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Tools: November 2008
Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution
Bill McCoy
November 24, 2008
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Last week my friend and International Digital Publishing Forum board colleague Peter Brantley, Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, published a thoughtful article on TOC arguing that "digital book DRM is bad bad bad."
I rashly volunteered to offer a counterpoint. Now, let me say up front that I don't think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, ...). Peter's post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look at likely outcomes given various scenarios, and to consider what these outcomes would mean for the principal actors involved (authors, publishers, and readers). Not whether something is good or bad but whether it's better or worse than the likely alternative.
To me, it's pretty clear that the establishment by the industry of a broadly adopted cross-platform ebook DRM system should lead to a significantly better outcome for all concerned than if no such platform ends up getting established. "DRM" is a somewhat loaded term: to clarify, by "ebook DRM" I mean a relatively lightweight means of limiting and/or discouraging copying and use beyond publisher-permitted limits, intended more to "keep honest people honest" than to totally prevent copying. After all, a book can be scanned and digitized, or even re-keyed, with only a middling level of difficulty -- so aiming for "ironclad" DRM is not warranted, even if it were feasible.
Read more…Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM
Peter Brantley
November 20, 2008
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There is increased interest among trade publishers in pursuing some sort of "interoperable digital rights management" (DRM) for digital ebooks. There are many unlikely allies, who think that achieving a little DRM encourages publishers to move into digital spheres, and gives them breathing room. I think this is a really bad idea, and I wanted to publicly detail a few reasons.
What I've compiled is largely a list of counter-arguments; there are many affirmative defenses for unencumbered content that could be promoted. I've also numbered these paragraphs; on re-reading, they more often than not meld and intertwine as a potlatch of thoughts, and have not taken to my weak organization very well.
In a separate post, my friend and colleague Bill McCoy from Adobe will attempt to establish his own conclusions about whether an ebook DRM standard is a useful compromise, or a fool's errand. (Note 11/24/08: Bill's post is now available here.)
Read more…Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation
Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008
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Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare:
It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, especially if you're accustomed to public relations-speak and the cheerleader behavior that accompanies marketing messages. When you talk directly to real people who read and buy books, they tune you out when you try to stay on message. If they wanted to rehash cover copy, they'd read the back of the book.
Related Stories:
- The Cluetrain Manifesto
- Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
- Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation
- Why Blogging and Social Media Shouldn't be Ignored
- How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?
- Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development
[TOC Webcast] Making the Case for Print on Demand
Mac Slocum
November 19, 2008
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Tools of Change for Publishing will host "Making the Case for Print on Demand," a free webcast with presenter Brian O'Leary, on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific).
Webcast Overview
Publishers who dismiss the use of print-on-demand (POD) technologies as too expensive may be missing an opportunity to better manage their inventory, total costs and the unit costs of books sold. This session will provide an economic rationale for more extensive use of POD services, based upon analysis and real-world use cases.
Slots are limited, so register for free today.
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Redefining Professional Content and Accepting Digital's Limitations
Mac Slocum
November 18, 2008
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Scott Karp expands on claims that Hulu is nipping at YouTube's heels with 10 pointed observations about the future of media. Karp's full list is recommended reading, but the following points inspired a few thoughts of my own:
1 . Professional content still has A LOT more value than "user-generated content."
This bodes well for publishers, studios and other companies that have attained professional status, but there's another aspect that deserves mention: The concept of professional in the digital realm is transforming from exclusive to inclusive.
Under traditional models with limited channels, a professional was someone who achieved a certain title through luck, talent and output; the content produced by these people was deemed professional by default. But digital platforms allow consumers to choose material on their own terms, and with that comes a shift of the professional label from job association to consumer impression. If consumers deem a piece of "user-generated" content to be professional, then it is (to those particular consumers). And if enough consumers assign the same value to the same content, advertisers will eventually get on board. We're in the very early stages of this professional transition (and the ensuing debate), but I'm excited to see how a reimiagining that includes both traditional companies and upstart professionals plays out.
8. Most analogue media businesses, when fully transitioned to the web, will likely bear little resemblance to the original businesses.
