MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 2): ISBN Identification, UK Libraries under threat, Historian Hobsbawm, The Internet and Authors

We released a summary of the BISG study on eBook identification this week: BISG Education in the UK is migrating away from the 'academic year' construct (Independent):

Many of the courses recruiting for January/February starts are for vocational areas, in particularly nursing degrees, which can be followed at several universities including Thames Valley, Sheffield Hallam, and West of Scotland. These are popular among the growing number of applicants in their late twenties and thirties, who are no longer locked into the traditional academic year milestones. But several other factors contribute to the growing popularity of a winter start. More students want to have their A-Level results before applying to university; some want to transfer from a course that started in October but hasn't quite worked out; and some want to start a course fitting in with a six-month break rather than a full gap year. A large proportion of winter start places go to overseas students, particularly those from countries where the academic year runs from January to December, a prominent example being Australia. Students from abroad make up a large slice of the 700 or so joining winter start courses at Middlesex University, based mainly in the departments of business and engineering and information sciences. "The delayed start is attractive to our overseas students for two main reasons," explains Margaret House, deputy vice-chancellor at Middlesex. "Firstly they may have had problems getting visas in time for a start in the preceding September; and secondly because it, in effect, saves them half a year's living costs."

Libraries are under serious threat in the UK (Independent):

Encouraged by David Cameron's Big Society philosophy, councils across the UK say volunteers must replace paid staff if libraries are to be saved. This week the Government will unveil its plan to give communities the right to bid to take over state-run services. But experts say that politicians have failed to understand the social, cultural and educational importance of libraries, and the role librarians play in providing services. The Labour leader Ed Miliband said yesterday his party would back campaigns to save libraries as "a place where community is built, as families get to know each other and form friendships". A national day of action is planned for 5 February in libraries serving poor and affluent areas, countering claims by a quango leader that libraries are the preserve of the "privileged, mainly white middle classes". Lib Dem and Tory ministers have privately expressed concern about the threat posed to libraries, but remain anxious to make clear that under the coalition, local decisions are taken without Whitehall interference. Eric Pickles, the Local Government Secretary, has warned councils repeatedly against cutting frontline services without first looking for savings elsewhere. "The Government has delivered a tough but fair local government settlement that ensures the most vulnerable communities are protected," a spokesman said.

Library emptied in effort to fight closure (Independent) A staple of any English history class: Eric Hobsbawm: a conversation about Marx, student riots, the new Left, and the Milibands As he publishes his latest book, 93-year-old historian Eric Hobsbawm talks communism and coalition with one of Britain's newer breed, Tristram Hunt, now a Labour MP (Guardian):

And after one hour of talking Marx, materialism and the continued struggle for human dignity in the face of free-market squalls, you leave Hobsbawm's Hampstead terrace – near the paths where Karl and Friedrich used to stroll – with the sense you have had a blistering tutorial with one of the great minds of the 20th century. And someone determined to keep a critical eye on the 21st. Tristram Hunt At the heart of this book, is there a sense of vindication? That even if the solutions once offered by Karl Marx might no longer be relevant, he was asking the right questions about the nature of capitalism and that the capitalism that has emerged over the last 20 years was pretty much what Marx was thinking about in the 1840s? Eric Hobsbawm Yes, there certainly is. The rediscovery of Marx in this period of capitalist crisis is because he predicted far more of the modern world than anyone else in 1848. That is, I think, what has drawn the attention of a number of new observers to his work – paradoxically, first among business people and business commentators rather than the left. I remember noticing this just around the time of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, when not very many plans were being made for celebrating it on the left. I discovered to my amazement that the editors of the [in-flight] magazine of United Airlines said they wanted to have something about the Manifesto. Then, a bit later on, I was having lunch with [financier] George Soros, who asked: "What do you think of Marx?" Even though we don't agree on very much, he said to me: "There's definitely something to this man."

