Should I be proud?

This blog comes up in the first page of results when you Google the words "delicious ass". Sorry folks, but everything here is SFW - unless you're interested in some hot library porn, in which case may I recommend Michael Griffith's excellent book Bibliophilia?

Jersey goes Google

Princeton University's library will become the 12th library to join Google Book Search, according to an article this morning that I found on Lifehacker's Daily News Roundup (credited to Yahoo News, ironically enough!). Score one for the Garden State!

This is of course wonderful news, as it demonstrates that after an initial period of uncertainty about getting involved in large-scale third party cooperative digitization projects, the big university libraries are beginning to see the benefits of letting the private sector help them with some of the heavy lifting. And from a practical standpoint, the more libraries that get involved with Google Book Search, the better chance they'll have to smooth out some of the rough edges in the existing service.

While it's great to have even just one copy of a rare or out-of-print text available, a lot of these books have experienced some significant wear and tear, so it would be nice to be able to consult multiple copies of the same edition scanned from other libraries. Not only would also vastly improve quality control to have additional copies available online, but from a digital Preservation angle the built-in redundancy would help Google and the library profession guard against any accidental data losses that may crop up in the medium and long-term.

And although as a librarian I naturally frown upon the practice of writing in a library text, in the digital aggregate these marginalia could one day prove as valuable as those found in the Medieval manuscript tradition. Imagine if these handwritten comments were also indexed by Google Book Search, such that when you looked at a particular item in a library's collection you could compare it against annotations made in every other known copy of that book as well. It seems a trivial thing until you reach a certain critical threshold of participation, at which point the study of library book marginalia could easily become a legitimate field of inquiry!

(Hmmm. I think I may have a thesis topic for a future Ph.D. here...)

Some new media business advice

Hey, content providers! Want to guarantee that your ebook venture will not exist in 5 years? Create a business model by which you force end-users to wait in a queue for the "copy" of the ebook you've sold access to. I'm sorry, maybe I've missed something here, but isn't the whole point of electronic books the fact that patrons can have these items when and where they want it, rather than placing holds and recalls and all of those other annoying dead tree library antics?

Unfortunately NetLibrary doesn't seem to have gotten the memo on this one. A rare misstep for parent company OCLC (short for Online Computer Library Center, Inc.), which is normally out on the cutting edge of the intersection of technology and books, NetLibrary tries to turn back the clock to the days when library patrons would literally come to blows over who got to use the Silverplatter CD-ROM next. It sucked then and it sucks now, especially when there's no reason on God's green earth for a library to agree to such crippling restrictions on ebook resources.

Maybe this is the library world's way of trying to persuade the publishing houses that we librarians are in fact not the enemy, but if the price to be paid for soothing Big Paper's nerves is committing to products that are as user-unfriendly as NetLibrary, maybe it's not worth it. I Googled "netlibrary sucks" just for the hell of it and got some independent confirmation of the kind of frustration its engendered among academic library users. Sez Leigh at Video Game Spaces:

It’s not very functional. It loads each page of the e-book (if you could call it that) separately. This means that, for one thing, it’s very slow to turn the page. It takes anywhere between 1-2 seconds to much longer than that to load the next page, depending on the time of day and the site traffic. The other aspect of the single-page loading feature is that you can’t just save the pdf to your hard drive and view it offline. No, you have to load the slow site with its clunky interface to view the book one page at a time.

That sort of interface is appropriate for something like Amazon, where it makes a lot of sense to put limits on the book viewing because they’re trying to sell a physical copy of the book. However, with an online library service it’s severely limiting. This sort of restricted viewing would be nearly last on my list of choices of how to read a book… slightly below a smelly and heavily highlighted used copy of the book, and slightly above a smelly and heavily highlighted used copy of the book that also has dead insects and vomit stains on the pages.

One of the other things that consistently irritates me about Netlibrary, other than this slow loading time, is that it logs you out after 15 minutes of inactivity. This means that you can’t take a break from reading or eat lunch or whatever unless you first write down the page number, because when you come back you’ll have to go through the lengthy process of loading the web page, logging in, finding your e-book again, and finding the page you were on, which is pretty slow because of the delay in loading each page individually.

It’s also only compatible with Windows, which means that if I want to read a Netlibrary book while I’m at school, I have to find the time to install Windows on my Macbook, which is really annoying. I’ve seen a lot of students with Macs this semester and these are all students that don’t have access to the service because of the poor design and limited compatibility. Also, it also doesn’t work for me in Firefox. I have to instead load Internet Explorer, with all of its security issues. Plus it occasionally hangs for no apparent reason (other than poor design), leaving me to spend a few minutes either trying to get it to load, or starting all over again with logging in, finding my book, and then slowly loading my page number.

