While appraising items made in, say, Sri Lanka, the Dominican Republic or China for purchase, I wonder who made it, under what conditions, how they live everyday and, almost concurrently, how this purse will look against a pair of slacks in my closet back at home or that hard drive will satisfy my space requirements, and whether I can get the item for cheaper elsewhere. When the next disaster hits one of these countries, I will most probably send money.

To top it all off, I recognize that to entertain all of these thoughts in one sitting is horrifyingly privileged and, at the same time, all too normal. That we can live with these dichotomies, but that’s life. Then, why do I rage on hearing of the latest young American who moved to New Orleans to “do good” or “make a difference” in the world?

In the wake of Kony 2012 (consider moving out from under your rock if you haven’t heard of this documentary and its fallout yet; on second thought, stay there), writer Teju Cole tweeted up a storm of a response. It started with “From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.” Six of these followed touching on the injustices levied against minorities and women all the way from the “microaggressions of American racism” to the stark contrast between American foreign policy on certain countries and our sentimentality towards what we consider charity cases in many of those same nations. Cole then hashed all of this out in a long-form Atlantic essay that is so civilized while not holding back. Please read it, take it all in and return.

Amen to our not-really-post-racial society, the repulsiveness of “civilized” journalism about topics inherently messy and barbaric and it being way past time we reclaim the ability to talk openly and directly about issues that pertain to us, especially when people who are not us do so fearlessly. Think Trayvon Martin, Wendell Allen, Robert Bales and even Joseph Kony and Jason Russell. But, here, I want to address the White Savior Complex specifically (leaving out “Industrial” on purpose for now, I’ll get to that later).

I disagree with Cole. I completely agree with him. Again with that pesky co-existing duality.

American sentimentality is a tremendously useful thing. It’s what drives the haves to replenish food banks and medical supplies in disaster-ravaged areas and offer money to people who need it NOW, to make it to TONIGHT, much less tomorrow. Back in 2008, when a group of us in New Orleans loaded up supplies for the United Houma Nations Old Store after Hurricane Gustav laid waste to Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in southern Louisiana, a volunteer asked, “What’s the point in taking all of these things down there if Hurricane Ike will come along next and wipe their homes off the map?” Another volunteer replied, “They’re still alive and need these things now, to make it to that next hurricane.” Even if there are grim and farther-reaching political reasons behind floods, wars and homelessness, up to and including the way we ourselves vote, those in need are in need right now. Food, drugs and money – stat.

I also noted at the time that the hurricane-flood victims themselves acknowledged the batshit-insane but economically-real logic with which they live in coastal Louisiana. In the interest of that cherished due diligence, let’s understand that those being helped are not utterly ignorant of their circumstances, too.

They spoke of the irony of working for [the offshore oil and gas] industry that destroys their land and ecosystem but offers them a steady paycheck. If they give up working as oilmen and start a petition for the removal of oil-producing infrastructure from their area, how else will they stay economically viable?  Everyone agreed that digging their own graves is what feeds them, but their hands are tied.

But, when we went down from New Orleans to the southern parishes after days of the roads being closed off by FEMA and other authorities, when the midwest-based First Draft crew came down to New Orleans to gut houses that had been allowed to flood in the first place and then fester for months thanks to federal-state-local government turf wars, we did so only on being invited by homeowners and communities themselves, to address very specific material wants and knowing fully well that the loss these folks suffered was our loss, too. That, as First Draft’s Athenae has tattooed on her arm since: Our fate is your fate. Intent, “[connecting the dots and seeing] the patterns of power behind the isolated ‘disasters’” and having a clue before intervention. This is where I fully agree with Teju Cole.

It goes back to Nicholas Kristof’s response to Cole’s tweets in which he says, “It seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.” Good grief, way to miss the point entirely. White is not just a skin color, Mr. Kristof, it’s also a state of mind and an economic paradigm. To put it in more blunt terms, even though my husband is white and understands the instant privilege that comes with the territory, I have more in common with boojie America than he does solely based on our respective families’/societies’ economic backgrounds and prevailing notions of success. To intervene with this mindset and little prior research into people’s cultures, what they consider home and their larger sociopolitical picture is nothing short of cultural proselytism.

