In Praise of Not-Reading

Reading is, in these days, an over-rated activity.

Most of what is most important about books is now about not-reading them. I was reminded of this deep but counter-intuitive truth by a blogger (An American Editor) recently complaining that his To Be Read pile (TBR Pile) was getting unmanageable because it was full of ebooks that often cost nothing and were without physical presence.

Which brings us to the special problem of ebooks. Yes, ebooks are a special problem because they take up virtually no space — just a bunch of bits and bytes, digits if you will, on a disk that can store gigabytes of digits. And so that TBR pool steadily grows. I looked this morning and I have more than 300 TBR ebooks, and that pile keeps growing. Acquiring Books for the TBR Pile: The Special Case of eBooks

American Editor is here admitting to a very old-fashioned mistake. He has not caught up with the twenty-first century. Books are now not really for reading -- or to be more accurate -- they are only occasionally, under the most special circumstances, for reading. Publishers are partly to blame for this (culpable, since all publishers, especially of newspapers and magazines, know that their profits are entirely dependent on selling stuff that the customers do not read) and digital book experts would be much more on the button if they spent less time fretting about 'reading'. And part of the problem is that the digital experts operate with a vastly over-simple model of what reading is. The conventional wisdom is that proper reading (sometimes called 'long form reading' -- a ghastly phrase for a dubious concept) is the measurable phase in which you open all the pages of the book and look at them, the hours and minutes through which a book, conveyor-like, passes, between the moment that you bought it and the moment that you shelve it in your personal library, never to be looked at again. Incidentally, 're-reading' is a much more interesting concept than mere 'reading', but we note that in passing and may return to the topic on another occasion (you will have observed that you can do that with writing as with reading). This Taylorean model of, conveyor-like, reading predicates that in serious reading our eyes scan more or less consecutively the whole book from page 1 to page umpteen. Efficiently and quickly. The time and motion expert holding a stop-watch, just as Google analytics calibrates our use of the Google library. As though reading a book might not actually comprise understanding it, or failing to enjoy it, or realising pretty instantly that it was not worth reading at all. Under any circumstances.

Of course, reading has always been, but is becoming steadily more, episodic; very little of our reading is like this conventional model of continuous reading, and most of us who now work in intellectual or bureaucratic activities which involve web-based reading, spend a lot of time, yes reading, in ways which are not at all like the way you first read and enjoyed Babar, P.G. Wodehouse or Jane Austen. You see, we spend a lot of our time and energy deciding what not to read. And these decisions matter. Possibly even as much as enjoying Babar, or re-reading Jane Austen.

Our understanding of digital books would be much better if we spent less time wondering about how we might read them, and a lot more time thinking about the ways in which we may use them without necessarily, or even at all, reading them. For certainly, and beyond all doubt, when there are 20 million books in Google Books Search we will not seriously, continuously, read more than the tiniest fraction of them. There are a lot of things that we need to do with books and it is not at all clear to me that we have a framework in which these activities can take place with digital books, half as effectively as with print books. For example, we need to be able to:

• search them (that activity appears to be brilliantly covered by the already mentioned Google Books Search)
• provide access to them (possibly well covered, in the USA, by the afore-mentioned)
  
• buy them
• listen to them
• lend them to a friend or a colleague
• translate them (well)
  
• quote from them
• (ideally) cite them when we quote them
• non-consumptively compute them (we none of us know quite what that might involve)
  

These are all important points, but I will admit to playing a rhetorical trick with this list, my bullet points, and the bold face. The key point about the list is the recurrent 'them'. There are so many things that we need to do with books aside from, and apart from reading them. The key thing about digital books is that we need them. We need digital books to be the 'object' of all these newly digital verbs and activities. Digital books need to be as versatile and as 'real' as physical books in all these ways, even though they are now becoming entirely virtual and insubstantial. The big challenge that Google, Apple and Amazon have yet to project is that books themselves are becoming networked. And the Google, Apple and Amazon models of network usage will inevitably fail if they are not truly book-centric.

May I recommend (unreservedly, though I have forgotten most of it, and disagreed with much of it) Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read. Which, in case you mistakenly decide not to read it, has many reviews here.

Why the iPhone is a better Reading Environment I

People have noticed that the iPhone is becoming a great environment in which to do some serious reading. But I am not sure that we have yet fully recognised why it has changed our expectations of the optimum digital reading environment. One point was recently well made by Hugh McGuire the Canadian blogger, publisher, philosopher. (He also leads Librivox).

My experience of reading news on iphone is totally different than reading on the web: on the web I flit from place to place, on the iPhone I read much like I would a newspaper ... going through the whole thing, reading multiple articles. And as mentioned I might possibly pay for it on the iPhone.

