You could say “this is a service to watch” but that would be missing the point. Yesterday the ‘Unglue.It‘ service launched as a way to crowdsource the funding of a fee to authors to release their own works under a Creative Commons license.
The internet has survived the great SOPA blackout, and we’re still talking about the fallout. Apple made a major announcement of plans to support textbooks on iPads, but there are concerns about the implementation. But the first story this week is about a free service geared towards teaching people how to program with weekly lessons throughout 2012.
One could say it is an all intellectual property edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. How could one miss the outpouring of opposition to SOPA/PROTECT-IP? If that was an overwhelming story you might have missed the introduction of the Research Works Act that could end the open access mandates now at the National Institutes of Health and coming elsewhere. And because we need some good news, Internet2 announced a new electronic textbook pilot that could be really interesting.
As the last DLTJ Thursday Threads of the year, the stories in this post look back to what we saw in 2011 and look forward to what we may see in 2012. Looking backwards is a list of five things we learned about publishing from O’Reilly Media and Google’s 3-minute Zeitgeist video. Looking forward are a list of predictions from Fast Company and from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts in the UK. At this high point when 2011 is slowing and we start down the hill of 2012, I wish you a happy and prosperous new year.
Two serious threads this week and one fun one. The first serious story is a look at the attitudes of e-book consumers from the Book Industry Study Group, including a finding that almost half of all e-book consumers would wait for an electronic edition up to three months after the print edition has been released. The second serious story is about a university press starting to sell excerpts from backlist titles as a way to capitalize on existing content. And finally, the fun story is a 12 minute TED talk from the founder of the Improv Everywhere project.
In this weeks thread of topics: the final report of library linked data, an interview with one of the executives of Wiley Publishing, important questions to ask when considering major system migrations, and the announcement of work to begin on a new comment and evaluation overlay layer for the web.
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This week’s list of threads starts with a pointer a statement by the International Coalition of Library Consortia on the growing pressure between publishers and libraries over the appropriate rights and permissions for scholarly material. In that same vein, Joe Lucia writes about his vision for libraries and the cultural commons to the Digital Public Library of America mailing list. On the more geeker side is a third link to an article with the experience of content producers creating HTML5-enabled web apps. And finally, on the far geeky side, is a view of what happens when a whole lot of new wireless devices — smartphones, tablets, and the like — show up on a wifi network.
I recently started reading content from a tablet device and in doing so re-encountered a list of web pages stashed in a Read It Later queue that are over a year old. Not only were these pages interesting enough to read a year ago, but in light of a year’s worth of “internet time” of innovations some of them are down right fascinating. So the DLTJ Thursday Threads this week are weaved from new reflections on old stories. First is a 13-month-old view of what publishers can do to reverse the perceived decline of their relevance in a digital publishing era. 15 months ago was an outline for a new role for publishers to engage authors and readers. And a little over a year ago came the first explorations of the “internet operating system”.
Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens
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.