All the (good) books

I have just re-read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and it was better than I had remembered. It holds up very well for a book first published in 1953. I was reading it as an example of book worship, as part of my investigation into examples of an irrational love of books. What became clear, however, is that this book does not describe an indiscriminate love, not at all.

I took note of the authors and the individual books that are actually mentioned in Fahrenheit 451. Here they are (hopefully a complete list):

Authors: Dante, Swift, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, Plato, Milton, Sophocles, Thomas Hardy, Ortega y Gasset, Schweitzer, Einstein, Darwin, Gandhi, Guatama Buddha, Confucius, Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, Christ, Bertrand Russell.

Books: Little Black Sambo, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Bible, Walden

I suspect that by the criteria with which Bradbury chose his authors, he himself, merely an author of popular science fiction, would not have made his own list. Of the books, the first two were used to illustrate books that offended.

"Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico."
...
"Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancers of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag."

The other two were examples of books that were being preserved.

Bradbury was a bit of a social curmudgeon, and in terms of books decidedly a traditionalist. He decried the dumbing down of American culture, with digests of books (perhaps prompted by the Reader's Digest brand, which began in 1950), then "digest-digests, digest-digest-digests," then with books being reduced to one or two sentences, and television keeping people occupied but without any perceptible content. (Although he pre-invents a number of recognizable modern technologies, such as earbuds, he fails to anticipate the popular of writers like George R. R. Martin and other writers of brick-sized tomes.)

Fahrenheit 451 is not a worship of books, but of their role in preserving a certain culture. The "book-people" who each had memorized a book or a chapter hoped to see those become the canon once the new "dark ages" had ended. This was not a preservation of all books but of a small selection of books. That is, of course, exactly what happened in the original dark ages, although the potential corpus then was much smaller: only those texts that had been carefully copied and preserved, and in small numbers, were available for distribution once printing technology became available. Those manuscripts were converted to printed texts, and the light came back on in Europe, albeit with some dark corners un-illuminated where texts had been lost.

Another interesting author on the topic of preservation, but less well-known, is Louis-Sébastien Mercier, writing in 1772 in his utopian novel of the future, Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred.*  In his book he visits the King's Library in that year to find that there is only a small cabinet holding the entire book collection. He asks the librarians whether some great fire had destroyed the books, but they answered instead that it was a conscious selection.

"Nothing leads the mind farther astray than bad books; for the first notions being adopted without attention, the second become precipitate conclusion; and men thus go on from prejudice to prejudice, and from error to error. What remained for us to do, but to rebuild the structure of human knowledge?" (v. 2, p. 5)

The selection criteria eliminated commentaries ("works of envy or ignorance") but kept original works of discovery or philosophy. These people also saw a virtue in abridging works to save the time of the reader. Not all works that we would consider "classics" were retained:

"In the second division, appropriated to the Latin authors, I found Virgil, Pliny, and Titus Livy entire; but they had burned Lucretius, except some poetic passages, because his physics they found false, and his morals dangerous." (v. 2, p.9)

In this case, books are selectively burned because they are considered inferior, a waste of the reader's time or tending to lead one in a less than moral direction. Although Mercier doesn't say so, he is implying a problem of information overload.

In Bradbury's book the goal was to empty the minds of the population, make them passive, not thinking. Mercier's world was gathering all of the best of human knowledge, perhaps even re-writing it, as Paul Otlet proposed. (More on him in a moment.) Mercier's year 2500 world eliminated all the works of commentary on other works, treating them like unimportant rantings on today's social networks. Bradbury also did not mention secondary sources; he names no authors of history (although we don't know how he thought of Bertrand Russell, as philosopher or also a historian) or works of literary criticism.

Both Bradbury and Mercier would be considered well-read. But we are all like the blind men and the elephant. We all operate based on the information we have. Bradbury and Mercier each had very different minds because they had been informed by what they had read. For the mind it is "you are what you see and read." Mercier could not have named Thoreau and Bradbury did not mention any French philosophers. Had they each saved a segment of the written output of history their choices would have been very different with little overlap, although they both explicitly retain Shakespeare. Their goals, however, run in parallel, and in both cases the goal is to preserve those works that merit preserving so that they can be read now and in the future.  

In another approach to culling the mass of books and other papers, Kurt Vonnegut, in his absurdist manner, addressed the problem as one of information overload:

"In the year Ten Million, according to Koradubian, there would be a tremendous house-cleaning. All records relating to the period between the death of Christ and the year One Million A.D. would be hauled to dumps and burned. This would be done, said Koradubian, because museums and archives would be crowding the living right off the earth. 

