The Slow Books Movement

An interesting idea is a powerful thing, but you can't eat it. You really have to give it away to make it worth anything, and even then you can't eat it. So what if you're good at having interesting ideas? You can go arounds giving talk at conferences. If the idea is incomprehensible enough, maybe you can even get tenure and a salary out of it. But what if it's an easy idea, one that resonates with a lot of people? Then your best option for making a living off the idea for a while is to write a best-selling book.


 Clay Johnson has an interesting idea, and I encountered his talk at this month's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. I can even explain it for you, but of course Johnson does it much more entertainingly, and the TOC talk is on the web. In short, Johnson's thesis is that the things that are right and wrong with out information diets are the same things that are right and wrong with our food diets.

Humans are evolved to prefer fat and sugar over the things that are good for us because these foods were scarce in the environment we evolved in. Fat and sugar aren't scarce anymore, and the result is that we eat too much of them and are not as healthy as we could be. Worse, the economic structure of our society has created incentives for corporations to create huge complex systems that efficiently feed us sweet fatty food at a low cost. It's what we want. Fast Food.

Thus the "slow food movement". Slow food is the opposite of fast food. Inefficiently and locally produced with few of the benefits of technology or high fructose corn syrup from Iowa. Cooked from raw ingredients, crafted by a grandmother in a small kitchen. High in fiber, vitamins, protein and minerals. Low in antibiotics and fossil fuel byproducts. I exaggerate, but I'm smelling a frozen pie in the oven, and my zeal for slowness is tempered by my desire... to finish writing before it cools!

We suffer similarly from our "information diets". People want information that confirms what they already believe. Who wants to be intellectually challenged, really? We want sweet stories that entertain us, make our lives seem justified, and feed the emotions we most want to feel. And so we get information products designed to give us what we want, not what's good for us. Our news is designed and selected for search engine optimization rather than human wisdom maximization. It's Fox News and MSNBC, not Walter Cronkite and the New York Times.

Johnson's idea and his presentation of it are so tasty, so delectable, so comforting, that once you absorb it you become suspicious that it's self-referential. Are we liking the idea because it's confirming a bias we already have? Is it a "Fast Idea"? Aaaaack!

Luckily there's a book, The Information Diet, published by O'Reilly. The book's cover looks like a cereal box, the kind that's supposed to be good for you. The book is thin and lean, and has little of the fat or sugar of Johnson's presentation. It has footnotes and ScienceDirect URLs in all their unshortened bleakness. There are no pictures. It's the ideal souvenir from a Clay Johnson talk. It grounds Johnsons talk in tight argument and factual background. It's a "Slow Book" for a "Fast Idea".

And this leads Johnson to a concept that he calls "Infoveganism" in the book, but more appealingly, "Slow Information" in his talk.

A healthy Information diet always starts locally-and your political information should be no different. The goings-on of your state representatives and city and county governments, along with your school boards, and other local government offices are the best, healthiest forms of content for political news, and should be consumed over the national or global news.

Really. The main problem I have with Johnson's book is its "veganism". It's a sermon that, as much as I might agree with it, is not going to change my behavior.

It's my view that economic and social incentives are what ultimately determine the behavior of organisms, not information, whether slow or fast. If we want a better information diet, we need to alter the economics of information availability. That's why a society with libraries can be better that a society with only bookstores, Harry Potter notwithstanding. It's also why I'm developing Unglue.it. If authors and publishers are rewarded for the value that people have received from books rather than for the catchiness of the cover art or the placement in the bookstore, we'll have better books to read. The books will last longer, and they'll connect people in richer ways. They'll be "slow books" because the economic model will have a long view.

I think I'll skip the whipped cream on my apple pie!

Borrowing vs. Buying Books: the Numbers

CC BY-NC by O'Reilly Conferences

I had many stimulating discussions and met many interesting people at this week's Tools of Change for Publishing Meeting in New York. I'm much too busy helping with development of Unglue.it to do a proper review. I'm obsessed with bug-fixing at the moment. So I just had to write and fix a minor bug in a presentation I heard.

