The Scholar’s Space

Georgia’s post on Kindle made some very good points. Interested readers may be willing to follow Ariadene’s thread a little longer and  look at an article in Slate which discusses some features of the new version.  Many  people shared Georgia’s irritation at the high clunkiness quotient in the original product, but AMAZON seems to have gone a long way to overcome at least some of these dorky things, and the new item is bigger, thinner and sleeker-looking than Kindle 1. But, some of the other complaints remain in force. The gadget is still pricey, pegging in at about $350 US, give or take.  And the DRM doesn’t seem any looser than on the last go-round.  The Kindles, pere et fils, are will probably go into some kind of technology museum one day, but the technology in itself is only part of the story, and not really the most interesting part either.  The Slate piece considers this side of things attentively.

Slate

Information Week  published a long article on other aspects of the e-book movement, including a speculation that AMAZON may turn out to be the victim of its own success and wind up cannibalizing itself. There is some danger, to AMAZON, that the various hand-held devices now around in great numbers will be modified by their manufacturers to allow downloading of e-books. Why should you buy an extra gadget, one that’s  pretty heavy and definitely not cheap, to read books on the commute or in the doctor’s office when you’ve got one with you that will do the same thing, perhaps not as well, but well enough for a few minutes reading here and there.  This is the best that many people can manage  nowadays, and this market may be the bigger one.

We’ll see.

I haven’t been all that enthusiastic about or interested in trying out the Kindle. I saw one shortly after they were introduced. It looked painfully clunky, but the person using it said she really liked it. She paid a lot for it, and from what I understood, the selection of books for it was not that great. But that’s to be expected for  a newly introduced product in this industry. Publishers seem to be really wary of putting their stuff out there where just anyone can get copies and do terrible things with them.

But my lack of interest was more basic than whether a book I wanted to read would be available anytime soon or whether the device lacked the elegance of the iPhone, or even it’s hefty price tag. It was the DRM. I just object, philosophically, to having my books tied to a specific vendor with a specific device. I felt the same way about DRM on music files. Never bought music from the iTunes store (geez, can that be true? not even one little song? you know, I just don’t recall ever buying one). I just bought a CD from time to time, ripped it immediately and loaded it onto my iPod and iPhone, and stored the disc away in case I needed to rip it again. Things happen to digital files.

But, when I learned that the Administrative office here at UT Austin’s Libraries had purchased one and that the Administrative staff were taking turns using it to get a feel for it, I decided to give it a try. Wouldn’t cost anything (even the download of a book or two would be paid for by the Libraries), and I do like to know firsthand about such things. So, I looked for several books that friends had recommended recently and not surprisingly, none of them was available. But finally, I hit upon Obama’s Audacity of Hope and thought that might be a nice read (it was). I finished it in about a week, and, to my surprise decided to download another, Thomas Friedman’s Flat, Hot and Crowded, which I’m about 1/3 of the way through now. I am recharging the battery, which says something right there. It lasted comfortably through one book but not two. It only takes about 2 or 3 hours to fully charge the battery though.

So here’s what I think: downloading the books whose owners are willing to make them available is quick and easy. The wireless connection is great. I can’t imagine any device that hopes to keep up not having its own ability to send and receive information. But that’s about where my praise ends.

I was ok with the screen readability and adjustable type size, but there are big tradeoffs with eInk. The flashing thing that happens every time you turn a page is really annoying; no backlighting is really annoying. You have to have external good light to read in.

I absolutely hated the way you go from page to page (the location and operation of the keys that one presses to make these functions happen): clunky doesn’t begin to describe it really. The design could not have been worse, at least not that I can imagine. You can barely touch the device without skipping to the next or a previous page. Building those keys into the edges of the device, practically top to bottom, is just plain stupid. And its angular edges give the device a hard, angular feel that I just didn’t like. It’s little keyboard has a rigid resistance that makes typing a chore. Well, it’s always a chore on any keyboard that small, but when you add in physical resistance to touch, it’s too much. Of course, there’s not much typing one would do on a Kindle. Sort of makes me wonder why the designers rejected a soft keyboard. Oh, wait a minute, that would suggest a touch-screen. Right.