The million-year period to which the burned junk related would be summed up in history books in one sentence, according to Koradubian: Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years." (Sirens of Titan, p. 46)

While one hears often about a passion for books, some disciplines rely on other types of publications, such as journal articles and conference papers. The passion for books rarely includes these except occasionally by mistake, such as the bound journals that were scanned by Google in its wholesale digitization of library shelves, and the aficionados of non-books are generally limited to specific forms, such as comic books. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Belgian Paul Otlet, a fascinating obsessive whose lifetime and interests coincided with that our own homegrown bibliographic obsessive, Melvil Dewey, began work leading to his creation of what was intended to be a universal bibliography that included both books and journal articles, as well as other publications. Otlet's project was aimed at all knowledge, not just that contained in books, and his organization solicited books and journals from European and North American learned societies, especially those operating in scientific areas. As befits a project with the grandiose goal of cataloging all of the world's information, Otlet named it the Mundaneum. Otlet represents another selection criterion, because his Mundaneum appears to have been limited to academic materials and serious works; at the least, there is no mention of fiction or poetry in what I have read on the topic.

Among Otlet's goals was to pull out information buried in books and bring related bits of information together. He called the result of this a Biblion. This Biblion sounds somewhat related to the abridgments and re-gatherings of information that Mercier describes in his book. It also sounds like what motivated the early encyclopedists. To Otlet, the book format was a barrier, since his goal was not the preservation of the volumes themselves, but was to be a centralized knowledge base.

So now we have a range of book preservation goals, from all the books to all the good books, and then to the useful information in books. Within the latter two we see that each selection represents a fairly limited viewpoint that would result in a loss of a large number of the books and other materials that are held in research libraries today. For those of us in libraries and archives, the need is to optimize quality without being arbitrary, and at the same time to serve a broad intellectual and creative base. We won't be as perfect as Otlet or as strict the librarians in the year 2500, but hopefully our preservation practices will be more predictable than the individual choices made by Bradbury's "human books."



* In the original French, the title referred to the year 2440 ("L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais"). I have no idea why it was rounded up to 2500 in the English translation.

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Works cited or used

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1953

Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred, London, Printed for G. Robinson, 1772 (HathiTrust copy)

Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2006

 Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2014.

All the Books

I just joined the Book of the Month Club. This is a throwback to my childhood, because my parents were members when I was young, and I still have some of the books they received through the club. I joined because my reading habits are narrowing, and I need someone to recommend books to me. And that brings me to "All the Books."

"All the Books" is a writing project I've had on my computer and in notes ever since Google announced that it was digitizing all the books in the world. (It did not do this.) The project was lauded in an article by Kevin Kelley in the New York Times Magazine of May 14, 2006, which he prefaced with:

"What will happen to books? Reader, take heart! Publisher, be very, very afraid. Internet search engines will set them free. A manifesto."

There are a number of things to say about All the Books. First, one would need to define "All" and "Books". (We can probably take "the" as it is.) The Google scanning projects defined this as "all the bound volumes on the shelves of certain libraries, unless they had physical problems that prevented scanning." This of course defines neither "All" nor "Books".

Next, one would need to gather the use cases for this digital corpus. Through the HathiTrust project we know that a small number of scholars are using the digital files for research into language usage over time. Others are using the the files to search for specific words or names, discovering new sources of information about possibly obscure topics. As far as I can tell, no one is using these files to read books. The Open Library, on the other hand, is lending digitized books as ebooks for reading. This brings us to the statement that was made by a Questia sales person many years ago, when there were no ebooks and screens were those flickery CRTs: "Our books are for research, not reading." Given that their audience was undergraduate students trying to finish a paper by 9:30 a.m. the next morning, this was an actual use case with actual users. But the fact that one does research in texts one does not read is, of course, not ideal from a knowledge acquisition point of view.

My biggest beef with "All the Books" is that it treats them as an undifferentiated mass, as if all the books are equal. I always come back to the fact that if you read one book every week for 60 years (which is a good pace) you will have read 3,120. Up that to two books a week and you've covered 6,240 of the estimated 200-300 million books represented in WorldCat. The problem isn't that we don't have enough books to read; the problem is finding the 3-6,000 books that will give us the knowledge we need to face life, and be a source of pleasure while we do so. "All the Books" ignores the heights of knowledge, of culture, and of art that can be found in some of the books. Like Sarah Palin's response to the question "Which newspapers form your world view?", "all of them" is inherently an anti-intellectual answer, either by someone who doesn't read any of them, or who isn't able to distinguish the differences.

