Must read articles on publishing standards and the future of public libraries

[40hz]

(Note: I've been away of late, mostly working on some of my own projects. But I thought it might be of interest if I shared a few articles that relate to some of what I'm getting involved with these days.  )
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We are all feeling varying degrees of pain over the current state of the book. And the insanity (something never found in short supply) continues to roll, with endless arguments and counterarguments between advocates of open access, and the entrenched business and political elements within the publishing industry.

Fortunately there's some constructive and intelligent voices attempting to get the attention of any who are willing to listen. The following three articles are well worth your time if you're a reader.

The first two are by designer and publisher Nick Disabato. Nick offers an analysis and set of recommendations for how a more intelligent and forward-looking approach to publishing standards offers hope we may eventually work our way out of the problems e-books have caused for all parties concerned.

Publication Standards Part 1: The Fragmented Present
by Nick Disabato

ebooks are a new frontier, but they look a lot like the old web frontier, with HTML, CSS, and XML underpinning the main ebook standard, ePub. Yet there are key distinctions between ebook publishing’s current problems and what the web standards movement faced. The web was founded without an intent to disrupt any particular industry; it had no precedent, no analogy. E-reading antagonizes a large, powerful industry that’s scared of what this new way of reading brings—and they’re either actively fighting open standards or simply ignoring them. In part one of a two-part series in this issue, Nick Disabato examines the explosion in reading, explores how content is freeing itself from context, and mines the broken ebook landscape in search of business logic and a way out of the present mess.

Publication Standards Part 2: A Standard Future
by Nick Disabato

The internet is disrupting many content-focused industries, and the publishing landscape is beginning its own transformation in response. Tools haven’t yet been developed to properly, semantically export long-form writing. Most books are encumbered by Digital Rights Management (DRM), a piracy-encouraging practice long since abandoned by the music industry. In the second article of a two-part series in this issue, Nick Disabato discusses the ramifications of these practices for various publishers and proposes a way forward, so we can all continue sharing information openly, in a way that benefits publishers, writers, and readers alike.

The third article comes to us from New Zeland and is by O'Reilly author and business advisor Nathan Torkington. Nat was invited to address "the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting." While there, he made this cautionary address that (IMHO) hit all the key points about why so many public library systems are facing the dilemma they currently are, along with some recommendations about how to address it.

Note: this address is also available as a PDF download. See the full article for links. If you love your local library: Download it. Read it. Pass it around. Discuss it.

Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong
by Nathan Torkington

It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year. I have been involved in libraries for a few years now, and am always humbled by the expertise, hard work, and dedication that librarians of all stripes have. Yet it’s no revelation that libraries aren’t the great sources of knowledge and information on the web that they were in the pre-Internet days. I wanted to push on that and challenge the National and State librarians to think better about the Internet.

I prefaced my talk by saying that none of this is original, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. I merely wanted to bring the different strands together in a way that showed them how to think about the opportunities afforded to libraries for the digital age.
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Bill Gates and Microsoft were caught flat-footed by the take-up of the Internet. They had built an incredibly profitable and strong company which treated computers as disconnected islands: Microsoft software ran on the computers, but didn’t help connect them.  Gates and Microsoft soon realized the Internet was here to stay and rushed to fix Windows to deal with it, but they never made up for that initial wrong-footing.

At least part of the reason for this was because they had this fantastic cash cow in Windows, the island software.  They were victims of what Clayton Christenson calls the Innovator’s Dilemma: they couldn’t think past their own successes to build the next big thing, the thing that’d eat their lunch.  They still haven’t got there: Bing, their rival to Google, has eaten $5.5B since 2009 and it isn’t profitable yet.

I’m telling you this because libraries are like Microsoft.

At one point you had a critical role: you were one of the few places to conduct research. When academics and the public needed to do research into the documentary record, they’d come to you. As you now know, that monopoly has been broken.

The Internet, led by Google, is the start and end of most people’s research. It’s good enough to meet their needs, which is great news for the casual researcher but bad news for you.

Now they don’t think of you at all.

