The “other documents” along with the syllabus are things like the midterm exam, the course evaluation, and the “final you don’t have to take.” We’d originally planned to have a final exam, but due to the complexity of the printing project and the fact that we really wanted them to focus on refining their virtual exhibition assignments, we chose to forego the exam. But that didn’t mean that I had stopped thinking of things I wanted to ask them.

Most of the questions on the “fake final” are questions that I actually find somewhat intriguing, but that I either left more raw or more jokey than I’d feel comfortable putting on a real exam. But Jessy had a very good question that she and I had talked briefly about during the class, but that never really made it to an open class discussion. Here’s my version of that question, which I think could have been a very good final exam essay question, indeed.

For a college book-collecting contest, a student wanted to submit a collection of electronic books. Would you allow such a submission? In supporting your answer consider some of the following: What are good criteria for judging a collection of tangible, physical books? Is it possible to evaluate a collection of electronic books the same way, or would you propose different criteria? Is it possible or useful to compare collections of paper books and electronic books? How do concepts of “individuality,” “ownership,” and “scarcity” affect your answer? Is book collecting of any kind merely a bourgeois exercise in Pokemon-esque conspicuous consumption, narcissism, elitism, and crypto-fetishism by an anal-retentive phallocracy of bibliobores?

Magazines are 40% off, which is a good deal, as are Blue Ray discs, which I guess is a good deal if you like that kind of thing. Most book departments are still just 20% off. I bought a martial arts book that I’d had my eye on, but when I later looked it up on Amazon I found that I had guessed wrong: I could have had it for 30% off.

Which may stand as reasonably emblematic of Borders’ problems. When, for one yearly fee, Amazon will deliver almost anything for free shipping in two days at a better price, why shop at Borders at all? And yet, that’s a bit too simple, as Barnes & Noble seems to be doing OK.

Peter Osnos, writing for the Atlantic, had some ideas about What Went Wrong at Borders back in January. In a post this week, titled The End of Borders and the Future of the Printed Word, Osnos quotes Neil Strandberg, whom I used to work with at Denver’s independent Tattered Cover bookstore.

Taking a cue from some of the technologies that have been so disruptive, collectively, the indie community is crowd-sourcing the sustainable bookstore-like thing of tomorrow. One of us is going to figure this out.

I love the “sustainable bookstore-like thing of tomorrow” language, and when I’m feeling futuristic, I’ll be writing about the “sustainable library-like thing of tomorrow.”

I worked at a Barnes & Noble for about two years, almost twenty years ago. It was mostly a crummy experience, with the notable exception of meeting my wife there.

As I picked at the fresh corpse of the local Borders, I looked at the remaining employees and wondered what they were thinking and how they were feeling. If I were in their shoes and depending on my Borders paycheck to support my family, I’m sure I’d be angry and scared about finding another job in a tight economy.

But if I were younger, or if I was part-time, or if for whatever reason I wasn’t counting on my Borders hours to keep me afloat, I think I’d be oddly energized about coming to work. I’d be curious to see how customers react, and if they understand the closing the same way I did. (The woman at the store this morning trying to return a book obviously did not understand.)

I think it might feel like a sombre Christmas holiday shopping season. In December, I remember things getting more frenzied by degrees, stepping up in intensity each weekend until by late afternoon of Christmas Eve, people finally were able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. It felt like a fever breaking.

Of course, Borders’ fever is terminal. But I bet there will be more than a few Borders employees who are making it through the next few weeks driven by morbid curiosity, and a sad sense of satisfaction in seeing things through to the end.

I’m feeling especially warm toward Bridle today, because his thoughts in his post Open Bookmarks II have led him to a position that sounds a lot like what Iris and I ended up saying in our plan that we drafted in reaction to the HarperCollins backlash.

Here’s the part that particularly resonated with me, though I recommend you read Bridle’s whole post:

Everything you can do with a book you should be able to do with an ebook. And this is where it gets hard. Because, again, try arguing with that sentence: is the future really about taking a step back, gaining some affordances only at the expense of losing others?