"All the Books" is a complex concept. It includes religious identity; the effect of printing on book dissemination; the loss of Latin as a universal language for scholars; the rise of non-textual media. I hope to hunker down and write this piece, but meanwhile, this is a taste.

Elkins Park

Many of you will have heard the name "Elkins Park" for the first time this week as the jurisdiction of Bill Cosby indictment. It is undoubtedly the most famous thing that Elkins Park has been known for. However, it has a connection to books and libraries that those of us involved with books and libraries should celebrate as a counter to this newly acquired notoriety.

The Elkins family was one of the 19th century's big names in Pennsylvania. William Lukens Elkins was one of the first "oil barons" whose company was the first to produce gasoline, just in time for the industrial and transportation revolution that would use untold gallons of the stuff. His business partner was Peter Widener, and the two families were intertwined through generations, their Philadelphia mansions built across the street from each other.

Eleanor Elkins, daughter of WL Elkins, married George Widener, son of Peter Widener, essentially marrying the two families. Eleanor and George had a son, Harry. Unfortunately, they were rich enough to book passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912. George and Harry perished; Eleanor Elkins Widener survived.

Harry Widener had been an avid book collector, sharing this interest with his best friend, William McIntire Elkins. Harry had graduated from Harvard, as had his friend WM Elkins, and his will instructed his mother to donate his collection to Harvard, "to be known as the Harry Elkins Widener Collection." His mother took it one further and funded the creation of a new library that would house both her son's collection but also the entire Harvard library collection. Yes, I am talking about the now famous Widener Library.

His friend, William McIntire Elkins, lived until 1947, and during his lifetime amassed a huge rare book collection. He was particularly interested in Dickensiana, which included not only first serially published editions of Dickens' works, but also Dickens' desk, candlesticks, ink well, etc. His will left his entire collection to the Free Library of Philadelphia. Well, it turned out that it was not only his book collection, but the entire room, which was moved into the library, looking much as it did during Elkins' life.

Elkins Park is named, of course, for the Elkins family whose massive estate held an impressive array of mansions and grounds. Much of the estate has been divided up and sold off, but portions remain.

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So that's the story of Elkins Park and how it fits into libraries and the rarified world of rare books. But I have another small bit to add to the story. In 1947, at the time of his death, John and Eleanor King, my grandparents, were working for (as he was known in my family) "old man Elkins" -- that is William McIntire Elkins. My grandfather was gardener and chauffeur for Elkins, and my grandmother was (as she called it) the executive of the household. When the library was transferred to the Free Library of Philadelphia, photographs were taken out the windows so that the "view" could be reproduced. Those photographs show the grounds that my grandfather cared for, and the room itself was undoubtedly very familiar to my grandmother (although she would never admit to having done any dusting with her own hand). A small amount bequeathed to them in Elkins' will allowed them to own their own property for the first time, just a few acres, but enough to live on, with sheep and chickens and a single steer. I have early memories of that farm, and a few family photos. Little did any of us know at the time that I would reconnect all of this because of books.

Libraries, Books, and Elitism

"So is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold? Perversely, the most popular service at some libraries has become free Internet access. People wait in line for terminals that will let them play solitaire and Minecraft, and librarians provide coffee. Other patrons stay in their cars outside just to use the Wi-Fi. No one can be happy with a situation that reduces the library to a Starbucks wannabe."

James Gleick, "What Libraries (Still) Can Do" NYRDaily October 26, 2015

This is one of the worst examples of snobbery and elitism in relation to libraries that I have seen in a long time. It is also horribly uninformed. Let me disassemble this a bit.

First, libraries as places to gather is not new. Libraries in ancient Greece were designed as large open spaces with cubbies for scrolls around the inside wall. Very little of the space was taken up with that era's version of the book. They existed both as storehouses for the written word but also a place where scholars would come together to discuss ideas. Today, when students are asked what they want from their library, one of the highest ranked services is study space. There is nothing wrong with studying in a library; in fact, as anyone with a home office knows, having a physical space where you do your studying and thinking helps one focus the mind and be productive. 

Next, the dismissive and erroneous statement that people use "terminals" (when have you last heard computers called that?) to play solitaire and Minecraft completely ignores that fact that many of our information sources today are available only through online access, including information sources available to most users only through the library. If you want to look up journal articles you need the library's online access. Second, many social services are available online. The US government and most state governments no longer provide libraries with hard copies of documents, but make them available online. From IRS tax preparation help to information about state law and city zoning ordinances, you absolutely must have Internet access. Internet access is no longer optional for civic life. I can't imagine that anyone is waiting in line at a library for a one-hour slot to build their Minecraft world, but if they are, then I'm fine with that. It's no less "library-like" than using the library to read People magazine or check out a romance novel. (Gleick is probably against those, too.)

