Scanners Work In Vain

One of the arguments you sometimes hear in the brouhaha over "intellectual property"
is "well you can just scan it in", referring to copying a book or a story.

My current response to the "you can just scan it in argument" is "like Hell you can!"

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to scan in an a novella I wrote with Ernest Hogan, called "Obsidian Harvest" that we intend to publish as an ebook. On the basis of my experiences I'd say scanning digest-sized (paperback book size) pages is in fact extremely difficult. The real reason we're no overrun with scanned pirated versions of books is it's damned hard to do.

Part of the reason it took so long was that I was also in the final stages of publishing my new book titled "Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers." That was another "interesting" experience, albeit much less frustrating than the scanner.

My first attempt at scanning was with my quirky HP 8500 all-in-one printer-scanner-fax machine. It took me over an hour to scan in the 28 magazine pages. Then it went through OCR and the fun really began.

First off, the quality of the scan and resulting OCR was lousy. There was a mistake or two on nearly every line. Worse, whole sections of the story had simply not been picked up. At several places in the copy I was missing half a page or more. In short the scan was unusable.

Now I regularly use the scanner for contracts and such without the OCR and it has performed satisfactorily. So I assumed the OCR software that came with the machine (OEMed) from Iris wasn't up to the job.

My next step was to go to Nuance and order OmniPage 18, a highly recommended scanning and OCR package. After some hassles getting it installed, I tried it on the pdf file the IRIS software had created. This is a file of graphic images and most OCR packages will accept it.

The results were definitely better, but there were still a lot of mistakes. And of course the gaps in the document was still there.

Okay, recalling the famous dictum of John W. Campbell Jr.: "Always use the proper tool for the job. The proper tool to fix a television is a television repairman." I decided to take doczilla to a scanning service and have it scanned professionally.

The first place I tried was a regular commercial service. After some back and forth on the phone the guy at the service told me that basically they couldn't do it. Not only was my project to small physically for their scanners to feed, it was also too small a job for them. "Now if you had 2800 pages instead of 28 . . ." my informant told me.

After calling a couple of more services I got the same response. They all dealt in letter or legal sized pages printed on dead-white background and in quantities in the thousands.

Then I decided to try one of my local quick print places. They did indeed have a scanner for small quantities, but when I took it down there the answer was the same: They couldn't do it. Their problem was the paper size. It was too small to feed reliably through their sheet feeder.

In talking to the very helpful guy at the copy center, I found out why I was getting gaps in the scans. My all-in-one simply didn't have enough RAM to handle the job. When it ran out of RAM it quit OCR until it caught -- with no warning, naturally.

Okay, I've got one final shot. I dug the original manuscript out of my files and today I'll take it back to the copy center and see if they can do that. It's a little dog eared, but it is a clearly printed original. If that doesn't work, it's time to hire a typist.

The point of this long, rambling tale is that "just scanning it in" isn't easy, especially when you're dealing with digest-size or paperback book-size packages. While it's theoretically easy, the practice for some kinds of documents is a lot harder. It doesn't help that you've got to take the pages out of the original to get a clean scan.

There are a lot of things like this in our high-tech world where the gap between "we can do it" and "we can do it easily and routinely" is broad enough to defeat even semi-serious efforts to make it work. Just because we can do something doesn't mean it has been reduced to everyday practice and just because something is reduced to everyday practice in one field doesn't mean it will transfer easily to another, even closely related, field.

Attention: The driving force behind the web

One of the peculiarities of selling stuff on the web is that the sales curve is quite a bit different.

I have particularly noticed this since I've been publicizing my new book "Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers." The topic is the rapidly changing landscape of e-publishing and the opportunities it offers writers.
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So far the book is following the standard pattern for ebooks. Sales start off very small and then ramp up. This is unlike a print book which typically starts strong and then runs out of legs after a few months.

I wasn't surprised by this because I've seen the pattern in other ebooks. Even runaway best-selling authors such as John Locke and Amanda Hocking has this happen both of them received paltry first royalty checks (less than $20 in both cases) on books that ultimately sold a million copies or more.

This difference is perfectly normal for ebooks, but it is very discouraging to print authors venturing into ebooks because for the first couple of months the book seems a failure.

That perception of failure can easily become self-fulfilling because it can discourage authors from continuing to publicize and market their ebooks. Selling ebooks takes constant marketing and if you let the effort die, so does your book.

So what's going on here? Why is the sales pattern so different?

The answer is that getting an ebook known is a much more important part of selling ebooks. You have to make your book known to potential customers. In the current state of the industry, this takes time and during that time your sales are low.

This also points up another difference between ebooks and regular books: Persistent marketing effort. In ebooks writing the book is only half of it. The other half is marketing the book after it comes out. That's what drives sales.

What Is The Future Of Printed Books

In light of the advantages of ebooks over printed books, particularly cost, do printed books have a future?

Let me answer that with another question. How many blacksmiths are active today?

The answer to the second question is "thousands". The Artists Blacksmith Association of North America has over 4,000 members and there are thousands of more blacksmiths who aren't affiliated with ABANA. Buggy whip makers are also thriving, and there are a lot of wheelwrights working as well. In fact it's hard to think of an obsolete trade or craft which isn't still being practiced today.

I submit the same thing is going to happen to publishers of print books. The economic advantages of ebooks my limit them to niche markets, but they're going to be healthy niches. Some people think enough of print books that they're willing to pay 5 or 10 times the price of ebooks for a printed-on-paper copy.