Laura Miller believes authors have avoided "dealing with the Internet" but this is now changing she says (Guardian):

Venturing back in time isn't the only option for novelists loath to address the mass media that most of us marinate in. There are also those populations cut off from the mainstream for cultural reasons, such as recent immigrants and their families – a very popular choice of fictional subject these days. And then there are those at the geographical margins, living in remote rural areas where broadband access is hard to come by. It's remarkable how many recent American literary novels and short stories are set on ranches, from writers as established as Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy to newcomers such as Maile Meloy and CE Morgan. And this is especially curious when you consider that the vast majority of the people who write and read these works live in cities and suburbs. Perhaps it's because the characters in ranch novels spend most of their time contemplatively driving long distances in trucks or climbing up snowy mountains to rescue stranded animals, scenarios in which there's absolutely no danger that a TV will be switched on or a laptop flipped open. (Real-life ranchers, of course, treasure their satellite dishes.) As the showdown in Wallace's graduate workshop indicated, the American novelist is buffeted by two increasingly contradictory imperatives. The first comes as the directive to depict "The Way We Live Now" – a phrase whose origins in the title of a Trollope novel have been almost entirely obscured by countless deployments in reviews and publisher's blurbs. Cliché it may be, but the notion that no one is better suited to explain the dilemmas of contemporary life than the novelist persists. After the 9/11 attacks, every fiction writer of note reported receiving dozens of calls from magazine editors, each looking for insights and ruminations that a whole industry full of accomplished journalists was apparently insufficiently thoughtful to summon on its own.

Melville and Hawthorne (Telegraph):

We don’t have all the information we might like to possess about their friendship, but we do know that once, in a snowstorm, Hawthorne appeared at the back door of Arrowhead and was invited to spend the night. The two authors sat in Melville’s study all night, talking in low voices, arousing the curiosity of his wife, mother and sister, who listened closely at the door. The extent of their intimacy is unknown, though it has intrigued biographers for a very long time. For the most part, as Sophie Hawthorne said, Melville poured his heart out, and Hawthorne listened. Certainly the few extant letters of Melville to his mentor are full of yearning. In one, he imagined the two friends sitting down together in Paradise in eternal conversation: “O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us.”

iDiots' Guide To Publishing On The iPad (MediaPost):

Print publishers are screwing up what could be their biggest opportunity. Many continue to botch their Web strategy, and are now doubling down by getting their iPad strategy completely wrong. The core of the problem lies in how publishers think about the iPad. Just look at the headlines: "Will the iPad save print?" asks one; "Savior crucified" proclaims another. These headlines make two huge assumptions, both of which are totally wrong. Chasing History: The first mistake is the belief that print should be "saved." "Saving print" is the wrong goal, and chasing it will almost certainly kill publishers. Survival in the face of new technology often requires us to abandon our old ideas. We don't need a print experience on the iPad -- we need a better content consumption experience for the iPad.

And from the twitter this week: The photography of Vivian Maier http://bit.ly/e9cHdt Amazing found collection of unknown photographer Downton Abbey book rights spark £1million bidding war - mirror.co.uk http://bit.ly/g9WglK The Guardian: Librarians:'We do so much more than shelve books and say shhh' http://bit.ly/egbDBt Provide "raw materials of social mobility" New MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative Aims to Improve Independent Online Learning - NYTimes.com http://nyti.ms/hSYIpF Library Journal - CES 2011: Up Close with the Kno Tablet http://bit.ly/dZtDXs

Watching Buddha

Watching Buddha, Ayutthaya Thailand 2003

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

In 2003, we visited Ayutthaya which was the ancient capital of Siam until it was destroyed in a war with Burma. Aside from the ruins of the capital, this is a city of temples and definitely worth the trek out of Bangkok to see and explore the town. This is one of the many Buddha figures of varying size located all over the palace complex and was approximately 10ft high between chin and forehead.

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Findings Meeting for the Identification of e-Books and Digital Content Project

As you may know, in May 2010 the Identification of E-Books Working Group of BISG’s Identification Committee began a systematic review of the International ISBN Agency recommendations for the identification of e-books and digital content. As a result of this review, BISG hired me to "conduct an objective, research-based study that would describe, define and make recommendations for the best case identification of e-books in the U.S. supply chain."

During September and October, I conducted over 50 interviews with 70 industry personnel from across the spectrum of the publishing industry and subsequently reported my findings to the working group during November. After further internal discussions about the findings, BISG has scheduled a meeting on January 13th to discuss the findings with the wider BISG community. Participants may register here.

This was a challenging engagement given the complexity of the issue, the varying points of view and the compacted time required to complete the project; however, we believe by conducting this study we have established an unequivocal baseline that will allow the industry to address the core issues for content identification as we migrate from physical to digital products.

BISG expects results from the new Identification of E-Books Research Project will directly influence the consensus-driven process of developing best practices for the identification of e-books. This work will happen within ongoing meetings of BISG’s Identification Committee and is expected to result in recommendations to the International ISBN Agency for the further development of this important standard.