With this in mind, too many times have I seen bright, young things armed with college degrees, blogs, social media cred and TED/Davos appearances come to New Orleans to “make a difference,” to “save them because they can’t save themselves.” They show up, make Connections, tweet a lot about Warehouse District parties and their new Friends in the Lower Ninth and Treme, raise some money for the latest charitable organization by getting a big corporation involved (which only gets the company more advertising and the community unsustainably dependent on a large outside source for financing and survival), find that they actually need money and real jobs to live in New Orleans, grow bored of keeping the charitable-organization-that-has-taken-on-a-life-of-its-own alive and weary of living amid the people they came to help and leave for New York or Los Angeles leaving a mess behind for someone else to clean up.

Because it is the only way they know how. And this is what I mean by intent: your only goal should be to want to help people restore or change themselves with self-respect based on their own cultural and economic dispositions and not remake them and their home in your image, much less feel good about yourself, pad your resume and make some money in the process.

Real help is not a sanitary or unique solution. Never ever help from a place of pity, misplaced self-confidence, an attempt to define your identity in externalities, self-justification or, worst of all, with no respect for the fact that the people you want to save are most probably doing their best to save themselves. Find out more about that and help that or get out of the way.

As for Industrial, this Charitable Behavior also reminds me a lot of emails from budding entrepreneurs asking if they can do you a favor by guest-writing on your blog about gardening equipment or child-rearing when that’s clearly not your territory or are Just Plain Clueless. And then you build up a whole infrastructure around it with flashy conferences in exotic locales and, there you have it, your insta-money-making scheme: Sound passionate about a current hot philanthropic topic, put a logo on it, cash in. You know why I like Warren Buffett? Because he made and still makes money honestly and doesn’t look blatantly inauthentic doing it.

I keep going back to First Draft because they are a great model of how to be (relatively more) privileged and effect real change. Girl loves her sexy boots and specialty soaps but, every single day, the time, money, sweat and tears Athenae and the other bloggers pour into no-bullshit, informational and passionate posts about politics, society and foreign policy and fundraisers for vetted causes – it’s amazing and stuff gets done. You would never see her or some others post the Kony documentary’s promo video as it is and then say something trite about the power of story, because (journalists, take note) they know the story changes based on who’s telling it. It’s so easy to feel good.

Please send money to Mexico. Also read up on why this most recent earthquake was destructive but not deadly, research our political relationship with Mexico, write your politicians on the way we treat Mexicans (and perceived Mexicans)  in America and think about how foreign stories are reported in our mainstream media. The more we inform ourselves, the more we participate and help in a really effective way, and the less antiseptic we are in our interaction with those different from us.

At the very least, it helps us recognize that the world is full of people different from us and they are all worthy of the same respect we expect. That right there is a ton of help.

Books prices plummet.
Literacy rates soar.
Education rates soar.
Old structures crumble, as did the Church.
Scientific Revolution.
Industrial Revolution.
Humanitarian Revolution.

Inventor of the electronic book and my dear friend Michael S. Hart would have been 65 today. Each time I say or think that – “he would have been 65 today” – the spirit of Michael frowns at me reproachfully, “Stop being so sentimental about the past. I am the past. Focus on the future!” This is the man who, if he were given the tough choice of saving his parents, wife or children from a sinking ship, would always pick his children. They are the future.

Reverence for the future, for what we cannot yet see but can begin to make, is the very core of the philosophy from which Michael created and ran Project Gutenberg. But, he was always looking at the land beyond the horizon. After eBooks, what next? While getting taxpayer-funded research back into public hands, making DRM more fair and continuously fighting draconian copyright laws all the way from Disney to SOPA and PIPA are extremely necessary and require our immediate energy, they are merely the taking-down of roadblocks to get us back to zero. What needs done in order for us to achieve true progress? What do we create next?

As I type this, I am suddenly wrecked and sobbing my eyes out. Not just because the world lost such a man and many don’t even realize what he signified, but because Michael was my friend and loved the people of now as much as he did those of tomorrow.

A friend who convinced me I could learn anything if I let go and think about it, taught me never to apologize for my personality and high standards, was proud of my achievements as he was of his own and I could call in the middle of the night with an Aha! moment or a broken heart.

A goofball who would chide me for spending too much on retail products but would buy at garage sales ten widgets that went into a machine he didn’t own or five tubes of toothpaste on super-sale because you never know when that make will be discontinued.

A teacher who broke down the quadratic formula for me visually so I understand what it physically means to complete the square.

A technophile who didn’t like that I work for the oil and gas industry because it isn’t forward-thinking enough but relished the technologies the industry fosters and drove his and friends’ cars into the ground (and in no way near a fuel-efficient manner).