Karp summarizes something that's been gnawing at me for months: the old models just don't hold up in the digital world. Distribution went from narrow and expensive to wide and cheap; audiences once limited to specific channels have dispersed across a broad landscape; Web advertising revenue will not replace traditional ad revenue; and, after 10-plus years of Web use, consumers now expect basic digital content to be free. Fighting against these changes delays the inevitable, but acceptance opens up enormous opportunity to build leaner businesses that use content, community and the Web's efficiences to sell scarce products (i.e. targeted research, consulting, education, events, experiences, and access).
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Tagging the Real World through Barcode Apps
Mac Slocum
November 14, 2008
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Earlier this week, Peter Brantley noted an interesting barcode application for Android phones that connects the ISBN data on a physical book with Google Book Search listings. This merging of the physical and digital worlds isn't novel -- other companies offer similar applications -- but the discussion surrounding these apps tends to focus on retail threats and opportunities rather than broader uses.
Speaking as an unabashed content geek, I find the information curation possibilities from this digital-physical merge particularly interesting. The Web has provided an assortment of organization tools -- RSS feeds, readers, tags, categories, etc. -- that help me find and synthesize a vast amount of information. But the same can't be said for the real world. If something pops onto my radar while I'm sitting in front of the TV or shopping at a store, I need to open a browser (assuming I have a computer or phone), punch in the information and save it for later retrieval. This isn't an arduous task, but it lacks the elegance of scanning and tagging Web-based data.
My online efficiency increased exponentially a few years ago when I incorporated RSS feeds and readers into my daily routine. Instead of tediously visiting particular sites or running open-ended search queries, I could now gather useful sources in one application and sort that data into segments geared toward my own needs. Not to get too syrupy here, but it was an eye-opening experience that revealed a new depth to the Web. These barcode apps offer similar possibilities for seamlessly accessing the physical world's stored information. Armed with a cell phone and a data plan, those of us who are curation minded can expand the boundaries of discoverability into an untapped region.
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Slides from "What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization" Webcast
Liza Daly
November 13, 2008
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TOC will be posting a complete recording of the presentation, but in the meantime I've posted the slides from yesterday's webcast, "What publishers need to know about digitization" on Slideshare.
Thanks to everyone who attended and especially to those who asked so many excellent questions.
APIs, New "Transactions" and the Google Book Search Registry
Peter Brantley
November 13, 2008
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At PersonaNonData, Michael Cairns discusses the Google Book Search registry, and muses whether it might support certain types of transactions through an API:
How the registry may be formed is anyone's guess, but for sake of argument I envision a pyramidal structure. The identifier segment forms the pointy top layer, bibliographic data the second layer, content the third and the 'transaction gateway' the bottom tier. Then again maybe it's a cube and I should be adding subjects, a retail/library segmentation, and transactional details like rights information. Regardless, it seems to me combining each of these segments into a registry might engender significant opportunities to improve the publishing supply chain. But more than that, the combination I suggest works better for the on-line world than the off which is the failing of the current crop of ISBN databases (including Amazon.com) ...
... The most obvious application enabled via the 'transaction gateway' would be purchase but a 'transaction' can be many things: views, queries, checkin-out, use rights, syndication and may more. An open service architecture would enable development of third party API's that could result in all kinds of new applications but existing ones would also benefit as well. Worldcat and Copyright Clearinghouse applications are good examples where users could find the physical content in a library or attain usage rights from CCC.
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The Barack SlideShow
Peter Brantley
November 8, 2008
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President-elect Obama has been very vocal about embracing an open government policy, and so far the signs are promising. See, for example, this page linked off Obama's public transition Web site, which lists resources reserved for incoming presidential teams -- it is both interesting and amusing to read texts discussing these essential change-of-governance issues along the lines of "Helping make your transition into government as easy as possible." It's historically rare to get a glimpse of national government continuance aided, as it must inevitably be, by the institutional bureaucracy's production of documents akin to a special issue of Make on "How to be President of the United States."
Equally interesting is the set of images of Barack Obama and his family backstage on election night, and proceeding into his acceptance speech. What's notable is that the images are fairly informal -- and they are on Flickr. This kind of photostream -- not unique in itself -- would previously, a generation ago, have been highly curated, entitled "The new presidential family waits for news," and published the week following in Life or Look magazine. However, the Obama pictures appear less curated (or at least have that air), were published nearly instantly, and do not involve the mediation of traditional media. In fact, whether these are eventually printed or not as official administration photos is secondary, because they are available freely and publicly online.
