Recent episodes include:

• Paul Nelles on “Books, Communication and Exchange: The Frankfurt Book Fair and Early Modern Print Culture”
• David Weinberger on “Knowledge at the End of the Information Age”

link: http://podcasts.ischool.utoronto.ca/
RSS feed: http://podcasts.ischool.utoronto.ca/?feed=rss2

Brewster Kahle wants to create a free, online collection of human knowledge. It sounds impossibly idealistic—but he is making progress.

FOR a man who has set himself a seemingly impossible mission, Brewster Kahle seems remarkably laid back. Relaxing in the black leather recliner that serves as his office chair, his stockinged feet wriggling with evident enthusiasm, the founder of the Internet Archive explains what has driven him for more than a decade. “We are trying to build Alexandria 2.0,” says Mr Kahle with a wide-eyed, boyish grin. Sure, and plenty of people are trying to abolish hunger, too. [more...]

Even those most suspicious of his honeyed oratory had to admit that the 44th president’s inaugural address was unexpectedly more “nose to the grindstone” than “head in the clouds”. But as the mood of grim practicality spreads from Washington across the world, the doomy economic clouds have afforded a glimpse of silver lining: crashing markets are, it seems, good news for fiction, specifically the library-borrowed kind.

America’s National Endowment for the Arts recently announced that the number of novels borrowed from US libraries is the highest it’s been for 25 years. Even more hearteningly, the demographic that has experienced the biggest increase in literary reading (which appears to mean fiction, drama and poetry in the NEA’s terms) is the oft-despaired-of 18-24 year old bracket. [more...]

Despite the internet’s origins as an academic network, when it comes to finding a book, e-commerce rules. Put any book title into your favourite search engine, and the hits will be dominated by commercial sites run by retailers, publishers, even authors. But even with your postcode, you won’t find the nearest library where you can borrow that book. (The exception is Google Books, and even that is limited.)

That’s strange, because almost every library has an electronic database of its books – searchable either at the library’s own website or via its local council. The wrinkle is that at the book level, those databases aren’t accessible to the search engines; and you may not be able to search all the libraries in your area at once.

Bibliographic data

Yet there is an alternative that few people seem aware of: Worldcat (worldcat.org), which offers web access to the largest repository of bibliographic data in the world – from the 40-year-old Ohio-based non-profit Online Computer Library Center (oclc.org). But Worldcat suffers from the same problem on a larger scale. OCLC shares only 3m of its 125m records with Google Books; none of them show up in an ordinary search.

You might expect forward-thinking libraries to put their databases online, to encourage people through their doors. But they can’t. Even though they created the data, pay to have records added to the database and pay to download them, they can’t.

In November, OCLC announced new rules covering the use of Worldcat data due to go live on 19 February. Among other things, the new policy prohibits any use – transfer, sharing – that “substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat”. In other words, no publicly searchable databases.
[more...]

The event was organized by Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin UK; James Bridle, of BookTwo, and Bookkake; and Russel Davies.

Thinking about books

If the amount of thought and enthusiasm generated that day — and evening — is any indication, I think we’re going to be OK. The book is alive and well, even if defining “book” is becoming more complicated; and the publishing business, bracing itself for the biggest shake-up since the paperback, will come out the other end, transformed certainly, but alive nonetheless. That’s my projection anyway.

An open slate

If you’ve never been to a “camp” or “unconference,” you should find the next one near you, show up and dive in. These un/conferences vary from place to place and event to event, but tend to share a few characteristics: they are free, they are open, and the sessions are not formally presented by the organizers, but rather decided by participants. Everyone is supposed to contribute. The result is that you get a much wider mix of people and perspectives than at industry conferences.

BookCamp London started with a blank grid: 6 timeslots and 5 spaces (or 5 spaces, 6 timeslots?), with participants asked to fill in the grid, adding sessions they’d like to discuss. (For some reason I didn’t write anything in. First time I’ve ducked that responsibility at a camp.)

The sessions

Sessions included (paraphrasing titles): Talking to Terrified Writers about the Web, the Book as Social Object/What Happens When Books Are Free?, EBook Gadgets, Is the Web Making Writing More Oral?, Social Networks and the Book, Encouraging Kids to Read. And more.

Fellow-BookOvener Suw Charman-Anderson lead a session about the Book as Social Object; or, What happens when all books are free? The group struggled with this difficult question: what happens if writers can no longer make their money from just selling books? The answer wasn’t so clear, but several things are certain: ebooks are coming; DRM won’t stop infinite reproduction on the web; no one likes DRM; and no one really knows how the business is going to work in a decade. But music, for all the worries about the industry at the corporate level, is thriving. How will writing evolve?

The next session I attended was Bookkake: How to Start a Publishing Company in Your Bedroom. James Bridle,Bookkake founder & BookTwo writer, has published new editions of five public domain titles, using ebooks, print-on-demand, and covers designed from photos on Flickr. An inspiring view of indie publishing’s future.

Michael Bhaskar of Pan Macmillan hosted a session on the web and the increasing orality of text, how text is taking on characteristics that we once associated with oral communications: quick feedback, ephemeral, linear, disposable ; Mark Johnson and Kate Hyde of HarperCollins (and Authonomy and BookArmy) lead a discussion of social networks and the book, that the successes and challenges they’ve had with their initiatives.

Speaking of books ….

In addition to enjoying talking with these smart people, I had great conversations with too many more to list, but some particularly good ones with Peter Collinridge of Apt Studio, Anthony Topping, of lit agents Greene & Heaton, Lucy Crichton, Alex Ingram, digital buyer at UK bookseller Waterstones, Naomi Alderman, and Adrian Hon. It was also nice to see some familiar faces, Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr, and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr, as well as Cory Doctorow, who I’ve crossed paths with numerous times online, but never met in person.

It was a great event, and I am very happy I decided to make the trip to the UK. Well worth it, and a real encouragement that what we’re up to at the Book Oven, behind the curtain, is on the right track. My only complaint was that it lasted one day, and not a week.

Can you see the future?

While there are nerves about the future of the book business, the overwhelming sensation I had leaving bookcamp was optimism. What else could be the result of spending a full day with so many bright people, excited about books, and actively shaping their future?

For some other thoughts on bookcamp (I’ll try to keep this up to date, as I see links) see:

• PenguinBlog
• Chocolate and Vodka: here, here and here.
• The Rosemoirs
• Going Underground’s Blog
• if:Book

[Photos by: Matt Biddulph, Annie Mole, and Russell Davies]

[via Jessamyn]

NY budget cuts nullify arts grants awarded but not paid, while Yankees get help for $370 mill in stadium cost overruns.

Forget about that image of librarians as a mousy bookworms. More and more of today’s librarians must be clever interrogators, helping the patron to reframe their question more usefully. Librarians then become high-tech information sleuths, helping patrons plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records, often starting with a clever Google search but frequently going well beyond. [more...]

[via Moby Lives]