In fact that's what has happened to traditionally bound books, made by hand with the cords running across the back under the leather binding. They're still available, although much more costly than regular printed books.

We're not going to lose printed books because of ebooks, but because of price and other advantages ebooks will dominate the market.

"Shift Happens" is now available

Since this blog is about paradigm shifts brought on by the new media, it's appropriate to discuss the changes that ebooks are bringing to the publishing industry. The answer is the changes are huge; so much so that I'd need a book to discuss them. So of course I wrote the book.

"Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers" is now available from Amazon

Ebooks change everything, from the price of books and the selection available to readers to the relationship between authors and publishers. The social implications are vast as well.

For writers the most important changes are that ebooks offer the opportunity for independent authors to make significant ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmounts of money and that they turn the relationship between the author and publisher upside down. Now the writer is in control of every aspect of their book, from copy to method and timing of publication. Considering the long-standing resentment among authors for publishers, this is a very liberating development.

Of course most people are readers rather than writers but for readers the changes are vast as well. Readers will have a much broader selection of books because publishers are no longer serving as gatekeepers between writers and readers. Perhaps more significantly, the price of books drops sharply because ebooks don't face the hideously expensive, archaic, distribution system that is the essence of modern conventional publishing.

There's a lot more and it's all available in Shift Happens

Cooks Law Of Media Mis-Action

Having accumulated enough evidence, I'm ready to propose a new law, which I have (with shocking immodesty) named Cook's Law Of Media Meltdown. To wit:

When faced with a disruptive technology which threatens their business, entrenched media companies can be counted on to do the wrong thing.

This is a remarkably consistent response. It may involve fleets of lawyers filing flurries of lawsuits, or it may involve using coercion or their market power to try to enforce silly rules to bolster the media company's position. It is often illegal, if the FTC or other appropriate bodies decide to look. But as inevitably as the sunrise, the media companies try it. And they almost invariably fail while the media death spiral continues.

Case in point: The major book publishers and ebooks.

Operating under the rubric of the "agency model", five of the six major publishers have banded together to fix prices on their ebooks. Under the rules publishers must set non-discountable prices for all their ebooks and at least 30 percent of the price must go to the retailer. This is in sharp contrast to bookstore pricing of print copies, which is a free-for-all.

There are two things to note about the agency model

1) It is almost certainly illegal.
"Almost certainly" because the authorities haven't investigated it yet. However the agency seems to fall under the established rules barring restrictive trade practices in most cases.

2) It is designed to keep up the price of ebooks to eliminate the competition with print books.
The publishers' problem is simple. Ebooks are much cheaper to produce. So much so that they threaten to decimate sales of conventional books. By artifically keeping up the price of ebooks publishers are trying to keep ebooks from "cannibalizing" the sales of print books.

There's a third thing to note as well:
3) This is an idiot scheme which is guaranteed to fail and damage the publishers in the process.

The basic flaw is that the big publishers control an ever-shrinking percentage of the ebook market. It doesn't really matter what the big boys do, the small publishers and independent authors are going to price their books as they please. That means plenty of ebooks available at attractively low prices.

It also means that most independent ebooks will be priced well below the price of their competitors from the large publishers. Since ebooks are highly price sensitive this means that the sales of independent ebooks will out-compete the major publishers' books on price alone.

But wait a minute! Isn't each book a unique item, not subject to substitution?

The publishers believe that but they've been drinking their own kool aid and lacing it with LSD to boot. In one sense it's quite true. No book is exactly like another one. But for most readers of non-fiction books are what economists like to call a fungible good. In other words there are lots of substitutes available.

I can't get the new Sookie Stackhouse (or I'm not willing to pay for it in hardback), so I pick up another paranormal romance from an independent author. If the difference in price is, say, $10 for Charlene Harris, and $3 for the independent, is that enough to influence my buying decision.

For most books the answer is clearly "yes". If I'm really hooked on Sookie Stackhouse, I may buy her latest adventure despite the price difference. But most readers aren't in that category. For that price different they'll forgo Charlene Harris' work, good as it is, and get two or three of the independent authors books instead.

In other words, what the mental giants in publishing have done with their agency agreement is to guarantee sales for independent authors, even if no one has heard of them before.

Typical dinosaur behavior.

--RC

The REAL Cultural Revolution In Ebooks

Over in my other blog, Rick Cook's Notebook, I've been talking about the revolution ebooks are producing in publishing. Because I'm an author and naturally I'm concerned about financial matters affecting authors I've (naturally) concentrated on the economic bonanza things like 70 percent royalty rates and a potential market of tens of millions of ebook reader owners will produce for us poor, starveling ink-stained wretches. (Joke, sorta.) However there are enormous cultural implications in the ebook revolution as well. Since this blog is more about the social effects of new media, including ebooks, I decided to move the cultural implications over here.

First, let's note that in cultural history giant oaks from little acorns grow. Something that's obscure today is likely to become a commonplace tomorrow. And such things often have totally unexpected results.

Case in point: The automobile and the sexual revolution. The automobile didn't start the sexual revolution -- if anything did, it was the wide availability of birth control pills -- but it gave it an enormous boost even before The Pill arrived. The car became a bedroom on wheels and the availability of cheap cars meant that millions of horny American teenagers were able to obey their raging hormones with a minimum of complications (after The Pill arrived, anyway). It can safely be said that if you came of age in a certain era, if you hadn't made it in a car you hadn't made it.