Oh yes, I know all the reasons why the web and Google are no replacement for a healthy research library. I know the critical importance of documentary heritage. But it’s not me you’re talking to at budget time. It’s the public, through the politicians.

They love public libraries, in our country at least. Every time a council tries to institute borrowing fees or close libraries, they get shot down. But someone tries, at least once a year. And England is a cautionary tale that even public libraries aren’t safe.

You need to be useful as well as important. Being useful helps you to be important. You need a story they can understand about why you’re funded.

Oh, I know, you have thought about digital a lot. You’ve got digitisation projects. You’re aggregating metadata. You’re offering AnyQuestions-type services where people can email a librarian.

But these are bolt-ons. You’ve added digital after the fact. You probably have special digital groups, probably (hopefully) made up of younger people than the usual library employee.

Congratulations, you just reproduced Microsoft’s strategy: let’s build a few digital bolt-ons for our existing products. Then let’s have some advance R&D guys working on the future while the rest of us get on with it. But think about that for a second.  What are the rest of us working on, if those young kids are working on the future? Ah, it must be the past.

So what you’ve effectively done is double-down on the past.
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Then when someone asks “why do we tip all these millions into this?” or “doesn’t Google do that already?”, your relevance is your answer.

You must do this. Libraries are the homes of critical thought, of long-term cultural preservation, and of democratic access to knowledge. This can’t end with the Internet.

Food for thought. And taking action. 

[TaoPhoenix]

That library article is a little strange in one sense - the elephant in the room is Copyright. Publishers grudgingly put up with libraries precisely because of the clunky nature of having to travel there, and either stay in the reading room, or borrow and return books. Middle class people and up bought their own copies of stuff.

However, without fancy DRM there is no such thing as "borrowing" a digital file. So I can certainly see how the internet would tangle up a library. Except for aesthetics, why ever buy a book again?

Remember when for about a decade libraries tried to get all modern and have music and movie collections? Wham! Watch how *that* will slam into the future-that-is-now! "Borrow a song"?

I'm far from having a complete answer, but my best suggestion has to do with what we now call "Pirates" is *free labor*. Posting the digital copy to torrents or download sites - trade that labor into digital files somehow. My glimmer of a clue I'll offer is that Eric Flint of Baen wrote somewhere, something like "it's too much work to digitize and/or clean up old paper books so it's not worth our money so we won't do it."

[IainB]

... the elephant in the room is Copyright...

-TaoPhoenix (June 08, 2012, 12:32 PM)

Yes. Exactly. I read about an interesting theory that copyright may need to exist to stop copyright holders competing with themselves, or something along those lines: Protectionism Against the Past (or: Why are Copyright Terms so Long?)

But that doesn't mean it is not being used as a straightforward tool to create/consolidate a monopoly position on certain kinds of property, working to the general public detriment and the benefit of (typically) a sole legal person.

[TaoPhoenix]

Sorry Iain, while you performed a useful service posting that article, I don't buy its premise. "Competing with themselves" = another way to say that they're playing all sides of the game. They're simultaneously trying to make us jaded so that anything more than 3 years old "isn't good enough and that we must buy new stuff", while echoing my note above "older stuff that isn't a Disney Mouse isn't worth fixing up to resell", and then finally "woe is us, if people got to watch/listen to all the old 80's classics they won't buy new stuff".

Nope.

While not the obvious elephant in the room, maybe the lost underfed cat in the room is Education. Over on that topic, we're whining about US has no education, blah blah. But the new age is about mashups and extreme forms of active learning. But we can't do that without the raw materials to throw around.

So, I don't buy the 70 year copyright term gig. I think only X small percentage of items need that level of protection. The rest just vanishes out of print. And the first reply comment on the blog doesn't buy it either.

[IainB]

Sorry Iain, while you performed a useful service posting that article, I don't buy its premise. "Competing with themselves" = another way to say that they're playing all sides of the game. They're simultaneously trying to make us jaded so that anything more than 3 years old "isn't good enough and that we must buy new stuff", while echoing my note above "older stuff that isn't a Disney Mouse isn't worth fixing up to resell", and then finally "woe is us, if people got to watch/listen to all the old 80's classics they won't buy new stuff".

