USS New York on The Hudson

Revisiting Scan this Book

I was clearing out my file draw this weekend - 'back in the day' I actually used to save print articles of interest - and I came across the Kevin Kelly article about the Google Book Scanning project which he wrote in May, 2006. Still an interesting read as he concludes (NYT):

Search opens up creations. It promotes the civic nature of publishing. Having searchable works is good for culture. It is so good, in fact, that we can now state a new covenant: Copyrights must be counterbalanced by copyduties. In exchange for public protection of a work's copies (what we call copyright), a creator has an obligation to allow that work to be searched. No search, no copyright. As a song, movie, novel or poem is searched, the potential connections it radiates seep into society in a much deeper way than the simple publication of a duplicated copy ever could.

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 44): Web Retailing, Future of Reading, Semantic Search, ChickLit, E-Books

Ex- Borders head of e-Commerce Kevin Ertell has some pointers for web retail (IR)

Because our sites and customers are complicated, figuring out how to solve for the gap between intention and action requires the analysis of millions of variables, which can include a broad range of possibilities like how fast page content loads and the size and location of Buy buttons. For example, when our analysis at Borders highlighted issues with search, we followed up with a question about what would make our site search more useful. We found that using words rather than icons for some search results display options, like “cover view” or “list view,” made a significant difference in customers’ successful use of our search results.

Tom Peters at Library Journal shares some thoughts on the Future of Reading (LJ):

Reading always has been multisensory. The look, feel, smell, and heft of a printed book all contribute to the overall experience of reading. Reading probably will become more sensational throughout this century, as multimedia information objects become intertwined into digital texts. While visual reading (in private, in a comfy chair) may be considered by many to be the platonic ideal of reading, perhaps the growth areas of reading in this century will rely on other senses. The eyes don't have it. Tactile reading, such as Braille, and auditory reading of audiobooks already have achieved prominence—Braille among the blind and audiobooks throughout the general population—and olfactory reading, drawing on our sense of smell, and gustatory reading, based on our sense of taste, may not be outlandishly impossible. Digesting a good book could become literal. Romance writer Jude Deveraux already has embraced these ideas. As Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times (9/30/09), “Ms. Deveraux said she envisioned new versions of books enhanced by music or even perfume. 'I'd like to use all the senses,' she said.” ..... Reports of the death of reading are premature. Readers are resilient and inventive. What worries me is not so much that reading will become an attenuated, marginalized field of practice but that the developmental paths of librarianship and reading will diverge in the 21st century. We may wander off from our power base, or it will evolve away from us.

Information Today looks at a recent implementation of semantic search at LexisNexis (IT):

LexisNexis has seriously addressed this "black box" perception of semantic search. Users enter search input text of up to 32,000 characters-perhaps substantial content of a target patent document. That input can be searched immediately (feeling lucky?), a process that may take several minutes, or it can be sent for semantic analysis prior to carrying out the search. The technology analyzes input sentences or search terms and creates a set of 20 weighted search terms presented as a "QueryCloud" for review and editing by the searcher. Terms can be replaced with alternative terms, and weighting may be adjusted from 4 for a mandatory concept in the search results; 3, 2, and 1 for varied prominence in the search results; 0 for an ignored concept; to -1 for a concept prohibited in search results. When the user is satisfied with the search concepts and weighting, the semantic search is conducted with the search statement corresponding to the terms of the QueryCloud.

Interesting book review by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker on a book by Cass Sunstein regarding how interests align in media (TNY)

And what holds true for the news sites is even more so for the blogosphere, where it’s possible to spend hours surfing without ever entering new waters. Conservative blogs like Power Line almost always direct visitors to other conservative blogs, like No Left Turns, while liberal blogs like Daily Kos guide them to others that are also liberal, like Firedoglake. A study of the twenty most-visited blogs in each camp in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential election found that more than eighty-five per cent of their links were to other blogs with similar politics. When the study’s authors charted the links in graphic form, they came up with a picture of non-interaction—a dense scribble on one side, a dense scribble on the other, and only the thinnest strands connecting the two. In 2006, Sunstein performed his own study of fifty political sites. He found that more than four-fifths linked to like-minded sites but only a third linked to sites with an opposing viewpoint. Moreover, many of the links to the opposing side’s sites were offered only to illustrate how “dangerous, dumb, or contemptible the views of the adversary really are.”

Traveling for Books: Rare Books Don’t Always Live in Glass Cases (NYT):

But these books are not just for scholars. They are also on view for the average visitor, albeit one with a decided interest in the sciences who makes a pilgrimage to western Missouri, where the sprawling red-brick library sits majestically on a 14-acre urban arboretum just a five-minute walk from Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

The Linda Hall is among dozens of libraries across the United States that house dazzling collections and often mount eccentric exhibitions but largely remain unfamiliar to the public.

