I’ve been away from DLTJ Thursday Threads for a while, but that doesn’t mean the fun hasn’t stopped. This week there are stories about the beginning and the end of the Research Works Act (again, one might add), Amazon’s continuing shifts in the ebook marketplace, and an announcement of beta access to OCLC’s Website for Small Libraries service.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Research Works Act is Dead

The introduction of HR 3699 [the Research Works Act] has spurred a robust, expansive debate on the topics of scientific and scholarly publishing, intellectual property protection, and public access to federally funded research. Since its introduction, we have heard from numerous stakeholders and interested parties on both sides of this important issue.

As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future. The transition must be collaborative, and must respect copyright law and the principles of open access. The American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid. This conversation needs to continue and we have come to the conclusion that the Research Works Act has exhausted the useful role it can play in the debate. As such, we want Americans concerned about access to research and other participants in this debate to know we will not be taking legislative action on HR 3699, the Research Works Act. We do intend to remain involved in efforts to examine and study the protection of intellectual property rights and open access to publicly funded research.

- Statement by Representatives Issa and Maloney (via Alexander Howard)

The Research Works Act (RWA) had the stated intention “to ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector” but many saw it an attempt to reverse the mandatory NIH 12-month to open publication mandate and prevent similar mandates in other government agencies. (Go ahead, follow the link; the legislation is remarkably short!) The efforts against RWA got into gear when it was revealed that Elsevier was a top contributor to Representative Maloney, a co-sponsor to the legislation. That sparked a boycott of Elsevier by researchers that signed a statement that they would stop submitting papers, refereeing, and performing editorial work for the publisher; it was signed by 7,666 people so far.

This week Elsevier dropped support for the Research Works Act, followed shortly by the message from the legislation’s sponsors that they would suspend work on the act. A more in-depth message was posted to the LIBLICENSE-L list by a Elsevier vice president. This is, however, not the first time such legislation has been proposed and defeated; similar bills were proposed in two previous congressional sessions.

Amazon Gives (Access to Ebooks) and Amazon Takes Away

The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library continues to grow rapidly, now offering more than 100,000 books that Amazon Prime members with Kindles can borrow for free—including over 100 New York Times Best Sellers like The Hunger Games trilogy—as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates.

- Amazon press release

Amazon.com removed more than 4,000 e-books from its site this week after it tried and failed to get them more cheaply, a muscle-flexing move that is likely to have significant repercussions for the digital book market.

- Amazon Pulls Thousands of E-Books in Dispute, by David Streitfeld, New York Times Bits Blog

Within the span of a week we see these two stories about ebooks on Kindles. In the first, Amazon announced that the size of the Kindle lending library has reached 100,000 books, including “a third of the Top 20 Kindle Best Sellers in February.” Amazon also noted that “over 1 million KDP Select books [had been] borrowed since program began in December.” The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is not without controversy from publishers and authors, though, as Amazon extends its reach into the role of the traditional publisher.

In the second, Amazon pulled access to ebooks from the Independent Publishers Group (IPG) when the two parties could not reach an agreement on terms. IPG explains its reasoning but we have not seen a similar response from Amazon. This story has similarities to the Amazon/Macmillan rift two years ago. Amazon blinked in that plotline and restored Macmillan books to the Kindle store. It remains to be seen if something similar happens in this case.

OCLC Website for Small Libraries Project Goes Beta

The Website for Small Libraries project, which began as an OCLC Innovation Lab experiment in 2011, is now available as a beta service for any library wishing to set up its own website.

By participating in the project, libraries will be able to quickly and easily set up a website that provides basic functionality for making small collection information available on the Web, setting up users, checking materials in and out, placing holds, and providing library contact, location, service and event information.

- OCLC Website for Small Libraries project makes getting on the Web easy and fast for small libraries, OCLC Press Release

OCLC’s project to offer Website for Small Libraries reached the beta stage earlier this month after a year in development. The early stages of development were covered previously in DLTJ, and it is good to see this project survive the early stages to make it to this point.

Welcome to the new year! Threads this week include a brief analysis of the legal problems in store if SOPA and PROTECT-IP become law, what an analysis of the problems with Best Buy might teach libraries, and why open source licensing of clinical tools is important.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

A Look at the Legal Aspects of SOPA and PROTECT-IP

Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.

- Don’t Break the Internet, by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, Stanford Law Review

In case you missed the dramatic events in the last days of 2011, SOPA and PROTECT-IP Act, just before Congress recessed for the year lawmakers concerned with the provisions of SOPA offered and debated enough amendments to the draft legislation that they effectively stalled passage through the House Judiciary Committee. At the end of the last committee meeting, the sponsors of SOPA acknowledged that there were significant issues and seemed to agree that they needed a confidential briefing from the Department of Homeland Security on the possible effects on DNSSEC — a highly technical but very important consideration. (Why it needs to be confidential when DNSSEC is an open specification stretches my imagination, but there you go…)

This paper by Lemley, Levine and Post describes the legal implications of enforcing the key provisions of SOPA and PROTECT-IP as drafted. The authors say “the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure” and describe how it is a bad prescient and why it won’t work in the end. In more positive news, there is an effort underway to draft legislation that would accomplish much of what SOPA and PROTECT-IP say they want to do without many of the downsides.

Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually

Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.

- Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually, by Larry Downes, Forbes

The authors tell a story about how as a Best Buy customer he was approached by a salesperson wanting to sell him an on-demand video package of some sort, and that reminded me just a little bit from my academic experience of trying to push bibliographic instruction on students rather than solving the problem they had at hand. The article goes on to describe how online retailers like Amazon are more in tune with customer needs and demands. I couldn’t help but wonder if our library processes and procedures and polices are more like Best Buy or more like Amazon. From what I hear at my consortial perspective we are trending towards Amazon, but are we going to get there fast enough?

By the way, I can highly recommend a recent 51 minute audio interview with Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad and now Chief Technology Officer of Best Buy (after Best Buy purchased and integrated the Geek Squad electronics service chain early last decade. It is a fascinating view of how customer service must trump all other concerns, and how efficiently executing customer service is the true path to survival. There are some lessons in there for libraries as well.

Open Source Licensing Defuses Copyright Law’s Threat to Medicine

Enforcing copyright law could potentially interfere with patient care, stifle innovation and discourage research, but using open source licensing instead can prevent the problem, according to a physician – who practices both at the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco VA Medical Center – and a legal scholar at the UC Hastings College of Law.

- Open Source Licensing Defuses Copyright Law’s Threat to Medicine, News service of the University of California, San Francisco

Here’s something to think about. What if new medical advances where suppressed because the diagnostic instruments used were protected by copyright. The doctor in the above article goes on to say that clinical tools tend to resemble one another “not because their creators are unoriginal, but because the tools are based on the same research and the same science.” That is a legal grey area where clinics decide to err on the side of caution and not use something that could be protected by copyright. It sort of reminds me about the unsettled law surrounding orphan works — just enough grey to stifle innovation.

Another “by the way”: I can also recommend a 16 minute recording of Karen Sandler speaking at the recent O’Reilly Media Open Source conference on the need to publish the source code of embedded medical devices under an open source license so the programs could be independently inspected. It, too, comes by way of the IT Conversations podcast. Two podcast mentions in one DLTJ Thursday Threads? What can I say…I listened to a lot of podcasts over the December break.

This week brought news of the Kindle-based e-book lending program through Overdrive, and Peter Brantley has an opinion piece on what this means for Amazon, publishers, and even libraries. From the other e-book powerhouse — Google — is a TED talk presentation about the Google Books ngram Viewer. Finally, there is a view of one of the benefits of the open source software model with an announcement that six libraries are funding development to meet their needs.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Lending E-Books is about B-2-C

There’s one other thing about the entry of Amazon into e-book lending that I find quixotic. Libraries have been wondering just how much e-book lending contributes to e-book sales, in order to help justify business models that accommodate library partnerships. Guess who has that data: the organization that does both selling and lending. That would be Amazon.

- Lending E-Books is about B-2-C, Peter Brantley, Publishers Weekly PWxyz blog

Peter Brantley, Director of the Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive, writes this short piece about the differences on how Amazon and publishers view the electronic book lending program. “Every Kindle e-book borrowed serves to inform Amazon’s sales and marketing departments and brings consumers to its website” versus “publishers see e-book lending from the perspective of lost unit sales.” The pull quote above puts this in a library perspective.

What we learned from 5 million books

14 minute TED talk video, and an ngram graph of "American Library Association"

Have you played with Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer? It’s an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

- What we learned from 5 million books, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, TED.com

Two visiting faculty at Google describes the origins and example findings from the ngram viewer of the Google Books project. With the ngram viewer, it is possible to look and compare the frequency of words digitized in books as part of the Google Books project. For example, one can look up the frequency of the phrase “American Library Association” (a 3-gram) in English language books from 1800 to 2000. This is the kind of digital introspection into the corpus of published materials that is being highlighted in the Digital Public Library of America proposals as a way to enhance patron access to information in library collections.

Six libraries partner to bring customizable print slips to Koha

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company announced today that six of their library partners are joining forces to bring customizable print slips to the Koha ILS…. ByWater Solutions will be partnering with Catalyst IT, of Wellington NZ on this development, making it a multi-state, multi-country collaborative effort.

- Six libraries partner to bring customizable print slips to Koha, Library Technology Guides

It isn’t typical that I post company press releases here on DLTJ Thursday Threads, but I think this one is worth special note. Specifically, it is useful to point out this mode of supporting open source software development. Six libraries have come together to fund the development of functionality that they need, and the output will ultimately be contributed back to the open source project for the benefit of all. The open source software development model enables this kind of “rising tide lifts all boats” possibility.

