This month I’ve got just a few quick items to share. First, I’ll ]]> Each month I try and sort out some of the more accessible and interesting entries on the SEPW to share with readers interested in issues such as library digitization, open access, and electronic journals. You can check out my previous entries here.

This month I’ve got just a few quick items to share. First, I’ll draw attention to “Creating the Mark Twain Project Online” by Lisa Schiff. The MTPO is a neat little project I had never before heard of. Its aim is to make free to the public a wealth of the great author’s personal documents and correspondence by “providing access to more than 2,300 complete texts, over 28,000 records of other known items, and almost 100 facsimile images.”

The case study linked to above isn’t about Mark Twain itself, though it will provide an interesting bit of reading for those interested in digital archiving and techie site creation stuff. Readers interested in getting into the Twain papers made available by this ambitious project should check out the Mark Twain Project directly.

“E-Books or Print Books, ‘Big Deals’ or Local Selections: What Gets More Use?” by Robert Slater provides a nice comparison of the changing ways in which people access books. Researchers at Oakland University tracked several hundred books and compared the usage of ebooks versus that of their deadtree counterparts.

Right off the bat, it is interesting to note that

Similar comparisons of print and electronic book usage have shown that overall electronic book usage is comparable to print book circulations. However, some specific subject areas do tend to be used more in one format than the other. Over time, there has been a trend towards e-books receiving more use than their print counterparts.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that humanities subjects such as linguistics and history tend to get more paper usage while the math and science see higher ebook numbers. The researchers also determined that locally selected ebook collections (by, say, librarians or a department) see much more popularity than those that were offered through “consortially selected collections.” The best news of all, however, is that scholarly ebook usage remains on the rise, and is perhaps accelerating.

Finally, interested in seeing just how important and far-reaching systems such as Google Book Search have become? Check out this Google Book Search Bibliography.

And here are a few quick links that aren’t free to access but may be of interest to some readers:

• “Unless Otherwise Indicated: A Survey of Copyright Statements on Digital Library Collections” by Melanie Schlosser
• “Describing Digital Objects: A Tale of Compromise” by Jessica Branco Colati, Robin Dean, & Keith Maull
• “The National E-Books Observatory Project: Examining Student Behaviors and Usage” by Lorraine Estelle & Hazel Woodward

Copyright law is dastardly business, with more nickel-and-diming and squabbling over percentages than most people probably gather. The music and film industries have gone batshit with copyright law since the rise of the internet, as evidenced by all the tricky take down notices and bogus fair use violation actions taken against ]]>

Copyright law is dastardly business, with more nickel-and-diming and squabbling over percentages than most people probably gather. The music and film industries have gone batshit with copyright law since the rise of the internet, as evidenced by all the tricky take down notices and bogus fair use violation actions taken against YouTubers and bloggers every day.

Imagine if everyone who contributed to the ingredients of a can of soup had a different stake in the overall profit of the can, then on top of that, the percentages paid out to the pea farmers and noodle makers changed depending on what side of the ocean the soup was purchased on. Same farmer; same soup. Once the soup gets old, and the farmers are dead no one can really claim the money anymore (unless they stick a new label on it and add a dash of salt). Books, more so than canned goods, have a tremendous shelf life.

I do not have Disney's permission to post this image.

Like with the music industry, the publishing industry is going crazy on trying to tighten up their copyright protections as they march timidly and reluctantly into a digital model. Also like the music industry, their main purpose of copyright is to retain as much money as possible for themselves at the expense (literally, and understandably) of their customers. The knee jerk reaction to this statement is “but the artists deserve to be paid for their work.” And indeed they do.