I think this is a fascinating shift in my content consumption ... back to an older, more focused kind of reading. (Quoting Hugh McGuire from an email).

This is a subtle point. The iPhone is a better reading environment because it is NOT completely of the web. I think its really a point about the way Apps work on the iPhone, rather than the way that the web, or Safari, works on the iPhone. In my experience, browsing the web on my iPhone is just about as mercurial and unsticky as browsing from the laptop, but the apparatus of the App (only one App at a time, they take a moment or two to fire up) tends to give them some valuable friction. A retaining wall, which if it is not a 'walled garden' is something like a 'reader's carrel'. There is a threshold with each App, which keeps you within the App in which you are browsing; whereas when one is reading a news site on the wild web it is just too easy to be distracted. Every link is a link out. Its too easy to flip over to something else, there are no boundaries to a web newspaper or a web magazine. But there are some subtle boundaries to an App which is branded for a newspaper or a magazine.

It could be that the 'Appy' quality of serious reading on the iPhone is the key to developing an effecitve publishing culture in that environment. There is a lesson here for book, magazine and newspaper publishers. Get your Apps in order!

There is another reason that the iPhone reading experience is subtly different. Touching. There is something special about touching what you read, more about this on another occasion....

Nostalgia for Books

Robert Darnton made an impressive cameo presentation speech at JISC's Oxford Conference on The Library of the Future (Presentations, Twittering). Darnton made some interesting points about Google Book Search and what libraries should be doing (appealing to Google's better nature and public spirited-ness, which may work?). One throw-away remark of his caught my attention:

"Someone born in 2010 will not feel nostalgia for the printed book."

He might be right about that. Think about the implications. This year, next year or the year after is a tipping point for digital books. He clearly isnt saying that three year olds will not be having Babar read to them in 2013. But it could be that a lot of kids will be having Babar read to them from iPhones or colour Kindles in 2013. A lot of folk in the publishing industry would say that Darnton is being a bit early with that conjecture, but if you look at the way that the iPhone and netbooks have jumped forward in the last year or two, he could be spot on. Bedtime stories in many households will be coming from mobile devices, of course with colour screens, in three or four years time. In three or four years time many households that cannot afford colour books will have mobiles with colour screens.

But I think that there is another implication of his remark. People will not in five or ten years time be feeling nostalgic for print books. They will be very excited about what you can do with real books, digital books. Sure printed books will still be collectable and valuable, some of us will prefer them to digital books. Just as a few of us prefer vinyl to digital recorded music, but it will be a small minority. It may be a very small minority. Do you still know people who use typewriters over computers, who use slide rules over calculators? Not many left.

When digital books have really arrived they will be so much better than print books that nobody will feel nostalgic for print. The books and the libraries of 2020 will be vastly more useful and vastly more accessible than those that we have now. Darnton is right. Also, though he did not say this: not only will the digital libraries be so much better than the merely print-based libraries of the 1970s, they will also be so much unlike our early efforts to create digital books and digital libraries, that readers of 2020 will be looking back on the primitiveness of our current Kindles, EPUBs, GBS and other efforts with embarasment. Do any of us remember how clunky the first calculators were? About digital books and magazines I am an unmitigated optimist.

Even about newspapers. The few remaining digital newspapers will be great once the publishers have learnt how to make them work. There is still a huge amount of fear of digital in the publishing industry. There needs to be more excitement and enthusiasm.

Incremental improvements

One of the major advantages of a software delivered as a web service is that one can make steady improvements to the service, with (one hopes) no adverse impacts on the expectations of users. On average we have been tweaking and improving our service more than once a week in 2008. Here are the figures for the number of new site releases since we started:

2005 28
2006 32
2007 58
2008 76

Our big steps in 2008 included: shops/stores that could be branded per publisher, iPhone enhancements (especially a mini toolbar for the small format screen), ASCII text for the print impaired and Google (odd that Google should be bracketed with the 'print impaired'?), greatly increased flexibility in showcasing samples of subscriber content, live post codes, promotional codes, user stats for our library customers etc.... There are more radical improvements to come in 2009. And I am sure plenty of small adjustments as well!

Wii Magazines

Reading The Spectator on your TV



If buying a Wii to improve your fitness and well being is not enough for you, its also quite OK to buy a Wii so that you can project your magazine subscriptions on to the TV in your lounge or kitchen.

Just a reminder that digital editions benefit from being pure web solutions. If a digital magazine or book runs on any standard web browser then it should run on any new web-connected gadget or device that appears in the consumer market (with the emerging Android open standard there are going to be quite a few). Take home lesson for publishers and aggregators: there is no need to develop and support different versions of your content for a multitude of platforms. Just make sure that your content is available on the web through a standard web browser. That is what software compatibility now means.