Legal action against the digitization and limited distribution of orphan works unexpectedly hit the news again this week. This week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads starts with an overview of the lawsuit filed by authors organizations and authors against Hathi Trust over plans to make digital versions of orphan works available to university users. And while we’re wondering of libraries’ role in providing access to digitized works, we should also take note of an article in American Libraries Magazine on what we could learn from Blockbuster’s fall. And lastly, I point to a story of one author’s experience when her own self publishing with Amazon ran afoul of a publisher’s desires.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Hathi Trust Taken to Court

The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University. … “This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights,” said Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like it to some, but writing books is an author’s real-life work and livelihood. This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection. These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books.”

- Authors Guild, Australian Society of Authors, Quebec Writers Union Sue Five U.S. Universities, Authors Guild blog

Just days before what could be the final status hearing before the judge in the Google versus Authors Guild et al. case, the Authors Guild in conjunction with two other authors organizations and eight individual authors filed suit in federal court against Hathi Trust and five of its member universities. And with that suit it would seem that the Authors Guild has begun a full-throated assault on libraries. In a subsequent post on the Authors Guild blog, they announce that they have found the author of one of the orphan candidates identified at the University of Michigan. The tone to me isn’t so much that they are pleased for the author that they accomplished this (they don’t say whether the author was a member of the Guild or not), but that they took great pleasure in rubbing librarians’ noses in it:

Just before we filed our lawsuit, we did some cursory research into some of the names on the list of “orphan works” candidates at the HathiTrust website to see if we could find contact information for a copyright holder. …

We weren’t hopeful, because we knew that research librarians were behind the project, and they were likely to be especially careful to avoid any embarrassing slip-ups in this first go-round. We thought, at best, we might find the representative of some obscure literary estate. We were wrong.

A bit nasty, eh guys? I imagine they are trying to fire up their membership for this fight against arguably one of the great institutions of America — the library. At the very least, you’d think that if they were trying to help their members that they would prominently post the link to the list of orphan work candidates in their postings, but it took a reader deep in the comments to offer a link.

In any case, this is being set up as a fight as dramatic as the original Google vs. Authors/Publishers lawsuit. Here are some things you should read, in ascending order of length and comprehensiveness:

1. Wards of the Court, Inside Higher Ed
2. The Orphan Wars, James Grimmelmann’s The Laboratorium
3. ARL’s Resource Packet on Orphan Works: Legal and Policy Issues for Research Libraries, with extensive commentary by Jonathan Brand of Policy Bandwidth

Avoiding the Path to Obsolescence

Blockbuster was much in the news last fall, though not in the favorable light it once enjoyed. The cultural phenomenon and former stock market darling that once prospered through aggressive marketing, savvy exploitation of technology, and keen insights into customer preferences filed for bankruptcy in September 2010. Though some analysts thought the filing could give the franchise time to reinvent itself, others predicted that the onetime video-rental colossus is steps from the graveyard of retail obsolescence.

There is a lesson or two for libraries in this riches-to-rags story.

- Avoiding the Path to Obsolescence, by Steven Smith and Carmelita Pickett, American Libraries Magazine

This is a great article. Although they don’t say it specifically, the authors point to Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Specifically, how an organization’s Resources-Processes-Values framework prevents it from reacting to innovations that are disrupting its products/services. Even if you aren’t familiar with Christensen’s work, I highly recommend reading this article.

On Self Publishing and Amazon versus Traditional Publishers

In January, 2010, I signed a contract with one of the Big 6 publishers in New York for my next novel. I understood then that I, like every writer in the business, was being coerced into giving up more than 75% of the profits from electronic sales of that novel, for the life of the novel. But I was debt-ridden and needed upfront money that an advance would provide. The book was scheduled for hardback publication in August, 2012, and paperback publication a year later. Recently that publisher discovered I had self-published two of my story collections as electronic books. To coin the Fanboys, they went ballistic. The editor shouted at me repeatedly on the phone. I was accused of breaching my contract (which I did not) but worse, of ‘blatantly betraying them with Amazon,’ their biggest and most intimidating competitor. I was not trustworthy. I was sleeping with the enemy.

- Sleeping With The Enemy: A Cautionary Tale, Davenport Dialogues

On the heels of last week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads entry on Amazon’s tactics for end-to-end control of book publishing comes this view from the author’s perspective. Publishers are getting squeezed from all ends by new models of getting content in the hands of readers. If we could, do you think we can throw into the air all of the pieces of the author-agent-publisher-printer-library-reader chain and sort them into nice neat lines of responsibility and value-add without all of this name calling and lawsuit-filing?

DLTJ Thursday Threads for two weeks in a row! I’m getting back in the groove. This week has pointers to geeky things (learning about structured data on the web) and not quite so geeky things (thoughts about indexes in ebooks and Amazon’s tactics for end-to-end control of book publishing). Well, admittedly, for only certain definitions of “not quite so geeky” … still I hope you enjoy the pointers and be sure to let me know what you think.

