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Peter Brantley: September 2008
A Plea for Passion in Museums
Peter Brantley
September 30, 2008
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This is a great post about passion for when we talk about our profession, about what we are all trying to do, whether we are librarians, technologists, publishers, or work in museums. It speaks to why libraries and museums often feel "dead." From Museum 2.0:
Museums shy away from presenting passionate views. It's ironic that we expect visitors to fall in love with our artifacts and exhibitions without ever presenting Bela-like models for that kind of passion. I think there are many visitors who wander into museums the same way they'd wander into a foreign sporting event -- they don't know what's going on, why people care, and most importantly, why they should care. At a sporting event, there are little Belas everywhere yelling at refs and hooting with glee. By following the cheering, newcomers can start to understand what parts of the game are most valued, and get a window into the deep love some fans show for the sport.
Museums don't have a cheering section. As visitors walk through galleries, it's easy to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why is it here? Who cares? Museums do a decent job addressing the first two questions, but we rarely tackle the third. The use of an "objective" authoritative voice makes it hard for visitors to assign value or significance to items with which they don't already have a connection.
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10 Things Ebook Merchants Should Offer
Peter Brantley
September 29, 2008
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Jane at Dear Author has a wonderful list of 10 things ebook merchants should be providing as a matter of course. Here's just one example, but read the whole list:
Buy a for a friend. The only site that offers this feature is Fictionwise. Amazon does not even offer this for Kindle which makes no sense. When a reader wants to buy a book for a friend, she wants to buy a specific book. She doesn't want to send a generic gift certificate and hope her friend uses it for said book.
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CEOs Must Have API Literacy
Peter Brantley
September 23, 2008
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With the release of the expanded Google Book Search application programming interface (API) presenting new opportunities and decisions for publishers, Adam Hodgin argues for API-literate CEOs:
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?
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Stanza E-Reader Catching On with iPhone Users
Peter Brantley
September 22, 2008
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VentureBeat writes about the success of Lexcycle's Stanza e-reader for the iPhone, and speculates that this type of platform will be far more successful than dedicated reader devices:
Stanza is currently the number one ebook app for the iPhone, and chief operating officer Neelan Choksi shared some other impressive stats with me. In its first six weeks, Stanza was downloaded 200,000 times -- compare that to Amazon's Kindle, which is seen as building momentum because it sells 40,000 units per month. Okay, that's a totally unfair comparison, since Stanza is a free app. But if you can get a free ebook reader for your iPhone, why bother paying for the Kindle, or even a more cutting-edge reader like Plastic Logic's? (Though of course the Amazon's and Plastic Logic's readers offer bigger screens, which is better for long-term reading.) People are actually downloading books, too -- Choksi says one of Stanza's content providers reports 20,000 downloads per day.
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Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations
Peter Brantley
September 18, 2008
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LibraryTechNZ mentions an interesting engagement of a European library with its community, something that bookstores could also do:
The library at the Hague in the Netherlands has introduced a simple form of tagging in real life. They now have two returns drop-boxes. One is for all items, and the other is for amazing books. Staff take the 'amazing' books and put them in the 'amazing books' display for visitors to browse. But they also tag them 'amazing' in the Library's collection database.
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iPhone Not Hot in Japan
Peter Brantley
September 17, 2008
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The Wall Street Journal says iPhone sales are stagnating in Japan:
According to market-research firm MM Research Institute, Apple sold about 200,000 phones in Japan in the first two months [July and August]. Since then, however, demand has been falling steadily, and analysts now widely believe sales are unlikely to reach a total of 500,000 units. That is half the one million units that they previously thought Apple could sell. One big challenge is that Japanese users already have access to some of the most advanced mobile-phone technologies in the world. Models currently sold by Japanese cellphone makers typically contain a high-end color display, digital TV-viewing capability, satellite navigation service, music player and digital camera. Many models also include chips that let owners use their phones as debit cards or train passes.
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UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release
Peter Brantley
September 11, 2008
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Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom:
Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a 6 figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September.
As I'm sure all of those working in the digital publishing departments of trade publishing houses will agree, it's nice finally to have a major high street bookselling brand pitch itself into the ebook ring so wholeheartedly - and the Sony device is the most compelling (and competitively priced) there is of the dedicated devices so far available here in the UK. I must say it did make my heart leap just a little bit to see huge POS displays promoting the Sony Reader and the associated ebook catalogue from Waterstones in the Tottenham Court Road and Picadilly branches, and it was fun to go in and do some underground detective work to discover that the Waterstones staff seemed quite clued up about it all.
Dear Author says a new version of the Sony Reader could be announced in October:
One release held close to the vest is news about the Sony Reader. Apparently there is a Sony Reader event to take place on October 2, which something new will be announced. It could be a larger Sony Reader. It could be a new design. Or it could be a Sony Reader with wireless capabilities. Who knows but it looks like waiting until October to buy a new reader makes some sense.
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Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights
Peter Brantley
September 10, 2008
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The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions:
But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says, because they fear that colleges will pay for copyright licenses instead of asserting their rights under fair-use doctrine. "We debate back and forth whether this is the best model for us," he says. "As we move toward more licensed products, are we giving up basic rights under the law?"
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Moving Ebooks into Mobility Culture
Peter Brantley
September 3, 2008
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Sherman Young writes about how ebooks should be seen in the context of mobile platforms and as part of mobility culture. From M/C Journal:
Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a mobility culture, as part of the burgeoning range of social activities revolving around a connected, convergent mobile device. Reading should be understood as an activity that doesn't begin with a particular device, but is done with whatever device is at hand. In much the same way that other media producers make content available for a number of platforms, book publishers should explore the potential of the new mobile devices.
Over 45 million smartphones were sold globally in the first three months of 2008 ("Gartner")--somewhat more than the estimated shipments of e-book reading devices. As well as allowing a range of communications possibilities, these convergent devices are emerging as key elements in the new digital mediascape--one that allows users access to a broad range of media products via a single pocket-sized device. Each of those smartphones makes a perfectly adequate e-book reading device, and it might be useful to pursue a strategy that embeds book reading as one of the key possibilities of this growing mobility culture.
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Writing Novels with Twitter
Peter Brantley
September 2, 2008
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ReadWriteWeb has a brief survey of mini serialized novels in the U.S.:
In Japan, mobile phone novels called "keitai shousetsu" have become so successful that they accounted for half of the ten best-selling novels in 2007. Here in the Western world several would-be novelists are attempting to use Twitter to create the same phenomenon. Some of the novels tweeted so far have been interesting and engaging, but others, sadly, appear to be abandoned. Will micro-format fiction ever take off here as it did in Japan?
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