A bat out of hell. But NEVER a cynic.

The world needs people like that to effect change while bringing others to realize that that change, the constant push towards better, is what keeps people and civilizations from brain and physical death.

Speaking of death, did I ever tell you Michael wanted to live forever? I am still upset we didn’t have his brain and some cells cryogenically frozen in a DQ Mr. Misty. Then again, it’s probably for the best, for who wants to deal with The Holocene Park Of Dr. Hart? *GROAN*awful*OW* Yeah, well, Michael would have appreciated that whole setup and delivery!

Happy 65th, my friend. Thinker, do-er and ever in my heart and actions. I love and miss you, but I draw the line at having a red Mr. Misty in your honor.

A request: If you read and love eBooks and understand the need to protect the public domain, please consider donating your time or money to Project Gutenberg.

Thank you, L.A. Eyewear, for donating the above image to the public domain.

This blog will go dark tomorrow to protest crimes perpetrated by people who know all about the internet aided by their toadies in government who know nothing of it.

From SOPAStrike.com:

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

As a scientist and representative of Project Gutenberg, i.e. an internet user, I stand against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its more insidious older twin, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) winding their ways through Congress.

DMCA, ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, whatever you want to call it, extended copyright terms and draconian terms of punishment for use violation are not the worst the state of intellectual property has come to. Every single day, books, art and scientific results that belong to the public domain are actively stolen away from us, turned into copyrighted product and then “protected from theft” with the help of those elected to represent us in government. This is a serious breach of the social contract and absolute proof that our congresspeople have been bought. They now represent other constituents that go by MPAA, RIAA, IFPI and AAP.

Keep information free, especially that which was free to begin with, and help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy. Join the fight against SOPA and PIPA. It’s going to be a long one.

Ever since Google killed existing features in Google Reader and began catering it to their new (mediocre) Google+ Social Media Extravaganza experience, I’ve been on the hunt for ONE quick and easy way by which to deliver media from around the web to a single archival list which I can then share here and elsewhere. The pattern that emerges from my investigation is one of inconsistency between platforms sprayed with a philosophy of We’re A Startup Waiting To Be Bought as opposed to Let’s Help You Share Information. Some of the avenues I tested and results in a convenient spreadsheet format:

The bottom line is that old Google Reader would update items in your carefully-compiled list of feeds, allow you to share your picks to Google Shared Items whether on a desktop, iPhone or iPad all through the same Google account and then give you the ability to publish that list to a page or the sidebar of your blog. SIGH. After this bit of research, the interim workaround I propose is to share these items in delicious and, if you use WordPress like me, can activate a seriously ugly delicious widget via a plugin called WP Delicious Sidebar, which then displays your items of choice in the sidebar. Doing this also serves to archive your links (with tags, if you so desire) in one place.

As I mention in the spreadsheet, Zite has potential but it is available only for iPad and doesn’t show every single item in a feed. As I mentioned to Patrix (who helpfully suggested that I sign up for HiveMined), I don’t want guesses at what I might want to read. I want to see every single item in every single feed to which I signed up, and the suggestions are lagniappe!

If you have any bright ideas or know of apps I’ve overlooked here, please let me know in the comments. Just remember that solutions have to work on desktop, iPhone and iPad and should not require having to turn around three times, pat your tummy and rub your head for five minutes, sing a song and tapdance before getting a piece of information from my screen to yours.

Yesterday, Google released the overhaul of its feedreader, Reader, which features increased integration with Google’s relatively new answer to Facebook, Google+. If you like auto-spamming your Facebook or Google+ timeline with links to articles minus context or, in general, do not think of the internet as a space in which to share information in a thoughtful and meaningful way, stop reading now. If you are tired of another company’s sorry attempt at imitating Facebook in the absence of a proper platform and especially don’t want it interfering with great features that work for you and your community of friends, colleagues and readers, keep going. Even better, if you work at Google or know someone who does*, there are a few suggestions below that I would like implemented to make the internet a happy and safe place for information sharing once again.

I use Reader to:

- quickly access and read the latest blog posts and online magazine articles from feeds that I have bookmarked in the reader,

- organize these feeds into the folders of Geology, Geophysics, New Orleans, Science, Science Blogs, Technology and Visualization; share links to individual folders (bundles) with interested parties;

- share specific blog posts or articles either on Shared Items or by publishing them to this blog inside the Recommended Reading sidebar widget (simple list of hyperlinked titles of shared items) ALL IN ONE CLICK and

- share and DISCUSS items inside Reader with a specific group of WILLING followers who can passively join my Followers list and I theirs.

