How many times have you been reading a book, come across a great quote and then, unless you're really analdiligent and somehow transcribed it, ended up forgetting all about it? I've always thought that the tipping point for e-books would be something that easily allowed you to track these quotes as you came across them. (Do me a favour and go read that old blog entry because man, it's prescient when you hear what I'm about to say next!)
And now, Amazon has released just such a feature for Kindle owners which track both the most highlighted books and individual passages from those books – with both all-time and recently highlighted lists for both books and passages.
Arguments rage on the Metafilter thread where I found this story about how much of an invasion of privacy this is and if its worse than the tracking Amazon does with any surfing you do on their site or what any other major Internet site does.
But overall, I think it's pretty cool. It might even become a new way to do a Coles notes-type speed reading of books that say, some blogger recommends but that you haven't got time to read for yourself. They don't have all the features I suggested in my earlier blog post (tagging, favouriting) but if that happens, look out!
Now, the biggest hurdle is that the Kindle isn't library friendly. I know I could never afford to actually buy copies – digital or dead tree – of every book I read. But some suggest that the Kindle could create a business model that could even replace public libraries! (Search for “public library” to find comment from Josh.)
Everybody's probably familiar with the sad story of Tori Stafford, the young girl from Woodstock, Ontario who was abducted and killed last year.
Recently, some new detail has apparently come to light but the judge has imposed a publication ban meaning no Canadian media can cover this aspect of the trial.
…the practical reality is that in the Internet age, trying to stop the
dissemination of information revealed in open court is impractical.
Indeed, placing limits on traditional, responsible media may be
counterproductive, as the only information available to the public will
be incomplete and rife with speculation and rumour.
As the Globe & Mail says, all a publication ban does is give free reign for anyone with an Internet connection to add their speculation to the mix (hi! ) or, with a couple carefully chosen keywords, even profit from the lurid interest. Some Canadian media outlets are doing the best they can to work within the ban, hypothetically musing their way through their reports.
A publication ban is doubly useless in the Internet age when a blogger OR a news outlet just across the US border in Buffalo or Cleveland could publish the details without any sanction as was frequently the case during the Karla Homolka trial.
Publication bans are even more useless in less sensationalistic circumstances. In the past, media have been prevented from revealing national election results from the east until polls have closed in the west. But again, anybody with an Internet connection and a modicum of technical knowledge could find out what was going on before going to cast their vote…as if enough people would ever be paying enough attention or change their vote significantly if they *did* see results for it to make a difference.
Finally, just as with the attention drawn by banned books pushing the questionable item to the top of the bestseller lists, a publication ban only serves to shine a light on information that would've likely made little more than a ripple otherwise.
The facts get distorted. This is going to snowball to epic proportions
and disgustingness. Really, I don’t understand how they’ll manage to
enforce hush-hushness. I’ve been going on Facebook all day to see if
anybody has posted anything about it. That’s so easy to do now, just put
up an anonymous page and say what you like. How are they going to stop
that? It’s impossible to keep secrets in this day and age.”
I rediscovered this this box in the garage recently and Pace was *very* excited to get so many “new” toys all at once!
For Pace, it's new but for me, this box contains so many childhood memories. I used to spend hours, not just re-enacting Star Wars & GI Joe scenes but using the figures to simulate hockey games, wrestling matches and football games. I used to act out movies, TV shows and rock bands with these figures – some based on real shows or bands I'd seen but many times creating originals out of my head.
If you didn't hear, Blippy, a site that encouraged users to share details about their credit card purchases in another escalation of the TMI world of social networking, had a wee glitch where a few actual credit card numbers were indexed by Google, not just the details of what was purchased and for how much. (Who didn't see that coming?)
Yet another site taking the concept of over-sharing to new levels is failin.gs which asks (or rather helps you ask) “What is wrong with me?” then lets your friends and others in your social circle give constructive criticism on ways you could improve yourself.
