Readability of Scanned Books in Digital Libraries

Displaying scanned book pages in a web browser is difficult, due to an array of characteristics of the common user's configuration that compound to yield text that is degraded and illegibly small. For books which contain only text, this can often be solved by using OCR or manual transcription to extract and present the text alone, or by magnifying the page and presenting it in a scrolling panel. Books with rich illustrations, especially children's picture books, present a greater challenge because their enjoyment is dependent on reading the text in the context of the full page with its illustrations. We have created two novel prototypes for solving this problem by magnifying just the text, without magnifying the entire page. We present the results of a user study of these techniques. Users found our prototypes to be more effective than the dominant interface type for reading this kind of material and, in some cases, even preferable to the physical book itself.

Ingram Gets Learned

The company said ALPSP members are invited “to contribute titles to an ALPSP-branded range of subject-based eBook collections which will be offered to libraries and other institutions” through its MyiLibrary content distribution partners including Swets. ALPSP members have access to all of Ingram Digital’s digital content solutions, like CoreSource for digital asset management, and member publishers can use Lightning Source Inc. to produce print-on-demand titles as well as enable digital content distribution to all markets and channels.

Because They're French!

The project, to be unveiled at the [Paris Book] fair, will offer more than 60,000 digitised works from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and 2,000 from about 50 publishers, some of whom received subsidies for the purpose. The BNF plans to add another 40,000 books imminently, with those copyrighted books supplied by publishers expected to quickly exceed 10,000.

Google Book Search Releases API

Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.

Damn the iPod, damnit!

GAO goes digital

NISO releases RFID best practices for libraries

The NISO recommendations for best practices aim to promote procedures that do the following:

• Allow an RFID tag to be installed at the earliest point and used throughout the lifecycle of the book, from publisher/printer to distributor, jobber, library (shelving, circulating, sorting, reshelving, inventory, and theft deterrence), and interlibrary loan, and continuing on to secondary markets such as secondhand books, returned books, and discarded/recycled books.
• Allow for true interoperability among libraries, where a tag in one library can be used seamlessly by another, even if the libraries have different suppliers for tags, hardware, and software.
• Protect the personal privacy of individuals while supporting the functions that allow users to reap the benefits of this technology.
• Permit the extension of these standards and procedures for global interoperability.
• Remain relevant and functional with evolving technologies.

Peter Brantley on Google

OCLC extends partnership with Blackstone Audio

"Blackstone Audio has enjoyed a successful partnership with NetLibrary as a provider of eAudiobooks for purchase," said Steve King, director of digital sales for Blackstone Audio. "We anticipate continued success with NetLibrary in offering a subscription option to libraries that would prefer the convenience of this model."

David Cully at B&T

Cully's primary responsibilities include managing all merchandising and purchasing functions, managing BTMS, and managing Baker & Taylor's new Specialty Markets Group.

BISG/BIC White Paper on identifiers

The Identification of Digital Book Content is intended to stimulate debate in the book industry about how digital book content should be identified and to encourage further work on the development and implementation of identification standards and best practices for such content.

Joe Reynolds promoted at Ingram Library Services

"Libraries everywhere will be the first important adopters of digital content...As librarians make the print-to-digital transition, we know we can be a valuable member of the team."

Credo Reference Expands Customer Base

Downloadable audio in libraries

Pajama Party

Books are great, but digital storage is the wave of the future. Yet we cannot see the wave in its entirety. We don’t know where most of that avalanche of knolwedge is and how to easily find it. Most information on the Web is locked up in databases and cannot be “spidered,” a term used to describe the software indexing of Internet material. For example, web pages generated from databases only “exist” when a query is run, like online telephone directories which do not have a separate page for every person in the directory and only create a page in response to a request. Database generated pages have a transient existence and cannot easily be indexed. Password protected websites like locked apartments or private telephone numbers defy our attempts to see within them. Much information lives on the Deep Web. It is there but we cannot see it without taking special steps.

The immense size of the unindexed Internet has motivated consultants and online resources to offer help at finding information in the Deep Web the way traditional librarians guided scholars through the stacks in days gone by.