Now:

- access is really slow with increased load times; furthermore, the feed refreshes and displays the latest set of posts while you’re still reading previous ones,

- folders are still there and users can still create and share bundles,

- you +1 (instead of share) a post which then goes to a +1 page on your Google+ profile (complete with a Buzz tab that we are warned will be going away in a few weeks). Note that you not only have to create a non-pseudonymous Google+ profile in order to share Reader items, but also have to point your friends, colleagues and readers to the location of the +1 page, and

- once you’ve publicly +1ed the Reader item of interest, you have the option (which works on a PC desktop, works for crap on a PC laptop and not at all on an iPad) to create a post on Google+ to let your Circles know that you, Google+ user, have shared yet another article which is going to take up more of their screen real estate than is really warranted.

This, i.e. what used to be feedreader + Twitter + del.icio.us + publishable outside of Google space + all self-contained in terms of size and community,

has become this for archival:

along with this for sharing and discussion:

Instead of going from my blog to the article, the pathway has now become my blog –> my Google+ +1 list –> the article or my blog –> my Google+ stream –> the article. Archival? That’s right out the window.

Because all we need are more gates and gatekeepers between us and the information.

The Official Google Reader Blog explains these changes: “Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.”

I don’t understand why Google has to cancel one set of features in favor of another, unless it is to force users into Google+. Some argue that the social integration with G+ is something that they look forward to, which is great, but why not host a +1 button for G+ users as well as a Share button for those who do not want to utilize Google products socially?

Which brings us to the fundamental difference between the two: signal to noise. As I said on a G+ post this morning to which not a soul responded (probably because it drowned in the sea of re-re-re-re-re-shares of Rick Perry’s “drunk” speech – QED):

Along with the tremendous amount of white space, the signal-to-noise ratio of content is already very low at Google+ which is why I also don’t hang out at Facebook much other than to comment on other folks’ posts (when I find them in the noise there) or to make short throwaway posts myself. Now, folks sharing their Reader items here without context makes it even more noisy and unreadable.

Congratulations, Google, you have succeeded in sacrificing internet meaning – content in context – for more internet clutter in a silly attempt to reproduce Facebook, and in the process really pissed off a bunch of scientists, bloggers and internet users who, until yesterday, happily utilized Reader as a staple of simple, one-click, high signal-to-noise sharing and discussion. You just can’t have this in Plus.

Garrett Guillotte sums up for me:

Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus — and shit no they haven’t, and it doesn’t look like they will — the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can’t remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can’t efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.

Some suggestions for Google:

1) Please help us publish our +1s outside of Google+ via a “shared feed.” All you have to do is build a “Share This On Your Blog” embed utility into the +1 page.

2) Please replace the “Note In Reader” bookmarklet with a +1 bookmarklet. What if I want to +1 an article published on a website that doesn’t use +1 buttons? And, no, they’re all not going to add the +1 button to their websites/pages, just like they didn’t “Facebook This” or “Tweet This.” Give it up.

3) Can we go back to refreshing feeds as we did two days ago? I would really appreciate the page not cutting to all white and then repopulating itself with new material, all while I am in the middle of reading something.

4) Please don’t let this become your version of what Yahoo! did to GeoCities.

Functionality over mediocrity. Tremendous usefulness over killing useful features. These should be internet mantras. Ultimately, there is just no need for another Facebook, which is itself far from perfect (and, in fact, on the quest to completely confuse the hell out of its users). But, a utility that can be Facebook, feedreader, Twitter and Pinboard/delicious to many and in the doses that they want? Now THERE is a gamechanger.

Who do you want to be, Google? Figure that out first.

==
* The guy who engineered the Google+ Circles model and I went to the same high school years apart. And what am I going to say? “Hey, fix this or I’ll stuff you in your locker.” We were a bunch of nerds who would have all been stuffed in lockers in a normal high school and we didn’t even lock our lockers.

***

Related:

Brian Shih | Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? “The closest analogue might be if Twitter made it so that 3rd party clients could use the Retweet functionality to push Retweets to a user’s stream — but only allowed you to consume Retweets on twitter.com.”

The 2011 Science Bloggers for Students online charity challenge was once again a smashing success thanks to all of you who donated. The overall drive brought in more than $51,000 from 698 people. Ocean and Geobloggers brought in around $3100 of that money to which you guys contributed $585 $645!