Google Street View Car getting lost in Florence

Yesterday, after playing with the new iPhone and blogging about Android, I set out on my usual walk to the bread shop. For the first time with an iPhone in my pocket (tempting to walk along playing with it). I had gone barely 50 metres when I noticed a black car moving up the street, rather uncertainly, with a large tripod on top. Could it be? Is it really? Yes, as it turned left towards Via Dante Castiglione, I noticed that the large tripod superstructure was certainly a bunch of cameras, and there was a prominent Google logo stuck on the inside of the rear window. A Google Camera car on its rounds, canning street views of our leafy suburb, which almost surely means that I will now be fixed and smudged as the indistinct figure in a sloppy jumper, when the Google Street view shows the rest of the world this part of Florence in 2 months time (wonder what the delay is in processing street views?). I was too slow with my iPhone to take a shot but there are plenty at Flickr:

Google Car in Bristol



And here is a close up of the camera: there is something almost comic about the Heath Robinson quality of the Google survey cars, which look somewhat experimental. But the whole process will surely be completely automated once the digital video gets into the Google workflow. I can not believe that they employ 'street view editors'. If they did, there is just a chance that one of them might intervene in my interests: "We can't have our view of Florence messed up by that tramp in sloppy jumper at 0.016181,0.038409&z=15. Can someone erase him?".

Nope, its bound to be completely automated and I am afraid that I am now immortalised as a smudge in Google Street View. It is quite extraordinary the way in which the web now touches us in the most specific and exact detail throughout our lives, and so many web systems are now ingesting mundane information from all corners of the earth.

How many publishing CEOs know what an API is?

Google yesterday announced their API for the Google Book Search platform (well it had sort of been pre-announced more than 6 months ago) but it has been given more breadth and visibility via this blog announcement. An API or Application Programming Interface is what allows one web service to integrate with and collaborate with another. If you have an API you need to be prepared to welcome the fact that other systems will figure out how to do cool stuff with your data that you never thought possible. The Google Book Search API is pretty tightly constrained, they list 3 API's and I expect that there will be more, but cool stuff will happen.

The system works efficiently and its much faster than some of the clunky preview systems on offer elsewhere. Here is a title from Arcadia that comes across swiftly and informatively. I can well imagine wanting to buy this book after glimpsing it in the Google search and preview mode. But there is a tendency for the Google system to reduce all the titles it manages to a grey uniformity. In some cases, as with this OUP book hosted at Blackwells, the text appears to be literally grey-ed. Is this because many of the titles are being scanned into the system? I am not sure. But I am sure that many publishers who care deeply about the look and feel, the design and readability of their texts, will not be won over to the Google platform.

The Google Book Search API is a great start, but it is not rich and deep. For that Google will need the active participation of publishers, Google itself will need to be committed to a more open Google Book Search, and there will be a lot more work on structuring texts.

Why does it matter whether your CEO knows what an API is? It matters because publishers (and newspaper owners, TV networks, film studios, content makers of all shapes) are not going to allow Google (YouTube, he she or ItTube, or anybody else) to manage and define the API which has access to their content. Having, or buying into, allying with, the API's which manage and accesses your content may be the key decision for media companies in the next decade. Either your CEO knows what an API is, and can find out how, in strategic terms, to negotiate Google's, Amazon's, Facebook's and Apple's, or he/she needs to be a media genius who does it by gut instinct (Rupert Murdoch is the only one of those that I can think of and he is the wrong side of 70). The heads of Random House, Conde Nast, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette and Pearson really ought to have an intuition about the way their business can develop an API to the servers which are hosting all their content. I wonder if any of them do?

On Being Positive in August

Vint Cerf, who is one of the internet's founding fathers had a nice positive piece in last Sunday's Observer If you thought the internet was cool, wait until it goes space age

It's amazing how quickly those of us with internet access have come to take for granted the remarkable amounts of information we have at our disposal, but we're only seeing the beginnings. The bulk of human knowledge remains offline. As more of us get access to the internet, more of the world's information will find its way online.

Cerf is right. We havent seen the middle of the beginning, merely the beginning of the beginning. There is a lot of knowledge to be shifted in the next ten years. Virtualised. Objective Knowledge, which has been printed in books is now being dumped in the cloud.

The publishing industry too often has a depressing air of worry about digital technologies. Sometimes Amazon fear. Sometimes Google gloom. Too many possibilities. New technology can, after all, be a bit challenging to an established industry.

