Go To Hellman

Unglue.it Preview All Systems Go

2012-01-26T12:53:00.001-05:00

A preview version of "unglue.it", the crowd-funding site for creative commons ebooks that I've been working on for more than a year, opened last week. Some key features are missing (pledging, campaigns) but the site lets you make a list of books you would support for "ungluing".

You can't really plan for a launch. Things always happen that you don't expect. It helps to have had a good night's rest, but other than that...

Our first unexpected event was that Library Journal ran a piece about our "soft launch" on their Digital Shift website, while we were in the process of deploying the website to production. They didn't link to us, but a few impatient readers typed in the website name and started exercising the site before we were finished testing the deployment. Nothing awful happened. Thanks, dave and gsf! Then Google spidered the site, exposing one or two errors. Thanks, googlebot!

We wanted our mailing list subscribers to be the first to see our work, and we finally sent out the email on Thursday. List readers discovered that our "popular" and "unglued" views were running very very slowly, loading down the site. Raymond studied the problem, and, as seems to happen so often with Django, found the answer hidden in plain sight (the documentation). After moving some nested queries, the pages returned 100x faster. The miracles of EC2 allowed us to spin up a bigger server to help with load. And the high load from the glacial queries helped expose some concurrency problems that we never would have found in a million years of normal operation. Or so says the errant coder- me.

We wanted to open the website when we did so that we could show our work to our many friends at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting in Dallas. So on Friday, I got up at 5AM (after bugfixing till 1AM) to catch a flight. I decided not to have any coffee so I could sleep on the plane. When I arrived at my Dallas hotel, I discovered another unexpected occurrence: I had left my laptop on the plane.

Before reading the next paragraph, check your laptop, your iPad, your kindle, your nook, or whatever. It probably looks plain, like mine (left). If there is no identification on it, go get one of those free address labels you got from the Awful Disease Foundation, and stick it on. Also some stickers from your favorite organizations. When you are done, it should look like @vmbrasseur's (right). Are you done?

Here's what I learned about lost MacBook Pros and airlines. Once the battery runs out, you can't even find a serial number. The typical baggage claim operation does not have geek squad backup. They don't have spare power cords or batteries to help them ID lost laptops. What they DO have is a safe, and that's where errant laptops go to die. If you ever find yourself in my position, go to the airport and ask the friendly lost-luggage attendant to go look in the safe. Otherwise, you will never see your laptop again, even if you have entered its serial number into the web form that has replaced the lost and found phone number that no one helpful ever answers.

In contrast, Jeanette, the DFW Continental Airlines baggage claim professional that I talked to in person, was very helpful. She called back to the guy with the safe, and we hardly had time to joke about the huge bag of dried fish from Africa that was smelling up the lost baggage area before safe-guy came out with MY LAPTOP. Yay!

Raymond had emailed me with a status report from the virtual home office, reproduced here in its entirety:

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/All+systems+go

So I was feeling pretty good. I got to the Convention Center and found Andromeda doing an in-person demo of unglue.it. The in-person demos are an invaluable complement to submitted feedback reports because they let you see expectation mismatch as well as outright failures. Andromeda seemed to have the demo drill down to a science. I am thankful for the generosity of our in-person testers, whose insights will soon be incorporated into the site.

Since this post has been accepting digressions, I must note here that Andromeda gives new meanings to the adjective "awesome". At some point over the past few months, most likely due to lack of proper supervision coupled with web development despair, Andromeda has learned to code javascript and CSS. In a subsequent period of inadequate supervision, Andromeda seems to have recruited a squadron of librarians learning to code, which is somehow becoming an official ALA "codeyear" Interest Group. I doubt that we have heard the last of this.

And then we had dinner at Wild Salsa. (I'm skipping a few things here and there.)

On Sunday, Beth Kephart's article on Unglue.it went live at Publishing Perspectives. Beth writes so beautifully that it hurts. Her first book, A Slant of Sun is on my Unglue.it wish list. Her article introduced the Unglue.it concept to hundreds of new book lovers, more than a few rights holders, and generated a bunch of traffic. We've always expected that we'd need some publicity to find significant numbers of rights holders willing to take the plunge for a completely new business model, and the Publishing Perspectives article was a great start. Ed Nowotka's more cautious commentary is spot on, as well.

In the first week, the preview site has signed up 133 users (a conversion rate of about 10%) and we've received numerous suggestions for improvement. Our intrepid ungluing pioneers have added over 7500 works to our database. The most frequent comment is that we need better ways to indicate works that are already "unglued", either by virtue of being in the public domain, or by being already available under creative commons licenses. Raymond is currently working on loading Project Gutenberg titles; there will be more "unglued" books added as we go on, as well as ways of adding them directly. Coming in second were requests to have more selective imports from GoodReads and LibraryThing.

I should mention that we've had some great talent helping the core unglue.it team. Most prominent is the design work of Stefan from Design Anthem. We've had part-time help on systems and software from Ed Summers and Jason Kace. And it's hard to overlook the contribution of the countless developers who contributed to the open source Python and Django projects.

If you haven't tried the site yet, please give it a spin and tell us what you like (or dislike). The more people that sign up, the less skeptical rights holders with interesting books will be about the concept. If you're a rights holder or a rights manager of any kind, please contact Amanda at rights@gluejar.com with your ideas and questions. Follow @unglueit on Twitter, like unglueit on Facebook.

Howard Dean and Rush Holt Oppose SOPA

2012-01-14T00:37:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday night I attended a fundraising event for Rush Holt, the Congressman representing central New Jersey. He's not my congressman, but as one of the few scientists in congress, he better represents many of my interests than the congressman representing my district. That guy has just been redistricted so he really doesn't represent me any more. As an added attraction, the event featured Howard Dean, the former DNC chairman and presidential candidate.

The reason I really wanted to attend the event was that I wanted to express my dismay at SOPA, the anti-intellectual-piracy proposal that would require the government to shoot internet machine guns at copyright cockroaches, with predictable results. I've previously written about how this law would affect libraries, both domestic and foreign.

The funny thing is that I had trouble discovering where Rep. Holt stood on the issue. I hoped that he would at least be sympathetic. So I arrived early to be sure to ask directly.

I waited my turn to get a photo taken, introduced myself and said I thought SOPA was a terrible law. To my great relief, both Rep. Holt and Gov. Dean responded quickly that they were against SOPA, and that opposition to the bill was growing rapidly. Gov. Dean urged me to talk to his brother Jim, who heads "Democracy for America" (DFA) the grassroots political organization started by Howard after his presidential run ran out.

It turns out that DFA has begun to oppose SOPA without even publicizing what it's doing. Their tech guy, with the support of the Deans, moved their many domains away from GoDaddy over the holiday break. So if you want to support a progressive group that's walking the walk on SOPA opposition, DFA is a great option. They've not made a big deal of it, because they're not sure how to translate their opposition into action.

When it comes to paying attention to science and what it tells us about public policy, Rep. Holt is the real deal. He's also paying attention to the changing roles of libraries and libraries in today's educational environment. Yesterday he toured school libraries in New Jersey with IMLS director Susan Hildreth to promote the Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries (SKILLs) Act, which he will soon introduce on the federal level. As I wrote last year, proper use of librarians in schools can have measurable impact on student achievement.

Howard Dean was the star of the evening, however. He spoke extemporaneously for about a half an hour and had the crowd cheering. He does have a problem with microphones, however. He gets so involved in what he talks about that any microphone amp in the vicinity goes into distortion. It was heartening to hear a national politician mention the SOPA controversy among all the other problems the nation faces.

For all the fears that SOPA is not getting proper attention in the mainstream media, its good to know there are some people in power who understand the issues.

Foreign Libraries Will Be Infringing Sites Under SOPA

2012-01-03T12:18:00.000-05:00

On January 1, "Public Domain Day", another year was added to the copyright gap between the US and the rest of the world. In most of the world, New Year's Day marked the end of copyright for works by authors who died in 1941. But not in the USA. Copying and distribution of gap works may be legal and unrestricted in most countries, but these activities are criminal acts of copyright infringement in the US, punishable by up to 10 years of prison.

One effect of SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (which almost means "garbage" in Swedish) is that the US Attorney General will be able to extend the effect of US copyright law to foreign web sites. For example, Project Gutenberg Australia (PGA) distributes electronic versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which is still under copyright in the US. SOPA would allow the US Attorney General to make a determination that Project Gutenberg Australia, by allowing access from the US, is a "U.S. directed site" that would be subject to forfeiture by the Attorney General for acts prohibited under section 2319 of the U.S. Criminal Code (ongoing copyright infringement), if it were based in the US.

If Project Gutenberg Australia persisted in its criminal activity, SOPA would allow the Attorney General to force internet service providers in the US to block access to the PGA domain. It would also allow the Justice Department to force Google and other US-based search engines to remove PGA links from its search results for the US. It could force Wikipedia to remove links to PGA. Most damaging to PG Australia, it would allow Justice to cut off PGA's revenue from Google's advertising services.

As libraries around the world move aggressively into the digital environment, they will de-emphasize the cataloguing of printed objects in favor of delivery of electronic content, especially public-domain and public-commons content that can be delivered without per-copy fees. They will run up against the same copyright extraterritorial issues exhibited today by Project Gutenberg Australia. If SOPA is enacted as currently written and our system of perpetual copyright persists, we can assume that most of the world libraries will sooner or later be blacklisted from the American internet. And the real bad-guy sites will easily circumvent the blacklist.

The Swedish word "sopa" is not really used as a singular noun. As a verb, it means "to sweep". The plural "sopor" is the stuff you sweep up. "Sopa bort" is what should be done with SOPA.

2011: The Year the eBook Wars Broke Out

2012-01-01T01:47:00.000-05:00

Open war is upon us, whether we would have it or not. These incidents in 2011 seemed like twitter-inflamed kerfuffles as we lived through them, but with the perspective of time, we can see they were preludes to a fight to the death.

1. Harper-Collins and Overdrive Stop Pretending

In a year or two, libraries may consider the Harper Collins limit of 26 circulations of a list price ebook through Overdrive to be a relative bargain, as all of the other large publishers will withdraw from "pretend-its-print" ebook licensing.

2. Amazon occupies Overdrive

Libraries mostly welcomed the possibility to lend their Overdrive ebooks to patrons with Kindles. Libraries are fundamentally service-oriented institutions and ebooks on Kindle is what the users wanted. But at what cost? Do the traditional library values of privacy go right out the door? Do libraries realize that patrons gone to Amazon might not come back?

3. The Penguin Strikes Back

The big publishers have watched Amazon's market power grow and see a future of slavery to an internet commerce master. Only Penguin allowed hostilities to break out, however, as the Amazon occupation of Overdrive broke the penguin's back. The target of opportunity was library lending. Evidently Penguin decided that a frontal assault on Amazon would be suicidal.

4. Prime Pretends to be a Library

Amazon added ebook borrowing features to their Amazon Prime service, revealing it as Amazon's answer to Netflix, and without even thinking about it, as a service that could eventually compete directly with public libraries. Now we see why Amazon wanted to get in on that library thing.

5. Publishers Decide Google is a Lesser Evil

Publishers looked back on the halcyon days when Google Books seemed poised to establish a new world order for ebooks with nostalgia. A separate, anticlimactic settlement between Google and the Association of American Publishers appears to be in the offing. It's Amazon that they're afraid of now.

6. Authors Lob Legal Grenades at Hathitrust

Spurned by the publishers in their joint crusade against the Google heathens, the Authors Guild decided that Hathitrust might be a less formidable opponent. And indeed it was, the lawsuit exposed a number of copyright blunders by the library cooperative. But the Guild's suit seemed hasty and ill-contrived. This sort of thing happens in wartime.

7. Amazon Obliterates Borders.

Although Borders was tactically weak in many ways, it was Amazon and the rise of ebooks that killed it strategically. Barnes and Noble, if it survives, won't look anything like the book marketing machine that it is today.

8. Libraries Muster the Resistance

The emergence of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a rallying point for libraries' continuing presence in the cultural life of America was a surprise, as it went against the prevailing tea-party currents for smaller government and increased reliance on the private sector. It's not clear how the symbolic presence of a library in Zuccotti Park could point the way to a digital future, but many things that have not yet come to pass are shrouded in darkness.

9. Anti-Piracy Hysteria Threatens Freedom Loving Citizens

The powerful publishing and media industries, in a paroxysm of inept do-something-ism, seem to have convinced Congress that it would be a good thing if the intenet could be censored for copyright infringement. Sadly, the solution they've fixed on, SOPA, will be ineffective against unlicensed content and will put the Justice Department smack in the middle of our nation's information infrastructure. Carpet bombing never ends well.

There's hope.

I have learned that whenever it seems that you're falling into the abyss, you must reach for a rope. There is always a rope.

How to Dig for Book Data Treasure

2011-12-16T12:08:00.002-05:00

To me, surest indicator of an impending doom for book publishing is hearing a publisher cite the advertising of Attributor, an anti-piracy solutions company, as if it were science. It's not the attitude towards piracy that bothers me, that's entirely sensible. It's the implied devaluation of honest data that depresses me.

There's hope though. I've gotten to know quite a number of people throughout the reading ecosystem with whom I can use the word "data" as high praise, roughly equivalent to the word "gold". If you're reading this, chances are you're a member of this secret society, and what follows is a sketch of a treasure map.

In a recent post, I promised to suggest ways that we might measure the effects of library ebook lending on book sales. If you think about it, there are many parallels between attempting such a measurement and previous studies that have tried to measure the effect of ebook piracy on book sales. Unfortunately, the only objective study I know of was a small study done by Brian O'Leary, and the effects observed in that study were small and in a direction counter to popular narratives (and thus rarely noted in the sort of presentations that cite Attributor advertising).

In that study, O'Leary looked for time-domain correlations between sales figures for books from two publishers and the appearance of the same books on BitTorrent. A similar study focused on library Lending could be much more compelling, because library circulation data is a much more direct measure of distribution than any sort of torrent tracking, and librarians are much better than pirates at sharing data.

With the cooperation of booksellers, library circulation and holdings could be compared and correlated to store-by-store sales. For example, you could look at a book that's held in a significant fraction of libraries and look for correlations (positive AND negative) between areas where a library is circulating the book and stores where the book is selling. You've have to remove regional and demographic variance, of course, but with enough data, almost anything is possible.

With the cooperation of a large publisher, rigorous experiments could be done. Scientific experiments derive rigor from the use of controls. To prove that lending influences sales, it's not enough to do lending and look for sales. A rigorous experiment would have both a trial where books are lent and an identical trial where the same books are not lent.

One way to control a lending experiment would be to make a random selection of a publisher's catalog available for lending. Imagine if Penguin had worked with the library community on an experimental withholding of a random part of its catalog from Overdrive. The sales could be analyzed for patterns and trends.

It's important that data analysis of this sort be done objectively by researchers with integrity. In any large collection of data, it's possible to focus on data which supports one narrative over another. If lending-sales studies were done, my guess is that some types of books would show correlations very different from others.

I've used the word "cooperation" several times already. I'm not so naïve as to think that data sharing will materialize out of thin air. Perhaps the sort of eco-system wide organization envisaged by the same Brian O'Leary could be the vehicle to make data treasure digging possible. Opportunity in Abundance for the win!

SOPA Could Put Common Library Software in the Soup

2011-12-12T23:07:00.000-05:00

The "Stop Online Piracy Act", or SOPA, is promoted as something that will... stop online piracy. So I was a bit surprised when I learned how it's supposed to work. A key provision of SOPA will shut down "notorious" websites by setting up a national web filter based on domain names. I'm sure the pirates had a great laugh about that one. They'll be the ones benefiting while the rest of us figure out how to avoid collateral damage. Members of Congress should consult the nearest available 14-year-old on the ease of web filter evasion: school teachers in my town routinely access their filter-blocked Facebook accounts by asking students to show them how it's done.

Rerouting domain names to alternate IP addresses is pretty easy to do, and can be very useful as well. One type of software used to accomplish this is called a "proxy server". It's called that because it acts as your web browser's proxy in requesting files from a web site. For example, after connecting to a proxy server in Stockholm, my requests for web pages would appear to issue from a computer in Sweden instead of from my computer in New Jersey.

Libraries often use proxy servers to simplify IP authentication of their networks to digital information providers. When an academic library buys access to a database, for example, they'll give the IP address of their proxy-server to the database provider, which then puts the IP address on an "allow" list. Then everyone at the school accesses the database through the address of the proxy server. In effect, those proxy-authenticated users circumvent the IP address-based filter that blocks unauthorized users.

Passage of SOPA would inevitably spawn the creation of a network of proxy servers hosted in countries that reject filtering of the internet. Users in the US could then connect transparently to blocked sites by connecting through a constantly shifting network of proxy servers. The key to that connection would be a Proxy Auto-config, or PAC file- essentially a mini DNS file installed in the user's web browser software.

SOPA contains provisions that allow the US Attorney General to

bring an action for injunctive relief against any entity that knowingly and willfully provides or offers to provide a product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of [domain name blocking] and taken in response to a court order issued pursuant to this subsection, to enjoin such entity from interfering with the order by continuing to provide or offer to provide such product or service.

Proxy servers meet the condition of being designed to route around filters and therefore fall into the category of services that could be subject to injunctive action under SOPA. The proxy servers most frequently used in libraries are OCLC's EZProxy and the open-source software known as SQUID, but there are many others in use.

In particular, SQUID makes use of PAC files, and thus could be vulnerable if the Justice Department decides that PAC files make it too easy to evade SOPA blockages. Conceivably, the Justice department could force browser developers to omit support for PAC files, or perhaps to restrict their transmission.

Similar concerns about important software have been raised by Jim Fruchterman on behalf of Benetech, a non-profit that among other things, provides ebooks to the reading disabled. Benetech is also one of the largest developers of software for human rights activists around the world. They operate TOR servers designed to foster anonymous communications. On Beneblog, Fruchterman worries that Benetech services could be impacted by SOPA. In response, a commenter signing in as "Copyright Alliance" argues that such action would be unlikely because "The State Department is strongly committed to advancing both Internet freedom and the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet." Too bad it's the Justice Department that gets to decide which services constitute circumvention.

I don't think that libraries will have their proxy servers taken away anytime soon, even if SOPA is enacted. But it's likely that the widespread development of SOPA-circumventing infrastructure would degrade the ability of rights holders to find and prosecute copyright violators. Knowledge of the actual locations of unauthorized files would by hidden offshore in distributed proxy servers, completely out of the reach of US law enforcement. The "file lockers" of today would dissolve into ungraspable bit vapors, and the online piracy problem would just get worse and worse.

There are many ways to address the online piracy problem- too many to list in this post. My own company is working on a piracy-neutering business model for ebooks. I don't know enough to evaluate the possible effectiveness of the payment and advertising network components of SOPA. But it appears to me that from the technical point of view, the internet filter component of SOPA will be a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth, boil and bubble.

Notes:

@amac has a good post on SOPA's scope issues, as well as links to other articles.
I focus here on SOPA, but there are similar issues with PROTECT IP, as described by Steve Crocker and 4 other prominent internet engineers.
The Crocker paper describes a number of other ways that domain name filtering might be circumvented. These include using replacing .hosts files on the user's computer (similar to PAC file installation) and switching the user to using a non-filtered DNS server. Apparently this is done transparently by some types of computer malware. This can only end badly.

Book Lending Ignorance

2011-12-09T11:41:00.001-05:00

To what degree does library book lending complement book sales, and to what degree does library lending substitute for book sales? I don't think anyone knows for sure. (Well maybe Amazon, but they're not telling.)

With over 40 billion dollars per year of sales at stake, you would think that the US book publishing industry would want to know as much as possible about how those sales are generated. Since US public libraries circulate more items than US bookstores sell, the industry needs to understand the role of libraries in getting people to read and purchase books. Is it small or big? Does the existence of libraries promote sales or hurt sales? How do the equations change when books become digital?

Publishers do a pretty good job of compiling sales data, and they spend a lot of money to figure out what books are selling and who's buying them. According to BookStats, a cooperative study by the AAP and BISG, Americans bought an average of 7.32 books in 2010.

On the library side, there's a bunch of interesting data. IMLS has been compiling a wealth of data about the footprint of public libraries, which is why I can tell you that the average American borrowed 8.1 items from public libraries in 2009. Library Journal has recently published the first installment of results from a fascinating survey of library patrons. (Aside: this study should be made available in every library!) They find that 46% of respondents use the public library less than 2 times per year.

The LJ Patron Profiles survey shows a strong relationship between library use and book purchasing. For example, over half of survey respondents report buying a book by an author whose works they'd previously borrowed from the library. That's a huge number, considering that 20% of respondent never go to the library, period. At the same time the survey indicates a competition between reading and borrowing. Respondents who report that they've decreased their use of libraries buy 12.18 books per year, while those who've increased their library usage buy only 10.9 books per year. What we can't tell from the data is cause and effect. With the recession having a wide impact, who's to know whether the folks showing up more at libraries might buy even fewer books if the libraries weren't around!

It costs about 11 billion dollars a year to run public libraries in the US, and libraries work hard to demonstrate their value to the communities that support them. They compile data to measure their activity and the community's return on their investment in libraries. These studies assign much of the benefit of library spending to substitutional activity. For example, a survey by Denver Public Library determined in 2009 that it saved its community $105 million based on the cost to use alternative sources of information, and delivered an additional $5 million by avoiding "lost use", activity that wouldn't have occurred if the library did not exist. (See Public Libraries- A Wise Investment (PDF, 1.4 MB) from Library Research Service)

Do libraries really believe that 91% of their circulations would have resulted in purchases if they didn't exist? There's no hard evidence anywhere that that's true. Every librarian can tell you about patrons who loved a book so much they went and bought the whole series, but there are also users who never buy a book they can get in the library. And what about those readers who never go to the library? Surveys are a cheap way to collect data, but they often don't reflect the real behavior of the people surveyed.

So much is unknown, and so much is to be gained by knowing more. What hasn't been done, as far as I know, is to try to compare and correlate hard data on book sales and library lending in any meaningful way. In my next post, I'll describe how a cross-industry cooperative approach to book data collection and analysis might provide some light amid the gloom of the reading industry's winter solstice of understanding.

It's Not About Libraries, It's About Amazon

2011-11-25T13:40:00.001-05:00

When Douglas County (Colorado) Libraries decided to put "Buy this book" buttons on their online catalog pages (example), the response was strong. In just 11 days, the buy buttons had garnered almost 700 clickthroughs. According to Library Director Jamie LaRue, the library is putting buy links direct to publisher-supplied urls when they are provided (often to Barnes and Noble). Of the 700 clickthroughs, 389 went to Amazon and 262 to Tattered Cover, the independent bookstore with 3 locations in the Denver area. In isolation, this data seems to be strong support for the notion that a digital presence in libraries can support sales of books. The withdrawal this week by Penguin from library ebook lending platforms (such as Overdrive) would seem to be a profoundly shortsighted move.