There are of course different angles to this. Spotify-type models of buying (or being given) access to libraries for fixed periods, or streaming books, or serialisations or installments: these change the traditional model of book ownership. But there will still be books for sale, and where a reader chooses to buy a book, that book belongs to them. We must not tolerate another 1984, and we must not accept further erosion of the First-sale doctrine. Of course times are changing, but our relationship with books, in whatever form they take, should remain a constant: our books, our reading, our experiences.

A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: “Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?”

Joshu answered: “Mu.” [Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning "No-thing" or "Nay."]

This is one of the most famous of Zen koans, or enigmatic stories meant to help one towards enlightenment. This one comes from the Mumonkan, or Gateless Gate, a collection of koans with commentary by Mumon Ekai.

The koan is less straightforward than it may appear, as many say that Joshu is not saying “no, the dog does not have Buddha-nature.” He is negating the question. The verse that ends Mumon’s commentary is as follows:

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.

Has a videogame art-nature or not?

My friend Jaybird couldn’t stop himself from putting another quarter in this dead horse this morning and producing a nice post on the subject. Which points to and is to some degree inspired by Brian Moriarty’s talk Apology for Roger Ebert which he delivered at the recent Game Developer’s Conference.

Coincidentally, I found a link to this video of Brandon Boyer’s microtalk at that same designer’s conference. Boyer’s talk is a cri de coeur for videogames as “the best tool available for exploring someone’s incredibly personal dreamscape,” while still acknowledging that finding videogames that live up to the work of people such as David Foster Wallace and Spalding Gray and the profundity of the kind of work that encompasses all the complexity of life up to and including “staving off the sweet seduction of suicide”–well, the games don’t do that, quite, now do they?

Are games art? Can they be beautiful, moving, upsetting, wicked, and challenging? Can they be the Mona Lisa or Hamlet or 4’33″ or Homage to New York or Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park or Untitled?

Have you beaten Guernica yet? Seen the videos of that speed run of Eraserhead?

Is sometimes the only way to win not to play?

Has a videogame art-nature or not?

Has an e-book book-nature or not?

In the Library Society of the World FriendFeed room, Kathryn Greenhill asks:

Just wondering what proportion of us actually enjoy reading ebooks as much or more than print books?. I know it varies from situation to situation, device to device, but GENERALLY, let’s try More, Same, Less ….?

The e-books I have read have tended towards free and cheap. I have tended to judge them accordingly.

E-books have text that flows and is re-sizable and which appears in the typefaces and resolutions and colors available to the device I read them on, making them seem a little more like every other thing and a little less like themselves.

Paper codexes never seem so great nowadays as they were in 1896 or 1623 or 1450. E-book devices never seem so great nowadays as they will be real soon now.

Ebooks don’t smell like anything. Codexes don’t smell like anything either except when they do and then they smell bad, hasn’t anyone digitized this smelly thing yet?

It’s impossible to drop a codex and render your whole library unreadable, just as it’s impossible to download another codex to replace the one your ex-best-friend lost on the stupid bus.

If I deplore the idea that people don’t read much anymore and I find the idea of e-books abhorrent, should I be happy or sad that those people who don’t read aren’t reading e-books?

Has an e-book book-nature or not?

Sometimes people make unauthorized copies of works, or they want to make unauthorized copies, or they just enjoy thinking about the issues surrounding the making of unauthorized copies. Such activity often leads to those people wanting to justify what they have done (or want to do or have thought about doing). Since the legal standing for making these unauthorized copies is, in many cases, dubious at best, those arguing in favor of copying must find their support outside the law as written, leading people to practical, moral, or cultural arguments rather than legal arguments.

A line of thought that I have seen in a few places recently goes something like this: “Suppose I have a legally-obtained copy of a work, either one that I have purchased or one that I have checked out from the library. Because I have this legal copy, I should then have the right to also obtain and use other copies of the work in other formats.”

For example, Jason Puckett recently posted this to a private feed on FriendFeed:

Hypothetical. I have a book checked out from the library but decide I don’t want to lug the physical copy around. I download a bootleg ebook edition from bittorrent and load that on my ipad. When I’m done I delete the ebook copy and return the stacks copy. Unethical?

Here, the idea is that as long as one has a legitimate copy in one’s possession, it does no harm to the market for the work to get additional digital copies for personal use, providing that copies aren’t allowed to proliferate, and providing that once the person no longer has possession of the legitimate copy, the unauthorized copies are destroyed.