Cindy Cunningham now at OCLC

Credo Reference adds Greenwood titles

• Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia
  Dictionary of Existentialism
  
• Dictionary of Italian Literature
  
• Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy
  
• Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
  
• Handbook of Environmental Society
  
• Handbook of United States Economic and Financial Indicators
  

Frankfurt Vibe

Folks, the pre-Frankfurt drumbeat is SOOO digital. Monsters and Critics has a big article on how the book industry is afraid of 0s and 1s. Probably the most fabulous paragraph:

Some European libraries have portrayed the bid to digitize 500 years of books and newspapers as an imperialist plot, because the big players such as Google are based in the United States.

Yes! It IS an imperialist plot! (Gawd, wouldn't that be more intriguing than what it actually is, which is a FREAKIN' MESS.)

But the best news is at the bottom of the article:

The New York Times has reported that Amazon is to launch in October an e-book reader brand-named the Kindle and priced above 400 dollars. The most likely venue: the Frankfurt Book Fair.

I keep forgetting about that October launch. 

Woo-hoo!!!

PW reports that according to a Frankfurt Book Fair survey, digitization (NOT DIGITALIZATION, jeez, people) is the biggest challenge facing publishing right now:

More than half of the 1,324 respondents called digitalization [sic] the biggest challenge facing the industry, while competition from other media was picked as the major threat to the health of book publishing. The three other major industry threats were overpublishing, piracy and illiteracy.

Following the issues represented by digitalization [sic], the survey found the other major industry challenges to be increased globalization, more user-generated content and the battle over territorial rights.

News Flash: Publishers Cautious About Digitization

Earthtimes.org posts a summary about publishers' tentative approach to mass digitization, listing the various digitization services (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) and publishers' reactions to each of their programs. It's actually a pretty clear delineation of publisher response, although it's framed in a way that suggests publishers are being dragged kicking and screaming into the world of ebooks:

Fearing that it will lose out financially, much of the book industry is resisting internet pioneers' vision of putting the world's entire store of published information online. Some European libraries have portrayed the bid to digitize 500 years of books and newspapers as an imperialist plot, because the big players such as Google are based in the United States.

Despite the histrionics, there's some good info here.

New Sony Reader Review

Wired reviews the new Sony PR-505 positively this morning:

 The new model will also work as a USB mass storage device (read: big thumb drive) and, at last, work natively with PDF, plain text and RTF files, which means you're not limited to Sony's CONNECT store for DRM crippled content.

LibraryThing Launches Google Book Search Search

Life just gets more meta. In the words of LibraryThing, they've just launched a search program that runs through Google Book Search - they call it a "bookmarklet":

Last week Google introduced an interesting "My Library" feature, allowing people with Google accounts to list some of their books. A few tech bloggers saw an attack on LibraryThing.

LibraryThing members were quick to dismiss it. It wasn't so much the lack of any social features, or of cataloging features as basic as sorting your books. It wasn't even the privacy issues, although these gave many pause. It was the coverage.

Google just doesn't have the sort of books that regular people have. Most of their books come from a handful of academic libraries, and academic libraries don't have the same editions regular people have. Then there are the books publishers have explicitly removed from Google Book Search. Success rates of below 50% were common. Of these a high percentage are only "limited preview" or "no preview."

The Google-kills-LibraryThing meme has another dimension. We WANT people to use Google Book Search. It's a great tool. Being able to search your own books is useful, and LibraryThing members should be able to do it. Call us naive, but we aren't going to be able to "pretend Google isn't there." And we aren't convinced that Google is going to create the sort of robust cataloging and social networking features that LibraryThing has.

Our bookmarklet works by transcending ISBNs, using what LibraryThing knows about titles, authors and dates to fetch other editions of a work. In limited tests I've found it picks up around 90% of LibraryThing titles.

