beth gourley's Profile

come to realize that we need a whole new guiding metaphor. So many of today’s commercial, academic and open-source reading environments are governed by metaphors of what I call “containing structures.”

My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate.

and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

Still, people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Fifteen or 20 years ago, electronic reading also impaired comprehension compared to paper, but those differences have faded in recent studies.

the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character.

It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.

According to her research, book publishers are where music publishers were in 2001 when the iPod launched:

“Book publishers need to understand that e-books are their future,” says Ms. Rotman Epps. “Then they need to think very critically about how to build a profitable business” around them, perhaps selling subscriptions to their catalogues or partnering with retailers.

It's the textbook market, however, that Ms. Rotman Epps believes will be the e-reader “killer app.” There are issues around colour (still not widely available), highlighting and note-making capabilities and various standards, but she thinks these will be solved over the next 12 months.

Ms. Rotman Epps thinks print media should consider subsidizing the devices for their subscribers to drive their adoption, and through them, the sale of digital subscriptions.

“Getting the bulk of consumers to change that behaviour will require an experience superior to that of the printed page.”

“You want e-readers to be lighter, flexible, more like a piece of paper.”

Here are some things that make a city livable for me:

Sensibility and attitude

Security

The perfect city isn't static. It's evolving and ever changing, and its laws and structure allow that to happen.

The iRex can also handle the ePub file format, a widely accepted industry standard, which means that owners can buy books from other online bookstores that use ePub and transfer texts onto the iRex.

Our plan is to make the Kindle books available on many different devices and platforms,” he said. The company distributes a Kindle reader for the iPhone, for example.

savvy consumers may hold off on buying devices to see whether Apple enters the market with a more general-purpose tablet computer.

When I look backward

The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent

the Republic of Letters was democratic only in principle

dominated by the wellborn and the rich

the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege

Republic of Letters, as it actually operated, was a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged

invoke the Enlightenment in an argument for openness in general and for open access in particular.

the present, do we see a similar contradiction between principle and practice

Our republic was founded on faith in the central principle of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters: the diffusion of light

For Jefferson, enlightenment took place by means of writers and readers, books and libraries—especially libraries,

The Founding Fathers acknowledged authors' rights to a fair return on their intellectual labor, but they put public welfare before private profit.

Twenty-eight years seemed long enough to protect the interests of authors and publishers

"the Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because Mickey was about to fall into the public domain), it lasts as long as the life of the author plus seventy years. In practice, that normally would mean more than a century.

When it comes to digitization, access to our cultural heritage generally ends on January 1, 1923, the date from which great numbers of books are subject to copyright laws.

for example, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, published in 1922, is in the public domain, whereas Lewis's Elmer Gantry, published in 1927, will not enter the public domain until 2022.

we would see that we live in a world designed by Mickey Mouse, red in tooth and claw.

professional journals sprouted throughout the fields,

he learned societies produced them, and the libraries bought them

Then commercial publishers discovered that they could make a fortune by selling subscriptions to the journals

the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490

Fortunately, this picture of the hard facts of life in the world of learning is already going out of date.

Openness is operating everywhere, thanks to "open access" repositories of digitized articles available free of charge,

When businesses like Google look at libraries, they do not merely see temples of learning. They see potential assets or what they call "content," ready to be mined. Built up over centuries at an enormous expenditure of money and labor, library collections can be digitized en masse at relatively little cost

Libraries exist to promote a public good:

To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale,

You cannot legislate Enlightenmen

"Digitize we must." But not on any terms. We must do it in the interest of the public, and that means holding the digitizers responsible to the citizenry.

Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize.

By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.

The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders

A "public access license" will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal.

And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a "consumer license" from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders

Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business—not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon.

a single terminal will hardly satisfy the demand in large libraries.

a boon to the small-town,

The eighteenth-century philosophers saw monopoly as a main obstacle to the diffusion of knowledge

Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly.

a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

We could have created a National Digital Library

It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit.

The district court judge will pronounce on the validity of the settlement, but that is primarily a matter of dividing profits, not of promoting the public interest.

As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information.

The settlement leaves Google free to negotiate deals with each of its clients, although it announces two guiding principles: "(1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of the Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education."

What will happen if Google favors profitability over access?

it could also employ a strategy comparable to the one that proved to be so effective in pushing up the price of scholarly journals: first, entice subscribers with low initial rates, and then, once they are hooked, ratchet up the rates as high as the traffic will bear.

The payment will come from the libraries

the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company

enhanced ebooks with multimedia content are going to be part of what publishers produce, but they lack the vital imaginative spark that uniquely binds the reader

Ebooks are nice devices but they are not books.