I'm usually pretty quick to join whatever new Web 2.0 fads come along and I actually thought about giving fallin.gs a try just to see what kind of feedback I got. Then I thought – actually there are probably some things better left for a private performance review at work and/or the detailed performance reviews I sometimes get at home!
[Edit: The NYT has a story about formspring.me, another site that's similar to failin.gs and which is apparently quite the rage among teeangers right now, precisely because it allows anonymous criticism and attacks.]
This is probably true in libraries too. We keep seeing studies that say that women are the majority of our patrons but often we don't ask why that is beyond “men don't read”.
There's also a gender bias in both publishing and libraries that the writer tip-toes around. But the truth is that the majority of people working in both publishing and libraries are female, the majority of library programmers are female, the majority of library collections development folks are female so a subtle bias is going to creep in no matter how conscious you try to be.
Men read. Tons of them do. But they are not marketed to, not targeted,
and often totally dismissed. Go to a book conference, a signing. Outside
of a Tucker Max event, what percentage of attendees are men?
I'm reminded of the program which I think ran in Southeast Regional where the branch held a “how to fix motorcycles” workshop. It was a huge success with tons of men in attendance. Same thing when another branch had a “hunting and fishing” program.
(Oh, and I happen to have read the mystery book described in the lead-off anecdote of the article. I'm glad that teen nephew of the publisher gave it a thumb's up! )
I recently gave kudos to the book “Crowdsourcing” which I'd just finished reading. You know a book's a good one when you're still thinking about it a few days later and you know it's a great one when you keep thinking of ways its lessons might apply in your everyday life beyond that.
How does that relate to libraries? Well, like the vast majority of organizations, libraries tend to have a hierarchical structure with a Director (and usually a Deputy Director) at the top then a variety of managers below that then supervisors then on down through the ranks.
Which makes me wonder? What if somebody tried to implement a completely crowd-sourced library? This would be a *major* shift for anyone used to working in hierarchies but it could produce some very interesting results. Tapping into a typical library's staff, you'd definitely have a large and varied crew and it's not hard to imagine how the advantages could manifest themselves.
Let's take a really simple example. Let's say you were trying to set-up a new adult program of some kind. In the traditional model, the decision might be made by someone like a Head of Programming in consultation with a Branch Manager and maybe (or maybe not) the actual staff who'd be delivering the program might have some input as well. Some libraries might do this via a committee structure, some might do it with a series of meetings.
Now, imagine the crowd-sourced library program. Suddenly, everyone on staff anywhere in the library could weigh in with their thoughts, likely via some web-based mechanism. Suddenly, the Pages might throw in some ideas about an upcoming but still underneath-the-radar new author that the Branch Manager wasn't aware of but the page knows because they're re-shelving those books constantly. Someone in another branch might be on the board of a community organization that connects to the theme of the program. The maintenance crew could share ideas from a perspective that the rest of the staff rarely consider (or at least consider to the same depth that the physical plant folks would.)
Or if you wanted to be truly crowd-sourced, you could open it up to the general public as well! After all, what are libraries at their core but a reflection of the communities in which they operate? And what better way to truly embody this (no, the occasional focus group doesn't cut it.)
[Edit: I did some further searching around after posting this and saw that the author of the crowdsourcing book is championing a “One Book, One Twitter” campaign based on the popular “One Book, One City” initiatives that have happened in various cities. Tomorrow's the last day so why not go vote?]
Our Deputy Director was in Chicago for a conference recently and brought home a really nice souvenir!
Shea's jealous that I got to play around with this as she wants an iPad more than I do. In reality, I've got mixed feelings about the device. I love my iPhone and though it's not perfect a perfect analogy, the “a bigger iPhone” analogy makes sense in many ways. But I also see many of the issues raised by folks like Cory Doctorow and others.
I think the secret of allaying my reservations is telling myself that I'm not buying a computer, I'm buying a toaster. It's just another appliance – only it's one that happens to go online and let you check e-mail and play games and stuff like that. If that means there are two types of computers in the future – mom and grandma-friendly iPads and the usual hacker/creator friendly laptops/desktops – so be it.
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