On a sad note, just as I was finishing composing this week’s Thursday Threads I saw a tweet that Michael Hart — instigator, founder, and tireless advocate for Project Gutenberg — died on Tuesday. The Project Gutenberg site has a wiki page with an obituary written by Dr. Gregory B. Newby. I never met Michael, but I ran into his writings and work soon after I started my own online journey in 1987. Before I got to know of his Project Gutenburg work I found I could easily identify his writings by his astonishing ability to full-justify his paragraphs without the need for added spaces. Brewster Kahle’s remembrance of Michael has an example. That one eccentric trait, for me at least, is evidence of the passion he brought to the desire to make public domain works available to everyone well before we knew what an e-book was. Rest in peace, Michael Hart; the world is a better place from your efforts.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Learn about and play with microformats, microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD

More and more of the world’s data is moving onto the Web. We want to share, re-mix and use this data to build more awesome Web applications. Using structured data technologies to mark up people, places, events, recipes, ratings, music, movies and products on the Web makes everybody’s life easier. This site will help you learn about big data, the semantic web, and the practical application of technologies such as Microformats, RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD.

- Structured Data on the Web

This is a nice site that just popped up on the web. The similarities and differences between microformats (an older and, in my opinion, more “hackish” way to make data machine readable on web pages), RDFa (what the hard core standardistas wished we would use to encode data), microdata (part of the new HTML5 specification), and JSON-LD (linked data as JavaScript Object Notation — a new one to me) can be hard to ferret out. This site brings together tutorials on these techniques with links to “playground” areas and utilities to use test and extract data from web pages. These techniques are the emerging ways that data is getting encoded into web pages for others to find and use, and to the extent that we want our bibliographic data to integrate into other domains we should be using these techniques.

Why an ebook still needs an index [and how they could be designed]

A draft screen design of an index entry for the term millet, from Peter Meyers' article

In sum, an index is a kind of a collection of pre-made searches: rather than diving headlong and unawares into a search oval’s do-it-yourself void, an index presents would-be searchers with an already assembled, alphabetized list of the 500 or so most common query items. (Microsoft’s effort to brand Bing as a “decision engine” offers an apt analogy; index is to search as a decision engine is to a search engine.) Speaking of search: of course, the standard ebook search oval has its role in the world of digital books. But for the kinds of guided lookup missions listed above, it’s a poor substitute for an index.

- Why an ebook still needs an index, by Peter Meyers, O’Reilly Radar

Professional indexers, take note! We still need your skills in the e-book world. Meyers argues in favor of robust indexes in e-books and functionality in ebook readers, and gives us some back-of-the-napkin sketches for how it could be implemented.

Amazon continues on its mission to disintermediate publishers

What if you could ask the author of a book a question while you were reading the book? That’s the kind of world Amazon wants to offer with its new @author feature, which the online bookstore launched on Wednesday with a group of writers including Susan Orlean and self-help guru Tim Ferriss. Readers can ask questions directly from their Kindles while they are reading a book, and the question gets sent to the author’s Twitter account as well as to their home page at Amazon. In addition to creating what the company hopes will be a kind of reader community around Kindle titles — something it has been pushing in other ways as well — this new feature looks like another step in Amazon’s quest to cut publishers out of the equation and build relationships directly with authors.

- Amazon continues on its mission to disintermediate publishers, by Mathew Ingram, Gigaom

My reaction was “if publishers are getting disintermediated in relationships between readers and authors, I wonder where that put libraries? I don’t see evidence that libraries exist in Amazon’s world.” My next thought was, “I wonder if there is a role for standards here such that libraries/librarians could participate in the conversations along side the author.” After all, we have seen what can happen when a librarian is brought in virtually to a classroom discussion. Could we see the same effect if public librarians were assigned to virtually participate in book groups? Then the cynical side kicked in and remembered that Amazon has again snubbed the standards process by recently promoting its own “print replica” ebook format over the established PDF standard.¹ If their goal is to disintermediate everyone in the book world, do we really think they would play nicely with standards?

Footnotes

1. Of course, we’ve come to learn that the Kindle Print Replica format is really a PDF wrapped in a proprietary file format.

This week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads is about data centers — those dark rooms with all of the blinking lights of computers doing our bidding. Data centers hit the mainstream news this week with the outage at one of Amazon’s cloud computing clusters. And since computers and their associated peripherals consume a lot of energy, researchers are proposing to run data centers on renewable energy. And finally Facebook and Google release separate videos that give glimpses into how large data centers are run.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Amazon EC2 Outage Hobbles Websites

Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud, which offers computation as a service to thousands of businesses, and its Relational Database Service, began experiencing errors shortly before 2 a.m. PDT on Thursday at Amazon’s US-EAST data center in Virginia and the service interruption has been ongoing for more than nine hours now.

The technical problems have slowed or disabled access to the websites of customers utilizing AWS US-East resources, including Engine Yard, Foursquare, Hootsuite, Heroku, Quora, and Reddit, to name a few.

- Amazon EC2 Outage Hobbles Websites, by Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek

Failures of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service — think of it as renting virtual computer servers somewhere out there on the internet — last week caused major internet sites to shut down. As of this writing, the root cause analysis hasn’t been published, but signs are pointing to a cascade of events starting with a minor failure that snowballed into system overload as the rented servers tried to restart themselves in other areas of Amazon’s cloud capacity. The questions being raised though are leading to a darkening of the puffy white cloud computing promise. Ultimately, though, use of computing in the cloud seems to be a trade-off where you can save money by not owning your own computing infrastructure with the downside that you don’t have as much control when something goes wrong.