Authors make money from royalties on sales, say 5-10% per book for the average author. They get a (usually pretty meager unless your Stephen King) advance, and don’t collect on the royalties until their advance is covered. Once the book makes the transition from hardcover run to paperback, the author’s earnings drop significantly. (The Dear Author blog has a nice breakdown of how this works in a digital setting.) It’s an undertandable reaction to think that the rise of ebooks might cut into print runs and hurt authors, especially when companies like Amazon take a ridiculously large cut of the pie. But as we’ve mentioned so often on this site (and pulled straight from like minded thinkers) free ebooks and even internet piracy can help authors, perhaps more than it can hurt them. Many people, myself included, buy the stuff they want, and download a whole lot of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise pay for. I’ve discovered a lot of good artists, authors, musicians, and movies this way, and many of them have made money from me since. Expanded exposure can be invaluable, especially when compared to a $.32 (yes, cent) cut of a paperback novel.

This is why I find ebook DRM so silly. I want to own my books, I want to draw in their margins (or save my note files to them, whatever), to share them with my friends. Buying a DRMed book is like buying a book that self destructs if you take it off of your bookshelf and lend it to a friend. Read it and then it more or less has to sit out of sight. Books are meant to be shared. And while I’m on the subject, if authors are really that concerned about ebooks killing their royalties, why didn’t the Authors’ Guild sic their attack dogs on all those damn libraries that dare share books with the public for free?

This photograph of this girl's cool carp tattoo is licensed under Creative Commons.

Books are more important than just means of profits for authors and publishers. They are important to readers, they mean something to us. As does all art. This is why fair use is important for books as well as other media. Art remains an evolving concept, where each generation builds off (or builds against) what came before. There is, of course, a fine line between homage and plagiarism, and that’s were Creative Commons is stepping in and trying to evolve our notions of copyright and sharing.

A Creative Commons license allows an author or artist to decide the parameters of how his or her work is shared. Will you allow your song to be remixed, your book to be copied for free in writing classes, will you modify your license to require a percentage of the profits from anything that borrows from your work? It is flexible, and it makes sense, and it leaves the power in the hands of those who created the work, rather than those with the most lawyers on retainer.

Their mission is simple and straightforward:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

[emphasis theirs]

In a mere 8 years they’ve already licensed over 120 million works, under the four main headings of Attribution, Share-alike, Noncommercial, and No Derivative Works. The license names are rather self explanatory, but you can read more here. This is building the internet into a broadening public domain, where art as business and art as a social right can coexist peacefully and without passwords. It’s not just for small fries either, with heavy hitters like Nine Inch Nails and writers such as Cory Doctorow seeing much success with these licenses. And it’s best for readers and users, who have un- or lightly fettered access to a wide variety of culture and art on the internet (not unlike visiting a library rather than a Borders).

This was the part where I was going to break down the basic differences between Creative Commons and copyright, but I then I came across this excellent example, so in the interest of sharing work, I’m going to point you directly their show at the end of this paragraph. Unfortunately, I can’t embed it (it’s a flickr slideshow-book-thing), but I’m going to have the link open in this window in order for the show to get full attention.

Watch the slideshow here: A Tale of Two Fish by Yiibu.

The second half of our interview swap (at least part 1 of the second half–we have a lot to say) with online magazine Fringe is now available on the  Fringe blog. Thanks a lot to Lizzie Stark and the others at Fringe for doing the interviews and asking some great questions.  Check out their questions and our responses ]]>  

The second half of our interview swap (at least part 1 of the second half–we have a lot to say) with online magazine Fringe is now available on the  Fringe blog. Thanks a lot to Lizzie Stark and the others at Fringe for doing the interviews and asking some great questions.  Check out their questions and our responses here.

image credit: howstuffworks.com

I’ve been noticing lately that a lot of people seem to off handedly toss both ebooks and self-published (e)books into the not “real” book category, or at least the not as “real” as those books published by an established publisher category. This is of course completely ridiculous. We do enough harping ]]>

image credit: howstuffworks.com

I’ve been noticing lately that a lot of people seem to off handedly toss both ebooks and self-published (e)books into the not “real” book category, or at least the not as “real” as those books published by an established publisher category. This is of course completely ridiculous. We do enough harping about ebooks on this site, but self-publishing doesn’t get much mention, so I thought I’d put together some quick ideas about self-publishing, as well as take a look on what the migration to digital text means for self-publishers. Most importantly, self-published books are sadly a largely unnoticed market, and there is a lot of great reading to be found by readers willing to take the plunge, so I’ve included some links to get you searching for your next, independently published read.