BISG and I look forward to your participation during the review of these findings and we hope you will encourage as many of your staff to attend this meeting as necessary.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 1): Digital Media Experiments, Murakami, Literary Illusion and Political Correction, Predictions, Cliche

From the Independent: Digital media offer unbounded opportunities for writers to experiment with form and conventions. So why do so many still allow themselves to be imprisoned by the traditional codex format of the book, asks Joy Lo Dico (Independent):

Pullinger started working in online fiction with the TrAce Online Writing Centre, based at Nottingham Trent University, a decade ago. "I was asked to teach online creative-story writing," she says. "Back in 2001, this was new to me. I only really used the internet for booking flights and sending emails. But after teaching the course, I found that it's a useful environment for focusing on the text, and that I had a kind of affinity for it." Since then she has been experimenting, often in collaboration with the electronic artist Chris Joseph, on several major projects. "Inanimate Alice", which came out in 2005, is a sequence of stories about a young girl who exists between real and digital worlds. The written narrative is deliberately minimalist and built into a rich audio-visual experience. Then came "Flight Paths", begun in 2007, which Pullinger describes as a "networked novel". It was inspired by the news story of an illegal immigrant who had stowed away behind the landing wheel of an aircraft, only to fall to Earth in suburban London. In addition to her own resulting short story, Pullinger invited others to contribute their own takes on the theme. "The third phase of 'Flight Paths' is now about to come together in digital and print," says Pullinger. "The first phases were open to discussion; the third is about closing it." Her most recent project, "Lifelines" – autobiographies of young people around the world put into historical and geographical contexts – has been specifically made as an educational tool.

Haruki Murakami in the year end issue of the IHT magazine (IHT):

There has been an especially noteworthy change in the posture of European and American readers. Until now, my novels could be seen in 20th-century terms, that is, to be entering their minds through such doorways as “post-modernism” or “magic realism” or “Orientalism”; but from around the time that people welcomed the new century, they gradually began to remove the framework of such “isms” and accept the worlds of my stories more nearly as-is. I had a strong sense of this shift whenever I visited Europe and America. It seemed to me that people were accepting my stories in toto — stories that are chaotic in many cases, missing logicality at times, and in which the composition of reality has been rearranged. Rather than analyzing the chaos within my stories, they seem to have begun conceiving a new interest in the very task of how best to take them in. By contrast, general readers in Asian countries never had any need for the doorway of literary theory when they read my fiction. Most Asian people who took it upon themselves to read my works apparently accepted the stories I wrote as relatively “natural” from the outset. First came the acceptance, and then (if necessary) came the analysis. In most cases in the West, however, with some variation, the logical parsing came before the acceptance. Such differences between East and West, however, appear to be fading with the passing years as each influences the other. If I were to pin a label on the process through which the world has passed in recent years, it would be “realignment.” A major political and economic realignment started after the end of the Cold War. Little need be said about the realignment in the area of information technology, with its astounding, global-scale dismantling and establishment of systems. In the swirling midst of such processes, obviously, it would be impossible for literature alone to take a pass on such a realignment and avoid systemic change.

From the WSJ Adam Kirsch on literary illusion in the age of Google (WSJ):

What this means is that, in our fragmented literary culture, allusion is a high-risk, high-reward rhetorical strategy. The more recondite your allusion, the more gratifying it will be to those who recognize it, and the more alienating it will be to those who don't. To risk an unidentified quotation, you have to have a pretty good sense of your audience: Psalms would be safe enough in a sermon, "The Waste Land" in a literary essay or college lecture, Horace just about nowhere. In the last decade or so, however, a major new factor has changed this calculus. That is the rise of Google, which levels the playing field for all readers. Now any quotation in any language, no matter how obscure, can be identified in a fraction of a second. When T.S. Eliot dropped outlandish Sanskrit and French and Latin allusions into "The Waste Land," he had to include notes to the poem, to help readers track them down. Today, no poet could outwit any reader who has an Internet connection.

