Four short links: 21 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Space arrays, mobile hell, book scanners, and open source brains:

1. Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Wired) -- Satellite hackers in Brazil are bouncing ham signals off a disused US military satellite array. Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations. [...] "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil." As William Gibson said, "the street finds its own uses for things." One man's space junk is another man's Make project. (via BoingBoing)
2. My Students, My Cellphone, My Ordeal -- there's probably a market selling lightweight forensic tools to schools, specifically to avoid scenarios like this poor man's.
3. DIY High Speed Book Scanner From Trash and Cheap Cameras (Instructables) -- $300 of parts gets you a reasonably high-quality scanner. It doesn't have an automatic page turner, but it's still a step up on "open the scanner lid, change the page, close the lid, hit scan, wait, [repeat until braindead]". We have a huge legacy of analog, and we're going to need consumer-grade consumer-priced systems if we are to rip-mix-burn our cultural legacy. What would the Google Books settlement look like if we all had high-speed scanners to do to our bookshelves what iTunes did to our CD shelves? (via BoingBoing)
4. OpenCog Brainwave Projects in Google's Summer of Code -- in case you think GSoC is all about GNOME apps getting alternate shortcuts for DVORAK keyboards, there's some esoteric stuff being approved. I wish that when I was a college student someone had paid me to work on a Application of Pleasure Algorithm Project.

Four short links: 7 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

Maps, meaning, makers, and orphaned works:

1. Lens Tools and Fisheye Map Browsing -- a summary of magnification in maps through history, culminating in use of the fisheye/lens as a way to explore layers and data in thematic maps. (via Titine's delicious stream)
2. Socially Relevant Computing -- frustrated by the meaningless examples and work in computer science classes, Mike Buckley started sending students into the real world and building projects for handicapped people, firefighters, children, etc. Read their SIGCSE paper (PDF) for more. (via Andy Oram)
3. Maker Faire Africa -- I wish I could go!
4. Google Book Search Lawsuit Settlement Analysis -- finally a simple statement of why many folks aren't happy with the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: Thanks to the magic of the class action mechanism, the settlement will confer on Google a kind of legal immunity that cannot be obtained at any price through a purely private negotiation. It confers on Google immunity not only against suits brought by the actual members of the organizations that sued Google, but also against suits brought by anyone who doesn’t explicitly opt out. That means that Google will be free to mine the vast body of orphan works without fear of liability. Any competitor that wants to get the same legal immunity Google is getting will have to take the same steps Google did: start scanning books without the publishers’ and authors’ permission, get sued by authors and publishers as a class, and then negotiate a settlement. The problem is that they’ll have no guarantee that the authors and publishers will play along. (via Glynn Moody)

At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge

by Linda Stone | comments: 11

I’ve been following Brewster Kahle and Robert Darnton, a University Professor and director of Harvard’s Library, recently, and they’re concerned over the settlement of the lawsuit between Google and the authors and publishers, over the scanning and use of books in Google Book Search. In my experience, Brewster is extraordinarily thoughtful and takes a long view. Early in my career, I was a librarian. I love books. So while I’m not a lawyer and I find this settlement confusing, I’m writing about it because I think it merits awareness and a serious discussion.

The key issues appear to be whether the business model created by the settlement will lock up content that essentially belongs to the public domain (per Brewster) and whether the publishers’ and authors’ creation of a Google monopoly for books will harm access to knowledge in the future (per Darnton). Below, I’m relying on their words to explain this further.

Last week Brewster posted “It’s All About the Orphans” (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/02/23/its-all-about-the-orphans/) on the blog of the Open Content Alliance, focusing on the plight of “orphan works” - that vast number of books that are still under copyright but whose authors can no longer be found:

"After digesting the proposed Google Book Settlement, it becomes clear that the dizzyingly complex agreement is, in essence, an elaborate scheme for the exploitation of orphan works… The upshot, if the Settlement is approved, would be legal protection for Google, and only for Google, to scan and provide digital access to the orphan works. Presto! … So, should the Settlement be approved, Google will be handed exclusive access to the orphans, and the public loses out… I, personally, am amazed at this creative use of class action law. The three parties have managed to skirt copyright law, bypass legislative efforts, and feather their own nests - all through the clever use of law intended to remedy harms. This Settlement, if approved by the judge, will accomplish things appropriate to a legislative body not to private corporate boardrooms. Let’s live under the rule of law, as arduous as that might be, and free the orphans, legitimately, not for one corporation but for all of us."

And in “Google & the Future of Books” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281), an article that Darnton published in The New York Review of Books last month, the focus is slightly different but the upshot is the same:

"After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese - one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world's largest library… Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business - not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon… The class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition… We are allowing a question of public policy - the control of access to information - to be determined by private lawsuit… As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly - a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information… The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company… This is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever."

A lot seems to be at stake and the court may approve the settlement in June! I don't care if the settlement means that Google will get even richer (disclosure: I’m a Google shareholder). The question is: to what extent will WE become poorer?

Four short links: 5 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

Google Books, conference books, a museum API, and some number silliness that makes me happy.

1. Jon Orwant on Google Book Search at TOC -- Jon drops info on conversion rates, future plans, mobile, etc. See this post for a roundup of blog-world commentary on the talk.
2. Brooklyn Museum Collection API -- I've linked to this amazing museum work before. Now they have an API. Search collections, fetch items, embed in your sites. (via the announcement)
3. Not So Empty Book -- a magazine, built from conference content, four editions of of which were published during the brief course of the LIFT conference this year. Brilliant!
4. March 5 is the Square Root of Christmas (Ned Batchedler) -- maths geekery like this is why I found it difficult to date when I was younger. (I solved the problem by marrying someone who, when I read this post to her, said "oh COOL!")