But, who can doubt that digital publishing will be a golden age for publishers and authors? Even staid old Television (which relies on mid-2oth Century technology, not on our Renaissance invention of moveable type) can, according to Mark Cuban, be rejuvenated by the application of a new technology. Boring 73", High Definition, flat panel TVs which have led to audience surges for the Olympics.

I dont have a flat panel TV. If I did, since its a digital device, I would want it to bring me the daily newspaper (all of them), magazines and books by the truckload. And why not?

Publishers need to consider the possibility that anything that can be published, will certainly be published digitally, and will, in principle, be available anywhere from many devices. That does not mean that it all will be free (why should it mean that?). But it does mean that it will either be available for free (sponsored by advertising) or because someone wants to buy, give, or rent it. That is a medium term horizon. Cerf should live long enough to see the end of the beginning.

Knols are moving into public Beta

Google has now opened up its developing database of Knols. See the official announcement ("a knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic"), and Danny Sullivan's helpful assessment. Danny provides a good outline of what Knol is doing and how it works. His reservation is particularly interesting:

Overall, I still lean toward not wanting Google to do this. I remain concerned that by hosting this content, it plays too much in the content owner space when its core business is supposed to be driving traffic outbound to others. Hosting content sets up inherent conflicts that over time start to erode the trust people have in Google, I feel.

Danny doesnt want Google to do it. But they are starting to do it, and it may now be tricky to pull back (they probably should). There are several hundred knols up there that you can test and evaluate, most of them are medical. You could write your own.

The knol that I looked at closely was on Breathing wine. It gave me some basic information. But it could have been written much more concisely, the take-home message is "don't bother to open bottles hours/minutes before you drink them, and if you need to decant because of the lees, then decant". In the 1,250 word article (this 'knol' terminology is a trifle tiresome) there was not a single link to anything, to any citation or to any source on the web. This is a specific weakness of the article that I selected, many of the medical entries have impressive references and citations. But there is no common format or standard for the level of annotation. This editorial uneveness suggests that the Knol project has a long way to go. Wikipedia works in part because of the tireless work of hundreds of experienced and unpaid editors who beaver away tidying things up.

Academic reference publishers will smile and recognise the challenge that the Knol project is facing. Giving a huge bunch of experts their head without detailed editorial planning and supervision is going to produce an uneven and messy mixture. Knol is a very curious enterprise for Google to be pursuing. It is a long, long way from PageRank.

The wikipedia entry on knol is impressive. There is not yet a knol entry on wikipedia.

ISBNs per Title, per Edition, or per SKU?

This topic is really only for publishing and logistics nerds. Since I am not nerdy enough, I am not really qualified to opine on the matter (but when did that stop anybody?). Anyway we find it an intriguing and perplexing issue. PersonaNonData today has a report on the flux that digital publishers find themselves in. Should there be as many ISBNs for each title as there are conceivable ebook formats? If so, there are going to be a very great many ISBNs, since it seems quite feasible that there are going to be a dozen, or perhaps many more. ebook/digital formats. Sure the market will settle down in due course to a few favoured formats. But that could take a while, and in the interim the ISBN system will need to cater for a very large set of potential numbers.

I have a suggestion: where titles go into a format where there are in effect many individual instances of the work then that format should have a separate ISBN attached to it. The ISBN system was introduced so that books would have a standard method of stock control. ISBNs are SKU's. So digital platforms where copies of books are handed/downloaded to readers/purchasers the SKU specific to that channel serves a purpose. For digital platforms which are based on an 'access' system, which would include Google Book Search, and Amazon Search Inside, there is no need for a separate ISBN, because there are no 'units' that need to be tracked. Exact Editions is another such access system and there is no need therefore for publishers to assign separate ISBNs to their titles in the Exact Editions platform. The identifiers that matter for 'access' systems are the urls which comprise the book's web presence.

I suspect that Exact Editions can hide behind the skirts of Google Book Search in this issue. It is pretty unlikely that Google will be prevailed upon to find and provide separate ISBNs for the millions of titles in its database. Very unlikely, because the ISBN fees for such a large number of titles will be a tidy sum. Very unlikely, because for many of the titles in Google Book Search, Google has no better idea than anybody else to whom the ISBN should be assigned. One of the difficulties with the Google Book Search project is that it is unclear who owns what. Who needs to be consulted about what? If Google knew how to assign ISBNs it would know which were the publishers to approach for permission to do so. Might as well ask them for permission to database the book at the same time?

A Publishing Ontology

Yesterday I was listening to two of my colleagues discussing our platform and what should be done with a catalogue, when I realised that I did not have a clue as to what was going on. When geek-talk overwhelms me I tend to reach back for philosophical roots.
-- "Hang on a minute -- I interjected -- you are talking about our ontology. I didnt realise that we have an ontology".