Gleick doesn't seem to know (and perhaps Palfrey, whose book he is reviewing, ditto) that libraries have limits on ebook lending.

And a library that could lend any e-book, without restriction, en masse, would be the perfect fatal competitor to bookstores and authors hoping to sell e-books for money. Something will have to give. Palfrey suggests that Congress could create “a compulsory license system to cover digital lending through libraries,” allowing for payment of fair royalties to the authors. Many countries, including most of Europe, have public lending right programs for this purpose.

This completely misses the point. Libraries already lend e-books, with restriction, and they pay for them in the same way that they pay for paper books -- by paying for each copy that they lend. Suggesting a compulsory license is not a solution, and the public lending right that is common in Europe is for hard copy books as well as e-books. The difference being that the payment for lending in those countries does not come out of library budgets but is often paid out of a central fund supporting the arts. Given that the US has a very low level of government funding for the arts, and that libraries are not funded through a single government mechanism, a public lending payment would be extremely difficult to develop in this country.  There is the very real risk that it would take money out of already stretched library budgets and would  further disadvantage those library systems that are struggling the most to overcome poor local funding.

I don't at all mind folks having an opinion about libraries, about what they like and what they want. But I would hope that a researcher like Gleick would do at least as much research about libraries as he does about other subjects he expounds on. They - we - deserve the same attention to truth.

The book you scroll

I was traveling in Italy where I spend a lot of time in bookstores. I'm looking not only for books to read, but to discover new authors, since Italian bookstores are filled with translations of authors that I rarely see in the few bookstores remaining in my home town of Berkeley, CA. While there I came across something that I find fascinating: the flipback book. These books are small - the one I picked up is about 4 3/4" x 3 1/4". It feels like a good-sized package of post-it notes in your hand.

 From the outside, other than its size, looks "normal" although the cover design is in landscape rather than portrait  position.

The surprise is when you open the book. The first thing you notice is that you read the book top-to-bottom across two pages. It's almost like scrolling on a web page, because you move the pages up, not across.

The other thing is that they are incredibly compact. The paper is thin, and some of the books contained entire trilogies, although only about 2 - 2.5 inches thick.

Because there is no gutter between the two pages, you essentially get a quantity of text that is equal to what you get on a regular book page. Oddly, the two contiguous pages are numbered as separate pages, although only the odd numbers actually printed, so you have pages 37, 39, 41, etc. However, the actual number of open pages is about the same as the paperback book.

The font is a sans serif, similar to many used online, so that whole thing feels like a paper book imitating a computer screen.

I haven't read the book yet, so I don't know if the reading experience is pleasing. But I am amazed that someone has found a way to reinvent the print book after all these years. Patented, of course.

There are few titles available yet, but an Amazon search on "flipback" brings up a few.

The "Mellen Mess" and the changing role of publishers

Reading about the "Mellen Mess" -- the case of the publisher that is suing a librarian who criticized the quality of the houses's output -- I found the most interesting discussion to have taken place in the comments area of the original post (available via the Wayback Machine). One poster says:

On the other hand, I would say that few if any publishers do not publish a number of books that I would not buy.

To which Dale Askey replies:

The fact is, however, that libraries have to be able to trust presses to turn out good titles, or our work becomes impossible given the sheer global output of scholarship... libraries lack enough qualified subject expertise to make such judgments at the necessarily granular level, and the trend here is not encouraging. Subject librarianship is dismissed as a relic of a past age, and we now talk about “patron-driven” acquisition as if it were the Holy Grail. Having spent a brief but wonderful portion of my career as a focused subject librarian for an area where I have expertise, I know the benefit of reading substantive reviews and making intelligent choices about individual titles, but even that library no longer has the funds (or perhaps just lacks the will to commit the funds) for such esoteric enterprises.

What I think we see here is evidence of a substantial change in what it means to be a publisher in this age of "everyone can be a publisher." First, a little history.

Turin book fair, 2007

The first followers of Gutenberg were equal parts scholar, technician and businessman. There was never any question that producing print was a for-profit activity, and the same printers who turned out carefully edited classics also printed the first advertisements as well as a large number of indulgences to be sold to wealthy (but not well-behaved) Catholics. Well into the late 19th century, publishers were also printers, and often saw themselves as having a key role in scholarship and culture. The reputation of the publisher was what made the introduction of new, unknown authors possible.