Viewed from a big six publisher's point of view, the situation looks different. If Douglas County's book buying rates match the rest of the country, its residents would purchase 2.1 million books per year, almost 6,000 books per day. The 7.1 million items circulated by Douglas County Libraries in 2008 would present as an attractive market opportunity.

It's hard to know what the bookselling environment will look like 10 years from now, after a transition to digital reading platforms. While some publishers hold out hope that they could play a much larger role in servicing the demand that libraries meet in today's market, it's not libraries that worry them today, it's Amazon. Today's big six publisher sees the Douglas County clickthrough numbers and worries that those 389 library patrons are being captured by Amazon. Amazon is pushing $79 Kindles to those patrons and then effectively owns their book consumption.

The casual observer might not imagine how much of a threat Amazon presents to a big six publisher. After all, Amazon is sending them huge amounts of money. But think about how this might play out. If Amazon, with its proprietary e-reading ecosystem, grows to dominate book sales the way it currently dominates ebook sales, then it will be easy for Amazon to squeeze out the big publishers. Amazon can acquire exclusive content by dealing directly with authors, and is already doing so. They will be able to demand that publishers reduce their margins so that they really are marginal. Publishers would have no choice but to surrender and perhaps die.

The Penguin move should be seen not as corporate verdict on libraries, but as a reaction to Amazon's entry into the library market. When Overdrive was distributing content to libraries on their own platform, the publishers were able to view Overdrive, and libraries in general, as a counterweight to Amazon. But the extension of Overdrive lending to the Kindle flipped libraries into the Amazon column. That's the best way to understand the Penguin decision, though you won't see them saying that.

The recently announced Kindle Owner's Lending Library demonstrates that Amazon, blessed with its trove of marketing data, understands the power of libraries to promote sales. But it also demonstrates that Amazon is not content to leave libraries to libraries. Amazon wants in on the lending action, too.

Bookstore closings and bankruptcies are just the first set of casualties in the war for dominance in the ebook industry, which has only just begun. Institutions with footprints as large as libraries won't be able to avoid cross-fire, or even direct attack. Neutrality won't be an option. The advance of technology doesn't respect the innocence of bystanders.

What's clear to me, at least, is that libraries could do worse than to follow the lead of Douglas County, stepping into the marketplace for ebooks without fear, with eyes open and with server logs studied.

eBook Markets Need eBook Quality Standards

2011-11-13T22:09:00.001-05:00

Yes, the Kindle is UL rated!

Underwriter's Laboratory (UL) issued its first standard, covering "tin clad fire doors", in 1903. It then became easier for architects to specify fire-resistant doors for new buildings, which no doubt was a boon to tin clad door manufacturers, who no longer had to compete with doors made with too-thin tin. The UL® labels now let consumers buy all sorts of electrical products without thinking about whether their new Amazon Kindle will burst into flames in the middle of Maharaja's Mistress.

Think about all the things you didn't have to think about today. If you nuked a mug of water for tea this morning, you probably didn't consider whether the microwave's magnetron would fry you. You probably don't even know that your microwave oven has a magnetron. Our modern civilization is built on being able to not think about these things. Quality standards such as those developed by UL help us to think less, and help marketplaces sell more.

Unfortunately, if you're an avid ebook reader, in 2011 you have to think more than you want to about ebook quality. When Neal Stephenson's new novel, Reamde, came out, early purchasers of the book were dismayed to find that it was rife with typographical errors. (But not the title. That "typo", for ReadMe, is intentional!) Amazon was forced to suspend sales.

I've been watching an important effort on ebook quality. It's worth supporting. The entry deadline for the Publishing Innovation Awards is this week, November 15. Entrants submit ebook files which are evaluated for quality, innovation and design. New this year is the "QED" seal, which is awarded to entrants that satisfy a checklist of basic ebook quality no-brainers:

Front matter: the title does not open on a blank page.
Information hierarchy: content is arranged in such a way that the relative importance of the content (heads, text, sidebars, etc) are visually presented clearly.
Order of content: check of the content to be sure that none of it is missing or rearranged.
Consistency of font treatment: consistent application of styles and white space.
Links: hyperlinks to the web, cross references to other sections in the book, and the table of contents all work and point to the right areas. If the title has an index, it should be linked.
Cover: The cover does not refer to any print edition only related content.
Consumable Content: The title does not contain any fill-in content, such as workbooks and puzzle books, unless the content has been re-crafted to direct the reader on how to approach using the fill-in content.
Print References: Content does not contain cross references to un-hyperlinked, static print page numbers (unless the ebook is intentionally mimicking its print counterpart for reference).
Breaks: New sections break and/or start at logical places.
Images: Art is appropriately sized, is in color where appropriate, loads relatively quickly, and if it contains text is legible. If images are removed for rights reasons, that portion is disclaimed or all references to that image are removed.
Tables: Table text fits the screen comfortably, and if rendered as art is legible.
Symbols: Text does not contain odd characters.
Metadata: Basic metadata for the title (author, title, etc.) is in place and accurate.

Next year, I hope they add a checklist item for typographical errors. If a publisher can produce print with minimal errors, there's no excuse to allow them in digital books. As the Reamde debacle showed, even typos can create significant customer service expenses for retailers.

A few years from now, it's likely that any ebook that doesn't meet these standards will be unsaleable; for now, a QED seal is a great way for publishers to realize the value of making a good digital product, and for readers to be able to think less.

Notes:

In building Unglue.it, we've realized that we need to give book lovers some assurance that the ebooks they support for ungluing will be of a quality that they will be proud to have contributed to. We'll point to QED as a reference point for the quality we expect from unglued ebooks.
I read the print version of Reamde. I thought the spin-up was Stephenson's best, but there was a lot of carnage as things spun globally out of control.

Creative Commons Media Neutrality and eBook Rights after Rosetta v. Random

2011-11-08T22:52:00.000-05:00

Here's where it gets complicated.

Not so long ago, book publishers had no idea that there would be such things as digital books. Publishing contracts mentioned nothing about ebooks. Literary agents made sure to keep derivative rights separate, so that translation rights, film rights, stage adaptation rights, etc. for a successful book could be separately monetized.

When ebooks started to become important, the digital publisher Rosetta Books took advantage of the situation, and started acquiring ebook rights to well-known books such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This did not please the print publishers at all. Random House, one of the "Big Six" US publishers, took Rosetta to court, saying that their publishing contracts gave them exclusive rights to distribute books, and ebooks were books.

And here’s where it gets REALLY complicated. The District Court ruled against Random House, but narrowly, and the Appeals Court upheld. It wasn't that the ebook's bookness was obvious one way or another. The courts only refused Random House’s request for an injunction. Random House had asked the court to order Rosetta Books to immediately “cease and desist” selling ebook editions of Random House books. Without an injunction, Random House would have had to continue with a lengthy legal preceding to assert its publication rights.

Instead, Random House negotiated a settlement with Rosetta Books, one which allowed some older books to be issued in ebook format by Rosetta. Rosetta got their ebook rights and Random got an undisclosed revenue share, according to Publisher’s Weekly. The details are not public, but the practical result seems to be that if Random House does not want to reissue an ebook of a book based on an older contract, they will allow the author to contract separately with a third party, such as Rosetta. Open Road Media is a more recent, and more aggressive, ebook "reprinter," and they have also contracted separately with authors and estates for ebook editions, such as the "enhanced" From Here to Eternity; Random House retains print rights only.

Despite this uncertainty, the book publishing industry has managed, for the most part, to avoid destructive legal battles. It seems to be understood by literary agents that ebook rights for works under pre-Rosetta print contracts are to be offered first to the publisher with print rights. While Random House will often waive ebook rights, Harper, S&S, Penguin, Macmillan, Hachette seem to block 3rd party licenses, slowly adding the backlist ebooks to their ebook catalogs, and only if they can get authors to accept the current standard ebook royalties, 25% of net. If no agreement can be reached on royalties no ebook is published.

For other publishers, the situation is confusing. According to Rosetta, "in England, the agent and author community has been clear for ten years that these backlist electronic rights are owned and controlled by the authors". Smaller publishers will often revert ebook rights because conversion and distribution costs for backlist books make it too expensive to create an ebook only to keep ebook rights.

The effect of the Rosetta v Random non-decision has been that a large number of works whose print rights remain with a publisher have ebook rights which may be subject to dispute. Often these books are scholarly works or trade books with little commercial value.

Our goal in building Unglue.it is to work with rights holders to re-license books such as these with the financial backing of book lovers everywhere. These "unglued ebooks" would be "given to the world" under something like a Creative Commons (CC) license. But how can such a license be applied when there is such uncertainty around ebook rights?

One problem is that the Creative Commons licenses are media neutral. If I release a print book under a CC license, there's nothing in the license to stop anyone from scanning it, turning it into an ebook, and distributing it on their website. Similarly, a CC ebook can be printed and bound, and redistributed with the same license, so long as the other license terms are obeyed.

It's not enough to have ebook rights to release a Creative Commons ebook, you need to have print rights cleared as well! ¹ (If you thought this article had reached the zenith of complicationness, you thought wrong.)

If what you're really interested in is ebook rights, then why use a Creative Commons license? With a CC BY-NC-ND license, the allowed noncommercial print uses are probably not very valuable.

Looking at this issue with our legal counsel, we considered the option of creating our own "Unglue.it eBook License" which would be similar to Creative Commons but which would prohibit even non-commercial printing. Unfortunately, this option would:

require us to establish an entirely new publishing "standard" license;
add legalese and restrictions that supporters and rights holders alike would find unfamiliar and undesirable;
lose the benefit of the universal and clear standards of the Creative Common licenses. CC licenses, for example, can be recognized and acted on by automated search engines. Precedents exist for what is allowed. For almost a decade, CC licenses have allowed authors such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow to publish successful commercial print and ebook editions alongside open access, CC-licensed ebook editions.

A different strategy would be to use a standard CC ND license, but to add a technical obstacle to printing which does not conflict with open access for the digital version. If we created something inherently digital (e.g. with revisions that include animations throughout that can’t be printed), then printing a version without animation would violate the non-derivative aspect of the license.

We're not enthusiastic about this option either. Just as legalese confuses normal people, the subtleties of media technology are likely to confuse lawyers and Judges. If someone wants to object to our interpretation of a “derivative use,” there's no technology that can keep them from suing.

A third option is by far our top choice, and is the one we will pursue. Get the various rights holders to agree among themselves! Since the CC BY-NC-ND license only allows incidental and not-for- profit printing of ebooks, print publishers willing to let an author unglue an eBook using this license should also be willing to waive any conflict with their “exclusive” print rights.

Authors and publishers have mostly managed to get on with business without a clear legal decision on whether an ebook is a book. The possibility of a crowd-funded payoff shared by print and digital rights holders should create a strong incentive for them to work together to unglue the ebook.

How hard could it be?

Notes:

Or at least, you need to have any publisher with “exclusive” print rights waive those rights with respect to any “non-commercial” printing of a CC ebook for personal use.
My colleague Amanda Mecke contributed to this article.
Yes, that's the new logo for the Unglue.it service, coming soon!
Standard IANAL disclaimer.

The United Nations of Reading

2011-10-29T16:36:00.000-04:00

The Internet Archive

I had a great time at Books in Browsers, even though I completely lost my voice on the second day. The assembled talent and brainpower made almost every moment a thrill. When my talk from the morning of the first day was given prominent mention in the New York Times' Bits Blog, I got so excited that I couldn't pay attention to an amazing talk on annotation of medieval manuscripts.

But the most important talk of the two days was Brian O'Leary's closing presentation, which prompted the Twitter backchannel to unanimously elect him the "Secretary-General of the United Nations of Publishing".

Here's his abstract:

Although business models have changed, publishers and their intermediaries continue to try to evolve their market roles in ways that typically follow the rules for “two-party, one-issue” negotiations. In an environment in which the negotiations are better framed using models for “many parties, many issues”, these more limited approaches have made the design of a flawed ecosystem even worse, shifting burdens onto valued intermediaries (libraries and booksellers, among others).

Content abundance, coupled with improvements in available technologies, gives us an opportunity to reshape the competitive framework. This talk will examine options to apply the principles of effective game design to create a set of new, targeted and evolving business models for content dissemination in an era of abundance.

O'Leary talked about the changes occurring in the entire ecosystem of what used to be called "publishing": authors, agents, publishers, distributors, retailers, libraries, and of course readers. He noted that relationships throughout the ecosystem were being renegotiated without an awareness of the effects of these changes on the rest of the ecosystem. As a result, frameworks, arrangements and processes that could benefit the entire ecosystem were not being given the consideration they deserve.

The future of EPUB

O'Leary pointed to the discussions leading to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as a possible inspiration for a reading-ecosystem way forward. The breakthrough in those discussions was the introduction game-theory models that helped the parties see the effects of agreements and provisions on all stakeholders in the Law of the Seas negotiations. If a similar sort of model could be developed for the activities surrounding publishing, it might be possible to do a lot more that to "save publishing". Intelligent, collaborative application of digital technologies should be able to increase the effectiveness of an industry whose purpose is to promote reading, education, culture and knowledge.

According to O'Leary, we need to figure out ways to fund the sort of research that could be the basis of modeling for the reading ecosystem. One possibility would be to create a cross-industry organization to do so.

If such an organization were created, I hope that its membership mirrors the composition of Books in Browsers attendees. Many inhabitants of the reading ecosystem were represented, despite the technology emphasis of the meeting- publishers, librarians, agents, academics, authors, designers. The contrast with last week's DPLA Launch meeting was striking- hardly any publishers or authors were in evidence at DPLA. It seems to me that with everything that's at stake, we could do a lot worse than to listen some more to Brian O'Leary.

Update (10/31/11): The text of O'Leary's talk is posted here.)

Creative Commons - ND (No Derivatives)

2011-10-23T21:27:00.000-04:00

When I was a sophomore in high school, I read Catcher in the Rye. To me, the amazing thing about this book was the language. It seemed like every other word was "bastard", "goddam" or "sonofabitch". What were my teachers thinking?

Imagine if the Salinger estate decided to release a Catcher in the Rye ebook with a Creative Commons License so that 10th graders around the world could read it for free. What sort of license would they choose? In particular, would they choose a "No Derivatives" license?

Here's the "legal code" of the No Derivatives (ND) restriction in the CC BY-NC-ND license:

The [granted] rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats, but otherwise you have no rights to make Adaptations.

"Adaptation" means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.

The advantage of allowing derivative works (Adapations) is that people would be free to use Catcher in the Rye for all sorts of amazing things. There would be a thousand YouTube dramatizations of Catcher in the Rye, free to all. There would be fan fiction. There would be novels about Holden as a homeless person, Holden as a Wall Street tycoon, or as President Caulfield. There would be translations, graphic novels and operettas. Best of all there would be versions of Catcher that would have all the goddams replaced by gosh darns and bitches replaces by guns, and that's what 10th graders would read in Texas. Imagine what they'd read in North Korea: Brother Ho Gathers Rice.

J. D. Salinger is rolling over in his grave even as we ponder the scenario. I think it's safe to say that Catcher in the Rye will not see a license allowing derivatives in my lifetime or in yours. It's not about generosity at all, it's about the artistic vision of the author. And J. D Salinger is not alone in wanting to ensure the integrity of his works. That why Creative Commons offers the "No Derivatives" option for its licenses in the first place.

There are lots of cases in which it's valuable to be able to change a work. As much as it hurts when your edit is reverted, the most amazing feature of Wikipedia is that anybody can change it. For a jazz singer, a song that you can't riff on is not jazz at all. For a teacher, a textbook that you can't adapt to your curriculum is just wrong. In these and many other applications, an ND license seriously reduces the value of a work.

But to date, most books have been written with the expectation that the the version that goes out to the printers is more or less the version that will be read. Authors have not incorporated the possibility of remixing and read-write literature into their creative visions. Certainly this will change as new forms and conventions emerge. But for now, most authors want to control the expression of their creations, even if they're willing to set them free. For the purposes of Unglue.it, we have to respect these wishes if we are to convince authors to release their works into the public commons. Money is not the issue.

As Mike Taylor, a long time friend of this blog, commented on a previous post, the ND aspect of our "standard" license clashes somewhat with the second two bullet points of Creative Commons' "Share, Remix, Reuse" slogan. It's important to recognize that even the CC BY-NC-ND license that Unglue.it will use by default unlocks "Remix" and "Reuse" activity that falls under "Fair Use". The Creative Commons licenses leave untouched the fair use rights of users, and are hostile to Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that in practice impedes these rights. DRM typically blocks many types of fair use, and in the US, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes the circumvention of this DRM.

Many of the derivative works that have Salinger spinning are allowed under fair use no matter what the license. But an ND license lets an author keep potentially valuable movie rights and translation rights. The value of these would be enhanced by letting everyone in the world read the book for free through ungluing, and this incentive will benefit the public by reducing the authors' ungluing price.

It's hard to know what sorts of "adaptations" of a work will be possible in the future. However, the Creative Commons licenses, including the ND licenses, make it clear that users have the right to migrate the work to new formats for the purposes of accessibility and compatibility with new media and technology. This is important to all of us, because without this right, it's quite possible that many of the ebooks we use today will be unreadable 50 or a hundred years from now.

Notes:

As always, don't confuse this blog with legal advice.
According to Wikipedia, Catcher in the Rye continues to sell 250,000 copies a year.
The Catcher in the Ryeis #410 on Amazon's best-seller list.
A fair "ungluing price" for Catcher in the Rye would be at least $4,000,000.
I've previously posted about the Attribution and Non Commercial attributes of Creative Commons Licenses
It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

The DPLA Muster

2011-10-22T01:10:00.002-04:00

Battle flags never made sense to me. "Why give your opponents something to shoot at?", was my thinking. As if soldiers with deadly weapon would bother rally to a flimsy piece of cloth. An idea. What's powerful about that?

Friday, I attended the plenary session that launched the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) at the National Archives in Washington DC. (with 300 others!) When it started early this year, I was pretty skeptical of the DPLA. It had no discernible plan of action, no coherent vision for the future of libraries, no business model, not even an awareness of how impossible its dream really was. All they had was... a battle flag, and a figurative one, at that.

What I saw was the power of a battle flag. John Palfrey and a cabal of Harvard academics have forged a movement from the fire of frustrated librarians, archivists, and information professionals who have recognized that a lot of the present system is broken and going nowhere fast. They sent out a call for help, and amazingly enough, that call was answered.

Although the news of the day centered around $2.5 million grants from Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund, and promises of cooperation from Europeana and the British Library, I was most encouraged by the presentations in the afternoon, from people who actually build stuff.

At Gluejar, we've been struggling with the difficulty of presenting collections of books to Internet users in a meaningful and effective way. The typical UI of a book site is pretty lame. If the site goes beyond bland lists, it may try for a "bookshelf" view. The problem is that a bookshelf can only present 50 books or so, and a decent library will have 100,000 or even a million things to display.

The most elaborated UI experiment latched on to DPLA was ShelfLife from the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. It presents books as an "infinite bookshelf" arranged vertically to best display titles on the spines. It clings to the physicality of books by using thickness to represent the number of pages in the book, and uses the height of the book to show... the height of a book. It sounds stupid, but works a lot better than you might think. Go try it.

Bookworm was another interesting demonstration, from the people who brought you Google NGram Viewer. Using the less-restricted data from OpenLibrary, Bookworm allows you to examine subject heading occurrence as a function of time, and uses this visualization as a way to expose lists of book records. Very cool, but I felt like it was a fun toy for a job that wants a ear-splitting power tool.

The enthusiastic reception for these and other projects, which seemed to come out of the woodwork in response to the DPLA call to action, convinced me that DPLA is much more than a pitch for foundation funding. The library world, and the academic community that relies on libraries, is hungering for innovation and experimentation to show the way out of ebook purgatory.

So go for it, DPLA. There will be content of all sorts from libraries, museums, and the like for you to organize. Internet Archive, Hathi Trust and others will push the boundaries on book digitization and distribution. Gluejar will do its best to stock your shelves with unglued books that people care about. My advice: do some small things well and the big things will follow. That's what battle flags are all about.

Creative Commons - NC (Non-Commercial)

2011-10-20T22:45:00.001-04:00

by Wahj (CC BY-NC-ND)Real worms don't come in cans. The last time I saw worms offered for sale, they came in paper buckets, the kind that usually hold Chinese take-out. You open these up, and the worms don't jump out at you. Maybe if you left the bucket open for a day or two, the worms would eventually find their way out, but any resulting problem is manageable. So when we say that doing something "opens up a can of worms", the main thing to think about is not about the calamities that will emerge from the bucket, it's whether or not you want to go fishing today.

The "Non-Commercial" attribute of Creative Commons "NC" licenses is definitely a can of worms. "Non-commercial" is subject to varied interpretation, and the license is not entirely successful at removing ambiguities. What uses are commercial? For example, is a blog that attracts advertising revenue allowed to post a CC NC licensed ebook? Is a for-profit distributor of ebooks allowed to distribute an NC ebook? Is a non-profit charity allowed to print paper copies of an NC ebook and sell the copies? Is a for-profit copy shop allowed to charge a school to make copies of an NC textbook? Is a for-profit company allowed to use an NC ebook about widget manufacturing to improve its factory? Is it ok for me to show you this picture of worms? Et cetera.

In building Unglue.it, we hope that readers and institutions will financially support Creative Commons relicensing of books that are important to them. In doing so, we need to make sure that the licenses we choose enable the things that the supporters want to do. We need to balance these uses against the rights and concerns of the authors and other rights holders who would be granting these licenses.

To get a better feel for what's allowed and what isn't under NC, we have to look at the "legal code" of the license. Here's what it says in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND) License:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You [...] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

Let's examine some of our wriggling worms against this "code". Remember that I'm not a lawyer, and you should not rely on my scribblings for legal advice of any kind.

Go ahead and improve your lucrative widget factory. The rights restricted by the NC clause are the rights to reproduce, distribute and publicly perform the work. The Creative Commons licenses do not restrict other uses of the work. If there are million-dollar ideas in the book, your ability to exploit them for commercial gain is not restricted by a CC license.
If your blog is your business, it's not a good idea to build it on NC licensed photos from flickr, even if you don't charge for access. But if you're a book blogger and you make money with advertising, is posting a free ebook "primarily directed towards commercial advantage"? This worm is jiggling a bit! If you're a potential supporter of a book, this is the sort of use you probably want to support. It's not really clear how to apply the NC clause. Similarly, Apple, Amazon and Google are big companies that make a lot of money in the course of distributing ebooks. Distribution of some ebooks for free gives them indirect commercial advantages. To the extent that the uncertainly in the NC provision prevents seamless distribution of the works to their users, it goes counter to what most book lovers would want.
Even if you're a non-profit, you can't print and sell copies of an NC e-book to raise money for starving orphans with cancer.