That pretty much sums it up. The books need to be freed from DRM and the reader needs touch-screen technology. Get rid of all the buttons and that oh-so-1990’s move-the-cursor-up-and-down-the-page, line by line and click-on-a-line to select an item; make it easy and intuitive to highlight, bookmark, look up words, connect to the Internet for additional research. Oh, wait a minute, again. I think I’m describing my MacBook with touch-screen or an iPhone that’s a little bigger. Neither of which exists yet, but ought to.

So, from what I hear, a new Kindle will be announced Feb 9, a week from today. I’d advise a little imagination, a little bravery on the part of the publishers and Amazon: move to a DRM-less flowable text format for content; don’t try to freeze the form of the book at dawn of the 20th century digital (ie, nothing more than a static book in digital form; no real taking advantage of future possibilities); make the device cool and desirable by making it do more; make it easy to do whatever it is it does. Clunky boxy can’t stand to hold it NO; Slinky sexy beautiful can’t live without it YES.

The latest edition of Peter Suber’s Open Access Newsletter includes a roundup of great news from 2008. There’s so much good news to report that he must say up front that he’s been selective, left out some things, and organized what he has into nine categories. And it is a lot to read. But it is so inspiring! It’s just what I needed to feel hopeful for 2009, that the momentum will carry forward.

Several of the items that were news to me were really surprising as well. Top among the surprises was this paragraph under heading 8, Books:

There were new OA textbook publishing initiatives from Flat World Knowledge, the Open University of Israel, and the Community College Open Textbook Project.  Florida became the first state in the US to approve an OA textbook program for use in its public schools.  The MakeTextbooksAffordable campaign released the Open Textbooks Statement to Make Textbooks Affordable, with signatures of 1,000+ professors from 300+ colleges in all 50 states.  StudentPIRGs launched a sign-on “Statement of Intent” for faculty to show their support for OA textbooks.  It also published a report recommending OA textbooks and criticizing TA digital textbooks for high prices, hobbling DRM, printing restrictions, and automatic expiration.

Having been a graduate student for the last 2 1/2 years and having used quite a few analog and digital textbooks, I see this industry as *way, way behind the curve* unable to take serious advantage of the digital networked environment. And I’ve heard that the negotiations with publishers to offer their texts in more innovative and more useful ways often fall flat if the publisher can’t be assured of making more money from the new model than he already makes from his existing strategy. Talk about innovator’s dilemma. This sets the stage perfectly for the upstarts who are willing to try new things because they don’t already have preconceived ideas about what they *ought* to be making right now from their existing customers. Have none of these folks read Christensen’s book, Innovator’s Dilemma? Their industry is positioned classically as the losing trajectory in the chart to the left. It shows how new technologies at first fail miserably to meet the needs of a firm’s current customers. Though their performance qualities fall so far below what current customers expect even at the low end of the market, they eventually improve through the process of sustaining innovation until they “break through” into the up-scale markets, directly competing with established firms for the same customers. Christensen documents this pattern in industry after industry. Publishing in general is following the pattern — like a puppy dog. Sad to see, but it’s frustrating as well.

Lessig’s latest, Remix, has been out for a couple of months now. I guess I didn’t rush to grab a copy because I follow his lectures closely (he posts videos) so I thought I probably knew what he was going to say in the book — and it was not available immediately in a CC licensed version. Had it been CC’d up front, I would have read it immediately. This actually was the biggest news about his book for me: 6 months before the CC version would be released. I’m sure there’s a reason why he agreed to this, but I can’t imagine what it is. Wait a minute, yes I can. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think maybe his publisher was taking a little baby-step towards a remixed business model, a step Lessig’s in a position to encourage, and so he did.

In fact, this particular kind of remix is precisely what I found to be new about the book now that I’ve relented, gone to BookPeople, my local “keep Austin Weird” (that is, buy local) endangered species of bookstore, and bought a copy (for $9.60 more than I would have paid at Amazon…) off of the wooden shelf to bring home, read, and put on my wooden shelf, which shelves I am running short of, and would just as soon not keep adding more shelves, but that’s none of the book publishing industry’s concern, is it? The book was offered for Kindle at Amazon, but I don’t want a Kindle. But back to remix, er, Remix.

