Superpatron

Newly requested: Isaac Asimov, I robot

I picked up a copy of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation's Edge" at a Little Free Library in Ann Arbor, and figured that I would trade up for what I really wanted - Asimov's classic "I robot", a series of short stories about the evolution of robot consciousness.

I remember reading Asimov in middle school and high school, and reflecting on the Three Laws of Robotics and how they are imperfectly applied in today's age of artificial intelligences and virtual assistants.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If you have an Ann Arbor District Library card, I, robot is available for reserve (and you'll get your copy after i'm done reading it). Otherwise my recommendation is to order from Literati in Ann Arbor, or globally from Amazon. A copy is a perfect gift for your personal assistant!

Why I love reading old patents. (The evolution of useful things / Henry Petroski)

Henry Petroski's 1992 "The evolution of useful things" gets a pass from Book Reviews for Real People. The authors found the writing style in some of the denser passages the "prose equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard."

Fasteners of dissimilar appearance were also developed to answer the objection to the paper-piercing points altogether.

The image is from patent 1,523,861, which illlustrates one of many improvements on the "Gem" paper clip still in use today. Modern patents are crazy complicated as the patent attorneys have figured out how to patent all kinds of abstractions, but if the first digit starts with 1 there's bound to be a drawing that would make a nice coloring exercise for your mechanical thinker.

CIP 91-39524; LC T212.P465 1992; 609 -- dc20; ISBN 0-679-41226-3; Librarything 1943752; OCLC 24906856; AADL 609 Pe.

The LibraryThing reviews of this work are really quite useful.

This is a book about failure and how failure drives the design of all things. (Jorge Cardoso)

 

Ever so slightly refocusing my attention to this weblog

A few changes.

This is a post to the Superpatron blog; they have been few and far between. No guarantees on continuity.

There is a change in the subtitle of the blog to note that bookstores and news stands have their patrons as well, and in some very fundamental way it's easier to be a bookstore patron (for purchase or for sale of books) than it is to be a library patron. I have way more to say about bookstores than libraries these days.

Once upon a time I had a blog called "Electronic Paper" that was about some future of reading books on digital devices that were lightweight and portable. That date seems to be here now, rather than in the future. Every once in a while there will be stuff here about electronic books, whether or not a bookstore or a library gets in the path of distribution.

My employer (AnnArbor.com; read my column at AnnArbor.com/vielmetti) follows the ups and downs of Borders, so I'll try not to miss linking to that coverage.

Traffic to this blog peaked when I was posting regularly, and has tailed down to a steady 20-40 per day, completely without any effort from me. I have no idea what is current in some of the worlds I used to track closely. 

Books sorted by color still are wonderful. Books sorted in any old way are always wonderful, especially if there is no trace of Dewey in the ordering. Send me photos.

Ed

On the proliferation of ISBNs - via Laura Dawson

One key bit of data about a book is the ISBN, the number assigned to it for lookup purposes. I hate to call it metadata, but there it is; it's data too.

The beginning of the ISBN era marks the time where books can be treated as commodities, as unambiguously tagged stock items that can be kept track of as precisely as gum or soap. And because every book needs one to go on the shelf, some publishers have taken the step to make every (minor) variant of a given work have its own unique ISBN. This could even mean that the dark red cover of the 3d edition has a different ISBN than the light red cover of the 3d edition. Useful for record keeping and inventory, but it starts to make a mess of book finding systems where the ISBN is often the only unique identifier that lets you move from one system to another to find the "same thing".

Laura Dawson notes this on read20-l - her comments from inside a large publisher are instructive.

Maintaining the metadata associated with each one of these ISBNs is incredible. Say you've got a Spanish textbook. Then you've got the e-version of it in three different formats (VitalSource, Quia, and
CourseSmart). Then you've got the print lab manual and the print workbook. Then you've got the e-versions of these. Plus you've got downloadable language labs that you can port into your iPod. You've got
instructional animations that are available as a separate product that you can put on your iPod as well. That's 14 related ISBNs with associated metadata attached to each one. Then if you need to customize
any of these for a particular state university adoption...

It's rather like having a very large extended family and having to keep track of birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, who's in trouble at school, who needs new clothes, what the babysitting schedule is, who is
getting a divorce, and that your niece is learning-disabled and your brother has to sue the school district every year just to get her the services she needs....