Turin book fair, 2007

Although I am at my very core a "book person," I was unaware of the culture of publishers before visiting Europe and attending both bookstores and a few book fairs there. What struck me immediately was that the book covers represented the publisher more than the book itself. Near a university I found a bookstore that was entirely organized by publisher -- not by topic -- so that the only access other than "known item" was browsing by publisher.

 By my own observation, by the 1950's the role of the publisher in the US was subordinated to the book, preferably a best-seller. We could all name key books (Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), but I doubt if many of us could name the publishing house that issued them.

As Epstein and Schiffrin explain (see Further Reading), the purchase of publishing houses in the late 20th century by companies with a primary interest in profits, unhindered with cultural concerns, has made the publishing house no more than another business. From scholar-printer-businessman, only the latter role remains. If "best-selling" is your idea of quality, then these publishers can be considered consistent and trustworthy. If you are looking for greater cultural pursuits, you will probably be disappointed.

While that describes popular publishing, scholarly publishing has retained the publisher reputation... at least until very recently. While there still are known scholarly publishers whose output can be trusted sight un-seen (as Askey explains), there are many new entrants to this business area whose primary goal is income, not scholarship itself. This seems to be following a similar path to that of popular publishing, but with a twist: scholars must publish. The real culprit in this story is the "publish or perish" culture of academia. It matters not that there is no audience for a scholar's work; in fact, being actually read is rather icing on the cake. The main thing is that a scholar must get his or her work produced by someone acting as a publisher. It is therefore unremarkable that publishers have come on the scene to address this market.

The big "however" here is that while author fees may cover the cost (plus profit) of publishing an open access article, printed books still need to have some sales. Throughout the history of publishing, vanity books have been known as money-losers,* and some publishers have contracted with the authors to buy back any un-sold copies. This is more than an un-tenured faculty member can afford, however, so the business of publishing books by academics is one that wise investors would avoid.

The upshot of the story here is that we've gotten ourselves into an untenable position between the pressure to publish and the actual market for published works. Something has to give, and it has to give at both ends of the equation.

The next step, then, is improving the social media that the academic community uses so that the "post publication peer review" becomes the filter for quality and importance. 

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* I ran into a great rant by a 19th c. Italian publisher about vanity publishing while doing research on Natale Battezzati. I unfortunately didn't mark it, but if I find it again I will link it here.


Further Reading

Epstein, Jason. Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso, 2000.

Book people v. article people

I am definitely a book person. When I want to learn about something, I want to read hundreds of pages about it. I have a half dozen books on copyright, more than a dozen about the social "questions" around the Internet, a handful on the Semantic Web, two shelves of books on libraries (history, cataloging, theory of knowledge organization), and now four books on cognitive science and the theories around concepts.

I've done work with people who are definitely "article people." Mostly academics, these folks rarely delve into a book since their scholarly conversation takes place in articles published in journals. My guess is that once you reach the level of knowledge that these folks possess, the breadth of a book contains nothing new and all of the interesting stuff comes out in article-sized chunks.

I also like to follow-up on my reading. When a bit of reading focuses around a place, like Bletchley Park or Los Alamos (as recent books on computer history do) I have to find them on a map. Concepts mentioned but not covered in detail require a visit to Wikipedia. I hunt down works cited in particularly intriguing passages. And it is in the midst of this last activity that I run into perhaps a hint about my attraction to books.

Because I am "unaffiliated" with an institute of higher education, it is easier for me to obtain books than to obtain articles. Books are available used or new in an open marketplace, and I find it to be rare that there is reference to a book that I cannot get at what seems to me to be a reasonable rate. But when I look up an article that I might be interested in, I often get something like:

 or

Yes, Wiley asks for $29.95 for an article, and JSTOR asks $38.00. I have seen these prices on articles as short as six pages. These prices are for the download of a PDF file, not an offprint to be delivered by express mail. I can only assume that they have no desire to sell access to individual articles, because the pricing is so out of whack with retail publishing. Remember, these are academic articles that quite frankly haven't a large audience. But they already exist in PDF and are available to members of subscribing institutions. In a world of $.99 pop songs and $9.99 best-selling e-books, these prices are just absurd.

One of the books I am reading at the moment is a compilation of essays called "Concepts: core readings." At least five of the essays were previously published in journals and when I looked them up the download price was $39.95 each. That's  about $200 for 100 pages of a 650-page book that retails for $55.