For starter, yes there are plenty of bad self-published books available. And there’s no denying that there’s a lot of get-rich-quick self-publishing stuff out there, but anyone who’s not an idiot can clearly see they’re mostly a bunch of crappy scams. And there’s also no denying that because a lot of self-published books are just this crappy, it is clearly for good reason that publishers ignore them. Yet some authors who self-publish are quite good, and just weren’t in the right place at the right time.

Ultimately, I don’t think who publishes a book really matters. If a book is good, people will read it. If it isn’t, they won’t. Churn out a book (even a 40 page tractor manual) in three days and I will guarantee you that it sucks. Sure, the publishers have agents and readers who carefully select authors from a very large and deep pool. They don’t create good authors (though they do try very hard to appear like they do); they just have the money and clout to market those they decide to publish. But how much marketing is that exactly?:

One wonders what a publisher, even a major New York publisher, can do for you if they aren’t planning on putting some major marketing push behind your book. And M.J. Rose claims that only 15% of all published books get more than $2,000 in marketing push. (from Indie Publishing Revolution)

Of course that’s no sum to sneeze at, and printing and distribution add to that cost tremendously–unless of course an author goes ebook only. It’s not an untouchable number for a dedicated author either. But just how often is it successful?

According to Beneath the Cover, 78% of all books are published by small run/independent means. However, 45% of all book sales belong to the 5 largest publishers in NY and 93% of all sales to the 20 largest firms. That translates to a whole lot of forks being jammed in the tiny piece of remaining pie. Especially considering how very unlikely each book is to be lucrative. Claims the Self Publishing blog on fonerbooks.com:

…the average self publishing author who reports income as a publishing business is earning less than $10,000/year in net profit.

As a reader, I see this as an encouraging statistic. To plunge headlong into a risky financial situation out of desire to have your work published means one of two things to me: the author is an idiot and deserves to lose money, or more optimistically, there is enough passion and drive in the writer that something redeeming is likely to be found in the book somewhere. I’d rather read a flawed work by a driven author than a cookie-cutter airport novel any day. Just because the big houses can afford to print and advertise enough Jody Picoult and celebrity biographies to fill so much of the market doesn’t mean that the remaining 7% is crap. Publishing is not a meritocracy.

But reading can be. And ebooks will cobble the path. Look at people getting rich off YouTube advertising. eBook publishers shouldn’t emulate this advertising model, but it goes to show how bloggers and internet memes are quickly evening the playing field between amateur artists and media conglomerates. Well-written books that aren’t picked up by larger houses clearly have a better shot on the internet than they do in a 500 print run. POD options such as the Espresso Book Machine also offer a lot of upside to the self-publisher as well.

For the reader this means that right now there are thousands of quality books available for free or low cost that you could be reading. And soon there will be many more. Not all will be good, but many will. And as readers continue to convert to digital reading, we’ll see better means of sorting through everything out there. So before you spend $7.99 on a novel you’ll leave on a train seat when you’re finished, try out a self-published novel. Here’re some links to get you started:

sources for self-published & small run books:

www.lulu.com

www.ebooks.com

www.authorhouse.com

www.feedbooks.com

www.double-dragon-ebooks.com

for more information about self-publishing:

http://www.selfpublishingresources.com/Booknews.htm

http://www.fonerbooks.com/2008/07/statistics-on-self-employed-authors-and.html

http://www.beneaththecover.com/2007/11/22/466/

http://www.indie-publishing-revolution.com/self-publishing-statistics.html

I get a little annoyed when people confuse the physical book (just a bunch of pressed wood pulp, ink, and glue) with the book itself (a collection of letters, arranged into words, arranged into sentences, in a one-of-a-kind sequence). Sure, it’s okay to have your preference in reading medium, but War and Peace is ]]>

I get a little annoyed when people confuse the physical book (just a bunch of pressed wood pulp, ink, and glue) with the book itself (a collection of letters, arranged into words, arranged into sentences, in a one-of-a-kind sequence). Sure, it’s okay to have your preference in reading medium, but War and Peace is War and Peace even if you pee it into the snow or yodel it.