Far-flung Data Centers Could Use Otherwise Unharvestable Renewable Energy For Computation

Researchers at Cambridge University want to put data centers in places so remote they aren’t on any power grid. Their models indicate that moving data-hungry computation to places such as scorching deserts, windswept peaks, and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean — all rich in sunlight and wind energy — could allow this otherwise unharvestable energy to do useful work.- Really Remote Data, by Christopher Mims, MIT Technology Review

The second thread comes by way of MIT Technology Review and points to a paper by Sherif Akoush, Ripduman Sohan, Andrew Rice, Andrew W. Moore and Andy Hopper — all of Cambridge University called Free Lunch: Exploiting Renewable Energy For Computing, to be presented at the USENIX-sponsored the 13th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems next month. The “Free Lunch” part comes from using renewable energy sources at these various locations to power data centers where compute jobs are shuffled around the locations depending on the available energy — and consequently computing capacity — at each center. A neat idea, and one that is probably valuable for compute-intensive jobs like video conversion and data mining.

What Goes Into Running Large Data Centers

Inspired by the model of open source software, we want to share the innovations in our data center for the entire industry to use and improve upon. Today we’re also announcing the formation of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide initiative to share specifications and best practices for creating the most energy efficient and economical data centers.>

- Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project, Facebook

This video tour of a Google data center highlights the security and data protections that are in place at our data centers.

- Security and Data Protection in a Google Data Center, YouTube

For two entirely different purposes, Facebook and Google released videos recently that give glimpses into what each does to run a data center. The four-and-a-half-minute Facebook video introduces us to their Open Compute Project: a set of plans for server hardware and for physical buidings to creating the most efficient computer clusters possible. In the seven-minute Google video, we see part of what Google does to keep data safe that is stored in the cloud (including a pair of hard drive crushing machines!).

I tried to stay away from ebooks again, in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads (I managed to do so last week), but the threads of announcements and conversations are too crucial to ignore. Just yesterday Amazon and OverDrive announced plans to lend library ebooks to Kindle users. The press release and subsequent discussion is full of ambiguity and missing details, but what was officially said is enough to be tantalizing. And why not? The Association of American Publishers said that ebooks are the leading format among all trade categories in the month of Febrary. At least by sales volume, not by total revenue. The last thread this week is how recommendation engines are finding their way into another corner of the lives of undergraduates — helping you pick your course schedule.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Amazon to Lend Books Via OverDrive

Amazon today [April 20, 2011] announced Kindle Library Lending, a new feature launching later this year that will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States. Kindle Library Lending will be available for all generations of Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps.

- Amazon to Launch Library Lending for Kindle Books

The Kindle Library Lending program will integrate into [a library's] existing OverDrive-powered ‘Virtual Branch’ website. Your existing collection of downloadable eBooks will be available to Kindle customers. As you add new eBooks to your collection, those titles will also be available in Kindle format for lending to Kindle and Kindle reading apps. Your library will not need to purchase any additional units to have Kindle compatibility. This will work for your existing copies and units.

- Kindle Library Lending and OverDrive – What it means for libraries and schools, OverDrive Digital Library Blog

The Kindle Library Lending program will support the existing business models that [publishers] have already set in OverDrive’s catalog. The Kindle eBook titles borrowed from a library will carry the same rules and policies as all other eBooks. As usual, users will still need a valid library card from a participating library, school, or college to check out an eBook for Kindle Lending.

- Kindle Library Lending and OverDrive – What it means for publishers, OverDrive Digital Library Blog

Amazon and OverDrive announce that they are making the Kindle devices full participants in library ebook lending programs. To this point OverDrive has relied primarily on Adobe Digital Editions digital rights management to control the lending of ebook items, which left out Kindle devices. (Kindle devices/software uses an Amazon-specific DRM encoding that no one else uses.)

Now there are some interesting questions that need to be worked out. The Amazon press release says that if you make notes or highlights, then “you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them.” So it sounds like that means that there will be some tie between an OverDrive patron account and the userid associated with a Kindle device/software. To me that says that Amazon will be able to link your OverDrive lends to the personally identifiable information of your Amazon/Kindle account. This crosses a boundary that makes me nervous. Of course Amazon has all of information of books that you buy or sample from the Kindle website, but library lending records have always been held to a higher privacy standard. At this point, I don’t think OverDrive knows much about me. If I “check out” an ebook or audio book that is available, OverDrive will know the IP address of the machine I used to download the checked-out file. If there is a waiting list, then I have to give OverDrive my e-mail address to notify me when the check out is available. To the best of my knowledge, OverDrive does not have any other personally identifiable information about me (unless my public library is transferring information to them in some sort of back channel based on my library card number).

What does this mean for the HarperCollins/OverDrive 26-checkout-limit controversy? Not a thing, as near as I can tell. The OverDrive blog post for publishers says that “Kindle eBook titles borrowed from a library will carry the same rules and policies as all other eBooks,” which I expect would include the 26-checkout-limit imposed by HarperCollins on its titles. And I also expect it would be 26 total checkouts regardless of format; you wouldn’t get 26 Kindle formats and 26 Adobe Digital Edition formats.

