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Slide 1: TrendSiters Digital Content And Web Technologies 3rd EDITION Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. Editing and Design: Lidija Rangelovska Lidija Rangelovska A Narcissus Publications Imprint, Skopje 2002-7 Not for Sale! Non-commercial edition.
Slide 2: © 2002, 2005 Copyright Lidija Rangelovska. All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from: Lidija Rangelovska – write to: palma@unet.com.mk or to samvaknin@gmail.com Visit the TrendSiters Web Site: http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb.html Internet – A Medium or a Message? http://samvak.tripod.com/internet.html World in Conflict and Transition http://samvak.tripod.com/guide.html ISBN: 9989-929-23-8 Created by:LIDIJA RANGELOVSKA REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA
Slide 3: Additional articles about Digital Content on the Web: http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb.html Essays dedicated to the new media, doing business on the web, digital content, its creation and distribution, e-publishing, e-books, digital reference, DRM technology, and other related issues. http://samvak.tripod.com/internet.html Visit Sam Vaknin's United Press International (UPI) Article Archive – Click HERE! This letter constitutes a permission to reprint or mirror any and all of the materials mentioned or linked to herein subject to appropriate credit and linkback. Every article published MUST include the author bio, including the link to the author's web site. AUTHOR BIO: Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. Between 1999-2002, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia. Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
Slide 4: The Articles (please scroll down to review them): E-books and e-publishing The Future of Electronic Publishing I. The Disintermediation of Content II. E(merging) Books III. Invasion of the Amazons IV. Revolt of the Scholars V. The Kidnapping of Content VI. The Miraculous Conversion VII. The Medium and the Message VIII. The Idea of Reference IX. Will Content ever be Profitable? X. Jamaican OverDrive - LDC's and LCD's XI. An Embarrassment of Riches XII. The Fall and Fall of p-Zines XIII. The Internet and the Library XIV. A Brief History of the Book XV. The Affair of the Vanishing Content XVI. Revolt of the Poor - The Demise of Intellectual Property XVII. The Territorial Web XVIII. The In-credible Web XIX. Does Free Content Sell? XX. Copyright and Free Online Scholarship XXI. The Second Gutenberg XXII. The E-book Evangelist
Slide 5: XXIII. Germany’s Copyright Levy XXIV. The Future of Online Reference XXV. Old Reference Works Revived XXVI. The Six Sins of the Wikipedia XXVII. Battle of the Titans – Encarta vs. Britannica XXVIIII. Microsoft Embraces the Web - Encarta and MS Student 2006-2007 XXIX. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2006-2007 XXX. Project Gutenberg’s Anabasis XXXI. The Ubiquitous Project Gutenberg XXXII. The Media Downloader’s Profile Web Technology and Trends Thoughts on the Internet’s Founding Myths I. Bright Planet, Deep Web II. The Seamless Internet III. The Polyglottal Internet IV. Deja Googled V. Maps of Cyberspace VI. The Universal Interface VII. Internet Advertising – What Went Wrong? VIII. The Economics of Spam IX. Don’t Blink – Interview with Jeffrey Harrow X. The Case of the Compressed Image XI. Manage IT – Information Technology at a Crossroads The Internet and the Digital Divide I. The Internet – A Medium or a Message?
Slide 6: II. The Internet in the Countries in Transition III. Leapfrogging Transition IV. The Selfish Net – The Semantic Web V. The Law of Technology VI. Metaphors of the Net VII. The Solow Paradox VIII. Decision Support Systems Author: Sam Vaknin Contact Info: palma@unet.com.mk; samvaknin@gmail.com
Slide 7: E-BOOKS AND E-PUBLISHING The Future of Electronic Publishing First published by United Press International (UPI) By: Sam Vaknin UNESCO's somewhat arbitrary definition of "book" is: ""Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers". The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place in the last few months. Time Warner's iPublish and MightyWords (partly owned by Barnes and Noble) were the last in a string of resounding failures which cast in doubt the business model underlying digital content. Everything seemed to have gone wrong: the dot.coms dot bombed, venture capital dried up, competing standards fractured an already fragile marketplace, the hardware (e-book readers) was clunky and awkward, the software unwieldy, the e-books badly written or already in the public domain. Terrified by the inexorable process of disintermediation (the establishment of direct contact between author and readers, excluding publishers and bookstores) and by the ease with which digital content can be replicated - publishers resorted to draconian copyright protection measures (euphemistically known as "digital rights management"). This further alienated the few potential readers left. The opposite model of "viral" or "buzz" marketing (by encouraging the dissemination of free copies of the promoted book) was only marginally more successful. Moreover, e-publishing's delivery platform, the Internet, has been transformed beyond recognition since March 2000. From an open, somewhat anarchic, web of networked computers - it has evolved into a territorial, commercial, corporate extension of "brick and mortar" giants, subject to government regulation. It is less friendly towards independent (small) publishers, the backbone of e-publishing. Increasingly, it is expropriated by publishing and media behemoths. It is treated as a medium for cross promotion, supply chain management, and customer relations management. It offers only some minor synergies with non-cyberspace, real world, franchises and media properties. The likes of Disney and Bertelsmann have swung a full circle from considering the Internet to be the next big thing in New Media delivery - to frantic efforts to contain the red ink it oozed all over their otherwise impeccable balance sheets. But were the now silent pundits right all the same? Is the future of publishing (and other media industries) inextricably intertwined with the Internet? The answer depends on whether an old habit dies hard. Internet surfers are used to free content. They are very reluctant to pay for information (with precious few exceptions, like the
Slide 8: "Wall Street Journal"'s electronic edition). Moreover, the Internet, with 3 billion pages listed in the Google search engine (and another 15 billion in "invisible" databases), provides many free substitutes to every information product, no matter how superior. Web based media companies (such as Salon and Britannica.com) have been experimenting with payment and pricing models. But this is besides the point. Whether in the form of subscription (Britannica), pay per view (Questia), pay to print (Fathom), sample and pay to buy the physical product (RealRead), or micropayments (Amazon) - the public refuses to cough up. Moreover, the advertising-subsidized free content Web site has died together with Web advertising. Geocities - a community of free hosted, ad-supported, Web sites purchased by Yahoo! - is now selectively shutting down Web sites (when they exceed a certain level of traffic) to convince their owners to revert to a monthly hosting fee model. With Lycos in trouble in Europe, Tripod may well follow suit shortly. Earlier this year, Microsoft has shut down ListBot (a host of discussion lists). Suite101 has stopped paying its editors (content authors) effective January 15th. About.com fired hundreds of category editors. With the ugly demise of Themestream, WebSeed is the only content aggregator which tries to buck the trend by relying (partly) on advertising revenue. Paradoxically, e-publishing's main hope may lie with its ostensible adversary: the library. Unbelievably, e-publishers actually tried to limit the access of library patrons to e-books (i.e., the lending of e-books to multiple patrons). But, libraries are not only repositories of knowledge and community centres. They are also dominant promoters of new knowledge technologies. They are already the largest buyers of e-books. Together with schools and other educational institutions, libraries can serve as decisive socialization agents and introduce generations of pupils, students, and readers to the possibilities and riches of e-publishing. Government use of e-books (e.g., by the military) may have the same beneficial effect. As standards converge (Adobe's Portable Document Format and Microsoft's MS Reader LIT format are likely to be the winners), as hardware improves and becomes ubiquitous (within multi-purpose devices or as standalone higher quality units), as content becomes more attractive (already many new titles are published in both print and electronic formats), as more versatile information taxonomies (like the Digital Object Identifier) are introduced, as the Internet becomes more gender-neutral, polyglot, and cosmopolitan - e-publishing is likely to recover and flourish. This renaissance will probably be aided by the gradual decline of print magazines and by a strengthening movement for free open source scholarly publishing. The publishing of periodical content and academic research (including, gradually, peer reviewed research) may be already shifting to the Web. Non-fiction and textbooks will follow. Alternative models of pricing are already in evidence (author pays to publish, author pays to obtain peer review, publisher pays to publish, buy a physical product and gain access to enhanced online content, and so on). Web site rating agencies will help to discriminate between the credible and the incredible. Publishing is moving - albeit kicking and screaming - online.
Slide 9: The Disintermediation of Content By: Sam Vaknin Are content brokers - publishers, distributors, and record companies - a thing of the past? In one word: disintermediation The gradual removal of layers of content brokering and intermediation - mainly in manufacturing marketing - is the continuation of a long term trend. Consider music for instance. Streaming audio on the internet ("soft radio"), or downloadable MP3 files may render the CD obsolete - but they were preceded by radio music broadcasts. But the novelty is that the Internet provides a venue for the marketing of niche products and reduces the barriers to entry previously imposed by the need to invest in costly "branding" campaigns and manufacturing and distribution activities. This trend is also likely to restore the balance between artists and the commercial exploiters of their products. The very definition of "artist" will expand to encompass all creative people. One will seek to distinguish oneself, to "brand" oneself and to auction one's services, ideas, products, designs, experience, physique, or biography, etc. directly to end-users and consumers. This is a return to pre-industrial times when artisans ruled the economic scene. Work stability will suffer and work mobility will increase in a landscape of shifting allegiances, head hunting, remote collaboration, and similar labour market trends. But distributors, publishers, and record companies are not going to vanish. They are going to metamorphose. This is because they fulfil a few functions and provide a few services whose importance is only enhanced by the "free for all" Internet culture. Content intermediaries grade content and separate the qualitative from the ephemeral and the atrocious. The deluge of self-published and vanity published e-books, music tracks and art works has generated few masterpieces and a lot of trash. The absence of judicious filtering has unjustly given a bad name to whole segments of the industry (e.g., small, or web-based publishers). Consumers - inundated, disappointed and exhausted - will pay a premium for content rating services. Though driven by crass commercial considerations, most publishers and record companies do apply certain quality standards routinely and thus are positioned to provide these rating services reliably. Content brokers are relationship managers. Consider distributors: they provide instant access to centralized, continuously updated, "addressbooks" of clients (stores, consumers, media, etc.). This reduces the time to market and increases efficiency. It alters revenue models very substantially. Content creators can thus concentrate on what they do best: content creation, and reduce their overhead by outsourcing the functions of distribution and relationships management. The existence of central "relationship ledgers" yields synergies which can be applied to all the clients of the distributor. The distributor provides a single address that content re-sellers converge on and feed off. Distributors, publishers and record companies also provide logistical support: warehousing, consolidated sales reporting and transaction auditing, and a single, periodic payment.
