This is my kind of performance art, from this year’s Printer’s Ball. Got pictures, anybody?
Busted Books: The Great Soaking. Performance by Davis Schneiderman. Attendees are invited to use a artisan-constructed dunk tank to soak either a book or a Kindle—depending upon the dunker’s feelings regarding the printed word and e-readers. With this simple choice, this physical act, readers can finally stop theorizing about the future of the book and do something about it.
Tags: books, dunk tanks, ereaders, humor, kindle
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, random thoughts | Comments (0)
“The only constant is change.” – Heraclitis
How well do you know Wikipedia? Get to know it a little better by looking at how your favorite article changes over time. To inspire you, here are two examples.
Jon Udell’s screencast about ‘Heavy Metal Umlaut’ is a classic, looking back (in 2005) at the first two years of that article. It points out the accumulation of information, vandalism (and its swift reversion), formatting changes, and issues around the verifiability of facts.
In a recent article for the Awl ((The Awl is *woefully* distracting. I urge you not to follow any links. (Thanks a lot Louis!) )), Emily Morris sifts through 2,303 edits of ‘Lolita’ to pull out nitpicking revision comments, interesting diffs, and statistics.
Tags: change, Wikipedia
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem, library and information science, social web | Comments (0)
What are the right ontologies for reading? And what kind of ontology support would let books recombine themselves, on the fly, in novel ways?
Today keyword searches within books and book collections is commonplace, highlighting a word in your ebook reader can bring up a definition, and dictionaries grab recent examples of word use from microblogs. ((In 2003, Gregory Crane wrote that “Already the books in a digital library are beginning to read one another and to confer among themselves before creating a new synthetic document for review by their human readers.” When I first read it in 2006, that article seemed incredibly visionary to me. Yet these commonplace “syntheses” no longer seem extraordinary to me.)) But can’t we do more? But what kind of synthesis do we need (and what is possible) for supporting readers of literature, classics, and humanities texts?
Current approaches seem to aim at analysis (e.g. getting an overview of the literary works of a period with “distant reading”/”macroanalysis”) and at creating flexible critical editions (e.g. structural, sometimes overlapping markup, as in TEI-based editions and projects like Wendell Piez’ Sonneteer ((currently offline, but brilliant; do check back, meanwhile see also his Digital Humanities 2010 talk notes)).) I would call these “sensemaking” approaches rather than tools for reading.
I was intrigued by the Bible Ontology ((It’s a bit disingenuous to advertise their work as an ontology: in fact they have applied the ontology, rather than just creating it.)) because of their tagline: “ever wanted to read and study the Bible Ontologically?” Yet I don’t really know what they mean by reading ontologically ((even though I’ve given a talk about supporting reading with ontologies!)).
Of course, they have recorded various pieces of data. For instance, for Rebekah, we see her children, siblings, birthplace, book and chapters she figures in, etc.: http://bibleontology.com/page/Rebekah. ((The most meaningful of their terms is the bop:isRelatedInEvent, perhaps since these events, like Isaac_blesses_Jacob, would require more analysis to discern.))
They offer a SPARQL endpoint, so you can query. For instance, to find all the married women ((Gender is not recorded so we can’t (yet) ask for all the women overall, though I’ve just asked about this.)) (live query result):
PREFIX bop: <http://bibleontology.com/property/>
select ?s ?o where {?s bop:isWifeOf ?o }
Intense and long-term work has gone into Bible concordances, scholarship, etc., so it seems like a great use case for “reading ontologically”. With theologians and others looking at the site, using the SPARQL endpoint, etc., perhaps someone will be able to tell me what that means!
Tags: Bible, Bible Ontology, ontologies, ontologies for reading, reading ontologically, SPARQL
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, semantic web | Comments (0)
The long-term freedom of the Internet may depend, in part, on convincing the big players of the content industry to modernize their business models.
Motivated by “protecting” the content industry, the U.S. Congress is discussing proposed legislation that could be used to seize domain names and force websites (even search engines) to remove links.
Congress doesn’t yet understand that there are already safe and effective ways to counter piracy — which don’t threaten Internet freedom. “Piracy happens not because it is cheaper, but because it is more convenient,” as Arvind Narayanan reports, musing on a conversation with Congresswoman Lofgren.
What the Congresswoman was saying was this:
- The only way to convince Washington to drop this issue for good is to show that artists and musicians can get paid on the Internet.