Now this was emphatically NOT what people like Henry Ford had in mind when they invented the automobile. Henry, in particular, would have been offended to the depths of his strait-laced soul. But once the technology was available, people used it for what they wanted and moralists and inventors be damned.

Actually it was kind of a nice combination of Heresy, Pornography and Treason all rolled into one invention.

In the case of ebooks, the critical cultural factor isn't the high royalties paid authors, or the wide availability of cheap books. The thing that is really revolutionary is simply this: With ebooks, gatekeepers effectively vanish!

Yep. Gone. Nonexistent. The equivalent of an ex-parrot.

The implications of this are huge. Effectively anyone can now say anything they want (barring such things as libel) by publishing it in an ebook.

This is a huge change from the situation which has existed up to now. Even the most fanatic publisher has been limited by economic considerations. Books were expensive to produce and the money had to come from somewhere. That limited the number of tracts that even the nuttiest publisher could put out.

Guess what? With ebooks there are effectively no more limits. If you want to publish the equivalent of a 600 page magnum opus and sell it at the Kindle Store for a penny a copy, there's nothing to stop you and you instantly reach a world-wide audience. Or, if you're a little more savvy, you can boost the price of your screed to Amazon's cutoff point of $2.99 and make just over $2 a copy on whatever you're peddling.

This means that every alternative view from the most staid and sober to the most virulent nutballery can be made available to everyone for almost nothing.

This first reaction to this realization is likely to be (in the best Jonathan Qualye Higgins voice ) "Oh. My. God."

The amount of stuff out there -- badly written, mostly illiterate and generally reaching a level of indescribable awfulness that is, well, indescribable -- that is going to descend on us is almost beyond comprehension. It's like browsing in a peculiar used bookstore where almost everything on the shelves is terrible but there are occasional nuggets of really good stuff tucked in here and there.

Remember, no censorship. No copy reading. No proof reading. And editing? That's like, so 20th Century. And remember, no gatekeepers built into the process.

To give you an idea of what that means, I still have a copy of a self-published book titled Eight Days With Hitler In Yellowstone Park that was put out in the 70's, before ebooks. The poor author actually paid thousands of dollars to have it published and yes, it is truly as awful as you imagine.

It could have been worse. This was apparently a fragment of a much longer work about Hitler's secret trip to the United States in the 30s. I gather there were thousands and thousands of pages of it which the author couldn't afford to publish.

(As an aside: Hitler, of course, did not visit the United States in the 30s. At least not in our universe. I've given up wondering what color the sky was on that planet, but I'd still kinda like to know the Ricci Tensor for that universe.)

So what's the compensation to justify this outpouring of terribleness? The fact that mixed in with it you also get a fair amount of good stuff that would otherwise go unpublished. Perhaps it didn't appeal to publishers (think Harry Potter), perhaps it is incomprehensible to the average reader (think Einstein's Theory of Relativity) or perhaps it is so politically and socially unpopular that it risks getting the publisher's office burned down (think the abolitionist tracts of the early 19th century in the south.)

In other words, just from the law of averages, we can expect that some fair proportion of this stuff will be quite good, and some of it will be vitally important to our world. Now personally I think that's a pretty good trade. But it really doesn't matter what I think. It's coming and coming fast.

--RC

Kindles, millionaires and paradigm shift

One thing about paradigms: Shift Happens.
-- G. Harry Stine

In the last couple of months there have been some major developments in the publishing business, specifically publishing e books with companies like Amazon. In fact the changes have been so great that I've written a (short) book about it. The title, unashamedly stolen from the late G. Harry Stine, science fiction writer, rocket scientist and cranky crossways futurist, is "Shift Happens". The subject is the paradigm shift in publishing and what it means for authors and readers.

(What's going to happen to conventional publishers and brick and mortar bookstores is less interesting. They're not going to be toast, but they are sure as heck going to be lightly browned.)

To give you an idea of the sea change that's taking place, here are a couple of names to remember: John Locke and Amanda Hocking. Locke is a 60-year-old insurance executive and real estate investor in Kentucky. Hocking is a 26-year-old writer from Minnesota. What makes them worth remembering is that both of them became instant millionaires by writing e books. (When I say instant, I mean instant. Both of them struck it rich in less than a year.)

These two rather ordinary people are worth remembering because they made a whole lot of money by riding the new wave in e publishing. Both of them struck it rich in 2011 and in Locke's case it took about five months to make his first million in e publishing.

This would be a curiosity except for the fact that they are not flukes. Instead they're the vanguard of a wave of successful authors who will be making a ton of money off e books. That means Locke and Hocking are worth careful study -- and emulation -- by up and coming writers. We can expect to see their stories repeated over and over again until "e book millionaire" becomes as common a phrase as "internet millionaire."

So what, you may ask, the heck is going on here?

Actually there's a lot going on. So much so that I'll probably spend the next five or six posts talking about it. For right now let's just deal with the basics.

The first basic is that the sales of e readers have exploded in the last two or three years. According to a recent survey something like 12 percent of the American adult population now has a Kindle or other e book reader. The market is growing rapidly and showing no sign of slowing down.

