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]
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I posted to wordr.org
Plaque to the future: the ebook edition
http://blog.openplaques.org/2011/10/plaque-to-the-future-the-ebook-edition/
October 26 2011, 1:32pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The Kindle and the Tube
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/13/the-kindle-and-the-tube
London’s top Underground blogger Annie Mole of Going Underground has noticed a surge in the use of e-readers in the capital’s crowded Tube carriages
This article titled “The Kindle and the Tube” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 13th April 2011 11.09 UTC This year’s London Book Fair, which ends today, held a session on Sunday called the Digital Future Is Now. A UK publishing executive spoke of the surging US e-book market and how the market had been jump-started by the Amazon Kindle. I don’t have a Kindle yet, but must get round to it. Annie Mole has noticed that there’s one in every Underground carriage these days, and who wants to be left out? Annie observes: It’ll be interesting to see how this picture will change in five years time. How long will it be before we see more people reading from iPads, Kindles or other e-readers than people reading printed books and papers on the Tube?
Not long at all, I’d say. The Tube experience is quite conducive to nourishing Kindle-use. After all, you need elbow room to turn a page. Now read on.
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April 13 2011, 6:18am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
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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