“What is fun is to become aware of these marvelous libraries that, though open to the public, are not well known and are filled with wonderful treasures,” said Robert S. Pirie, a prominent book collector who lives in Manhattan and has his own library of several thousand volumes.

An e-Book cheat sheet listing all (I think) the features of current e-Books (DealNews) DeepDyve announces rental model for scientific research materials (DD):

But DeepDyve sees their service as reaching to a unique potential user groups that have generally been underserved by academic publishers including individual knowledge workers and small businesses. Indeed, the recent study of small and medium UK enterprises on their uses and desires for the professional and academic literature revealed that the price per article charged by many publishers was deemed excessive, considering that users can’t preview the full-text before purchase and that abstracts were often “uninformative or misleading,” requiring potential readers to “purchase blind.” The rental model reduces the economic risk to the paying reader.

E-books helping surge in UK library members (Telegraph):

Fiona Marriott, at Luton Libraries, said: "In recent weeks the number of ebook downloads has been increasing fast, and there are people emailing us from all over the country and even abroad asking if they can join as members online."

She said there had been a sharp increase in members, as a result, with more than 250 new users signing up, even though only local residents could join the service. Other librarians agreed more people had become members since e-books became available, though no official figures are yet available.

Chick Lit for the weight challenged seems to be a developing phenom (Guardian):

"This new genre is proof that women are finally learning to love each other and themselves – warts and all. Chick lit is finally holding a real mirror up to its readers, and they can't get enough of it."

A slew of books in which the protagonist is not just "curvy" or "voluptuous" but is actually "fat" are about to hit the bookshops. As well as The Pi**ed Off Parents Club, there is The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens, bestselling author of The Girls, which was the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year in 2006 and a finalist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

"It's classic wish-fulfilment: readers want to read about women learning to love themselves whatever their weight, because then they don't have to go through that pesky world of dieting themselves. There's a big market of people who want to hear that message," said Julia Llewellyn, author of Love Nest, to be published in February by Penguin, in which one of the central characters is overweight.

John le Carré: A man of great intelligence The celebrated author and former spy's popular books display a masterly understanding of moral complexity. His recent decision to switch publishing houses should see them firmly esconced as modern classics. (Guardian):

Like his early hero, Graham Greene, le Carré is at home in the company of diplomats and adventurers, at high tables and low dives. In his best, and most morally complex, work, he is acutely sensitive to thwarted idealism and human failing. He is married to Jane, with whom he has a son. His first marriage to Ann Sharp, which produced three children, did not long survive his change of profession in 1964. "I've had an untidy love life," he said a few years back, "and am now settled."

And some more about why he may have moved from Hodder (Guardian)

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 43): Reviews, Kindle, Celebrity Authors, Jeff Archer, Pearson, Nabokov

(I know I have been remiss in posting this week - I hate it when work intrudes). Most of these have not appeared on the twitter (by me at least). Sir Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, visits Princeton for a discussion on book reviews (TLS):

I brought some figures to the meeting, prepared in London by our Managing Editor and writer on contemporary poetry, Robert Potts, assisted, I should say, by some numerate summer interns. The team had taken for analysis a twelve month period to April this year and four other loosely comparative titles, the New York Times section, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and The Guardian.

These showed that of the 1832 books reviewed by the TLS in this time, 73 per cent were not reviewed by any of the other publications, 20 per cent were reviewed by one other, 5.6 per cent by two, one per cent by three - and that only seven books were reviewed by all five papers. I had not intended to publish these, being no statistician myself and ever nervous of the ill use that such numbers can be put. But one of our hosts was keen that I should - and to hosts as generous as those here it would be ungracious to say no. So there they are.

The small number of books reviewed by all was a surprise. Probably it would benefit from deeper appraisal. Seven shared titles is a strong counter to those who accuse book reviewers of a herd mentality to all review the same things. It would suggest,however, that there may be too little acceptance of a common canon, too little confident gate-keeping. Those newspaper owners and editors who cut back on book coverage might be more impressed if there were greater agreement on what is good.