In other words the more ISBNs you have, the more crucial accurate metadata becomes, because otherwise how the hell are you going to keep your products straight? And I think this is in large part what
publishers object to. They have a lot of frustration in keeping up with the metadata explosion that goes on with these splintered, fragmented, related products.

The mistake is in thinking that fewer ISBNs means less data administration. Your products still need to be sold, even if we could come up with a different way of identifying them - just as your
husband's second cousin will still need a new baby gift even if you can't for the life of you remember her name.

No, really. The more products you get involved with, the more metadata you have to keep track of. And that's just a cost of doing business.

Laura's blog is a worthwhile read for perspectives from the publishing
industry, especially on book industry standards.

The Lost Art of Reading, Gerald Stanley Lee - and discontent with the new librarians of 1903

From Barbara Tozier, who is working on a volume of Gerald Stanley Lee's The Lost Art of Reading for Distributed Proofreaders; this selection, complaints on the new librarian in the new library in town (in 1903):

I have had occasion to notice that, as a general rule, when I find myself finding fault with a man in this fashion—this vague, eager fashion—the gist of it is that I merely want him to be some one else. But in this case—well, he is some one else. He is almost anybody else. He might be a head salesman in a department store, or a hotel clerk, or a train dispatcher, or a broker, or a treasurer of something. There are thousands of things he might be—ought to be—except our librarian. He has an odd, displaced look behind the great desk. He looks as if he had gotten in by mistake and was trying to make the most of it. He has a business-like, worldly-minded, foreign air about him—a kind of off-hand, pert, familiar way with books. He does not know how to bend over—like a librarian—and when one comes on him in an alcove, the way one ought to come on a librarian, with a great folio on his knees, he is—well, there are those who think, that have seen it, that he is positively comic. I followed him around only the other day for fifteen or twenty minutes, from one alcove to another, and watched him taking down books. He does not even know how to take down a book. He takes all the books down alike—the same pleasant, dapper, capable manner, the same peek and clap for all of them. He always seems to have the same indefatigable unconsciousness about him, going up and down his long aisles, no more idea of what he is about or of what the books are about; everything about him seems disconnected with a library. I find I cannot get myself to notice him as a librarian or comrade, or book-mind. He does not seem to have noticed himself in this capacity—exactly. So far as I can get at his mind at all, he seems to have decided that his mind (any librarian’s mind) is a kind of pneumatic-tube, or carrier system—apparently—for shoving immortals at people. Any higher or more thorough use for a mind, such as being a kind of spirit of the books for people, making a kind of spiritual connection with them down underneath, does not seem to have occurred to him.

The New York Times wrote at the time:

Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, whose book on "The Lost Art of Reading" deserves further consideration, is a preacher of the gospel of "fullness and leisure and power of living": of unconsciousness, of "not knowing what time it is." He is an enemy of the modern forms of culture, reading, and especially of "analysis."

Sort your home library by ISBN

In the "there's too many books in boxes to find them all, time to sort" mode:

I'm starting to rearrange our home library by ISBN instead of by topic or call number. This has a couple of interesting side effects, which seem to be useful. Pictures to follow at some point once it's stable.

When you do an ISBN sort, effectively you're sorting by publisher, and within the publishers you're sorting by size and longevity. This puts the McGraw-Hills and the Penguins at the front of the shelf, the MIT Press and U of Michigan Press in the middle, and someone who figured out how to get an ISBN number to print your own books dead last.

Actually shelving books is starting to look super easy. For big presses, just throw the book somewhere near others that have the same logo on it; for little presses, throw it on the right shelf. At some point you'll want to reorganize to make things make more sense, but remember for now some books are in boxes and you're just trying to unearth them. In part, you want to make it dead easy to put books into the right box without thinking too hard and to still find the book on the first try.

Some things pop out fast. Any book pre a certain vintage doesn't have an ISBN, which makes it an antique in some way. Bound galleys don't have ISBNs, and some (but not all) magazines are missing individual ISBNs for each issue. The journals that you wrote don't have ISBNs (yet!), and all of those annual reports are missing these numbers.

It's remarkably nice to have all the books from the same press next to each other, because it suggests another path to more books, as well as a path to people (editors, publicists, designers) who are part of the process of book marketing. Some presses regularly print all kinds of related stuff and by seeing what you have collected together you can guess there may be more of the same to look for. The little presses are all at the end, so you have a jumble there (but a fun jumble).