More readers mean more e books to read. And in fact this is happening. Amazon, one of the largest book retailers in the country, is now selling more e books than it is print books.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that e books are much cheaper than their print counterparts. (They're not as cheap as they should be but that's a topic of another post.) Locke prices his mystery novels at 99 cents each, while Hocking's fantasy novels sell for $2.99 each. These prices and the accompanying royalties of 35 to 70 percent of the cover price mean that people like Locke and Hocking can sell a ton of books and make more off each copy than they'd make in a conventional royalty deal with a regular publisher.

Finally, decades of stupidity and an absolutely insane business model are catching up with conventional publishers. Their poor business practices, and those of conventional bookstores, are cutting the industry off at the knees and threatening to implode the whole business. (Hmm. Mixed metaphors much?)

What all this means for authors is that people who couldn't ever get published under the conventional system are flooding the market with new books. What it means for readers is that they have far more choice than ever when it comes to books -- at the price of having to wade through a lot of illiterate, crazy dreck, but still. . .

What it means for our society in general is that the realities of the new media are catching up with us in a very public way.

What it does not mean is that we'll have smooth sailing into a perfect world. Things won't work the way they have and as usual that means a combination of good news and bad news.

Personally I think the news will be good on the balance, but we're all in for a wild ride.

--RC

BACK TO 1984 DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

Amazon has taken to rewriting the present by retroactively censoring books. Specifically, the company erased copies of George Orwell's “1984” and “Animal Farm” from its customers' Kindle ebook readers.

1984 was, of course, the totalitarian distopia that introduced the term “memory hole” to the wold. In Orwell's book the hero worked for the “Ministry of Truth” censoring books and rewriting history, or the present, to cover it up. The memory hole was the incinerator chute where superseded documents went to make sure the record conformed to the Party's view of history today.

What happened was that someone offered unauthorized copies of Orwell's novels “1984” and “Animal Farm” for sale through Amazon's Kindle book store. When the copyright owner found out, they demanded Amazon remove the books from their store, which Amazon promptly – and correctly – did. But then Amazon veered off into 1984 territory.

According to the New York Times Amazon not only took down the offending books, they reached out and deleted already sold copies of the book from customers' Kindles, while crediting their accounts for the selling price.

This has infuriated nearly everyone, except for a few of the morally tone deaf who have been drinking too much of the “intellectual property” Kool Aid™

Amazon didn't help itself by the surreptitious way it handled the business. No notice to the Kindle readers, just down the memory hole. And apparently no thought to the firestorm of criticism this was going to arouse. At least they didn't bother to publish an explanation, although they did respond to the Times' questions in an email.

Amazonian ineptness aside, this incident points to a serious flaw in the world of the new media. A few months ago in this blog Eisenstein's Changes: Printing and the Web, I compared the changes brought about by the introduction of printing and web publishing. In general the web extended and enhanced the trends that were exemplified by the printing press.

The exception was permanence. As I pointed out then, and as this example underlines, material posted to the web – and apparently downloaded electronically – is much less permanent that printed copy. It is not only easy to create, it is tragically easy to destroy.

We are rapidly moving into an era when not only the past, but the present as well are mutable at the whim of publishers. If you don't secure a copy on your own disk – or even if you do in the case of Kindle – the material can disappear in an eyeblink.

This is flat scary. Americans as a group already have a loose enough grasp on history (“All the historical sense of a colony of cherrystone clams” to paraphrase “Bored of the Rings”), but now we're in danger of losing even that.

As in Orwell's 1984, the first place this has shown up is in politics, going back to the Clinton era. But when it can show up in literature as well, the problem is becoming much, much worse.

The Newspaper of the Future: 9 things that will change and 1 that won't

What will the newspaper of the future be like? Here are nine things that will change – and one that won't.

1)It will be online
The costs of a traditional newspaper are just too high. If you want something to curl up with, you can always print out stories.
2)It will break the locality based model
Today geographical location is the key differentiator. Every city has “its” newspaper. The news sites will operate in a manner more akin to syndication or the Associated Press today.
3)The space cadets will be on board
The advertising departments will sell online ads with the same enthusiasm and skill that they sell print ads today. One of the major problems with online news now is the general news sites don't have effective sales forces. This hurts revenue.
4)It will have a smaller, but more effective, staff
Rather than trying to have a reporter to cover everything, the reporters will be concentrated in the areas that are important to that news site, including strictly local news. The rest will be covered by stringers and agreements with other news sites.
5)A journalist is as a journalist does
“Journalist” will be defined by the kind and quality of output, not by a degree or the organization they work for. High quality, well-written results will tend to get you hired on to a news site.
6)As always, editors will be key
There is no substitute for good editors.
7)Quality of writing will be a key differentiator
News sites will live or die by the quality of their output. The writing will have to be of uniformly high quality to win and keep readers.
8)Insight will be another key differentiator
Reporters and editors will have to understand what they're writing about at a fairly profound level.
9)It will use all the available web tools
That includes things like Google Maps, tweets, graphics, podcasts and video clips. Web 2.0 and beyond.
10)The pay will be lousy
Some things won't change.

Clay Shirky Gets It (Mostly) Right

Clay Shirky has the best analysis of the current newspaper situation I've seen in a long time. I've covered parts of it here, but never in the breadth and depth Shirky does.

Shirky argues that what we need is not newspapers but journalism and that the web and other new media will find a way to feed that need for journalism. Newspapers as they exist today, however, are toast.

Shirky also notes that such revolutionary transitions, like the introduction of the printing press in the 16th century are inherently chaotic. There's going to be a period of many different competing models where important parts of the job of journalism aren't going to be done.