So when I read things like this post from techradar (Why Publishers Would Be Mad to Support eBooks), it grinds my gears a bit. Beyond the fact that the author has clearly done little research and likely hasn’t taken the time to actually try an ereader before condemning them (I was an opponent won over quickly and those who naysay without trying one really sounds akin to someone in the 80s calling email a gimmick), he doesn’t seem to read books all that much, and certainly doesn’t love them.

Right now, the publishing industry faces a similar change [to that encountered by the music industry]. If it goes digital, it’s moving into a world where there are bigger, more powerful and more experienced players, and those players will eat the publishers’ lunch; if the book trade thinks supermarket discounting is making its life difficult, it ain’t seen nothing yet.

By sticking to dead trees, however, the book publishers can keep on doing what they’re doing. Sure, some people will be happy with a leaked download of Harry Potter, or a badly scanned how-to manual. But they’ll be the minority.

Recorded music is a relatively new invention, but books have been around for nearly two thousand years and mass-produced books for several hundred. If publishers don’t rush into digital, they could be around for hundreds more.

Besides the basic economic principal that competition drives innovation, the recommendation that the book publishers can safely keep doing what they’re doing is ridiculous. They are currently pushing extra production of the “safe” books at the expense of taking new risks, which is buoying their bottoms lines in the short term, but they know it won’t save them. At some point, even Nora Roberts fans will get sick of Nora Roberts. Also, a news flash: the “bigger, more powerful and more experienced” players are already involved, and the absolute worse way to handle things would be to do as the music industry did (almost fatally) and stubbornly ignore the inevitable change in market trends.           

This guy changed the literate world six centuries ago; it's high time to give change another go.

Books get me really excited. Nowadays, ebooks get me worked up too. I love the idea of them, and I can’t wait for them to hit their stride and really improve upon the book as it has been for the last 570 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, I love deadtree books and will continue to buy them until the day I die. Currently 99% of my reading is done in deadtree books. Despite that, I recognize that electronic books offer a real chance for books to evolve into something more. This change could be as significant as the transition from carving stone to stretching parchment, from monastery transcriptions to the Gutenberg press. Imagine being able to search your books easily, link your notes between books, have instant access to similar books (actually similar, not Google search of a title similar), interact with your book in various ways, all while retaining the solitary, distraction-free activity that is reading a book.

This is all coming, and likely soon. The pieces are in place, it’s just that ebooks are not quite superior to paper ones yet. All we need now is for someone to put the effort into making an ebook with the care and effort that goes into publishing a deadtree book. Because, honestly, as handy as ebooks are, in their current form they are little more than text dumps. Rather than stubbornly trying to force a failing business model and succumb to a buyout from a hardware pusher like Amazon, publishers need to step up and innovate; they need to create a product that the buyers will want and that the hardware makers will need to support. They shouldn’t cower and stay the sinking course in an attempt take what they can get before slipping into obscurity, as this Iago seems to suggest. The sooner they realize the obvious financial benefits of innovation, the sooner the readers like you and I can breathe easy again.

As promised, we’ve done an interview swap with online magazine Fringe. Editor-in-Chief Lizzie Stark was kind enough to answer our questions about digital publishing and some of the challenges of publishing an online magazine as well as their ideas on keeping up with a constantly changing literary and online landscape. You can read the other ]]>

As promised, we’ve done an interview swap with online magazine Fringe. Editor-in-Chief Lizzie Stark was kind enough to answer our questions about digital publishing and some of the challenges of publishing an online magazine as well as their ideas on keeping up with a constantly changing literary and online landscape. You can read the other half of the swap, where we answer questions about ereaders, ebooks, and our plans for a the future on the Fringe blog.

C4: Why did you choose to create an entirely online magazine? Was it primarily a financial decision? Did it have anything to do with Fringe’s goal to publish progressive/non-mainstream writing? What are the advantages you see with an entirely online magazine?

