Digital Gist

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.

Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

"Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book," says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, Ill. "The Google model is going to drive a lot of sales. We think they could get 20% of the e-book market very fast."

Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.

There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.

ephemeral material supplied the main business of the early publishing industry. Classical authors, we are told, accounted for “around 5 percent of all printed books published in the 15th century.”

Pettegree writes well and amasses information superbly. He refrains from explicitly comparing the technology of print, and its historical impact, with the technology of the Internet. Implicit similarities include issues of intellectual property and privacy, of power, of libel, as well as a general challenge to old modes — the proliferation of personal expression, the contentiousness, the question of how to capitalize, and capitalize upon, a new medium. This scholarly restraint, leaving his readers to compare and contrast, seems wise. And there are certainly contrasts with the modern age.

In an appended “Note on Sources,” Pettegree allows himself to acknowledge that, “Ironically, it has been the next great information revolution — the Internet — that has allowed this work on the first age of print to be pursued to a successful conclusion.” Digital information newly available from all over the world enhanced his research on early print culture — in all its frequently vulgar, ephemeral, zany and menacing variety.

We've given awards to 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities:Steven Abney and Terry Szymanski, University of Michigan. Automatic Identification and Extraction of Structured Linguistic Passages in Texts.Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, George Mason University. Reframing the Victorians.Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University. Classics in Google Books.Miles Efron, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois. Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques.Brian Geiger, University of California-Riverside, Benjamin Pauley, Eastern Connecticut State University. Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books.David Mimno and David Blei, Princeton University. The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.Alfonso Moreno, Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Bibliotheca Academica Translationum: link to Google Books.Todd Presner, David Shepard, Chris Johanson, James Lee, University of California-Los Angeles. Hypercities Geo-Scribe.Amelia del Rosario Sanz-Cabrerizo and José Luis Sierra-Rodríguez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Collaborative Annotation of Digitalized Literary Texts.Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia. JUXTA Collation Tool for the Web.Timothy R. Tangherlini, University of California-Los Angeles, Peter Leonard, University of Washington. Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.

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.