The Asterisk behind NYPL and Bookish

Joe Regal grew up in a family that moved around. Granger, Indiana.  Lewiston, New York. Towanda, Pennsylvania. In every town there was a library, which young Joe would seek out as a haven of virtual stability. Regal remembers that in Fairfield, Connecticut, he picked up Breakfast of Champions, because the cover looked like a cereal box. He opened it and was thrilled to discover, right there on page 5, the "drawing" of an anus/asterisk. And the text of Kurt Vonnegut's novel was even more subversive than the drawing.

"Vonnegut was one of those writers who made me feel less alone.  He also made me understand that it was OK to break the rules, because often the rules were insane.  That message - captured even in the asterisk/anus drawing, though of course more deeply, richly, and powerfully in the actual writing! - meant so much to me at 13, it's hard to convey or even fully remember the totality of it.  The freedom, the sense that you could explore without fear of punishment or retribution - that's a lot of what the library meant to me as a kid.  It's easy for us to forget as adults that a book can literally save your life. Or even on a more prosaic level, if there was literally no cost to taking out a book, I could take out anything without worrying whether it was right for me. I could browse, read a bit, take it out, get bored, return it."

As an adult Joe Regal translated his passion for books to a successful career as a literary agent. He believed so deeply in Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Travelers Wife that he ignored countless rejections until he found a publisher for it. ("I do not publish science-fiction." was the complete text of one rejection.)

As an agent, Regal could see first-hand what ebooks and Amazon were doing to the ability of authors, publishers and bookstores to sustain their livelihoods. He thought about what an seller of ebooks could and should be. There should be space for curation and community. Authors should be able to connect with readers. As he talked with others about his ideas, the concept of a new kind of website for ebooks began to take shape. (I got to know Regal and his family around this time.)

A few years later, Zola Books is a reality. Initially funded by friends of Regal (including Niffenegger), Zola has recently closed a $5.1 million seed round. The round includes a variety of authors and prominent individual investors led by Charles Dolan, founder of Cablevision and HBO. Even considering the funding, Zola's ambition is breathtaking. They've built a commerce platform like BN.com, a social platform like GoodReads, an HTML epub reader with proprietary DRM (not yet launched), and partner curation tools like- (stretching a bit) sort of a TripAdvisor for books. Not to mention a solid catalog of ebooks.

A recommendation engine has been a big space on the Zola development roadmap from the beginning. It's not easy technology, so when the recommendation engine built by Bookish became available (along with the Bookish website) at a fraction of its development cost, Zola, newly funded and in a hurry, snapped it up at a bargain-basement price.

The Bookish recommendation engine uses "finger-prints" of books in its algorithm. In other words, it works more like Pandora than like Netflix. The fingerprints are not just metadata and are not just text analysis, but use elements of both along with human-powered analysis.

recommendations for
Breakfast of Champions

On Monday, New York Public Library announced that it had integrated the Bookish-powered recommendation engine into their NYPL BiblioCommons-powered web catalog, fulfilling Regal's dream of being able to give back to the libraries he loved growing up, opening up unexpected books like Breakfast of Champions to new generations of readers.  The recommendations are live on the NYPL website, so you can decide for yourself if the recommendations are good or not. I found them to be intriguing, at least.

Apparently NYPL has been looking to add a recommendation feature to its website for a few years. They tracked potential partners along with Bookish to determine the best option, and had the benefit of seeing some advance demos before "Bookish Recommends" launched online. NYPL was impressed by Bookish's "big data back-end" and that it was not driven by sales; the number of titles the it covered at the outset was impressive.  NYPL will be assessing  performance over the first year to ensure that the recommendations are valuable to readers.

According to Patrick Kennedy, Co-founder and President at BiblioCommons,

"The background to this story is the interest a number of libraries have shared with us in broadening their role as a source of book recommendations in their communities.  The initiative will allow for better visibility and sharing of librarian recommendations and reviews, the integration of other third-party recommendations databases such as LibraryThing and NoveList.  Our goal is provide a neutral platform that allows libraries to integrate the sources of their choice.  In all cases the integration API is made available by the third parties to BiblioCommons with the understanding that any library on the BiblioCommons platform may license the content."

Zola is hoping to make the Bookish API widely available to libraries and is considering a variety of licensing models. As Kennedy points out, there are recommendation services already available to libraries. The LibraryThing service (marketed by Bowker), is based on activities in the LibraryThing social network and is incredibly deep; the NoveList service from EBSCO takes a more traditional reader's advisory approach. The Bookish recommendation engine may not be based on sales the way Amazon's is, but if it doesn't help Zola sell ebooks, it will die. Can the mission of a library be advanced by using a tool whose ultimate purpose is to sell books? Or does it depend on the sort of bookseller behind the tool?