I may have commented on this one before, nevertheless here is commentary on a book about Evelyn Waugh and the background to Brideshead Revisited (TLS):

This is particularly unfortunate because the reader’s faith in Byrne’s reliability is undermined by a number of errors and misapprehensions in her text. She claims that there was no Baedeker for Berlin in 1931 (an English-language edition, frequently revised, had been available since 1903); believes the Lord Chamberlain controlled film censorship; and imagines “crabs” to be “a sexual disease” rather than an infestation of lice. Noël Coward was not, as she states, a Roman Catholic, and Forthampton Court was the family home of Henry Green, not of his “in-laws”. More worrying, her grasp of Waugh’s work is not always as sure as it ought to be. She repeatedly describes the Arts and Crafts chapels of both Madresfield Court and Brideshead Castle as “art deco”, and refers to the Flytes’ “startling beauty (like faces carved out of Aztec stone)” – an image inexpertly appropriated from the novel’s description of Sebastian’s less attractive older brother who has “the Flyte face, carved by an Aztec”. Paul Pennyfeather’s mistress in Decline and Fall, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, who is at least ten years his senior, is referred to as “the upper-class girl he adores”, and Apthorpe in the Sword of Honour trilogy is inexplicably bracketed with Trimmer and Brideshead’s Hooper as “the symbol of the new age of the common man – half-educated, blasé, an insensitive bore”.

Though clearly entranced by Waugh’s world, Byrne is not entirely at home in it, and her book contains some jarring failures of register.

The Times takes a look at Amazon's European strategy for the Kindle and is frustrated (TimesOnline):

Why it is so hard for Amazon to price its product locally, and at least ship a load to the UK remains a bit of a mystery. Apple seems to manage all right, selling iPods for pounds, and a conversation with Amazon’s Steve Kessel, the company’s senior vice president of Kindle business, leaves the caller none the wiser. He simply repeats how Amazon is focused on a “great customer experience” — indeed — and how it is a major achievement to create a device that can download electronic books and newspapers over the air in 100 countries without any cost to the Kindle owner in terms of phone bills. The last point is fair enough, but it doesn’t really absolve Amazon the responsibility of trying to flog the Kindle on its UK website, or even, dare one say it, Tesco, where it might just attract a few more owners. But perhaps Amazon is desperate to cut costs.

10,000 less words probably makes this more appealing: Jeff Archer rewrites Kane and Able. In the interests of full disclosure, I did consume this in the summer of 1979 sitting by the pool and importantly, I was entertained. (Telegraph)

To celebrate the milestone, Archer has returned to the novel, and substantially re-written it. He has explained that, with the benefit of 30 years’ experience in the writing game, he can see that the pacing and prose needed tightening. This “re-crafting” of the book took him nine months and involved cutting nearly 10,000 words. He has switched around the order of chapters, but is keen to make it clear that the plot remains exactly the same.

I'm a celebrity get me a book deal! Controversy over the 'success' of Katie Price et al (Telegraph):

Even before La Plante got to the microphone, McCutcheon’s appearance had made our toes curl. Alan Davis, the host for the evening, asked her how she had found the experience of writing her novel. She said something like: “Yeah, it were great.”

They do this, you see. When asked in interviews how they managed to find the time, what with their busy schedule of OK! spreads and premieres, these celebrities — Sharon Osbourne, Coleen Nolan and Cheryl Cole are also bringing out novels — will happily babble on about how they had to discipline themselves to write the customary 1,000 words a day. As if. The novel, or rather the literary novel, is an art form, and writing one requires a degree of creativity, intellectual engagement and, yes, discipline, with a writer often spending many soul-searching years getting it right.

Pearson upgrades forecasts after boost to education (Telegraph)

Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive, said: "We began 2009 in a cautious mood, wary of the impact of the global economic crisis. We have now seen enough of it to say that, though no part of Pearson has been untouched, the company as a whole has proved its strength."

The final twist in Nabokov's untold story (Guardian):

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now, 30 years after his death, his last novel is finally to be published. But should it be? On the eve of his death, fearing it was imperfect, he instructed his wife to destroy the manuscript, sparking a fierce controversy that embroiled family, friends and the literary establishment, writes Robert McCrum

Ian Rankin goes bar hoping in Edinburgh (Guardian):

Edinburgh has always seemed to me a furtive place. Throughout history it has made its money from invisible industries such as banking and insurance. And while the city has been known to celebrate its success stories (the Scott Monument) and flag up folly (the unfinished "Parthenon" on Calton Hill), it is not a place where people flaunt their talents. You don't see many Ferraris – the wealth sits quietly behind the New Town's thick Georgian walls.

It was once called a city of "public probity and private vice" and this still rings true, though the "probity" tag has lost some lustre since the near-collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the city's biggest employers. But visitors to Edinburgh, if they stick to the main tourist routes, will be seeing only the city's most public side. Travel just a little further afield and you can widen your appreciation. That's why, on a blustery day, I set out from the Oxford Bar for a walk

Images of Afghanistan

The NY Times found some images from Kabul sent in by journalists - not photographers -taken in the 60-70s. (NYT)

Mr. Salisbury’s evocative and smartly composed photos, taken in and around Kabul in 1961, were among the surprising images that greeted Darcy Eveleigh, a Times photo editor, as she peered into old file cabinets in the photo archive to find illustrations for Elisabeth Bumiller’s article on Afghanistan before 1978 in the Week in Review.