Slide 10: Yet, having said all that, content intermediaries still over-charge their clients (the content creators) for their services. This is especially true in an age of just-in-time inventory and digital distribution. Network effects mean that content brokers have to invest much less in marketing, branding and advertising once a product's first mover advantage is established. Economic laws of increasing, rather than diminishing, returns mean that every additional unit sold yields a HIGHER profit - rather than a declining one. The pie is getting bigger. Hence, the meteoric increase in royalties publishers pay authors from sales of the electronic versions of their work (anywhere from Random House's 35% to 50% paid by smaller publishers). As this tectonic shift reverberates through the whole distribution chain, retail outlets are beginning to transact directly with content creators. The borders between the types of intermediaries are blurred. Barnes and Noble (the American bookstores chain) has, in effect, become a publisher. Many publishers have virtual storefronts. Many authors sell directly to their readers, acting as publishers. The introduction of "book ATMs" - POD (Print On Demand) machines, which will print every conceivable title in minutes, on the spot, in "book kiosks" - will give rise to a host of new intermediaries. Intermediation is not gone. It is here to stay because it is sorely needed. But it is in a state of flux. Old maxims break down. New modes of operation emerge. Functions are amalgamated, outsourced, dispensed with, or created from scratch. It is an exciting scene, full with opportunities.
Slide 11: E(merging) Books By: Sam Vaknin A novel re-definition through experimentation of the classical format of the book is emerging. Consider the now defunct BookTailor. It used to sell its book customization software mainly to travel agents - but such software is likely to conquer other niches (such as the legal and medical professions). It allows users to select bits and pieces from a library of e-books, combine them into a totally new tome and print and bind the latter on demand. The client can also choose to buy the end-product as an e-book. Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age old notions such as "original" and "copies", copyright, and book identifiers. What is the "original" in this case? Is it the final, user-customized book - or its sources? And if no customized book is identical to any other - what happens to the intuitive notion of "copies"? Should BookTailor-generated books considered to be unique exemplars of one-copy print runs? If so, should each one receive a unique identifier (for instance, a unique ISBN)? Does the user possess any rights in the final product, composed and selected by him? What about the copyrights of the original authors? Or take BookCrossing.com. On the face of it, it presents no profound challenge to established publishing practices and to the modern concept of intellectual property. Members register their books, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around for a total stranger to find. Henceforth, fate determines the chain of events. Eventual successive owners of the volume are supposed to report to BookCrossing (by e-mail) about the book's and their whereabouts, thereby generating moving plots and mapping the territory of literacy and bibliomania. This innocuous model subversively undermines the concept - legal and moral - of ownership. It also expropriates the book from the realm of passive, inert objects and transforms it into a catalyst of human interactions across time and space. In other words, it returns the book to its origins: a time capsule, a time machine and the embodiment of a historical narrative. E-books, hitherto, have largely been nothing but an ephemeral rendition of their print predecessors. But e-books are another medium altogether. They can and will provide a different reading experience. Consider "hyperlinks within the e-book and without it - to web content, reference works, etc., embedded instant shopping and ordering links, divergent, userinteractive, decision driven plotlines, interaction with other e-books (using Bluetooth or another wireless standard), collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities, automatically or periodically updated content, ,multimedia capabilities, database, Favourites and History Maintenance (records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, plot related decisions and much more), automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities, full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities and more".
Slide 12: Invasion of the Amazons By: Sam Vaknin The last few months have witnessed a bloodbath in tech stocks coupled with a frantic redefinition of the web and of every player in it (as far as content is concerned). This effort is three pronged: Some companies are gambling on content distribution and the possession of the attendant digital infrastructure. MightyWords, for example, stealthily transformed itself from a "freefor-all-everyone-welcome" e-publisher to a distribution channel of choice works (mainly by midlist authors). It now aims to feed its content to content-starved web sites. In the process, it shed thousands of unfortunate authors who did not meet its (never stated) sales criteria. Others bet the farm on content creation and packaging. Bn.com invaded the digital publishing and POD (Print on Demand) businesses in a series of lightning purchases. It is now the largest e-book store by a wide margin. But Amazon seemed to have got it right once more. The web's own virtual mall and the former darling of Wall Street has diversified into micropayments. The Internet started as a free medium for free spirits. E-commerce was once considered a dirty word. Web surfers became used to free content. Hence the (very low) glass ceiling on the price of content made available through the web - and the need to charge customers less than 1 US dollars to a few dollars per transaction ("micro-payments"). Various service providers (such as Pay-Pal) emerged, none became sufficiently dominant and all-pervasive to constitute a standard. Web merchants' ability to accept micropayments is crucial. E-commerce (let alone m-commerce) will never take off without it. Enter Amazon. Its "Honour System" is licenced to third party web sites (such as Bartleby.com and SatireWire). It allows people to donate money or effect micro-payments, apparently through its patented one-click system. As far as the web sites are concerned, there are two major drawbacks: all donations and payments are refundable within 30 days and Amazon charges them 15 cents per transaction plus 15(!) percent. By far the worst deal in town. So, why the fuss? Because of Amazon's customer list. This development emphasizes the growing realization that one's list of customers - properly data mined - is the greatest asset, greater even than original content and more important than distribution channels and digital right management or asset management applications. Merchants are willing to pay for access to this ever expanding virtual neighbourhood (even if they are not made privy to the customer information collected by Amazon).
Slide 13: The Honour System looks suspiciously similar to the payment system designed by Amazon for Stephen King's serialized e-novel, "The Plant". Interesting to note how the needs of authors and publishers are now in the driver's seat, helping to spur along innovations in business methods.
Slide 14: Revolt of the Scholars By: Sam Vaknin http://www.realsci.com/ Scindex's Instant Publishing Service is about empowerment. The price of scholarly, peerreviewed journals has skyrocketed in the last few years, often way out of the limited means of libraries, universities, individual scientists and scholars. A "scholarly divide" has opened between the haves (academic institutions with rich endowments and well-heeled corporations) and the haves not (all the others). Paradoxically, access to authoritative and authenticated knowledge has declined as the number of professional journals has proliferated. This is not to mention the long (and often crucial) delays in publishing research results and the shoddy work of many under-paid and over-worked peer reviewers. The Internet was suppose to change all that. Originally, a computer network for the exchange of (restricted and open) research results among scientists and academics in participating institutions - it was supposed to provide instant publishing, instant access and instant gratification. It has delivered only partially. Preprints of academic papers are often placed online by their eager authors and subjected to peer scrutiny. But this haphazard publishing cottage industry did nothing to dethrone the print incumbents and their avaricious pricing. The major missing element is, of course, respectability. But there are others. No agreed upon content or knowledge classification method has emerged. Some web sites (such as Suite101) use the Dewey decimal system. Others invented and implemented systems of their making. Additionally, one click publishing technology (such as Webseed's or Blogger's) came to be identified strictly to non-scholarly material: personal reminiscences, correspondence, articles and news. Enter Scindex and its Academic Resource Channel. Established by academics and software experts from Bulgaria, it epitomizes the tearing down of geographical barriers heralded by the Internet. But it does much more than that. Scindex is a whole, self-contained, stand-alone, instant self-publishing and self-assembly system. Self-publishing systems do exist (for instance, Purdue University's) - but they incorporate only certain components. Scindex covers the whole range. Having (freely) registered as a member, a scientist or a scholar can publish their papers, essays, research results, articles and comments online. They have to submit an abstract and use Sciendex's classification ("call") numbers and science descriptors, arranged in a massive directory available in the "RealSci Locator". The Locator can be also downloaded and used off-line and its is surprisingly user-friendly. The submission process itself is totally automated and very short. The system includes a long series of thematic journals. These journals self-assemble, in accordance with the call numbers selected by the submitters. An article submitted with certain call numbers will automatically be included in the relevant journals.
Slide 15: The fly in the ointment is the absence of peer review. As the system moves from beta to commercialization, Scindex intends to address this issue by introducing a system of incentives and inducements. Reviewers will be granted "credit points" to be applied against the (paid) publication of their own papers, for instance. Scindex is the model of things to come. Publishing becomes more and more automated and knowledge-orientated. Peer reviewed papers become more outlandishly expensive and irrelevant. Scientists and scholars are getting impatient and rebellious. The confluence of these three trends spells - at the least - the creation of a web based universe of parallel and alternative scholarly publishing.
Slide 16: The Kidnapping of Content By: Sam Vaknin http://www.plagiarism.org and http://www.Turnitin.com Latin kidnapped the word "plagion" from ancient Greek and it ended up in English as "plagiarism". It literally means "to kidnap" - most commonly, to misappropriate content and wrongly attribute it to oneself. It is a close kin of piracy. But while the software or content pirate does not bother to hide or alter the identity of the content's creator or the software's author - the plagiarist does. Plagiarism is, therefore, more pernicious than piracy. Enter Turnit.com. An off-shoot of www.iparadigms.com, it was established by a group of concerned (and commercially minded) scientists from UC Berkeley. Whereas digital rights and asset management systems are geared to prevent piracy plagiarism.org and its commercial arm, Turnit.com, are the cyber equivalent of a law enforcement agency, acting after the fact to discover the culprits and uncover their misdeeds. This, they claim, is a first stage on the way to a plagiarism-free Internet-based academic community of both teachers and students, in which the educational potential of the Internet can be fully realized. The problem is especially severe in academia. Various surveys have discovered that a staggering 80%(!) of US students cheat and that at least 30% plagiarize written material. The Internet only exacerbated this problem. More than 200 cheat-sites have sprung up, with thousands of papers available on-line and tens of thousands of satisfied plagiarists the world over. Some of these hubs - like cheater.com, cheatweb or cheathouse.com - make no bones about their offerings. Many of them are located outside the USA (in Germany, or Asia) and at least one offers papers in a few languages, Hebrew included. The problem, though, is not limited to the ivory towers. E-zines plagiarize. The print media plagiarize. Individual journalists plagiarize, many with abandon. Even advertising agencies and financial institutions plagiarize. The amount of material out there is so overwhelming that the plagiarist develops a (fairly justified) sense of immunity. The temptation is irresistible, the rewards big and the pressures of modern life great. Some of the plagiarists are straightforward copiers. Others substitute words, add sentences, or combine two or more sources. This raises the question: "when should content be considered original and when - plagiarized?". Should the test for plagiarism be more stringent than the one applied by the Copyright Office? And what rights are implicitly granted by the material's genuine authors or publishers once they place the content on the Internet? Is the Web a public domain and, if yes, to what extent? These questions are not easily answered. Consider reports generated by users from a database.