Tim Coates, of Bilbary, made the statement that "twice as many books are borrowed in the US as are sold by booksellers". This factoid made it into at least one report of the session, on the role of libraries moving forward. I recently worked on compiling some data about this, and while the effect of the statement is still valid, it's not accurate. And for all I know, Coates may have misinterpreted something I wrote, so I feel that I should participate in fixing this data bug.

In 2009, the most recent year for which real data is available, US public libraries circulated 2.44 billion items, according to data from IMLS. That's a lot. But not all of them were books. In Ohio, 40% of the public library circulation that year was non-book material, or in other words, audio and video. If we assume the same fraction for the entire US, we're left with a book circulation of about 1.45 billion. US public libraries spent $889 million on print materials in 2009, or 61 cents per book circulation.

The BookStats 2010 survey reported publisher net unit sales of 2.57 billion. Trade books comprise about half the dollar volume, $13.94 billion. So if we compare public library circulation with trade book unit sales, they're roughly equal in units. If we compare the public library spend with the trade book total revenue (offset by one year), we see that public libraries make up about 6.4% of the market. If you add the K-12 education sector to the total (34% of library circulation is "juvenile" literature), the library share drops to 4.6%

These data-based numbers are worth keeping in mind when we think about the economic impact of library lending on book sales. We shouldn't single out Coates; I've heard un-sourced numbers quoted that are all over the place. There's so little hard data available that these real numbers are all that more precious.

Libraries Happen

Michael Scotto's Just Flash is a children's book about a strange animal trying to figure out its identity.

Flash is the only animal of his kind, but he wishes he could just belong to a pack like everyone else at the zoo. He first tries to become another animal, in order to fit in. He tries to be a giraffe; he tries to be a gazelle; he even tries to be a zebra. Along the way, though, Flash realizes that it's more rewarding to be himself – no more, no less.

Libraries and librarians crossing over from print to digital must feel a lot like Flash. Even newly born entities like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are finding themselves in an awkward period of not knowing what they should be.

I was a guest at a recent DPLA "Audience and Participation Work Stream" meeting that brought together participants with a variety of perspectives and experience, but joined by a deep concern for the future of libraries. We met at the Dallas Public Library, just after the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting at the nearby Convention Center. Our charge was to help articulate "why we need a public library when it's all on the web" and suggest how to attract involvement from all types of libraries.

The DPLA has the incredibly difficult task ahead. It must weave together many distinctive strands of activity emerging from a strong but inchoate desire for the missions of libraries to continue in new more powerful ways.  It's encouraging to me that the DPLA leadership is spending a lot of time learning about the needs and desires of diverse communities. But I think that sometimes our understanding of what libraries are today holds us back from seeing what the library movement could be tomorrow. Separating the essential from the institutional manifestation is not always easy to do.

During my time in Dallas, I had the fortune to witness a "library" happening in its purest, most human form.

YALSA is one of the American Library Association's many incomprehensible abbreviations. YALSA stands for the Young Adult Library Services Association. I don't really know much about what YALSA does, but on the Sunday exhibit floor of the ALA meeting, I saw more than one group of teenagers roaming the exhibits wearing YALSA T-shirts. On the way back to my Dallas hotel, I shared a subway train car with one of these groups. I started chatting with two of the teens. It seems that the librarian at their suburban Dallas high school had organized their expedition. The teens had made off with huge bags full of books courtesy of the exhibit vendors.

Sitting on the other side of the train car was a Hispanic family- a young mother, her daughter of perhaps 6 years, and an older man who was probably the girl's grandfather. The little girl was reading what appeared to be a fast food restaurant placemat, but it didn't seem to interest her much. The YALSA teen next to me noticed. She asked the mother, "Are you going a long way on the train? I have some books here she might like." And out of the bag appeared a copy of Just Flash. The girl's eyes lit up. For the next 20 minutes I watched the girl enchanted by an illustrated story that had appeared as if by miracle, chosen specifically for her. As I got off the train, a second book was emerging from the teen's bag.

I don't know what sort of animal libraries will evolve into. Maybe librarians will ride trains with mega-book digital libraries on memory sticks for kids who need them. Maybe restaurant placemats be ultra-cheap reading devices. Whatever stripes it wears or what name it answers to, the simple act of letting a book bring joy and wonderment to a little girl will define what a library must be, no more, no less.

Unglue.it Preview All Systems Go

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

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.