LS: We decided that being online-only would waste fewer resources, which is a way to live our political belief in environmentalism as a magazine.  Being entirely online also means that (in theory, at least) we can put out issues more frequently than the usual literary magazine. The geographic advantage is that our editors can live in different states, which means we can keep staff for longer periods of time.  We’ve also been able to publish some cool multimedia things, like flash poetry and audio collage — it’d be very hard to do that in print.

Most importantly, we’re able to reach way more readers online than we’d ever be able to reach in print.  In the last year, our smallest number of monthly unique users was 6,500, and our largest number was 35,000, with 14,000 being our average monthly number.  It’d be incredibly costly to reach that many people on a print level.

C4: Are there any areas where you feel a print mag would better serve your goals/your readership?

LS: No.

C4: Clearly, there’s still a stigma among writers about publishing online vs. publishing in print. How do you feel about the difference between online and on paper credits? Have you noticed a change in the online/print prejudices of your contributors in the years since you started Fringe?

LS: My basic attitude is that published is published.  It may feel more palpable when you can hold a print object in your hands, but if you want people to read your work in the 21st century, you have to be online in some capacity — blog, Twitter, personal website or through online publication.

And yes, I’ve definitely noticed a change in the prejudices of our contributors since we’ve started Fringe.  I think for an online literary venture, the first years are hard because in addition to trying to establish the fact that you’ve got literary taste and editing chops, you also have to prove that you’re not going to let your site go bust next month. Some contributors worry that if an online journal goes bust, their work will evaporate.  For the most part, I think this is an unfounded fear.  A reputable journal can find ways to archive itself through Biblio, and barring that there’s always the WaybackMachine.

Interestingly, we’ve found that known poets are more likely to send out their work via email than fiction writers.  Not sure why that is, but there you have it.

C4: Have you considered a downloadable format for collected volumes?

LS: Yes. Right now we offer printable pdfs for all the work on our site, but we have thought about releasing a dead-tree anthology when we turn five, for example, and we’d definitely want to offer that in an ereader format. In terms of our new website, however, producing a downloadable format for each piece on the site is going to be prohibitively expensive in terms of money and coding and loading time. Instead we plan to offer work in printer-friendly formats.

C4: Do you find certain types of writing (fiction, poetry, blog posts) are more or less popular with online readership?

LS: It varies from month to month, story to story, and on how much of an online network the readers we publish already have; writer with blogs, for example, tend to generate more traffic to their pieces.  We don’t host our blog posts on our site at the moment, so comparing stats from blog posts to literature wouldn’t be a fair comparison.

In general, though, online readers are lazy. Pieces that are shorter and break up long blocks of text are more readable.

C4: A lot of writers and readers we’ve talked to have a negative knee-jerk reaction whenever they talk about ereaders. What do you think about the emergence of digital publishing and its future effect on and relationship with print publishing?

LS: That’s a pretty big question. In general, I think that e-readers will become more popular but that books will never die. There’s something magical about the way books feel and smell. I love reading library books because the history of the physical book — the idea that people before me have read it — gives me arcane enjoyment.

However, I think digital readers are going to open up a whole new realm of experimental literature. Ishmael Reed included photos in his experimental novel Mumbo Jumbo. Perhaps in the future experimental digital novels will include hypertext, video and audio, but keep the page-by-page readability of a novel. I think that’d be super fly.

C4: Have ever tried reading on a dedicated ereader device? Would you be willing to?

LS: I have not, because I’m a journalist and apparently, my industry is in decline and not very lucrative. But I’d jump at the chance to try out an ereader.

C4: Fringe incorporated as a non-profit; why did you choose to go the non-profit route over other incorporations which might have been cheaper and less of a hassle?

LS: We wanted to be able to apply for grants, we wanted to make donating to us tax-deductible, and we wanted to hold true to our theme song, which includes the line, “This magazine is owned and Published Co-operatively by Its Editors. It has no Dividends to Pay, and nobody is trying to make Money out of it.”