Anyway. Read the whole thing.
--RC

The Dismal State Of Online Ad Sales

Online advertising is struggling for the first time in years. After growing at double-digit rates since the beginning of the decade, online ad revenue grew at a barely perceptible .4 percent last quarter (it still grew a total of 18 percent in all of 2008) and market researcher IDC is predicting a 5 percent drop in the first quarter of this year. IDC says that could get worse in the second quarter.

This is distinctly better than the results from conventional advertising. But as Sarah Lacy points out the difference between conventional advertising and online advertising is the difference between an amputation and a broken leg.

So what went wrong?
A lot of things. This is, after all, the worst economic situation on 75 years and it's no news that a lot of people got a lot of things wrong. Compared to, say, bankers, the online advertisers and their evangelists look like geniuses.

That's the good news. The bad news, I think, is a combination of wishful thinking and jumping the gun. Bluntly some of the factors which were supposed to keep online advertising growing aren't in place yet.

For example, online advertisers maintained that online ad results were more measurable and hence a better value than print or electronic ads.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the superiority is more theoretical than practical and second, just because something is self-evidently true doesn't mean that people will act on it.

To take the second point first, the advantages of online advertising over other media haven't sunk in yet with a large fraction of advertisers. They may have heard it, they may even generally agree with it, but they haven't internalized it in a manner that really matters when they have to trim their ad budget.

The first reason is a little simpler – and somewhat more depressing. The theoretical ability to do precise measurements of customer response to online advertising hasn't translated broadly into such measures. Most online advertising measurement is stuck back in the cost per thousand page views era.

As I pointed out in an earlier post in this blog, page views are a poor measure of ad success. They don't reflect the impact of the ad on the viewer and they don't translate directly into reader responses. There are more sophisticated tools available, but most sites don't offer them.

This is compounded by the attempt to get page views at all costs – including turning the potential customer off with irritating ads. It doesn't matter how many page views an ad gets, if it irritates the viewers to the point where they don't want to deal with you, it is not a successful ad.

If online advertising is going to live up to its potential it is going to have to recognize its problems and fix them. It needs a lot more promotion based on success stories and less on “logical” PowerPoint slides. It needs to offer easy-to-use metrics that relate ad spending on line to the bottom line. And it needs more innovative ad strategies designed to produce action and not just page views.

The Social Media and the Brain: A Good Thing

In a remarkable display of point missing, some neuroscientists are Viewing With Alarm the entire phenomenon of the social media (and by extension all the new media of the 21st century.

The most recent viewer with alarm is Professor Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and an authority on the brain and its development.

As Prof. Greenfield told the House of Lords (she is also Baroness Greenfield):
“If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales.“

She may even be right. And she completely misses what's going on. Dyslexia wasn't a handicap until writing was invented. And what's happening with the new media, especially the social media, is a sea change as profound as the invention of writing.

Thanks to being immersed in a sea of information of all sorts, children are being conditioned to handle multiple data streams at high speeds.

What will our children and their children use this new capacity for? Mostly the same sorts of things we use the ability to read for. Which is to say they will fritter it away on the equivalent of trashy novels and supermarket tabloids.

But some of our descendants will use it for other things too. These capabilities will give them the ability to handle vast amounts of information and (with the help of the appropriate software) to correlate and draw conclusions from it in ways we can hardly imagine. They won't be smarter than we are, but thanks to the enhancements of the media they will have a far greater effective intelligence.

Indeed, the biggest problem with social media and their results is not that the brains of children are being affected, it is that not all children are having their brains so affected.

In another 50 years people who can't handle this datalanche are going to be at a tremendous disadvantage.

And The Practical Effect Is. . .

The Topeka, Kansas, public library has voted to keep minors from accessing five sex manuals, including "The "Joy of Sex".

By a 5-3 vote, the board decided to keep people under 21 away from the manuals, including "The Joy of Sex", "The Joy of Gay Sex", "The Lesbian Kama Sutra" and something called "Sex For Busy People."

Seemingly unnoticed in the ensuing -- and completely predictable -- uproar is the simple fact that the library's action in restricting (some would say "banning") the books has precisely no effect in the Internet age.

Understand, I am opposed to censorship and "The Joy of Sex" -- the only one of the books I am familiar with -- is a book I'd gladly give to a curious 14-year-old. On the other hand, I can understand that most of the minors who check out the book are going to use it as arousing material for solitary sex practice and their parents might object. I also expect that the books would be at the top of the library's "most stolen" list.

However that's immaterial if the purpose is to keep kids away from such material. Most kids no longer get their sex education on street corners. Now they go on line to find out. Which as far as I'm concerned is a very good thing.

Quite simply the rules of the game have changed and public libraries are losing a lot of their importance as sources of information. Things like popular fiction and movies are becoming more important to library patrons and one of the most used features at the public libraries is the bank of computers for patrons to go online.

To their credit librarians are aware of this, but they still haven't figured out how to deal with it.

As someone who spent many happy hours in the public library I'd be sorry to see libraries disappear. I don't think they will though. I expect that like bookstores and so much else in our society they will maintain their name and shift their function under the influence of the new media.