Without benefit of any mainstream media publicity, the pictures were so popular that they brought down Flickr. Thus, this is an event worthy of notice: an expectation of democratic transparency in a federal government combined with a mere decade plus-old publishing infrastructure jointly craft a community around the globe. In a sense, the limited access of the photographer on that election night make this a callback to the effect of TV in the 1950s, when monolithic media broadcast a culture that was shared and discussed in the conversations of millions. Yet the means of this publication, and the premise of sharing, are profoundly different.
I think there's one other interesting point to note. Up until this presidency, documentation such as the photoshoot routinely went en masse into archives, where it later established the basis for the Presidential Library. However, existing Presidential Libraries such as LBJ's or JFK's are faced with the challenge of reaching back into their collections to digitize materials and make them widely accessible, and they face significant policy, logistical, and funding challenges in doing so. The Obama administration will be publishing a great deal of material outbound -- a digitally native presidency -- at a magnitude far beyond any of its predecessors.
When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library -- built from today and onwards -- are transformative.
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Webcast Video: Why Publishers Should Care About SEO
Mac Slocum
November 6, 2008
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Below you'll find the full recording from last month's TOC Webcast, "Why Publishers Should Care About SEO," with SEO expert Jamie Low.
Read more…
Open Source, Community and Audiobooks: Q&A; with LibriVox Founder Hugh McGuire
Mac Slocum
November 5, 2008
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LibriVox is a volunteer effort with a big goal: record audiobook editions for every title in the public domain. In the following Q&A;, LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire discusses the project's beginnings, the organic development of the LibriVox community, and the distinctions (or lack thereof) between "professional" and "amateur" efforts.
How did LibriVox start?
LibriVox came about in August 2005, when I was looking for free, full-length audiobooks online for a long car trip. I went to gutenberg.org, but found mostly machine-read stuff there, which I don't like. Eventually I found someone who had recorded half of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was enough for my trip, but it occurred to me when I got through the first half, that i would have to wait months to hear the rest.
At the time, I'd been thinking and writing about a fair bit about the free software/open source movement, and how it might apply to non-software projects. Wikipedia was a big inspiration there, as was Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive, and his call for, "universal access to all human knowledge." I'd been enjoying podcasting, and in particular had been excited by AKMA's project to get a group of volunteers to record and distribute Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, also an inspiration. Project Gutenberg has been a long-time inspiration, too.
So all those things percolated together, and I thought, well why not try to start a big open source project to get volunteers around the world to record public domain texts for free? I put up a blog, sent out some emails, and had 13 people agree to read our first book in the first day. Three months later, we'd completed eight books; within a year later we had 257 books.
How many audiobooks do you offer?
Currently our collection includes 1,896 completed works, all free, all public domain. We produce anywhere from 60 to 115 works in a given month, which puts us among the most prolific publishers of audiobooks in the world. We've got books in 26 different languages, including Finnish, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and German. Our books include classics from Twain, Austen, Nietzsche, Zola, Plato, Shakespeare, Sun Tzu, as well as many more obscure books, such as The Romance of Rubber.
What file formats are LibriVox audiobooks available in?
128kbps MPe, 64 kbps MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. All our files are hosted on the Internet Archive.
How many volunteers have participated? How do these folks find LibriVox?
We have 12,362 users registered on our forum, 2,476 of whom have volunteered to read. Many of our volunteers started as listeners. The rest just find us one way or another on the Web.
Do volunteer readers typically read entire books? Or, do books feature multiple volunteers reading different chapters?
Roughly half of our projects are collaborative projects, and half solo projects. That ratio has remained stable over the past few years (and, frankly, was something of a surprise to me: I did not expect so many people to record entire works, since it is a challenging thing to do).
What do you think motivates people to participate?
A whole range of things, but probably the main thing is our volunteers enjoy recording texts. Many were read to as kids, and enjoy being read to, or reading to others; some of us have idealistic motivations, about free access to knowledge; others have ambitions to become professional voice actors (a number of our volunteers have gotten gigs as pro readers). There is probably a certain satisfaction of being the voice of a writer you love for thousands of people. For a long time, Pride and Prejudice was our most popular book, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, read by a library student from Missouri. I expect that's a pretty wonderful feeling, having so many people get so much pleasure from something you've done for your own enjoyment.
