Nick Baker 

Via Library Juice, Thoughts on the reaction to Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Letters from Lincoln Cushing

Books demise predicted -- again? 

The end of books? by Simon Midgley

Could the advent of electronic texts mark the death of books, for so long the staple fare of university libraries and college students? This will be one of the key discussions at a major conference on the future of textbooks at London's City University tomorrow.

Publishers, university librarians, authors and vice-chancellors are meeting to explore the issues facing academic publishing in the wake of the internet, digital publishing and the government's ambition to increase the number of 18-year-olds participating in higher education to 50% by 2006. [read more]

Not one email in support -- Take that Sen. Hollings 

Digital-copyright bill inspires flurry of criticism by Andy Sullivan

A digital-copyright bill introduced last month has inspired howls of protest from consumers and high-tech firms who say it could slow technological advances and dictate how consumers listen to music or watch videos at home.

Well-connected lobbyists and everyday users alike have flooded Congress with faxes and e-mails over the last several weeks to lodge complaints against a bill that would prevent new computers, CD players and other consumer-electronics devices from playing unauthorized movies, music and other digital media files.

Sen. Ernest Hollings' bill is backed by media firms such as The Walt Disney Co., who fear fast Internet connections and an array of digital devices such as MP3 players and CD burners will encourage consumers to seek free copies of hit singles and new movies.

The South Carolina Democrat has said he introduced the bill to encourage media and technology firms to work together to stop digital piracy.

Instead, it has inspired a flurry of criticism.

A grass-roots group called DigitalConsumer.org, which did not exist a month ago, claims to have signed up 24,000 members, who have sent off 80,000 faxes to their elected representatives. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has also held hearings on the issue, has received more than 3,500 comments criticizing the bill, a spokeswoman said.

"We haven't received one e-mail in support of the Hollings bill," said Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Mimi Devlin. "It seems like there's a groundswell of support from regular users." [read more]

Amazon goes into the recycling business 

Unloading His Books, but Not His Conscience by Fred Bernstein

A few weeks ago a friend carried a pile of dusty volumes to the Strand, the used-book store in Greenwich Village, to trade clutter for cash. "I would never do that," I thought snootily, as I pictured him haggling over the value of a dog-eared copy of "The Internet for Dummies."

And then I logged on to Amazon.com (news/quote) to buy a book and was startled to see: "Fred A. Bernstein, make $436.32. Sell your past purchases at Amazon.com today!" In an audacious gambit to expand its marketplace, Amazon has not only become a broker of used books but has also found a way to prime the pump: encouraging people who bought books on Amazon to resell them.

The $436.32 represented my potential take from the 25 books I had bought on Amazon since last July; Amazon's computer sees every one of those not just as a past sale but also as a future resale. I was intrigued. Perhaps I could do what my friend had done -- pick up some extra money, make space on my shelves -- without lifting a finger.

But as a book lover, I had misgivings, and it turns out I was not alone. This week, the Authors Guild protested Amazon's recycling program by asking its 8,200 members to remove links to Amazon from their Web sites. Authors, who are generally paid a commission for every book that publishers sell, make no money on resales. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, past president of the guild, said that Amazon's practice was "threatening the industry's ecological balance."

The very day that "China Dawn," a book about the Internet revolution in China, went on sale last month, Amazon was offering used copies (at a substantial discount) almost as prominently as new ones. "Either there are a lot of speed readers out there," said the author, David Sheff, "or people are selling advance copies." [read more]

Score 1 for privacy 

Court uphold privacy of book buyers: Retailer can refuse to turn over records by David G. Savage

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects the privacy of both bookstore owners and their customers when it refused yesterday to force a Denver retailer to turn sales records over to police.

Legal experts predicted that the decision would slow, if not halt, the recent trend of investigators seeking records of book purchases or video rentals as a quick way to track suspects or bolster a prosecution.

Four years ago, independent counsel Kenneth Starr surprised booksellers when he subpoenaed the records of a Washington, D.C., store, seeking information on purchases made by Monica Lewinsky.

Since then, there has been "an alarming increase in the number of bookstore subpoenas and search warrants" -- including requests to online booksellers -- said Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.

But the bookstore owners have fought back, and they won an important victory yesterday. [read more]

Reading 

Enjoy the miracle of reading - soon and often by Herbert Siegel

Before the invention of paper, the thin inner bark of certain trees was used as a writing tablet. In Latin, this bark was called liber, which in time also came to signify a a "book." Hence, our library, the place for books, and librarian, the keeper of books. Books are the keepers of words, the tools of communication that elevate us above all other life forms on Earth.

Although the role of today's public library has been greatly expanded to accommodate advanced technology such as computers, DVDs and the like -- all beneficial for its patrons -- the very core of this institution is, in a word, words. Which returns us to the book, miracle-worker that it is, through the means called reading. [read more]

On the web vs. in print 

'Why Do We Need to Keep This in Print? It's on the Web ...': a Review of Electronic Archiving Issues and Problems by Dorothy Warner

Indeed! It may be on the web today, but is there a plan in place to ensure that it will be there in twenty or more years? Probably not. In the haste to make information available electronically there are few agreed-upon plans for the preservation of digital information and much has already been lost. The particular concern of preserving electronic state government documents recently became an issue for our State Documents Interest Group of the Documents Association of New Jersey (DANJ) when we recognized that not only are fewer documents produced in print format but there is not a state plan to preserve the electronic documents being produced. For several years the Division of Elections in New Jersey eliminated the web page that gave the previous year's election lists and results. Fortunately, the concern from those using the information prompted the Division of Elections to begin to retain this information. But the earlier information is gone. Recently, Public Utilities created a new web page and eliminated virtually all of the documents that had existed on the earlier page. At least one agency replaces its old annual report with the new one. The predicament in New Jersey is not an isolated one. Our response was to research the issue of digital preservation and to present a report of recommendations to the State Librarian. The report, edited by Sue Lyons (2001, available at the DANJ website), provides a thoughtful overview of the concerns and problems of digital archiving, offering recommendations for a cooperative process and plan by the state. In the report, Lyons cites several examples of lost digital information, including data from the Viking mission to Mars and all computerized data from a New York study mapping land use and environmental data throughout the state. [read more]

