librarian.net

Amazon likes to make you think that they are selling ebooks at a tremendous rate. And they are, compared to hardcover books. But when you add paperbacks into the mix, and then extrapolate to what Amazon’s share of the ebook market is (90%) ebooks market dominance seems much less gigantic. Longer discussion over at Slashdot.

I’m still sort of annoyed at Amazon’s self-serving press release about more ebooks being sold for the Kindle on Christmas Day than “real” books. I feel a few things

1. they’re creating a distinction that isn’t necessary, between ebooks and paper books
2. at the same time they’re obscuring the very very real distinction that exists and is terribly important: you do not own an ebook, you license or lease it

Plus I just plain old don’t believe it. I mean maybe it’s true for the narrowly sliced timeframe they’ve outlined but really? This isn’t a trend, it’s a blip. Want me to think otherwise? Release some actual numbers. Amazon makes more money off of ebooks than paper books. They’d like to keep doing that. So.

I’ve been meaning to link to this talk for a while, a transcribed talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the National Reading Summit in November. The title of his talk was How to Destroy the Book. I think you’ll enjoy it.

[T]he most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].

Having your books there like an old friend, following you from house to house for all the days and long nights of your life: this is the invaluable asset that is in publishing’s hands today. But for some reason publishing has set out to convince readers that they have no business reading their books as property—that they shouldn’t get attached to them. The worst part of this is that they may in fact succeed.

I was waiting to write about the Kindle story until I knew what the heck actually happeend. As you know, when journalists [or bloggers] write about technology, especially hot button stories, they tend to leave out important information. This is often because they don’t totally understand the mechanisms they’re describing, but also because certain people have vested interests in the story being told a certain way. No one says “A Microsoft virus” they say “A computer virus.” Anyhow… Copyfight, one of my favorite blogs has created a heavily hyperlinked timeline of what was going on with the situation in which Amazon pulled some titles (including Orwell’s 1984), titles users had paid for, off of Kindles. Granted, the blog post uses some heavy-handed language, it’s certainly far from objective, but let’s be not just fair but accurate when we try to explain the ways in which a book is not at all the same as an e-book. The differences matter.

Rochelle mentions a library in New Hampshire that is lending out Kindles and also mentions that their use — which was okayed by Amazon support — got a different answer to “is this okay” from the support rep that she spoke with.

Rochelle asks and Amazon answers: is loaning the Kindle (by libraries) a violation of Amazon.com’s terms of service. Answer: yes.

I learned what I know about greasemonkey and an awful lot about accessibility by reading Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility and Dive Into Greasemonkey. He has a blog at DiveIntoMark, of course, which I sometimes read. Today I was directed there by David Weinberger to the post called The Future of Reading. As David points out Mark’s post is not just a cheeky then and now juxtaposition of some of the things Jeff Bezos has said, it’s also “the story of the coming change in norms. And a change in norms rewrites all the stories leading up to it.” How are you feeling about your digital rights, and the content in your libraries?

I am intrigued by nownow.com, Amazon’s answers-like service that allows you to ask questions via your phone [or other web enabled device] and they’ll email you back three answers, fast. Looks like the answers come from people working for mturk.com and, if I’m not mistaken these answers generally take a minute or two and answerers get paid a few cents. The answers I’ve seen are your standard concise copy/paste web answers, they seem pretty good for factual type questions. Here are some examples

Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
What fast birds start with the letter A?
Where is the closest public bathroom to 3 Hanover Square NY NY 10004….um like NOW!

At some level it’s like being able to email someone to have them do a web search for you, I bet it becomes very popular and I’m curious to see how it fits in with Amazon’s other qanda product, Askville.

Contrast this to library email reference. In this example (which coincidentally came in to my inbox this week for an unrelated reason) where someone is trying to remember a book from their childhood (which, as we know, is a really typical reference query). The librarian, while excruciatingly thorough with the resources, does the standard librarian thing and teaches as he or she tries to answer the question. For an opening line to a response to a “what’s this book” question, this one is sort of…. daunting?

Fiction is usually cataloged by author and title, not by subject or plot line, which makes identifying books by their plot an often difficult endeavor. One of the best ways to find books for which you know only the plot is to ask other knowledgeable and well-read people for help. There are several resources you can consult to do this.

The answer is amazing if, like librarians, you look up books for people as your job. However, telling someone to subscribe to a listserv just to answer a “what’s this book” question seems a bit like overkill. Telling them to ask knowledgeable people seems to pave the way for the response “isn’t that what I just did?” In any case, names have been removed and this is not a “tut tut” post, just an interesting observation on the divergence of serious ref and ready ref.

Amazon.com is getting into the community Q & A game with their new website AskVille. It’s in limited beta right now, but feel free to IM me (US and Canada only) and I’ll be happy to spot you an invite. My first impressions? Slick and pastellish with some neat features, but seems like it’s going to go more in the Yahoo Answers direction [high noise, low signal] than any other more authoritative AskA sites. I’ve asked a question and answered a question, but so far I’m not feeling real compelled to go back.

If Amazon sucked like our old OPAC. To be fair, this Innovative version is pretty ancient. Funny? Yes. Accurate? Not entirely. [thanks marlene]

I was poking around on Amazon.com today and noticed two things

1. They have changed my name from Jessamyn Charity West to Jessamyn West which means that clicking on my name gets you all the books by the other Jessamyn West. I can only imagine why this happened and, to be fair, they would be changing it back to how it was before. I complained and they changed it, but not before telling me that this sort of munging of author names was “a feature” of their system. The change is recent, the Google cache still contains my full name.
2. Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases which is a whole new approach to the sticky issue of “aboutness” Add ot this the existing tools of concordance and readibility and you’ve got two things 1) strong “keeping up with the Joneses” pressure to submit to the Inside the Book program 2) the beginnings of cataloging by robots.

This all came to me a day after getting a fat envelope from Sandy Berman which included, among other things some articles he had written about “bibliocide by cataloging” where subject headings assigned by OCLC or LoC or OCLC member libraries and passed down to thousands of libraries via copy cataloging are so vague as to be essentially useless as finding aids. Do these Amazon features solve this problem or compound it? Eli also expands a bit on what I said about Google a few days ago; these issues are not disconnected.

“Why catalog in-house? Why catalog locally? And why not outsource the whole operation? Because critical, creative catalogers within individual systems are the last and only bulwarks against the often error-laden, access-limiting, and alienating records produced by giant, distant, and essentially unaccountable networks and vendors.”