Now It's the Authors' Guild's turn to act silly

Authors are having a lot of trouble adjusting to the new realities of 21st century media. First we had the Science Fiction Writers of America getting their knickers in a twist over unauthorized posting of copyrighted works – and making fools of themselves in the process.
Now it's the turn of the Authors' Guild, an organization ostensibly dedicated to protecting the rights of authors. Their dovecote is all aflutter because of Amazon's new e-book reader, the Kindle 2. The technically aware types at the Authors' have discovered that – horrors! – the Kindle 2 has a built-in speech synthesizer which can read the text of an e-book aloud.
The guild immediately cried foul , claiming this violates the authors' copyrights unless the publish has acquired “performance rights” (i.e. audio books) as well as print rights.
To give you an idea of how stupid this is, consider one simple fact: Text to speech isn't unique to Kindle. Both Windows and Mac machines can read text files and in all probability Linux can as well. In other words, nearly every computer out there is capable of reading a downloaded book. What's more, they have been able to do it for years.
This is truly a piece of multi-dimensional silliness. In addition to the fact that most computers can synthesize speech, there's the simple fact that Kindle, like the other computers, doesn't do a very good job of it. The “speech” sounds like the the Cylons on the original Battlestar Galactica. It's intelligible but painful to listen to in large chunks.
Compared to simply synthesizing speech from text, the problem of producing “real” sounding speech is exponentially more complex. It will take a lot more processing power and a lot of sophisticated software development to lick and that sort of power and sophistication isn't going to show up any time soon in a $300 ebook reader.
There's also the little matter of what constitutes a “performance”. Normally that's understood as reading for an audience, specifically a paying audience of multiple people. Considering that this is feature, to the extent it is used at all, will be used almost exclusively to play text files for the person who owns the Kindle 2.
It's going to be interesting to see if the Authors' Guild will put their money where their mouth is and sue Amazon (and Microsoft, and Apple, and everybody else) over this piece of nonsense. They have sued over such things in the past and in fact won a $125 million settlement http://www.dailytech.com/Harvard+Google+Cannot+Reach+Book+Scanning+Agreement/article13360.htm from Google over its program to scan books from major libraries. However that case was a lot more clear cut.
What's really going on here is another failure to understand and accept the changes in the media. The fact is that the old media in general – including an awful lot of print authors and their publishers are not merely clueless when it comes to the changes sweeping over us, they're scared to death of them.
This fear comes out in various irrational acts, many of which are silly on their face.
This is unlikely to go anywhere, but if the Authors' Guild decides to pursue it, my advice is to sit back and enjoy the show.

McLuhan Reconsidered

If you're of a certain age, you undoubtedly passed through a Marshall McLuhan phase. When it was published in 1967, "The Medium Is The Massage" struck like an intellectual thunderbolt. It was hotly debated and nervously dismissed, but soon we were all talking, ironically or not, about "the global village" and how "the medium is the message."

Time may, as the say, heal wounds, but it exposes gaping great holes in social commentors' logic.

Re-reading the hot book du jour, say, 30 years later gives you a much better appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments.

Some such books, such as Charles A. Reich's "The Greening of America" turn out to be a tissue of weaknesses surrounding gaping wounds when read outside the moment. Others are more substantial, although few of them survive the aging process without suffering some damage. Even the most perceptive social critic, after all, is unlikely to get everything right.

Read in this light, Marshall McLuhan's work is very much a mixed bag. Some of McLuhan's insights are striking, some are worth pondering and some were obviously wrong when McLuhan wrote them.

McLuhan's central insight, that society is being shaped by the media used to express ideas stands up well. Indeed, it has become a commonplace. Some of his surrounding insights are off-the-wall brilliant and some of them are simply off the wall. For example the notion that children learn the alphabet by osmosis without being taught was obviously untrue in 1968 -- as any primary school teacher could have told Prof. McLuhan.

So, is there value in the exercise of re-reading MitM (as its aficionados took to calling it), other than promoting a shallow sense of superiority at how much we know better? I think there is.

One of McLuhan's problems was that he was writing too early. If he had written his book in 1977 rather than 1967, it would have been a very different work and, I think, a much more valuable one.

That decade saw the birth and early growth of the personal computer. By 1977, the internet and a few of the changes it wrought could at least dimly be sensed.

It turned out that the defining medium for the late 20th century and early 21st century was not television and radio, although they were important, it was the computer and the associated internet.

Prof. McLuhan intuited some of those changes, but, ironically, he didn't understand the mechanism by which they would come about. Or the depth to which the new media would allow them to run.

More significantly, he misunderstood some of the fundamental developments because the media he was dealing with were largely heirarchical. Information in electronic form still flowed from the top down, or through a series of gatekeepers. True, phenomena like the underground press had begun to break that down, but it was still a top-down world when it came to communication.

There was truly, in the words of the Bob Dylan quote McLuhan included in MitM "Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, Do You Mister Jones?"

And we didn't. Not even McLuhan.

On the dangers of the internet

Since one of the themes of this blog is that history tends to recapitulate, I wasn't surprised to be reminded that the attitudes toward the web and other new media are reflected in attitudes toward other "new" media in the past.

I was, however, mildly surprised to find a statement of the "problem" as far back as Socrates. To wit:

"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to external written characters and not remember of themselves. . . You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things and have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing."
-- Socrates, "Phaedrus"
Quoted by Marshall McLuhan in "The Medium Is The Massage"

On the "decline" of reading

A recent study notes with alarm that young people are spending less time reading and more time on the internet -- where the primary form of interaction is: Reading

Hmmm. Reading counts for less because it's on a screen than on a printed page?

