Day 898: eBook News
February 11, 2008 - Filed Under books, media, project gutenberg, public domain
One million books scanned at U of Michigan
Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go.
Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
Forget everything you believe about Google’s book digitization project. Once you get past the freakishly high numbers bandied about, the two-dozen-plus distinguished institutions that have signed on, the legal paranoia and the ultra-ultra-secret processes and technologies involved, you’ll find that Book Search (from the fifth most valuable company in America) is simply another high-cost effort that is simultaneously visionary and crude. It doesn’t even have to succeed in order to impact the transformation of scholarship activities.
Just a reminder that scanned copies of paper books are not eBooks, they are merely photographs of books (susceptible to copyright). A real eBook is plain, searchable and reformattable text.
NYTimes: The paperless society?
“Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. “Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?”
… After rising steadily in the 1980s and ’90s, worldwide paper consumption per capita has plateaued in recent years. In the richest countries, consumption fell 6 percent from 2000 to 2005, from 531 to 502 pounds a person.
Remind me to email Brewster and let him know that loads of telephone books are manufactured and delivered everywhere in this city. They are then recklessly thrown into the dumpster, thanks to our non-existent recycling effort, but they do exist here in all their mulchy glory. Then again, this is New Orleans we’re talking about.
Day 732: Grab Bag
August 30, 2007 - Filed Under books, computing & internet, education, global, music, project gutenberg, science & technology
Who Killed Beethoven? - Dun dun dun duuuuuuun …
Examiners in the UK are asked to “make science easier” - Unintelligent design crosses the pond, thus making us not the only G7 nation with low expectations of our kids. Or as England’s equivalent of the DoE(dumacation) responds,”Deliberately increasing the proportion of easier questions is a clear example of lowering the bar.”
Teachers, bypass NCLB and read your kids some Rilke! In English or the original German?
All Your IP Are Belong To Teh Google - Google may own anything you work with in any of their services including Maps API, Google Earth, Documents, Calendar, GMail … and Blogger.
Knowledge Is Priceless, But Textbooks Are Not - A mother sending her child off to college offers great advice on locating discount textbooks online. Wait until girlie goes to grad school and sees the pricetags on Springer-Verlag and Elsevier journal subscriptions. Yet another reason to support Project Gutenberg and fight the publishing industry’s daylight robbery.
Mysterious Fairyland Spider Web Found In Texas - Dang! I was hoping it came from one Shelob-sized spider. Why do “Texas” and “spider” remind me of the following bumper sticker?
Day 683: Optimal Copyright Term Is 14 Years
July 13, 2007 - Filed Under books, project gutenberg, public domain
So says mathematics (thanks, D)
[Rufus] Pollock’s work is based on the pr[e]mise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down. As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in have dropped substantially, but actual copyright law has only increased.
The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).
Forever minus a day? Some theory and empirics of optimal copyright
This is exactly what Michael Hart and I have been arguing (him in papers, me on listservs) for years, but now with proof and a not-so-round number.
Day 665: Blogging Out Loud
June 25, 2007 - Filed Under citizen journalism, computing & internet, new orleans, project gutenberg, science & technology
Like Loki, I suffer from a bit of blog burn-out and have considered simply shutting VatulBlog down and restarting another space dedicated to Project Gutenberg, geophysics and other assorted geekiness. No, no, I’m not turning off the blog and the following tells you why.
The conversations here have been severely lacking since last fall really, and often it’s just me talking to a big electronic wall, while the real dialogue occurs over email and in real life. Yes, this blog still gets a lot of hits and is a great place for media and lay visitors to come a-knockin’, but the discussions are elsewhere and/or most of us are just fatigued. Plus, what am I going to report that you don’t already know? All levels of American government suck, the schools suck, crime is on the rise and the justice system sucks, everyone wants to take you for a ride and Americans are too wrapped up in their warp-speed lives to care. Ho hum.
Plus, if a paradigm exists that blogging mirrors one’s life, this blog doesn’t reflect it (well, except for the part about the trips I take). Most of what I spend my time on — work, bringing New Orleanians with various resources together and taking the time to meet with them, finances for non-profits — I can’t blog about and don’t have the time to, so what’s the point?
The point is to extract head from ass and acknowledge that the problems of New Orleans are a lot larger than mine and different from America’s, and that a vast majority of this city has it much harder than I ever will. Also, there is more going on here than the hopelessness of government, schools, crime, etc. with the occasional indictment or step forward. The point is to publicize these hardships and hard-won victories, bring those email and in-real-life discussions into this blog and, in this second year after Katrina, remember that we’re doing rather than being. We’ve identified the problems, now is the time we act rather than talk about them.
It is also important to remember the 1990s, and that in this field, temporary separations are alright, but never outright divorces. Between the years of 1993 and 1998, I took a hiatus from Internetland and concentrated fully on geology. While my proficiency in technical computing and scientific data interpretation and visualization grew, my social computing knowledge declined. Same with Web 2.0 as I entered the oil industry, although Web 2.0 to me is akin to putting Hello Kitty stickers on Web 1.0 technology, where the real work was done.
I admit that the internet, especially this blog, is my playground and always will be, and I’ll rip my heart out before I destroy this space. Perhaps the combination of a long meditation, realigning this blog to reflect what’s really being done in New Orleans, and creating another one for Project Gutenberg and technical computing purposes is the way to go.