We also have a wonderful, helpful online community, so I think many people just enjoy hanging out on our forum. The main thing that motivates people, and keeps us going, is that it's fun.
Do you find that the same core group of volunteers continues to participate year after year, or do volunteers come and go?
There is a core of a few of us who have been around since the beginning, but we've had lots of turnover. It's the kind of thing that becomes an obsession for many people, and so there is a natural burnout process. But there always seems to be a new crop of people to jump in. We have about 25 moderators/admins, and probably adding and subtracting about three people every three months or so.
As with Wikipedia, a huge portion of our recordings are done by a small number of readers. The 20 most prolific readers have read 30 percent of the sections in our catalog (!).
Was there a moment when the LibriVox community seemed to take on a life of its own? If so, when did this happen and how did you know it?
That's easy: on Sept 12, 2005, when Boing Boing wrote about us. Traffic went from a couple of hundred a day, to 10,000 in one day. Nothing's been the same since!
What are the biggest challenges you've faced in building and maintaining the LibriVox community?
In the early days the main challenge was dealing with the growth in the community and production. With a few books I gathered all the files myself, and uploaded all the files to the Internet Archive as they came in. But by the time we got to 10 projects that was too much for me (and I'm no good at organizing that sort of thing); at 100 projects we needed to streamline our system. We currently have about 400 active projects (that's typical) and we are releasing an average of eight hours of audio a day. So the whole management of that process evolved organically, but took a fair bit of thinking about.
The other challenge more recently is a change in the sorts of people who are deeply involved in the project. In the early days, it was kind of like the wild west, and we attracted a motley crew of open sourcey types, with a broad range of skillsets (Web design, coding, etc). These days it seems like there are fewer of those kinds of people around (or, because the community is much bigger, it's harder to find them), so some things we'd like to get done (for instance making our Web site more accessible) have been on the back burner for a long time. So that's a challenge we have yet to figure out.
Have you marketed LibriVox, either through traditional advertising channels or via grassroots campaigns?
We've never done any marketing, except sending the odd email to Boing Boing and places like that. We get something like 40,000 visits a day on our site, all of it driven by general interest on the Web -- small blogs writing about us, podcasters talking about us, and once in a while a big media piece (New York Times, Reason, LA Times, BBC, NPR etc). But mainly it's just old-fashioned netroots marketing that seems to take care of itself.
Which titles and genres are most popular? Why did these titles/genres catch on?
The big ones are Bronte, Twain, Austen, L.M. Montgomery, Thomas Hardy, Dickens, and Conan Doyle. I think these are the classic stories of English literature, and so they are the writers most people seek out. But Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory" has been downloaded 38,000 times, so it's a pretty broad range of interest displayed by listeners. There are a number of sites that select out the best-of LibriVox, and that probably drives a fair bit of traffic, but it's all a bit of a mystery to me how certain things in our collection become popular.
In previous coverage, it's been noted that LibriVox's goal is to "record every book in the public domain." Do you have a sense of how many books that would involve and how long it would take to accomplish that goal?
I have no idea how many books that would be. In theory, the corpus of texts in the public domain should increase every year, as copyright terms expire. But the US Congress keeps extending copyright term, so we seem to be stuck with a fixed number of texts, mainly those published before 1923. Maybe someday that will change. I hope so.
But to the question: Project Gutenberg has 25,000 public domain books available to us, and the Open Content Alliance/Internet Archive just passed the 1 million mark of scanned public domain books. The there is Google's project. So, I'm not sure what the total number would be, but ideally we'd like to do all public domain books in all languages. We have our work cut out for us.
Our plan is to continue our efforts until we're finished. If we up our production a little bit, to say 1,000 books/year, it will take us 1,000 years to get through the Open Content Alliance's collection (which contains the entire Gutenberg collection). But if we can really get cracking and push to increase production by a factor of 10, we could cut that to 100 years.
Let's split the difference and say 550 years.
Is there any distinction between "amateur" and "professional" on LibriVox? How do you define quality in a volunteer effort? Does quality even matter in this case?