The part of the book that’s new-to-me describes remixed businesses. He calls them hybrids (oh, I want one so bad but I’m determined to wait until the all-electric comes out in 2010), but they are really just examples of the mashups he lectures about, the creative combinations of video, voice, images and text that he celebrates so as the harbingers of new creativity. These mashup businesses combine aspects of traditional commercial economies (I do this because I want to make money) with aspects or expressions of traditional sharing economies (I may do this for a million reasons but expressly *not* to make money) to take advantage of aspects of the Web that the analog world alone can’t take advantage of, thus competing better, in a Clayton Christensen kind of “innovator’s dilemma” way. They are the hybrid upstarts that Lessig predicts will upend not only bricks-and-mortar competitors like BookPeople, but even Web competitors who are not taking advantage of what can be done in Web 2.0 that couldn’t be done in Web 1.0.

Lessig gives plenty of examples of these hybrid business models that combine commercial aspects with sharing aspects, but he goes much further. He analyzes the elements that make them better competitors, their aspects that actually define what it means to make the combination, sort of an entry-level criteria recipe:

1. taking advantage of the Long Tail
2. taking advantage of the information that people freely leave about what they like, what they do and what they want, all over the place online
3. allowing others to innovate on your platform (i.e., letting others turn what you create into a building block for their own businesses).

In the world of book publishing, who is doing this? Right now?

So, it’s not that pairing a CC licensed version with a physical copy option is a hybrid. Look at the list above and ask yourself whether any of the criteria are met. It’s just that at the stage of experimentation the publishing industry is at right now, CC/buy at the same time represents a step in the right direction, and CC later/buy now is sort of sizing up that step. It takes a little bit of advantage of what people who love to share can do for the publisher — increase sales. But it leaves a lot of innovation on the table, it still leaves the industry quite vulnerable to the upstart that figures out how to compete better online, how to take better advantage of what networking (hybridizing commercial and sharing economies) can do that not-networking can’t.

Well, I haven’t finished the book. From what I understand, the best part is at the end where he suggests how copyright law ought to be changed to facilitate this advance. So, more later.

So, have you visited James Boyle’s book blog yet to check out his latest, The Public Domain? I mentioned it a few days ago, and am now about a third of the way through it. I’m reading it in pdf form on my Mac in a beta screen reader called Stanza. A bit buggy, but I like it. As I mentioned, the book is CC licensed and for sale, at the same time, as Boyle’s blog explains.

Then, yesterday, on a list I subscribe to, Michael Carroll raised an interesting question for the publishers on the list that brought together Boyle’s book’s CC license, the Google/Publisher/Author settlement agreement and OA generally. Oh, Michael Carroll — he’s actually one of the people who appears on the little CC video explanation that Boyle links to from his book blog that explains why a CC license (in Boyle’s case, OA for a book) makes sense to authors (at :20 and again at 1:02, maybe further in). Again, if you haven’t had a look, please go check it out. It’s a great little, short, pithy explanation of CC licensing and very well-done. You could send the link to faculty who don’t have lots of time to figure out the future of scholarly publishing while they’re busy, busy, busy with their scholarship…

But back to the story. So Michael asked this question:

I know that the issue of monograph publishing and the sustainability of university presses has been an oft-discussed topic on this list.

I’d be interested in … reactions to the question of whether academic authors and publishers might not do better tha[n] the Google settlement route by taking the open access route for scholarly monographs.

Case in point.  James Boyle’s new book has just been released under a Creative Commons license by Yale University Press.

According to publicly available sales statistics, it’s doing quite well.

According to Amazon, yesterday, its Sales Rank was: #3,103 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in these categories: (What’s this?)

#1 in   Books > Professional & Technical > Law > Intellectual Property
#1 in   Books > Nonfiction > Law > Intellectual Property
#4 in   Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Sociology > Culture

So, is that an aberration?  If so, why?  If not, why doesn’t this point the way to a more profitable future for the public and university presses?

I’m not a publisher, but I certainly am interested in the future of publishing, especially scholarly publishing, and I wonder the same thing as Michael. Is he asking, “should a publisher just OA its books to raise sales of the print copies in lieu of participating in the settlement infrastructure or entering an agreement with Google?” I’m not so sure that it has to be either/or, does it? Maybe Michael doesn’t think it is an either/or either.