Thanks for listening as I thought out loud.
Day 621: Michael Hart Interviewed On NPR Today
May 11, 2007 - Filed Under computing & internet, media, project gutenberg, public domain
Founder and executive director of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart, was interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday this morning. Fellow interviewees are Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive (that “dovetails with Project Gutenberg”) and Michael Keller of Stanford University’s library (representing Google). The topic is Digital Libraries and universal access to all knowledge. This conversation will help those of you who want to understand the importance of and need for the public domain. Also, pay attention to the dialogue between Kahle and Keller about images of texts (Google effort) vs. actual eBooks.
“eBook” is not about format - paper books vs. electronic text. The issue is content over form and “ownership of personal libraries as [people today] own their personal computers.”
“Real men don’t make backups. They upload it via ftp and let the world mirror it.” — Linus Torvalds
To listen to the interview, click HERE.
Day 608: Hart Article In Global Politician
April 28, 2007 - Filed Under books, culture-society-history, media, project gutenberg, public domain
Michael has a great article in the Global Politician entitled Web2.0 - Erudition, Not Hoarding: Response to Sam Vaknin. With computing and electronic media, as with any medium including book, newspaper, television, radio, its value depends on the user. For the person who really doesn’t want to learn, the argument over medium is immaterial.
… Sam Vaknin comments, “the fare served up by the electronic media everywhere now consist largely of soap operas, interminable sports events, and reality TV shows.” Still, he does not give credit to this independent effort by thousands of people worldwide to bring a new kind of library to electronic doorsteps everywhere … If one cannot judge, cannot evaluate, cannot assimilate or chooses not to assimilate, then one is simply awash in a sea of words Sam has described above.
… Vaknin’s final quotation concludes here: “This relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new ‘Dark Age,’ hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine enlightenment.”
… These “New Dark Ages” are not fostered by the masses. They are the outcome of the abdication of the intellectuals, those who could have been great teachers and scholars, great librarians of the Third Millennium’s multi-billion book libraries … If you take neither side, then you, too, have abdicated humanity.
Day 564: Fahrenheit Dumb
March 15, 2007 - Filed Under books, culture-society-history, desi / india, education, government, project gutenberg
“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” — Heinrich Heine
Gita and Ramayana Will Be Burnt By The DMK
Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) president K Veeramani has warned that the sacred book of the Hindus, the Bhagawad Gita and the Indian epic Ramayana, would be burnt as part of a demonstration to be organised soon. Veeramani said and alleged that Ramayana, one of the oldest and well known epics of the world, besmirched women … The DK leader also said that the Bhagavath Gita and Manusmruthi too denigrated the women folk. Hence, a demonstration would be held soon and these works would be burnt to ashes.
Because burning religious texts will empower poor and uneducated women in Tamil Nadu. Right. Why doesn’t the DK, for instance, give them an educational hand up after which women parse religious and secular texts for themselves, and figure out what they want? But, it isn’t really about the empowerment of Tamilian woman, is it?
When Marx opined that religion is the opiate of the masses because it discourages independent thought, he didn’t foresee his own philosophy turning into the anthem of an organized sheep huddle. Any enshrined set of ideas can be twisted and abused for the acquisition of power. Ask Jesus about the Catholic Church and Mohammed about Sharia.
This brings us to books and literacy: Before The Gutenberg Press the average person owned 0 books. Before Project Gutenberg average persons owned 0 libraries. Let’s make the personal computer the personal library, starting right here with the falling literacy rate of the United States.
Related: House Passes Freedom of Information Bills
Day 520: Google’s Moonshine
January 30, 2007 - Filed Under books, computing & internet, gizmos & hacks, media, project gutenberg
a.k.a. the perks of having a large, well-funded PR department.
The New Yorker: Google’s Moon Shot - The Quest For The Universal Library
Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com.
… Google’s is not the only book-scanning venture. Amazon has digitized hundreds of thousands of the books it sells, and allows users to search the texts; Carnegie Mellon is hosting a project called the Universal Library, which so far has scanned nearly a million and a half books; the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries, is also scanning thousands of books; and there are many smaller projects in various stages of development. Still, only Google has embarked on a project of a scale commensurate with its corporate philosophy: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Anyone heard of Project Gutenberg, the oldest producer of free eBooks on the internet, 20,000 at last count? Scanning books, even destructively, is not a big deal, but proofreading them and converting them to universally-readable plain-vanilla ASCII text is. Why do Google et al. think Distributed Proofreaders even exists? Scanned images are not eBooks. The concept of a universal library sounds lofty, but its purpose must be utilitarianism and not amassment for its own sake.
So, what is wrong with the mainstream press that they refuse to acknowledge, much less highlight, the longstanding eBook project that is Project Gutenberg, along with its scanning and proofreading efforts? Founder Michael Hart’s answer is double-pronged, “There’s a fairly well-known saying attributed to Gandhi, and often used by activists battling injustice: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’” Then he said, “We don’t have a PR dept . . . hint, hint. . .”
Tonight, as I lay me down to sleep, prayers will be dispatched for two extra arms and four hours added to each day.
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