Let's face it. If you can't read fairly well you're going to have trouble using the internet, even to play games. And as we all know reading is a skill that improves with practice.

So logically. . .

But this is the evil old internet. Good things _can't_ be coming out of it.

Goodbye Newspapers

The web is full of stories recently about the coming demise of newspapers. This doesn't surprise me for a lot of reasons, but it does make me sad.

I started out in newspapers. I cubbed at a suburban daily and finished my career as the energy reporter for the largest daily in the state. In between I worked for a wire service and was managing editor of a small daily. If I hadn't had a crazy boss and an offer for a lot more money to do PR I would probably still be working for newspapers today.

-- If there were any jobs, that is.

Even when I started, I knew newspapers were dying. The big metro dailies were disappearing and more and more cities were becoming one-newspaper towns. The suburban papers were flourishing, but even there you could see signs as television and free shoppers cut into their advertising revenue. Still, I stuck with it for as long as a could because journalism was a high moral calling and besides, it was fun.

To this day, I think newspapering is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

But the newspapers as I knew them are dying. Circulation is dropping as other media steal their audience and advertising is dropping even faster. Costs are soaring for everything from paper to printing presses. Worse, the bean counters are firmly in control and they're applying their sovereign remedy for any industry in trouble -- cut costs and to hell with product, the future or anything else.

Beyond this, journalism today faces a whole series problems with its basic business. Bluntly, old style journalism of all sorts is too easy to manipulate and people from all parts of the political spectrum are manipulating like hell. That, combined with smaller staffs and lack of competition is making the news is newspapers less reliable.

That's a real shame because there are some places where the new media haven't yet picked up the slack, and perhaps never will. There are some stories that require the kind of access an accredited (read: employed) reporter can have and the general public doesn't. As a member of the public try calling the governor's office for background on the latest state scandal.

I suspect this is going to change, just as we will continue to have newspaper like things out there. Some of them will be essentially lifestyle, obits and meeting notices. Some of them will be serious sources of news, probably web-based. But none of them will be newspapers.

And that's sad.

This doesn't mean that things

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Some of you may have been following the tale of the teenage girl who was tricked by a phony Facebook ID and committed suicide when her "friend" turned against her.

It turned out the mother of an acquaintance of hers was involved and set up the phony Facebook profile. The woman has now been charged.

However before that happened, the mother's identity was revealed and she and her family were the objects of a campaign of hate mail, death threats and such, much of it coming over the internet from out of town.

Some people have seen this as an example of the dangers of the internet. I see it as an example of community response to an incident they disapproved of. In other words, the only new thing is the internet and that doesn't change much.

People have always reacted negatively to incidents they feel broke social barriers. A few of them took it to extremes. Two hundred years ago they'd throw rocks through your window -- or if they were really angry they'd burn your barn. Having been the editor of a small town daily newspaper, I can tell you that things haven't changed much there -- except now there's glass in the windows to break and they set your car on fire.

The point I see in this is that human behavior doesn't change that much, with or withour the internet. Most of the people who blame these kinds of things on the internet don't understand how they worked before the internet.

READING JOURNALISTIC TEA LEAVES -- AND GETTING IT NOT-QUITE-RIGHT

The Center For Excellence In Journalism has released its 2008 report on the state of journalism in America. The report is a gold mine of information for those with a serious interest in journalism. However almost no one is reading past the executive summary (the thing is huge) and the summary's conclusions and (mostly implicit) predictions for the future are questionable.

Basically the report, and a lot of the commentary, reflect the usual problem with making sense of a mind-bendingly revolutionary technology . (Hereinafter MBRT for ease of typing.) That is that when we're faced with something mind-bending and imperfectly understood, the natural instinct is to fall back on our preconceptions of how the world works -- i.e., our prejudices.

Now preconceptions about the way the world works come in two general flavors: The conventional and the radical. The conventional view is that whatever it is isn't going to make much difference, thing will keep on working the way they have, and all the fuss is overblown. The radical preconceptions sees the MBRT as something that will remake the world into the image the particular radical preconceiver finds most attractive. Thus, socialism becomes a cure for body odor on the subways, conserving energy will lead us to a green utopia, radio will provide rich culture to the masses, computers will set us all free -- etc., etc., et dreary cetera.

(There's a third form of preconception, which is apocalyptic. Whatever it is will destroy us utterly. This tends to quickly shade over into forces driving us to the particular preconceiver's utopia. Witness Marxism and the reaction to the atomic bomb.)

The problem, of course, is that preconceptions are no better guide to the future than they are to the present. If you're looking at a truly MBRT (and they're rarer than proclaimed) it does change the world, but not totally and not in the ways or to the degrees the radicals or the apocalyptic want to believe.

The journalism report, coming as it does out of the journalistic mainstream (not to say the journalistic establishment) is pretty throughly conventional. It discovers much in the report's data to support the conventional view of the impact of the new media. As such it stands in sharp contrast to the radical view of the new media and journalism. IMHO both sets of preconceptions are equally wrong.

One of the report's points which is getting a lot of play is that the 10 most popular online news sites are mostly products of the world of conventional journalism. Whether it's a journalistic organization such as the New York Times or an aggregator such as Google or Yahoo.

That's true. However the conclusions the report's summary draws from that, and other data, is much more questionable.

The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations.