No, there is no distinction really. Everyone is encouraged to join us. We have a wide range of quality, from truly exceptional (in a traditional sense), to good, to not so great. Our goal, however, is to record the books, and to make a platform that allows anyone to contribute to the effort. We ask no questions, require no auditions, make no judgments about style or technique, and are happy for every single audio file someone chooses to contribute to the project. So in many important ways we are not like a traditional publisher: our focus is more on our volunteers, helping them to record in order to contribute to our mission:
"To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the Internet. "
And in some ways it's a wonderful side-benefit that the world gets free audiobooks as a result of our efforts.
I personally like the more idiosyncratic recordings in our collection -- the birds chirping in the background, and the rustling papers, the odd cough or stumble. These bring a different sense of humanity to the books than do professional readings. But that's my personal feeling, and I do love the more traditionally "good" recordings as well.
But my general feeling is that the Internet is very good at sifting through piles of complex information, so other sites should come along and rank and sort our content, by whatever criteria they find important. It's out there and available for all to use for free, however they would like to do so.
We have a policy against rating, and against un-asked-for criticism on our forum. It tends to discourage participation, and we need as many people to help out as we can convince.
However, you can search our catalog by reader; you can search for just solo works; and you are also encouraged to submit another version of recordings. A good number of our books have multiple versions.
So in short: we don't do the sorting ourselves (though we have started to compile a list of favourite recordings from among our community), but we encourage others to do it.
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A Call for Tiered Access to Google Book Search Terminals
Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008
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Peter Brantley says proposed public access (pdf) to Google Book Search library terminals is too restrictive, particularly in areas serving underprivileged populations:
This is not an economic matter; it is a social foundation. A library is a refuge; you can provide solace in that refuge, and a promise for a different and better kind of future. It is morally incumbent upon you to do so.
I propose that public terminals be accessible on a tiered basis. If a certain percentage of a public library's served population falls beneath the poverty level or a similar metric, the number of public access terminals is commensurately increased.
Related Stories:
- Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
- EFF's Concerns About the Google Book Search Settlement
- Siva Vaidhyanathan "My initial take on the Google-publishers settlement"
- David Rothman: "TeleRead vision vs. Google book settlement: Bring the e-books HOME"
- Google Book Search Agreement
- ALA 2008: Librarians and Patrons Want More Openness
What Cookbook Publishers Can Learn from the Music Industry
Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008
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The similarities between the music and book industries tend to diverge when you examine the smallest possible component of each format: unlike songs, book chapters aren't usually self contained.
But recipes are a different matter. A recent story in the New York Times looks at the upcoming Web site, Cookstr, which aims to catalog recipes from top chefs:
Cookstr, which will be supported by advertising revenues, will aggregate recipes from published cookbooks. All of the authors will have their own pages, with biographies, links to recipes and books, and in the case of restaurant chefs, links to their locations on Google maps.
Cookstr isn't blazing new trails here: All Recipes, Epicurious, Big Oven, FoodNetwork.com and other Web outlets have built their sites around aggregation of individual recipes. But there's still a silo-based mentality in play because recipes are only free to roam within the boundaries of each site. This is equivalent to a record company only making songs available through its own proprietary service. As we've seen with the success of iTunes, YouTube and most recently through Hulu, users flock to platforms that replace traditional boundaries with massive catalogues of material. Shoehorning content and users into a specific channel rarely works on the Web (iTunes is the exception), so the record labels eventually moved toward wide distribution across multiple platforms.
There are key differences between songs and recipes -- paid downloads vs. free text content most notable among them -- but a variation on the song model might work for recipes: sell advertising against publisher-owned recipe pages; allow standalone recipes to disperse with attached branding and pull-back opportunities; and use increased attention from wider distribution to deliver related products with built-in scarcity, such as traditional cookbooks, custom books, curated collections, cooking classes and events.
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Vanishing Paper in Higher Education
Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008
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Christopher Conway has a thoughtful essay at Inside Higher Ed on the seemingly inevitable trend towards digital text consumption:
It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? Say you are teaching David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and you had a choice between an excellent paper-and-binding edition by a major academic press, with useful footnotes and front matter, and an electronic edition that students could download to their handy e-book readers, along with selected secondary articles you have selected for them to read? What if their e-book readers had a stylus and/or a network that enabled the class to annotate those assigned texts, and share them over the class network? I don't think anyone's nostalgia for paper-and-binding can replace the pedagogical value of my not-so-fanciful or far-fetched e-book scenario."
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