The biggest usefulness of this quite frankly is that it doesn't take any time at all to decide where a book goes once you have settled on the shelf sizes, and you can safely box things away and find things using ISBNs as you external markings on boxes.

Other people have considered this, notably this post on Hackito Ergo Sum: The Library Problem:

The problem with the ISBN number is that it isn't a very good number to use to catalog the books. Sorting by ISBN number would create a list which didn't have anything to do with the author or the subject of the book. This would create an effectively random order of books and make it very difficult to find what you are looking for.

To the extent that one McGraw Hill book is pretty much the same as the other, this might be true; but there's a distinctive style from a lot of smaller presses that I seem to collect books from, and with the smaller presses you start to get a lot closer to contact with individuals.

This classification does also show up one thing about the typical library binding; the standard place for the call number is on the spot on the book where the typical publisher's logo is. Someone somewhere has an opportunity to preserve the logo and put a call number on it at the same time for additional ease in findability on the shelf.

Now - just - to get the first block of my very own ISBN numbers financed. There's a big perceived difference in quality between books in the 8xxxx series and the 9xxxxx series - the ever so slightly bigger publishers seem to have a lot more chance of producing a book that looks real.

A subsequent task, naturally, is to register as an official library, one that can send and receive inter-library loan requests; I have a sneaking suspicion that if I compose a properly ordinary looking ALA form that this is something that might just work.

"Publishers International Isbn Directory" (Gale Group)

Technorati Tags: bookshelf, isbn, classification, consequences

Book finding systems on your Blackberry web browser

I'm collecting instances of online book finding systems that either work well by design or by accident on Blackberry web browsers. I do this for a couple of reasons:

- I have a Blackberry
- There's some idealistic views of what a mobile book finding device should be
- Most of those idealistic views are wrong
- Some of the actual uses are interesting (and easy)
- Two people clicked on a Feedburner ad for Blackberry in my RSS feed

Here's something like a run-down.

Purpose built systems from libraries

There are some library book finding systems specially designed for small screens. I don't have a huge list of them (yet). This is an announcement from Black Hills State University:

http://iis.bhsu.edu/lis/pda/

Patrons on the move can now stay connected with the BHSU Library. The E. Y. Berry Library-Learning Center at BHSU recently launched a new website for PDAs and other handheld devices such as Blackberry, to cater to the needs of the growing number of mobile users. Users can now search the library catalog, check their library account, and see library hours while they are on the move.

As far as I can tell this runs on a South Dakota wide network on top of the Aleph system. A second one from Ball State

http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/mobile/

Through our mobile Web site users can search the library catalog and serials collections; and see library hours, contacts, and information on our various collections and services while on the go. The site was designed for ease of use and navigation for mobile devices with their constaints on bandwidth, screen size and memory.

Non-library book finding systems that have mobile interfaces

My poster child for this would be LibraryThing Mobile

http://www.librarything.com/m/

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2006/06/announcing-librarything-mobile.php

The idea is simple—you get the most important features of LibraryThing through your cell phone's "internet" feature. So you can check whether you have something—by title, author, tag or ISBN—when you're in the bookshop, browse your catalog, and read your reviews. You can even accesss your "Pssst!" recommendations. But I don't know anything about cellphone security, so you can't add items, and you can't look at private libraries—even your own.

Like the other systems mentioned to date, this is a read only interface - it helps me figure out what I own, or perhaps what I aspire to own if I've tagged it right, but it doesn't handle the need of scribbling down the name of a title that you want to remember for later or to look up something and add it to your list of books to read.

Mobile non-library non-book finding systems of general use

Here we escape the bounds of the library world and even the book world and look at systems which solve a more general problem of mobile personal recall and mobile search without necessarily being tethered to a particular book oriented problem.

Google

Google Mobile has to be mentioned here - if you've stashed away a book list in your Gmail, you can search for it from your Blackberry's Gmail interface, and find it whether or not you had explicitly dumped it into a book finding system. This is the most general kind of search, and depends entirely on your personal ability to squirrel away useful information.

There's no mobile version of Google Book Search that I know about, and no mobile Google Scholar, more's the pity. The Google search engine is OK on a mobile phone but suffers from providing primarily pointers to non-mobile content, so you lose a lot.