Slide 17: Are these reports copyrighted - and if so, by whom - by the database compiler or by the user who defined the parameters, without which the reports in question would have never been generated? What about "fair use" of text and works of art? In the USA, the backlash against digital content piracy and plagiarism has reached preposterous legal, litigious and technological nadirs. Plagiarism.org has developed a statistics-based technology (the "Document Source Analysis") which creates a "digital fingerprint" of every document in its database. Web crawlers are then unleashed to scour the Internet and find documents with the same fingerprint and a colourcoded report is generated. An instructor, teacher, or professor can then use the report to prove plagiarism and cheating. Piracy is often considered to be a form of viral marketing (even by software developers and publishers). The author's, publisher's, or software house's data are preserved intact in the cracked copy. Pirated copies of e-books often contribute to increased sales of the print versions. Crippled versions of software or pirated copies of software without its manuals, updates and support - often lead to the purchase of a licence. Not so with plagiarism. The identities of the author, editor, publisher and illustrator are deleted and replaced by the details of the plagiarist. And while piracy is discussed freely and fought vigorously - the discussion of plagiarism is still taboo and actively suppressed by image-conscious and endowment-weary academic institutions and media. It is an uphill struggle but plagiarism.org has taken the first resolute step.
Slide 18: The Miraculous Conversion By: Sam Vaknin http://www.ideavirus.com The recent bloodbath among online content peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words, that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the hordes of visitors to a web site. It was taken as an article of faith that a certain percentage of this mass will inevitably and nigh hypnotically reach for their bulging pocketbooks and purchase content, however packaged. Moreover, ad revenues (more reasonably) were assumed to be closely correlated with "eyeballs". This myth led to an obsession with counters, page hits, impressions, unique visitors, statistics and demographics. It failed, however, to take into account the dwindling efficacy of what Seth Godin, in his brilliant essay ("Unleashing the IdeaVirus"), calls "Interruption Marketing" - ads, banners, spam and fliers. It also ignored, at its peril, the ethos of free content and open source prevalent among the Internet opinion leaders, movers and shapers. These two neglected aspects of Internet hype and culture led to the trouncing of erstwhile promising web media companies while their business models were exposed as wishful thinking. The second mistake was to exclusively cater to the needs of a highly idiosyncratic group of people (Silicone Valley geeks and nerds). The assumption that the USA (let alone the rest of the world) is Silicone Valley writ large proved to be calamitous to the industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and Rupert Sheldrake developed models of cultural evolution. Dawkins' "meme" is a cultural element (like a behaviour or an idea) passed from one individual to another and from one generation to another not through biological -genetic means - but by imitation. Sheldrake added the notion of contagion - "morphic resonance" - which causes behaviour patterns to suddenly emerged in whole populations. Physicists talked about sudden "phase transitions", the emergent results of a critical mass reached. A latter day thinker, Michael Gladwell, called it the "tipping point". Seth Godin invented the concept of an "ideavirus" and an attendant marketing terminology. In a nutshell, he says, to use his own summation: "Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost-effective anymore. You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing, in large groups and hope that some will send you money. Instead the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk."
Slide 19: This is sound advice with a shaky conclusion. The conversion from exposure to a marketing message (even from peers within a consumer network) - to an actual sale is a convoluted, multi-layered, highly complex process. It is not a "black box", better left unattended to. It is the same deadly sin all over again - the belief in a miraculous conversion. And it is highly UScentric. People in other parts of the world interact entirely differently. You can get them to visit and you get them to talk and you can get them to excite others. But to get them to buy - is a whole different ballgame. Dot.coms had better begin to study its rules.
Slide 20: The Medium and the Message By: Sam Vaknin A debate is raging in e-publishing circles: should content be encrypted and protected (the Barnes and Noble or Digital goods model) - or should it be distributed freely and thus serve as a form of viral marketing (Seth Godin's "ideavirus")? Publishers fear that freely distributed and cost-free "cracked" e-books will cannibalize print books to oblivion. The more paranoid point at the music industry. It failed to co-opt the emerging peer-to-peer platforms (Napster) and to offer a viable digital assets management system with an equitable sharing of royalties. The results? A protracted legal battle and piracy run amok. "Publishers" goes this creed - "are positioned to incorporate encryption and protection measures at the very inception of the digital publishing industry. They ought to learn the lesson." But this view ignores a vital difference between sound and text. In music, what matter are the song or the musical piece. The medium (or carrier, or packing) is marginal and interchangeable. A CD, an audio cassette, or an MP3 player are all fine, as far as the consumer is concerned. The listener bases his or her purchasing decisions on sound quality and the faithfulness of reproduction of the listening experience (for instance, in a concert hall). This is a very narrow, rational, measurable and quantifiable criterion. Not so with text. Content is only one element of many of equal footing underlying the decision to purchase a specific text-"carrier" (medium). Various media encapsulating IDENTICAL text will still fare differently. Hence the failure of CD-ROMs and e-learning. People tend to consume content in other formats or media, even if it is fully available to them or even owned by them in one specific medium. People prefer to pay to listen to live lectures rather than read freely available online transcripts. Libraries buy print journals even when they have subscribed to the full text online versions of the very same publications. And consumers overwhelmingly prefer to purchase books in print rather than their e-versions. This is partly a question of the slow demise of old habits. E-books have yet to develop the user-friendliness, platform-independence, portability, browsability and many other attributes of this ingenious medium, the Gutenberg tome. But it also has to do with marketing psychology. Where text (or text equivalents, such as speech) is concerned, the medium is at least as important as the message. And this will hold true even when e-books catch up with their print brethren technologically.
Slide 21: There is no doubting that finally e-books will surpass print books as a medium and offer numerous options: hyperlinks within the e-book and without it - to web content, reference works, etc., embedded instant shopping and ordering links, divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines, interaction with other e-books (using Bluetooth or another wireless standard), collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities, automatically or periodically updated content, ,multimedia capabilities, database, Favourites and History Maintenance (records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, plot related decisions and much more), automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities, full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities and more. The same textual content will be available in the future in various media. Ostensibly, consumers should gravitate to the feature-rich and much cheaper e-book. But they won't because the medium is as important as the text message. It is not enough to own the same content, or to gain access to the same message. Ownership of the right medium does count. Print books offer connectivity within an historical context (tradition). E-books are cold and impersonal, alienated and detached. The printed word offers permanence. Digital text is ephemeral (as anyone whose writings perished in the recent dot.com bloodbath or Deja takeover by Google can attest). Printed volumes are a whole sensorium, a sensual experience olfactory and tactile and visual. E-books are one dimensional in comparison. These are differences that cannot be overcome, not even with the advent of digital "ink" on digital "paper". They will keep the print book alive and publishers' revenues flowing. People buy printed matter not merely because of its content. If this were true e-books will have won the day. Print books are a packaged experience, the substance of life. People buy the medium as often and as much as they buy the message it encapsulates. It is impossible to compete with this mistique. Safe in this knowledge, publishers should let go and impose on ebooks "encryption" and "protection" levels as rigorous as they do on the their print books. The latter are here to stay alongside the former. With the proper pricing and a modicum of trust, ebooks may even end up promoting the old and trusted print versions.
Slide 22: The Idea of Reference By: Sam Vaknin http://www.britannica.com There is no source of reference remotely as authoritative as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There is no brand as venerable and as veteran as this mammoth labour of knowledge and ideas established in 1768. There is no better value for money. And, after a few sputters and bugs, it now comes in all shapes and sizes, including two CD-ROM versions (standard and deluxe) and an appealing and reader-friendly web site. So, why does it always appear to be on the brink of extinction? The Britannica provides for an interesting study of the changing fortunes (and formats) of vendors of reference. As late as a decade ago, it was still selling in a leather-imitation bound set of 32 volumes. As print encyclopaedias went, it was a daring innovator and a pioneer of hyperlinked-like textual design. It sported a subject index, a lexical part and an alphabetically arranged series of in-depth essays authored by the best in every field of human erudition. When the CD-ROM erupted on the scene, the Britannica mismanaged the transition. As late as 1997, it was still selling a sordid text-only compact disc which included a part of the encyclopaedia. Only in 1998, did the Britannica switch to multimedia and added tables and graphs to the CD. Video and sound were to make their appearance even later. This error in trend analysis left the field wide open to the likes of Encarta and Grolier. The Britannica failed to grasp the irreversible shift from cumbersome print volumes to slender and freely searchable CD-ROMs. Reference was going digital and the Britannica's sales plummeted. The Britannica was also late to cash on the web revolution - but, when it did, it became a world leader overnight. Its unbeatable brand was a decisive factor. A failed experiment with an annoying subscription model gave way to unrestricted access to the full contents of the Encyclopaedia and much more besides: specially commissioned articles, fora, an annotated internet guide, news in context, downloads and shopping. The site enjoys healthy traffic and the Britannica's CD-ROM interacts synergistically with its contents (through hyperlinks). Yet, recently, the Britannica had to fire hundreds of workers (in its web division) and a return to a pay-for-content model is contemplated. What went wrong again? Internet advertising did. The Britannica's revenue model was based on monetizing eyeballs, to use a faddish refrain. When the perpetuum mobile of "advertisers pay for content and users get it free" crumbled the Britannica found itself in familiar dire straits. Is there a lesson to be learned from this arduous and convoluted tale? Are works of reference not self-supporting regardless of the revenue model (subscription, ad-based, print, CD-ROM)? This might well be the case. Classic works of reference - from Diderot to the Encarta - offered a series of advantages to their users:
Slide 23: 1. Authority - Works of reference are authored by experts in their fields and peer-reviewed. This ensures both objectivity and accuracy. 2. Accessibility - Huge amounts of material were assembled under one "roof". This abolished the need to scour numerous sources of variable quality to obtain the data one needed. 3. Organization - This pile of knowledge was organized in a convenient and recognizable manner (alphabetically or by subject) Moreover, authoring an encyclopaedia was such a daunting and expensive task that only states, academic institutions, or well-funded businesses were able to produce them. At any given period there was a dearth of reliable encyclopaedias, which exercised a monopoly on the dissemination of knowledge. Competitors were few and far between. The price of these tomes was, therefore, always exorbitant but people paid it to secure education for their children and a fount of knowledge at home. Hence the long gone phenomenon of "door to door encyclopaedia salesmen" and instalment plans. Yet, all these advantages were eroded to fine dust by the Internet. The web offers a plethora of highly authoritative information authored and released by the leading names in every field of human knowledge and endeavour. The Internet, is, in effect, an encyclopaedia - far more detailed, far more authoritative, and far more comprehensive that any encyclopaedia can ever hope to be. The web is also fully accessible and fully searchable. What it lacks in organization it compensates in breadth and depth and recently emergent subject portals (directories such as Yahoo! or The Open Directory) have become the indices of the Internet. The aforementioned anti-competition barriers to entry are gone: web publishing is cheap and immediate. Technologies such as web communities, chat, and e-mail enable massive collaborative efforts. And, most important, the bulk of the Internet is free. Users pay only the communication costs. The long-heralded transition from free content to fee-based information may revive the fortunes of online reference vendors. But as long as the Internet - with its 2,000,000,000 (!) visible pages (and 5 times as many pages in its databases) - is free, encyclopaedias have little by way of a competitive advantage.