This conflict is probably why booksellers and libraries haven't been sharing as much book information infrastructure as you might expect. A library has different goals for a recommendation system than does a bookseller. Libraries need to steer users toward books of their collection that are less used, while booksellers need to present the user with books that the patron is most likely to buy. Which might ALWAYS be 50 Shades or Hunger Games.

But bookselling and libraries are both changing rapidly. With the big-box bookstore dying before their eyes, publishers are scrambling to find ways to continue putting books in front of readers. One possibility is that libraries will respond to this need and evolve a closer connection to commerce, and that booksellers will figure out how to tighten their connections to communities and their libraries. The alternative is that libraries and ebookstores grow apart to serve very different populations and needs – Amazon Prime and library subprime, if you will.

My guess is that libraries sharing infrastructure with booksellers will become the norm rather than the exception it is now. Monday's announcement by NYPL and Zola is more than just a website usability widget, it's about a vision of what libraries and booksellers can become. Zola has sent a love letter to the library world.

Notes

1. Bookish.com started out as a joint venture of Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster. Bookish spent a vast amount of money developing the site.
2. Competition between LibraryThing and Bookish might well lead to some changes. Bookish uses some content from LibraryThing, such as reviews, on its website. When Bookish launched, LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding wrote 

   Besides reviews, Bookish has access to some other LibraryThing data, including edition disambiguation and recommendations. A glance at their recommendations, however, will show you that they're not using them "cold," but as some sort of factor."

3. I wrote about BiblioCommons when they came out of stealth a few years ago. They've won the business of some very high profile public Libraries, NYPL and Seattle Public Library included. They have the big  benefit of starting from scratch with current web technology, and as a result have been innovating quickly.
4. I took a look at how the integration was done. The Bookish API is a straightforward REST and JSON with access keys. ISBN-based queries such as
   
   http://api.bookish.com/recapi/api/v1/recommendations?maxItems=15&token=<token>&apiKey=<key>&isbn13s=9780670024902
   
   return JSON like:
   [{
  "basic": {
    "isbn13": "9780671742515",
    "bookUrl": "http://www.bookish.com/books/long-dark-tea-time-of-the-soul-douglas-adams-9780671742515/<token>",
    "imageUrl": "http://images.bookish.com/covers/m/9780671742515.jpg",
    "title": "Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul",
    "subtitle": "",
    "authors": ["Douglas Adams"]
  }
}]
   
   The library-side integration done by BiblioCommons is ajaxy and javascript based; a javascript calls the api, pulls out the ISBNs and sends them back to BiblioCommons, which checks for the recommended ISBN in the catalog. A list of holdings is sent back to the browser for rendering. It looks like Bibliocommons itself does not call the bookish API, which could lend itself to easier integration with other recommender APIs.
   
5. Another interesting recommender system in the library world is bX from ExLibris. It's a usage based system focused on article links, rather than books. Currently, bX will return book recommendations based on articles, but doesn't provide recommendations based on books.
6. Don't confuse Bookish.com, the company acquired by Zola Books with booki.sh, the company acquired by Overdrive
   
7. Not that we haven't had this problem at unglue.it, but why does NYPL list Robert Egan as the author of the ebook version of Breakfast of Champions? (Update: Answer from Amy Geduldig at NYPL- "The catalog entry here refers to the play Breakfast of Champions by Robert Egan, which is based on the novel by Vonnegut, but in and of itself is a different work, which is why Egan is listed as the author. ")
8. All the book links in this post point at the NYPL BiblioCommons catalog so you can see try out Bookish Recommends for yourself.

Biblio-Social Objects: Copia, Mendeley, LibraryThing and Mongoliad

The long awaited Copia e-reading platform finally launched, and the big surprise is that the previously announced devices have disappeared. Copia's innovation is that it smushes together a bookstore, reading environments that live across devices, and a social network. As such, it's interesting to look at.

Another recent arrival is the App for Mongoliad, the ambitious collaboration between Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear "and friends". It's a serial work built on a custom platform (including both website and apps) that supports multimedia and user-generated content, and it aspires to be a community inside a fictional world containing multiple narratives rather than a novel.

It's undeniable that books belong in our social networks, but it's far from obvious how social aspects should fit into the reading experience. Copia is designed with the point of view that the integration should be tight- it allows the sharing of annotations right within the reader application. Mongoliad does that, and more, it invites and rewards reader contributions, even to the point of letting the community influence the narrative. In thinking about how books should fit in to a social network, it's useful to look at two thriving social networks built around bibliographic objects, LibraryThing and Mendeley.

