Superpatron

BYU library puts Kindle lending program on hold

As seen in the Deseret News

BYU's Harold B. Lee Library is suspending a short-lived pilot program using Amazon.com's electronic book, the Kindle, as a substitute for interlibrary loans.

The program, which has been available to faculty members for about a month, created some buzz on library-related blogs for breaking ground in the uncertain area of lending books on the Kindle.

Although BYU had verbal permission to proceed with the program, Roger Layton, communications manager for the library, said the program is on hold until the university has a clearer picture of Amazon's legal concerns.

I found a Kindle blog with a list of other libraries who are doing Kindle lending, plus a handful who are lending Sony readers.  Amazon doesn't appear to have given anyone explicit written permission for lending, but that hasn't stopped about a dozen libraries for going forward.  Those who have reconsidered have looked at the cost, e.g. this note on Tinfoil + Racoon:

Before I heard from White today, I was talking with our IT manager, who wondered if it was time for us to check out some Kindles. I did some math and could not come out with a number that made me think "good value." We're cancelling a bunch of databases for abysmal cost-per-search numbers, and a Kindle, loaded with a small number of titles didn't come out with a good cost-per-circ. When I mentioned this to White, she said that they looked at loaning Kindles as a try-this-tech program. It's not about the content, according to White, but about the experience.

Note the metrics used to evaluate services!

that new-book smell

As seen on "now smell this", a perfume blog

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?

Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?

If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.

But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.

Five scents are offered: Classic Musty, New Book Smell, Crunchy Bacon Scent, Scent of Sensibility and Eau, You Have Cats.  More in The Guardian., including suggestions for other book scents, and a actual perfume inspired by the book Madonna of the Almonds (true!).

Every digital book as an audiobook, the Authors Guild, and Assistive Media

Sometimes I clip the headlines just so that a year or two from now we'll wonder what the fuss is.  Today's instance of that is protests by the Author's Guild that Amazon's newest edition of the Kindle has such a good way to do text to speech on the digital texts of digital books that this violates the author's rights to sell the audiobook rights separately from the text.

A piece from Roy Blount, Jr. in the New York Times is instructive in seeing the narrower rights management issue:

True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading “Harry Potter” or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.)

Author Neil Gaiman summarizes the author's "get over it" point of view after a discussion with his agent:

My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

My own experience in audio production comes from a long association with Assistive Media, which does audio recordings of short works (magazine articles, short stories, poetry) and produces them for the web. A listener to that service, Gail Elliot-Ross, explains:

“Tom and I both enjoy Assistive Media: it has been one of the most innovative and enjoyable resources for material in alternate format that we have found. Putting things online which are read with REAL voices and are immediately accessible is so useful and has great possibilities. Many advances have been made in technology, such as electronic braille books and computerized voices for text, but the human voice is so delightful in comparison. I now envision instant access to drama, poetry, information brochures...anything!!

Even the best computerized voice sounds mechanical in comparison with the wide variety of sounds you get from when people really read. 

If you want to hear what Neil Gaiman sounds like, you can hear him read his own The Graveyard Book audiobook online on his publisher's site, Harper Collins.

If you want to hear Roy Blount, Jr. reading his own book Long Time Leaving, Dispatches from the South, you can hear an audio advertisement for it at AudioFile.

And, if you want to listen to Kathleen Starling reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Social Life of Paper from the New Yorker (2002), you can hear it (and many more things) at Assistive Media.

More reading on the current state of the Kindle audiobook issue at Techmeme.

Scientist gadgets - carrying your research library with you everywhere?

If you are working in a field where new materials are being published regularly and where there's some sense that collecting and reading the whole canon of that field is key to your efforts, portable electronic document readers are appealing.  They offer the illusion that your entire research library - at least the portion of it that matters - can be with you everywhere.http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2008/10/arxivmobi---phy.html

Here's a piece of that discussion lifted from the blog NEQNET: Non-equilibrium Phenomena, in a piece entitled 251. Scientist’s gadgets: Kindle 2 vs. Palm

Although Tungsten T3 was costly, I neverregretted that purchase. The thing turned out to be reliable (in fact, it is still with me, it works fine after 8 years of rather extensive use). I have read thousands of e-books and papers from arxiv.org on my Palm.