Medieval Manuscripts 

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

More on Copyright (or wrong) 

On the Contrary: Copywrongs by Wendy Kaminer

If I drop dead tomorrow, all the work I've produced since 1978 will enjoy copyright protection for the next 70 years, until 2072, some 120 years after my birth. If I live another 30 years or so all the work I've produced since 1978 will be protected into the beginning of the twenty-second century. Much as I value my copyrights, which allow me to control and profit from my work, and much as I disdain plagiarism and pirating, I don't expect to derive any benefit from copyrights that survive me by decades. But, then again, the Copyright Extension Act of 1998, which added an additional 20 years to almost all existing copyrights, wasn't intended to benefit me or other individual writers and artists. It was primarily intended to benefit corporations that expect to live forever, with congressional assistance: Disney may prove virtually immortal, if it never loses the rights to Mickey Mouse.

Disney lobbied hard for the 1998 law, partly because Mickey's copyright was due to expire in 2003. Now it will last an additional 20 years, until 2023, or the expiration of the next copyright extension -- whichever comes second. Can Congress repeatedly extend copyrights for decades, impoverishing the public domain, to benefit corporations and the distant descendants of individual creators? That question is now before the Supreme Court: In Eldred v. Ashcroft, it agreed to review the constitutionality of the 1998 copyright-extension law. [read more]

The Future of the Book 

The Future of the Book? Gutenberg to Gates

The Future of the Book by Umberto Eco

Since my arrival at the symposium on the future of the book I have been expecting somebody to quote "Ceci tuera cela." Both Duguid and Nunberg have obliged me. The quotation is not irrelevant to our topic.

As you no doubt remember, in Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo, comparing a book with his old cathedral, says: "Ceci tuera cela" (The book will kill the cathedral, the alphabet will kill images). McLuhan, comparing a Manhattan discotheque to the Gutenberg Galaxy, said "Ceci tuera cela." One of the main concerns of this symposium has certainly been that ceci (the computer) tuera cela (the book).

We know enough about cela (the book), but it is uncertain what is meant by ceci (computer). An instrument by which a lot of communication will be provided more and more by icons? An instrument on which you can write and read without needing a paperlike support? A medium through which it will be possible to have unheard-of hypertextual experiences? [read more]

What is the Future of the Book in the Digital Era?

We experience a world of ever-expanding websites, CD-ROMs and other digital electronic media led by the developed industrial nations today. What will become of the paper-printed media of books in relation to the rapid evolution of this new media?

Much has been discussed about digital media in the context of multimedia and its interactive features, but not in relationship to carrying printed words and characters. If they were discussed at all, a negative outlook has been very pervasive. Is there any way we can expect a positive effect of the new media on books?

Can books only exist in the paper-printed media? Can the text be separated from paper to be reused as a book through digital media? Is such a discussion relevant to the subject of books?

What is the future of the book? This round table discussion invites participants from countries of different histories and cultures -- Japan, France, China, Thailand and America -- each facing different issues on books (such as shortage of paper, distribution, penetration of audiovisual media, literacy, etc.) to discuss the new form this durable medium may take. [read more]

The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World by Clifford Lynch

Commercial publishing interests are presenting the future of the book in the digital world through the promotion of e-book reading appliances and software. Implicit in this is a very complex and problematic agenda that re-establishes the book as a digital cultural artifact within a context of intellectual property rights management enforced by hardware and software systems. With the convergence of different types of content into a common digital bit-stream, developments in industries such as music are establishing precedents that may define our view of digital books. At the same time we find scholars exploring the ways in which the digital medium can enhance the traditional communication functions of the printed work, moving far beyond literal translations of the pages of printed books into the digital world. This paper examines competing visions for the future of the book in the digital environment, with particular attention to questions about the social implications of controls over intellectual property, such as continuity of cultural memory. [read more]

Electronic publishing and the future of the book by Tom Wilson

It is a brave person who can claim to talk with assurance about the future of anything, since the future is fundamentally unknowable, and to talk about the information future in any of its aspects, given the speed of change and the novelty of successive technological developments, is even more foolhardy. Nor does the history of forecasting in the world of books give any cause to be optimistic that we can be any more certain today than in the past: the "death of the book" has been forecast on numerous occasions, from the time of mass radio broadcasting, through the introduction of television, to the rise of the computer and the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Nor can we reliably forecast in any statistical fashion: the typical forecasting model uses the linear projection of current trends into the future. That is, the basic assumption is that things will be as they are, only more so - that is, there will be growth or decline. In talking about electronic publishing and its impact on the book, however, we are talking not about a process of continuous change, but about discontinuous change - the relatively sudden emergence of a new technology that enables us to publish in a completely different way from the way we have published before. The question is no longer about the growth of book publishing and buying and the growth of Internet use and electronic publishing, but about they way the latter is likely to affect the former. Trend lines can tell us little about this at the moment because electronic publishing is too new in the situation and the data will not exist in forms that enable us to make statements about the probable causes of whatever consequences occur.

Given this, we must take the debate to a more abstract level, if we are to discuss how one form of publication is likely to affect the nature of, and growth of (or decline of) another form of publication. We must look at the functions and effects of both methods of publishing and then try to hazard some guesses about the way one form is likely to affect the other. [read more]