If we want "equal access to information," as we often claim we librarians do, then we need to do something about journal article pricing. I'd be quite willing to pay $2-$4 for an article, but the $30-$40 price range is ridiculous. I'm sure that these journal companies sell very few, if any, full-price articles. As we've seen with other media, when the price is right, it becomes as convenient to pay the price as it is to bother to pirate the materials (which in my case means borrowing someone's academic identity). Surely selling zero articles at $39.95 isn't better than selling a handful of articles at $2 each.

It's great that JSTOR is now offering some articles for free (although I have yet to be able to create an account since their site just hangs when I try), and I wouldn't suggest that JSTOR should be providing an entirely free service, since they have expenses. But $38 for an article is not just too much, it is prohibitive, and it unnecessarily creates an inequality of access. Someone needs to do to the journal publishers what Apple did to the music industry: show them the money.

Google/AAP settlement

This Google/AAP settlement has hit my brain like a steel ball in a pinball machine, careening around and setting off bells and lights in all directions. In other words, where do I start?

Reading the FAQ (not the full 140+ page document), it seems to go like this:

Google makes a copy of a book.
Google lets people search on words in the book.
Google lets people pay to see the book, perhaps buy the book, with some money going to the rights holder.
Google manages all of this with a registry of rights.

Now, replace the word "Google" above with "Kinko's."

Next, replace the word "Google" above with "A library."

TILT! If Google is allowed to do this, shouldn't anyone be allowed to do it? Is Jeff Bezos kicking himself right now for playing by the rules? Did Google win by going ahead and doing what no one else dared to do? Can they, like Microsoft, flaunt the law because they can buy their way out of any legal pickle?

Ping! Next thought: we already have vendors of e-books who provide this service for libraries. They serve up digital, encoded versions of the books, not scans of pages. These digital books often have some very useful features, such as allowing the user to make notes, copy quotes of a certain length, create bookmarks, etc. The current Google Books offering is very feature poor. Also, because it is based on scans, there is no flowing of pages to fit the screen. The OCR is too poor to be useful to the sight-impaired. And if they sell books, what will the format be?

TILT! Will it even be legal for a publicly-funded library to provide Google books if they aren't ADA compliant?

Ping! This one I have to quote:

"Public libraries are eligible to receive one free Public Access Service license for a computer located on-site at each of their library buildings in the United States. Public libraries will also be able to purchase a subscription which would allow them to offer access on additional terminals within the library building and would eliminate the requirement of a per page printing fee. Higher education institutions will also be eligible to receive free Public Access Service licenses for on-site computers, the exact number of which will depend on the number of students enrolled."

TILT! Were any public libraries asked about this? Does anyone have an idea of what it will cost them to 1) manage this limited access and pay-per-page printing 2) obtain more licenses when demand rises? Remember when public libraries only had one machine hooked up to the Internet? Is this the free taste that leads to the Google Books habit?

Ping! The e-book vendors only provide books where they have an agreement with the publishers, thus no orphan works are included. So, will Google's niche mainly consist of providing access to orphan works? Or will the current e-book vendors be forced out of the market because Google's total base is larger, even though the product may be inferior?

Ping! We already have a licensor of rights, the Copyright Clearance Center, and it was founded with the support of the very folks (the AAP) who have now agreed to create another organization, funded initially by Google and responding only to the licensing of Google-held content.

TILT! Google books gets its own licensing service, its own storefront... can anyone compete with that? And what happens to anything that Google doesn't have?

Ping! It looks like Google will collect fees on all books that are not in the public domain. This means that users will pay to view orphan works, even though a vast number of them are actually in the public domain. Unclaimed fees will go to pay for the licensing service. Thus, users will be paying for the service itself, and will be paying to view books they should be able to access freely and for free.

Ping! We have a copyright office run by the US government. I'm beginning to wonder what that Copyright Office does, however, since we now have two non-profit organizations in the business of managing rights, plus others getting into the game, such as OCLC with its rights assessment registry, and folks like Creative Commons. Shouldn't the Copyright Office be the go-to place to find out who owns the rights to a work? Shouldn't we be scanning the documents held by the Copyright Office that tell us who has rights? (Note: the famed renewal database is actually a scan of the INDEX to the copyright renewal documents, not the full information about renewal.) Even if we had access to every copyright registration document in the Copyright Office, would we know who owns various rights? I think not. And how much of this will change with the Google opt-in system? I get the feeling that we'll maybe resolve some small percentage of rights questions, somewhere in the order of 2-5%. And it will, in the end, all be paid for by readers, or by libraries on behalf of readers.