Slide 24: Will Content Ever be Profitable By: Sam Vaknin THE CURRENT WORRIES 1. Content Suppliers The Ethos of Free Content Content Suppliers is the underprivileged sector of the Internet. They all lose money (even sites which offer basic, standardized goods - books, CDs), with the exception of sites proffering sex or tourism. No user seems to be grateful for the effort and resources invested in creating and distributing content. The recent breakdown of traditional roles (between publisher and author, record company and singer, etc.) and the direct access the creative artist is gaining to its paying public may change this attitude of ingratitude but hitherto there are scarce signs of that. Moreover, it is either quality of presentation (which only a publisher can afford) or ownership and (often shoddy) dissemination of content by the author. A really qualitative, fully commerce enabled site costs up to 5,000,000 USD, excluding site maintenance and customer and visitor services. Despite these heavy outlays, site designers are constantly criticized for lack of creativity or for too much creativity. More and more is asked of content purveyors and creators. They are exploited by intermediaries, hitchhikers and other parasites. This is all an off-shoot of the ethos of the Internet as a free content area. Most of the users like to surf (browse, visit sites) the net without reason or goal in mind. This makes it difficult to apply to the web traditional marketing techniques. What is the meaning of "targeted audiences" or "market shares" in this context? If a surfer visits sites which deal with aberrant sex and nuclear physics in the same session - what to make of it? Moreover, the public and legislative backlash against the gathering of surfer's data by Internet ad agencies and other web sites - has led to growing ignorance regarding the profile of Internet users, their demography, habits, preferences and dislikes. "Free" is a key word on the Internet : it used to belong to the US Government and to a bunch of universities. Users like information, with emphasis on news and data about new products. But they do not like to shop on the net - yet. Only 38% of all surfers made a purchase during 1998. It would seem that users will not pay for content unless it is unavailable elsewhere or qualitatively rare or made rare. One way to "rarefy" content is to review and rate it.
Slide 25: 2. Quality-rated Content There is a long term trend of clutter-breaking website-rating and critique. It may have a limited influence on the consumption decisions of some users and on their willingness to pay for content. Browsers already sport "What's New" and "What's Hot" buttons. Most Search Engines and directories recommend specific sites. But users are still cautious. Studies discovered that no user, no matter how heavy, has consistently re-visited more than 200 sites, a minuscule number. Some recommendation services often produce random - at times, wrong - selections for their users. There are also concerns regarding privacy issues. The backlash against Amazon's "readers circles" is an example. Web Critics, who work today mainly for the printed press, publish their wares on the net and collaborate with intelligent software which hyperlinks to web sites, recommends them and refers users to them. Some web critics (guides) became identified with specific applications - really, expert systems -which incorporate their knowledge and experience. Most volunteer-based directories (such as the "Open Directory" and the late "Go" directory) work this way. The flip side of the coin of content consumption is investment in content creation, marketing, distribution and maintenance. 3. The Money Where is the capital needed to finance content likely to come from? Again, there are two schools: According to the first, sites will be financed through advertising - and so will search engines and other applications accessed by users. Certain ASPs (Application Service Providers which rent out access to application software which resides on their servers) are considering this model. The recent collapse in online advertising rates and click-through rates raised serious doubts regarding the validity and viability of this model. Marketing gurus, such as Seth Godin went as far as declaring "interruption marketing" (=ads and banners) dead. The second approach is simpler and allows for the existence of non-commercial content. It proposes to collect negligible sums (cents or fractions of cents) from every user for every visit ("micro-payments"). These accumulated cents will enable the site-owners to update and to maintain them and encourage entrepreneurs to develop new content and invest in it. Certain content aggregators (especially of digital textbooks) have adopted this model (Questia, Fathom). The adherents of the first school point to the 5 million USD invested in advertising during 1995 and to the 60 million or so invested during 1996. Its opponents point exactly at the same numbers : ridiculously small when contrasted with more conventional advertising modes. The potential of advertising on the Net is limited to 1.5 billion USD annually in 1998, thundered the pessimists. The actual figure was double the prediction but still woefully small and inadequate to support the internet's content development. Compare these figures to the sale of Internet software (4 billion), Internet
Slide 26: hardware (3 billion), Internet access provision (4.2 billion in 1995 alone!). Even if online advertising were to be restored to its erstwhile glory days, other bottlenecks remain. Advertising encourages the consumer to interact and to initiate the delivery of a product to him. This - the delivery phase - is a slow and enervating epilogue to the exciting affair of ordering online. Too many consumers still complain of late delivery of the wrong or defective products. The solution may lie in the integration of advertising and content. The late Pointcast, for instance, integrated advertising into its news broadcasts, continuously streamed to the user's screen, even when inactive (it had an active screen saver and ticker in a "push technology"). Downloading of digital music, video and text (e-books) leads to the immediate gratification of consumers and increases the efficacy of advertising. Whatever the case may be, a uniform, agreed upon system of rating as a basis for charging advertisers, is sorely needed. There is also the question of what does the advertiser pay for? The rates of many advertisers (Procter and Gamble, for instance) are based not on the number of hits or impressions (=entries, visits to a site). - but on the number of the times that their advertisement was hit (page views), or clicked through. . Finally, there is the paid subscription model - a flop to judge by the experience of the meagre number of sites of venerable and leading newspapers that are on a subscription basis. Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal) and The Economist. Only two. All this is not very promising. But one should never forget that the Internet is probably the closest thing we have to an efficient market. As consumers refuse to pay for content, investment will dry up and content will become scarce (through closures of web sites). As scarcity sets in, consumer may reconsider. Your article deals with the future of the Internet as a medium. Will it be able to support its content creation and distribution operations economically? If the Internet is a budding medium - then we should derive great benefit from a study of the history of its predecessors. The Future History of the Internet a Medium The internet is simply the latest in a series of networks which revolutionized our lives. A century before the internet, the telegraph, the railways, the radio and the telephone have been similarly heralded as "global" and transforming. Every medium of communications goes through the same evolutionary cycle:
Slide 27: Anarchy The Public Phase At this stage, the medium and the resources attached to it are very cheap, accessible, under no regulatory constraints. The public sector steps in : higher education institutions, religious institutions, government, not for profit organizations, non governmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions, etc. Bedevilled by limited financial resources, they regard the new medium as a cost effective way of disseminating their messages. The Internet was not exempt from this phase which ended only a few years ago. It started with a complete computer anarchy manifested in ad hoc networks, local networks, networks of organizations (mainly universities and organs of the government such as DARPA, a part of the defence establishment, in the USA). Non commercial entities jumped on the bandwagon and started sewing these networks together (an activity fully subsidized by government funds). The result was a globe encompassing network of academic institutions. The American Pentagon established the network of all networks, the ARPANET. Other government departments joined the fray, headed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) which withdrew only lately from the Internet. The Internet (with a different name) became semi-public property - with access granted to the chosen few. Radio took precisely this course. Radio transmissions started in the USA in 1920. Those were anarchic broadcasts with no discernible regularity. Non commercial organizations and not for profit organizations began their own broadcasts and even created radio broadcasting infrastructure (albeit of the cheap and local kind)dedicated to their audiences. Trade unions, certain educational institutions and religious groups commenced "public radio" broadcasts. The Commercial Phase When the users (e.g., listeners in the case of the radio, or owners of PCs and modems in the case of the Internet) reach a critical mass - the business sector is alerted. In the name of capitalist ideology (another religion, really) it demands "privatization" of the medium. This harps on very sensitive strings in every Western soul: the efficient allocation of resources which is the result of competition. Corruption and inefficiency are intuitively associated with the public sector ("Other People's Money" - OPM). This, together with the ulterior motives of members of the ruling political echelons (the infamous American Paranoia), a lack of variety and of catering to the tastes and interests of certain audiences and the automatic equation of private enterprise with democracy lead to a privatization of the young medium. The end result is the same: the private sector takes over the medium from "below" (makes offers to the owners or operators of the medium that they cannot possibly refuse) - or from "above" (successful lobbying in the corridors of power leads to the appropriate legislation and the medium is "privatized"). Every privatization - especially that of a medium - provokes public opposition. There are (usually founded) suspicions that the interests of the public are compromised and sacrificed on the altar of commercialization and rating.
Slide 28: Fears of monopolization and cartelization of the medium are evoked - and proven correct in due course. Otherwise, there is fear of the concentration of control of the medium in a few hands. All these things do happen – but the pace is so slow that the initial fears are forgotten and public attention reverts to fresher issues. A new Communications Act was enacted in the USA in 1934. It was meant to transform radio frequencies into a national resource to be sold to the private sector which was supposed to use it to transmit radio signals to receivers. In other words : the radio was passed on to private and commercial hands. Public radio was doomed to be marginalized. The American administration withdrew from its last major involvement in the Internet in April 1995, when the NSF ceased to finance some of the networks and, thus, privatized its hitherto heavy involvement in the net. A new Communications Act was legislated in 1996. It permitted "organized anarchy". It allowed media operators to invade each other's territories. Phone companies were allowed to transmit video and cable companies were allowed to transmit telephony, for instance. This was all phased over a long period of time - still, it was a revolution whose magnitude is difficult to gauge and whose consequences defy imagination. It carries an equally momentous price tag - official censorship. "Voluntary censorship", to be sure, somewhat toothless standardization and enforcement authorities, to be sure - still, a censorship with its own institutions to boot. The private sector reacted by threatening litigation - but, beneath the surface it is caving in to pressure and temptation, constructing its own censorship codes both in the cable and in the internet media. Institutionalization This phase is the next in the Internet's history, though, it seems, few realize it. It is characterized by enhanced activities of legislation. Legislators, on all levels, discover the medium and lurch at it passionately. Resources which were considered "free", suddenly are transformed to "national treasures not to be dispensed with cheaply, casually and with frivolity". It is conceivable that certain parts of the Internet will be "nationalized" (for instance, in the form of a licensing requirement) and tendered to the private sector. Legislation will be enacted which will deal with permitted and disallowed content (obscenity ? incitement ? racial or gender bias ?) No medium in the USA (not to mention the wide world) has eschewed such legislation. There are sure to be demands to allocate time (or space, or software, or content, or hardware) to "minorities", to "public affairs", to "community business". This is a tax that the business sector will have to pay to fend off the eager legislator and his nuisance value. All this is bound to lead to a monopolization of hosts and servers. The important broadcast channels will diminish in number and be subjected to severe content restrictions. Sites which will refuse to succumb to these requirements - will be deleted or neutralized. Content guidelines (euphemism for censorship) exist, even as we write, in all major content providers (CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo!-Geocities, Tripod, Prodigy).