I think it can be both — for three reasons right now, and another hypothetical reason in the future:

1. NOW: Any publisher can take the chance Yale took with Jamie’s book and allow CC licensed downloads and sales at the same time
2. NOW: Any publisher can also have an agreement with Google about including its books in Book Search through the Partner Program (see below)
3. NOW: Any publisher without an agreement with Google can have its already published books displayed as it sees fit (previews up to 100%) in Google Book Search pursuant to the settlement terms, and it can opt out of algorithmic settlement pricing, and set its own price for digital download, why not at $0 (4.2(b)(i)(1)).
4. FUTURE: The settlement terms provide for a possible future print on demand option, and I would assume that, again, for books published before 2009, for a copyright owner without an agreement with Google, 100% preview (ie, totally readable online) could be combined with a free download, which could be combined with a paid print on demand option. But that’s not currently offered.

The Google settlement is, as a practical matter, only really about pre-2009 out of print (commercially unavailable) books. If you have a new book, the best way to get involved with Google Book Search is by becoming part of its publishing partners program. You negotiate a contract with Google. Google markets and helps you sell your book. Every major US publisher has already done this (*while they were suing Google*). Lots of scholarly presses have too (UT Press has an agreement, for example; maybe Yale does too but I don’t know). Those publishers with agreements with Google can have their negotiated terms *instead of* the settlement terms for all their books. Any publisher or author with a book currently in print and without an agreement with Google will find that those in print books are automatically opted out of display uses. Nada: no one sees anything if the book is identified as relevant to a search unless you specifically direct Google to change your in print work to a “display book.” It is assumed that if your book is in print, you want to define the terms upon which it is offered to the public. It’s your baby. It’s all up to you.

So, what is keeping at least the scholarly publishers from doing what Yale did? Maybe a bit scared. Actually, as Michael knows, lots of them are doing what Yale did, sort of. They have OA projects. They are experimenting, just like Yale is. Those who are not experimenting in some form or fashion are probably making plans to. But it will just take some time to get up the courage, based on good results of experiments, to finally figure out more broadly workable new business models for scholarship that do not prevent people from accessing the work as a means for paying for production and distribution. OA just makes too much sense to not be among the options that get a lot of attention. If you can cover your costs from some sales, while everyone else who won’t or can’t buy reads for free, and those who pay are happy to pay for the added whatever it is that you add that they pay for, what’s not to like? OA will work because OA already works.

So, one more brick *out of* the wall! I would say we should get set to see considerable progress in scholarly publishing this coming year, progress towards OA and CC licensing as viable alternatives to, but not replacements for, settlement pricing (that is, Google’s algorithmic pricing), rightsholder pricing (traditional sell only copies), collective institutional support for publishing and distribution, author pays/institution pays one-item-at-a-time, and some things no one’s thought of yet.

Go check it out! The Public Domain — Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. You can read it online at Yale University Press’ website, or download the pdf, or (and) buy a copy if you prefer or desire.

Boyle  includes on the download page two explanations for why it makes sense to offer his book in its entirety online for free at the same time it’s for sale in physical copies, one explanation for authors and one for publishers. The reasons, and the motivations, of these two groups are not the same, but they overlap sufficiently  in the open access business model to make it work. And that is worth celebrating.

The book, well, I just got started on it today, and it will be awhile before I finish it with school in its last week and papers due and homework due and all that. I’ll report more later. In the meantime, since you can, go ahead and download it and get started reading it yourself! From what I’ve read so far, it’s incredibly fluid, easy to get into, filled with clever legal references to all the most important cases without mentioning them by name, and not the least bit wordy, legalistic or esoteric. I have to say though, Boyle *apologizes* upfront for committing to make this a readable story and I find that just a little sad. I wish he didn’t feel he had to apologize for trying to avoid creating barriers to a wide readership. It’s the scholar thing. Thank goodness he took the plunge. I for one am very, very grateful that his book has half a chance of being more widely read than most scholarly works will be read. It deserves and needs a wider audience. Most of us just don’t realize what’s happening to America’s legal infrastructure that supports creativity and innovation. Boyle is making it clear as a bell, and clear that it makes a difference and affects us all. Go have a look!