Yahoo

Yahoo's delicious service fills the bill here too, if you have already decided to use it to bookmark books. It's pretty easy to construct a browser bookmark that would be something like
http://del.icio.us/vielmetti/toread
and then refer to that next time you were wandering through a bookstore or library looking for ideas. More elaborate URLs and more elaborate tagging supports more precise memory systems.

Twitter

This last one probably should be first, because it's so awesome. Twitter has three mobile interfaces - an SMS based one if you have a cheap SMS plan, a Jabber based IM interface to go with Google Mobile Talk, and a mobile browser interface that I use because it has $0 additional fees and is acceptably fast.

Step one: collect a few hundred people in your Twitter friends list; make sure to include some librarians.

Step two: Post the question
I'm at the library. What should I read next?

Step three: Get personalized suggestions from people, or a reference interview if you aren't careful. Iterate until you find exactly what you want.

Step one in this is the obvious critical step - if you want good book finding, you need to build the set of people who will give you good recommendations.

Technorati Tags: mobile, search, book-finding-systems, blackberry

Things I want to write more about here - categories A-G

Every so often I run into corners of the world that I want to explore. Here's some list of the things I'd like to write more about, even if I don't have a full blog-length posting for any of them written right now. I'm keying off the categories I've set up.

This is part 1: Amazon through Google Book Search.

Sorry no links yet....will hyperlink as I have time to edit, but I thought I'd get this out into the world.

Amazon - about the book cover and album cover art database they have; how to set up an affiliate bookstore that actually works; on using Amazon to do wish lists that are then fulfilled through your library (via Jon Udell); on using Amazon as a book finding system and then using Book Burro or similar to connect back to your library; much more I'm sure.

Ann Arbor - plans for a new library downtown; reviews of all of the branches; reviews of other Washtenaw County libraries; special libraries in town like the Ford Presidential Library

Archives - an interview with the folks who run the Labadie Collection; an interview with the Prelingers; an interview with Brewster Kahle; some discussion of the peculiar nature of archives in the digital age

Archival Television - Jeff Ubois blog of the same name; the loss of the video record; clearing and securing rights; bootlegs on Youtube; museums of the broadcast industry

Beyond big vendors - this was the title of a talk I gave; an exploration of consolidation in the integrated library systems space, and some understanding of new alternatives

Book Burro - at least an annual post on what it is (repetition is the soul of the net); a screencast showing how I use it; documentation for online book finding system developers to get them to have Book Burro pop up on their book screens; a discussion of how tools like this can be funded by affiliate revenues

Book covers - as finding aids; variations between editions; in online book finding and book inventory systems; search by contents of the cover, not contents of the book

Book trading - more reviews of any book trading systems I find; some stories about book swap clubs that meet in person; children's birthday parties where everyone brings a book and everyone gets a book

Bookins - how they advertise new inventory on Twitter; comparison with other book swap sites; integration with LibraryThing

Books - more book reviews, lots of book reviews would be welcomed; the book publishing industry as a whole; old books; smelly books; pretty much anything is fair game.

Books sorted by color - more discussion of cover art, illustrations, other metadata about the book captured in the cover art but not indexed by typical book finding systems; the book illustration business; how covers are designed; history of binding systems; algorithms to determine which color a book is; art and photographic illustrations of installations where books have been sorted by color

Bookshelves - compact shelving, buying shelves for personal libraries, reviews of bookcases, shelving for libraries, innovations in book shelving, reviews of books about bookshelves, how to build your own, built in shelving, what to do when yours fill up

Code - more code! software that does interesting things with book and library data; mashups, data extraction, search algorithms, recommender systems, page layout, interactive design, home grown alternative views of the library

Collection development - impact of patrons on collections; controversial materials and how they are added to the collection and perhaps subtracted from the collection; metrics used for weeding and deaccessions; building your personal library from another library's discards; libraries as endangering printed materials

Electronic collections - library originated book and non-book collections; hardware, software, and systems for managing and cataloging same; preservation of digital relics; copyright, fair use and international implications of same; the proper provenance of enthusiast collectors

Events and exhibits - individual events and exhibits, and also ways by which libraries can improve their ability to bring people through the door by hosting book-themed events. Compare libraries to bookstores and see how they stack up; facilities building and planning with events in mind.

