Threads this week without commentary. (It has been a long week that included only one flight of four that actually happened without a delay, cancellation, or redirection.) Big announcements are one from the Library of Congress to re-envision the way bibliographic information travels, one from Douglas County (Colorado) Library’s experiment with taking ownership of ebooks and applying its own digital rights management, and a study on the ecosystem of spam.

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.

Transforming our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress

Spontaneous comments from participants in the US RDA Test show that a broad cross-section of the community feels budgetary pressures but nevertheless considers it necessary to replace MARC 21 in order to reap the full benefit of new and emerging content standards. The Library now seeks to evaluate how its resources for the creation and exchange of metadata are currently being used and how they should be directed in an era of diminishing budgets and heightened expectations in the broader library community.

- Transforming our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress, Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative

Also see John Mark Ockerbloom’s Open data’s role in transforming our bibliographic framework for more details and links to other posts talking about the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative.

Douglas County Library to Distribute Ebooks with its own DRM

We are pleased to announce a partnership between the Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA), and two Colorado libraries: Red Rocks Community College Library, and Douglas County Libraries.

Many members of CIPA have entered the world of digital publishing. By June of 2011, Red Rocks Community College Library and Douglas County Libraries will not only offer eBooks from CIPA’s authors for checkout through their library catalogs, but will also allow click-through purchases of these titles.

- New e-book partnership, Douglas County Libraries

There are more details on a post on the ALA Presidential Task Force on Equitable Access to Electronic Content blog along with an earlier post about that library’s experiments with Adobe Content Server.

Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions

For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work.

Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.

- Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions, by John Markoff, New York Times

Last week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads theme of ebooks continues again this week, and the top story from last week is the top story again this week: the debate over the limited checkout ebooks terms set by HarperCollins. While there seems to be nothing new from either HarperCollins or OverDrive (except for the new license terms coming into effect on Monday the 7th), there is still a lot of discussion on the biblio-blogosphere about what should be done. Another entry this week focuses on the Digital Public Library of America effort that is now getting underway. The last entry is about a young fiction writer who is making a fortune by selling ebooks through Amazon/Kindle and keeping most of the profit.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topic. 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.

Ebooks: durability is a feature, not a bug

Whether a HarperCollins book has the circulatory vigour to cope with 26 checkouts or 200, it’s bizarre to argue that this finite durability is a feature that we should carefully import into new media. It would be like assuming the contractual obligation to attack the microfilm with nail-scissors every time someone looked up an old article, to simulate the damage that might have been done by our careless patrons to the newsprint that had once borne it.

The controversy continues over the unilateral changing of the terms by HarperCollins for ebooks lent through OverDrive. The quote above is from an opinion piece by Cory Doctorow in the U.K. Guardian newspaper. Iris Jastram and Steve Lawson have proposed an ebook plan that includes making libraries a trusted party of publishers and creates a division of labor that mimics the existing publisher/library relationship. Jenica Rogers is not so sure the culture of respect and trust exists right now to create such a relationship. I wonder if there is a role for the Digital Public Library of America (see more info in the next story). In particular, I could see the DPLA serving as an agent that receives ebooks free of Digital Rights Management wrappers from publishers and wraps the ebooks with DRM for the library to check out to its patrons. The American Library Association is trying to coordinate a response while some libraries are making decisions to no longer purchase ebook content from HarperCollins.

Update (10-Mar-2011 at 11:30am EST): I missed these three posts by ALA Task Force on Electronic Content Access member Michael Porter where he was live blogging the meeting.

Report from the Digital Public Library of America Workshop

On March 1, 2011, the Berkman Center convened a group of participants from public and research libraries, government agencies, publishers, and private industry for a day-long workshop focused on the content and scope of a proposed Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Participants were invited to explore intrinsic features of specific types of content and their interrelations and to consider questions of how to deal with vendors and materials under various types of restrictions. The goal of this initial meeting was to make an important contribution to the overarching goal of the initiative: to work towards a shared vision of a DPLA and a set of prioritized next steps. This document highlights a selection of central discussion points and questions; we hope that these takeaways will serve as input into future discussions about a potential DPLA.