LibraryThing describes itself as a "social cataloging website". It helps you catalog your book collection, but it derives its vitality from the way it lets members use your personal catalog to connect with other LibraryThing members. A typical "Thingish" activity going on now is SantaThing, a sort of Secret Santa for Book Lovers. (Sorry it's too late to join for this year!)

Mendeley is surprisingly similar in function to LibraryThing, but it concentrates on a different set of bibliographic objects- journal articles. Like Copia, it includes a stand-along application, but its core utility is managing references for scientists and scholars. If that's all it did, it wouldn't create much excitement- services such as RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero and many others do that job. It's the emerging community that makes Mendeley special, which has a look and feel reminiscent of Facebook. Mendeley has recently added a public groups feature that helps researchers coalesce around topics defined by articles of interest. Very soon, they'll be rolling out a feature that connects users with other users based on their reference libraries.

It's a bit early to judge either Copia or Mongoliad- both shows lots of rough edges and awkwardness, but you expect that in things so new and ambitious. (Random examples- At first, Copia didn't remember where I was in a book; now it does, and I'm not sure what changed. You have to log in twice because of DRM- once to Copia, and a second time to Adobe. This is soon to be fixed, according to Copia representatives. Mongoliad's web version has an annoying border trim that made the edges of the page rather hard to read, and the navigation is at times mystifying.) Instead, I'd like to point out two architectural issues that these products raise, and which aren't likely to change easily. The answers to these questions are likely to determine their ultimate success or failure.

1. Should reading environments and social activity be tightly coupled or loosely coupled?

Copia is betting that a better user experience will result from the tight-coupling philosophy. Comments and annotations live in the social graph of Copia members and are fed right into the Copia reading applications. It's the same philosophy that Apple has used for its Ping network with no great success - yet. YouTube's social networking features could be characterized as being tightly coupled to their video content, and if Copia achieved a fraction of YouTube's success I'm sure they'll be quite happy.

The alternative to tight coupling would be loose coupling. There's no technical reason that users of Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Sony and Kobo reading environments couldn't all share comments and annotations via Twitter, Facebook and Buzz messaging backbones. Technical frameworks for open annotation are beginning to emerge.

Loose coupling is the way MLB has added social activity to their baseball Apps, and it works well there. Watching baseball is very much a social activity, but that doesn't mean that people want to build their social network around baseball games. My guess is that reading a book is more like watching a game in terms of the social interactions that work well around it.

Loose coupling to social features would allow users to combine their favorite reading device or application for example, Stanza or Ibis on iPad, their favorite social network, say LibraryThing or GetGlue, and their favorite shopping environment, which might be Amazon or Kobo. Loose coupling makes for more competition, resulting in a more challenging business environment for the provider of the social network. The types of web services present in both LibraryThing and Mendeley (and Facebook and Twitter, for that matter) allow coupling to other services, greatly increasing the footprint of the social network.

Mongoliad, by contrast, is content with extreme coupling to its social network, to the extent that you worry about scaling. While the Mongoliad platform supports only one narrative work (not sure if I should call it a book!) the company behind it, Subutai, intend it to be a platform for many different works. How will the community formed by one work interact with other communities on the same platform? will there be narrative leakage?

2. Which comes first,  objects connecting you to friends, or friends connecting you to objects?

This is a chicken and egg question, of course, but the interactions enabled by a social network are of one type or another. In a network like Facebook, the friends come first, and the stream of social interactions can bring along connections to many types of entities, books included. In networks like LibraryThing and Mendeley, it's the other way around- the books and articles create connections between you and other members of the network.

The reason this question is architecturally important for book- and article- -oriented networks is that it determines whether the objects in your network are works or whether they are products. Products can live in a friend-first network, but they stick out like a sore thumb in book-first social networks, where they really need to be "works".

To understand what I mean, consider a book I mentioned in a previous post, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History. Copia has a product catalog, not a work catalog, and so there are two separate entries for this work, one an ebook, the other a hardcover. When a paperback comes out, there will be a third entry. It makes very little sense for my social interactions surrounding the hardcover to be separated from similar interactions surrounding the ebook. Other works are much worse. Try loading "Moby Dick" into a Copia library. Although it's a public domain work, free from Project Gutenberg, you have to pay for the versions available for download in the Copia store. It's not as bad as Kindle but it's not as good as Apple's iBooks; I WAS able to import my iBooks file of Moby Dick into the Copia Reader.