Competition in the eBook Market

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 9

There's been a lot of buzz on forward-looking publisher mailing lists in the past few days about Robert Darnton's piece in the New York Review of Books, Google and the Future of Books. When it hit techmeme today, I thought it might be appropriate to share more broadly the comments I made on the Reading 2.0 list (links added, minor edits):

Darnton's piece is eloquent, insightful...and wrong. I loved his history of the idea of reading as a driver for the enlightenment and the dream of America, his evident love for the mission of the librarian, and his worried disdain for profiteers who limit that mission, but on the subject of the Google Book Search settlement stifling competition, he can't be paying attention to the fact that the electronic book marketplace is finally taking off!

There has never been more competition either in electronic books, or for books, in the broader electronic "republic of letters."

It is true, perhaps, in the narrow sense, that no other party will be able to do a mass digitization project on the scale of Google's - but that was already true. The barrier has always been the willingness to spend a lot of money for little return; the settlement doesn't change that.

Meanwhile, the settlement provides absolutely no barrier to publishers providing their own digital copies, and this is in fact happening. At O'Reilly, we are selling digital copies of all our books through subscription services like Safari Books Online (which also includes thousands of books from other publishers), as direct downloads from our web site in pdf, mobi, and epub formats, and through emerging ebook channels like Amazon's Kindle, Stanza, and the iPhone app store.

Safari is now O'Reilly's #2 channel, behind only Amazon. Meanwhile, in its first month of sales, our IPhone: The Missing Manual, released as a standalone iPhone app (really, a bundle with Stanza) reached sales levels that would have made it the #1 computer book, beating all print computer books reported by Bookscan in that same period.)

In short, there's a strong economic motive for publishers to release digital editions of their books, and to treat Google Books as only one possible channel. If the revenues generated by GBS (via services enabled by the settlement) are significant, new titles will be released to that channel by publishers. But there's no reason why publishers will release their titles through GBS in despite of other possible channels. Google will have to prove its value, just like any other reseller.

Frankly, I'd be far more worried about Darnton's wished-for utopia, in which the government had funded the equivalent, mandating that all publishers participate. That might well have nipped the competitive ebook landscape in the bud.

As it is, we see lots of different competing approaches to bootstrapping this market. I'd say it's opening up very nicely!

Meanwhile, the republic of letters, and the republic of ideas, has moved beyond books in substantial ways, into dialogs such as we have here, into blogs, onto web sites and other information services. It's alive and well! By the time I'm done, I imagine that my email correspondence and online writings would fill fifty volumes, just as did the physical letter writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau and Voltaire that Darnton rhapsodizes. If only my writings (and those of hundreds of millions of others) were so worth preserving!

This is not to say that there aren't serious concerns with the Google Book settlement. James Grimmelman wrote a fantastic piece back in November, Principles and Recommendations for the Google Book Search Settlement, that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand just what the settlement means and how it could be improved upon:

Summary of principles and recommendations (hyperlinks take you back to the section of the document that discusses them)

• P0: The settlement should be approved
  • R0: Approve the settlement.
• P1: The Registry poses an antitrust problem
  • R1: Put library and reader representatives on the Registry’s board.
  • R2: Require the Registry to sign an antitrust consent decree.
  • R3: Give future authors and publishers the same deal as current ones.
• P2 If it didn’t already, Google poses an antitrust problem
  • R4: Strike the most-favored-nations clause.
  • R5: Allow Google’s competitors to offer the same services the settlement allows Google to offer, with the same obligations.
  • R6: Authorize the Registry to negotiate on copyright owners’ behalf with Google’s competitors.
• P3: Enforce reasonable consumer-protection standards
  • R7: Prohibit Google from price discriminating in individual book sales.
  • R8: Insert strict guarantees of reader privacy.
  • R9: Protect readers from being asked to waive their rights as a condition of access.
• P4: Make the public goods generated by the project truly public
  • R10: Require that Google’s database of in-print/out-of-print information be made public.
  • R11: Require that the Registry’s database of copyright owner information be made public.
  • R12: Require the use of standard APIs, open data formats, and (for metadata) unrestricted access.
• P5: Require accountability and transparency
  • R13: Require that Google inform the public when it excludes a book for editorial reasons.
  • R14: Tighten up the definition of “non-editorial reasons” for excluding a book.
  • R15: Allow any institution ready, willing, and able to participate in scanning books to do so.

I'd add to those recommendations one more: book search should work like web search. That is, because of the powers given to Google under this settlement, Google searches should be required to present and rank results from all electronic copies of books that are available online, not giving preference to the copies in their own archives.

I stand by my assertion that Google Book Search is good for publishers, authors, and the reading public. While the settlement does give Google what seems to be unprecedented power over the market for out-of-print but not out-of-copyright books, I'm not sure that market matters all that much to publishers, and it matters a LOT to the public. And in any event:

1. If there is significant value to be derived from these "under copyright but out of print" books, GBS will bring that value to the surface, and will then get those works on the radar of those who own those rights (if those rightsholders still exist.) Those parties can then start to exploit those rights through other available channels.

2. If there is no rights-holder to be found, we're no worse off than we were before, since there was no way of recognizing that economic value anyway. So the GBS settlement is worse, say, than just reducing the length of copyright, or requiring regular re-registration to keep books in copyright, letting those that are orphaned go more quickly into the public domain, but it's not worse than the situation before the settlement, in which no one but google was spending the money to digitize these works anyway.

There are no fewer incentives to digitize valuable works than there were before, and one can argue that GBS will bring to light works that will then become available to competing digital channels in ways that wouldn't have happened without the settlement.