TILT! Rights holders can opt-out of the Google Books database. If (when) Google has the monopoly on books online, opt-out will be a nifty form of censorship. Actually, censorship aimed directly at Google will be a nifty form of censorship.

GAME OVER. All your book belong to us.

Glut? Gunk!

You've probably had the experience of participating in some activity that was later covered by print or TV news. In many cases, the report of the event is so wrong, so different to what you experienced, that you could hardly recognize it as being the same event. Similarly, when reporters write about something you know intimately, the reports are almost always aggravatingly wrong.

The same is true about books, of course. I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which drove real scientists nuts for everything it got wrong. Now I'm going out of my mind reading Alex Wright's Glut, which I can only describe as poorly researched, and in some cases just outright wrong.

I became suspicious when I read on page 21

"It is no coincidence that snakes have been a leading cause of human mortality throughout our species' history, so it should come as no surprise that the occurrence of serpent imagery tracks closely to the prevalence of poisonous snakes in particular regions."

I don't doubt that snakes are scary creatures and they sure do seem to show up in all kinds of ancient imagery and tales, but "a leading cause of human mortality"? I don't think so. Famine, pestilence, war -- those are leading causes of human mortality. Snakes? A drop in the bucket.

OK, we all can slip up when we get going at the keyboard, and I figured that his editors just hadn't paid attention. Then I got to page 79 where he says:

"... a new form of document: the codex book, so named because it originated from attempts to 'codify' the Roman law in a format that supported easier information retrieval."

Codex comes from "codify"? Were the Romans speaking English? And besides, I'd recently read a few books on book history myself and those all referred to that origin as being from the Latin term "caudex" referring to wood used as the first book covers. The use of "code" for groups of laws came from the term "codex," not vice versa. I began to wonder where he would have gotten such a definition, and on a hunch decided to look at the Wikipedia entry on Codex. There had been some confusion between codex and code in an early Wikipedia version of the codex page, and it was removed:

"Mistaking Codex for Code

I moved this mis-stated misunderstanding here: "A legal text or code of conduct is sometimes called a codex (for example, the Justinian Codex), since laws were recorded in large codices." This is simply an error, one that doesn't come into educated or official discourse. --Wetman 20:14, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I have no idea if that is where Wright got his information, but this statement makes the same mistake that Wright does.

I have kept reading, I guess because I wanted to get to his treatment of more modern times. I've gotten as far as Panizzi, but had to get all of this out of my system before going on. On page 167, Wright quotes a biographer, one Louis Fagan, on Panizzi's appearance. I looked at the citation for the quote and found:

"3. Louis Fagan, quoted in Teresa Negrucci, 'Historiography of Antonio Panizzi,' 2001, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/maack/Panizzi.doc"

I looked up the paper online, and Ms. Negrucci was a student in the UCLA library school at the time of writing this paper, done for IS 281 "Historical Methodology for Library and Information Science." (The citation above is no longer valid. You can find it linked from this page of student writings.) A perfectly fine school paper, but probably not an authoritative source. Plus, I was taught that you only took quotes from someone else if the original is terribly hard to get to. Fagan's book is available in at least 80 US libraries, according to WorldCat, although today I was able to get to it online. Now, I admit that the book may not have been available via Google Book Search when Wright was composing his work, but by no means is the original inaccessible. In fact, if he had looked at the original, rather than the student paper, he would have understood that Fagan was quoting someone else in his description of Panizzi, not making the statement himself, as Wright states.

It's not an important point nor a particularly important passage, but it is sloppy scholarship. It means he took his information from someone else and did not verify the original source. In fact, of the about 260 citations in the book (and I'm counting all of the "ibid's" in this) a full 52 are "quoted in" or "cited by," and mainly the former. The entire first half of the book, which is on ancient and medieval history, uses modern sources almost exclusively. One chapter, on memory, cites only six discrete works, and takes quotes of Thomas Aquinas, Giulio Camillo, John Willis, John Wilkins, and Francis Bacon second-hand from books published mainly in the 1990's. In that chapter, only one "ancient" quote is from an original source. One of the citations referring to Wilkins is to a BBC web site page. It's no longer available. I might be just being mean, but I can find the BBC page cited on the Wikipedia entry for John Wilkins in the Wikipedia version prior to the date of Wright's citation, although it has since been removed. I don't at all mind people using Wikipedia for its basic purpose: to give one a clue and lead one on to sources. And of course we all jump on to the nearest bit of information on the web. But when researching a well-known historical figure, it really is important to cite a good, permanent resource, and in terms of Wilkin, other resources should be available.