We also knew that some people would be wary about submitting to an online journal and we thought this was a good investment in the future, a way of saying “we’re going to be around a while and you can trust us with your work.”

C4: Fringe is in the process of raising funds for a website remodel. What are you changing and what do you want to do with the new site?

LS: The new website is going to change a lot of things — we’re basically re-envisioning the magazine to take advantage of the technology that’s already out there. We’ll publish one piece weekly instead of in big issues every four months. We’re also going to make the site easier to navigate and more visually compelling.

As we clean up the back end of the site and reduce loading time, I’m hoping we’ll have more time to pursue techie-oriented writing projects, like the digital Round Robin story we’ve just launched from our blog.

C4: A lot of sites are changing from Flash-heavy destinations to more content oriented blogroll-type approaches to accommodate the changing habits of internet users and increased traffic via mobile devices. The Kindle can access blogs (for an unfortunate fee) and many other ereaders can load blog and newspaper content via Calibre, not too mention a good many internet users read their content though a centralized RSS/Atom feed source, such as Google Reader, or a mobile device like the iPhone. How does the growing flexibility and user-customization of the internet alter your ideas about site design? Will your new site be designed around this (relatively) new change in internet standards?

LS: Well, we’re not going to be accommodating the Kindle anytime soon.  Would we like to?  Sure.  But right now it’s a matter of the financial and temporal resources we have to devote to the redesign, and at the moment I don’t think that the Kindle audience is large enough to pay off in terms of the resources we’d need to devote to it.

However, we will be making Fringe web 2.0 with this new redesign, and we’re using lessons we’ve learned from watching highly-trafficked media sites.  We’ll be adding social networking widgets, an email function, “Most recent” and “Also in this genre” pages to increase traffic. We’re toying with the idea of letting readers vote for pieces and then generating lists based on that.  We might add comments to our site via a link to the blog, combining reader feedback with an author’s need to let her work stand alone.

In addition to our blog RSS we’ll have an RSS for the whole site and for each genre.   Finally, we’re going to introduce decks for many of our pieces — teasers/one sentence excerpts for everything but poetry that will entice readers to click in, and that would provide a taste of the goodies inside to mobile users as well as people coming to the site.

C4: What are you future plans for Fringe content-wise? Will this change at all when your site’s redesign is complete?

LS: Our plans are much the same as they’ve always been: to publish the best work we can find and to do it in a way that’s sustainable for the staff over the long term.

This isn’t a business — all of the editors have day jobs and as we get older, our time is at more and more of a premium. We’ll keep publishing Fringe, but we’re going to do it in a way that’s smarter, faster, and more readable.

Lately I’ve been poking around on a great directory called the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (located here), which compiles articles about ebooks published in scholarly journals. In general, scholarly journals don’t get very much love from non-scholars. The articles can be pretty dry, and the gists sometimes tough to parse without a ]]>

Lately I’ve been poking around on a great directory called the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (located here), which compiles articles about ebooks published in scholarly journals. In general, scholarly journals don’t get very much love from non-scholars. The articles can be pretty dry, and the gists sometimes tough to parse without a filter. However there’s always a lot of interesting reading provided from some very smart people in them, and they’re usually the first places to learn of new trends, studies, etc., before they are disseminated through newsprint and the internet. 

I’ve filtered out some of the most intriguing and provided brief abstracts for them below, and I’ve only included articles that can be accessed for free in this post.

Though some articles linked to by the SEPW are gold Open Access (OA), many aren’t. Most of the people who read these sort of things have subscriptions through scholarly sources, but it’s still frustrating there isn’t a better (read: affordable) way for laypersons to access them. Some journals offer unhindered access to schools and laypersons alike through gold OA, but since scholarly journals aren’t exactly lucrative, most have to remain green OA (which scholar decided to use two “g” words to qualify OA I don’t know) to keep afloat. Makes me wish for the good old days of college library access so I could read any I wished. I’m still waiting for a truly great electronic library to spring up at some point and make this point moot.

