In the Wall Street Journal (Feb 11), JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG has an article about an experiment by Random House to begin selling books one chapter at a time. This seems to follow the model that has become popular in the music industry.

Random House Publishing Group’s experiment appears to be the first time a major consumer publisher has offered a title on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It will sell the six chapters and epilogue of “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” for $2.99 each.

The move comes at a time when retailers and publishers are looking for clues into how readers want to access digital content. Most recently, Amazon Inc. announced that it was buying audiobook seller Audible Inc. for about $280 million. Late last year, Amazon introduced its Kindle electronic-book reader, a device with built-in wireless Internet access that quickly sold out upon debut.

Publishers are convinced that as it becomes easier to download books, and screen technology improves, an ever-larger number of readers will opt to receive digital content.

I’ve been reading McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory in print and find it a fascinating experience. I’m reading with the book open to two pages. You may know that he wrote the book online through a system developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book that invited user comment on the text. Those comments are published with the book as “Cuts (Endnotes).”  I’m accustomed to looking to footnotes or endnotes for citation information and expansion of an idea, but this is the first time I’ve encountered reader comments. It’s a little like reading the transcript of a conversation, though Wark doesn’t directly respond to the comments. The book is available online. It may actually be easier to read online than in print.

David Pogue provides a good review of Sony’s new ebook reader. His assessment is much like that of Ben Vershbow at the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Trying Again To Make Books Obsolete – New York Times

This sounds like an advance in ebook readers, though not without a few quirks. But I remain unconvinced that its designers understand how we read.

The Chronicle: Daily news: 08/09/2006 — 01

The University of California system has joined Google’s controversial book-digitization project, and the partnership is expected to convert millions of books from the system’s 100 libraries — even volumes that are protected by copyright — into fully searchable electronic texts. Google officials say they plan to add even more academic libraries to the program in the near future.

I’ve been looking at emerging publishing options. Future of the Book has several I’ll mention in a future post, but I thought I would point out that Yochai Benkler whose book: The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom has just recently been published has also made the book available via PDF download and in a Wiki. Here is his description for what he hopes will happen in the Wiki:

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book’s notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.

One has to register to see the changes, comments, etc. from other users which are substantial. It is an interesting model for scholarly discourse that includes but moves beyond traditional scholarly publishing.

I’ve mentioned before Katleen Fitzpatrick’s collaboration with the Future of the Book to create an electronic scholarly press. Her May 3 summary of a meeting that took place is remarkable several reasons. The fact that a group of scholars was willing to seriously discuss and support the concept is remarkable. The group developed a set of principles that suggest their new publishing environment will:

• promote intellectual discourse in all its forms;
• design its process to improve the quality of that discourse;
• encourage openness in its process and its products, while offering a range of options to authors;
• share the tools that underlie its process;
• provide for the preservation of its products;
  support collaboration and experimentation;
• make visible the social networks that underlie intellectual discourse; and
• leverage the information that results from the impact and use of material published by the press.

Fitzpatrick goes on to say:

The first two of these principles are of the utmost importance: if the purpose of scholarly publishing is to further the dissemination of ideas, which in turn produces new advances in scholarship, then a process that takes advantage of the technologies that networked systems make possible can only be an improvement. The average scholarly book takes over a year to move from manuscript to published book, and that’s after the lengthy delays produced by the current peer-review system. Adding to this the fact that getting reviews of such books published can take several years more, it begins to become clear that intellectual discourse is not being served, not even remotely, by print. It is little wonder that so many scholars have begun blogging; it’s currently one of the few ways to have conversations about ideas in anything like a timely fashion.

What’s clear from her statements is that the group is drawing a distinction between scholarly publishing and scholarly discourse. She is not willing to allow the ineffectiveness of the first to interfere with the second.

A similar dissatisfaction prompted the development of digital repositories to reduce cost and time for dissemination of findings in scientific research. From that has developed the Open Archives Initiative and protocols for harvesting metadata. It will be interesting to see how the efforts of Fitzpatrick and her colleagues shape the future of publishing.