If you read further you see lots of discussions of how to convert materials, primarily complex PDFs downloaded as preprints from the net, to formats suitable for use on handheld machines.  The Kindle gets low marks for its ability to handle any kind of open formats, and the Kindle 2 is better but not enough better to make it an easy choice for arXiv readers due to limits on its PDF import and conversion process.

(An earlier post on reading arXiv on an iPhone led me here.)

amazon kindle vs. mobile phone based book readers

Some interesting comparisons from a set of people with enough discretionary income to keep up with the gadget race, but who are still dismayed at the mean time to failure and cost of repair of single-purpose electric book readers.  Philip Greenspun highlights his frustration at: Amazon Kindle bites the dust… $187 to fix

I may have to rethink my enthusiasm for the electronic book.  Realistically the way that people handle books, the Kindle is not going to last more than one year.  That means you’re spending $360 for the initial purchase and $187 every year for hardware repairs.  Some of the Kindle editions of books are edging their way up towards $20 (see this Naipaul biography, for example).  Suppose that you read one book every two weeks, or 25 books per year…

Kindle:  $250 per year for hardware (spreading the cost of the initial Kindle purchase a bit) plus $312 for books at $12.50 per book = $562 per year.  Good for individual travel and treadmill usage; bad for having to worry about forgetting it somewhere; bad for taking on vacation with family due to difficulty of sharing; terrible for illustrations and photos.

Paper:  25 books at $15 per book = $375 per year.  Probably 50 percent of those books can be recycled into gifts, so the true cost is closer to $200 per year (assuming you need to buy gifts for friends and family periodically).  Heavy for long trips; awkward for treadmill usage; good for carefree life (risk of forgetting in coffee shop limited to $15); great for sharing; great for illustrations and photos.

The commenters of course urge the use of libraries and online library reserves, but there's an interesting piece of the thread re using relatively advanced mobile phones as readers (iPhone, Android leading the pack).  Philip points to this from Robin Bloor at Have Mac Will Blog: One Million Users: Is Stanza Killing The Kindle?

Does an ebook need a software application that runs on a device (like the iPhone) or does it need a purpose-built device (like the Kindle)?

Imho, the ebook is software and I have little doubt that I’m right about this. There will be some people who are prepared to buy a Kindle (or the Sony equivalent) in order to have a device that’s purpose-built for reading books. But if you can get equivalent functionality from an iPhone or iPod, then you’re not going to be happy to pay over $300 for the Kindle just for the privilege of buying ebooks. If ebooks were difficult to read on the iPhone/iPod then Stanza would already be dead in the water, but that’s not the case.

And, as you would expect, Stanza will not be confined to the iPhone. There’s already a Beta version for Google Android and one will likely be developed for RIM. There are also versions for the Mac and Windows (you may not want to read books on those platforms, but you’ll want to keep your library somewhere. For Lexcycle it makes sense to port it wherever there’s a platform that might be used for reading ebooks.

At various points in the history of consumer computing technology there's brief moments of "convergence" where everyone seems to be doing the same thing at least briefly before the tower of Babel hits again.  The trend-spotter in me looks at this and thinks that mobile phones are getting more capable at least as fast as any dedicated purpose-built book reading machine, and that coming from the other end the small cheap "netbook" laptops will squeeze prices from the other end.  To me that doesn't leave much room for a special purpose mobile book reader, but suggests that there may be multiple plausible general purpose phone-like or laptop-like things that will have a bunch of book-like things ready to read on them.

project gutenberg mobile edition, first impressions.

Project Gutenberg is doing a mobile edition for its books.  From their news release:

Why using Amazon’s proprietary Kindle when you can use your mobile phone instead? Today’s cell phones offer excellent screens and massive computing power to ensure best reading comfort. Mobile books do not weigh much and you can carry them with you wherever you are. Each Java / MIDP 2.0 enabled cell phone is sufficient - the most common computing platform in the world: There are by far more cell phones shipped worldwide than personal computers.

PG Mobile is a software that transfers the plain text format provided by Project Gutenberg onto small handset screens - together with all the features known from physical books like turning pages, page numbers and bookmarks. Just download the PG Mobile version of any eBook and read it on your phone: All Project Gutenberg mobile eBooks will soon be available for download as an additional file format in the download section of each Gutenberg title on Gutenberg.org. Stay tuned!