Speaking of libraries, this first entry describes how the many different functions of libraries can be enhanced through expanded mobile access. Not directly about ebooks, though they obviously play an important role as libraries become higher tech, the author presents some nice points about how libraries can efficient evolve to meet the changing needs of library users.

People use a growing array of services to manage their digital lives. Although some are local to their devices, a growing number are on the network. Think, in different contexts, of Zotero, Delicious or Connotea; Flickr, YouTube or Slideshare; Google Docs, Scribd or Zoho. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, as well as others, will continue to aim to provide a framework within which people manage their resources, communicate, and build their online identity. Two thoughts come to mind. One I have already mentioned: some of these resources may be important to the institution, which may want to provide backup services to ensure their continuity. The other is increasingly interesting: how do library resources play in these environments? Can I link to individual catalog records, journal articles or e–books? Can I mix library resources with those in my personal collections? Are library resources RSS–ified?

Read the whole article (only a few pages) here: Always on: Libraries in a world of permanent connectivity by Lorcan Dempsey.

Next, an interesting piece calling for the digitizing of all documentation by expanding programs such as Google Book Search to encompass film negatives, manuscripts, physical art, etc. The article provides a nice breakdown of how the current digitizing efforts work, and some suggestions for how it can help preserve information in danger of being lost. I found the techniques for cleaning up images and digitization most interesting. It’s really great to see effort like this being made to prevent a modern disaster occurring á la the Library of Alexandria.

Read it all here: Toward Digitizing All Forms of Documentation by George V. Landon.

Finally, here’s more of an opinion piece that bounces around a bit, but mostly focuses on some interesting comments about online journals. Most of this is done by pulling various quotations together like that which set this up:

The message here is that, for some nations at least, online journals may be the only realistic way to publish peer-reviewed articles. For other nations and fields, print may already be a less-satisfactory alternative.

You can find the many viewpoints complied in the bottom half of the article. In the first half, the author brings up nice interesting points about open access to information online, something I wish more people would find concern with:

Gratuitous statements by OA advocates to undermine topical-repository mandates and suggest that institutional repositories don’t cost anything to establish and operate don’t get us there—but help assure that we never will get there. There doesn’t seem much question that IRs are in trouble; that doesn’t bode well for green OA as the only or even the primary answer. And nonsense like the reintroduced Conyers bill threatens to undermine what progress has been made on what should be the low-hanging fruit for repositories: research funded by the Federal government, which—if it was carried out in Federal labs—would automatically be in the public domain.

The whole page: Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

And, if you’re into stats, here’s a nice state-of-the-industry piece about OA ejournals: LIS Open Acess E-Journal: Where Are You? By Izabella Taler.

Meeting with a group of philosophy professors Thursday afternoon, the ]]> According to a Missouri local newspaper, representatives from McGraw-Hill met with faculty from Northwest Missouri State University facutly this week to discuss how things are going with the pilot ebook program and no doubt investigate how they can great more desirable digital textbooks. One suggestion:

Meeting with a group of philosophy professors Thursday afternoon, the publishing representatives learned that students and teachers would prefer to have online access to the books they use, as well as the downloaded versions, on the university laptops.

Let’s hope this means a next iteration of digital textbooks (and perhaps ebooks of the near future) that takes user needs interaction and connectivity seriously. In a previous post, Nico pointed out the school’s plans for using digital texts and their unique position due to their textbook rental policy (a great idea for sparing students the outrages prices of collegiate text books, especially used ones: schools should do better than to fleece their students like they do). You can read the whole article about the publishing reps’ visit here. 

It’s a little disheartening that they didn’t seem to find any great shakes with the ereader devices, but it’s easy to understand how the limited functionality of current-gen ereaders doesn’t capture the attention of the multitasking young college student majority.  The connectivity and sharing potential of the Vital Source program and note-sharing capabilities mentioned are many, however, and hopefully other publishers like McGraw-Hill are thinking seriously about improving their digital products for “voracious” customers, and building a viable epublishing model, rather than merely dumping text into digital formats for quick profits as too-often seems to be the current trend.

Via stjoenews.net