The areas of uncertainty includes some use cases that we think are non-commercial uses. To make it clear that we consider the distribution of unglued ebooks for free to be an allowed activity under NC licenses, rights holders who offer works to the public through Unglue.it will agree to the following:

For purposes of interpreting the CC License, Rights Holder agrees that "non-commercial" use shall include, without limitation, distribution by a commercial entity without charge for access to the Work.

We may also require a statement to the same effect in the front matter of the released ebook; we're still working out the file format details.

Given this clarification, why not go all the way, and require that Unglue.it rights holders agree to commercial distribution of works that get unglued?

It turns out that the alternative to our can of worms harbors some poisonous snakes. Let me introduce you to one of these. Look at the Amazon page for Dance Dance Revolution (Wii Video Game) a 140 page paperback supposedly edited by Lambert M. Surhone, Mariam T. Tennoe, and Susan F. Henssonow. The so-called publisher, "Betascript Publishing" takes Wikipedia articles and turns them into books. So far, so good. Perfectly legal within the scope of Wikipedia's Creative Commons License (BY-SA). But how would you feel if you found a Wikipedia article that you wrote (with minor edits from others) on sale at Amazon for $57.47? When this happened to my brother he was mostly amused at the audacity of it all. But I think that if the same thing happend to a book I had worked on for a year of my life, it would seriously piss me off. If I had contributed money to "give the book to the world" I would be similarly aggravated. You could argue that Betascript is providing a valuable service by providing attractive formatting and improving the discovery of the article, but please don't.

by gabrielsaldana (CC BY-SA)Retention of commercial rights is potentially of significant value to authors, and can reduce their asking price for ungluing books. I've previously written about Cory Doctorow's experience with selling "deluxe bound" versions of his Creative Commons Licensed books. There's also the possibility that authors' prior publishing contracts preclude them from offering commercial Creative Commons licenses (I'll write more about that soon). Since most of the uses we imagine for unglued ebooks, including the uses most important to libraries, are not affected by our use of the NC-flavored licensed, we've decided to open this "can of worms" in hopes of catching more "fish". We'll allow rights holders to offer non-NC licenses, but we won't expect them to do so.

Notes: I posted yesterday on the "Attribution" in Creative Commons Licenses. Here are some links on Betascript, which has over 350,000 "books" listed in some book directories:

The odd tale of Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing
VDM Publishing (Wikipedia)

Creative Commons - BY (Attribution)

2011-10-20T00:04:00.001-04:00

Have you ever wondered whether Anonymous can use an Creative Commons attribution license? The Answer is YES, Attribution licenses ARE useful, even for Anonymous.

In the process of developing the Unglue.it service, we've had to study licenses and decide which ones are best for ungluing ebooks. Since supporters will be putting up real money to relicense the books (making them free to the world), the details of the license need to be spelled out clearly, upfront.

It's a big topic with lots of considerations, so I'm going to write about our choices in three pieces. We'll be using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND) License for most of the books that we unglue. This post will focus on the easiest choice- the attribution part. Even with attribution, there are some tricky bits.

Here is the text, or "legal code" of the attribution requirement in the CC BY-NC-ND License:

If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or Collections, You must [...] provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing:
the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;
the title of the Work if supplied;
to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work.
The credit required by this Section may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors. For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties.

In the case of Anonymous, you can't distribute a CC BY licensed work owned by Anonymous unless you provide attribution to anonymous. You can't say that you wrote it, for example.

For Public Domain works, there's no attribution requirement. It would be perfectly legal for me to take Moby Dick, for example, change the title to Moby Duck, attribute it "the Gluejar Collective" (me and Herm), and sell it on Amazon for $100 per copy (if I get an ISBN!). It might not be legal in France, though. Unlike the United States, most European countries, and especially France, have strong protections for authors' "moral rights". In France, even if an author had released work under a non-attribution license, I wouldn't be able to use the work in a way that abused the author's name and reputation.

Non-attribution licenses (i.e. CC0) are particularly useful when many people contribute to a work, as in the case of Wikipedia, and the use of the work would be inhibited if attribution of all the contributors was required. CC0 (technically a waiver, not a license) tries to address possible conflict with laws assuring moral rights.

For Unglue.it, we expect that most creators will insist on the attribution requirement. Come to think of it, most readers and supporters would insist on it as well. You wouldn't want to read Primary Colors by Herman Melville, would you?

Note: I'm an engineer, not a lawyer, so please don't use this article as a substitute for legal advice. If you want to build nuclear weapons with it, or generate superluminal neutrinos based on the information it contains, you have my explicit permission to do so.
Update 10/20/2011: Corrected CC0 info. The "NC" option is discussed in another post.

How Can We Change the Future? The Tomorrow Project

2011-10-16T00:06:00.000-04:00

It turns out that Intel, the giant chip maker, employs a full time futurist. His name is Brian David Johnson, and he actually gets paid to go around asking people what the future might be like. Intel says they're the "Sponsors of Tomorrow", so I guess they want to have a clue about what they're sponsoring. When I worked at Intel in the early 80's, we could have sponsored a thousand futurist studies, and not one of them would have predicted that Intel would someday employ a "Chief Futurist" leading a "Tomorrow Project".

None of those futurists would have predicted that over a hundred thousand people would show up at New York Comic-Con, either. But it's happening. The show is completely sold out. Jacob Javits Convention Center is packed to the gills with zombies, otaku, wood nymphs, transformers and girls with blue, purple or red hair- i don't know the word for them.

Many of them packed a very serious session hosted by Johnson featuring Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer, blogger, and activist. The session was entitled "Sci-Fi Prototyping: Designing the Future Panel". No on in the audience was disappointed not to hear about the future of the panel, and we also did without Doug Rushkoff, whose appearance was scheduled to make the panel a panel, but who failed to predict his future schedule well enough to participate.

Doctorow, Johnson, Rushkoff, and will.i.am, who was accurately predicted to not be present, have contributed to The Tomorrow Project Anthology which had its launch today. Nostalgically enough, this is a book. Less nostalgic, but perhaps just as dated, it's a 1.8MB PDF file. Made available for free, by Intel. Doctorow's contribution is a novella by Doctorow called The Knights of the Rainbow Table which so far (I'm on p.17), is a fun read. It's about the nano-apocalypse that will occur in the near future when it's easy for a group of grad student low-lifes to crack everybody's website password security.

Johnson framed the session as a discussion about the ways in which science fiction can provide a narrative to steer the future. I'm a bit skeptical. I don't think that the "narrative" of Star Trek communicators caused Motorola engineers to create the flip-phone, even if they were fans of the show while growing up. Doctorow had a really interesting analogy, though. He said a science fiction story was like a Petri dish that lets an microscopic idea grow into a huge colony of micro-organisms visible to the naked eye. That strikes me as a really useful way to think of how fiction influences the world.

The problem with ascribing power to narrative is evident if you look at the world around us. Narratives compete with other narratives, and their relative power derives not from their truth or their skill, but rather from their fit. Narratives warning about the death of privacy, for example, have scant power compared to the offer of a free movie, or even a free PDF download. No one pays attention to a narrative unless it fits with what they want to do today.

Before the panel, Doctorow expressed to me his strong commitment to making his works available with Creative Commons licenses; He'll certainly release The Knights of the Rainbow Table that way. But let's work on Intel to change the future a bit. Why can't they release The Tomorrow Project Anthology with a similar license? (the current license is all rights reserved, you can download it, but you can't redistribute it) You CAN help change the future- file a request to post the whole ebook using this form.

In yesterday's tomorrow, androids dream of electric sheep, cars fly around LA, and in Blade Runner, people read newspapers on paper. What will today's tomorrow look like tomorrow? I wonder how much of today's best writing about the future will be available to people ten years from now. Unfortunately, the answer depends on licensing details that most creators don't think much about. Doctorow is an exception.

The Clawback of @lessig's "Remix"

2011-10-12T22:51:00.001-04:00

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at the Harvard School of Law and a prominent scholar of intellectual property law in the age of the internet, has written several books about "Free Culture". He argues that today's copyright laws are poorly suited to copyright's original purpose of advancing the creative arts. Today's digital culture increasingly blurs the line between creator and consumer and remixes strands of media to create new works in ways that were inconceivable when copyright was invented.

To provide ways for copyright holders to participate more fully in today's digital culture, Lessig co-founded Creative Commons (CC). The licenses offered by Creative Commons will be used by Unglue.it for "unglued e-books". "Unglueing books" is what we call the process of gathering together people and institutions willing to contribute to the cost of relicensing books they love under CC licenses. (Specifically, we'll use CC BY-NC-ND) Since Lessig has made many of his books available under CC licenses, you could say they're already unglued. By checking on the availability of these books, we can get a feel for the readiness of readers and institutions for ebooks that can be free to all readers, everywhere.

Lessig's groundbreaking first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published before Creative Commons existed, it's out of print, and not available as an ebook. But a second edition, Code, Version 2.0 was released with a CC (Attribution, Share-Alike) License. You can download it for free from Google Books. But it's not available on the Nook store or on Internet Archive. Amazon wants $2.99 to put it on your Kindle. Kobo books wants $13.69. Worldcat reports that it's available in 462 libraries around the world, but only 11 of these libraries report holding the electronic version. Worldcat has a URL for the ebook, but it's dead. If you don't like the idea of downloading from Google, you can get it from a site owned by Lessig, or you can download it from my personal website. The non-unglued, earlier (and out of date!) edition is much more available in libraries, with 1103 libraries listing it in Worldcat.

If you think that Code 2.0 is an important book, and you want your friends to read it, you can not only download and distribute it from your website, you can print up a bunch of copies and sell them, or give them away. Code 2.0 doesn't restrict its redistribution to non-commercial uses or prevent you from making derivative works, as long as you use the same license on the copies and derivative works that you sell or distribute. The Creative Commons licenses are media-neutral and aren't restricted to digital works. Licensees (the users) may migrate the licensed works to other formats, so a CC-licensed pdf file can be printed to make a CC-licensed print volume.

The fact that only 11 libraries list the digital version of Code 2.0 in Worldcat says a lot about the chasm that the library world needs to traverse if it is to effectively support unglued books. Most libraries don't yet have the workflow to select and manage ebooks that aren't offered by their accustomed vendors, even if the price is zero. There is a huge amount of stuff available "for free", and individual libraries don't have the resources to seek out the material that's of value to their communities. But now's a great time to start. Code 2.0 is a good book to start with. There's no reason it shouldn't be available digitally to every user in every library in the world!

In 2004, in the wake of his failed challenge in the Supreme Court to the Copyright Term Extension Act, Lessig published Free Culture, How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity with Penguin Books. At about the same time, Lessig published the book as a PDF on his free-culture.cc website using a Creative Commons Non-Commercial, Attribution License.

For readers looking to read Free Culture, the CC license has resulted in availability from many sources, which dominate a Google search for the book. But although Lessig is a lawyer, his free-culture intent for Free Culture is undermined a bit by some legal flamethrowing on the book's title page:

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

This mixed message may be what's keeping Google Books and other institutions from making the book available in some ways that Code 2.0 is available.

Obviously, Penguin (the publisher) wants you to buy a copy of Free Culture instead of downloading it for free. The non-commercial CC license permits Lessig to license commercial rights separately to Penguin. Many people who read the book for free digitally will still want to buy a bound copy while many others will prefer print to digital from the start. At Amazon, you can have Free Culture on your Kindle for $12.99, which is actually a premium to the new hardcover price of $10.94. If you want the French translation, Culture libre (French Edition), it's a free download via whispernet (incorrectly described as a public domain work). If you want it from a library, the situation is similar to Code. It's in the catalogs of 1601 libraries, but only 20 of these list the ebook. If I want to read it on an iPad, I'm best off going to Internet Archive, which has it in many different formats, including EPUB. (Just drag an EPUB to iTunes, and it loads automagically into iBooks on your iPad.) I can also get it direct from Goodreads.

By contrast, Lessig's 2008 book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy appears to be a poster child for everything that could go wrong for an unglued ebook in today's environment. Remix was published in the US by Penguin and in the UK by Bloomsbury Academic. In 2009, Lessig announced on his blog that Remix (the Bloomsbury version, at least) was available as a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) download. He even went on the Colbert Report and challenged viewers to remix his interview with Stephen Colbert:

The Colbert people even made a joke on their website about Penguin requesting a takedown of Remix.

Today, it seems as though the free version of Remix has been clawed back from the internet, but not as a joke, more likely it's just a bunch of unrelated mistakes. I challenge you to find it by googling. Only Scribd still has a copy (in a Bloomsbury Academic account). A month ago, Internet Archive offered it in several formats, but their page is currently dead. I'm told it's some sort of database problem. Links to the Scribd page have vanished from the Bloomsbury Academic site, which was totally revamped a few months ago. Google Books wants you to buy the Penguin ebook. Amazon wants $4.99 for the Kindle edition. Same story for ebooks from Feedbooks.

At least libraries can buy the ebook of Remix from their preferred ebook providers. Here's the description at Ebook Library. But perhaps most depressing is the entry from Overdrive:

Adobe PDF eBook Rights:
  Copying not allowed
  Printing not allowed
  Lending not allowed
  Reading aloud not allowed

It's a bit scary. Imagine if it was not just a couple of mistakes. What if a commercial licensee wanted to wipe a CC-licensed free version of Remix from the Internet, to enhance their profits. A sleazy take-down notice or two, and CC Remix would be gone, despite the best intentions of its author.

Remix comes with this description:

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms every intrepid, creative user of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the postwar world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

Let's do what we can to make that vision a reality.

Update 10/13/2011 9PM EDT: The Internet Archive page for Remix is back up; the Worldcat link for Code 2.0 is fixed. Nothing is unfixable, if we pay attention!

Are Neutrinos Superluminal? Judge for Yourself.

2011-09-24T13:34:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I couldn't restrain the physicist inside me. I just had to watch the seminar from CERN where Dario Autiero presented the result from CERN and CNGS of a measurement of the neutrino's velocity. The measurement is a tour de force of modern experimental physics, which harnesses amazing technologies such as the global positioning system, large scale data processing, picosecond lasers, ultrafast digital electronics, billion-volt particle beams, and highway tunnels a mile beneath a mountain in Italy. The scientific communication system is also state-of-the-art. The preprint (with 174 authors) appeared in ArXiv.org on thursday night: "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam", arXiv:1109.4897v1 [hep-ex]. And CERN webcasted the presentation live around the world, with not even a hiccup in the video feed.

What the news reports have failed to convey is that despite the impressive effort, the accuracy of the velocity measurement is teased out of the data with statistical procedures that are sure to come under intense scrutiny.

The way the experiment works is this. Pulses of neutrinos lasting 10.5 microseconds are generated by the accelerator at CERN, pointed at neutrino detectors 730km away under the mountain in Italy. Neutrinos are incredibly hard to detect (they have no difficulty traveling through 450 miles of rock), so only a tiny fraction of them are detected. Over 3 years, 16,111 of the CERN neutrinos were detected in Italy. The shape and timing of each generated pulse is measured and stored to be compared later with the timing of the detected neutrinos. The nub of the matter is shown in this graph, which shows only the leading and trailing edges of the accumulated data:

As you can see, the leading edge of the neutrino pulse is about 500 nsec wide. The red line is the cumulative shape of the generated pulse, the data show the counts and relative timing of the detected neutrinos.

The evidence for superluminal neutrinos is that the red curves at on the bottom, shifted by 60.7 nsec faster than the speed of light, are a better fit to the data than the red curves at the top. The claim is made that the bottom fit is 6 sigma away from the fit at the top. What do you think? Isn't physics fun?

Can JSTOR Solve the Course-Assigned eBook Problem?

2011-09-21T11:14:00.000-04:00

Just imagine iflibraries were like airlines. Your flight to Information could cost $20 or$2,000 depending on how far in advance you book, whether you're connecting throughSeattle or going direct, how full the flight is, the day of the week, the phaseof the moon, and who knows what else. Airlines employ operations researchPh.D.s who create and maintain elaborate systems to "manage theload". These systems make sure that people who have little choice of whenand where to fly pay a lot more than others who have flexibility to seek lowfares.

You don't haveto imagine very hard to realize that academic libraries are part of a system that's a lot like the airline industry.Consider college students. Once they've signed up for a class, they have littleflexibility with their assigned reading. Even a college library with a 10million volume collection won't be of much use to them, because someone elsewill have checked out the assigned reading – if it's not on reserve. Thestudent is sent to the college bookstore, where it's a pretty good bet the bookwon't be on sale. If the student has planned in advance, they might bought acopy used on Amazon, or borrowed it from an upperclassman.

Academic book"load management" was not devised by financial engineers, it arose asa by-product of a paper-based distribution system. Students don't perceivelibrarians as evil just because they haven't bought a hundred copies to supplythe whole class. But the environment is very different when the books aredigital. Scarcity of digital books is a manufactured fiction, so it's easy fora student to perceive the library as being complicit in a money-extractionmachine, never mind the benefits that accrue globally when publishers arerewarded for producing books worthy of being assigned in a course.

Libraries hatesaying “No” to their users, so ebook models that allow unlimited simultaneousaccess are very attractive to them. Even limited simultaneous access would help meet the needs ofstudents. The same models are very scary for publishers, because they count onprofits from selling many copies of course-assigned texts to cover their losseson slow-selling titles. Academic libraries don't have the money to replace thatrevenue, because the embedded practice is for students to pay for their owntextbooks.

A few universities,notably Indiana University, have startedto reexamine the role of academic libraries in the digital provision of course-assignedtextbooks. Libraries have a better bargaining position withpublishers than students, and are in a unique position to integrate digital texts withdatabases and other types of information available from the library. It makeslittle sense to tell students to come to the library for quality information-unless they need it for a class!

Publishers alsohave incentives to find library-based digital solutions for course-assignedreading. If the library can be charged based on the number of students enrolledin a course, no revenue is lost to used-book sellers, peer-to-peer networks orstudents who don't bother to read the texts. Solutions that work have nonethelessbeen elusive, partly because it's very difficult to have print and digitalmodels coexisting, but also because budgets are tight all around.

At Ithaka'sSustainable Scholarship meeting this week, JSTOR's Bruce Heterick told thegathered publishers and librarians that JSTOR's ebook program, to be launchedin 3rd quarter of 2012, would include a pilot program to address thecourse-assigned title problem. This news was warmly received by the entireaudience. Books at JSTOR will make over 15,000 books available on multipleplatforms (including ebrary and NetLibrary) and on multiple devices (iOS andAndroid). At launch, the ebooks will be offered on a sales model, and all theebooks will be archived in Ithaka's Portico service so that libraries can beassured that their access will really be perpetual. The icing on the cake isthat the ebooks will be integrated with JSTOR's discovery and crosslinkingplatform, which is very popular with the students and faculty at subscribinginstitutions.

Although thedetails of the course-assigned title pilot were not yet decided, JSTOR ManagingDirector Laura Brown responded to questions by saying that as many as 3different models would be tried in the pilot. JSTOR's subscriber outreach hassuggested that different approaches are needed in different sorts ofinstitutions. I suppose you could think of these models as “charter flights”that can be added to package tours.

Regular readersof the Go To Hellman blog will know that I'm working on a new approach to selling ebooks. Iview every market problem as a possible opportunity for the new model, which wecall "unglued ebooks". Course-assigned titles are no exception.

My analysisindicates that the market dynamics for some books may favor the ungluing model.It works by aggregating donations by many people and institutions with a stakein a particular book and then paying the book's rights holders who “name theirown price” to issue a Creative Commons licensed digital edition. The ebook canthen be used without limit by everyone, everywhere. (OK, it’s backwards fromPriceline, but we totally have to get Leonard Nimoy as our spokesperson!)

In situationswhere two titles compete with each other to be put on a course list, theungluing model introduces a severe form of price competition. A title that issuccessfully unglued, even at a price equal to the present value of its entire futurerevenue stream, would have a huge advantage over a competing title that remainedon the per-copy selling model. It remains to be seen, of course, whetherstudents and libraries will be able to organize an ungluing campaign to meet the high ungluing prices commanded by books with steady recurring sales. Still,there is a huge variety of courses and books, and thus a reasonable chance thatthe model will work in at least a few cases.

There’s a greatneed for experimentation and risk-taking by libraries and publishers in thetransition to the digital environment. It's good to see JSTOR step up to that plate. But don’t take my airline industry analogy too seriously. Whendeveloping new models for ebooks and libraries, let’s omit the pat-downsecurity searches and checked-baggage fees, OK?

Crowd-Finding the Orphan Books

2011-09-19T02:16:00.001-04:00

A solution to the orphan books problem won't be delivered by a settlement of the Google Books lawsuit anytime soon, we learned on Thursday. "Orphan" works are ones subject to copyright restrictions, but for which rights holders can't be found or determined. A proposal to open them up via settlement of a class action was rejected by Judge Denny Chin in March of this year. There was still hope, however, that a settlement between the parties would find a way to implement a "Book Rights Registry" that, while falling short of eliminating the orphan works problem, could go a long way towards making rights holders easier to find. I was present at last week's status conference where the parties met with Judge Chin to report their progress towards a new settlement addressing Judge Chins concerns, or failing that, a timetable for renewed prosecution of the lawsuit. Although the lawyers for the publishers seemed to be optimistic about a settlement, Michael Boni, the lead attorney for the "authors" talked as though the their part of the lawsuit would go to trial.

No orphans here, just books being deeply
discounted at a Borders going-out-of-business sale.
Note the blurb on the book at the bottom.

While there are important copyright issues at stake in the lawsuit, I've been most interested in the proposed book rights registry. A book rights registry would compile and maintain a database of rights holders, making it easy (and cheap!) to contact, query and pay rights holders for uses that are would not be allowed without their permission or provided for by fair use. In the current environment, it can cost hundreds of dollars to clear the usage rights for an in-copyright book, even without paying anything to rights holders. With a publisher-only settlement and continued prosecution now likely, my guess is that the book rights registry is either dead or years from being a reality.

It's ironic that the past week demonstrated how badly a book rights registry is needed. HathiTrust, the research library consortium formed to manage the scans of library books generated by the Google Books program, announced plans to expand access to a small number of works that they deemed to be orphans. The Authors' Guild then sued HathiTrust to block the expanded access.

The legal experts thought the suit "borders on the frivolous", due to serious problems with the "standing to sue" issue. Only copyright owners have standing to sue to enforce copyrights in the US, and none of the rights holders were parties to the Authors' Guild suit.