Sometimes, as with Aaron’s comments in this thread, people argue that once they have purchased a copy of a work in one format–any format–they should be entitled to download the same work in digital form for free.

In either case, the argument seems to be that when one has a legitimate copy, one also has something else: a license to the work in other formats. In some cases–as with the first example above–the argument is that one has a limited license to electronic copies that don’t involve the loss of a sale. In other cases–as with the second example, and as with more extreme cases I have seen elsewhere–the argument is that purchasing one copy in one format one time amounts to a blanket license for the rest of the purchaser’s life. So that 8-track copy of Mr. Roboto kicking around the back of your Trans Am should let you download it on iTunes for free.

What is fascinating to me is the way that consumers have internalized the idea of the license, creating what I’m thinking of as “license culture.” We started to think of music recordings as “content” when home taping became cheap and easy, and this only accelerated with digital music files. Software has always seemed like something apart from the medium upon which it was recorded. We have conceived of books in this way for a while now by analogy with these other media, but only recently has it been feasible to think of actually obtaining a book-as-text without also obtaining a book-as-codex.

And I think that this means the “content suppliers” and “rights holders” have won. If even those contemplating “piracy” (as the “rights holders” would certainly term it) are thinking in terms of licenses rather than copyright, I think that might mean that copyright is pretty much done, except as a gateway to licenses. Even Creative Commons is a license. It seems we all agree that copyright is broken, we just can’t agree how.

OK. So. Does that make sense? Is it more useful/interesting or tautological/boring or confusing/TL;DR?

Lastly, I know that people must have thought about “content” apart from “containers” for millennia. Does anyone have good recommended reading that would help me trace this idea through history?

But that can be a dangerous argument to make. Twenty-six circulations is unacceptable, but you say some books can go for a hundred circulations? So it should be fine if HarperCollins sets a 100 checkout limit, right? Honestly, this is not the conversation we want to have. The problem is not that the number of circulations set by the publisher is too small; the problem is that no publisher should be able to control these aspects–really any aspects–of the library’s workings.

Many librarians say they want the library to own the ebook, not simply lease or license it from the publisher. If we are to do this, we need to recognize that it’s hard to own something that lives on a for-profit corporation’s servers, whether that corporation be the publisher or Overdrive or some other vendor. Yes, there are publishers who currently sell ebook or ejournal content outright, but how many of us host those books on our own servers? If those companies went under, how long would it take us to get access for our users up and running again? Libraries cannot afford to enter into licenses that leave publishers and vendors holding all the cards. How many books in an average library are out of print, or printed by publishers that no longer exist? We believe that the publisher should publish, and the library should own, lend, and preserve.

We also understand that most libraries aren’t interested in creating their own digital “stacks” to hold all the files that make up their ebook collections. For those libraries–probably most libraries–ebook files could be hosted by a trusted not-for-profit service. The important thing is that the books would be hosted by the library or by a site or service that is working for the library, not for a publisher or vendor.

Neither of us love the current state of copyright in the United States. We believe that copyright lasts too long, protects the rights of the creator way out of proportion to the rights of the user, and leads people to limit their uses of copyrighted material far more than necessary. The solution, however, is not even more restrictive licenses. We envision a system, like the one under which paper books are bought and sold today, that does not depend on licenses. Instead, publishers would have recourse to the same protection they have had for years: copyright.

Lastly, we think that publishers have a right and a reason to be scared that libraries lending ebooks will lead to rampant and uncontrolled unauthorized copying. (And even if we didn’t believe it, it seems that they are, and it seems that we need to address that.) Accordingly, we think there is a place for digital rights management technology (DRM) to keep users from casually making unauthorized copies of ebooks. However, this, too, we believe needs to be under the control of libraries. Libraries will be likely to use the least DRM necessary to accomplish the goal of preventing unauthorized copies–in fact, it wouldn’t “manage” “digital rights,” it would simply be copy protection. Patrons could trust that there would be no library “rootkits” on library-loaned ebooks. The current state of DRM for library loans is incoherent and confusing for librarians and patrons alike. Imagine having separate loan and photocopying policies for the different print books in a library’s collection.