MyiLibrary Adds Publishers

MyiLibrary has added 12 new publishers to its program, bringing the total number of publishers working with MyiLibrary to 350. The new publishers are:

• Bit 10
• Council of Europe
• Eleven International Publishing
• G7 Books
• How to Books
• Insomniac Press
• M&M Scrivener
• Opera Journeys Publishing
• Policy Press
  
• Scion Publishing
• Tottel Publishing
• University of Calgary Press
  

MyiLibrary Partners with Swets

Meanwhile, MyiLibrary (not to be confused with Google's My Library) has partnered with Swets, according to Information Today:

to enable customers to access ebooks and electronic journals from one easy-to-use and efficient point of access. The first offering of combined services between MyiLibrary and Swets is expected to launch this September...Combining the functionality of MyiLibrary with SwetsWise Subscriptions is designed to create a powerful platform that enables organizations to manage their journal subscriptions and ebooks from a single interface.

Google Does Library Thing

Google has added new functionality to its book search, reports PW:

Google Book Search users now have the ability to create a personal online library by clicking on a new “add to My library” link that has been added to book search results. Readers can build personal libraries of their favorite titles.

As this sounded suspiciously like Library Thing to me, I hopped over to the Library Thing blog...where they were too busy launching Wiki Thing (a wiki for their site) to even be bothered by what Google is doing.

Overdrive Standing Orders

Overdrive announced the launch of its new Standing Order plan, which allows libraries to automatically download all frontlist titles from Overdrive's Digital Content Reserve. Says The Book Standard:

Download Standing Order Plan, which was made available earlier this week, allows libraries to automatically add frontlist audiobooks on or before their release dates, without spending time researching new titles. 

Ingram Offers MyiLibrary to Public Libraries

Ingram has opened the gates of MyiLibrary to its public library clients, according to a release I just received this morning. MyiLibrary has over 70,000 ebook titles, with about 1000 added every month. A "tethered" system which allows patrons to access ebooks online (rather than downloading them for checkout), MyiLibrary also features a multi-user option, which lets 3 patrons access the same title simultaneously.

More information is here. 

Times Discovers E-books; Slow News Day Confirmed

The NY Times today has an article about ebooks which honest-to-God says very little except that...people are reading them. On their phones.

Now, granted, articles like this are quite useful for those of us looking to justify the effort and expense of creating digital standards, or looking to figure out how to trade individual chunks of books. Wave this article around and get your airfare to New York (or your membership in BISG - hem, hem, AUDIBLE.COM) taken care of.

What I found interesting is that this particular article emphasized the trade in romance titles:

But lately, the lists are led by romance and women’s fiction. The top seller at Fictionwise yesterday was “Lady Beware” by Jo Beverley. The top seller at both Mobipocket and eReader recently was “The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever” by Julia Quinn.

“The public’s attitude is that electronic media is disposable,” said Nick Bogaty, the executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum. “Mystery and romance are priced lower, and there’s an argument to be made about trade e-books that the consumers want a lot of product, and they want it relatively inexpensively.”

Another advantage of the format, he said, is that “on the subway, you don’t need to be embarrassed by the cover.”

Interesting on 2 counts. One is that in yesterday's issue of The Big Picture, Steve Potash also confirmed romance as a top category in Overdrive's Digital Library Reserve. Two is that Gawker just covered this on July 31st. Or, well, their version of it.

The Big Picture - nterview with Steve Potash, CEO Overdrive-Digital Library Reserve

Are Audiobooks Cheating?

Is listening to the audiobook cheating?

Despite my consultancy with Audible, which lasted 10 weeks and put me nose-to-nose with the audiobook industry, I have never managed to become a diehard audiobook fan. To me, reading is a physical thing, and active and pleasurable thing, while listening is a passive thing that I just don't find as fun. But not everybody shares my love of curling up with a book - my youngest daughter is a devotee of audiobooks and my feeling is...however you can get the story, get it.

The Times has an article today about audiobook-philes, and the snobbery surrounding audiobooks. (Frankly, I think it says more about the general snobbery of book clubs than anything else.) What I found most interesting were the statistics, of course:

People are pressed for time, and so growth in the audio book industry has been brisk, with overall sales (downloads, CDs and cassettes) at $871 million in 2006, up 5 percent over the previous year.