The Digital Public Library of America is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the above quote comes from the report of the workshop focused around the content and scope of the project. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the attention of many respected thought leaders and doers, it is trying to define a cooperative effort to support a national public library. At the moment, there are more questions than answers. Dan Cohen and David Weinberger — both participants in the workshop — posted their thoughts, and project chair John Palfrey posted raw notes for each session. I think this is an effort to track, although I expect it will move at a very deliberate and measured pace for a while as it picks up steam. There will likely be future DLTJ Thursday Threads entries on the topic.

Update (10-Mar-2011 at 2:30pm EST): Here is another good source that I didn’t read until after this Thursday Threads issue was published: a report from workshop attendee Molly Raphael, ALA president-elect.

This 26-Year-Old Is Making Millions Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle

Welcome to disruption. 26-year old Amanda Hocking is the best-selling “indie” writer on the Kindle store, meaning she doesn’t have a publishing deal, Novelr says.

And she shouldn’t. She gets to keep 70% of her book sales — and she sells around 100,000 copies per month. By comparison, it’s usually thought that it takes a few tens of thousands of copies sold in the first week to be a New York Times bestselling writer.

The comparison isn’t entirely fair, because Hocking sells her books for $3, and some $.99. But that’s the point: by lowering the prices, she can make more on volume, especially impulse buys. Meanwhile e-books cost nothing to print, you don’t have to worry about print volumes, shelf space, inventory, etc. And did we mention the writer keeps 70%?

That’s the start of a story from Business Insider that describes how this writer is using Amazon’s digital publishing platform to bring her content to users without traditional publishers. A few days later Business Insider runs another story that suggests publishers build a longer-term relationship with readers: HEY PUBLISHERS: Here’s How To Survive (And Thrive) In The Coming Nuclear Winter. A perfect example of this is my experience with technology publisher O’Reilly Media and how they offer free errata updates to the ebook editions. Earlier this year they announced how they retroactively went back and improved the formatting of their ebooks. Sure, it was a relatively simple thing to do, but they offer the updated editions to previous purchasers for no extra cost. That really encourages customer loyalty.

Another data point: with the announcement of a bigger, stronger, faster iPad coming later this month, some are speculating that Amazon is on track to start a program in which they give away Kindles. I wonder, in addition to the scenarios proposed in that article, if a free Kindle device program plus an inexpensive-to-libraries content checkout program targeted towards public libraries be a competitor to OverDrive? Perhaps as a loss-leader (to Amazon) with money made by making an offer inside the device’s user interface to the library patron to buy the book? [Link to CNN story via Eric Schnell]

It wasn’t too long ago that the music industry was in an uproar about stories of how easy it was to copy digital audio files and make digital copies with high fidelity. It was predicted that we would see the same thing in other media forms, and this week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads has two stories on the topic of book publishing. First is news of another inexpensive and simple (and now to be commercially produced) book digitizing system. Although the process of “ripping” a book from its physical medium might take longer than an audio track, these kind of devices are emerging that will make it simple to do. What happens with the digital copy after that? The second Thursday Threads pointer is to an interview with the founder of book publishing industry consultant about the state of book piracy, how it is measured, and why digital rights management software is a poor way to stop it. The last entry this week is a short excerpt of a brief summary of a study conducted by OCLC last year on the usage of MARC tags in cataloging records.

As a side note, apologies to DLTJ readers that had problems reading some of the content here over the past couple of weeks. A series of problems with my personal server — driven by the fact, I believe, that the server was first set up about 10 years ago and all the patches, tweaks, and updates over the decade have finally driven performance into the ground — prompted me to migrate this blog to Amazon’s Web Services cloud. It is now running on a micro Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) virtual machine backed by Simple Storage Service (S3) and the CloudFront content distribution network. I’ve also been optimizing the snot out of configuration — employing all sorts of new tricks for reducing the time it takes to deliver pages to your browser. I have another blog post in draft with the details for when anyone (even me!) wants to replicate it. Given enough personal time, watch for that in the next week or so.

All of that said, if you are seeing things that don’t look or function right, please let me know.

Book Saver – A personal book digitization setup from ION

Picture and Demonstration Video of the Book Saver from ION

Book Saver has two cameras that take separate images in rapid succession of each page within an open book. Both cameras of Book Saver also have a flash for allowing the page to be fully illuminated during the scanning process. Book Saver’s cradle, where the book is placed during the scanning process, is also angled as to not require you to hold pages down to get a flat, even surface. While similar devices require up to seven seconds per one page, Book Saver takes only one second per two pages!