And Kirsch again on the editing for political correctness (whatever that is) NYT:

“Huckleberry Finn” was intended, of course, as an attack on racism. In its most famous scene, Huck hides the runaway slave Jim from a party of slave-hunters, and then feels guilty for having done so. “I knowed very well I had done wrong,” he says, though the reader, and Twain, know he has done right. It’s a searching demonstration of the way conscience is not just innate but also learned, and how confusing it can be to do right in a society dedicated to wrong — the same kinds of questions that bedeviled Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann trial. ... This is also the promise of American history, and above all of the Constitution. Unlike Twain’s novel, that classic American text was written in the expectation that it would be corrected. And it needed correction, or amendment, for the same essential reason: the framers’ imagination of the people they led was not full enough. It took a devastating civil war, whose sesquicentennial we are now observing, to revise the Constitution in the direction of justice. When the House readers decided to skip the parts of the Constitution that reveal its original limitations, they were minimizing that history, pretending that our founding document was flawless from the beginning.

IBM's top five predictions for 2015 (Kurzweil):

IBM has unveiled its fifth annual “Next Five in Five” — five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years:

• You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D
• Batteries will breathe air to power our devices
• You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet
• Your commute will be personalized
• Computers will help energize your city

IBM’s fifth annual “Next Five in Five” is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible. (Hat tip: Above the Fold)

Is “follow” the new economic model poised to take on “search”? (BOIC)

Therefore the problem (Generating wealth from the web) is far more complex, multifaceted and inter-twangled, as there is unlikely to be a single source.

• Do I want to be directed by people I trust but I may not be able to determine their source – Follow
• Do I want to be directed by an unknown algorithm that can change at any time and could be biased to their own needs – Search
• Do I want to be directed by Brands – Marketing/Ads
• Do I want to be directed by the media/ editors/ critics where I may be able to determine their bias – Broadcast/ News
• Do I want to be directed by the fashion/ celebrity – Sales

This complex dependency is an issue that editors and bloggers have faced time over. Do I post based on what people want to read, based on clicks and response data or what I find interesting – are we (am I) adaptive or reactive, do we want to be individual or loved or make money or provide democracy or lead?

I really don’t need to know what you had for lunch and I don’t have to follow you. Follow would put me in control and can seek out value from the community and not some bland algorithm that controls what part of the web I can see. However the issue facing follow is how will I pay the platform that underpins the service?

Wrapping up This long Viewpoint started with the idea that “follow” is the new economic model poised to take on “search” and I believe that there is value in “follow.” Reading that Google offered $3bn for Twitter makes be believe that there are other strategists who are struggling with the same issues and the value!

The war on Cliche's is not going well according to Holroyd at the Guardian:

To my mind, it is Amis's campaign against the clichés on which our outrage feeds that has failed. Is there any meaning whatever in the repeated words we hear? "Fantastic" and "incredible" seem to parody or refute the statements they are intended to strengthen. Many of our newly minted clichés have a touch of violence added to them – such as "kick-start" instead of the quicker, simpler "start", and the aggressive coating of "batter" which (as if taking orders in a totalitarian restaurant) all cricket commentators suddenly began using one morning. Several of the phrases used by media people suggest in Big Brother style the exact opposite of what they say – radio as well as television presenters claiming they will see us again in the next hour, day or week when surely it is we who may see or hear them. And everywhere there is the sound of single-syllable words, such as other people's "mums" or the soldier "boys" who are tragically killed in battle, which signal our everlasting child-status. We need to be particularly careful when examining the language of bureaucrats and economists. I think I can see through "transparency" pretty well, but I cannot remember the words we used before "infrastructure" came into being – probably they were simple words such as "roads". "Efficiency", I realise, means spending as little as possible on something and, by not "throwing money at it", doing it on the cheap. So the word "efficiency" has come to mean almost the opposite of "competence". The phrase I particularly dislike, because I believe it to be deliberately misleading, is "taxpayers' money", which is used whenever the government is making absolutely certain nothing will happen. It is a bogus phrase because it generally refers to money which actually does not belong to the individual taxpayer such as you and me. What we are legally obliged to render unto HM Revenue and Customs belongs to our elected government. The taxpayer's money is what is left in her bank after her Revenue cheque has been cashed – but that is not what politicians mean when they use that phrase as an excuse for positive inactivity.

Q Magazine's top Albums from the past 25yrs (Q) From the Twitter (@personanondata): New ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Edition Does Disservice to a Classic - http://nyti.ms/fMUc1g The Irish Times: What shops have to do when their products go digital http://bit.ly/g7oURD Announcement: ProQuest acquires eBrary http://bit.ly/fqVX3R Girl gang's grip on London underworld revealed http://t.co/LhNFm2K via @guardian.