Slide 29: The Bloodbath This is the phase of consolidation. The number of players is severely reduced. The number of browser types will settle on 2-3 (Netscape, Microsoft and Opera?). Networks will merge to form privately owned mega-networks. Servers will merge to form hyper-servers run on supercomputers in "server farms". The number of ISPs will be considerably cut. 50 companies ruled the greater part of the media markets in the USA in 1983. The number in 1995 was 18. At the end of the century they will number 6. This is the stage when companies - fighting for financial survival - strive to acquire as many users/listeners/viewers as possible. The programming is shallowed to the lowest (and widest) common denominator. Shallow programming dominates as long as the bloodbath proceeds. From Rags to Riches Tough competition produces four processes: 1. A Major Drop in Hardware Prices This happens in every medium but it doubly applies to a computer-dependent medium, such as the Internet. Computer technology seems to abide by "Moore's Law" which says that the number of transistors which can be put on a chip doubles every 18 months. As a result of this miniaturization, computing power quadruples every 18 months and an exponential series ensues. Organic-biological-DNA computers, quantum computers, chaos computers prompted by vast profits and spawned by inventive genius will ensure the continued applicability of Moore's Law. The Internet is also subject to "Metcalf's Law". It says that when we connect N computers to a network - we get an increase of N to the second power in its computing processing power. And these N computers are more powerful every year, according to Moore's Law. The growth of computing powers in networks is a multiple of the effects of the two laws. More and more computers with ever increasing computing power get connected and create an exponential 16 times growth in the network's computing power every 18 months. 2. Content related Fees This was prevalent in the Net until recently. Even potentially commercial software can still be downloaded for free. In many countries television viewers still pay for television broadcasts but in the USA and many other countries in the West, the basic package of television channels comes free of charge. As users / consumers form a habit of using (or consuming) the software - it is commercialized and begins to carry a price tag. This is what happened with the advent of cable television : contents are sold for subscription or per usage (Pay Per View - PPV) fees. Gradually, this is what will happen to most of the sites and software on the Net. Those which survive will begin to collect usage fees, access fees, subscription fees, downloading fees and other, appropriately named, fees. These fees are bound to be low - but it is the principle that counts. Even a few cents per transaction may accumulate to hefty sums with the traffic which
Slide 30: characterizes some web sites on the Net (or, at least its more popular locales). 3. Increased User Friendliness As long as the computer is less user friendly and less reliable (predictable) than television less of a black box - its potential (and its future) is limited. Television attracts 3.5 billion users daily. The Internet stands to attract - under the most exuberant scenario - less than one tenth of this number of people. The only reasons for this disparity are (the lack of) user friendliness and reliability. Even browsers, among the most user friendly applications ever -are not sufficiently so. The user still needs to know how to use a keyboard and must possess some basic acquaintance with the operating system. The more mature the medium, the more friendly it becomes. Finally, it will be operated using speech or common language. There will be room left for user "hunches" and built in flexible responses. 4. Social Taxes Sooner or later, the business sector has to mollify the God of public opinion with offerings of political and social nature. The Internet is an affluent, educated, yuppie medium. It requires literacy and numeracy, live interest in information and its various uses (scientific, commercial, other), a lot of resources (free time, money to invest in hardware, software and connect time). It empowers – and thus deepens the divide between the haves and have-nots, the developed and the developing world, the knowing and the ignorant, the computer illiterate. In short: the Internet is an elitist medium. Publicly, this is an unhealthy posture. "Internetophobia" is already discernible. People (and politicians) talk about how unsafe the Internet is and about its possible uses for racial, sexist and pornographic purposes. The wider public is in a state of awe. So, site builders and owners will do well to begin to improve their image: provide free access to schools and community centres, bankroll internet literacy classes, freely distribute contents and software to educational institutions, collaborate with researchers and social scientists and engineers. In short: encourage the view that the Internet is a medium catering to the needs of the community and the underprivileged, a mostly altruist endeavour. This also happens to make good business sense by educating and conditioning a future generation of users. He who visited a site when a student, free of charge - will pay to do so when made an executive. Such a user will also pass on the information within and without his organization. This is called media exposure. The future will, no doubt, will be witness to public Internet terminals, subsidized ISP accounts, free Internet classes and an alternative "non-commercial, public" approach to the Net. This may prove to be one more source of revenue to content creators and distributors.
Slide 31: Jamaican Overdrive - LDC's and LCD's By: Sam Vaknin OverDrive - an e-commerce, software conversion and e-publishing applications leader - has just expanded an e-book technology centre by adding 200 e-book editors. This happened in Montego Bay, Jamaica - one of the less privileged spots on earth. The centre now provides a vertical e-publishing service - from manuscript editing to conversion to Quark (for POD), Adobe, and MS Reader ebook formats. Thus, it is not confined to the classic sweatshop cum production centre so common in Less Developed Countries (LDC's). It is a full fledged operation with access to cutting edge technology. The Jamaican OverDrive is the harbinger of things to come and the outcome of a confluence of a few trends. First, there is the insatiable appetite big publishers (such as McGraw-Hill, Random House, and Harper Collins) have developed to converting their hitherto inertial backlists into e-books. Gone are the days when e-books were perceived as merely a novel form of packaging. Publishers understood the cash potential this new distribution channel offers and the value added to stale print tomes in the conversion process. This epiphany is especially manifest in education and textbook publishing. Then there is the maturation of industry standards, readers and audiences. Both the supply side (title lists) and the demand side (readership) have increased. Giants like Microsoft have successfully entered the fray with new e-book reader applications, clearer fonts, and massive marketing. Retailers - such as Barnes and Noble - opened their gates to e-books. A host of independent publishers make good use of the negligible-cost distribution channel that the Internet is. Competition and positioning are already fierce - a good sign. The Internet used to be an English, affluent middle-class, white collar, male phenomenon. It has long lost these attributes. The digital divides that opened up with the early adoption of the Net by academe and business - are narrowing. Already there are more women than men users and English is the language of less than half of all web sites. The wireless Net will grant developing countries the chance to catch up. Astute entrepreneurs are bound to take advantage of the business-friendly profile of the manpower and investment-hungry governments of some developing countries. It is not uncommon to find a mastery of English, a college degree in the sciences, readiness to work outlandish hours at a fraction of wages in Germany or the USA - all combined in one employee in these deprived countries. India has sprouted a whole industry based on these competitive endowments. Here is how Steve Potash, OverDrive's CEO, explains his daring move in OverDrive's press release dated May 22, 2001: "Everyone we are partnering with in the US and worldwide has been very excited and delighted by the tremendous success and quality of eBook production from OverDrive Jamaica. Jamaica has tremendous untapped talent in its young people. Jamaica is the largest English-speaking nation in the Caribbean and their educational and technical programs
Slide 32: provide us with a wealth of quality candidates for careers in electronic publishing. We could not have had this success without the support and responsiveness of the Jamaican government and its agencies. At every stage the agencies assisted us in opening our technology centre and staffing it with trained and competent eBook professionals. OverDrive Jamaica will be pioneering many of the advances for extending books, reference materials, textbooks, literature and journals into new digital channels - and will shortly become the foremost centre for eBook automation serving both US and international markets". Druanne Martin, OverDrive's Director of publishing services elaborates: ""With Jamaica and Cleveland, Ohio sharing the same time zone (EST), we have our US and Jamaican production teams in sync. Jamaica provides a beautiful and warm climate, literally, for us to build long-term partnerships and to invite our publishing and content clients to come and visit their books in production". The Jamaican Minister of Industry, Commerce and Technology, the Hon. Phillip Paulwell reciprocates: "We are proud that OverDrive has selected Jamaica to extend its leadership in eBook technology. OverDrive is benefiting from the investments Jamaica has made in developing the needed infrastructure for IT companies to locate and build skilled workforces here." There is nothing new in outsourcing back office work (insurance claims processing, air ticket reservations, medical records maintenance) to third world countries, such as (the notable example) India. Research and Development is routinely farmed out to aspiring first world countries such as Israel and Ireland. But OverDrive's Jamaican facility is an example of something more sophisticated and more durable. Western firms are discovering the immense pools of skills, talent, innovation, and top notch scientific and other education often offered even by the poorest of nations. These multinationals entrust the locals now with more than keyboarding and responding to customer queries using fake names. The Jamaican venture is a business partnership. In a way, it is a topsy-turvy world. Digital animation is produced in India and consumed in the States. The low compensation of scientists attracts the technology and R&D arms of the likes of General Electric to Asia and Intel to Israel. In other words, there are budding signs of a reversing brain drain - from West to East. E-publishing is at the forefront of software engineering, e-consumerism, intellectual property technologies, payment systems, conversion applications, the mobile Internet, and, basically, every important trend in network and computing and digital content. Its migration to warmer and cheaper climates may be inevitable. OverDrive sounds happy enough.
Slide 33: An Ambarrassment of Riches By: Sam Vaknin http://www.doi.org/ The Internet is too rich. Even powerful and sophisticated search engines, such as Google, return a lot of trash, dead ends, and Error 404's in response to the most well-defined query, Boolean operators and all. Directories created by human editors - such as Yahoo! or the Open Directory Project - are often overwhelmed by the amount of material out there. Like the legendary blob, the Internet is clearly out of classificatory control. Some web sites - like Suite101 - have introduced the old and tried Dewey subject classification system successfully used in non-virtual libraries for more than a century. Books - both print and electronic (actually, their publishers) get assigned an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) by national agencies. Periodical publications (magazines, newsletters, bulletins) sport an ISSN (International Serial Standard Number). National libraries dole out CIP's (Cataloguing in Publication numbers), which help lesser outfits to catalogue the book upon arrival. But the emergence of new book formats, independent publishing, and self publishing has strained this already creaking system to its limits. In short: the whole thing is fast developing into an awful mess. Resolution is one solution. Resolution is the linking of identifiers to content. An identifier can be a word, or a phrase. RealNames implemented this approach and its proprietary software is now incorporated in most browsers. The user types a word, brand name, phrase, or code, and gets re-directed to a web site with the appropriate content. The only snag: RealNames identifiers are for sale. Thus, its identifiers are not guaranteed to lead to the best, only, or relevant resource. Similar systems are available in many languages. Nexet, for example, provides such a resolution service in Hebrew. The Association of American Publishers (APA) has an Enabling Technologies Committee. Fittingly, at the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1997, it announced the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) initiative. An International DOI Foundation (IDF) was set up and invited all publishers American and non-American alike - to apply for a unique DOI prefix. DOI is actually a private case of a larger system of "handles" developed by the CNRI (Corporation for National Research Initiatives). Their "Handle Resolver" is a browser plug-in software, which re-directs their handles to URL's or other pieces of data, or content. Without the Resolver, typing in the handle simply directs the user to a few proxy servers, which "understand" the handle protocols.
Slide 34: The interesting (and new) feature of the system is its ability to resolve to MULTIPLE locations (URL's, or data, or content). The same identifier can resolve to a Universe of interrelated information (effectively, to a mini-library). The content thus resolved need not be limited to text. Multiple resolution works with audio, images, and even video. The IDF's press release is worth some extensive quoting: "Imagine you're the manager of an Internet company reading a story online in the "Wall Street Journal" written by Stacey E. Bressler, a co-author of Communities of Commerce, and at the end of the story there is a link to purchase options for the book. Now imagine you are an online retailer, a syndicator or a reporter for an online news service and you are reading a review in "Publishers Weekly" about Communities of Commerce and you run across a link to related resources. And imagine you are in Buenos Aires, and in an online publication you encounter a link to "D-Lib Magazine", an electronic journal produced in Washington, D.C. which offers you locale-specific choices for downloading an article. The above examples demonstrate how multiple resolution can present you with a list of links from within an electronic document or page. The links beneath the labels - URLs and email addresses - would all be stored in the DOI System, and multiple resolution means any or all of those links can be displayed for you to select from in one menu. Any combination of links to related resources can be included in these menus. Capable of providing much richer experiences then single resolution to a URL, Multiple Resolution operates on the premise that content, not its location, is identified. In other words, where content and related resources reside is secondary information. Multiple Resolution enables content owners and distributors to identify their intellectual property with bound collections of related resources at a hyperlink's point of departure, instead of requiring a user to leave the page to go to a new location for further information. A content owner controls and manages all the related resources in each of these menus and can determine which information is accessible to each business partner within the supply chain. When an administrator changes any facet of this information, the change is simultaneous on all internal networks and the Internet. A DOI is a permanent identifier, analogous to a telephone number for life, so tomorrow and years from now a user can locate the product and related resources wherever they may have been moved or archived to." The IDF provides a limited, text-only, online demonstration. When sweeping with the cursor over a linked item, a pop-down menu of options is presented. These options are pre-defined and customized by the content creators and owners. In the first example above (book purchase options) the DOI resolves to retail outlets (categorized by book formats), information about the title and the author, digital rights management information (permissions), and more. The DOI server generates this information in "real time", "on the fly". But it is the author, or (more often) the publisher that choose the information, its modes of presentation, selections, and marketing and sales data. The ingenuity is in the fact that the DOI server's files and records can be updated, replaced, or deleted. It does not affect the resolution path - only the content resolved to. Which brings us to e-publishing. The DOI Foundation has unveiled the DOI-EB (EB stands for e-books) Initiative in the Book Expo America Show 2001, to, in their words:
Slide 35: "Determine requirements with respect to the application of unique identifiers to eBooks Develop proofs-of-concept for the use of DOIs with eBooks Develop technical demonstrations, possibly including a prototype eBook Registration Agency." It is backed by a few major publishers, such as McGraw-Hill, Random House, Pearson, and Wiley. This ostensibly modest agenda conceals a revolutionary and ambitious attempt to unambiguously identify the origin of digital content (in this case, e-books) and link a universe of information to each and every ID number. Aware of competing efforts underway, the DOI Foundation is actively courting the likes of "indecs" (Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce System) and OeBF (Open e-Book). Companies ,like Enpia Systems of South Korea (a DOI Registration Agency), have already implemented a DOI-cum-indecs system. On November 2000, the APA's (American Publishers' Association) Open E-book Publishing Standards Initiative has recommended to use DOI as the primary identification system for e-books' metadata. The MPEG (Motion Pictures Experts Group) is said to be considering DOI seriously in its efforts to come up with numbering and metadata standards for digital videos. A DOI can be expressed as a URN (Universal Resource Name - IETF's syntax for generic resources) and is compatible with OpenURL (a syntax for embedding parameters such as identifiers and metadata in links). Shortly, a "Namespace Dictionary" is to be published. It will encompass 800 metadata elements and will tackle e-books, journals, audio, and video. A working group was started to develop a "services definition" interface (i.e., to allow webenabled systems, especially e-commerce and m-commerce systems, to deploy DOI). The DOI, in other words, is designed to be all-inclusive and all-pervasive. Each DOI number is made of a prefix, specific to a publisher, and a suffix, which could end up painlessly assimilating the ISBN and ISSN (or any other numbering and database) system. Thus, a DOI can be assigned to every e-book based on its ISBN and to every part (chapter, section, or page) of every e-book. This flexibility could support Pay Per View models (such as Questia's or Fathom's), POD (Print On Demand), and academic "course packs", which comprise material from many textbooks, whether on digital media or downloadable. The DOI, in other words, can underlie D-CMS (Digital Content Management Systems) and Electronic Catalogue ID Management Systems. Moreover, the DOI is a paradigm shift (though, conceptually, it was preceded by the likes of the UPC code and the ISO's HyTime multimedia standard). It blurs the borders between types of digital content. Imagine an e-novel with the video version of the novel, the sound track, still photographs, a tourist guide, an audio book, and other digital content embedded in it. Each content type and each segment of each content type can be identified and tagged separately and, thus, sold separately - yet all under the umbrella of the same DOI! The nightmare of DRM (digital rights management) may be finally over.
Slide 36: But the DOI is much more than a sophisticated tagging technology. It comes with multiple resolution (see "Embarrassment of Riches - Part I"). In other words, as opposed to the URL (Universal Resource Locator) - it is generated dynamically, "on the fly", by the user, and is not "hard coded" into the web page. This is because the DOI identifies content - not its location. And while the URL resolves to a single web page - the DOI resolves to a lot more in the form of publisher-controlled (ONIX-XML) "metadata" in a pop-up (Javascript or other) screen. The metadata include everything from the author's name through the book's title, edition, blurbs, sample chapters, other promotional material, links to related products, a rights and permissions profile, e-mail contacts, and active links to retailers' web pages. Thus, every book-related web page becomes a full fledged book retailing gateway. The "anchor document" (in which the DOI is embedded) remains uncluttered. ONIX 2.0 may contain standard metadata fields and extensions specific to e-publishing and e-books. This latter feature - the ability to link to the systems of retailers, distributors, and other types of vendors - is the "barcode" function of the DOI. Like barcode technology, it helps to automate the supply chain, and update the inventory, ordering, billing and invoicing, accounting, and re-ordering databases and functions. Besides tracking content use and distribution, the DOI allows to seamlessly integrate hitherto disparate e-commerce technologies and facilitate interoperability among DRM systems. The resolution itself can take place in the client's browser (using a software plug-in), in a proxy server, or in a central, dynamic server. Resolving from the client's PC, e-book reader, or PDA has the advantage of being able to respond to the user's specific condition (location, time of day, etc.). No plug-in is required when a proxy server HTTP is used - but then the DOI becomes just another URL, embedded in the page when it is created and not resolved when the user clicks on it. The most user-friendly solution is, probably, for a central server to look up values in response to a user's prompt and serve her with cascading menus or links. Admittedly, in this option, the resolution tables (what DOI links to what URL's and to what content) is not really dynamic. It changes only with every server update and is static between updates. But this is a minor inconvenience. As it is, users are likely to respond with some trepidation to the need to install plug-ins and to the avalanche of information their single, innocuous, mouse click generates. The DOI Foundation has compiled this impressive list of benefits - and beneficiaries: "Publishers to enable cross referencing to related information, control over metadata, viral distribution and sales, easy access to content, sale of granular content Consumers to increase value for time and money, and purchase options Distributors to facilitate sale and distribution of materials as well as user needs Retailers to build related materials on their sites, heighten consumer usability and copyright protection Conversion Houses/Wholesaler Repositories to increase access to and use of metadata DRM Vendors/Rights Clearing Houses to enable interoperability and use of standards Data Aggregators to enable compilation of primary and secondary content and print on demand Trade Associations facilitate dialog on social level and attend to legal and technical perspectives pertaining to multiple versions of electronic content eBbook software Developers to enable management of personal collections of eBooks
Slide 37: including purchase receipt information as reference for quick return to retailer Content Management System Vendors to enable internal synching with external usage Syndicators to drive sales to retailers, add value to retail online store/sales, and increase sales for publishers" The DOI is assigned to publishers by Registration Agencies (of which there are currently three - CrossRef and Content Directions in the States and the aforementioned Enpia Systems in Asia). It is already widely used to cross reference almost 5,000 periodicals with a database of 3,000,000 citations. The price is steep - it costs a publisher $200 to get a prefix and submit DOI's to the registry. But as Registration Agencies proliferate, competition is bound to slash these prices precipitously.
Slide 38: The Fall and Fall of the P-Zine By: Sam Vaknin http://home.wuliweb.com/index.shtml http://www.pshares.org/ The circulation of print magazines has declined precipitously in the last 24 months. This dissolution of subscriber bases has accelerated dramatically as economic recession set in. But a diminishing wealth effect is only partly to blame. The managements of printed periodicals from dailies to quarterlies - failed miserably to grasp the Internet's potential and potential threat. They were fooled by the lack of convenient and cheap e-reading devices into believing that old habits die hard. They do - but magazine reading is not habit forming. Readers' loyalties are fickle and shift according to content and price. The Web offers cornucopial and niche-targeted content - free of charge or very cheaply. This is hard to beat and is getting harder by the day as natural selection among dot.bombs spares only quality content providers. Consider Ploughshares, the Literary Journal. It is a venerable, not for profit, print journal published by Emerson College, now marking its 30th anniversary. It recently inaugurated its web sibling. The project consumed three years and $125,000 (grant from the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds). Every title Ploughshares has ever published was indexed (over 18,000 journal pages digitized). In all, the "website will offer free access to over 2,750 poems and short stories from past and current issues." The more than 2000 (!) authors ever published in Ploughshares will each maintain a personal web page comprising biographical notes, press releases, new books and events announcements and links to other web sites. This is the Yahoo! formula. Content generated by the authors will thus transform Ploughshares into a leading literary portal. But Ploughshares did not stop at this standard features. A "bookshelf" will link to book reviews contributed online (and augmented by the magazine's own prestigious offerings). An annotated bookstore is just a step away (though Ploughshares' web site does not include one hitherto). The next best thing is a rights-management application used by the journal's authors to grant online publishing permissions for their work to third parties. No print literary magazine can beat this one stop shop. So, how can print publications defend themselves? By being creative and by not conceding defeat is how. Consider WuliWeb's example of thinking outside the printed box.