- Currently they are not seeing any evidence of this. The Congresswoman believes that new technology needs to be developed to let artists get paid. I believe she is entirely wrong about this; see below.
- The arguments that have been raised by tech companies and civil liberties groups in Washington all center around free speech; there is nothing wrong with that but it is not a viable strategy in the long run because the issue is going to keep coming back.
Arvind’s response is that the technology needed is already here. That’s old news to technologists, but the technology sector needs to educate Congress, who may not have the time and skills to get this information by themselves.
The dinosaurs of the content industries need to adapt their business models. Piracy is not correlated with a decrease in sales. Piracy happens not because it is cheaper, but because it is more convenient. Businesses need to compete with piracy rather than trying to outlaw it. Artists who’ve understood this are already thriving.
Tags: business models, censorship, content industry, free speech, monetization
Posted in future of publishing, information ecosystem, intellectual freedom | Comments (0)
Holding on to old business models is not the way to endear yourself to customers.
But unfortunately this is also, simultaneously, a bad time to be a reader. Because the dinosaurs still don’t get it. Ten years of object lessons from the music industry, and they still don’t get it. We have learned, painfully, that media consumers—be they listeners, watchers, or readers—want one of two things:
- DRM-free works for a reasonable price
- or, unlimited single-payment subscription to streaming/DRMed works
Give them either of those things, and they’ll happily pay. Look at iTunes. Look at Netflix. But give them neither, and they’ll pirate. So what are publishers doing?
- Refusing to sell DRM-free books. My debut novel will be re-e-published by the Friday Project imprint of HarperCollins UK later this year; both its editor and I would like it to be published without DRM; and yet I doubt we will be able to make that happen.
- crippling library e-books
- and not offering anything even remotely like a subscription service.
– Jon Evans, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Books, via James Bridle’s Stop Press
Eric Hellman is one of the pioneers of tomorrow’s ebook business models: his company, Gluejar, uses a crowdfunding model to re-release books under Creative Commons licenses. Authors and publishers are paid; fans pay for the books they’re most interested in; and everyone can read and distribute the resulting “unglued” ebooks. Everybody wins.
Tags: business models, content, DRM, ebooks, publishing, subscriptions
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem | Comments (0)
We’ve extended the STLR 2011 deadline due to several requests; submissions are now due May 8th.
JCDL workshops are split over two half-days, and we are lucky enough to have *two* keynote speakers: Bernhard Haslhofer of the University of Vienna and Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research.
Consider submitting!
STLR 2011
June 16 (PM) & 17 (AM) 2011
http://stlr2011.weebly.com/
Co-located with the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2011 Ottawa, Canada
While Semantic Web technologies are successfully being applied to library catalogs and digital libraries, the semantic enhancement of books and other electronic media is ripe for further exploration. Connections between envisioned and emerging scholarly objects (which are doubtless social and semantic) and the digital libraries in which these items will be housed, encountered, and explored have yet to be made and implemented. Likewise, mobile reading brings new opportunities for personalized, context-aware interactions between reader and material, enriched by information such as location, time of day and access history.
This full-day workshop, motivated by the idea that reading is mobile, interactive, social, and material, will be focused on semantically enhancing electronic media as well as on the mobile and social aspects of the Semantic Web for electronic media, libraries and their users. It aims to bring together practitioners and developers involved in semantically enhancing electronic media (including documents, books, research objects, multimedia materials and digital libraries) as well as academics researching more formal aspects of the interactions between such resources and their users. We also particularly invite entrepreneurs and developers interested in enhancing electronic media using Semantic Web technologies with a user-centered approach.
We invite the submission of papers, demonstrations and posters which describe implementations or original research that are related (but are not limited) to the following areas of interest:
*EXTENDED* Paper submission deadline: May 8th 2011
Acceptance notification: June 1st 2011
Camera-ready version: June 8th 2011
Each submission will be independently reviewed by 2-3 program committee members.
Please use PDF format for all submissions. Semantically annotated versions of submissions, and submissions in novel digital formats, are encouraged and will be accepted in addition to a PDF version.