Now I'd like to maintain that no one ever claimed that "citizen media" didn't have limitations. Unfortunately it wouldn't be true. One of the phenomena associated with MBRT is that some people see it as doing away with everything that went before and utterly reshaping the landscape -- not surprisingly, in their own image.

Consider, for example, the"Computer Liberation" of the 60s and 70s, built around Ted Nelson's book of the same name. "Computer Liberation" is worth reading today to see how the predictions of MBRT do -- and don't -- come true.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

-- Computer Lib, 1974
(Ted Nelson)

The parallels are instructive. And Ted is both brighter and more rational than a lot of the radicals sounding off on the impact of the new media on journalism.

The summary continues:

The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs.

Here's where preconceptions start to run the authors off the rails. This statement is only true if you bought into the massive hype about the new media destroying the old journalism. Of course it's done no such thing and it's not likely to.

What it is going to do, just as personal computers did, is to change the landscape fundamentally. Most user created comment is, and will continue to be, meta-comment. That is comment on other sources of information. Currently the most accessible of those sources are conventional media.

However conventional media are beginning to change in response to the new media. Some of the most important changes arise from the fact that the conventional media are no longer the only ones with a megaphone. Others come from the availability of information from much more diverse sources.

Google Headlines may aggregate conventional news sources, but it aggregates hundreds of news sources from all over the world. This gives a much broader picture of what's going on. And if you want more information DAGS (Do A Google Search) for the background, reports, documents and all sorts of other information. Don't want to do it yourself? There are usually a lot of bloggers and citizen journalists out there who will point you toward sources.

News people report the most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments and to some extent pictures and video.

First, note whose perception they are relying on: Journalists. That's an interestingly self-referential filter. Second, that's to be expected, of course. At the present time journalists are much more tightly connected with the tools to gather news. (Try calling up the governor's office as a private citizen and asking for comment on the latest state budget crisis.) However this is changing as more sources of information become available.

But citizens posting news content has proved less valuable, with too little that is new or verifiable.

If it's new and verifiable it's scooped up by the conventional media as soon as it hits the web. Which is as it should be. This phenomenon is starting nationally and working its way down. Its worthwhile to look at the list of major national news stories which are broken each year by bloggers and other citizen journalists. In the area where bloggers and citizen journalists are most highly concentrated -- science and technology -- the percentage of stories that start with citizen journalists approaches 100 percent in some cases. Even political stories are increasingly broken by people like Matt Drudge and of course the work of bloggers like Michael Yon in Iraq pretty nearly defined the war at a time when the conventional media were getting it spectacularly wrong.

But a study of citizen media contained in this report finds most of these sites do not let outsiders do more than comment on the site’s own material, the same as most traditional news sites.

In other words, we're not all Wikipedia. But the missed point here is that if you don't like what that particular citizen medium has to say, it's easy to set up your own. "Freedom of the Press belongs to he who owns one", a media critic famously observed in the last century. However today that's everybody.

In other words there's an important corrective here that's lacking in conventional media because there are so many alternate voices. Less generally, but more tellingly, the claim that the response opportunities are "the same as most traditional news sites" is either mind-numbingly self-serving or breathtakingly ignorant.

The fact is that virtually every new media site, and certainly the important ones, offers far, far more opportunity for comment without the kind of editorial filtering one encounters in the letters to the editor column of a newspaper. (As the one-time managing editor of a small daily I can say this with some authority.)

Few allow the posting of news, information, community events or even letters to the editors. And blog sites are even more restricted.

This is by-and-large not true. As scanning through the comments sections following articles on sites like Slashdot, TechCrunch, etc. will easily demonstrate. And if you're still not satisfied with your ability to post, start your own blog.

This is so wrong, I suspect strongly the authors' problem is ignorance rather than being disingenuous. They simply don't know, and can't understand, how the new media work. The next comment supports that notion.

In short, rather than rejecting the “gatekeeper” role of traditional journalism, for now citizen journalists and bloggers appear for now to be recreating it in other places.

Ah yes, the "gatekeeper" argument. The problem with this argument is that it's specious because it equates a single blog or news site with the local newspaper. The key difference is that the newspaper, plus perhaps a couple of television stations (although the local news gerbils do a horrendous job when it comes to original reporting) are the only source of news in the community. The blog or news site is one of dozens, perhaps hundreds commenting on major topics.

More broadly the argument is misconceived for the simple reason that you will always have, and need, gatekeepers for any given source. Over the years journalism has been lambasted for its role as a gatekeeper, not because gatekeepers are inherently bad, but because one or two organizations had a monopoly on gatekeeping. The monopoly was the problem, not gatekeeping per se.

Finally we come to the quote that sums up what the report's authors want to believe.

more and more it appears that the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.

Which comes perilously close to saying that conventional media will continue to be the main source of information and this whole new media thing is overblown.

New media is indeed overblown in some (ever narrowing) circles, but conventional media will most assuredly not continue to be the public's main source of information -- at least not in the traditional sense. Looking back over the last decade there's been a sea change in journalism and the change is only beginning.

The "crisis in journalism" -- traditional journalism, anyway, -- is indeed in large part that newspapers, television and other old-style media are losing advertising revenue. One area where that's particularly true is the most lucrative section of any newspaper, the classified ads. This was already starting to be a problem 30 years ago with the growth of free shoppers. The web has greatly speeded up the process. So advertising is migrating to the web. It's just not supporting conventional journalism as it does so.

The Tech Liberation site has an overview of the report here. The report itself, all 180,000 words, can be found here: