ebooks | Andy Roberts

Plaque to the future: the ebook edition

http://blog.openplaques.org/2011/10/plaque-to-the-future-the-ebook-edition/

Much as we hope Open Plaques will support and expand public exploration of our surroundings past and present, we didn’t imagine a selection of our community’s content gracing an ebook in the Kindle store quite yet. Our mistake clearly, as that’s exactly what’s happened in photographic terms… Early last month (5th September 2011 to be precise), Simon Harriyott of our team received a message via Flickr about usage of some of our photographs in a forthcoming ebook. The prospect seemed intriguing, and it’s since turned out to be even more complementary to our aims than we’d initially guessed. It seems that almost without realising, we’ve managed to gather together through our user-contributed service a collection of photographs that helps overcome the usual limits of publishing. The ebook in question – London’s Blue Plaques In A Nutshell - features some 1029 illustrated plaques, 259 photographs of which come from those displayed on the Open Plaques website. Each reproduction is also clearly accredited to its individual creator, in line with the attribution license that photos need to have to be included in our service. A book is of its time – that’s half its strength and attraction, and central to how we value both the artifact’s meaning and the author’s perspective. But it’s equally true that as our physical landscape changes – and the amount of historical plaques constantly shifts with both losses and gains – something like a “blue plaques guide” is hard to keep current for more than a matter of weeks. Add to that the sheer mass of plaques to be captured (we currently have 1,625 listed in London) and in this scenario the digital, community-driven collection comes up trumps. The Contents area of the ebook divides the plaques up into 21 categories, framed by what the person commemorated is most notable for (the nearest equivalent on the Open Plaques site being ‘roles‘). Most are quite precise such as literature, science, theatre, music and politics; the notable exception is ‘overseas visitors’ (this category has some 53 entries, including Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Karl Marx and Napoleon). Of course the ebook also allows you to navigate freely between plaques, with the categories acting as a useful but optional pathway. “A native of Scotland, Boswell, was forced to spend a lot of his time in Edinburgh practising Law with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Long known only as the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson the recent publication of Boswell’s journals revealed one of the world’s greatest diarists. Boswell was gregarious, high-spirited, sensual, attractive to women and he found in London the combination of gross and refined pleasures that he needed.” The Open Plaques team is delighted to help facilitate a project produced by someone who has real form in uncovering and curating London’s past and is also a veteran of the digital space. After obtaining at PhD in physical chemistry, author Bill McCann researched and lectured at Imperial College London, before joining the Museum of London where he worked as an archaeologist and managed a geophysical laboratory. Whilst there, McCann made an interesting intervention in the debate around the likely architectural accuracy of the replica Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre three years after it opened in 1996. From from 2000 to early 2011 he also ran StoryOfLondon in his spare time – a website that explored “the odd and unusual” history of the capital. Snapshots of this can still be viewed in the WayBackMachine part of the Internet Archive project, but the site is due to be revived shortly. Bill has always been interested in language, and moved to China as a TEFL teacher in January 2006. He has now settled in Suzhou, and has developed a keen interest in Chinese dialects, particularly those of Wu group, of which Suzhouhua is the premier dialect. He is currently the Associate Editor for China on the International Dialects of English Archive. The preface of the ebook also adds this illuminating detail: “The origins of this book go back to 2004 when I worked with Robbie Stamp and Stuart Williamson on a project that would have delivered short stories from history directly to people’s mobile phones. At that time I wrote a single aphorism for each of the Blue Plaques in Central London and these, together with short biographies of selected individuals, were to be recorded and made available to anyone dialling a special number on his or her phone. A number were indeed recorded by Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley, but alas, the project was ahead of its time, and the necessary start-up financial backing proved elusive.” There’s a parallel of sorts with another project then engrossing one of McCann’s partners. Robbie Stamp who had co-founded the collaborative online encyclopedia h2g2 with Douglas Adams, was at that time also executive producing the film of Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, released in 2005, a project that itself had struggled for several years through many incarnations and funding hurdles before coming to fruition. The trio of McCann, Stamp and Williamson were were ahead of their time with their portable history project. Seven years on, we’ve finally squared the circle: ebooks and the evolution of the web more broadly has caught up with their vision. Mindful too of the time constraints imposed upon busy urbanites and any rushed visitor to the capital, the textual content attached to each each plaque entry has retained the aphoristic brevity first planned by McCann in 2004. “The 1st woman to sit in the House of Commons, Nancy Astor’s sharp and acid wit was more than a match for her male colleagues, including Winston Churchill. She was led into the House of Commons by Arthur Balfour and Lloyd-George, both of whom had said that they would rather have a rattlesnake in the House than her. Mr Speaker advised her against wearing hats in the House; changes in fashion would excite idle comment. Ignoring him, she wore a toque on her first day.” The rabbit hole with any plaque and its underlying story – should you chose to select it – is yours to plunge down, via the Wikipedia links on the Open Plaques website and in many other places. But as a starting point for Kindle users to explore and discover six centuries of London encapsulated in plaques, this looks like a great primer. If you happen to get this ebook, we’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on it. [Extracts from James Bowell and Nancy Astor plaques copyright of the author Bill McCann]

October 26 2011, 1:32pm | Comments »

I posted to distributedresearch.net

Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit

Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.

This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.

We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”

At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.

Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »

I posted to distributedresearch.net

EU raids ebook publishers in price fixing investigation

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/05/eu-raids-ebook-publishers-in-price-fixing-investigation

Big companies trying to maximise profits by setting up price fixing cartels? Whatever next. EU story about ebook publishing

This article titled “EU raids ebook publishers in price fixing investigation” was written by Benedicte Page and Leigh Phillips in Brussels, for The Guardian on Friday 4th March 2011 19.36 UTC The European commission has launched morning raids on several publishing houses suspected of fixing the prices of ebooks, as a huge battle for the future of the sector is fought within the publishing and technology industries. Officials in Brussels have refused to say how many or which publishers were targeted although a spokesman for Hachette, famed for its dictionaries, confirmed that it was among them. The inquiry is understood to be focused on French companies. In a statement, the commission said that it “has reason to believe that the companies concerned may have violated EU anti-trust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices”. The EU competition spokeswoman, Amelia Torres, said: “We have suspicions of collusion to keep prices high. But if our suspicions prove to be founded, this would have an impact across the EU because ebooks are sold across borders.” She added that the firms involved face fines if the commission finds “hard evidence”. The development comes on the heels of an investigation in January by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading into whether arrangements between certain publishers and retailers over the sale of ebooks “may breach competition law”. Investigation teams have asked many of the biggest London publishing houses, including HarperCollins, Hachette and Penguin, for all records and documents relating to ebook sales. The OFT said the investigation was “at an early stage”, stressing: “It should not be assumed that the parties involved have breached competition law.” It is thought the investigation could last a year. The focus for the price-fixing investigation is understood to be what is called the agency model, which has been adopted by almost all the biggest publishers for their ebook sales. This is distinct from the traditional wholesale model, in which retailers buy the books from the publisher and can then do what they wish with them. Under the agency model, the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, which itself sets the retail price of the ebooks, with the retailer taking a commission. Publishers see the agency model as crucial because it allows them to trade with Apple, which was already using it for iTunes, and also to control the price at which their ebooks are sold. Until the agency model was imposed, Amazon had been setting a $9.99 (£6) standard price for new bestsellers in the US and discounting the Kindle editions of some of last autumn’s UK bestsellers by as much as 72%. Amazon, the ebook pioneer that makes the Kindle reading platform, unsurprisingly dislikes the agency model. The OFT said it had received “significant” complaints but did not name the sources. Ronald Blunden, Hachette’s head of communications, denied that the company engaged in price fixing. “Emphatically no,” he said. “We are dealing with distributors who have considerable clout. “We found that in the US, electronic retailers began to apply large discounts on ebooks, driving the cost down. Steadily the spread between the price of a printed book and an ebook became so substantial that we felt it was just unacceptable.” “It’s important for the publisher to control the retail price,” Blunden continued. “We don’t want the items sold below cost, as the perceived value of books becomes damaged. Once this happens, can we expect online retailers to absorb the cost of financing the editing and publishing of books?” John Makinson, the Penguin group chief executive, argued that the “very important” agency model contributes to a competitive ebooks marketplace. “To have vibrant competitive markets, it’s important that Apple and the other digital vendors have a place in that market. The agency model made it possible to have that choice,” he said. Makinson added that he saw “a certain irony” in an OFT investigation designed to ensure competition and consumer choice. “That in our view is what the agency agreement has provided,” he said. Novelist Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World, agreed. “If the agency model is really a problem under EU law, the law is the problem, not the industry,” he said. “Otherwise you fall back into a situation where Amazon controls the market. This is not to demonise Amazon, but they are a massive portion of the physical market and if their wholesale model also dominates the digital book market, it becomes much harder to negotiate with them.” Philip Jones, deputy editor of the trade magazine The Bookseller, said control over pricing was the most single important issue facing publishers. “I don’t think they can convince consumers that ebooks themselves are worth the same as print books, therefore they effectively have to strong-arm them,” he said. “If you allow the market to decide, ebooks will become too cheap and you won’t be able to pay authors, editors, or all the infrastructure that sustains the industry.”

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March 5 2011, 4:16am | Comments »

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Plaque to the future: the ebook edition

Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

EU raids ebook publishers in price fixing investigation

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