“When I opened up the folders, I was floored,” she said. In contact sheet after contact sheet, print after print, Afghanistan’s golden era of stability had been recorded for The Times by staff members better known for their bylines as correspondents: A. M. Rosenthal, Ralph Blumenthal and William Borders among them.

The PND archive is also throwing up some interesting images - although the photographer in this case wasn't particularly skilled. (Flickr)

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 42): GBS Frankfurt Panel, Libreka, FTC

In the waning Friday of the Frankfurt bookfair there was a contentious, apparently somewhat 'anti-google' discussion of the Google Book Settlement as reported by Richard Nash on the fair's blog:

The impact of the Google Book Settlement, in whatever form it might eventually take, promised to be one of the most controversial panels at this year’s Fair and the participants, especially Prof. Roland Reuss, author of the Heidelberg Appeal, a vehement critique of the Google scanning project, did not disappoint. He denounced as “garbage of hysterical propaganda” the claims by Google that they were enhancing access, maintain that “if you want to finance production, you have to shelter the ones who produce,” not those that consume, and that moreover any student who is completely dependent on the Internet for “must be stupid.” .... Reuss was largely unmoved. “It has always been possible for scholars to get the information,” he said, “since the 5th century.” He believes that the focus on access is inappropriate, “fetishistic,” and that the true issue with scholarship is to produce, not to access.

Reuss' comments seemed to be as much against the internet as against the issue of copyright, nevertheless there appeared to be some in the audience who applauded his commentary. The panel discussion sits neatly as a bookend to Chancellor Merkel's per-Frankfurt oration in the perils of the Google Book Settlement and the institution of German copyright. Curiously not a subject I would have expected a head of state to draw attention to but then perhaps the subject was thematic with respect to the opening of the fair. Richard noted the German Bookseller and Publisher supported site Libreka which was launched three (possibly four) years ago (PND) to great fan fair and has managed to amass 120,000 books available for full-text search. Libreka was created to provide a platform for German published full-text content and continues to announce content and publisher deals. Through the significant discussion of Merkel's comments - where they valid, where they informed for example, no one mentioned Libreka which speaks to its' irrelevance and lack of traction. A review of Libreka's web traffic report seems to support the last point. The Börsenverein is both the operator of the Frankfurt bookfair and the 'publisher' of Libreka and perhaps this relationship suggests a more practical motivation for Merkel's copyright comments. The Interactive Ad Bureau has asked the FTC to rescind their recent statement on blogger disclosure statements saying (Reuters),

"What concerns us the most in these revisions is that the Internet, the cheapest, most widely accessible communications medium ever invented, would have less freedom than other media," said Mr. Rothenberg, "These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinguish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered. The practices have long been afforded strong First Amendment protections in traditional media outlets, but the Commission is saying that the same speech deserves fewer Constitutional protections online. I urge the Commission to retract the current set of Guides and to commence a fair and open process in order to develop a roadmap by which responsible online actors can engage with consumers and continue to provide the invaluable content and services that have so transformed people`s lives."

Google launched or re-launched their on-line bookstore that will initially contain 500,000 titles. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that Amazon.com - absurdly - is smoke. (Guardian):

Editions is set to launch in the first half of 2010, potentially giving readers in America and Europe access to around half a million titles including best-sellers and back catalogue books. Crucially, the store will be compatible with a number of devices - including mobile phones, computers and ebook readers - that could allow it to market services to millions of people worldwide.

Under Google's plans, readers will be able to download texts straight from Google Books website, or from the websites of book retailers or directly from publishers who choose to work with the Silicon Valley company. Executives said they are targeting partnerships with major retailers such as WH Smith and Blackwell - many of which already have existing partnerships with the site.

Bookriff and Chunks.

Richard Nash on the Frankfurt Blog notes a new product that enables chunking of content:

Still in beta is Bookriff—it was not presented in the Book Fair programming, but the company principal Mark Scott was meeting with publishers to establish partnerships and I stopped by to talk to him. Effectively Bookriff allows publishers to upload chunks of content, most likely chapters and short stories, to a database. A users can then search the site for interesting chunks and create her own anthology which can then be submitted automatically to a print on demand facility. So it is a make-your-own-book service, perfect for travel books where you only need to buy those chapters you want for your itinerary, permitting the creation of custom readers for academic coursework, allowing non-profits to create premium products. (Publishers set their own licensing fees…)