In order of donation date, thanks and high-fives go to:

1. The Donors Choose team
2. Anne J.
3. Anita C.
4. Julie H.
5. Anonymous Donor Fairy (who gave $100 – yeah!)
6. Janet S.
7. Chris R.
8. my very own D
9. Craig C.
10. Rusty H.
11. Anne J. (again!)
12. Elizabeth B.
13. Lynn C. and
14. Cynthia D.

The fourteen of you reached 519 students, got four earth science classroom projects fully funded and helped four others get started! I want to take this opportunity to thank Janet Stemwedel as well, for once again organizing us science bloggers into doing something tremendously useful.

A note to those of you who donated during the last three days of the drive: Gift codes will arive via e-mail. How the match is calculated and issued to you is detailed here. As gerty-z says, “THIS IS FREE MONEY, folks. Let’s make sure the kids see every last penny.” Just because the Science Bloggers drive is over doesn’t mean individual classroom projects have expired as well. I highly encourage you to donate to one or more of these four projects:

• Mitosis In Motion (needs $140 $55 by December 13th),
• Was That An Earthquake? What Does It Mean? (needs $467 by February 5th),
• Amazing Science for Amazing Kids (needs $184 by February 14th)
• Exciting Earth Science (needs $583 by February 19th).

An interesting observation about the projects that did get fully funded before October 22nd: They all have ROCK in the title. Keep On ROCKing In The Free World, Rock Stars, Rock Out and Science ROCKS! Tuck that idea away for next year, earth science teachers.

Thanks again to all of you who gave. I’m making *sparkly eyes* at you.

My Visual DNA: Pretty sure my entire personality profile came from my favorite type of movie (assuming that "banana suit kicks goat-cow suit" implies "comedy") and choice of ride (safe).

[LINK] Which helps you understand yourself, thereby “allowing The New York Times marketing department to make personalized product recommendations.” Hey, at least they’re open about their intent.

Turns out I’m a Tech Guru. Flattery is the best form of irritation. Let’s look at what the detailed personality assessment said and then, um, assess ourselves:

“You are the type of person who has the ability to see things from multiple TWO MAYBE THREE perspectives. Nothing is more satisfying than spotting patterns forming in life HUMAN MISTAKES and seeing the beauty in nature. You think everything in life is connected, and keeping in touch with nature ROCKS AND FOSSILS is just as important as keeping up with the latest gadgets. Your sense of humor is one of your best NERDIER qualities. You are naturally friendly and always have something to talk about.

“You have an inquisitive mind and possess an irresistible urge to experiment with TOUCH AND BREAK everything around you. You’re a real get-up-and-go OH WHAT NOW kind of person who likes to keep at least one finger on the pulse of everything that’s hot and happening from the latest movies CAT MACROS and sport FOOTBALL to the coolest technologies and gadgets. A true entertainment junkie, there’s no TOTALLY A chance of you ever getting bored and you’re always the first SECOND AFTER YOUR HUSBAND to get your hands on some shiny new gizmo that’s going to revolutionize TAKE OVER your life. You have a realistic outlook on what you can achieve and enjoy attention to detail in most SOME IDIOSYNCRATIC aspects of your life.”

Much better.

One of the last things Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, wrote before he passed away was an essay on Steve Jobs, on the occasion of the latter’s resignation as Apple CEO.  Here is an excerpt from Michael’s piece that reminds why both of these great people will be sorely missed.

We live in an age where the media are controlled by mega-corporations — hopefully not Apple — who deny the importance of the individual hero, to whom we owe so very very much because they want to replace all that via a corporate image that does not depend on individuals, other than as ad spokesmodels for their products, but no longer as the inventor, creator or maker of those products.

Those people, the inventors, creators, and makers of our products are a now lost species in the eyes and ears of our media’s corporate control.

Why Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak?

Because without them we would be years, if not decades, behind in world advancement of personal computers.

Yes, it’s that time of year again when I beseech you, dear readers, to donate to the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers For Students online charity challenge that helps high-poverty science and mathematics classrooms in need. There is a lot less fanfare and competition between us science bloggers this year, but classrooms are more underfunded than ever. The challenge runs from October 2nd to 22nd this year.