Their technology comes from Qioo.  Here's the existing Qioo Mobile Library.

Here you can download english mobile books. In most cases you need only the JAR-file. Save files in separate folder because each mobile book has the same file name. After installation an individual name is given.

Alternatively you can download the JAD-file over the air. In most cases this is the most convenient way to install a mobile book. You can do so by entering the following URL in the WAP-Browser of your cellphone (please note: you will be charged for the GPRS/UMTS-traffic caused by the file download): http://www.handybibliothek.de/index.wml

Qioo says on its web site that it has 15 titles on line right now, of which 5 are "free" (the ubituitous Alice and 4 others) and 10 are "advertising supported". 

Presumably more titles will actually go online under a PG label soon; no sign of them yet on the main PG site.  I went to the Qioo site which has more than 15 titles, most of which are in German, and downloaded the "Luther-Thesen" for my Blackberry (about 35k), which downloaded within about a minute.  Now I have one more application on my phone to run.  I ran it, it loaded in about another minute, and it came up with an instruction screen in German which I didn't completely understand.  Some amount of directed button-mashing later and I get "Uncaught exception: java.util.EmptyStackException".

I'm willing to believe that it might work, but frankly for my time I'd rather have an "electronic book" that's simply an HTML page that's conservatively formatted so that it works on my phone's browser and a bunch of plausible browsers similar to it.  Enough people have done this already that it's not rocket surgery.

Mobilizing the library and its friends

I've changed ever so slightly the name of this blog.

It used to be "Superpatron - Friends of the Library for the net". 
Now it's "Superpatron - Mobilizing the Friends of the Library".

This reflects two sets of relevant current focus which I hope to turn into more frequent posts: one around "mobile libraries" in the sense of access to library services provided by mobile phones, and the second around "mobilizing library patrons" to bring them to effective action as needed to bring to bear support for or change in the library services in their communities.  There's a third piece of that too re mobility in the sense of access to transportation to library services and access by patrons who have mobility challenges or who are relying on public transportation.

The scenario I have in mind runs as follows - anywhere you see a computer in here you should assume that it's on a mobile device, not a desktop or a laptop.

I hear about a book I want to read; I reserve it at the library, and I plan a bus trip to the library to pick it up.  Two minutes before the bus arrives I show up at the bus stop, hop on the bus, sit down and read a poem along the way. When I get off the bus, I walk to the library, pick up the book, read it, find a few more that I want to read that are related, and walk to the stacks to pull them.   When I'm done I scribble a few notes and transcribe a few quotes to be added to my next presentation.  And then I'm off to the next meeting.

Related to themes of the past (my "library mashups" work that got a lot of interest) I think that more of what I'm going to be working on for code is going to run on a server somewhere, since I have pretty pessimistic assumptions about my ability to write code for all of the mobile phones out there.    The transportation part is not really a library issue per se, but there are a lot of people who use the bus to get to the library, and there's some unique opportunity to put transit information into library on-site displays to help that out.   And there's a whole slew of "ebooks" ferment underway, ranging from special purpose handheld bookstores like the Kindle to plain text short format fiction that actually work pretty well on ordinary mobile phone web browsers.

The "mobilizing" word is deliberate as well.  At various times I describe myself as a "community organizer" (now that it's clear what that career path looks like) and part of that role is mobilizing support and bringing people to action to support their cause.

I have a couple of talks lined up for 2009 - one non-trivial goal is to have the slides that I make have relevance to what would otherwise be a non-overlapping or barely overlapping set of programmers, library directors, community leaders and transportation people.   As dates are confirmed I'll share them here. 

thanks!

Ed

How to go mobile (from a newspaper point of view)

more in the mobile libraries thread -

here's a story and a research report on suggestions for newspapers in building mobile access to their news and reference content; looks like good reading.

Recently the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) released its development guide for mobile sites. This guide covers mobile content, revenue, and a few case studies.

Considering that the mobile landscape is still undiscovered country for many newspapers, NAA's guide is fairly comprehensive. The case studies focus on mobile sites for the New York Times, Tampa Bay Tribune, Cincinnati Enquirer, and Reuters.

It's not just about smartphones. I was pleased to see e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader covered in NAA's research. These devices use a special electronic paper technology with very low power consumption (measuring battery life in days, not hours).

As seen on Poynter Online, via read20-l.