All submissions must adhere to the following page limits:
Full length papers: maximum 8 pages
Demonstrations: 2 pages
Posters: 1 page
Use the ACM template for formatting: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html
Submit using EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=stlr2011
Tags: annotation, CFP, context-aware, ebooks, electronic media, ePub, JCDL2011, LLD, location-based storytelling, multimedia collections, recommendations, semantic libraries, STLR2011, workshops
Posted in future of publishing, library and information science, PhD diary, scholarly communication, semantic web, social semantic web | Comments (2)
Apple’s press release about its “new subscription services” seems at first innocuous, and the well-crafted quote ((
“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”
– Steve Jobs at “Apple Launches Subscriptions on the App Store“)) from Steve Jobs has been widely reposted:
“when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing.” Yet analysts reading between the lines have been less than pleased.
The problems for publishers? (See also “Steve Jobs to pubs: Our way or highway“)
And there are problems for customers, too.
The upside? Device-independent HTML5 apps may see wider adoption. HTML5 mobile apps work well on iOS, on other mobile platforms, and on laptops and desktops.
For ebooks, HTML5 means Ibis Reader and Book.ish. For publishers looking to break free of Apple, yet satisfy customers, Ibis Reader may be a particularly good choice: this year they are focusing on licensing Ibis Reader, as Liza Daly’s Threepress announced in a savvy and well-timed post, anticipating Apple’s announcement. Having been a beta tester of Ibis Reader, I can recommend it!
If you know of other HTML5 ebook apps, please leave them in the comments.
Tags: agency model, Apple, book.ish, business models, content, HTML5, ibis reader, ibisreader, iBooks, iOS, iOS: iPad, iPhone, etc., iPad, jailbreaking, middleman, subscriptions, walled garden
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem, iOS: iPad, iPhone, etc. | Comments (0)
Yesterday I spoke at Beyond the PDF about use cases for reading. Slides are below; the presentation was also webcast, so I hope to share a video recording when it becomes available. The video is now on Youtube (part of the Beyond the PDF video playlist) and below.
Thanks to the DERI Social Software Unit for feedback on an earlier version of this presentation. I’m particularly grateful to Allen Renear and Carole Palmer from UIUC, whose call for ontology-aware reading tools pushed me down this path, and to Geoffrey Bilder who presented these ideas in a way I couldn’t help thinking about and remixing. Cathy Marshall’s clear exposition, in Reading and Writing the Electronic Book was fundamental to digging deeper.
Tags: Beyond the PDF, beyondthePDF
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, library and information science, scholarly communication, social semantic web | Comments (2)
Moderator Ed Hovy picked out 6 quotes to summarize Beyond the PDF’s sessions on Annotation.
Papers are stories that persuade with data.
But as authors we are lazy and undisciplined.
Communicating between humans and humans and humans and machines.
I should be interested in ontologies, but I just can’t work up the enthusiasm.
Christmas tree of hyperlinks.
You will get sued.
Tags: Beyond the PDF, beyondthePDF, quotes
Posted in future of publishing, information ecosystem | Comments (1)
Nicole Henning suggests that academic libraries and scholarly presses work together to create the ultimate mobile app for scholarly ereading. I think about the requirements a bit differently, in terms of the functional requirements.
The main functions are obtaining materials, reading them, organizing them, keeping them, and sharing them.
For obtaining materials, the key new requirement is to simplify authentication: handle campus authentication systems and personal subscriptions. Multiple credentialed identities should be supported. A secondary consideration is that RSS feeds (e.g. for journal tables of contents) should be supported.
For reading materials, the key requirement is to support multiple formats in the same application. I don’t know of a web app or mobile app that supports PDF, EPUB, and HTML. Reading interfaces matter: look to Stanza and Ibis Reader for best-in-class examples.
For organizing materials, the key is synergy between the user’s data and existing data. Allow tags, folders, and multiple collections. But also leverage existing publisher and library metadata. Keep it flexible, allowing the user to modify metadata for personal use (e.g. for consistency or personal terminology) and to optionally submit corrections.
For keeping materials, import, export, and sync content from the user’s chosen cloud-based storage and WebDAV servers. No other device (e.g. laptop or desktop) should be needed.
For sharing materials, support lightweight micropublishing on social networks and email; networks should be extensible and user-customizable. Sync to or integrate with citation managers and social cataloging/reading list management systems.
Regardless of the ultimate system, I’d stress that device independence is important, meaning that an HTML5 website would probably the place to start: look to Ibis Reader as a model.
Tags: beyondthePDF, mobile, scholarly publishing
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem, library and information science, scholarly communication | Comments (5)