Phew.

Those are our main ideas. The result is a plan for libraries to buy, lend, and preserve ebooks which looks like this:

• Libraries will purchase e books from publishers or other sources. Libraries will not license ebooks.
• Licenses are not necessary. The entire process will be based on copyright. The publishers’ control over the ebook ends the moment it is sold to the library. This does not mean that the publisher loses the same rights it has today to sue for copyright infringement and damages.
• Most libraries will employ a third party to be responsible for both access to and preservation of ebooks. Some libraries–probably very large public libraries or research libraries–may prefer to go it alone rather than contracting with such a service. In either case, the entity that actually keeps the files, the loan policies, the patron information, and so on, is either the library or a group working only for the library, and not for a publisher or vendor.
• Most libraries will choose to add DRM to ebooks in the form of copy protection in order to satisfy publishers’ desires not to see unauthorized copies proliferate. Copy protection that is acceptable to libraries will be largely invisible, platform-independent, and will serve only to prevent the creation of additional complete unauthorized copies.
• Copy protection must not interfere with readers’ rights to fair use.
• Copy protection will never be applied by the publisher, but by the library, or by a third party hosting the ebooks under contract from the library. When dealing with paper books, we don’t allow each publisher to determine different check-out and photocopying policies for each book. We set a single policy to encourage copyright compliance for all books in the collection.

We can’t pretend this is the final word on ebooks; we aren’t even sure we are the first to propose such an idea. We know that embracing copy protection–however limited, however under library control–will be unacceptable to some librarians and activists. While we have tried to look at things from the publishers’ point of view, we realize they might find a plan such as this to be laughable.

This plan isn’t perfect. But we think it’s progress.

[Thanks to Marianne Aldrich for suggesting that it is “copy protection” rather than “digital rights management” that we are talking about.]

Science fiction writer John Scalzi posted this weekend a list of Yet Another 10 Things I’ve Done That You Probably Have Not. It’s a fun list, with items like “swatted a fly off Harrison Ford’s lapel” and “been in a car that crashed, in a not-quite-irony-free fashion, through a cemetery fence.” It’s a little heavy on the encounters with famous men for my taste, but “ingratiatingly self-aggrandizing” is part of Scalzi’s brand, so it works.

His first item on the list is what caught my eye, though: “1. Been a couple of feet away from a Shakespeare First Folio.” This is a bet he would have lost with me.

I was fortunate enough to work at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin when I was in library school. The job itself wasn’t all that glamorous, and mostly consisted of paging materials from the closed stacks to bring to the readers in the reading room. But even as a lowly page, one could say things like, “wait, which copy of the First Folio did he want? He knows we have two, right?”

So yes, I have been a couple of feet from a First Folio. I then closed the distance and picked it up and took it to the reading room. When the reader was done with it, I probably paged through it.

In that job, I held manuscripts hundreds of years older than the First Folio and 19th century “yellowback” popular novels far more rare than the First Folio. I held the first printed edition of Dante and the first book printed in English. I held manuscript pages written by D.H. Lawrence and Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams.

Which, you know, yay me. But yay you, too. If you work at a college or university, you likely have something brag-worthy in your special collections, too. Here at Colorado College we have 4,000-year-old clay tablets and a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible. We have a few dozen books printed before the year 1600 and dozens more artists books from the 20th century and beyond. So even if you don’t work at such a library, you can visit one. And the lovely thing about libraries is that books, as we say, are for use. For all but the rarest, most fragile and delicate things, you will be allowed to hold them, page through them, and even read them if you so desire.

So I encourage you to one-up John Scalzi. Find something in special collections to get up close and personal with.

I just finished reading Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, and yes, there’s no way to make that sound like I’m not making a joke. But I was thinking about reading conference reports for events that I haven’t attended.

It’s too tempting to take quick conference blog posts (or worse, Twitter posts) at face value, and assume that

• what was reported is actually what was said;
• the person who said it belives it; and
• the person who reported it appoves of the sentiment.

None of that is necessarily true. So it’s tempting to decide simply not to comment at all. I know that Walt Crawford tries to do that.