News of the new Book Saver product comes from Fiacre O’Duinn. It is a hand-held device for digitizing book materials. The promotional literature says it takes about 15 minutes to digitize a 200-page book. The product was announced in time for the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, but is not yet available. It is expected to ship this summer with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $189 (I’m already seeing price points of $149 mentioned).

One of the “Key Features” listed on the product page is that the device “eliminates the need to purchase electronic versions of reading material you already own.” As Fiacre points out in his post, this really brings down the cost (in equipment and in effort) of digitally reproducing books. Are we about to see a new wave of personal book sharing/piracy? And what will the impact on libraries be? In the higher education arena, it is already being mentioned as a way to digitize textbooks. It is conceivable that students would borrow textbooks from our libraries, digitize them in an afternoon, and return them — or maybe just digitize them in the library. Do we need to get ahead of devices like this with education and policy initiatives?

Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data

As digital book publishing continues to expand at a rapid pace to meet reader demands, piracy rears its head at the forefront of many a discussion in publisher circles. Many publishers respond to the perceived threat with strict digital rights management (DRM) software. But is this the best solution? And does it even provide protection from piracy?

In the following interview, Magellan Media founder and TOC 2011 speaker Brian O’Leary (@brianoleary) discusses the current state of book piracy, how measurement data isn’t sufficient to determine its impact, and why DRM is a poor anti-piracy tool.

The same arguments in favor of digital rights management for the music sector are now being made in the book publishing sector. This interview comes from the perspective of why DRM is the wrong answer to the perceived problem of book piracy. The backdrop is O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference to be held next month in New York City.

Core Bibliographic Description

Those “outliers” can be categorized according to three general purposes:

• Provenance and Identity: identifiers (e.g. ISBN, OCLC, etc.) and cataloging source (040)
• Elements useful for discovery: title statement (245), personal names (100, 700) and subject (650)
• Elements useful for understanding and evaluation: publication statement (260), physical description (300), and notes (500)

That’s it. In a nutshell you have the very core of bibliographic description as defined by librarians over the last century or so.

This post by Roy Tenant briefly summarizes the work of OCLC Research staff member Karen Smith-Yoshimura. The research work was to gather evidence to inform changes in MARC metadata practices, and that project page includes a 72 page report [PDF] and an Excel spreadsheet of data tables along with audio and video of a one hour webinar on the report. In my FriendFeed posting of Roy’s article, Walt Crawford noted a similar finding in his 1986 Bibliographic displays in the online catalog. As Walt notes, “somehow it’s not surprising that it’s still true in 2010.”

This week’s Thursday Threads looks at a big hole in the security model of most internet sites that require you to log into them with a username and password plus a pair of stories about “big media” battles. 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 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, as always, are welcome.

Users of Non-SSL Sites are Prone to Hijacking

When logging into a website you usually start by submitting your username and password. The server then checks to see if an account matching this information exists and if so, replies back to you with a “cookie” which is used by your browser for all subsequent requests.

It’s extremely common for websites to protect your password by encrypting the initial login, but surprisingly uncommon for websites to encrypt everything else. This leaves the cookie (and the user) vulnerable. HTTP session hijacking (sometimes called “sidejacking”) is when an attacker gets a hold of a user’s cookie, allowing them to do anything the user can do on a particular website. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy.

Screenshot of Firesheep in action, from codebutler.com

This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death, yet very popular websites continue to fail at protecting their users. The only effective fix for this problem is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL. Facebook is constantly rolling out new “privacy” features in an endless attempt to quell the screams of unhappy users, but what’s the point when someone can just take over an account entirely? Twitter forced all third party developers to use OAuth then immediately released (and promoted) a new version of their insecure website. When it comes to user privacy, SSL is the elephant in the room.

Today at Toorcon 12 I announced the release of Firesheep, a Firefox extension designed to demonstrate just how serious this problem is.

Most of the coverage of Firesheep this week focused on the fact that using Facebook on an open wi-fi network in a coffee shop makes you prone to having your account broken into. That is true, and perhaps most the most common scenario, but the problem goes deeper than that. This can occur at any point where a third-party can intercept the communication between your browser and the web server: your home wireless router, your internet service provider, or even some types of local area networks. The real answer is to have the entire session — from the point when you log in to when you log out — encrypted. Google recently made this the default for GMail sessions, and some of the engineers involved in the effort published findings about how the SSL encryption overhead isn’t that bad. In the meantime, Network World has some options to consider to protect yourself a little bit from this kind of attack. (Hat tip to Dan Scott on Code4Lib IRC.)