A funny thing happened on the way to the courtroom, though. Under intense scrutiny, one of the purported orphans turned out to have easy-to-find parents. The Authors Guild gleefully reported that the day before filing the suit, they were able to locate a rights holder "with a few minutes of googling". This report seemed to indicate incompetence all around, HathiTrust for neglecting the few minutes of googling in their orphan-identification workflow, and the Authors' Guild legal team, for failing to address their "standing to sue" problem with "a few minutes of googling".

A subsequent blog post from the Authors Guild was a revelation. It turns out that the Authors' Guild didn't really need a registry to find rights holders. By asking for help from their large number of blog readers, they were able to identify rights holders for many more of the purported orphan works. It seems that when large numbers of people are interested to find a rights holder, it's not so much of a problem. Of course a rights registry would help, but even the best registry can't fix everything.

I started following the Google Books case over two years ago because I thought it was important to increase access to all sorts of in-copyright works. What I learned in the process made me realize that a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all solution would never work, let alone pass judicial scrutiny. An equitable arrangement for academic authors would treat authors who write for a living unfairly; and vice versa. Authors in other countries would be ill-served by a process devised with American authors in mind. I realized that access to the works most important to book lovers would only happen with lots of reader support. And that realization has led to the work at Gluejar on Unglue.it, currently in the implementation stage.

Unglue.it will address "orphan works" the same way that the Authors' Guild has done in its recent blog posts. In addition to working with rights holders that want to offer creative commons licensing of ebooks to the public (ungluing them, in our parlance), we'll give users the opportunity to "wish" for the ungluing of any book that's been published. If a lot of users wish for a book, we'll check into who owns the rights, and give them a chance to make an offering. If we can't find the rights holder, we'll ask the people doing the wishing for help. If 10,000 people ( or even a dozen, for that matter) care about J.R. Salamanca's The Lost Country, they'll do a lot more than a few minutes of googling. They'll be knocking on his door and sending him postcards from Fiji.

When a lot of people care about a book, they'll have the combined economic power to do a lot more than opening a book to snippeting and search. We'll ask the rights holders for their price to give their book as an ebook to the world under a non-commercial creative commons license (CC BY-NC-ND). That will make it possible for everyone, everywhere, now and long into the future, to use the book the way the creator always intended- to read, to learn and to enjoy.

The Smell of a Book

2011-09-11T22:33:00.000-04:00

There's one part of the human brain that seems programmed to never forget things. It's somewhere in the limbic system, and it connects smells to emotions. This past week, deep in the bowels of New York Penn Station, that part or my brain was momentarily triggered by an acrid smell. Perhaps it was smoking train brakes or hot diesel oil, but it evoked a sad memory from ten years ago.

Smells connect us across decades, maybe across millennia. Some smells are hardwired to be pleasant or noxious, other smells are neutral and imprintable. Think of the smell of a new-born baby or the smell of your grandmother. Think of the smell of Starbucks, or of bread baking in the oven at home. Imagine being in a damp cave, or a medieval cathedral.

Scientists have studied this. It's now thought that the primal connection between smell and memory is a result of direct connections between our olfactory lobes and the hippocampus. Some scientists in Israel used functional MRI to see directly the involvement of the hippocampus in memories imprinted with strong smells. (Notes 1 and 2 and the picture.)

It's odd that so many people claim to love the smell of books. It's even stranger that people claim to love the smell of libraries or used bookstores. It's just old glue, ink, dust, mold, and decay. Odd, until you think about the time-travel aspects of smell.

In preparation for the upcoming launch of Unglue.it, I've been talking to a lot of people about the books that they love. "Love" in this context is not the "love" people might use casually to describe their relationship with a product for sale. Instead, people seem to relate to books the way they relate to people. There's the love for a teacher who makes a difference in your life. Love for a friend you helps you feel joy. The thrill of discovering a soul mate. And among authors, there's the blind love for a child that goes beyond all rationality.

The intensity of these emotions must get bound up with smells in the hippocampus to create a lasting impression on book lovers. When we smell a book all of these feelings resonate across time and they comfort us. Even in the future when all our reading is done on ebook readers or other screens, we'll keep real books around us like the clothing of a spouse or a parent lost to a tragedy, left in the bed to warm and comfort. And then we'll find strength to move on, but the spirit of the book will remain.

Notes:

Jonah Lehrer's article on the Israeli fMRI study is very accessible.
That study, "The Privileged Brain Representation of First Olfactory Associations" was written by Yaara Yeshurun, Hadas Lapid, Yadin Dudai and Noam Sobel in Current Biology 19(21), 1869-1874, (9 November 2009) and is available at http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(09)01857-0
Another human sensation mediated by the hippocampus is laughter. I suffered repeated bouts of this affliction upon reading a website claiming to promote an aerosol spray. I was almost unable to finish this post.

To Honor Project Gutenberg's Founder, Dedicate Something to the Public Domain

2011-09-07T21:58:00.004-04:00

The following is an obituary Of Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, who died yesterday. Its author has dedicated it to the public domain, which allows me to reprint it here:

Michael Stern Hart was born in Tacoma, Washington on March 8, 1947. He died on September 6, 2011 in his home in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 64. His is survived by his mother, Alice, and brother, Bennett. Michael was an Eagle Scout (Urbana Troop 6 and Explorer Post 12), and served in the Army in Korea during the Vietnam era.
Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart's life's work, spanning over 40 years.

Hart was an ardent technologist and futurist. A lifetime tinkerer, he acquired hands-on expertise with the technologies of the day: radio, hi-fi stereo, video equipment, and of course computers. He constantly looked into the future, to anticipate technological advances. One of his favorite speculations was that someday, everyone would be able to have their own copy of the Project Gutenberg collection or whatever subset desired. This vision came true, thanks to the advent of large inexpensive computer disk drives, and to the ubiquity of portable mobile devices, such as cell phones.

Hart also predicted the enhancement of automatic translation, which would provide all of the world's literature in over a hundred languages. While this goal has not yet been reached, by the time of his death Project Gutenberg hosted eBooks in 60 different languages, and was frequently highlighted as one of the best Internet-based resources.

A lifetime intellectual, Hart was inspired by his parents, both professors at the University of Illinois, to seek truth and to question authority. One of his favorite recent quotes, credited to George Bernard Shaw, is characteristic of his approach to life:
 "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.  Unreasonablepeople attempt to adapt the world to themselves.  All progress,therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
Michael prided himself on being unreasonable, and only in the later years of life did he mellow sufficiently to occasionally refrain from debate. Yet, his passion for life, and all the things in it, never abated.

Frugal to a fault, Michael glided through life with many possessions and friends, but very few expenses. He used home remedies rather than seeing doctors. He fixed his own house and car. He built many computers, stereos, and other gear, often from discarded components.

Michael S. Hart left a major mark on the world. The invention of eBooks was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that eBooks are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature. Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.

In July 2011, Michael wrote these words, which summarize his goals and his lasting legacy: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven't thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we’re all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job.” He had this advice for those seeking to make literature available to all people, especially children:
 "Learning is its own reward.  Nothing I cansay is better than that."
Michael is remembered as a dear friend, who sacrificed personal luxury to fight for literacy, and for preservation of public domain rights and resources, towards the greater good.

This obituary is granted to the public domain by its author, Dr. Gregory B. Newby.

The best way to honor Hart's life, I think, is to dedicate one or more works to the public domain. I have just dedicated my Ph. D. Dissertation to the public domain: Hot Electron Resistance and Magnetoresistance in High Purity Gallium Arsenide. And this blog post, too, is hereby dedicated to the public domain. That means you can take it apart, copy pieces of it, remix it, make a Youtube video from it, perform it as a dance, even pretend that you wrote it, instead of me. And that would be OK with me and Michael Hart. Go crazy.

Update (9/9): I've been reminded that the easiest way to do a public domain dedication is to upload the work to Internet Archive. As I did.

Ungluing eBooks Progress Report: We Have a Name!

2011-08-30T01:30:00.002-04:00

Unglue.It will be the name of Gluejar's ungluing ebooks website. Based on feedback from blog readers and many others, we ditched the horrible-in-retrospect "BookPatrons.org", and focused on names that used the "ungluing ebooks" metaphor, which has no baggage and seems to work pretty well. We then polled subscribers to the gluejar mailing list, and twitter followers, who overwhelmingly preferred "unglue.it" over the two other finalists. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

For readers new to this blog, "ungluing ebooks" is what I'm calling the process of raising money to make creative-commons licensed ebook editions of the books that you love, so that everyone, everywhere can read them. You betcha.

The ".it" top level domain shows every indication of being the next ".ly". I recently attended a session of the New York Tech Meetup which featured presentations from startups "want.it" and "knowabout.it". ".it" is the domain for Italy. We'll want to include Italy in the service as soon as possible. I've never been to Italy. Now that I think of it, the president of any company that wants to use a country's top level domain should be required to show up there sometime. Libya and Tuvalu could use the tourism dollars! (Yes, we have unglueit.com, too.)

After Hurricane Irene.

We're developing the Unglue.it website on the Amazon cloud; in addition to the four full time Gluejar staff, we have three design and development contractors working on its construction. It's a great team, but we're still figuring out how to make our virtual office work. Even when Irene knocks out our power.

Our prototype is using the PayPal payment processing infrastructure, various bibliographic web services, and the Django web application framework. Right now, it looks like we'll hit alpha in October.

Many of the development tools we're using are new to me. I'm still trying to understand Github, and I'm enamored of Pivotal Tracker.

One of our big decisions has been to use an invitation-only rights holder strategy during the launch phase. Since dealing with rights holders (authors or publishers) is likely to be our most human-intensive task to begin with, we need to carefully manage the number of rights holders we deal with. We'll launch with a limited number of rights holders, and thus a limited number of works to unglue. If you're an author or publisher interested in ungluing a work that you have rights to, please fill out the form at the Gluejar rights holder contact page, and maybe we'll invite you. After launch, we'll add rights holders based on interest expressed by ungluers (anyone who registers with the site). Ungluers will be able to ask for any published book to be unglued.

It's an exciting and intense period for us, but rewarding in many (non-financial) ways. We hope you'll agree it'll be worth the wait.

Peak Book Value

2011-08-24T22:46:00.001-04:00

"Don't be an author unless you can't not be an author" was the triple negative I heard at recent author's panel in my town. The speaker was a literary agent offering scant encouragement to hopeful authors. Making a living by writing books is just so difficult these days, that only pure love and passion for writing can justify such a poorly rewarded existence.

Part of the reason for this is basic supply and demand economics. On the demand side, people will read only a certain number of books per year, and only a fraction of those are purchased in a way that generates revenue for the author. The people who read and buy the most books also patronize libraries and used book stores. While library sales are quite profitable for publishers due to the lack of returns, the author's royalty on a library book read by 50 people is the same as on a book sold through a bookstore. Even so, despite all the nonsense about people reading fewer books because of the internet, book sales keep on rising, year after year. Last, year, the AAP reported US book sales up 2.2% from 2009 to 2010.

It's the supply side that's the problem for authors. As difficult as it is to get published by a reputable publisher, the supply of books keeps increasing. According to Bowker, which publishes Books in Print, 316,480 books were published by traditional publishers in the US last year, a 4.6% increase over the prior year. So if you do the math, the average published book grossed 2.4% less in 2010 than in 2009.

But it's worse than that. Bowker also reports the number of books published non-traditionally. Non-traditional means publishers of print-on-demand books, public domain reprints, author-financed books: LuLu, xlibris, Amazon's createSpace, AuthorHouse, BiblioBazaar, and Kessinger Books. This category increased 169% from 1,033,065 in 2009 to an amazing 2,776,260 books in 2010.

Even if 90% these titles are spam, the remaining 10% equal the number of traditionally published books. If you include these, the average sales revenue per published book has dropped by half over the past 3 years.

This analysis doesn't consider backlist sales, which historically have been the most profitable for publishers. Backlists, as measured by Books In Print, have expanded, even as their contribution to total sales has apparently declined over the years. Books in Print has 3 times as many entries in 2011 as it had 8 years earlier; total revenue increased only 21%.

According to John Thompson's masterful "Merchants of Culture", the decreasing sales contribution of the back list is due to a combination of factors. The "big book" focus of mass market retailers such as Walmart, Target, and the big box book stores concentrate consumer attention on the top list, while competition from cheap editions of public domain "classic" titles has squeezed the backlist. I think another factor is a more efficient used book market enabled by the internet.

If book rights were securities, traders would be short-selling. On the demand side, the pluses come with downsides. eBooks could expand backlist sales by destroying the library and used-book channels; rapidly growing international markets are price sensitive, and particularly vulnerable to piracy.

On the supply side, the downward pressure on book value is pervasive. Public domain books, which include the crowning cultural achievements of humanity, will be free and are worthy of readers' precious time. The mass digitization of in-copyright books means that books no longer go "out of print". But to my mind, the biggest source of price pressure for the traditionally published book will be the creative output of non-professional and semi-professional writers, offering their work for free.

In many ways, the book industry is becoming like the movie/television/video industry. The blockbusters are getting bigger, and established market segmentation is being rearranged by the internet. We're starting to see services labeled as "the Netflix of books". We've not yet seen the emergence of a "YouTube for books", but at least a few readers feel that some blogs are worth reading.

It's undeniable that future revenue streams from books, and thus the worth of a book, have a huge uncertainty. Who knows, ebook rights might turn out to be the next tulip mania.

Notes:

The effect of an increasing supply of books is not new. The New York Times noted the issue 6 years ago.
A good resource on book industry statistics comes from Foner Books.

What's a Book Worth?

2011-08-14T13:19:00.000-04:00

Imagine you're an author of a book that was published a few years ago, but you've retained ebook rights. Someone wants to be able to give away digital copies of the book for free to an unlimited number of readers. What sort of fee should you demand? After all, if everyone can get your book for free, they probably won't be buying the ebook anymore, and though some people might still want to buy a print copy, chances are there won't be a lot of them.

This is the central question that I've been asked over and over again when I explain the concept behind Gluejar's forthcoming ungluing ebooks service. How much is it going to cost to unglue a book?

A book industry veteran told me that when publishers sell backlist titles to other publishers, the rule of thumb is to pay twice the previous year's net sales for a backlist title. That seems like a good deal to me. If a book that sold at $15 wholesale was selling 1000 copies per year, a publisher should expect to pay $30,000 to acquire the title (and the associated revenue stream).

But I'm the type that has to understand where these simple-sounding rules come from. In an environment where everything is changing, it's worth understanding whether "rules of thumb" still have hands to attach to.

Here's another thing to imagine. Suppose someone offered to pay you $1000 per year, forever. What would you pay that person in exchange for that (reliable) promise?

If you are not a mathematician or a banker, you might suppose that no amount of money could secure such a great deal. A revenue stream that lasts forever should have infinite value, shouldn't it? It is my duty to tell you that if you thought that, you would be wrong, and the bankers and their mathematicians would be right. In fact, you can easily purchase such a revenue stream. It is called a US Treasury Bond.

For the current discussion, I will ignore the odd fact that the securities markets have for the past few days responded to Standard & Poors' downgrade of US Treasury obligations by making the same obligations more valuable. That says a lot about both Standard & Poors and US Treasury Bonds, but it says nothing about selling books.

New World Disorder, by Stephen Barnwell

Today, you can buy a 30 year treasury bond that pays interest of 3.54%. That means that you can pay $28249 for an investment that pays you $1000 a year for 30 years, and then returns your $28,249 to you. If you want a AAA investment that does the same over a hundred year term, you can buy 100 year MIT bonds at a lower price.

Owning rights to a book that pays you $1000 this year is not nearly as good a deal as owning a treasury bond that pays the same. That's because most books sell fewer copies year after year. Let's suppose that a book's sales decline 30% per year. Then the total revenue from that book will be

R = $1000(1+ 0.7 + 0.7² + 0.7³ + 0.7⁴ + 0.7⁵+ ...)

continued to infinity. Here's where math comes in. That infinite sum is equal to a simple ratio:

R = $1000/(1 - 0.7) = $3333

But you'd do better putting the $3333 into T-bills, because very few books have the same sales year after year. If the T-bill interest rate is r and the sales decline is d, then the value of the book's revenue stream is

R= $1000/(1 - r - d )

Finally, it's important to note that revenue is not the same as profit. If a book wholesales for $15, a publisher probably keeps only half that as margin. So if the publisher's margin is m, and this years net sales is N, the revenue stream is worth N * m *(1/(1-r-d)). So, for

m = 50%
r = 70%
d = 3.54%

the revenue stream is worth 1.89 times net sales. Those thumb guys weren't so far off!

Many authors will look at these calculations with some skepticism. What if a book is discovered by Oprah and becomes an overnight success? There are some things to keep in mind. First, Oprah isn't doing her show any more. If you think of owning a book as a lottery ticket, there are two more things to think about:

You can take cash and buy real lottery tickets
there might be ways to improve the lottery odds of a book. Giving your book to a million people for free, might greatly increase the value of your next book if they love the first. Just hang on to the movie rights!

It's hard to know how rapidly book sales decline. I expect it varies from genre to genre. No one knows how changes in the book industry will effect individual book sales either; I'll write about that in my next post. But the numbers indicate to me that there's plenty of room for new ways for authors realize what their books are worth.

Structures to Build

2011-08-09T00:03:00.002-04:00

Being a scientist means asking good questions. A good question is one that you don't know the answer to, but the answer has consequences. In designing experiments, a good scientist can't worry so much about the consequences of the answer, because the truth is more important.

Being an entrepreneur also means dealing with questions you don't know the answer to. But the consequences matter much more than the answer. The entrepreneur does experiments too, but the object is to obtain a good outcome, not to learn the truth.

Experimentation has never been more important for the word of books and the stories they tell. We don't know how books will be distributed ten years from now. We don't even know if public libraries will exist. We hardly know how verbal stories will be told in 10 years. The answers to these questions are of great import to our societies and to the generations that will come. Since I think of myself as both a scientist and an entrepreneur, I have a lot of questions to answer.

The Uni Project- Home Stretch

While I'm busy with the experiment in the business of books that is Gluejar, I can't help but be fascinated other sorts of experiments that are in progress, and which are worthy of public support. While I'm sure that interesting experiments are being conducted in academic and government institutions and that many of these are being supported by foundations and research agencies, the most audacious experiments I know of are being conducted by passionate individuals and being funded by in non-traditional venues such as Kickstarter.

One of these is the Uni Project. Last year, I wrote about the Chinatown Storefront Library. Never intended to be more than a temporary installation, it has left a legacy of understanding of the ways a space designed for reading and books can interact with and enrich a community. The team behind that project, Sam and Leslie Davol, wondered whether structures could designed specifically to be temporary, itinerant libraries- quick to deploy, easy to operate, and dramatic to see. Working with Professor J. Meejin Yoon of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, they came up with a concept for a modular system of stackable cubes, each of which could contain a micro-collection of library materials.

I don't know whether this idea will work. But I do know how to help them find out: support them on Kickstarter. The project is currently 90% funded; they have 6 more days to raise another $1900. Update 8/11: The Uni achieved its goal with 3 days to spare!

I learned about another compelling experiment last week. This one aims to have people all around the New York City area contribute to a location based story, using an augmented-reality view of the twin towers as a unifying theme. Founded by Brian August, a New York technology executive who describes himself as "obsessed with the twin towers" 110 Stories will be an iPhone app that aims to both inspire and document the stories of the millions of us who saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center almost every day until they were destroyed on 9/11 almost ten years ago. Although the augmented reality feature gets the buzz, I think the story-telling aspects will be a lot more interesting in the long term. Imagine a location-aware ebook using the technology that Liza Daly demonstrated last year.

110 Stories

As of tonight, 110 stories has blown through its goal of $25,000 with the help of 423 backers, and the fundraising campaign has 4 days to go.

As we build Gluejar's ungluing books website, we're trying to work out whether the "only six days left" aspect of Kickstarter projects is a necessary ingredient for a crowd-funding site. Since we'll be working to "unglue" books that have already been written and published, they won't disappear if a fundraising goal isn't reached by a given cutoff date. A rights holder that's willing to release a creative commons edition of a book for $10,000 on July 31 will probably still be willing to do so on August 15, so there's not the same time-pressure in an ungluing campaigns.

Questions to answer. Towers to build.

Library Data Beyond the Like Button

2011-07-31T23:26:00.002-04:00

"Aren't you supposed to be working on your new business? That ungluing ebooks thing? Instead you keep writing about library data, whatever that is. What's going on?"

No, really, it all fits together in the end. But to explain, I need to talk you beyond the "Like Button".

Earlier this month, I attended a lecture at the New York Public Library. The topic was Linked Open Data, and the speaker was Jon Voss, who's been applying this technology to historical maps. It was striking to see how many people from many institutions turned out, and how enthusiastically Jon's talk was received. The interest in Linked Data was similarly high at the American Library Association Meeting in New Orleans, where my session (presented with Ross Singer of Talis) was only one of several Linked Data sessions that packed meeting rooms and forced attendees to listen from hallways.

I think it's important to convert this level of interest into action. The question is, what can be done now to get closer to the vision of ubiquitous interoperable data? My last three posts have explored what libraries might do to better position their presence in search engines and in social networks using schema.org vocabulary and Open Graph Protocol. In these applications, library data enables users to do very specific things on the web- find a library page in a search engine or "Like" a library page in a Facebook. But there's so much more that could be done with the data.

I think that library data should be handled as if it was made of gold, not of diamond.

Perhaps the most amazing property of gold is its malleability. Gold can be pounded into a sheet so thin that it's transparent to light. An ounce of gold can be made into leaf that will cover 25 square meters.

There is a natural tendency to treat library data as a gem that needs skillful cutting and polishing. The resulting jewel will be so valuable that users will beat down library websites to get at the gems. Yeah.

The reality is that library data in much more valuable as a thin layer that covers huge swaths of material. When data is spread thinly, it has a better chance of connecting with data from other libraries and with other sorts of institutions: Museums, archives, businesses, and communities. By contrast, deep data, the sort that focuses on a specific problem space, is unlikely to cross domains or applications without a lot of custom programming and data tweaking.

Here's the example that's driven my interest in opening up library linked data: At Gluejar, we're building a website that will ask people to go beyond "liking" books. We believe that books are so important to people that they will want to give them to the world; to do that we'll need to raise money. If lots of people join together around a book, it will be easy to raise the money we need, just as public radio stations find enough supporters to make the radio free to everyone.

We don't want our website to be a book discovery website, or a social network of readers, or a library catalog; other sites to that just fine. What we need is for users to click "support this book" buttons on all sorts of websites, including library catalogs. And our software needs to pull just a bit of data off of a webpage to allow us to figure out which book the user wants to support. It doesn't sound so difficult. But we can only support to or three different interfaces to that data. If library websites all put a little more structured data in their HTML, we could do some amazing things. But they don't, and we have to settle for "sort of works most of the time".