The "thing" that really separates LibraryThing from other book oriented social networks is the emphasis it has put on the grouping of different book editions. (Full disclosure- one of my achievements at OCLC was managing the productization of OCLC's book-grouping web service, xISBN, which competes with a similar service from LibraryThing). Similarly, Mendeley expends a huge computational effort determining which article instantiations are the same as other article instantiations in its network.

Retailers naturally work at the product level, and the current version of Copia exposes the weaknesses of using product data as the basis of a social network. They'll eventually clean this up (as has Amazon) but it will be a slow and difficult process for them to re-engineer their backbone to address the complexities that libraries have long needed to deal with.

Mongoliad, though I'm sure it will cause the ISBN agency all sorts of headaches, is crystal clear about its status as a single, sprawling work. It will be interesting to watch its development as users begin to interact around the objects inside the work- characters, maps, places, etc, each of which is associated with a "'pedia" page.

Now what?

Once you've collected a network of people around a book, what happens next? Social networks are not unlike coffee shops or bars. If the business model for the network owner is to sell books (beer, coffee), the point is to get the network to buy their books (beer, coffee) through the network. Thus Copia's network will inevitably be slanted towards discovery of new things to read. If the business model for a social network is to collect some sort of membership fee, the point is to make the members so cozy they recruit more members. Hence the vibrant communities at LibraryThing and Mendeley, both of which use "freemium" business models. If the business model is to sell a subscription, the point is to get the reader hooked on characters and continuing narrative narrative. Hence Mongoliad is likely to include a lot of cliffhangers.

There's one more thing a book-mob will be able do, and that's evangelize the book. Large, evangelical groups of readers are exactly what Gluejar will need to gather the financial muscle to "unglue" books. Cooperation with all sorts of social networks will be a key to the success of this venture.

Even though its very much a self contained system, I'm really starting to get into Mongoliad, however. Thinking back on other Stephenson works, I'm realizing how ill-fitting they are in book form. The Subutai platform has unglued the narrative from the pages in a rather unexpected way.

I'd like to acknowledge invaluable conversations related to this article with Copia's Sol Rosenberg, LibraryThing's Tim Spalding, Ian Mulvany and Jan Reichelt of Mendeley (and all of Neal Stephenson's novels!)

Back to the Future at the Storefront Library

I wish library I can buy book.

I wish we had a permanent library.

I wish to be happy and proud of my accomplishments.

In the window of the Chinatown Storefront Library in Boston stood a Wish Tree. Modeled after Yoko Ono's Wish Tree Project, the tree was meant to allow patrons to pass on a spirit of energy and hope. The instructions were:

Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a wish tree. Ask your friend to do the same. Keep wishing until the branches are covered.

The Chinatown Storefront Library closed its doors on January 17, 2010, the Sunday that ALA Midwinter was in town. Always meant to be a temporary library, the Storefront Library was an expression by Boston's Chinatown community of its need and support for a library of its own. The Chinatown neighborhood of Boston has been without a branch of the Boston Public Library since 1956, when the branch was closed and demolished to make way for a highway.

Without a local branch, Chinatown residents needing library services have to go to the main library in Copley Square, which, though a beautiful building, may seem rather imposing and hard to navigate for someone looking for Chinese language materials.

The founders of Chinatown Storefront Library, Sam and Leslie Davol, had been involved in community meetings surrounding the proposed design and construction of a new branch of Boston Public Library, and in that process had gotten to know faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. With a new branch on hold due to budgetary reasons, the Davols decided to take action. A local developer offered to let them use a vacant storefront for free. Design students made some gorgeous, modernistic shelving pieces for the library, enabling it to create an inviting environment in an bare commercial space. Library students from Simmons paired with Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking community volunteers to staff the facility. Donations of over 5,000 books were solicited, and for twelve weeks, a community library came into existence. The operating budget for the entire project was about $10,000.

The day before the closing, I had a chance to tour the Storefront Library and sit down with Sam Davol. Formerly a legal-aid lawyer in New York, he and his wife moved back to Boston with their two children, partly so that Sam could devote more time to music. The Library project was an outgrowth of their involvement in the community and other cultural programming they've produced.

In just a few short months, the Storefront Library has had a clear impact on its neighborhood. People who used to avoid the block because of its vacant, spooky feel began to feel welcomed by the activity surrounding the library. Cultural activities, language classes and storytimes attracted people from the community and passersby.