As for Panizzi, Wright talks about his creation of a schedule of tiered subject headings. On page 168 he has a quote from Elaine Svenonius that implies some criticism of Panizzi's work.

"Some would argue [the subject headings] were too ambitious -- that there was no need to construct elaborate Victorian edifices since jerrybuilt systems could meet the needs of most users most of the time."

The bracketed words "the subject headings" was added by Wright. In fact, Svenonius was not referring to Panizzi's headings. The quoted passage is about "systems produced during the second half of the nineteenth century," ("Victorian" should be a hint) which would be after Panizzi, whose primary work was done earlier in that century. And the full quote, with no reference to subject headings, is:

"The systems produced during the second half of the nineteenth century, a period regarded as a golden age of organizational activity, [cites Cutter 1904] were ambitious, full-featured systems designed to meet the needs of the most demanding users. Some would argue that they were too ambitious -- that there was no need to construct elaborate Victorian edifices since jerrybuilt systems could meet the needs of most users most of the time. [cites Coffman]" Svenonius, p. 3

The Cutter reference is to his 4th edition of Rules for a Dictionary Catalog. The sentence quoted by Wright is a reference to American Libraries article by Steve Coffman called "What If You Ran Your Library Like a Bookstore?".

Must I go on? I was able to check this one reference carefully because I happened to have the Svenonius book on my own bookshelf. I have no reason to believe that the rest of his text is any more accurate or faithful to the sources he cites. I suppose the one consolation is that in spite of his MLS from Simmons, Alex Wright calls himself an Information Architect, eschewing the "L" word. I wouldn't want people to think that librarians don't know how to do research.

So it goes

Kurt Vonnegut now exists in all of his past moments, but there will be no more future ones. Vonnegut was/is a an odd character. As an author, he wrote rather disjointed texts in the unflowery language of a college freshman, with short paragraphs that often end in a punch line. He made it a point to write nothing high-minded, to avoid creating literature.

When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while. He had a terrible scar across the top of his skull. He didn't resume practice. He had a housekeeper. His daughter came over almost every day. (Slaughter-House Five, p. 25)

None of his characters were heroes. Some of them weren't even interesting. Billy Pilgrim, the time-travelling character of Slaughter-House Five, is an optometrist. Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a Service Engineer with General Electric, turned Nazi. Many of his characters are writers, usually unsuccessful ones. One of these is Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer that no one has ever heard of.

His books are about death, war, religion, more death. And somehow the man managed to be adolescent throughout his life, at least as far as his writing is concerned.

"Maturity," Bokonon tells us, "is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything." (Cat's Cradle, p. 198)

I had my own run-in with Vonnegut, or with a distant digital surrogate of him. The story is rather Vonnegutian in nature. In 1999 I wrote a short piece called "Information Granfalloons" that I put on my web site. The term Granfalloons comes from Cat's Cradle, and it represents a group that is based on meaningless characteristics. In the book, Hoosiers are an example of a Granfalloon. There is nothing important in anyone's life about belonging to such a group. A meaningful group is a Karass. If you lived in a commune, you would probably see the members of the commune as a Karass, but a Karass can also be people you encounter throughout your life who make some kind of difference in your life. (When Vonnegut explains it, it comes out as a joke, of course.) Trying to explain why the Internet is not a library, I used Vonnegut's terms from Cat's Cradle: the Internet is a Granfalloon, and the library is a Karass.

I was very surprised, a year or so later, to see in my web logs hits coming to my site from rosetta.com. I went onto the site and tracked it down to the page where they were (and still are) selling an ebook version of Cat's Cradle. Rosetta was at the time embroiled in a copyright battle with some hard copy publishers of its books who claimed that only they had the rights to produce the books. (See second part of this article by Lolly Gassaway.) Rosetta was claiming that the original contracts were for the publishing of books, and that the dictionary defined a book as "printing on paper." Since the ebooks were not printed on paper, the contract for the hardcopy did not not apply. The judge agreed, and Rosetta is still selling these books, victorious in its copyright battle.

There's a link from the Cat's Cradle page called "Commentary" that links directly to my piece on Information Granfalloons. I was both pleased and a little miffed. They hadn't asked permission, and I didn't like my piece being used on a commercial web site. But it seemed only right to take a Vonnegutian attitude about it. I could conclude that my piece, should anyone actually read it once they reached my web site, was as likely to put off a potential purchaser as it was to encourage him or her to buy the book. The only plausible approach for me to take was to just say "So it goes."

I hope they bury him with a tombstone like the one from Slaughterhouse Five. It reads:

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

It's funny, because we know it isn't true.