E-Books Rank as #1 Format among All Trade Categories in the Month of Febrary

For February 2011, e-Books ranked as the #1 format among all categories of Trade publishing (Adult Hardcover, Adult Paperback, Adult Mass Market, Children’s/Young Adult Hardcover, Children’s/Young Adult Paperback). [...]

For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.

- Popularity of Books in Digital Platforms Continues to Grow, According to AAP Publishers February 2011 Sales Report, The Association of American Publishers

[F]or many readers, it may be less that we’re buying more books, but that we’re buying books in a new format, taking away from the revenue from the sale of $25 hardcovers that have long floated the industry and now purchasing our books in $10 digital formats. That means the publishing industry has to sell a lot more e-books to make up that difference.

- E-Book Sales Surpass Print: Is This a Win or a Loss for the Publishing Industry?, ReadWriteWeb

Here is another reality check on the importance of ebooks. The way I’m reading this Association of American Publishers press release is that unit sales of ebooks has surpassed that of print books, although — as the ReadWriteWeb post indicates — total revenue for print books is nearly three times higher than that of ebooks. I sense the pace of change just kicked into a higher gear…

Recommendation Engine Used to Help Undergraduates Pick Classes

When Netflix suggests movies based on how much previous renters liked them, all that’s at stake is a night’s entertainment. Now a handful of colleges have begun using similar recommendation systems to help students pick their courses—a step that could change GPA’s and career paths.

- The Netflix Effect: When Software Suggests Students’ Courses, by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education

I picked out this thread because it is another cases where recommendation engines — relevance ranking derived in part by a searcher’s previous activity — is coming closer to the norm. In this case, “when suggesting a course, the automated system considers each student’s planned major, past academic performance, and data on how similar students fared in that class.” Librarians have a strong professional ethic to hold confidential the activity of our patrons, typically through the most expedient solution of “don’t keep patron activity.” Increasingly, though, I think this response is going to harm the perceived performance of our search tools relative to other systems our patrons are using. While the use of anonymized data, such as Ex Libris’ bX Recommender Service, can bring us part of the way there, we are going to need to figure out a way to use patron-specific past activity data to improve that patron’s future search results.

This week Amazon takes center stage of DLTJ Thursday Threads with a report of their new Kindle Singles program for medium-form digital content and a screen-reader-aware version of the Kindle reader application for PCs. After that is a look at how scholarly discourse is changing — radically! — with the availability and use of near-real-time feedback loops. And we close out with a peek at shaky ground in the world of ISBN identifiers.

As a sidenote to last week’s comment about this blog migrating to Amazon’s service…there are still a few hiccups. For instance, last week’s edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads wasn’t published via the RSS feed until late in the day and it wasn’t until Friday that the e-mail subscribers received it. I think those issues are ironed out now, but if you notice any other problems please let me know.

Kindle Singles — Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length — Now Available in the Kindle Store

Before the advent of digital reading, writers often had to choose between making their work short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the “heft” required for book marketing and distribution. Three months ago, Amazon made a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Kindle in making a new kind of content available to readers—Kindle Singles. Typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words, each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length. Today, Amazon is introducing the first set of Kindle Singles to the Kindle Store. …

The new Kindle Singles section of the Kindle Store is now available at www.amazon.com/kindlesingles. Available to both Kindle device and app users, and priced between $0.99 and $4.99, the first set of Kindle Singles include original reporting, essays, memoirs and fiction. Amazon plans to frequently launch many more Kindle Singles over time.

Is there room for commercial content between “short enough for a magazine article” and a full-fledged book? Amazon seems to think so with this announcement of the Kindle Singles program. Among the first are three works from TEDTalk speakers priced at $2.99 each. The content is only available in digital form and only in the proprietary Kindle format. This may be a problem for a library trying to acquire this content for its collection (although this is just a subset of the more general issue of acquiring content saddled in proprietary formats with restrictive digital rights management). What makes this problem more acute, though, is that Amazon is seeking high quality content for the Kindle Singles channel (“Singles will be a highly curated group of content they feel is valuable to their readers” according to the Kindle Expert website). That might make the content more desirable by patrons and more likely to be considered preservation-worthy. (You can read about one author’s perspective on publishing in the Kindle Singles program.)

Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin

Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin is a free application for your Windows PC. It provides the following accessibility features:

• Text-to-speech reading with adjustable voice settings
• Voice-guided menu navigation
• Large font sizes
• High contrast reading mode
• Keyboard navigation
• Accessible shortcuts

Because this software is an assistive technology, there are no restrictions on text-to-speech reading. In order to use the text-to-speech feature, an external screen reader program must be installed and running on the Windows PC. Tested screen readers include: JAWS and NVDA. An external screen reader is used to read aloud menus and navigation items, while book text is read by a built-in text-to-speech engine.

Although I’m hard pressed to find the formal announcement, a version of the Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin was made available earlier this month. The National Federation of the Blind has a review of the software with some constructive criticism that hopefully Amazon will take to heart. What is interesting is that one can use a screen reading program such as the commercial Jaws for Windows or the open source NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) to have the text of the book read aloud “regardless of a publisher’s [text-to-speech] … choice.” If you are serving a population of users with a sight impairment, this may be an option to look at to expand the universe of accessible materials to everything available in the Kindle store.

Peer review: Trial by Twitter

For many researchers, the pace and tone of this online review can be intimidating — and can sometimes feel like an attack. How are authors supposed to respond to critiques coming from all directions? Should they even respond at all? Or should they confine their replies to the conventional, more deliberative realm of conferences and journals? “The speed of communication is ahead of the sheer time needed to think and get in the lab and work,” said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Mountain View, California, and the lead author on the arsenic paper. Aptly enough, she circulated that comment as a tweet on Twitter, which is used by many scientists to call attention to longer articles and blog posts.

To bring some order to this chaos, it looks as though a new set of cultural norms will be needed, along with an online infrastructure to support them. The idea of open, online peer review is hardly new. Since Internet usage began to swell in the 1990s, enthusiasts have been arguing that online commenting could and should replace the traditional process of pre-publication peer review that journals carry out to decide whether a paper is worth publishing.

This article in Nature News points out the problem when commentary on scientific studies moves at Twitter speed. The old mechanisms of published peer-reviewed articles followed by commentary in later issue of the same journal in the form of published letters is being challenged by the internet world of blogs and tweets. As the author says, a new form of cultural norms is required as well as mechanisms to track the discourse. [Via Eric Schmell]

eBook Identifier Confusion Shakes Book Industry

Last Thursday, I was fortunate to be at a presentation of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) about identification of eBooks. BISG hired Michael Cairns, the principal of Information Media Partners, to do a study of the use, issues and practice surrounding assignment of ISBNs in the US book industry. Think of him as a structural engineer hired to inspect the damage to the supply chain’s supporting infrastructure after an earthquake. Cairns conducted 55 separate interviews with a total of 75 industry experts from all facets of the industry. (I was interviewed for my expertise in the use of ISBN in library linking systems).

• BISG eBook ISBN Study Findings Released Michael Cairns’ blog
• Summary of BISG Presentation From BISG, PDF 730 KB

Cairns (@personanondata on Twitter) is an industry veteran- he’s held senior executive positions at Bowker and other companies. His presentation was clear and direct, and he quickly went to the heart of the matter. He found very little support for the policy set forth by the 2005 revision of the ISBN standard regarding when to assign a new ISBN to an ebook.

Eric Hellman writes about his views of the dysfunction surrounding ISBN assignments for ebooks. “What problems?” you might ask — Eric writes has an example of how Barnes and Noble was enhancing some ebooks for their Nook platform. By itself, this activity wouldn’t result in assigning a new ISBN. But because publishers are now exerting more control over setting the prices of ebooks (the so-called “agency model“) the existence of these Nook-enhanced versions needs to cross back-and-forth between the publisher’s and retailer’s electronic systems. The only commonly agreed upon identifier? The ISBN. And this proliferation of ISBN assignments is making trouble for library’s efforts to effectively identify material — which is to say nothing about what it is doing to our efforts to shoehorn these distinctions between various works into the MARC format used by our catalogs. Is that a separate record for that manifestation with a different ISBN?

With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher’s view of Amazon’s strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk drives down the cost of enlisting humans to overwhelm anti-spam systems, and a story of multispectral imaging adding information in the process of digital preservation.

As the new year approaches, I wish you the best professionally and personally.

Books After Amazon

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, “what kind of king they’re going to be.” A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature—on what books can be published successfully—is far more in doubt.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri publishes this view of Amazon’s marketing practices in the lastest issue of the Boston Review. From the publisher’s pespective, the strong-arm tactics described sound horrible. But the story also points to cracks appearing — at least for the bigger publishers. That may leave smaller, independent publishers in a big squeeze. [Via OCLC Research's Above-the-Fold]

Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

Abstract: In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse. Some were concerned researchers could use our guidelines to manipulate rankings of scientific articles and promote what we call ‘academic search engine spam’. To find out whether these concerns are justified, we conducted several tests on Google Scholar. The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed—and with little effort—possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement. At the end of this paper, we discuss whether academic search engine spam could become a serious threat to Web-based academic search engines.

Joeran Beel and Bela Gipp have this article in the most recent issue of Journal of Electronic Publishing. In addition to being able to game Google Scholar, the authors note that Microsoft Academic Search and CiteSeer (as well as their own academic search engine currently under development — SciPlore) have the same issues. Although it is possible, we don’t know if it is being done — or even if there would be an penalties in the academic community for doing so.

Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% spam

At this point, Amazon Mechanical Turk has reached the mainstream. Pretty much everyone knows about the concept. Post small tasks online, pay people cents, and get thousands of micro-tasks completed. Unfortunately, this resulted in some unfortunate trends. Anyone who frequents just a little bit the market will notice the tremendous number of spammy HITs. (HIT = a task posted for completion in the market; stands for Human Intelligence Task). “Test if the ads in my website work”. “Create a Twitter account and follow me”. “Like my YouTube video”. “Download this app”. “Write a positive review on Yelp”. A seemingly endless amount of spam HITs come to the market, mainly with the purpose of spamming “social media” metrics. So, with Dahn Tamir and Priya Kanth (MS student at NYU), we decided to examine how big is the problem. How many spammers join the market? How many spam HITs are there?

This post from Panos Ipeirotis, Associate Professor at the IOMS Department at Stern School of Business of New York University, describes a review of activities posted to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Spam is everywhere, and it appears that the Mechanical Turk is reducing the friction between buyers and workers of spam activity. [Via Ron Murray]

Cutting-Edge Imaging Helps Scholar Reveal 8th-Century Manuscript

With a manuscript like the St. Chad Gospels, multispectral imaging—a series of scans, each based on a single part of the color spectrum—allows his team to create images that have the equivalent of three-dimensional detail, down to revealing the thickness of brush strokes on letters and illustrations. Cockled pages can be virtually flattened out so that all their details can be studied. Studied color band by color band, the chemical composition of ink can be determined.

This article by Jennifer Howard at the Chrnoicle of Higher Education reviews the story of how 8th-century documents in England were digitized by scholars at the University of Kentucky. It caught my eye because of the mention of multispectral imaging; this is something that the JPEG2000 file format can natively store. Digitization at this level doesn’t just provide alternative, online access to documents — it actually adds new information to the process of researching those documents. [Note: the link is behind a publisher paywall. If you would like to see it, send me an e-mail and I'll forward you a short-term link from the Chronicle's website.]

This is definitely becoming a habit…welcome to the fourth edition of DLTJ‘s Thursday Threads. If you find these interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the left. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments, as always, are welcome.

Defining Linked Data By Analogy

RDF is the grammar for a language of data. URIs are the words of that language. As in natural language, these words (i.e., the URIs) belong to grammatical categories. RDF properties (such as “isReferencedBy”) function a bit like verbs, RDF classes like nouns.

As in natural languages, where utterances are meaningful only if they follow a sentence grammar, RDF statements follow a simple and consistent three-part grammar of subject, predicate, and object. Analogously to paragraphs, RDF statements are aggregated into RDF graphs.

This is a posting from Thomas Baker on the W3C Library Linked Data exploratory group mailing list. It compares RDF to natural languages using analogies of grammar, words, sentences, and paragraphs. I think this is a useful way to think about RDF and linked data, although as initial introduction to the topic, you might want to see the presentation below.

RDF For Librarians presentation recording

The RDF model underlying Semantic Web technologies is frequently described as the future of structured metadata. Its adoption in libraries has been slow, however. This is due in no small part to fundamental differences in the modeling approach that RDF takes, representing a “bottom up” architecture where a description is distributed and can be made up of any features deemed necessary, whereas the record-centric approach taken by libraries tends to be more “top down” relying on prespecified feature sets that all should strive to make the best use of. This presentation will delve deeply into the differences between these two approaches to explore why the RDF approach has proven difficult for libraries, look at some RDF-based initiatives that are happening in libraries and how they are allowing different uses of this metadata than was previously possible, and pose some questions about how libraries might best.

Jenn Riley gave this hour-long presentation to the Indiana University Digital Library Brown Bag earlier this month. The URL to the slides synchronized to the audio recording is http://breeze.iu.edu/p48776227/. The presentation slides and the handout from the session are available as well. I highly recommend spending an hour with this presentation to learn about how linked data compares and contrasts with MARC records. (via Diane Hillmann)

The Future of the Federal Depository Libraries

[ProPublica's Dafna] Linzer’s expose of government tampering with a court docket is an example of the problem on which the LOCKSS Program has been working for more than a decade, how to make the digital record resistant to tampering and other threats. The only reason this case was detected was because Linzer created and kept a copy of the information the government published, and this copy was not under their control. Maintaining copies under multiple independent administrations (i.e. not all under control of the original publisher) is a fundamental requirement for any scheme that can recover from tampering (and in practice from many other threats).

David Rosenthal summarizes a story about how a published document from the U.S. government was changed and why we need highly-distributed copies of government documents to detect and recover from tampering. There are big implications here for the future of government documents depository programs.

ProPublica’s Guide to Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk – or mTurk – is an online marketplace, set up by the online shopping site Amazon, where anyone can hire workers to complete short, simple tasks over the Internet. Amazon originally developed it as an in-house tool, and commercialized it in 2005. The mTurk workforce now numbers more than 100,000 workers in 200 countries, according to Amazon. At ProPublica, we use it for tasks like collecting, reformatting, and de-duplicating data. This is a guide to journalists looking to use Mechanical Turk in their data projects. It’s meant for users who are already familiar with mTurk and are looking for ways to improve their results.

Do you have repetitive digital conversion or analysis jobs that can be broken down into manageable-sized chunks? ProPublica published this guide on using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to outsource this activity.