Real books get used in all sorts of ways. People annotate them, they suggest them to friends, they give them away, they quote them, and they cite them. People make "TBR" piles next to their beds. Sometimes, they even read and remember them as long as they live. The ability to do these same things on the web would be pure gold.

Liking Library Data

2011-07-27T15:39:00.004-04:00

If you had told me ten years ago that teenagers would be spending free time "curating their social graphs", I would have looked at you kinda funny. Of course, ten years ago, they were learning about metadata from Pokemon cards, so maybe I should have seen it coming.

Social networking websites have made us all aware of the value of modeling aspects of our daily lives in graph databases, even if we don't realize that's what we're doing. Since the "semantic web" is predicated on the idea that ALL knowledge can be usefully represented as a giant, global graph, it's perhaps not so surprising that the most familiar, and most widely implemented application of semantic web technologies has been Facebook's "Like" button.

When you click a Like button, an arc is added to Facebook's representation of your social graph. The arc links a node that represents you and another node that represents the thing you liked. As you interact with your social graph via Facebook, the added Like arc may introduce new interactions.

Google must think this is really important. They want you to start clicking "+1" buttons, which presumably will help them deliver better search. (You can try following me+, but I'm not sure what I'll do with it.)

The technology that Facebook has favored for building new objects to but in the social graph is derived from RDFa, which adds structured data into ordinary web pages. It's quite similar to "microdata", a competing technology that was recently endorsed by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Facebook's vocabulary for the things it's interested in is called Open Graph Protocol (OGP), which could be considered a competitor for Schema.org.

My previous post described how a library might use microdata to help users of search engines find things in the library. While I think that eventually this will be an necessity for every library offering digital services, the are a bunch of caveats that limit the short-term utility of doing so. Some of these were neatly described in a post by Ed Chamberlain:

the library website needs to implement a site-map that search engine's crawlers can use to find all the items in the Library's catalog
the library's catalog needs to be efficient enough to not be burdened by the crawlers. Many library catalog systems are disgracefully inefficient.
the library's catalog needs to support persistent URLs. (Most systems do this, but it was only ten years ago that I caused Harvard's catalog to crash by trying to get it to persist links. Sorry.)

But the clincher is that web search engines are still suspicious of metadata. Spammers are constantly trying to deceive search engines. So search engines have white-lists, and unless your website is on the white-list, the search engines won't trust your structured metadata. The data might be of great use to a specialized crawler designed to aggregate metadata from libraries, but there's a chicken and egg problem: these crawlers won't be built before libraries start publishing their data.

Facebook's OGP may have more immediate benefits. Libraries are inextricably linked to their communities; what is a community if not a web of relationships? Libraries are uniquely positioned to insert books into real world social networks. A phrase I heard at ALA was "Libraries are about connections, not collections".

Libraries don't need to implement OGP to put a like button on a web page, but without OGP Facebook would understand the "Like" to be about the web page, rather than about the book or other library item.

To show what OGP might look like on a library catalog page, using the same example I used in my post on "spoonfeeding library data to search engines":

<html> 
<head> 
<title>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</title>
</head> 
<body> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

Open Graph Protocol wants the web page to be the digital surrogate for the thing to be inserted into the social graph, and so it wants to see metadata about the thing in the web page's meta tags. Most library catalog systems already put metadata in metatags, so this part shouldn't be horribly impossible.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
      xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"> 
<head> 
<title>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="Avatar - Mysteries of Septagram #2"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="book"/>
<meta property="og:isbn" content="9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:url"   
      content="http://library.example.edu/isbn/9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:image" 
      content="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Example Library"/>
<meta property="fb:admins" content="USER_ID"/>
</head> 
<body> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

The first thing that OGP does is to call out xml namespaces- one for xhtml, a second for Open Graph Protocol, and a third for some specific-to-Facebook properties. A brief look at OGP reveals that it's even more bare bones than schema.org; you can't even express the fact that "Paul Bryers" is the author of "Avatar".

This is less of an issue than you might imagine, because OGP uses a syntax that's a subset of RDFa, so you can add namespaces and structured data to your heart's desire, though Facebook will probably ignore it.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
      xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> 
<head> 
<title>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</title>
<meta property="og:title" 
      content="Avatar - Mysteries of Septagram #2"/>
<meta property="og:type" 
      content="book"/>
<meta property="og:isbn" 
      content="9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:url"   
      content="http://library.example.edu/isbn/9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:image" 
      content="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" 
      content="Example Library"/>
<meta property="fb:app_id" 
      content="183518461711560"/>
</head> 
<body> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span rel="dc:creator">Author: 
    <span typeof="foaf:Person" 
        property="foaf:name">Paul Bryers
    </span> (born 1945)
 </span>
 <span rel="dc:subject">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

The next step is to add the actual like button by embedding a javascript from Facebook:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script   src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=183518461711560&xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:like href="http://library.example.edu/isbn/9780340930762/" 
       send="false" width="450" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like>

The "og:url" property tells facebook the "canonical" url for this page- the url that Facebook should scrape the metadata from.

Now here's a big problem. Once you put the like button javascript on a web page, Facebook can track all the users that visit that page. This goes against the traditional privacy expectations that users have of libraries. In some jurisdictions, it may even be against the law for a public library to allow a third party to track users in this way. I expect it shouldn't be hard to modify the implementation so that the script is executed only if the user clicks the "Like" button, but I've not been able to find a case anyone has done this.

It seems to me that injecting library resources into social networks is important. The libraries and the social networks that figure out how to do that will enrich our communities and the great global graph that is humanity.

Spoonfeeding Library Data to Search Engines

2011-07-12T02:01:00.003-04:00

CC-NC-BY rocketship

When you talk to a search engine, you need to realize that it's just a humongous baby. You can't expect it to understand complicated things. You would never try to teach language to a human baby by reading it Nietzsche, and you shouldn't expect a baby google to learn bibliographic data by feeding it MARC (or RDA or METS or MODS, or even ONIX).

When a baby says "goo-goo" to you, you don't criticize its misuse of the subjunctive. You say "goo-goo" back. When Google tells you that that it wants to hear "schema.org" microdata, you don't try to tell it about the first indicator of the 856 ‡u subfield. You give it schema.org microdata, no matter how babyish that seems.

It's important to build up a baby's self-confidence. When baby google expresses interest in the number of pages of a book, you don't really want to be specifying that there are ix pages numbered with roman numerals and 153 pages with arabic numerals in shorthand code. When baby google wants to know whether a book is "family friendly" you don't want to tell it about 521 special audience characteristics, you just want to tell it whether or not it's porn.

If you haven't looked at the schema.org model for books, now's a good time. Don't expect to find a brilliant model for book metadata, expect to find out what a bibliographic neophyte machine thinks it can use a billion times a day. Schema.org was designed by engineers from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Remember, their goal in designing it was not to describe things well, it was to make their search results better and easier to use.

The thing is, it's not such a big deal to include this sort of data in a page that comes from an library OPAC (online catalog). An OPAC that publishes unstructured data produces HTML that looks something like this:

<div> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

The first step is to mark something as the root object. You do that with the itemscope attribute:

<div itemscope> 
<h1>Avatar</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

A microdata-aware search engine looking at this will start building a model. So far, the model has one object, which I'll denote with a red box.

The second step, using microdata and Schema.org, is to give the object a type. You do that with the itemtype attribute:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

Now the object in the model has acquired the type "Book" (or more precisely, the type "http://schema.org/Book".

Next, we give the Book object some properties:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author:

<span itemprop="author">Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span></span> 
 <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

Note that while the library record for this book attempts to convey the title complexity: "245 10 $aAvatar /$cPaul Bryers.$", the search engine doesn't care yet. The book is part of a series: 490 1 $aThe mysteries of the Septagram$, and the search engines don't want to know about that either. Eventually, they'll learn.
The model built by the search engine looks like this:

So far, all the property values have been simple text strings. We can also add properties that are links:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author:

<span itemprop="author">Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span></span> 
 <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg"

itemprop="image">
</div>

The model grows.

Finally, we want to say that the author, Paul Bryers, is an object in his own right. In fact, we have to, because the value of an author property has to be a Person or an Organization in Schema.org. So we add another itemscope attribute, and give him some properties:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book"> 
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <div itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org.Person">

Author:  <span itemprop="name">Paul Bryers</span>

(born <span itemprop="birthDate">1945</span>)
 </div>
 <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg"

itemprop="image">
</div>

That wasn't so hard. Baby has this picture in his tyrannical little head:

Which it can easily turn into a "rich snippet" that looks like this:

Though you know all it really cares about is milk.

Here's a quick overview of the properties a Schema.org/Book can have (the values in parentheses indicate a type for the property value):

Properties from http://schema.org/Thing

description
image(URL)
name
url(URL)

Properties from http://schema.org/CreativeWork

about(Thing)
aggregateRating(AggregateRating)
audio(AudioObject)
author(Person or Organization)
awards
contentLocation(Place)
contentRating
datePublished(Date)
editor(Person)
encodings(MediaObject)
genre
headline
inLanguage
interactionCount
isFamilyFriendly(Boolean)
keywords
offers(Offer)
publisher(Organization)
reviews(Review)
video(VideoObject)

Properties from http://schema.org/Book

bookEdition
bookFormat(BookFormatType)
illustrator(Person)
isbn
numberOfPages(Integer)

This post is the second derived from my talk at ALA in New Orleans. The first post discussed the changing role of digital surragates in a fully digital world. The next will discuss "Like" buttons.

Library Data: Why Bother?

2011-07-08T14:43:00.009-04:00

When face recognition came out in iPhoto, I was amused when it found faces in shrubbery and asked me whether they were friends of mine. iPhoto, you have such a sense of humor!

But then iPhoto looked at this picture of a wall of stone faces in Baoding, China. It highlighted one of the faces and asked me "Is this Jane?" I was taken aback, because the stone depicted Jane's father. iPhoto was not as stupid as I thought it was- it could even see family resemblances.

Facial recognition software is getting better and better, which is one reason people are so worried about the privacy implications of Facebook's autotagging of pictures. Imagine what computers will be able to do with photos in 10 years! They'll be able to recognize pictures of bananas, boats, beetles and books. I'm thinking it's probably not worth it to fill in a lot of iPhoto metadata.

I wish I had thought about facial recognition when I was preparing my talk for the American Library Association Conference in New Orleans. I wanted my talk to motivate applications for Linked Open Data in libraries, and in thinking about why libraries should be charting a path towards Linked Data, I realized that I needed to examine first of all the motivation for libraries to be in the bibliographic data business in the first place.

Originally, libraries invested in bibliographic data to help people find things. Libraries are big and have a lot of books. It's impractical for library users to find books solely by walking the stacks, unless the object of the search has been anticipated by the ordering of books on the shelves. The paper cards in the card catalog could be easily duplicated to enable many types of search in one compact location. The cards served as surrogates for the physical books.

When library catalogs became digital, much more powerful searches could be done. The books acquired digital surrogates that could be searched with incredible speed. These surrogates could be used for a lot of things, including various library management tasks, but finding things was still the biggest motivation for the catalog data.

We're now in the midst of a transition where books are turning into digital things, but cataloging data hasn't changed a whole lot. Libraries still need their digital surrogates because most publishers don't trust them with the full text of books. But without full text, libraries are unable to provide the full featured discovery that a a search engine with access to both the full text and metadata (Google, Overdrive, etc.) can provide.

At the same time, digital content files are being packed with more and more metadata from the source. Photographs now contain metadata about where, when and how they were taken; for a dramatic example of how this data might be used, take a look at this study from the online dating site OKCupid. Book publishers are paying increased attention to title-level metadata, and metadata is being built into new standards such as EPUB3. To some extent, this metadata is competing for the world's attention with library-sourced metadata.

Libraries have two paths to deal with this situation. One alternative is to insist on getting the full text for everything they offer. (Unglued ebooks offer that, that's what we're working on at Gluejar.)

The other alternative for libraries is to feed their bibliographic data to search engines so that library users can discover books in libraries. Outside libraries, this process is known as "Search Engine Optimization". When I said during my talk that this should be the number one purpose of library data looking forward, one tweeter said it was "bumming her out". If the term "Search Engine Optimization" doesn't work for you, just think of it as "helping people find things".

Library produced data is still important, but it's not essential in the way that it used to be. The most incisive question during my talk pointed out that the sort of cataloging that libraries do is still absolutely essential for things like photographs and other digital archival material. That's very true, but only because automated analysis of photographs and other materials is computationally hard. In ten years, that might not be true. iPhoto might even be enough.

In the big picture, very little will change: libraries will need to be in the data business to help people find things. In the close-up view, everything is changing- the materials and players are different, the machines are different, and the technologies can do things that were hard to imagine even 20 years ago.

In a following post, I'll describe ways that libraries can start publishing linked data, feeding search engines, and keep on helping people find stuff. The slides from my talk (minus some copyrighted photos) are available as PDF (4.8MB) and PPTX (3.5MB).

3M's eBook Cloud Library Didn't Come Out of Nowhere!

2011-06-30T00:14:00.006-04:00

When the Douglas County Libraries in Colorado installed self check-in stations a while ago, they realized that hey had an opportunity to restructure their space. The circulation desk that dominated the main entrance was no longer needed. It seemed obvious to Library Director Jamie LaRue what to put in its place. Libraries need to greet their visitors with displays of books available for immediate checkout. 80% of Douglas County's adult circulation is generated by visual displays of books, so the best way to entice visitors to read is to show them great books to read.

When Douglas County began investigating how to put ebooks into county resident's computers, they wanted to do something similar. A user looking for ebooks should be greeted with a virtual bookshelf of books waiting to be checked out. LaRue was not satisfied with the offering of industry leader Overdrive because he couldn't do such a simple thing.

Public libraries that offer ebooks are frequently faced with problems posed by the strong demand for ebooks. Their users are frequently disappointed that the ebooks they want are always checked out. Overdrive has not yet implemented an programming interface that would allow library catalogs to check on an ebook's availability before showing it to a user, so the process of finding an available ebook can involve a lot of tedious clicks.

To address these needs, Overdrive has announced the "Overdrive WIN" service, which will address better integration with library automation software along with a host of other improvements and service innovations.

I spoke with a number of library automation vendors at this past weekend's American Library Association meeting in New Orleans. eBook integration is high on the list of their customers' wish lists, but I couldn't find any that could tell me when they would be implementing better Overdrive integration, though many of them were in "discussions".

A new vendor worth mentioning was Toronto-based BiblioCommons, whose EC2-cloud-based OPAC service has been implemented by Seattle Public Library and is in beta with New York Public Library. I'd been hearing about BiblioCommons for long enough that I'd had my doubts as their reality. At ALA, they demoed a clean, modern web interface with plenty of social features- go take a look at Seattle Public. Given NYPL's status as a prominent Overdrive customer and Bibliocommons' actively developing codebase, I had hoped to see some preview glimpses of Overdrive WIN in BiblioCommons, but had no such luck.

Back in Douglas County, Jamie LaRue wasn't satisfied with the available options, so around the end of 2010, he had his team approach their auto-check-in vendor, 3M, to see if they could do something about ebooks. As luck would have it, they could. And they did.

Although 3M's entrance into the library ebook platform business came as a complete surprise to many in libraries and publishing, it seems obvious in retrospect. 3M's RFID tag, self-checkout/checkin, and detection businesses were already integrated with library automation systems, so much of the code needed to integrate to library systems was already written. 3M licensed ebook reader and DRM systems from Adobe, and in the space of six months, with the advice and help of customers such as Douglas County, was able to assemble a strong set of services it is branding as the "3M Cloud Library". These include reader software for iOS and Android, as well as spiffy "3M Discovery Terminals", electronic kiosks "with an intuitive touch-based interface". (pictured) 3M is even going to sell "white-label" eReader devices with software tweaked to meet the needs of libraries that want to lend devices.

While 3M is arguably breaking new ground in integration of ebooks with library systems, 3M is far behind Overdrive in the area of publisher relations, which can't just be switched on in a mere 6 months. Overdrive has announced expansions of its offerings in the school and academic markets. Meanwhile, 3M is going in publishers' back doors as it helps the State of Kansas withdraw from an awkwardly drafted Overdrive contract, which Kansas says allows them to move purchased content from Overdrive to other platforms. It's in publishers' interests to have a library ebook channel that competes with Overdrive, but they do SO like to be asked permission first.

For his part, LaRue just wants to be able to tailor his library service to the needs of his community. "I want to provide a quality, integrated experience with a local focus" is what he told me. That doesn't seem to be asking so much.

Update 6/30/11: At The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder reported in May that a lot of 3M's reading platform was sourced from txtr, a German start-up they'd invested in. I wasn't able to confirm this at ALA, but have since done so. The Adobe DRM implementation, reading software, apps, presentation interfaces all originated in txtr. I'm also told by multiple sources that 3M has been talking to publishers since at least December 2010.

Four Times Around the Library World

2011-06-27T19:41:00.003-04:00

The New Orleans Convention Center is sandwiched between the warehouse district and some railroad tracks, and as a result, it's a kilometer long, end to end. This past weekend, it has hosted the American Library Association Annual Meeting. I've walked the length of the convention center about 10 times over the past 4 days. It's another kilometer from my hotel to it's near end, so add another 8 km to my total. Bourbon Street is 1.3 km down and back; so add 3 km there. There were 2.5 km of exhibits on the show floor at ALA; I make it a point to look at every one, at least briefly. So my ALA pedometer racked up about 25 km (over 15 miles, for the metrically challenged).

It's not over yet, but the ALA conference twitter feed says this week's attendance is over 20,000, including exhibitors. (Update: the final totals are 14,969 attendees and 5,217 exhibitors.) Their mileage may vary, but my estimate is that on average, an ALA attendee walked about 5 miles in total. So the grand total of walking at ALA should be about 160,000 km. That's 4 times the circumference of the earth.

All that walking is good for us. I replenished many of those calories at Cochon, where I hosted some lunches to tell librarians about Gluejar. But the Buttermilk Pecan Tart I had on Friday was worth the whole trip to New Orleans. The pleasure capital of Louisiana has moved a mile south as far as I'm concerned!

Cochon brought back memories of 5 years ago, when ALA was the first big convention to come to ALA after Hurricane Katrina. Cochon had opened just a week before, and I raved to friends after having oven-roasted oysters there. By the end of ALA 2006, the place was packed.

The meeting five years ago was a special one; the city was far from having being repaired or rebuilt, and many workers had been bussed in and bunked in temporary housing just so we could come. Everyone was just so happy to see us, it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. In New Orleans they still remember the weekend that librarians brought the city of New Orleans back to life.

EPUB 3 Beefs Up Metadata, but Omits Semantic Enrichment

2011-06-22T20:25:00.006-04:00

Ironic amusement fills me when I hear book industry people say things like "metadata has become cool", or "context is everything". Welcome to the 20th century and all that. Meanwhile, in the library industry, metadata has been cool long enough to coat everything with a thick rind of freezer burn.

There's good news and notsogood news for ebook metadata. The revision to the EPUB standard, published just a month ago, includes metadata tools that could eventually lead to a new era of metadata cooperation between publishers and the entire book supply chain, including libraries. At the same time, the revision fails to take advantage of ready-made vehicles for semantic enrichment of content, a move that could still provide new types of revenue for publishers while giving libraries new opportunities to remain relevant as books become digital.

Since I'm incurably optimistic, I'll start with the half-full glass: Publication-level metadata. EPUB 3 includes a whole bunch of ways to include publication-level metadata in an EPUB container. As an example, imagine an EPUB3 for "Emma" with this mark-up in its package document (essentially the navigation directory for the book):

<metadata>
 ... 
 <meta property="dcterms:identifier" 
 id="pub-id">urn:uuid:A1B0D67E-2E81-4DF5-9E67-A64CBE366809</meta>
 <link rel="marc21xml-record"  href="http://www.archive.org/download/cihm_29722/cihm_29722_marc.xml" />
 <link rel="marc21xml-record"  
 href="/cihm_29722_marc.xml" />
 <link rel="foaf:homepage" href="http://openlibrary.org/books/OL24234129M/Emma" />
 ...
</metadata>

In this example, the first link element points to a MARC 21 xml record (MARC 21 is a blattarian standard for library metadata (look it up)) at the Internet Archive. The second link element points to the same record included in the EPUB container itself. There is also built-in vocabulary that allows the link element to point to ONIX, MODS, and XMP metadata records.

The example also shows that other vocabularies (such as FOAF) can be added for use in metadata elements. So, if you're a believer in RDA, you can put that in an EPUB file as well.

The meta element can also be used in the EPUB package document's metadata block. It's defined quite differently from HTML5's empty meta element, with an about attribute and allowed text content. In principle, it can be used to encode arbitrary RDF triples, thanks to a prefix extension mechanism borrowed from RDFa which allows EPUB authors to add vocabularies to their documents.

These capabilities, on their own, could support major changes in the way that books are produced, delivered and accessed. In a publisher workflow, the EPUB file could serve as the carrier for all the components and versions of a book, even bits that today might be left out or lost in the caverns of so-called "content management systems". A distributor would no longer need to match up content files with records in a separate metadata feed. EPUB books for libraries could be preloaded with cataloging and enrichment data, greatly simplifying the process of making the ebooks accessible in libraries.

Given the great advances for "package-level" metadata, it's a bit disappointing that semantic mark-up of content documents missed the EPUB 3 boat. The story is a bit complicated, and it's far from over. Imagine that you want to add mark-up to a book's citations- perhaps you want to embed identifiers to support library linking systems. Or perhaps you're a medical publisher and you want to embed machine readable statements about drugs and diseases in a pharmaceutical textbook. Or perhaps you want to publish a travel guide and you want search engines to pick out the places you're describing. These applications are not really supported by the current version of EPUB 3.

EPUB content documents have a feature that you might think would do the trick, but doesn't really. The epub:type attribute supports "semantic inflection" of elements. This attribute can be used to mark a paragraph as a bibliographic citation, for example, and supports many of the requirements imposed by conversion of content from legacy or specialized formats into the HTML5 dialect used by EPUB. It's an important feature, but not enough to support semantic enrichment.

Part of the problem is EPUB 3's dependence on HTML5, which is not yet a stable spec and is enmeshed in some surprisingly raw W3C politics. W3C has been the home of HTML standards development since the very early stages of the web, and has also been the home of semantic web standards development. HTML5 started outside of W3C in the WHATWG, an initiative to develop HTML in a way that would be backwards compatible with good-old fashioned non-XML HTML. W3C was convinced to fold WHATWG into its development efforts because of WHATWG's corporate backing. Even so, the WHATWG version of the HTML5 spec drips with sarcasm towards W3C HTML Working Group decisions.