Last year, this blog raised around $500 with a dollar-for-dollar match by HP. At the conclusion of the last challenge, I said, “A simple $1.50 per child living in poverty can make the difference towards a better and slightly more equipped science education.” This is still true. Also read some of the thank-you letters from teachers whose classrooms benefited from your donations through this very page last year. One from a teacher in Illinois puts it all in perspective:

… In addition to increasing the modes of instruction in my classroom, the projector has been an invaluable resource due to the limited budget and high poverty experienced at my school. Several students at my school cannot afford necessary eyeglasses and struggle seeing writing on whiteboards when sitting in the front row. With the new projector, I can zoom in on text to allow all students to read important information. Additionally, my school is struggling to afford paper and toner for the copy machine. We have gone weeks at a time without being able to make copies. The projector allows me to display the required instructions, problems, graphs, and tables so the students can learn and practice new skills.

Please peruse the projects on my 2011 GIVING PAGE and please, please, PLEASE consider giving even $5 to a project of your choice. Let’s support American science education even if (and especially because) the government and private sector couldn’t care less!

Today’s xkcd:

I’ve lost grey matter beating my head on the walls of this blog and elsewhere on the internet that the advent of eBooks does not signal or signify the death of paper books, nor should it. Anyone who wants paper books to go away is in the business of reading for the sake of technology and not access. With that in mind, it is sad that there are many in this nation, especially librarians, who consider a potential decline in the number of paper books or “the death of print” as a widening of the digital divide. They are right and wrong.

Let’s look at how they are wrong first: Think beyond America (few do) and the number of people across the world we cannot ship physical books to or books that are not printed in their language. With cheap cellphones and pricing plans everywhere in the world except this country, eBooks are made more accessible anywhere you can get a cellphone signal. Now that is access. The digital divide closes. Now, look back at America. We are a nation that takes expensive technology as a given and works for change from that premise. I think we need to take a step back and look at how we consume and address (read: fight) our own patterns of consumption before we cry about how others cannot consume the same way. For instance, I will never buy a Kindle (single function) and truly question the purchase of eBooks for an iPad or similar device. More about this in a little bit.

How they are so, so right: Access to paper and electronic books in the US is a hot, confusing, expensive mess. Most libraries are woefully underfunded and understocked and the stacks of most university libraries are off-limits to the uninitiated, in many cases taxpayers who paid for them in the first place. And why in the name of everything right and sweet are new paperbacks almost $10 a piece, forget larger paperbacks for $14.99 and hardbacks upwards of $40? So, if getting to paper books is this hard, think how much more of a barrier there is is for the average American to get to electronic books. American internet and cellphone plans are the epitome of price-gouging and, in this economy, the first things to be cancelled when drawing up a budget. Following that, unless you plan to read only free, public-domain eBooks for the rest of your life, the pricing structure for for-sale eBooks is completely bogus. Up to $15 for a new eBook – they have to replant more electrons, you see – and don’t give me all that about having to pay the authors and editors because y’all know how much you were paid for paper copies of your books back when. The big honking cherry on top is the question of ownership and sharing. This brings me back to the point earlier in this post when I questioned the purchase of eBooks for any reader.

Is my purchased eBook really mine? In other words, can I do whatever I want with it, including giving it to a friend after I’ve finished reading it without giving away my reader with it? I recently stumbled across librarian Bobbi Newman’s really cool blog and am absolutely intrigued by the notion of checking out your local library’s electronic copy of a book on your reader. How many libraries do this? But, more importantly, when can we do this between my iPad and your Kindle? When can I give you my eBook that I bought for $14? And will a SWAT team come crashing into my house Brazil-style and cart me away to Penguin-Knopf Prison Cell Block C because, somewhere in the fine print of all the legalese surrounding the purchase of an eBook, it says I cannot give you my eBook as I would have my paper copy? Again, if the process is this difficult for me to understand, a technologist who works with Project Gutenberg, to fathom, how much harder is it someone who simply wants to read a book, not pay a fortune for it, actually own it and maybe give it away when done with it? Note that I did not even get into how you have to purchase an expensive eReader first (and its attendant DRM agreements with the providers of every chunk of content you put into it) before you go about borrowing library eBooks.

Yes, I can see how the digital librarians worry. But, I wish they, especially the more high-profile ones, would speak out more and louder against the dictates of the publishing and telecommunications industries instead of taking them as a given. We need less gatekeepers and more gatecrashers.

At the time of this writing, I am considering attending Books In Browsers 2011 as a PG representative, where I hope to learn a lot more about the current state of eBooks and generate ideas to increase access to electronic and paper books. Literacy creates opportunity.

Related Reading: Library Pirates Unlock Rented Digital Textbooks, Take Aim at Publishers