Cory Doctorow on the Role of “Free”

The topic I leave my family and my desk to talk to people all over the world about is the risks to freedom arising from the failure of copyright giants to adapt to a world where it’s impossible to prevent copying. Because it is impossible. Despite 15 long years of the copyright wars, despite draconian laws and savage penalties, despite secret treaties and widespread censorship, despite millions spent on ill-advised copy-prevention tools, more copying takes place today than ever before.

As I’ve written here before, copying isn’t going to get harder, ever. Hard drives won’t magically get bulkier but hold fewer bits and cost more.

Networks won’t be harder to use. PCs won’t be slower. People won’t stop learning to type “Toy Story 3 bittorrent” into Google. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something – generally some kind of unworkable magic anti-copying beans that they swear, this time, will really work.

Cory writes this piece in the U.K. Guardian in response to a column from a fellow Guardian writer on how creative people can control their own intellectual property and some media companies’ demands for digital rights management are actually stifling creativity. It starts as a rant and moves quickly into a powerful summary of what is at stake in the “copyright wars.” (Hat tip to OCLC’s Above the Fold.)

What Network Neutrality Really Means

In its continuing contract showdown with Cablevision, the News Corporation tried to extend its blackout of the Fox Broadcasting network to Fox.com and to Hulu, the popular Web site for free TV viewing, on Saturday. Angry Cablevision customers reported being unable to watch episodes of “Glee” and “House” on Hulu.

The blackout caused shock waves because it had not been done before by a programmer. Though the shutdown was brief, the message was unmistakable: do not expect to be able to watch Fox online unless you are paying for Fox on TV.

The attempted Web blockade was leverage for Fox in its contract negotiations, but more important, it was the latest evidence that entrenched media companies hope to replicate their walled gardens in a new medium, the Internet.

Broadcast and cable companies in the New York City area are locked in a dispute over what the latter needs to pay the former for the right to retransmit the content on cable TV. The dispute spilled over into the internet when the cable company started blocking internet subscribers from reaching the broadcast company’s shows on its website and on Hulu. This could be seen as a litmus test for net neutrality: should an internet service provider be able to decide what content it sends to end-users — either by giving preferential treatment to some content or by blocking other content? The dispute, by the way, continues…even impacting those who want to watch baseball’s World Series.

Last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review had an opinion piece by Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) with the title “Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?” (subscription required). An excerpt from the beginning:

While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and assumptions about our work.

Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for creating online content and building peer communities, and — perhaps most important — that multitasking with various electronic devices, often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work. The implications of those changes must transform our publishing strategies. ¹

Does one need any more confirmation that libraries, too, must change? The students have changed, the publishing industry is going to change, one of the intermediaries has changed (clicks-and-bricks bookstores); isn’t it time the other intermediary (libraries) changed as well?

Okay, probably not — if you still need that confirmation you must have been living in a cave the list five to ten years. But it does make one wonder if publishers and libraries can get together as suggested by Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford). (As a recall, an almost word-for-word quotation of Zittrain’s speech: “Libraries are so far the best hope for those in a position to release something” ² under a “neutral” digital rights management system. In other words, libraries can be trusted with the un-DRM’d version of content knowing that the libraries take their role of mediating access to licensed content very seriously and can apply the appropriate DRM at the appropriate time for the appropriate circumstances.)

Footnotes

1. The Chronicle Review, Volume 52, Issue 41, Page B20.
2. Thanks to teaguese1 for jogging my memory

The plenary session of JCDL this morning was Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford) entitled “Open Information: Redaction, Restriction, and Removal.” This was so good that I couldn’t stand to stop and take notes. I did write down one bit: “Libraries are the best hope…for the controlled release of information.” His point was that the library profession is a trusted gatekeeper — librarians have a track record of providing orderly access to shared information resources and taking seriously the responsibility to provide access to those resources under the terms with which they were acquired. (Although there was a great deal of humming in the room at one key point of the presentation — those that were there know what I mean.) Can publishers entrust content to us such that the library controls the DRM that protects the content? Would publishers be willing to give the library the content in an unrestricted form with the promise, in the form of a legal agreement, that the library will apply the appropriate DRM at the appropriate time? Could that be a new role for libraries in this new DRM-happy society?