The district court judge will pronounce on the validity of the settlement, but that is primarily a matter of dividing profits, not of promoting the public interest.
  • As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information.
  • The settlement leaves Google free to negotiate deals with each of its clients, although it announces two guiding principles: "(1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of the Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education."
  • What will happen if Google favors profitability over access?
  • it could also employ a strategy comparable to the one that proved to be so effective in pushing up the price of scholarly journals: first, entice subscribers with low initial rates, and then, once they are hooked, ratchet up the rates as high as the traffic will bear.
  • The payment will come from the libraries
  • the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company
  • beth gourley on 17 Sep 09
     
    "How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright."
Katie Day

The 21st Century Writer - The Future Writer -- from The Futurist - 0 views

www.wfs.org/...futewrite3.htm

future reading literacy technology

shared by Katie Day on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Beyond blogging, this means that the writers of the future (both fiction and nonfiction) will work with Web designers, software writers, and other professionals to create product.
  • To Lapham, the crudeness, silliness, and uncultured quality of today’s Web culture is a symptom of the immaturity of the new medium and the youthfulness of its users. The change will be gradual. “We’re still playing with it like it’s a toy,” he said of the Web. “We don’t yet know how to make art with it. McLuhan points out that the printing press was 1468, it’s a hundred years before you get to Cervantes, to Shakespeare.” 
  • “Look at Notre-Dame de Paris,” he said. “The novel is not about the hunchback so much as it is about the church, and the idea of sculpture as a way of communicating stories. In the preliterate era they told the stories through these churches.… Victor Hugo was lamenting the loss of that stone literacy, where people would look up at the church and know what it was about. Yes, something was lost. But we gained a lot. I remember a conversation I had at our open source convention with Freeman Dyson, the physicist. He said something wonderful; someone asked him what do you think about the fact that we were losing something or other, and he said, ‘We have to forget, otherwise there would be no room for new things.’ That’s an important thing to take.… Be accepting of the losses and the gains.”  “Reading isn’t going to go away,” agreed Abram, “but it’s only one aspect. Probably, it will be some combination of reading, visual conversations, and lessons. What you’re authoring is contributing to a corpus that is significantly larger than it is now, electronically. Most of the important stuff will have been converted 20 years from now. We can convert the entire Library of Congress for $9 billion right now, which, in terms of national priorities, is only five weeks of Iraqi conflict. It’s doable. It used to be undoable. The corpus, the ability to create cultural context, is going to change the nature of how culture is expressed.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “The written word will survive because there are things you can do with the written word that you simply cannot do with film or with radio. I don’t know if it will be a mass medium,” said Lapham. “The large majority of mankind is passive. The change comes from the active minority. Those people will continue to read. Books will continue to be read. Maybe the more popular forms of writing will be taken over by video games. But it’s up to members of your generation to teach young people how to read and what the difference is between reading literature and sifting data.”
  • Rushkoff sees new kinds of information systems springing to life next to writing, and sees this as part of a grand evolution in human communication. “Just because things became written down, we didn’t lose oral culture,” said Rushkoff. “Read Walter Ong [author of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word]. We changed, but we still talk to each other, dance for each other. We do them in different situations. The written word is cool. It’s for a certain kind of thing. The more media we have to exchange, the better we understand what the biases are. The written word is abstract, contractual. It launched monotheism, ethics; it launched evolution. It was really important for a lot of things, and that will remain. But visual media will lead to other kinds of insights.”
Katie Day

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Accessing the e-book revolution - Stephen Johnson - 0 views

www.ft.com/...f4-11e0-92d0-00144feabdc0.html

digitalgist mirror_web stephen_johnson ebooks internet digital_library

shared by Katie Day on 31 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The difference between our time and Gutenberg’s is, of course, the rate of change. It took almost half a century for the alphabetical index to become a standard; Arabic page numbers were not adopted until the 1500s. There were feature wars in the new platform of the book, but salvos were fired only every 20 years. It may have taken a long time, but when all those features coalesced into the system of citation, indices, page numbers, footnotes, bibliographies and cross-references that we now take for granted, they helped usher in the scientific revolutions of the modern age. Entire ways of interacting with information became possible because we had agreed on how to describe where the information lived and how to point people towards it.
  • This is a story with a direct connection to our current situation. This year is the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification. The defining property of that standard was this: it established a way to describe where information lives and how to point people to it. The extraordinary run of innovation seen on the web starts with the breakthrough of web addresses and links. For two decades, this new universe of linkable data expanded faster than any other form of information. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip.
  • Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
  • Katie Day on 31 Dec 10
     
    discusses the danger of information on the web (e.g., inside/via apps and pages inside e-books) that cannot be directly linked to - proposes the solution is the mirror web, whereby you have parallel information online
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