Of course, the really insulting thing about Netlibrary is that they put all these restrictions in place at all, when they are a library service. I should be able to save the book to my hard drive, to be viewed offline at my convenience in the pdf reader of my choice. What am I going to do, try to sell it? You have to be a student at the library to even use the service in the first place… and who’s going to be interested in pirating academic books in the first place? It’s not going to be highly sought after like a new blockbuster film or new popular music. They should follow the model of allowing downloading, like article search sites do. Sure, I could download an article and then email it to someone… but who would I email it to that isn’t already a student somewhere — someone who’s already paying for their own access to these services? And then there’s the really insulting element of proprietary control of knowledge in the first place (emphasis mine).

I couldn't have said that any better. Not to sound too much like new media prophet Jeff Jarvis, but it's this simple: evolve or die. Any ebook scheme involving DRM so strict that you might as well check out the paper copy is doomed to failure. End of story. So that's the first and last time I'm going to use NetLibrary -- someone give me a call when publishers finally come to terms with Google and let them offer copyrighted works alongside of their growing library of public domain books, because right now this dog won't hunt. If the purpose of ebooks is to replicate all of the shitty features of paper books, why bother with the new technology at all?

Update: The Wired Blog has a timely post about the library world's flirtation with dubious forms of DRMfor its electronic content, focusing on the OverDrive Media Console. The amazing thing about both this and NetLibrary? No Mac functionality. While I'm by no means an Apple conspiracy theorist, you have to wonder how deals like these get made with public institutions and institutions of higher education.

Google and copyright: back to the future?

Recent proposed changes to Australian copyright law have brought an ancient conundrum -- in terms of the World Wide Web -- back to the fore regarding intellectual property rights and search engines. As early as 1996, when Google was still being run out of a garage on the Stanford University campus, the search engine was generating complaints from website owners, who accused Google (née Backrub) of "stealing" their online content.

Insofar as Backrub's approach to indexing the Internet was entirely new, the content owners could be forgiven for their suspicious response. Whereas previous search engines merely used top-level keywords to generate their results, Backrub looked at as many pages on a website that it could get its little spidery appendages on, so when some robot hailing from the Stanford Computer Science Department starting requesting every last blasted scrap of html on the web servers of museums and other early online resources it set off all kinds of warning bells. Fortunately the folks at Stanford and Google were able to head off any legal action by assuring the content producers that their page requests were not an attempt at massive virtual theft but merely a means to an end that would benefit all parties involved.

But fast forward ten years to the present: now that virtually every content producer out there is also an online content producer as well, the stakes are completely different than they were back in 1996. While the gentleman's agreement that Google had with the people whose websites they had copied for the purpose of indexing now is still mutually beneficial, the owners of virtual intellectual property -- riding a wave of a decade of successful lobbying on their own behalf internationally -- are now attempting to renege on their end of the symbiotic bargain, having somehow convinced themselves that they don't need things like Fair Use and Net Neutrality now that the digital age has come into its own.

At the heart of this conflict is the issue of control. Content producers/providers have a vested interest in things like portals and "sticky" websites, whereas increasingly users just want what they were looking for in the first place, thank you very much. This isn't to say that they're not interested in serendipitous finds, but that they would rather make these discoveries through disinterested parties like social networking software and tags rather than via product synergy or payola schemes. This is why MP3's are now the basic unit of music instead of the album, because why pay for the other eleven tracks when all you want is the one you like? By the same token this is why online newspapers and other periodicals vigorously oppose the practice of "deep linking", which takes you straight to the article you want to see rather than forcing you through a front page portal loaded with all the other crap they'd like to look at as well.

Who will ultimately prevail in this tug-of-war? While the content producers have managed to rig the legal table fairly well in their favor, even they are beginning to realize that even if you have the law on your side that doesn't mean the public will fall in line and behave as you wish them to -- something that even the recording industry finally seems to get. Even the most hard-line intellectual property types are starting to understand that when millions of people turn to "illegal" methods for acquiring the information and online commodities they desire this represents a failure of the market to deliver a desirable option, and offers an opportunity for innovation rather than representing a threat to Western Civilization as We Know It™.

In the case of this proposed Australian law, observers are not exaggerating when they say that if enacted it will effectively cripple the Internet as we know it, just as the legal blocking of such efforts of Google Book Search will only hurt authors rather than help them. Despite every effort on the part of the old guard to paint Google as a villain, the public continues to reward the search company for understanding our needs and working to meet them; and though it may be that Google's legal challenges may be far from over, I think at the end of the day it is they that will still be standing.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the original story link!