During part of the development of EPUB 3, the HTML5 draft included "Microdata", a method of embedding semantic mark-up in HTML. RDFa, a standard that competes with Microdata, was developed by W3C channels, and within W3C, it was decided in February of 2010 to move Microdata out of the HTML spec so as to give it equal footing with RDFa. Some participants in the EPUB working group wanted to include RDFa in the standard; others thought this would impose too much of a complexity burden on publisher-implementers. The EPUB draft ended up being released without either RDFa or Microdata.

The recent endorsement of Microdata by the Google-Yahoo-Bing cooperation has changed the competitive landscape for embedded semantics. It's now apparent that Microdata will get priority implementation in HTML development tools, leaving RDFa as a niche technology. For most use cases of EPUB semantic markup, the differences between RDFa and Microdata are small compared to the advantages of piggybacking on the technology investment supporting website creation.

According to members of the EPUB working group, it is expected that a dot release will follow relatively quickly behind EPUB 3.0. It seems to me that picking a semantic markup technology for content documents should now not be so hard. If you work for a publishing company that has ever mentioned semantic markup in a product plan, you should probably be making sure that the EPUB working group is aware of your needs. If you are a librarian who can imagine the possibilities of a semantically enriched EPUB collection, you should similarly be making your concerns known.

Although the EPUB working group includes representatives from tools vendors that might conceivably benefit from the adoption of EPUB-only constructs, the group's track record for adopting wider web standards has been very encouraging. By adopting HTML5 as a stack component, the group has ensured that cheap or free tools to produce and author EPUB 3 content will be readily available.

Once semantic enrichment of ebooks becomes routine, libraries will play a vital role in their use. Libraries provide a copyright-friendly DRM-free community commons in which users can access and build on the information contained in licensed content. (Of course, I see "unglued" books as playing an equally important role in the library commons.)

The EPUB metadata glass is half full, and there's more wine in the bottle!

Note: This is one thing I'll be talking about on Saturday at the American Library Association meeting in New Orleans. (The program is somewhat inaccurate; the program will end at 10:30 AM at the latest. Ross Singer from Talis will lead off with an overview of semantic web technologies in libraries; I'll follow with discussions of RDFa, the Facebook "Like" button and of course, EPUB.

We Need a Name for Our Ungluing Books Service

2011-06-17T17:04:00.004-04:00

In 1996, the company I worked for was briefly named "Company B". The day a new name for the company was to be unveiled was really quite exciting. The company that had been AT&T was being split into three pieces. The "A" piece, was to keep the AT&T name and the long-distance phone service. The "C" piece was NCR, which had been acquired a few years before for reasons no one really understood. The "B" piece was going to sell telecommunications equipment and would be centered around our beloved Bell Labs. That's what the "B" stood for.

Nobody was excited by the name "Lucent Technologies" when it was announced. Millions had been spent on a brand consultancy, and more had been spent trying to get Judge Greene to allow the use of "Bell" in the name. And none of us could comprehend that with all that money, they hadn't even bothered to secure the "lucent.com" domain name.

Our management struggled to convince us of the benefits of a meaningless name. They told us the name was an "empty vessel" which meant it would only acquire the meaning that we put into it with our "Bell Labs Innovations". The name had been field tested with focus groups, and nobody hated it. The domain name was acquired.

In late 2005, I needed a name for my company, because I was selling the business along with the name to a non-profit. The company itself was to become an empty shell that would hold money until I had something to do with it. I asked my son for name suggestions and we came up with "Gluejar".

Last year, as Gluejar began serious work on a new business, I back-formed the term "ungluing ebooks" from the company name. I didn't really expect to still be using the term eight months later, but its "empty-vessel" quality has proved to be useful. People have no idea what it means to "unglue" an ebook, so we have the opportunity to fill the word with meaning. The downside, of course, is that we have to explain what it means. "Crowd-funding the relicensing of ebooks with Creative Commons" is a mouthful, and most people don't understand that either!

The language surrounding ebooks can be tricky. "Free" is an immediate turn-off for publishers and authors who want to earn a living from their books; "unlock" suggests breaking DRM, "liberate" suggests that the books were in prison. So we keep on using "unglue".

We've brainstormed a bit about a name for the ungluing-ebooks website we're building. Our working name for the site is "BookPatrons.org". It's a name that describes with reasonable accuracy the activity that we want to occur on the site, and it has some library flavor to it. From Wikipedia:

Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows to another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings or popes have provided to musicians, painters, and sculptors.

"BookPatrons" is a bit boring, though. Will ordinary people want to think of themselves as "patrons" of books? Does the "pater" root make it seem a bit male? (Will we get competition from "BookMatrons.org"?)

Maybe we should "stick" to Gluejar or some other "unglue" related name. What do you think? This is your chance to be consulted!

If you think that "ungluing books" or "BookPatrons" are really stupid names, please say so now, in the comments. If you think they work well, tell us that too. You can contact us privately, too, with your great ideas.

It can be fun to come up with really awful names, too. My worst effort: "Biblerty.com".

Our Metadata Overlords and That Microdata Thingy

2011-06-08T22:39:00.004-04:00

On June 2, our Metadata Overlords spoke. They told us that they'll only listen when we tell them things using a specialized vocabulary they've now given us at the schema.org website. Although we can still use our stone tablets if that's what we're using now, we're expected to migrate to a new Microdata Thingy, assuming that we really want them to pay attention to our website metadata supplications.

There are among us believers, who, led by druids enraptured by the power of stone tablets to carry truth, will shun the new thingy, but most of us will meekly comply with the edicts of the overlords. We're not able to distinguish the druidic language of the tablets from the new liturgy of of the state church. Many things are difficult to articulate in the new vocabulary, but gosh, those tablets were heavy to carry around. And the new thingy doesn't seem so awful, although it's difficult to tell with the mumbled sermons and hymn singing and all.

I hope the overlords don't try to take our pagan rituals of Friending and Liking away from us, though. The incantations used to invoke and bless the Like ritual also use the druidic language, and the help scrolls tell us we might confuse the overlords if we use more than one language in our prayers.

My soul remains troubled, however, at the thought that the Overlords care not for truth and for justice. Sometimes it seems as though the overlords want only for our offerings of attention and seek only to feed our lust for food, drink, entertainment, debauchery and money. Yes, there are new words for our books and learning, but we can say so little about these in schema.org language that our wizards and mages will be mute if they ever choose to enter that realm.

I myself was present at a conclave of such mages and wizards dedicated to the entwinement of data from libraries, museums and archives in full openness. When tweet of the new order came, we endeavored to learn more of schema.org and its thingy. We questioned whether the thingy was an abomination against openness, or whether we might exploit its Overlord endorsement to make our own spells more powerful. We agreed to teach each other our new thingy spells, even as our colleagues elsewhere figured out how to chisel the new vocabulary into stone. Word came from other lands that the new vessel would founder trying to cross the seas.

We then visited the temple of the archive and found the servers cool to the touch. We heard words from a past oracle, ate as they never ate in Rome, drank cool drafts, and returned home emboldened with an enlarged appreciation of intermingled bits.

So it was said, so shall we do.

Notes:

Google's blog post on adopting microdata was signed by R. V. Guha who had a bit to do with the creation of RDF.
It's not really a surprise that Google doesn't care about RDFa. In my article on RDFa from 2009, I pointed to mistakes that Google made in their RDFa documentation. They never fixed it.
Schema.org can't even list all of its schemata- the web page, chock full of non-breaking spaces, is truncated!.
The current microdata spec is in an odd state where it's confused about how to define an itemtype. In fact, the mechanism for defining new itemtypes is gone! Here's what it says:
The item type must be a type defined in an applicable specification.

Except if otherwise specified by that specification, the URL given as the item type should not be automatically dereferenced.

A specification could define that its item type can be derefenced to provide the user with help information, for example. In fact, vocabulary authors are encouraged to provide useful information at the given URL.
Apparently, stuff was removed for some sort of political reason- it's there in the WHAT-WG version; note that Google links to the W3C version, which is not fully baked.
the Schema.org terms of service are creepy when you get to the part about patents.
The big selling point for RDFa was that Google, Yahoo and Bing supported it for Rich Snippets and the like. But Microdata's inability to easily support complex markup turned out to be an key feature for the search engines. The moral of the story for standards developers: your best customers are always righter than the others.
In the video, Brewster Kahle reads from the last page of A Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Material by Robert C. Binkley (1936). OCLC Number 14753642. Peter Binkley, a meeting participant, donated a copy of his grandfather's book to the Internet Archive, along with permission to make it free to the public.
Henri Sivonen has written a very readable and informed discussion about Microdata, RDFa, Schema.org and the process of making standards that you should read if you are interested in why things are the way they are in HTML5.

EPUB Really IS a Container

2011-06-02T11:34:00.000-04:00

"It's OK for libraries to put things in their EPUB books." That's what Bill Kasdorf, a member of the EPUB Working Group, told me last week at the IDPF Digital Book 2011 Meeting. He checked with EPUB Revision Co-Editor Markus Gylling to make sure. I had been curious if libraries could put all their cataloging information inside an EPUB file instead of siloing it in their catalog system.

It may seem an odd question if you don't know a few things about EPUB. EPUB is a standard format for ebooks. It's used by Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Overdrive and many others not named Amazon. EPUB is near the end of a revision process that will result in EPUB 3.0.

The EPUB specs define a lot more than just a file format. Both EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 define a container format (in EPUB 3 it's called the EPUB Open Container Format (OCF) 3.0, and then go on to define a number of file formats for files that go inside this container. These files are the resources- texts, graphics, etc. that make up the ebook.

OCF uses the ubiquitous ZIP format to wrap up all a book's resource files into a neat, transportable package. That's pretty much standard these days. Java ".jar" and ".war" files use the same mechanism, as do MacOS' ".app" files. As a consequence, you can use any unzip utility to look inside an EPUB file and manipulate its contents.

There's even a reserved name for a file to contain book level metadata in OCF: META-INF/metadata.xml, as well as another file for rights information, META-INF/rights.xml. Another file, META-INF/signatures.xml can be used to prove who made parts of the file and determine whether anyone has mucked with them. When Gluejar issues Creative Commons editions of newly relicensed works, we'll use the rights.xml file to make sure the CC declaration is explicit.

The new EPUB revision is coming fast. Last Monday, Bill McCoy, Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) announced the release of the full EPUB 3 proposed specification. My guess is that when we look back on this event 10 years hence, we'll recognize this as the moment EPUB began to revolutionize the world of information, and with it, the book industry.

Although Amazon still uses the aging MOBI format on its kindle devices, it seems only a matter of time before the infrastructure accumulating behind EPUB pushes them into the embrace of the IDPF. Already, most of the content flowing into the Amazon system is being produced in EPUB and converted to MOBI. Don't expect this shift to happen soon though; in his IDPF presentation, Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects described rumors that this would happen soon as "bunk"- but it will happen sometime.

EPUB 3 comes with lots of goodies. The revision adds several modules of sorely needed capability. It includes MathML, SVG and JavaScript over a substrate of HTML5 and CSS2.1. While MathML and SVG are essential for education and technical markets, JavaScript has been somewhat controversial because of the difficulty of making sure things work securely and without connections. Most of the reading systems inherit javascript capability from the WebKit rendering engine they're based on, so a lot of javascript functionality will work in ebook readers regardless.


(left) Autography Founder and Author T. J. Waters

All this capability will remain latent unless people find compelling uses for it. I'm not worried. As the BookExpo itself got started, I met two different companies who were manipulating ebook files to solve the same problem: how can an author sign a book when the book is digital? Both companies, Autography and InScribed Media, create personalized experiences that leave artifacts of an author-consumer interaction inside ebook container files. Both of these companies have compelling solutions; they differ in their business models. Autography is structured as an author focused bookstore; InScribed is developing partnerships with existing bookstores.

InScribed Media Founder and Author Alivia Tagliaferri

To some extent, InScribed and Autography are forced to be a bit convoluted in the way they deliver their product because they need to live inside DRM green zones; users don't have access to the files inside books without cracking the DRM (which is rather easy, by the way!). It's unfortunate, because personalization of ebooks could be a good way to encourage responsible use. I certainly don't want that picture of me torrenting around the world!

Libraries face a similar dilemma. The insides of an EPUB file could be greatly enriched by libraries, which have every motivation to enhance discovery both of the book and the information inside of it. But DRM gives the publisher and its delivery agents the exclusive ability to build context inside ebook containers. Libraries and readers are locked out. I think that for DRM systems to survive they will need to accommodate a more diverse set of user manipulations; author signatures are just the tip of the iceberg.

Coming soon, I'll report on EPUB 3 metadata.

Unbound wants to be the Kickstarter for Books

2011-05-29T22:10:00.003-04:00

... and what they really are is the editor-curated, agent-filtered Gluejar for books that haven't been written and might end up sucking.

Ignoring the fact that tomorrow is Memorial Day (and why aren't you Brits out barbecuing anyway?), I feel compelled to write promptly about today's unveiling of Unbound, because many of the words being used to describe Unbound are similar to things I've written about Gluejar.

One of my early attempts to describe our model of "Ungluing eBooks" was that Gluejar would be "like Kickstarter for ten million books". I found that approximately 50% of the subjects tested were mystified by that description, and the other 50% got totally the wrong idea.

So the introduction of Unbound allows me the chance to compare and contrast Unbound, Kickstarter, and GlueJar.

Business model

Unbound is a conventional publisher that asks readers to pre-fund some or all of the fixed cost of producing a book that hasn't been written yet. Unbound tells you how many supporters a book needs, but not how much cash. Unbound doesn't tell you how much money they get or how much the authors get, and once a project is subscribed, Unbound publishes the book, and splits net profits 50/50 with the author.

Kickstarter is not a publisher at all. They just let creators ask for a specific amount of money to support their projects, including projects that might result in the production of a book. Kickstarter takes a 5% fee from funds raised; 100% of subsequent profits from a book go to the creator.

Gluejar won't be a publisher as the term is currently understood. Gluejar will allow book lovers to pledge support for making books (that already exist) free to the world in a creative-commons licensed ebook edition. Authors retain commercial rights for print and other subsidiary rights. The price is set by the rights holder to match or exceed the income they would expect for future sales of the ebook; Gluejar takes a fee similar to Kickstarter's from funds raised.

Selection Process

Despite their slogan "Books are now in your hands", Unbound is using a selection process that's pretty much identical to how it already works. Book proposals will be carefully curated, and Unbound is only going to deal with submissions coming from literary agents. So if you're Monty Python's Terry Jones, great. I feel so empowered.

Kickstarter also reviews projects rather carefully to ensure quality. But anyone can propose a project, and it's clear from the projects on the site that it's relatively open to newcomers and nobodies with good ideas. It's really the crowd that decides what flies.

Gluejar will allow patrons to pick books for themselves. Although there are a huge number of books out there, you already know which ones you love. We're not sure how to extend the concept to new books or new authors.

Risks

Because Unbound acts as the publisher, supporters have a reasonable assurance that a completed project will actually deliver a book. On the downside, a book that has already been funded might turn out to be less than promised. The incentives encourage the author to split a narrative into multiple volumes, and if a book turns out to be bad, or perhaps just dull, the supporters don't get their money back. I don't know what Unbound means when it says that "All unused credits expire after 30 days."

Kickstarter doesn't do anything to assure that projects get completed. Supporters have to judge for themselves whether the creator is honest and worth supporting.

Gluejar will act as a trusted third party to make sure that good quality, Creative Commons editions are delivered to patrons of a successful pledge campaign. What Gluejar can't guarantee is that a rights holder with all the needed rights for relicensing a particular book will exist. That's why we'll let supporters spread their pledges onto lists of books.

Bottom Line

Unbound has launched with a very nicely done website. They've done a nice job of setting up reward levels and website features matched to book publishing. But Unbound is profoundly timid about putting publishing into the hands of the reader. It's more of a brilliant marketing gimmick than a publishing revolution; they've mapped out a healthy way to pre-sell an ebook for £10.

Thanks to @pablod, @julietalionetti and @muttinmall for a great discussion bringing out some of these issues.

Hachette at the Tipping Point

2011-05-21T02:01:00.010-04:00

Hachette CEO David Young

But it's not the tipping point that you might be thinking of. At this week's Publishing Point Meetup, David Young, Chairman and CEO of Hachette Book Group took his turn being interviewed by Michael Healy. Here's the bit that caught my ear:

If you just rewind the clock five, even ten years, the negotiations that one had with with Barnes and Noble, or WH Smith or Waterstones seemed like the most challenging things in the world, you were entering a G8 summit or something, and now they appear like a vicar's tea party compared with the people with whom we now regularly deal. Massive companies, Amazon, Apple, Google, and in fact last year was a tipping point for our company, because 50% of our net revenues were made through outlets that were not invested in us. Companies like Walmart and Costco and all the others you can think of, not directly invested in our business. And I think that was a big moment and it means you're having to deal with people who think about books in a way totally different from the way Barnes and Nobles regards books. Every retailer who does sell books understands that they drive traffic into their stores, I have no doubt that's why Walmart and Target and Costco love them so much, but they do tend to cream off the top. [..]

We have a very wide ranging, wide array of customers with whom to deal. They're selling our books in our special sales department through TJ Maxx and Anthropologie now. I know they even think about covers of our new books ahead of time to make sure that they're in this season's color.

That's right, Amazon just announced they were selling more Kindle ebooks than print books, and the big transition in Hachette's business is that they don't sell the majority of their books in bookstores anymore.

I had never been inside an Anthropologie store before, so I decided to go and take a look at the future of the book selling business. It seems to be mostly pink and pale green this year. Also a sort of pale purplish blue.

Here are some of the titles I found:

What a brilliantly arranged store! The casual cotton dresses look at least twice as slinky with a stack of color-coordinated Lover's Dictionaries piled next to them. And my mom loved candles- I never realized their connection to good parenting!

That other tipping point I've been writing about here? The library ebook thing? In the Q&A session, Young was asked: "What's your policy on ebook library lending?" Since Hachette allows Overdrive to distribute its ebooks to libraries, I hoped this would be a softball. But it wasn't. (Or maybe Young, an Englishman, only knows cricket.)

That is, I think, a really really big question, and I wish I knew the answer to it. All I know is we're putting a lot of thought into it. I'm meeting the President of the ALA in New Orleans in June and we're talking with our various partners around that. I think its something that needs a lot of careful thought because if you let that particular genie out of the bottle and get it wrong then you could get yourself in all sorts of trouble. Should there be a library solution? I'm certain there should be, but what it is we haven't figured it out. We're putting a lot of thought and effort into it.

The beginning of dialog at the very highest level between book publishers and librarians is definitely good news, and long overdue, but I'm not sure what advice I would give to ALA President Roberta Stevens for that meeting. Maybe she could offer to put the genie in one of those pot-candles that look so great alongside books at Anthropologie?

The Object-Oriented Book

2011-05-18T21:46:00.004-04:00

To most people, objects are things you can touch, see, maybe even smell. They have existence on their own. Software developers talk about objects as well. Although they're more abstract, software objects can also be touched- programs can interact with them, and they exist on their own as packages of code and data.

In some recent conversations about books and content containers, I've been hit in the face with the fact that most people in publishing haven't been steeped in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) the way I once was, and as a result, some of the things I've written about the evolution of the book into digital form have sounded a bit strange to many people. So I've decided to write a bit here about how books are becoming software objects, and why it matters.

Object orientation is a style of programming that models problems as spaces of objects from various classes. The programmer solves problems by manipulating objects; the objects communicate among themselves by passing messages. The messages that objects pass are governed by interfaces; every class of objects is defined by the interfaces it supports. If that doesn't make sense to you, don't worry, I'll have some examples.

Let's think about how we might model the book as a software object. With a physical book, you know how to get the title and name of the author. You open up the book to the title page, and there you find the title, probably the words in the largest type size, and the author's name, probably printed below the title, perhaps with a designator word such as "by".

In the prehistory of programming before OOP, a book program might define data structures containing tables of book titles and author names. The program would look in these tables for the book data. An object-oriented program would instead send the book-object messages saying "what is your name?" and "What person was your author?" An object-oriented approach binds the code and data together, so that objects of the book class know what their title is, how many chapters they have, and what the 20th word of the 32nd paragraph of their 3rd chapter is. The set of messages that an object can respond to defines its class. A programmer knows that any object in the Book class will be able to tell you its title.

Another key concept in object orientation is inheritance. A cookbook is a book and inherits from the Book class the ability to tell you its title. But you expect a Cookbook to have recipes, and you should be able to ask it how many recipes it contains.

The reason I think this is important for non-coders to understand is that very soon, the book industry will become focused on producing lots and lots of these software objects. And I'm not talking about some far-fetched digital utopia.

The third revision of the EPUB standard is very soon to become a reality, and I believe its use will quickly become pervasive in the book industry. It would be a mistake to think of EPUB3 as yet another document format. With the adoption of EPUB3, the book industry will, for the first time ever, have standardized a software object model for the book. This comes along with EPUB3's use of HTML5 as a foundational layer.

An object model became associated with HTML documents very early in its evolution. Called the DOM, or Document Object Model, it was developed by programmers working with HTML documents, and it quickly became the basis for most software that works with HTML documents. With the development of Javascript, HTML documents delivered over the web could bind to code that accesses and manipulates their data via the DOM. It's only with HTML5, however, that the DOM is officially becoming part of the HTML standard.

With HTML5 as its basis, EPUB3 becomes a very capable "container" of content. The whole discussion of how containers limit the ways in which content can interact with consumers becomes completely moot, and a bit silly. EPUB3 binds a complete "API" (application programming interface) onto the content, and provide many mechanisms for the extension of that interface. The "API" and the "container" are one and the same.

If we look at the immense infrastructure that arose around the book as a physical object, from book bags and compact shelving, to printing plants, warehouses, libraries and used bookstores, we can get an inkling of the infrastructure that will grow up around the book as a software object. In the coming weeks, I'll try to write about some of the implications of EPUB3 for the industry as a whole.

Open Access eBooks, Part 4. Libraries

2011-05-18T13:31:00.000-04:00

The fourth section my book chapter on Open Access eBooks looks at theier relationship with libraries. I previously posted the Introduction, What does Open Access mean for eBooks and Business Models for Creation of Open Access E-Books. I'll be posting one more section, a conclusion.

Thank you for all of your comments; the completed chapter (and OA eBook) will be better for them.

Libraries and Open Access E-Books

One of the missions of libraries is to provide access to all sorts of information, including e-books. If an e-book is already open access, what role is left for libraries play?