Well it turns out that we do, and I am begining to get the hang of it. There are four important types of entity in the Exact Editions universe. (1) Publishers, who come at the top of the tree (of course) who control access, deliver content, they may need branding, they may get subscriptions and revenue, and they will expect to get usage statistics; then there are (2) Publications, which may be of various subtypes (eg magazines, brochures, books, catalogues etc), publications will have their own 'entry point/home page' and our usage statistics will be aggregated for the individual publication; then there are some special publications which have peculiar characteristics for example they may have earlier or later issues: (3) Issues. Searches can be aggregated across issues of a single publication. At any rate yesterday's geek-speak was hovering over the question of whether publishers' catalogues have issues or not, since they can certainly have (4) Supplements. We decided that some catalogues are issue-like. Publisher's seasonal lists have a periodical frequency which makes them a bit like issues of a periodical. At any rate, our ontology now allows for the possibility.

In fact we are still only scratching the surface. If you want to get tied in absurdly complex knots we have to introduce you to the topic of loose-leaf-publications........It will make Being and Nothingness feel like child's play.

The Future of Internet Search?

Mac Funamizu has a very interesting posting which you need to see, as the verbal description is not as compelling as his graphic mockup. Hat tip to Brantley, who emailed me the link.

The first example he gives, of a search on a skyscraper vista, is completely believable. Google has been beavering away with its rich cityscapes. You may have noticed that they added Little Rock, Anchorage and 11 other Metro areas last week. City-scape recognition will be a great way of delivering mobile search.

But I found Mac_Fun's second example even more intriguing. He is right, the device that does city-scape recognition will also do user-generated document scanning. That puts the world of digital documents in a completely different ball-game. The thesaurus example he gives, is a little bit lame......there will be vastly richer linkage patterns available. "Show me who else has read this!" For one. Privacy issues come crowding around mobile search.

A Sale a Second

Earlier in the afternoon (at 13:05:22) someone in the UK bought a subscription to Quest Bulgaria one precise second before someone in France bought an annual subscription to Le Monde Diplomatique (at 13:05:23). Google tells me that there are just over 31.5 million seconds a year, and if we suppose that each subscription is worth £16.877 on average ....... I make that something over £500 million a year when we are handling subs every second throughout the year.

Dream on! Think about the customer service! How many publications would be called for to attract 30 million subscribers? Still its nice to know that we can handle an order a second when we are busy :-)

Lessig into Politics

Lawrence Lessig may be about to announce that he is running for Congress. He has been an early and strong Obama supporter. It would be interesting if it happens; Obama for President and Lessig in Congress?

Lessig will not be worried if both his supporters and his critics scour his publications for clues to his political motivation and for controversial issues which will be aired in the election process. The Exact Editions Lessig mini-library facilitates searching and cross-comparisons. I guess the 'black' propagandists of the Republican right may be searching it for inconsistency right now ;-). Mind you would'nt it be cool if we could put Obama's book The Audacity of Hope into an Open Exact Editions format? Perhaps every politician running for office should make his publications open, at least during the election campaign.

I suspect that Bloomsbury would do no damage to sales and will attract some worthwhile interest if they were to put Gordon Brown's two books into an open format. Since Random House will want to recoup the $9 million advance on Tony Blair's forthcoming book, it is unlikely that it will be appearing with a Creative Commons licence any time soon.

Reading a URL

One of the Exact Editions foundation stones is that in this digital platform each print page has its equivalent web page. Our platform systematically turns magazines, books etc into collections of ordinary web pages. If you had nothing better to do you could learn to read these urls. For example, here are pages from trial issues for Le Monde Diplomatique :

[French]http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/373/409/2657/2/1
[English]http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/373/399/2074/2/1

In these urls '373' refers to the publisher/owner Le Monde the company, '409' to the French language edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, '2,657' refers to the July number and '1' at the end to the page number. If you replace the '2' by a '3' you jump to the larger page size whereas you will land up in the 16-pp view if you replace the '2' by a '1'.

Queries also have a quasi-readable syntax. Here is a search for 'Paris' in the trial issue of the English LMD:
http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/search.do?term=Paris&issueId=2074&magazineId=399&type=issue

Reading urls is not an exciting business, but it is important that all of the pages and all searches in the Exact Editions system have distinct urls. This way readers can bookmark articles of special interest and they can share search results, citations or references with anybody who may have access to the same material. Any respectable digital publishing system, whether for books or magazines, should produce determinate and shareable references. A lot of the current offerings fail this simple requirement.