New York Center for Independent Publishing: “What’s Next?”

I had the great pleasure of speaking on a panel at the NYCIP on the future of the book industry, along with Paul Biba from Teleread, Jeff Rivera (author and Galleycatter), and Mike Shatzkin. It’s now a podcast, courtesy of moderator Chris Kenneally, whose Beyond the Book program can be found here.

Text-to-speech and the complexities of “books”

I wanted to turn folks on to a post by Bob Martinengo on Accessible Publishing. An excerpt:

[A]s the book form intersects with digital technology, surprisingly complex structures are being revealed, which, rather than point out the limitations of ‘old-fashioned print’, actually illustrate the boundaries of digital interfaces. In other words, the presumed simplicity of the book form has masked the truly complex information structures it can support.

 

Oracle buying Sun

Not usually my bailiwick, but my is one of Sun’s best chip designers, so we’ve been swapping thoughts all morning.

Sun/Oracle Media Kit - Bro says the "highlights" are particularly good, so I checked them out (even though it’s a PDF – grrr), and he’s right.

NY Times – which is how I found out and accidentally sprung it on poor bro who hadn’t gotten the memo yet….

Okay, so no libraries can change out their SPARC stations for 10 years because…I want little bro to keep working.

Google Book Search Settlement Analysis

Pam Samuelson has a great article on the O’Reilly blog – thanks to Colleen Lindsay for tweeting it – on the Google Book Search settlement. It’s very thoughtful and well-articulated, and the comments are also well worth reading. She also links to some slides from a presentation she gave on the subject.

She’s especially cogent on the subject of orphan works:

An estimated 70 per cent of the books in the Book Search repository are in-copyright, but out of print. Most of them are, for all practical purposes, “orphan works,” that is, works for which it is virtually impossible to locate the appropriate rights holders to ask for permission to digitize them.

A broad consensus exists about the desirability of making orphan works more widely available. Yet, without a safe harbor against possible infringement lawsuits, digitization projects pose significant copyright risks. Congress is considering legislation to lessen the risks of using orphan works, but it has yet to pass.

The proposed Book Search settlement agreement will solve the orphan works problem for books—at least for Google. Under this agreement, which must be approved by a federal court judge to become final, Google would get, among other things, a license to display up to 20 per cent of the contents of in-copyright out-of-print books, to run ads alongside these displays, and to sell access to the full texts of these books to institutional subscribers and to individual purchasers.

Future of Reading in the WSJ

Usually I roll my eyes at future-of-books/future-of-reading articles. But this guy knows what he’s talking about.

Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We’ll have to see.

This correlates directly to what we found during our research on the StartwithXML Project.  The problem? There are no standardized descriptive tags right now. There are tags to describe entire books, but not describe parts of books.

At every turn in the article, I expected to start with the eye-rolling. But I never did. 

#amazonfail funny

Oh, and also?

This.

(Thanks to Evan Schnittman.)

Taxonomies and #amazonfail

This is a re-post, in a way – I posted to Peter Brantley’s Read 2.0 listserv in response to Clay Shirkey’s piece and Mary Hodder’s other piece, and was urged to post publicly. 

I’ve done so much taxonomy work, both for Muze and BN.com – and my colleagues and I have all agonized over the political decisions we’ve had to make because in a taxonomy you have to articulate concepts and arrange them. Like staying-awake-at-night agonizing, because these articulations and arrangements either bring books to light or tuck them away where few can find them, depending. (Richard Nash also makes a great point up this same alley.)

And it’s worth getting upset about. What happened at Amazon is the result of dozens of small decisions about how to name things and the structure of those names – whether the decisions were made by people at Amazon or they were importing other companies’ taxonomies (probably both) or using semantics to create algorithms. Shirky is right in that it probably wasn’t a person or group of people deciding that they didn’t like gay people that day. But (as Richard points out) it was the result of heteronormative thinking creating search rules that ultimately resulted in…#.

What taxonomizing teaches you is that no worldview is neutral, and the best you can hope for is to keep trying to reach in that direction. Detangling what happened at Amazon is compounded by the fact that they aren’t talking to anyone, but it appears to be a compilation of complacent taxonomizing, linking certain concepts to the theme "adult", imposing some sort of filter on the "adult" titles (without realizing what "adult" meant in terms of the terms that linked to it) in a misguided effort to make explicit books less visible, not fully investigating the problem when it first came to Amazon’s attention (but dismissing it as a "policy" decision, which is most likely never was in the first place), and now not really responding effectively. Probably because those in charge of responding really have no idea how it happened.