Initially, the Storefront library did not plan to circulate books, but in the first week of operation patrons told them that they really wanted to take books home with them. A makeshift paper-based circulation system was implemented, and over 1,374 books were circulated in 11 weeks of operation, over half of them in Chinese. Over 4,000 books were catalogued using LibraryThing.

In talking to librarians in general about the storefront library concept, I've gotten a consistent reaction that small storefront spaces could not provide sufficient room to provide internet access; terminals take up more room than books. At the Storefront Library, the computers tended to be lightly used. When I was there, some older gentemen were reading newspapers, some children were reading books, but no one was using the computers or internet access. This could be because the Library did not subscribe to electronic resources.

I think the most important lesson that can be learned from the Storefront Library experiment is that even small temporary libraries can be powerful agents of community development. In Boston, this role was accentuated by a location in close proximity to people's everyday lives. While I've written that the future of public libraries may be in smaller locations, the Chinatown Storefront Library reminded me that many public libraries began as grassroots efforts to promote knowledge and culture.

Now that the Storefront Library has closed, its books will be going to a new reading room, to local schools, and a few to the Chinese Historical Society of New England. The furniture will be going to local schools and daycare facilities. Information about the project will be published on the storefrontlibrary.org website so that similar projects in other communities can learn from their experiences.

As for Sam Davol, he goes on tour. He plays cello with the indie-pop band "The Magnetic Fields", which has a new CD out, Realism. I just got my tickets for one of the shows at New York's Town Hall in March.

I wish there were more people experimenting with libraries.

Numbers for Libraries and the Book Market

The two best things about 10-year prognostication are that no one knows if you're a fool or a genius until it's too late to spoil the fun, and that you start to understand how little you know about the present.

In trying to predict how libraries will fit into the ebook economy (and I've decided to start leaving out the dash) I began by trying to explain the role of libraries in the print book economy. I quickly ran into the fact that it's difficult to get good estimates of how large the market role of libraries really is!

I talked to Outsell Chief Analyst Leigh Watson Healy, co-author of the Book Industry Study Group's Book Industry TRENDS report (highlights are here). Outsell estimates that the total US book market in 2009 was 41 billion dollars. They estimate that book sales to libraries was a bit over 1.6 billion dollars, which is almost 4% of the total market.

Another way to estimate the economic footprint of libraries is to look at library budgets. The Institute of Museum and Library Services publishes an annual survey (available here) of all the government-supported public libraries in the US. For the last year available, 2007, they compute that US public libraries spent 934 million dollars on their print collections (including serials). IMLS is counting something different from Outsell and there are a number of reasons the numbers would be different; my guess is the Outsell numbers, which are gathered from publishers, include a lot of libraries that either don't fit into the IMLS definitions or are outside the US.

Similar information for the UK is available from the British Booksellers Association and the Public Library Materials Fund and Budget Survey. UK public libraries spent 77 million pounds on books in 2008, while the British public spent a total of 2.3 billion pounds on books, suggesting that public library spending was 3.3% of the total.

Public libraries are only part of the library market, of course. Academic, school, medical and corporate libraries are also purchasers of books. Altogether, it seems likely that libraries total at least 5% of the book market, which is nothing to sneeze at. If we assume that public libraries buy books that are predominately in the juvenile and adult trade categories, then even the IMLS total is over 6% in those categories. In some segments of the book market, such as academic monographs, libraries probably make up much more of the total market.

The IMLS report also has some numbers relevant to my prediction of fewer libraries, more locations. In 2007, there were 9,040 "central" public libraries, 7,564 "branches" and 808 bookmobiles in the US. The per capita expenditures on public libraries was $37.21, and Americans borrowed an average of 7.3 books per year.

I plotted some of the IMLS data to see if if my fewer libraries prediction is just an extrapolation of a trend. It's not. The total number of libraries and library locations, held pretty steady between 2003 and 2007, after rising slightly from 1998-2003.

Part of the reason libraries are not merging is expressed by Katherine Gould in her comment on my fewer libraries post. Her library district has had good success with a small satellite branch, but the idea of merging libraries isn't one that appeals to her. It shouldn't; the tradeoffs of libraries vs. locations are painful, and only likely to occur in times of economic hardship. Oh.

A good example of the "storefront libraries" that I described is the Chinatown Storefront Library in Boston. An expermental, temporary library in a vacant storefront, the Storefront Library (唐人街店面图) is the ultimate "lean" library. It uses donated books, LibraryThing cataloguing, volunteer labor, community support, and a surplus of optimism about libraries. It will close the week after ALA Midwinter comes to town; I definitely recommend going by to take a look at the future of library locations. I certainly will!