Film - libraries for film; collecting video and film; archival television (via Jeff Ubois); rights, copyrights, and the like; stock footage libraries; impact of digital distribution on the circulation patterns in public libraries that have big DVD collections

Friends Bookshop - relationships between Friends groups and libraries; examples of particularly fun bookshops; self service bookshops; using friends book inventory to do outreach; purposes of friends bookshops - to entertain people who want to run a bookstore, or to raise money, or both

Friends of the library - about national and local organizations; demographics of friends groups; "Friends of the Library, for the net"; library advocacy; when friends groups turn into haters groups

Games - games in the library; word games; something more about Eli@AADL; Wii at the library. Games in the kids room - ice cream truck. Learning from games.

Google Book Search - contracts, restrictions on use of data, inaccuracies within, quality of scanning, quality of metadata, shout out to Ben Bunnell, aftermarket greasemonkey hacks to fix issues with, comparison with Microsoft et al, comparison with Open Library, Distributed Proofreaders

Google Scholar - library use and access to, Andrew Odlyzko on open publishing, relative frequency of citation of non-internet publications, Math 40 yr history of increased collaboration via Patrick Ion, quality of data, quality of metadata, use by scholars as replacement for vita

Judge a book by its cover

from Marginal Revolution, on the practice of buying (or more generally reading or finding) books based solely on cover art:

My thought was this: presumably the publisher designs the cover to appeal to people who will spread favorable word of mouth about the book. As a sometimes good (but non-reductionist) Bayesian, if I like the cover I should infer I will praise the book. Furthermore I should be especially keen to buy on this basis for a "word of mouth book," and indeed this author does not have a celebrity name.

If I like the cover *a lot*, can I receive a worse evaluation by checking out the blurbs and thus skewing or minimizing my gut reaction to the image? Surely if someone is able to manipulate me, my optimal strategy is let just some of the manipulative information through. The case for viewing the cover -- and only the cover -- is simply that many more people see the cover than evaluate any other part or aspect of the book. Might we then not expect the cover to be the strongest and best thought out signal?

My own experience with cover art is that especially for kids books you can tell a huge amount by what you see on the cover, and even if you end up with a story that's meh you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of good art. I've picked a few choice titles out of my "wall of books" just this way - the "street sweeper" book that entranced my 2 year old was nothing I would have ever found with a text based search.

Technorati Tags: books, cover-art, coverflow, covers, illustration, library

Bookins - http://www.bookins.com - book trading

Bookins is a book trading site.  Here's what they have to say about themselves:

Bookins is the only book-trading service that helps you swap books with no fuss. There is no standing in line at the post office, and no need to follow-up with each member you exchange with. We provide the postage, track all shipments, and make sure you get back books of equal value. We even provide replacements at our expense for lost/damaged books.

They have been up and running on LibraryThing as a partner for about a year (since last year's Talk Like a Pirate Day):

Bookins bills itself as "easy, automated and fair." Its unique features include an algorithm for assigning points to books, so a new hardcover of Freakonomics is worth more than an old paperback Tom Clancy novel, and a $3.99 flat shipping rate, with package tracking right on the site. Again, it's nice to see that the dozen or so swap sites aren't just copying each other, but trying out different ideas.

Their key innovation is using self-printed accurate prepaid USPS postage for book returns, saving you a trip to the post office to weight and ship things.  From a USPS publication:

Putting good books in the hands of eager readers presented a shipping challenge for entrepreneur Mitchell Silverman. But with the help of USPS Web Tools, his company, Bookins, is able to do just that. USPS Web Tools allow customers to print out their shipping labels while remaining on the Bookins site. It’s a service Silverman depends on, and he’s never been disappointed.

There's a patent application on Method and apparatus for bartering items #20060026077

According to a computer-implemented approach for bartering items between customers, customers engage in the exchange of items wherein the system determines the parameters of the exchange. According to the approach, customers provide item selection criteria to a provider indicating items the customers desire to receive and items the customers are willing to send. In response to the item delivery criteria being satisfied, the provider prompts a customer to send an item to another customer, and the customer prompted by the provider sends the item to the other customer over a delivery channel. Provider determines the point value of the item sent and gives points to the customer sending the item and charges points from the customer receiving the item.

Technorati Tags: bookins, librarything, mitchell-s-silverman, barter, usps, usps-web-tools, uspto, patents, books, book-trading