Slide 39: It is a simple online application which enables its users to "send, save and share material from print publications". Participating magazines and newspapers print "WuliCodes" on their (physical) pages and WuliWeb subscribers barcode-scan, or manually enter them into their online "Content Manager" via keyboard, PDA, pager, cell phone, or fixed phone (using a PIN). The service is free (paid for by the magazine publishers and advertisers) and, according to WuliWeb, offers these advantages to its users: "Once you choose to use WuliWeb's free service, you will no longer have to laboriously "tear and share" print articles or ads that you want to archive or share with colleagues or friends. You will be able to store material sourced from print publications permanently in your own secure, electronic files, and you can share this material instantly with any number of people. Magazine and Newspaper Publishers will now have the ability to distribute their online content more widely and to offer a richer experience to their readers. Advertisers will be able to deploy dynamic and media-rich content to attract and convert customers, and will be able to communicate more completely with their customers." Links to the shared material are stored in WuliWeb's central database and users gain access to them by signing up for a (free) WuliWeb account. Thus, the user's mailbox is unencumbered by huge downloads. Moreover, WuliWeb allows for a keywords-based search of articles saved. Perhaps the only serious drawback is that WuliWeb provides its users only with LINKS to content stored on publishers' web sites. It is a directory service - not a full text database. This creates dependence. Links may get broken. Whole web sites vanish. Magazines and their publishers go under. All the more reason for publishers to adopt this service and make it their own.
Slide 40: The Internet and the Library By: Sam Vaknin "In this digital age, the custodians of published works are at the center of a global copyright controversy that casts them as villains simply for doing their job: letting people borrow books for free." (ZDNet quoted by "Publisher's Lunch on July 13, 2001) It is amazing that the traditional archivists of human knowledge - the libraries - failed so spectacularly to ride the tiger of the Internet, that epitome and apex of knowledge creation and distribution. At first, libraries, the inertial repositories of printed matter, were overwhelmed by the rapid pace of technology and by the ephemeral and anarchic content it spawned. They were reduced to providing access to dull card catalogues and unimaginative collections of web links. The more daring added online exhibits and digitized collections. A typical library web site is still comprised of static representations of the library's physical assets and a few quasi-interactive services. This tendency - by both publishers and libraries - to inadequately and inappropriately pour old wine into new vessels is what caused the recent furor over e-books. The lending of e-books to patrons appears to be a natural extension of the classical role of libraries: physical book lending. Libraries sought also to extend their archival functions to ebooks. But librarians failed to grasp the essential and substantive differences between the two formats. E-books can be easily, stealthily, and cheaply copied, for instance. Copyright violations are a real and present danger with e-books. Moreover, e-books are not a tangible product. "Lending" an e-book - is tantamount to copying an e-book. In other words, e-books are not books at all. They are software products. Libraries have pioneered digital collections (as they have other information technologies throughout history) and are still the main promoters of e-publishing. But now they are at risk of becoming piracy portals. Solutions are, appropriately, being borrowed from the software industry. NetLibrary has lately granted multiple user licences to a university library system. Such licences allow for unlimited access and are priced according to the number of the library's patrons, or the number of its reading devices and terminals. Another possibility is to implement the shareware model - a trial period followed by a purchase option or an expiration, a-la Rosetta's expiring e-book. Distributor Baker & Taylor have unveiled at the recent ALA a prototype e-book distribution system jointly developed by ibooks and Digital Owl. It will be sold to libraries by B&T's Informata division and Reciprocal.
Slide 41: The annual subscription for use of the digital library comprises "a catalog of digital content, brandable pages and web based tools for each participating library to customize for their patrons. Patrons of participating libraries will then be able to browse digital content online, or download and check out the content they are most interested in. Content may be checked out for an extended period of time set by each library, including checking out eBooks from home." Still, it seems that B&T's approach is heavily influenced by software licencing ("one copy one use"). But, there is an underlying, fundamental incompatibility between the Internet and the library. They are competitors. One vitiates the other. Free Internet access and e-book reading devices in libraries notwithstanding - the Internet, unless harnessed and integrated by libraries, threatens their very existence by depriving them of patrons. Libraries, in turn, threaten the budding software industry we, misleadingly, call "e-publishing". There are major operational and philosophical differences between physical and virtual libraries. The former are based on the tried and proven technology of print. The latter on the chaos we know as cyberspace and on user-averse technologies developed by geeks and nerds, rather than by marketers, users, and librarians. Physical libraries enjoy great advantages, not the least being their habit-forming head start (2,500 years of first mover advantage). Libraries are hubs of social interaction and entertainment (the way cinemas used to be). Libraries have catered to users' reference needs in reference centres for centuries (and, lately, through Selective Dissemination of Information, or SDI). The war is by no means decided. "Progress" may yet consist of the assimilation of hitech gadgets by lo-tech libraries. It may turn out to be convergence at its best, as librarians become computer savvy - and computer types create knowledge and disseminate it.
Slide 42: A Brief History of the Book By: Sam Vaknin "The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely." (French National Assembly, 1789) I. What is a Book? UNESCO's arbitrary and ungrounded definition of "book" is: ""Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers". But a book, above all else, is a medium. It encapsulates information (of one kind or another) and conveys it across time and space. Moreover, as opposed to common opinion, it is - and has always been - a rigidly formal affair. Even the latest "innovations" are nothing but ancient wine in sparkling new bottles. Consider the scrolling protocol. Our eyes and brains are limited readers-decoders. There is only that much that the eye can encompass and the brain interpret. Hence the need to segment data into cognitively digestible chunks. There are two forms of scrolling - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and the computer screen are three examples of the vertical scroll - from top to bottom or vice versa. The e-book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of the lateral scroll - from left to right (or from right to left, in the Semitic languages). In many respects, audio books are much more revolutionary than e-books. They do not employ visual symbols (all other types of books do), or a straightforward scrolling method. Ebooks, on the other hand, are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text cannot be opened at any point in a series of connected pages and the content is carried only on one side of the (electronic) "leaf". Parchment, by comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and to the print book. All these advances are now being reversed by the e-book. Luckily, the e-book retains one innovation of the parchment - the hypertext. Early Jewish and Christian texts (as well as Roman legal scholarship) was written on parchment (and later printed) and included numerous inter-textual links. The Talmud, for example, is made of a main text (the Mishna) which hyperlinks on the same page to numerous interpretations (exegesis) offered by scholars throughout generations of Jewish learning. Another distinguishing feature of books is portability (or mobility). Books on papyrus, vellum, paper, or PDA - are all transportable. In other words, the replication of the book's message is achieved by passing it along and no loss is incurred thereby (i.e., there is no physical metamorphosis of the message).
Slide 43: The book is like a perpetuum mobile. It spreads its content virally by being circulated and is not diminished or altered by it. Physically, it is eroded, of course - but it can be copied faithfully. It is permanent. Not so the e-book or the CD-ROM. Both are dependent on devices (readers or drives, respectively). Both are technology-specific and format-specific. Changes in technology - both in hardware and in software - are liable to render many e-books unreadable. And portability is hampered by battery life, lighting conditions, or the availability of appropriate infrastructure (e.g., of electricity). II. The Constant Content Revolution Every generation applies the same age-old principles to new "content-containers". Every such transmutation yields a great surge in the creation of content and its dissemination. The incunabula (the first printed books) made knowledge accessible (sometimes in the vernacular) to scholars and laymen alike and liberated books from the scriptoria and "libraries" of monasteries. The printing press technology shattered the content monopoly. In 50 years (1450-1500), the number of books in Europe surged from a few thousand to more than 9 million! And, as McLuhan has noted, it shifted the emphasis from the oral mode of content distribution (i.e., "communication") to the visual mode. E-books are threatening to do the same. "Book ATMs" will provide Print on Demand (POD) services to faraway places. People in remote corners of the earth will be able to select from publishing backlists and front lists comprising millions of titles. Millions of authors are now able to realize their dream to have their work published cheaply and without editorial barriers to entry. The e-book is the Internet's prodigal son. The latter is the ideal distribution channel of the former. The monopoly of the big publishing houses on everything written - from romance to scholarly journals - is a thing of the past. In a way, it is ironic. Publishing, in its earliest forms, was a revolt against the writing (letters) monopoly of the priestly classes. It flourished in non-theocratic societies such as Rome, or China - and languished where religion reigned (such as in Sumeria, Egypt, the Islamic world, and Medieval Europe). With e-books, content will once more become a collaborative effort, as it has been well into the Middle Ages. Authors and audience used to interact (remember Socrates) to generate knowledge, information, and narratives. Interactive e-books, multimedia, discussion lists, and collective authorship efforts restore this great tradition. Moreover, as in the not so distant past, authors are yet again the publishers and sellers of their work. The distinctions between these functions is very recent. E-books and POD partially help to restore the pre-modern state of affairs. Up until the 20th century, some books first appeared as a series of pamphlets (often published in daily papers or magazines) or were sold by subscription. Serialized e-books resort to these erstwhile marketing ploys. E-books may also help restore the balance between best-sellers and midlist authors and between fiction and textbooks. E-books are best suited to cater to niche markets, hitherto neglected by all major publishers.