Here’s a thought-experiment for libraries: imagine that the library’s entire collection is digital. Should it include Shakespeare? Should it include Moby Dick? These are available as public domain works from Project Gutenberg; providing these editions in a library collection might seem to be superfluous. Many librarians have been trying to convince their patrons that “free stuff on the Internet” is often inferior to the quality information available through libraries. There are certainly e-book editions of these works available for purchase with better illustrations, better editing, annotations, etc. Should libraries try to steer patrons to these resources instead of using the free stuff?

For the most part, libraries have not done a good job of incorporating resources such as those available from Project Gutenberg into their digital collections. Overdrive, the leading provider of e-books to public libraries, now offers Project Gutenberg titles for no extra charge, but they are offered as a separate collection. At present, if a user searches for Moby Dick in a library collection, a result will be returned only if the library has a purchased edition of Moby Dick, which may be in use by another patron. A separate search must be done to retrieve the free edition.

As we saw in the section on types of open access, for an e-book to really be Open Access, there must be an appropriate license (or public domain status) AND effective access. There are a number of ways that libraries can work to make that access effective, both individually and through cooperative effort. Similarly, Open Access e-books can play an important role in supporting the mission of libraries. This section will consider libraries’ roles in access, selection, archiving, community, and production of Open Access e-books.

Access and Storage

Most libraries can avoid worrying about access and storage of Open Access e-books, thanks to services such as the Internet Archive’s OpenLibrary project and HathiTrust, a “partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future”. These services provide reliable low-cost file storage and bandwidth. Adding effective access to cost-free e-books at other sites may need a bit more work; figuring out and tracking stable, persistent URLs at multiple locations can create a logistics burden for libraries that could help manage access. Library-oriented “knowledgebase” services from vendors such as OCLC, Proquest and Ex-Libris may prove to be useful in this regard.

As users shift towards reader devices and tablet computers, libraries will find themselves spending a lot of time helping users figure out how to move Open Access e-books onto their devices. In principle, Open Access e-books shouldn’t require Digital Rights Management, and should thus be compatible with most devices. In practice, getting content free content onto a device can be non-intuitive and often “side-loading” or other indirect procedures are required; most e-reader devices have book shopping functionality and the vendors are not motivated to push users to content that doesn’t generate revenue.

Selection and Description

Metadata based discovery and browsing have been a strength of libraries; without the motivation to sell copies, many cost-free e-books lack even basic metadata, let alone good quality catalog records. This is clearly an area where libraries can make significant contributions, especially when they work cooperatively.

With a flood of free content already available, and much more on the way, there is a continuing need to highlight the material most suited to the needs of the user. Multiple editions can exist of public domain works; it makes sense for libraries to help patrons find the best ones.

Perhaps the best example to date of work in a library on selection and description of Open Access e-books is the Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania. Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, it indexes over a million online books, all of them available for free to users (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/).

Archiving and Preservation

One of the biggest uncertainties presented by e-book licensing is whether today’s e-book acquisitions will meet the needs of future readers. As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first e-books, it’s hard to ignore the fact that most libraries have print collections that reach back a hundred years and more. We don’t know what parts of today’s written culture will be in demand 100 (or even 40) years from now or how readers will expect to approach them. For that reason, texts must be in a form that can evolve with reading technology, and the evolution must not depend on the permission and continued existence of publishing companies, platform vendors, rights management software, proprietary software or hardware. Formats must adhere strictly to standards. The forty-year-old texts from Project Gutenberg can still be read today because they used very simple formats; these are being converted to newer more capable formats such as EPUB for easy consumption on e-book readers. Going forward, there will be continuing challenges in the evolution of photos, graphics, mathematics, scripting, and linking of e-books.

LOCKSS, a peer-to-peer preservation system in which libraries are taking the lead in preserving e-journals and other websites. LOCKSS has been working to extend its digital preservation efforts to e-books; about 45,000 e-books are “in-process”, and it’s expected that another 30,000 will be added in 2012.

Community and Context

Open Access e-books give libraries new ways to reach out to the communities they serve. The social aspects of reading are well known to libraries; the story times and book clubs nurtured by public libraries are excellent examples. Although an e-book isn’t tied to location the way a print book is, people and their social circles are tied to places. There are two types of advantages for the use of Open Access e-books in a library’s outreach efforts. Cost is an obvious factor; public libraries have an obligation to support reading by community segments that might not be able to afford the books they need. A second advantage is that of context building. The sort of annotation, commenting and discussion around books that can take place in a group of friends and neighbors is quite different from that which occurs anonymously in a global forum. At the same time, the availability of free, untethered e-books from libraries, free from DRM or Internet monitoring, allows individuals to obtain and read books with real privacy.

Participation

As technology lowers the barriers to e-book production, more and more people will be able to produce and distribute e-books. Just as the combination of YouTube, cheap video cameras and editing software allows Rebecca Black to become a viral sensation, the corresponding e-book technologies are already starting to nurture grassroots authorship. Libraries may play an important role in enabling and promoting community-created content. Books that may not be commercially viable may still be important to a community, and libraries can play a role in connecting local authors to communities both near and far.

Libraries can also fill the need for educating grassroots authors about the meaning and importance of public licenses. Some authors will of course need to use traditional licensing strategies, but most will be unfamiliar with Creative Commons and other types of licenses. The social benefit of the use of these licenses is aligned with the library’s mission of promoting access to information, and libraries should not be hesitant to promote their use.

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Open Access eBooks, Part 5. Changing the World

2011-05-16T21:28:00.001-04:00

The final (short) section of my book chapter on Open Access eBooks tries to make clear why I think think it's important to work on them. I'll release an EPUB version of the full chapter around when the book gets published.

Here's the outline for the full set of posts:

Again, thank you for all of your comments.

Changing the World

As applied to the scholarly journal, the goals of the Open Access movement have been diverse. The success of the movement must be judged against those goals. There’s no doubt that Open Access has been successful at its core goal of increasing access to many types of information. But some other hopes pinned on the movement have been unrealized. Serials budgets at libraries have continued a seemingly inexorable rise.

It’s been estimated that 4 billion books are printed each year. That seems like a big number until you remember that the world’s population is almost 7 billion. A large fraction of the world’s population has minimal access to books. Yet the number of cell phones in the world has been estimated at 4.6 billion. As more and more cell phones become capable of delivering e-books, the fraction of the world’s population with access to e-books may soon exceed the fraction of the world’s population with access to physical libraries.

The majority of the people in the world will not be able to pay $9.99 for an e-book. Even in wealthy countries, the cost of food, clothing, shelter, transportation and medical care limit many people's ability to buy content licenses. Yet the thirst for literature, learning and culture is not confined to the wealthy of the world. Open Access e-books can help to slake this thirst and help to create a global community of understanding and knowledge. Through shared access to culture and ideas, Open Access e-books can erase some of what separates the nations of the world, rich and poor.

For Open Access e-books to have this sort of impact, their production and distribution must be effective. Production can occur through a variety of business models, including models that reward authors and creators for their efforts. New distribution channels must be created and supported. Libraries have a clear and vital role in this process, and must work cooperatively to meet the needs of their diverse communities. Venues for such cooperation already exist (OCLC, OpenLibrary, Hathitrust, Europeana and various national libraries) or are being planned (the Digital Public Library of America), but new ones will also be needed.

Together, we must strive to make sure that the best and most thoughtful of the world’s e-books are not lost in a deluge of free dross, free come-ons and free polemics. If people are to govern themselves in peace, they should have easy access to good ideas and honest information.

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The Coffee's On, Let's Get to Work

2011-05-10T11:29:00.004-04:00

Gluejar is becoming real. I'm pleased to announce the first three hires for Gluejar's new business of "ungluing ebooks".

Amanda Mecke is an expert in literary rights management. Before founding her own literary agency, Amanda was VP, Director of Subsidiary Rights for Bantam Dell, a division of Random House Inc. from 1989-2003, where she led a department that sold international and domestic book rights and pioneered early electronic licenses for subscription databases, CD-ROMs, audiobooks, and ebooks. She was also a co-leader of the Random House/SAP Contracts and Royalties software development team. Prior to joining Bantam Dell, Amanda ran the New York marketing office of the University of California Press. While there she served the board of the American Association of University Presses and was President of Women in Scholarly Publishing. Amanda has been a speaker at the Frankfurt Book Messe Rights Workshop, NYU Summer Publishing Program, American Independent Writers conference, and the International Women’s Writers Guild. She has a B.A. from Pitzer College, Claremont, California and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Amanda will continue to represent original work by her literary agency clients.

Although our founding team will be be playing many roles at once, Amanda will be spending much of her time reaching out to rights-holders and identifying works that will attract financial support from book lovers who want to see the ebooks available for free to anyone, anywhere. Her experience in both trade and academic publishing, together with her keen insight into the world of book rights, stood her above a lot of great people who expressed interest in working for Gluejar. Amanda's Gluejar.com email address is amecke. Contact her with your ideas for books that deserve to be free.

Raymond Yee is a data architect, author, consultant, and teacher. He is author of the leading book on web mashups, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (published by Apress and licensed under a Creative Commons license). At the UC Berkeley School of Information, he taught Mixing and Remixing Information, a course on using APIs to create mashups. An open data and open government aficionado, he recently co-wrote three influential reports on how the US government can improve its efforts to make data and services available through APIs. Raymond served as the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project (a widely used open source research tool) and managed the Zotero Commons, a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive. Raymond has been an invited speaker about web technology at the Library of Congress, Fashion Institute of Technology, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, American Library Association, the Open Education conference, Code4lib, Educause, and NISO. While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to middle and high school students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. Raymond is an erstwhile tubaist, admirer of J. S. Bach, and son of industrious Chinese-Canadian restaurateurs.

I've admired Raymond's work for several years now, and the work that he's done is very much is tune with the technical vision I have for an ebook crowd-funding website. The interfaces it will expose to other websites and the data mash-ups it will enable will be just as important as the website itself. Expect that any webpage- book blog, face book page, or library online catalog, will be able to combine book data and user interaction with the effort of nudging the book towards Open Access. Raymond's Gluejar.com email address is rdhyee. Contact him with ideas about how your website can work with ours.

Andromeda Yelton is former Latin teacher and recent library science graduate (with a background in mathematics) who's quickly made a name for herself in the library world. She has a BA in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, an MA in Classics from Tufts, and recently completed her MLS from Simmons. She blogs at Across Divided Networks and at ALA TechSource, and last year won the LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award for an article on A Simple Scheme for Book Classification Using Wikipedia. She was named an ALA Emerging Leader this year.

Andromeda's been mentioned in this blog before. In January, I wrote about her fund-raising to "Buy India a Library". She also has first-hand experience with public broadcasting- she was once a listener contestant on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Andromeda has already started work on a new Gluejar corporate web site. Her Gluejar.com email address is andromeda. Contact her with all your libraryish ideas.

You can follow the Gluejar team on Twitter with a single click at @gluejar/team.

Don't be surprised if my blog post are less frequent- I'll have a lot to keep me busy!

Open Access eBooks, Part 3. Business Models for Creation

2011-05-08T00:04:00.003-04:00

Here's the third section of my draft of a book chapter for a book edited by No Shelf Required's Sue Polanka. I previously posted the introduction; and What does Open Access mean for eBooks subsequent posts will cover Open Access E-Books in Libraries and a Conclusion. Note that while the blog always uses "ebook" as one word, the book will use the hyphenated form, "e-book". The comments on the second section prompted me to make significant revisions, which I have posted.

Business Models for Creation of Open Access E-Books

Any model for e-book publishing must have a business model for recouping the expenses of production: reviewing, editing, formatting, design, etc. In this section, we’ll review methods that can be used to support Open Access e-book publishing.

In 2009 Cory Doctorow put together a collection of short stories called “With a Little Help” and documented the process of publishing it in a series of columns on Publisher’s Weekly. He used a variety of business models to support the project, as detailed below, and the e-book version was released under a Creative Common License.

DIY publishing models

One way to meet the costs of e-book production is to keep those costs close to zero. Free blogging sites have made it simple for authors to produce blogs and other sorts of websites; additional tools are available to add keywords, links, and images. Other tools can convert a blog or similar website to the EPUB e-book format; EPUB export is available in Apple’s Pages word processor and it’s likely that other programs will soon follow suit.

Given these tools, authors can produce e-books on their own, with no other expense than the value of their time. For With a Little Help Doctorow did most of the production himself; as the title suggests, he got friends to help out with things such as cover and book design.

In the “Do It Yourself” or DIY model, there are essentially no expenses to recoup. If the author wants to earn something, additional money needs to be spent on an ISBN and a bit more to get metadata into a feed for Amazon. But if income is not the object, the e-book can simply be posted on a website and made available to the world. A CC license allows the e-books to be distributed in a wide variety of channels.

In fact, with the consent of the editor, this book chapter will be released as a DIY Open Access e-book in EPUB format, with a CC BY-ND license. The author hopes to profit primarily from the experience of doing so.

Freemium models

“Freemium” refers to the business model, common on websites, to offer one level of service for free, and then, when the user is solidly hooked on the use of the service, to offer them a premium level of service for a fee. The difficulty of this model is to have a service that’s attractive enough at the free level of service to drive premium conversions, and at the same time to have the free service be limited enough that upgrades deliver significant value.

In the e-book space, the traditional premium service is typically either the print version or an updated or otherwise enhanced digital edition. O’Reilly has used this model to great effect, by allowing authors to make free PDF versions available on websites while O’Reilly sells print versions through traditional channels.

In Doctorow’s project, he offered Print-on-demand versions through Lulu.com for $18 each, along with 250 “super-limited hardcovers” for $275 each: These were hand-bound on acid-free paper and included original paper “ephemera”, and came with a memory card with the full text of the book and audiobook. The $275 version turned out to be the big moneymaker.

As e-book readers become preferred over print by users, using print as a revenue engine may run out of steam. Bloomsbury Academic is building a platform that also uses e-book versions as the premium. While CC noncommercial versions are available for reading online, the books will also be issued for purchase in print and on Kindle and Sony readers. It’s possible that publishers will look at enhancing e-books with supplementary content or deep semantic mark-up as their revenue driver; a bare-bones Open Access version would serve as promotional vehicles for the core product.

Advertising and promotional models

Cost-free and Open-Access content can promote more than just a premium edition of the same content. E-Book formats are much like HTML web sites in that they can embed links; even javascript functionality is becoming available in e-book content. Publishers can use these types of functionality to generate revenue through advertising. A quick look at iPad or Android App Stores reveals a huge selection of free, advertising-supported Apps, including many apps that simply wrap e-book content.

In one scenario where this might happen, an author of a book series might produce an OA electronic version of the first in the series. The free e-book could have embedded links or “in-app purchase” buttons for subsequent books in the series. OA E-books might also be supported by contextual links and/or product placement; imagine a story featuring a sports car where the brand and model of the car are chosen based on support from a car company.

Another type of promotion that can be furthered by all types of free e-books is personal brand-building. It could be argued that Cory Doctorow’s biggest payoff from the With a Little Help project was that it increased his fame and thus his ability to make money on appearances, commissions, and on the Boing-Boing website. (One story in the collection was a $10,000 commission) Seth Godin

Public funding

Some books, such as those relating to education, public health, political or social advocacy, or scientific research, fulfill a public purpose. Publication of these books using a form of Open Access will further their public purpose. The costs of production and release of these-books can financed by foundations, charities, political action committees, private individuals, or governments.

European governments have joined together to fund the digitization and distribution of cultural heritage works through Europeana. Funded by the European Commission and national ministries of culture, Europeana acts as a portal enabling distribution of large numbers of OA e-books. In the US, books created by the federal government belong by law to the public domain, but there’s no centralized funding of OA e-books or their distribution.

In developing countries, governments seeking to provide textbooks to large numbers of student will eventually find that producing e-textbooks, released for free, is the only scalable method of providing for their national educational needs. Many states in India, for example, already release their state-published textbooks on an OA basis.

A variation on public funding for OA e-books in the context of academic monograph publishing has been proposed by Frances Pinter. Her idea is for libraries to join together in a cooperative, diverting a fraction of their acquisition budgets to fund the fixed costs of producing new monographs by university and commercial scholarly presses, which would then be made Open Access. She estimates that individual libraries could save over 75%, depending on the participation rate.

Another sort of public funding model with a long history of use is the “tip-jar”, or more profitably, the pay-what-you want model. Here, the creator urges his audience to leave some money as a “thank you” in return for value received. Doctorow reported receiving over $1200 using a Paypal-powered donation box, which actually did better than his print-on-demand offering.

Crowd-sourcing

Wikipedia and the more specialized wiki sites it has spawned are excellent examples of Internet resources created by large numbers of individuals working together virtually. These volunteer collaborations have replaced printed encyclopedias for most people, and might be considered to be the largest, most dynamic Open Access e-books in existence. Most users wouldn’t consider these websites to be books, even though the printed equivalents certainly were.

An organization called “Distributed Proofreaders” (DP) is an aggregation of volunteer effort clearly focused on e-books. Many of the digital texts in Project Gutenberg have been produced by DP volunteers who check and correct OCR transcriptions of scanned books. While OCR (optical character recognition) can be very accurate for modern books, books and magazines printed in the nineteenth century and earlier present a variety of challenges. The resulting digitized works are dedicated to the public domain.

Crowd-funding

The model that the author is working on at Gluejar Inc. is crowd funding. It’s analogous to the method that public radio and public television is funded in the U.S., except that every book that’s to be released with a Creative Commons license has a fund drive of its own. Once the producer’s price has been matched by reader pledges, an Open Access e-book is released. The pledge drives are managed by a website.

Authors have used crowd-funding websites such as kickstarter.com to cover the expenses of completing a new book. For example, Mur Lafferty raised over $19,000 from more than 250 backers to fund book design, cover design, and e-book conversion for a fantasy audio series. In a few cases, the projects use Creative Commons licenses. Stephen Duncombe, a Professor at NYU, has been trying to raise $3500 to fund the further production of an open-source version of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which is distributed with a CC BY-SA license. (Of course the underlying work is in the public domain, but the new translations, annotations, and commentary is subject to copyright.)

To get a better idea of how crowd-funding might scale to large numbers of books, consider the author of a romance series. Rights for the earliest books in the series have reverted to her, but there’s no cash to convert the book to e-book formats. She contacts the pledge-drive website, and enters an offer to release the first book under a Creative Commons license in exchange for a lump sum payment that she considers to be fair and which covers the conversion to e-book. Fans of the series can then go to the site and pledge support. If the author's offer price is met, supporters get billed, and the author gets the payment. The resulting e-book file is sent to all the people who have pledged, and put on a feed for the rest of the world to pick up. Since the e-book is now Creative Commons licensed, it can be redistributed for free.

In another scenario, a reader launches the pledge campaign, perhaps someone who has found the book in a library. The library metadata is pushed to the pledge-drive site and other fans can pledge their support. Eventually, the pledge amount gets big enough to attract notice from rights holders, who can then show up, deliver the e-book, and take the cash off the table and divide it among themselves.

Notes:

Cory Doctorow's With a Little Help Project
Bloomsbury Academic
Seth Godin's What Matters Now
Europeana
Distributed Proofreaders
Mur Lafferty's Kickstarter Project- The Afterlife Series: Heaven, Hell, Earth, Wasteland, War
Stephen Duncombe's Open Utopia project on Kickstarter:The Open Utopia: A New Kind of Old Book

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Open Access eBooks, Part 2. What does Open Access mean for e-books?

2011-05-02T22:06:00.003-04:00

Here's the second section of my draft of a book chapter for a book edited by No Shelf Required's Sue Polanka. I previously posted the introduction; subsequent posts will include sections on Business Models for Open Access E-Books, and Open Access E-Books in Libraries. Note that while the blog always uses "ebook" as one word, the book will use the hyphenated form, "e-book". The comments on the first section have been really good; please don't stop!

What does Open Access mean for e-books?

There are varying definitions for the term “open access”, even for journal articles. For the moment, I will use this as a lower-case term broadly to mean any arrangement that allows for people to read a book without paying someone for the privilege. At the end of the section, I’ll capitalize the term. Although many e-books are available for free in violation of copyright laws, I’m excluding them from this discussion.

Public Domain

The most important category of open access for books is work that has entered the public domain. In the US, all works published before 1923 have entered the public domain, along with works from later years whose registration was not renewed. Works published in the US from 1923-1963 entered the public domain 28 years after publication unless the copyright registration was renewed. Public domain status depends on national law, and a work may be in the public domain in some countries but not in others. The rules of what is in and out of copyright can be confusing and sometimes almost impossible to determine correctly.

In addition to public domain books that are made available by Project Gutenberg, works digitized by other efforts may be available on an open access basis. It’s not true, however, that any digitized public domain book is also open access. That’s because the digitizer can restrict access to the works using license agreements. For example, JSTOR has many digitized public domain works included in its subscription products, but the terms of the subscription prevent republication of their scans. Similarly, Google puts restrictions on the public domain books from partner libraries that it has scanned, digitized and included in Google Books. While they’re available for free, there are limits on what you can do with them.

The public domain is more than just free; it belongs to everyone. Public domain works can be copied, remixed, altered or extended. A book publisher can take a public domain text, print up bound volumes, and sell them in bookstores. A movie producer can create a cinematic dramatization of the public domain work; derivative works such as the movie acquire copyrights of their own and are not in the public domain.

Free Copyrighted Content

Laypeople often confuse public domain for “free”, and vice versa. Most content available for free on the web is copyrighted, which restricts what people can do with it. Often, the content is made available using an advertising model, trading the opportunity to read and interact with content for the user’s attention to ads or links to e-commerce websites. But website users are usually not free to republish content or email the content to friends beyond the bounds of fair use. They’re bound by whatever terms and condition the website chooses to employ; if there are no explicit terms and conditions, they still can’t copy the website’s content for other uses.

Even professional publishers are sometimes confused by copyright on the web. In 2010, the editor of “Cooks Source”, a Massachusetts magazine got into hot water for republishing a blogger’s work without permission. The publisher’s response to the blogger, on being asked for restitution, made the rounds of the Internet, and is striking for the bellicose ignorance it betrays:

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!

Many free e-books are available on a similar basis as free websites. They may include advertising or advocacy. Promotional literature and instruction manuals often fall into this category. Many publishers make free e-books available for limited periods of time as a means of marketing them; that doesn’t make them free to redistribute, though it happens.

Creative Commons Licensing

Creative Commons licensing arose to expand the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. Many authors really want their works to be redistributed for free in venues such as Cooks Source, but they want to make sure attribution is given, and often want to prevent their work from being altered or chopped into pieces. Others want to make sure that if their work is altered or somehow improved, the altered or improved version will also be available for free. Sometimes, authors are happy to have their works reused non-commercially, but want to keep their works from being commercially exploited without permission. Creative Commons licenses give authors the tools they need to accomplish these goals.