-TaoPhoenix (June 08, 2012, 09:27 PM)

No, quite. I don't buy that premise either. It's irrational. I think you have it pretty much spot-on there.
Essentially, Big Media seems to fasten on like a leech (apt simile) to any argument to justify strengthening, or continuing, or extending copyright. It's just rationalisation, and it doesn't have to make sense as a valid, rational argument. The motive is provided by the legal and/or corporate obligation to maximise profits. It's what good corporate psychopaths have to do.

[IainB]

Here's a really novel patent to improve the financial security of copyright. Maybe it takes an economics professor and a lover of intellectual freedom (NOT) to dream up such a thing: Anti-Piracy Patent Stops Students From Sharing Textbooks
The post from Torrent Freak is in the spoiler below: (minus links, so go to the link to see any embedded/specific links in the post)

Spoiler

Source: http://torrentfreak....haring-books-120610/

Anti-Piracy Patent Stops Students From Sharing Textbooks
A new patent granted this week aims to stop students from sharing textbooks, both off and online. The patent awarded to economics professor Joseph Henry Vogel hopes to embed the publishing world even further into academia. Under his proposal, students can only participate in courses when they buy an online access code which allows them to use the course book. No access code means a lower grade, all in the best interests of science.
For centuries, students have shared textbooks with each other, but a new patent aims to stop this “infringing” habit.
The patent in question was granted to Professor of Economics Joseph Henry Vogel. He believes that piracy, lending and reselling of books is a threat to the publishing industry.
“Professors are increasingly turning a blind eye when students appear in class with photocopied pages. Others facilitate piracy by placing texts in the library reserve where they can be photocopied,” Vogel writes.
The result is less money for publishers, and fewer opportunities for professors like himself to get published. With Vogel’s invention, however, this threat can be stopped.
The idea is simple. As part of a course, students will have to participate in a web-based discussion board, an activity which counts towards their final grade. To gain access to the board students need a special code, which they get by buying the associated textbook.
Students who don’t pay can’t participate in the course and therefore get a lower grade.
The system ensures that students can’t follow courses with pirated textbooks, as tens of thousands are doing today. Lending books from a library or friend, or buying books from older students, isn’t allowed either. At least, not when the copyright holders don’t get their share.
Vogel’s idea leaves the option open for students to use second-hand textbooks, but they still have to buy an access code at a reduced price. This means publishers can charge multiple times for a book that was sold only once.
Needless to say, publishers are excited about gaining more control in the classroom. Anthem Press of London has already expressed interest in the system and Pat Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, also welcomes the idea.
“For every rogue site that is taken down, there are hundreds more demanding similar effort. I can’t think of a more timely example of the need for additional tools,” he says.
On the surface the idea might seem well-intentioned, but to proponents of an open knowledge society it goes completely in the wrong direction. If anything, the Internet should make it easier for students to access knowledge, not harder or impossible.
While it’s understandable that publishers want to stop piracy, preventing poor students from borrowing textbooks from a library or friend goes too far.
Perhaps it’s a better idea to approach the problem from the opposite direction.
Thanks to the Internet, publishers are replaceable. And since many of the textbook authors are professors who get paid by universities, it is not hard to release books in a more open system.
Professor Vogel believes that sending more money to publishers helps academia, which might be a flawed line of reasoning. Isn’t it much better to strive to make knowledge open and accessible, instead of restricting it even further?

We have a wholemeal bread in New Zealand that is sold under the brand name "Vogel's" (similar to "Hovis'" bread in the UK), and it tastes quite nice, but it is marketed as a trendy boutique bread and sold at a ridiculously high price that only some are gullible enough to pay (wholewheat bread is plentiful and a cheap staple commodity in NZ), so I don't buy it.
I don't buy this professor Vogel's rationale, either.

"Professor Vogel believes that sending more money to publishers helps academia..."

Yeah, right.