Lorcan Dempsey suggests the difference between the rights of ownership of copyright protected materials and licensing are not as different as one might at first image:

What this means is that a large part of library collections is still in copyright. The library ‘owns’ the cost of storing it, shelving it, keeping it at the right temperature, and so on. It can be shared and borrowed in its current form. However, the library does not ‘own’ it to the extent that they can freely re-format it and allow it to be used by many parties.

In this sense, the gap between the materials that libraries ‘own’ and the materials that libraries license is smaller than we are used to thinking about.

His point is well-taken. I especially appreciate his inclusion of the ongoing cost of storing and preserving the item. What he’s describing may be more akin to a “lease-to-own” plan. If the library (or individual that purchases the book) keeps a book long enough, the rights of ownership do eventually include the right to copy, digitize, etc. The work eventually moves into the public domain. But the cost is quite high.

Scott Bennett’s article and cost analysis, Just-in-Time Scholarly Monographs builds in more detail case models to compare what he calls “Just-in-Time” versus “Just-in Case” models for libraries. “Just-in-case” strategies would acquire books in case someone might need them. “Just-in -time” strategies acquire a book only when it is needed. Nearly 10 years old, Bennett’s cost models continue to provide a helpful model for modeling the cost of various strategies for providing ready access to materials.
I’ve been thinking about how to control the cost of housing a book for the long-term, and retrieval of that book for use by library users. The cost of digitizing books has decrease in recent months. One of my primary costs is retrieval of books shelved off-site. I recently calculated it cost us over $50 to retrieve and return an item from off-site shelving.
Shifting to digital access to these materials may be more a more cost effective means of providing access to lesser used materials.

A frequent complaint about digital/virtual libraries is that one can’t easily browse. Browsing, it is asserted, is the means by which library users discover in a serendipitous manner the book sitting next to the one they are looking for…

Now we are hearing the same thing about RSS. Ken Varnum posted a response to an essay in St. Petersburg Times on March 26 (“The Endangered Joy of Serendipity“).

I’ve been known to add my voice in support of this argument. Placing books on the “reserve shelf” means easy, insured access to class readings, but it also means that students don’t have an opportunity to see what sits on the shelf next to it in its original location. But…

It seems to me there are two flaws in the argument. First, whether it is an RSS feed, a newspaper article, a journal article, or a book sitting on the reserve shelf, the reader is not reading it in the absence of context. It may not be its original context but it exists in a context. One can’t have an absence of context. Reading an article or a book online means one is reading in the context of a network connection, on an electronic device, etc. One’s discovery mode may not be physically browsing the shelves or reading the article that may be next to the article in a journal or newspaper. But there was a discovery process, one that is rarely so precise as to eliminate “bumping into” other documents.
Second, I suspect serendipitous occurrences are not dependent solely on a physical context, whether original or not. I haven’t studied such occurrences, but in my own experience, they seem to depend as much on my state of mind as on the physical context. To assume that one can facilitate serendipitous occurrences by preserving, or forcing the reader/user into the original physical context seems to questionable…

The Guardian Unlimited includes a story by Bobbie Johnson detailing Sony’s agreement with Borders to market its about to be released E-book reader. Moving it out of the electronics store into book stores is an interesting marketing move….

if:book: sophie is coming!

This is worth a read, if nothing more than to see a good critque of E-books. Speaking about the PDF and HTML options:

Here, in a nutshell, is the problem with these ideas about electronic books: they treat a book as being essentially a text. A text, however, is not a book: a text is only part of a book. A book presents a reading environment which is something we’re interested in creating with Sophie. Electronic books could be much more: there’s no reason to stop with what we have.

I’ve suggested before that the problem with E-books has far less to do with display technology than that current efforts fail to understand how people read. At this point, Sophie is vaporware, but I’m encourged that the Institute for the Future of the Book understands that an E-book needs to be more than simply display of text…