CC BY-SA mark

The different licenses available from Creative Commons are designated with a special mark, with added code letters that indicate the features invoked by the rights holder. For example, the “Attribution-ShareAlike” license is denoted by the letters “CC BY-SA” and the mark shown. This license requires attribution as to the author of the work, and the ShareAlike features bind the licensee to share any modifications or improvements.

It’s important to note that in the Creative Commons licenses, the owner of the copyright does not give up ownership of the work. The owner is free to re-license the work under any terms they desire, and can still sue people who infringe on the copyrights. The owner licenses the work to the user, who accepts the license as a condition of use. The user can in turn distribute the work along with a copy of the license to other users, who accept the terms of the same license from the copyright owner as a condition of their use.

Creative Commons licensing is now widely used for free e-books distributed on the web. Perhaps the best known e-books using CC are the works of Cory Doctorow, a blogger, science fiction author and advocate for copyright law reform. It’s also used for Wikipedia contributions, and is supported by Flickr for use in photos.

Copyleft

While Creative Commons licenses are the most frequently used for e-books, other licenses can be used to allow for the free reading of books. Noteworthy among these is the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), created by the Free Software Foundation to allow software documentation, manuals and other text to be distributed with strong “copyleft” provisions compatible with the GPL software they’re meant to accompany. The GNU FDL can easily be applied to e-books; many ebooks have been released with this license and with other Free Software Foundation licenses.

The idea of copyleft is that licenses can be used to prevent someone from taking from the commons without also giving back. For example, when a book publisher adds commentary and illustrations to the text of a Shakespeare play, the resulting book is covered under copyright and permission must be given for redistribution even though the underlying work is in the public domain. This would not be allowed by a copyleft license. The Creative Commons SA licenses have weak copyleft; the GNU FDL is stronger, and even forbids the use of DRM. It’s not clear whether it would be legal to distribute a GNU FDL e-book to a Kindle e-reading device without permission from the author.

Open Access vs. open access

Consider the book How Wikipedia Works by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. Is it an open access e-book? Based on the page at the Free Software Foundation, you might assume the answer is an easy yes, because it comes with a GNU FDL license. If you search for this book on Google, however, you’ll have to dig quite a bit to get a free e-book. Amazon will sell you the Kindle version for $21.64. You can buy it in three different formats from O’Reilly or from No Starch Press, the publisher, for $23.95. Google books has it through their publisher program; it appears to fully available and Google doesn’t try to sell it to you. You can find the e-book in a library through Worldcat, but the libraries that hold it restrict access to their own users. Wikipedia itself has a page for it, but no download link; for that you need to look on the talk page.

The intent of the publisher of this book doesn’t seem to be to make the e-book available openly, even though it uses a “free” license. The free distribution of the e-book is not effective. There are a lot of ways to license content, but at the end of the day, it’s the intent of the rights holders and the effectiveness of the free distribution that makes an e-book “Open Access” with capital OA.

Notes:

How Wikipedia Works: is available (GNU FDL license) as PDF (here (15 MB)). The Google books version is here. It's listed on a GNU web page.

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Open Access eBooks, Part 1

2011-04-28T10:54:00.006-04:00

I've been working on on a book chapter for a book edited by No Shelf Required's Sue Polanka. My chapter covers "Open Access E-Books". Over the next week or two, I'll be posting drafts for the chapter on the blog. Many readers know things that I don't about this area, and I would be grateful for their feedback and corrections. Today, I'll post the introduction, subsequent posts will include sections on Types of Open Access E-Books, Business Models for Open Access E-Books, and Open Access E-Books in Libraries. Note that while the blog always uses "ebook" as one word, the book will use the hyphenated form, "e-book".

Open Access E-Books

As e-books emerge into the public consciousness, “Open Access”, a concept already familiar to scholarly publishers and academic libraries, will play an increasing role for all sorts of publishers and libraries. This chapter discusses what Open Access means in the context of e-books, how Open Access e-books can be supported, and the roles that Open Access e-books will play in libraries and in our society.

The Open Access “Movement”

Authors write and publish because they want to be read. Many authors also want to earn a living from their writing, but for some, income from publishing is not an important consideration. Some authors, particularly academics, publish because of the status, prestige, and professional advancement that accrue to authors of influential or groundbreaking works of scholarship. Academic publishers have historically taken advantage of these motivations to create journals and monographs consisting largely of works for which they pay minimal royalties, or more commonly, no royalties at all. In return, authors’ works receive professional review, editing, and formatting. Works that are accepted get placement in widely circulated journals and monograph catalogs.

In the late 1970’s and 1980’s academic libraries became acutely aware that an expansion of research activity had resulted in the growth of both the numbers of journals and the numbers of articles published in the journals. The combination of increased subscription prices and the number of journals needed to support research resulted in a so-called “serials crisis”. Libraries were forced to cancel subscriptions. The reduction in circulation forced publishers to raise subscription prices further to make ends meet, and the resulting cycle of cancellations and price increases led to a fear that the whole system would collapse. If few libraries could afford subscriptions, fewer scholars would be able to read the articles, diminishing the attractiveness of publishing.

The advent of web-based publications in the 90’s led many to believe that the solution to the serials crisis would be a shift of the scholarly publishing industry to so-called “Open Access” business models. Open Access publications are those that can be read at no cost to the reader or the reader’s institution. The traditional model of publishing supported by subscription fees was thus styled as “Toll-Access” publishing. It was hoped that the combined cost reductions from digital distribution and automation would stop the cycle of rising expenditures.

Perhaps the most successful implementation of Open Access has been ArXiv, a database of digital preprints and reprints (“e-prints”) originally focusing on the particle physics community. Originally started by Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Labs, ArXiv is now located at Cornell University and hosts more than 670,000 scientific articles in e-print form. Authors deposit articles they’ve written into the repository, and other scholars are free to search, browse and download articles without needing any sort of subscription.

One reason for the success of Open Access archives has been that they have grown up in a parallel coexistence with the traditional academic journals, which have mostly shifted onto the web. In the so-called “Green” model for Open Access, many journals allow versions of accepted articles to be made available via repositories. Authors can thus submit their articles to high-prestige subscription-supported journals without worrying about colleagues’ access, because scholars that need to read their works can always access versions from free sources.

Meanwhile, the shift of traditional journals onto the web has allowed the rise of secondary distribution channels. Most academic libraries today enjoy access to a much broader range of journals compared to 20 years ago because of the availability of article databases that aggregate content from large numbers of journals.

The past decade has also seen the rise of “Gold” Open Access journals. These journals leverage low cost Internet distribution to allow articles to be read universally with no subscription charges. Led by Biomed Central and PLoS, these journals cover expenses by charging publication fees to the submitting author. They build prestige and avoid becoming “vanity” presses by establishing rigorous review processes.

The success of Open Access journals and articles has for the most part not yet been duplicated in the word of books. There are a number of possible reasons for this. The first is the matter of cost. Publication fees for Open Access journal articles are in the range of $600-$3000; editing and production expenses for a book published by a university press are estimated to range from $10,000 for a book that’s mostly text to much more for a book with figures, photos, equations and cover art. Author-funded publication fees this large are unlikely to be practical, even with significant institutional subsidies.

Another factor holding back Open Access books may be a preference for print books over e-books. Books are much longer than journal articles, and many readers are uncomfortable reading a book on a computer screen. It’s only in the past two years that dedicated reader devices such as the Kindle and tablet computers such as the iPad have improved the e-book experience enough to gain wide consumer acceptance.

The business environment for book publishers is another possible factor. The university publisher loses money on much of its catalog, but compensates for this by having one or two titles that cross over to be successful outside the academic environment. Amazon.com has bolstered this pattern, by providing wide distribution for small print-run titles that would never have been available in bookstores before. In contrast, journal articles almost never cross over into non-professional markets.

Nonetheless, there have been a few notable attempts to publish Open Access e-books. I’ll cover these later in a section on business models for Open Access e-books, but it wouldn’t be right to omit mention of Project Gutenberg at this point. Project Gutenberg (PG) produced not only the first Open Access e-books, it produced the first e-books, period. Started by Michael Hart in 1971, PG aimed to take the text of public domain works and make them available via the Internet. To date, PG has put over 34,000 works into its collection, entirely through the efforts of volunteers.

Distribution of Open Access e-books can be thought of as an enterprise separate from their production, since the costs involved are of a different nature. The scaling laws of Internet distribution favor centralization, and as a result, organizations such as the Internet Archive are able to distribute appropriately licensed e-books on a vast scale; businesses such as Google are able to search and organize them; libraries, blogs, and portal sites are able to select and “curate” them. To some extent, this type of distribution depends on the self-contained nature of the book; it shouldn’t require the context of a specific website to retain and accumulate value.

Open Access for e-books provides many benefits in addition to allowing people to read for free. Access to the full text of books makes for more complete indexing. The utility of Google Books, and the effort Google has put into digitizing books from libraries, even when they are unable to make the books available because of copyright, is testament to the value of indexing the full text. Long-term preservation of our cultural heritage is another public benefit of Open Access to e-books.

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A Corollary to Raganathan's Third Law

2011-04-25T21:00:00.000-04:00

What do you see when you walk through a deserted library crammed with books? Do you see a vast store of knowledge, just waiting to be tapped, or do you see a horribly inefficient use of resources? Do you think of what could be, or do you see what isn't? If you're a librarian with a limited budget, you might think of all the money that went into those books, and you'd be thinking about how to get people to use those books. That's how interlibrary loan came into being.

Now imagine if the books were digital. Interlibrary loan is problematic for ebooks, but librarians are anything if not pragmatic. Some books, though valuable, are unlikely to be circulated a lot. So instead of purchasing those books for the library, the library contributes to a consortium that buys ebooks for the use of all its members. This benefits library patrons, because they gain access to a large number of books they'd otherwise not have access to, and it benefits publishers, because they are able to sell a broader range of books, at higher prices, than they'd sell if the consortium didn't exist.

I haven't yet commented on the consortial aspects of the recent HarperCollins kerfuffle. Here's what Overdrive told its partner libraries:

Another area of publisher concern that OverDrive is responding to is the size and makeup of large consortia and shared collections. Publishers seek to ensure that sufficient copies of their content are being licensed to service demand of the library’s service area, while at the same time balance the interests of publisher’s retail partners who are focused on unit sales. Publishers are reviewing benchmarks figures from library sales of print books and CDs for audiobooks and do not want these unit sales and revenue to be dramatically reduced by the license of digital books to libraries.

Let me translate this into English.

Publishers are aware that many of the books they sell to libraries are seldom used. (See my posts on Book Use for some quantitative information) They worry that they'll no longer be able to sell 10 copies of a seldom-used book to 10 libraries, because 1 electronic copy will meet the demand from 10 libraries in a consortium. They feel that they deserve the benefit of inefficient library purchasing decisions.

This sort of thinking is myopic. Libraries have responded to budget pressures by making their purchasing more efficient and relying more on inter-library loan (ILL), a process which is invisible to publishers. Because inter-library loan is relatively expensive, publishers gain when ILL is replaced by consortial ebook lending because the money saved can be redirected to ebook acquisitions.

An efficient library channel will compete, to some extent, with ebook direct-sales channels. The optimum strategy for publishers, however, is not to force inefficiency in the library channel, but rather to optimize pricing to monetize increased efficiency.

The efficiency of library acquisitions can be increased by introducing more consortia. A library needing a collection specializing in medicine, for example, should bolster its collection by participating in a consortium with the corresponding specialization. In principle, there could be a consortium specialized for every book that gets published. Such a consortium could manage the number of copies it purchases to closely manage global demand. If the economics worked out it could even strike a deal for unlimited use of the book by consortium members.

The single-book consortium could even allow individuals participate. It could negotiate with rightsholders for global access.

So here's a corollary to Raganathan's Third Law of Library Science:

Every Book its Consortium

Mmmmm. That sounds like my business idea for Gluejar, un-gluing ebooks.

In Defense of the Book as a Container

2011-04-11T16:41:00.003-04:00

Podcasting has turned radio into a new medium. From the New York Times Magazine:

...the value of a media product does not come from being fast. It comes from being timeless. ...It wouldn't make sense, [Abumrad] said, to devote the effort to seduce, disturb and engage the listener if "Radiolab" epidsodes were merely broadcast once and disappeared.

Exactly, I thought, Radiolab is like a book.

Back in October, Brian O'Leary posted a rather long essay on his blog, called "Context First". The essay was well received, and he presented versions of the essay at conferences around the world. I excerpt:

my idea in a nutshell is this: book, magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have used for centuries to transmit information. Those containers define content in two dimensions, necessarily ignoring that which cannot or does not fit.

Worse, the process of filling the container strips out context – the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata – that is a luxury in the physical world, but a critical asset in digital ones. In our evolving, networked world – the world of “books in browsers” – we are no longer selling content, or at least not content alone. We compete on context.

I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated. To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content.

Something about O'Leary's essay has been gnawing at me ever since, but until reading yesterday's article on Radiolab, I couldn't put my finger on what it was that bothered me.

The implication of O'Leary's "Unified Field Theory of Publishing", is that in order to compete, print publishing needs to break away from the limiting forms of the print medium and become something new, in jazzy harmony with our contextually dynamic digital world, filled with links and metadata and APIs.

Bear in mind, O'Leary's [a consultant who's worked in both the magazine and book industries, is] dead right about magazines. But I've decided his implication is dead wrong about books. We need to understand what it is about the book that makes it a container of media that will persist into the digital world. It's NOT context. The wonderful thing about the book as container is the same thing that lifts Radiolab as podcast above Radiolab as radio. It's the timelessness.

So as we evolve the ebook, I think we need to be aware of and nurture its potential for timelessness. If we put the context first, as O'Leary urges, then all we have left is a website.

Long live the content container formerly known as the book!

Notes:

As we develop plans for the Gluejar business, we need to add some definition to the "containers" that get released as creative commons ebooks. One thing we might do to enhance "timelessness" is to add a digital signature that verifies that the content of the ebook hasn't been altered.
[Update] This conversation has continued over on Brian O'Leary's blog. There's also a remarkable reflection, in French, at SoBookOnline, that does a great job of laying out the ideas and questions that Brian and I are wrestling over.

The Public Broadcasting Model for eBooks

2011-04-06T11:07:00.002-04:00

Imagine if Radiolab (my favorite radio show) were a book. It would be a best-seller, probably the kind you might buy at Target. It would sound good on your coffee table, and you'd have a shelf full of your favorite episodes. You'd also be able to get it for free at the library. Now that radio is becoming digital, you might even be able to buy it instantly at Amazon.com, or download it to your iPad from the iBookStore.

It's expensive to create fantastic programs like Radiolab. New York Public Radio, which produces Radiolab, produces other award winning programs and operates three of America top public radio stations, all on an annual budget of just under 48 million dollars. That works out to $130,854 per day. If you spread that expense over the 19 million potential listeners in the New Yourk Metropolitan area, it works out to 0.69 pennies per day per person.

But it doesn't even cost that much to listen to WNYC or WQXR. Most people pay even less, zero pennies, to be exact. What's more, you can listen to the shows for free on the internet. On your iPad, even. And you don't even have to go to the library.

A relatively small number of us send money to become "members" of the station. The $120 my family contributed turned into a deduction on the tax return I completed yesterday. Most people who listen don't contribute, but they're never referred to as "pirates" or "thieves".

The reason this works anyway is that radio has large fixed costs and infinitesimal marginal costs. If the listenership doubles, the costs stay exactly the same. It's not like book publishing, which spends a lot of money pumping paper through a complex supply chain.

A book can cost a lot to produce, too. An author might devote a whole year to the writing of a book. Let's be generous and say the author deserves $200,000. There's an editor, a graphic designer, maybe an illustrator who also work on the book. Add some management overhead, tax accountants, lawyers, and it's easy to get over $300,000 in fixed costs, and we haven't even started promoting, printing and shipping the book. Many books, of course are produced for much less money. Some authors don't get paid a cent.

But EBOOKS ARE NOT BOOKS. They're just bits, and typically not so many, compared to a radio show. The cost of making a copy is negligible. It needn't cost anything to distribute the ebook. eBook distribution is even cheaper than radio, because you don't have to pay for transmitter power, and you don't have to own a frequency license. It's the monetization machinery that costs money: the ecommerce systems and the DRM. If the producers of ebooks had some way of covering their fixed costs (with profit to make it worth their while), ebooks could work just like free radio. Three million people contributing a dime would do quite nicely. 30,000 contributing $10 would work, too.

A public "bookcasting" system would work somewhat differently from public radio. Audiences and patrons would be assembled around individual books and authors, which would be much more numerous than radio stations. People would be motivated to help make the books they love public by the virtuous cycle of receiving books supported by other public book patrons.

In case you haven't been paying attention, this business model is what I've begun working on as Gluejar, Inc.. The Internet presents an incredible capability for assembling audiences around a common purpose. The business will bring together people to pay for the fixed costs of producing ebooks, reward the best producers with profits, and to make these ebooks public, free to read, free to copy, to everyone, everywhere in the world, using Creative Commons Licensing.

This can work. I can see it now. The pledge drive will take up pages 40-50.

The Threat to Book Publishing From Long-Dead Authors, and a Solution

2011-04-01T00:23:00.003-04:00

The US constitution empowers Congress

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

But the framers could never have anticipated the threat to our civilization posed by the unholy alliance of long-dead authors and electronic books.

In the print world, long-dead authors compete fairly with the living and the recently departed. James Patterson, whose every word is dearly paid for, is offering his hardback "Toys" for $27.99 (list). Steig Larsson's heirs are saved from poverty and Swedish taxes by $27.95 per copy from "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest". They compete for the book buyer's dollar with works such as "The Count of Monte Cristo" by long-dead author Alexandre Dumas, offered by Penguin for $15. That's a fair competition; I mean even at half the price, how many readers really want to read about vegetable shortening math?

But when it comes to ebooks, even James Patterson has trouble making a buck. He has to compete not only with Dumas, but authors like Mark Twain, James Joyce, Agatha Christie, H. G. Wells, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, and even William Shakespeare. Though dead, these authors are brazenly flogging their books, nouns verbs and adjectives all included, on sites like Project Gutenberg, where they have the chutzpah to be selling the ebooks for $0.00. That's right, they're giving these ebooks away! For zilch! Nada! That's an umpteen gazillion factor less than Larsson's Hornet's Nest, which sells for a paltry $11.99 on the Kindle.

How is a living, breathing author to compete with free? Living authors need money to eat; long-dead authors don't. They don't need to pay support for their illegitimate offspring. Shakespeare doesn't need to pay lawyers to defend against infringement suits from Francis Bacon. Dostoyevsky doesn't need a shrink. Joyce doesn't need to buy whiskey, Twain doesn't need cigars; James Fennimore Cooper doesn't need to pay for a writing coach. The Bell brothers are just as dead as the Brontë sisters, whose sickly father is no longer needing medical care.

This unfair competition needs to be stopped! Luckily, the US Supreme Court is on the case. In Golan v. Holder, the Court is considering whether Congress may remove works from the public domain. A crybaby Conductor of music, Lawrence Golan, is complaining that his free-speech rights were taken away by a law that removed the works of Igor Stravinsky, a composer currently bereft of life, from the public domain in the US. Stravinsky has been trying to compete unfairly (though unsuccessfully, I might add) in the free-music marketplace with the likes of Rebecca Black.

Clearly modern authors need protection from unfair competition out of the hereafter. A favorable ruling for America's creative industries will pave the way for Congress to take action against the long-dead authors. Copyright protection should be restored to ALL creative works that have been produced. It's only by doing this that we can be assured that authors like Rhonda Byrne will have meaningful incentives to write a sequel to The Secret.

You may be wondering how we'll dispose of the royalties generated by works of long-dead authors. These royalties can be used to eliminate the other main reason that authors won't bother writing anything decent for ebooks. That's right, the taxes that living authors have to pay on their royalties! By cutting or even eliminating taxes on live-author royalty income, we'll stimulate the creativity of our moribund authoring classes. Publishers will no longer be desperate for unsolicited book manuscripts.

The more I think about this course of action, the more it makes sense to me. Think of the huge amounts of money that will be saved over the current complicated and idiotic rules that govern copyright status. With the extension of copyright to all works, the answer will be easy and cheap to determine- everything will be covered by copyright! Orphan works problem- solved!

The free-culture crowd will inevitably denounce the extension of copyright to all works as a threat to the freedom of speech. That's ridiculous. Dead people don't have the right to free speech, and even if they did, I'd hate to hear them try. Speech may be free, but in the words of our greatest President, "I paid for this microphone".

Notes:

Patterson has been trying his best to compete with the dead-author slushpile. He's been forced to offer the first 21 Chapters of "Toys" for free on the Kindle.
If long-dead authors were free to express themselves, they'd just write more tedious run-on sentences like
the provision is unequal to the task; the means either cannot or will not accomplish the end, and the whole affair is a felo de se; for as the greater weight will always carry up the less, and as all the wheels of a machine are put in motion by one, it only remains to know which power in the constitution has the most weight, for that will govern; and though the others, or a part of them, may clog, or, as the phrase is, check the rapidity of its motion, yet so long as they cannot stop it, their endeavors will be ineffectual; the first moving power will at last have its way, and what it wants in speed is supplied by time.
It's just common sense to keep them in their coffins.
Of course, to achieve the maximum benefit from copyright uniformity, website readers will have to start paying royalties for the articles they read online. This minor inconvenience is a tiny price to pay for the cultural renaissance that will ensue in the universal copyright regime.

Go To Hellman

Unglue.it Preview All Systems Go

Howard Dean and Rush Holt Oppose SOPA

Foreign Libraries Will Be Infringing Sites Under SOPA

2011: The Year the eBook Wars Broke Out

1. Harper-Collins and Overdrive Stop Pretending

2. Amazon occupies Overdrive

3. The Penguin Strikes Back

4. Prime Pretends to be a Library

5. Publishers Decide Google is a Lesser Evil

6. Authors Lob Legal Grenades at Hathitrust

7. Amazon Obliterates Borders.

8. Libraries Muster the Resistance

9. Anti-Piracy Hysteria Threatens Freedom Loving Citizens

There's hope.

How to Dig for Book Data Treasure

SOPA Could Put Common Library Software in the Soup

Book Lending Ignorance

It's Not About Libraries, It's About Amazon

eBook Markets Need eBook Quality Standards

Creative Commons Media Neutrality and eBook Rights after Rosetta v. Random

The United Nations of Reading

Creative Commons - ND (No Derivatives)

The DPLA Muster

Creative Commons - NC (Non-Commercial)

Creative Commons - BY (Attribution)

How Can We Change the Future? The Tomorrow Project

The Clawback of @lessig's "Remix"

Are Neutrinos Superluminal? Judge for Yourself.

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Risks

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Community and Context

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Changing the World

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Freemium models

Advertising and promotional models

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Crowd-funding

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