But thinking about the ideas in Bayard’s book, I realize that I need not be so circumspect. In the context of of a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, Bayard sums up Wilde’ point this way:

Criticism is the record of a soul, and that soul is its deep object, not the transitory literary works that serve as supports for that quest. (176)

As with criticism, so too, I would argue, with the blog post, or the presentation.

So let’s talk about the “Dead Technology” session at Computers in Libraries earlier this week. I’m not entirely sure who presented. I don’t really know what they said. But the mere existence of such a panel prompted people to create their own lists of dead tech and have their own arguments online, and it also prompted people to second-guess the technologies that were reported by eyewitnesses. You can sample the #deadtech hashtag on Twitter, or read a fairly interesting FriendFeed thread kicked off by Meredith asking “Help! Need clever/funny examples of dead tech for Marshall Breeding. Anyone?”

But just as you don’t need to have seen this panel to say something about it, the technology doesn’t have to be “dead” for you to bring it up at this panel, and neither does the “deadness” of the technology ensure that it is interesting or appropriate to talk about.

Velcro as seen through a scanning electron microscope.

In that FriendFeed thread, people really picked up on Meg vs. Meg’s suggestion of “velcro.” It seemed to drive people nuts that they use velcro every day, but that someone would have the temerity to suggest that it is a dead technology. I’d say that Meg was exactly right. Velcro’s ubiquity proves that it is dead. When every kid has a yard of velcro on his shoes, backpack, and jacket, is that still a “technology?” Is it something that you have to maintain? Is it a feature that sells a product? Are we waiting to buy this velcro product because we hear that there will be better velcro released next month? It’s no longer technology; it is lint.

Of course, if you wanted to take something that was undeniably dead and talk about it, you’d have to go a different direction. How about microcard? I doubt there are many librarians who would argue that microcard still has much life left in it. So it’s boring to talk about unless you can show why we should care that it is dead. You could talk about how in 1944, Fremont Rider devoted an entire book, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library: A Problem and Its Solution, to a passionate case for microcards. You could talk about where that solution took us and how it informs what we think today. Lastly, you could talk about how a current-day technology that looks very much alive is actually rotting from the inside, and likely to take us the way of the microcard. I wonder if that’s what the speaker was getting at who said the iPad was dead tech.

Anyone can pick a technology out of the hat and say that it is “dead.” What is interesting is what happens after that–can they make you care why it is dead? Can they make you mourn that dead technology, or swear to avenge it? That’s what the dead tech panel is about.

Addendum

If the whole idea of “dead technology” is interesting to you, let me recommend two books, one of which I have read and one of which I haven’t (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which is which.)

Carolyn Marvin’s 1988 book, When Old Technologies Were New is a fascinating look at how people reacted to an assimilated new technologies in the late 1800s. It examines issues of class, art, work, and public discourse in the age when the electric light, telephone, phonograph and even the idea of an “electrician” were new and untamed.

A great companion to Marvin’s book is Klaus Musmann’s Technological Innovations in Libraries, 1860-1960: An Anecdotal History. He covers some of the same ground as Marvin, in looking at technologies like the electric light and the telephone, but in this case how they specifically were seen to relate to libraries and library work. His book documents a world where librarians are not technological innovators, but are restlessly reactive, forever adopting and adapting technologies.

Today, though, I’m mostly interested in the cover (this copy is from the collection of the University of Denver). The cover’s Schedl illustration from 1964…

Looks an awful lot like Tutt Library, where I work, here seen in a photograph from the Colorado College Archives. I can’t be sure, but I think this is from around the time the library opened in 1962.

The library of tomorrow, yesterday!

So I wrote a book. The experience of writing the book–even a pretty short, straightforward book like this one–was far more difficult than I expected it would be, so you might imagine that it would make seeing it finished to be that much more rewarding.

I really don’t expect individuals to buy the book, because it’s priced for libraries. But if you have the authority to spend money on librarian’s professional development books, you could find worse uses for your money than the ten books in the series, The Tech Set. I’m happy to be listed alongside such witty, accomplished, and attractive people as the other authors on that list.

Lastly, if you are reading this blog post, there is a strong chance that I thanked you in the acknowledgements, either by name or by implication. So take a look below, and thank you again.

Libcamps Acknowledgements