There is a new, or newish, blog on scholarly publication. It’s called The Scholarly Kitchen; what’s hot and cooking in scholarly publishing. It originates in the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and  has been going for some months now.  I just learned about it, and after a quick look, decided to add it to my regulars.  Going back and examining some of the earlier posts seems to be a good idea too, because I noted some grabbers as I was flying through prior messages.  Another blog on scholarly publication seems to produce the same reaction as the announcement of another Mexican restaurant:  what are they going to serve that isn’t on offer someplace else, better and cheaper? But, in both cases, the only answer is to try it. So, I will. Here is the link:
Kitchen

In what definitely seems at least a partial  rejection of the conventional wisdom,  articles from the German version of  Wikipedia  will appear as a printed volume.  WPauf Deutsch is said to be the second largest portion of the total WP effort, after the English language section.  About  25,000 items will appear in the printed version,  out of more than 750, 000, covering the topics WPaD  searchers have been looking up in the online resource.  Some people have noted that the publisher, Bertelsmann, had been making unflattering comments about the low quality of WP articles over the last years. But, presumable there is nothing like the prospect of profit to soothe old frictions.  Germany has a very large book industry, and the publication of informative works of reference on all sorts of topics has always been healthy. In fact, I have such a thing on my book shelf, not even one foot away from me. It’s an old Knauer’s Lexikon, held together by slabs of green tape over the spine. A team of editors has been reworking the WPaD material into abbreviated form with each entry to be about a paragraph or so in length. About 1000 photos are to be included as well.   I think the WPaD in print will resembe the almanacs that are familar to us over here: a place to get information  on a specific topic, quickly, without firing up the laptop or PC and logging in. We were at a conference recently, and one of the presenters noted that Cambridge University Press has a policy of posting materials online, and this has lead to increased sales of the printed version in almost every case.  As long as real reading on screens, as opposed to consulting or dipping, is so trying physically, decent printing on good paper will be with us. The WP One Volume Encyclopedia will go on sale in September for 19.95 Euros, and the WP Foundation will get 1 Euro on each sale. If the 2008 version succeeds commercially, there could be others. We shall see.

In today’s New York Times,  there is an article on the problem of long term data preservation, and on some of the cost factors involved in any scheme to do this.  Librarians are very familiar with the problems of preservation, and for a while there, a number of articles appeared in our press and in  other venues, discussing what was involved.  Then, the topic seemed to disappear, at least in regard to preserving the scholarly record as we have come to understand it. But the same animal has returned, wearing a somewhat different hide and coloration.  Interest is being focused on the enormous quantities of data produced as a result of  research in the physical and social sciences.  And, some investigators want to “repurpose” data generated in  earlier experiments, their own or someone else’s  with different endpoints or outcome measures,  different analytical techniques and so forth.  But as the enthusiasm for such efforts grows, the facts about data preservation emerge, or rather, re-emerge with discouraging force; long- term data preservation, in an  accessible and useful format,  is a real technological challenge. Moreover, whatever measures might be suggested as solutions, it’s all going to cost a great deal of money.  Preservation also means more than mere dumping of files someplace, even with something like intelligent and conscientious curation.  A good deal of what we would call subject analysis and description ( OK, metadata in today’s lingo), will be necessary.  Institutional repositories, “Long Tail” marketing, Publishing on Demand (POD), digital publication in general and a lot of other goodies existing now or promised all depend on a reliable and secure “data base”, and I’m wondering if we have it or can get it at a price our institutions can, or will, pay. It’s probably time for a serious assessment of what is possible and what the price tag will be.

The New York Timesreported on Sunday that the advent of online encyclopedias is affecting the production and sale of  printed versions.  It’s worth librarians’ reading simply to recall how many of these things there are now. Most of us think of Widipedia, which is often in the news and sometimes for the wrong reasons. But the famed Britannica   has a digital version, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  has been around for awhile, and has emerged as a major resource in that field.  The newly launched Encyclopedia of Life is aiming very high indeed: its goal is to become the summa of biological knowledge. Foreign encyclopedias are looked at also. In Germany, the famous Brockhaus encyclopedia is moving its major articles to an online version, and probably will not appear in print any longer. And the Oxford English Dictionary is temporarily reclassed as an encyclopedia, and discussed. I remember listening to Simon Winchester, who wrote a history of the OED, called The Meaning of Everything, discuss what a new printed edition would look like: forty volumes, weighing about a quarter ton, with a staggering price tag even for the most well-budgeted library. Never happen, and it probably shouldn’t happen on grounds of environmental responsibility.  Digital publishing also gets round one besetting drawback of the printed product: updating. In the past, keeping up meant using supplements and a set of very clever methods to tamper with the text, that still had to fit within the confines of the printed volume. But, that’s all moot with digital publising.  So it seems that the two century  heyday of the printed multi volume reference source for all knowledge is coming to a close. Or maybe what seems to  be an end is just the first stage of a new beginning.