Slide 44: III. Literature for the Millions E-books are the quintessential "literature for the millions". They are cheaper than even paperbacks. John Bell (competing with Dr. Johnson) published "The Poets of Great Britain" in 1777-83. Each of the 109 volumes cost six shillings (compared to the usual guinea or more). The Railway Library of novels (1,300 volumes) costs 1 shilling apiece only eight decades later. The price continued to dive throughout the next century and a half. E-books and POD are likely to do unto paperbacks what these reprints did to originals. Some reprint libraries specialized in public domain works, very much like the bulk of e-book offering nowadays. The plunge in book prices, the lowering of barriers to entry due to new technologies and plentiful credit, the proliferation of publishers, and the cutthroat competition among booksellers was such that price regulation (cartel) had to be introduced. Net publisher prices, trade discounts, list prices were all anti-competitive inventions of the 19th century, mainly in Europe. They were accompanied by the rise of trade associations, publishers organizations, literary agents, author contracts, royalties agreements, mass marketing, and standardized copyrights. The sale of print books over the Internet can be conceptualized as the continuation of mail order catalogues by virtual means. But e-books are different. They are detrimental to all these cosy arrangements. Legally, an e-book may not be considered to constitute a "book" at all. Existing contracts between authors and publishers may not cover e-books. The serious price competition they offer to more traditional forms of publishing may end up pushing the whole industry to re-define itself. Rights may have to be re-assigned, revenues re-distributed, contractual relationships re-thought. Moreover, e-books have hitherto been to print books what paperbacks are to hardcovers - re-formatted renditions. But more and more authors are publishing their books primarily or exclusively as e-books. E-books thus threaten hardcovers and paperbacks alike. They are not merely a new format. They are a new mode of publishing. Every technological innovation was bitterly resisted by Luddite printers and publishers: stereotyping, the iron press, the application of steam power, mechanical typecasting and typesetting, new methods of reproducing illustrations, cloth bindings, machine-made paper, ready-bound books, paperbacks, book clubs, and book tokens. Without exception, they relented and adopted the new technologies to their considerable commercial advantage. It is no surprise, therefore, that publishers were hesitant to adopt the Internet, POD, and epublishing technologies. The surprise lies in the relative haste with which they came to adopt it, egged on by authors and booksellers. IV. Intellectual Pirates and Intellectual Property Despite the technological breakthroughs that coalesced to form the modern printing press printed books in the 17th and 18th centuries were derided by their contemporaries as inferior to their laboriously hand-made antecedents and to the incunabula. One is reminded of the current complaints about the new media (Internet, e-books), its shoddy workmanship, shabby appearance, and the rampant piracy.
Slide 45: The first decades following the invention of the printing press, were, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it "a restless, highly competitive free for all ... (with) enormous vitality and variety (often leading to) careless work". There were egregious acts of piracy - for instance, the illicit copying of the Aldine Latin "pocket books", or the all-pervasive piracy in England in the 17th century (a direct result of over-regulation and coercive copyright monopolies). Shakespeare's work was published by notorious pirates and infringers of emerging intellectual property rights. Later, the American colonies became the world's centre of industrialized and systematic book piracy. Confronted with abundant and cheap pirated foreign books, local authors resorted to freelancing in magazines and lecture tours in a vain effort to make ends meet. Pirates and unlicenced - and, therefore, subversive - publishers were prosecuted under a variety of monopoly and libel laws (and, later, under national security and obscenity laws). There was little or no difference between royal and "democratic" governments. They all acted ruthlessly to preserve their control of publishing. John Milton wrote his passionate plea against censorship, Areopagitica, in response to the 1643 licencing ordinance passed by Parliament. The revolutionary Copyright Act of 1709 in England established the rights of authors and publishers to reap the commercial fruits of their endeavours exclusively, though only for a prescribed period of time. V. As Readership Expanded The battle between industrial-commercial publishers (fortified by ever more potent technologies) and the arts and craftsmanship crowd never ceased and it is raging now as fiercely as ever in numerous discussion lists, fora, tomes, and conferences. William Morris started the "private press" movement in England in the 19th century to counter what he regarded as the callous commercialization of book publishing. When the printing press was invented, it was put to commercial use by private entrepreneurs (traders) of the day. Established "publishers" (monasteries), with a few exceptions (e.g., in Augsburg, Germany and in Subiaco, Italy) shunned it and regarded it as a major threat to culture and civilization. Their attacks on printing read like the litanies against self-publishing or corporate-controlled publishing today. But, as readership expanded (women and the poor became increasingly literate), market forces reacted. The number of publishers multiplied relentlessly. At the beginning of the 19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first, black and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and anatomical charts, and other graphics to their books. Battles fought between publishers-librarians over formats (book sizes) and fonts (Gothic versus Roman) were ultimately decided by consumer preferences. Multimedia was born. The e-book will, probably, undergo a similar transition from being the static digital rendition of a print edition - to being a lively, colorful, interactive and commercially enabled creature. The commercial lending library and, later, the free library were two additional reactions to increasing demand. As early as the 18th century, publishers and booksellers expressed the fear that libraries will cannibalize their trade. Two centuries of accumulated experience demonstrate that the opposite has happened. Libraries have enhanced book sales and have become a major market in their own right. VI. The State of Subversion
Slide 46: Publishing has always been a social pursuit and depended heavily on social developments, such as the spread of literacy and the liberation of minorities (especially, of women). As every new format matures, it is subjected to regulation from within and from without. E-books (and, by extension, digital content on the Web) will be no exception. Hence the recurrent and current attempts at regulation. Every new variant of content packaging was labeled as "dangerous" at its inception. The Church (formerly the largest publisher of bibles and other religious and "earthly" texts and the upholder and protector of reading in the Dark Ages) castigated and censored the printing of "heretical" books (especially the vernacular bibles of the Reformation) and restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of controlling book publishing. In 1559, it published the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("Index of Prohibited Books"). A few (mainly Dutch) publishers even went to the stake (a habit worth reviving, some current authors would say...). European rulers issued proclamations against "naughty printed books" (of heresy and sedition). The printing of books was subject to licencing by the Privy Council in England. The very concept of copyright arose out of the forced registration of books in the register of the English Stationer's Company (a royal instrument of influence and intrigue). Such obligatory registration granted the publisher the right to exclusively copy the registered book (often, a class of books) for a number of years - but politically restricted printable content, often by force. Freedom of the press and free speech are still distant dreams in many corners of the earth. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the V-chip and other privacy invading, dissemination inhibiting, and censorship imposing measures perpetuate a veteran if not so venerable tradition. VII. The More it Changes The more it changes, the more it stays the same. If the history of the book teaches us anything it is that there are no limits to the ingenuity with which publishers, authors, and booksellers, re-invent old practices. Technological and marketing innovations are invariably perceived as threats - only to be adopted later as articles of faith. Publishing faces the same issues and challenges it faced five hundred years ago and responds to them in much the same way. Yet, every generation believes its experiences to be unique and unprecedented. It is this denial of the past that casts a shadow over the future. Books have been with us since the dawn of civilization, millennia ago. In many ways, books constitute our civilization. Their traits are its traits: resilience, adaptation, flexibility, self re-invention, wealth, communication. We would do well to accept that our most familiar artifacts - books - will never cease to amaze us.
Slide 47: The Affair of the Vanishing Content By: Sam Vaknin http://www.archive.org/ "Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac already to notice the problem properly." (Stewart Brand, President, The Long Now Foundation ) Thousands of articles and essays posted by hundreds of authors were lost forever when themestream.com surprisingly shut its virtual gates. A sizable portion of the 1960 census, recorded on UNIVAC II-A tapes, is now inaccessible. Web hosts crash daily, erasing in the process valuable content. Access to web sites is often suspended - or blocked altogether because of a real (or imagined) violation by the webmaster of the host's Terms of Service (TOS). Millions of other web sites - the results of collective, multi-annual, transcontinental efforts - contain unique stores of information in the form of databases, articles, discussion threads, and links to other web sites. Consider "Central Europe Review". Its archives comprise more than 2500 articles and essays about every conceivable aspect of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkan. It is one of countless such collections. Similar and much larger treasures have perished since the dawn of the digital age in the 1920's. Very few early radio and TV programs have survived, for instance. The current "digital dark age" can be compared only to the one which followed the torching of the Library of Alexandria. The more accessible and abundant the information available to us - the more devalued and common it becomes and the less institutional and cultural memory we seem to possess. In the battle between paper and screen, the former has won formidably. Newspaper archives, dating back to the 1700's are now being digitized - testifying to the endurance, resilience, and longevity of paper. Enter the "Internet Libraries", or Digital Archival Repositories (DAR). These are libraries that provide free access to digital materials replicated across multiple servers ("safety in redundancy"). They contain Web pages, television programming, films, e-books, archives of discussion lists, etc. Such materials can help linguists trace the development of language, journalists conduct research, scholars compare notes, students learn, and teachers teach. The Internet's evolution mirrors closely the social and cultural history of North America at the end of the 20th century. If not preserved, our understanding of who we are and where we are going will be severely hampered. The clues to our future lie ensconced in our past. It is the only guarantee against repeating the mistakes of our predecessors. Long gone Web pages cached by the likes of Google and Alexa constitute the first tier of such archival undertaking. The Stanford Archival Vault (SAV) in Stanford University assigns a numerical handle to every digital "object" (record) in a repository.
Slide 48: The handle is the clever numerical result of a mathematical formula whose input is the number of information bits in the original object being deposited. This allows to track and uniquely identify records across multiple repositories. It also prevents tampering. SAV also offers application layers. These allow programmers to develop digital archive software and permit users to change the "view" (the interface) of an archive and thus to mine data. Its "reliability layer" verifies the completeness and accuracy of digital repositories. The Internet Archive, a leading digital depository, in its own words: "...is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record of public material." Data storage is the first phase. It is not as simple as it sounds. The proliferation of formats of digital content has made it necessary to develop a standard for archiving Internet objects. The size of the digitized collections must pose a serious challenge as far as timely retrieval is concerned. Interoperability issues (numerous formats and readers) probably requires software and hardware plug-ins to render a smooth and transparent user interface. Moreover, as time passes, digital data, stored on magnetic media, tend to deteriorate. It must be copied to newer media every 10 years or so ("migration"). Advances in hardware and software applications render many of the digital records indecipherable (try reading your word processing files from 1981, stored on 5.25" floppies!). Special emulators of older hardware and software must be used to decode ancient data files. And, to ameliorate the impact of inevitable natural disasters, accidents, bankruptcies of publishers, and politically motivated destruction of data - multiple copies and redundant systems and archives must be maintained. As time passes, data formatting "dictionaries" will be needed. Data preservation is hardly useful if the data cannot be searched, retrieved, extracted, and researched. And, as "The Economist" put it ("The Economist Technology Quarterly, September 22nd, 2001), without a "Rosetta Stone" of data formats, future deciphering of stored the data might prove to be an insurmountable obstacle. Last, but by no means least, Internet libraries are Internet based. They themselves are as ephemeral as the historical record they aim to preserve. This tenuous cyber existence goes a long way towards explaining why our paperless offices consume much more paper than ever before.
Slide 49: Revolt of the Poor - The Demise of Intellectual Property By: Sam Vaknin Three years ago I published a book of short stories in Israel. The publishing house belongs to Israel's leading (and exceedingly wealthy) newspaper. I signed a contract which stated that I am entitled to receive 8% of the income from the sales of the book after commissions payable to distributors, shops, etc. A few months later (1997), I won the coveted Prize of the Ministry of Education (for short prose). The prize money (a few thousand DMs) was snatched by the publishing house on the legal grounds that all the money generated by the book belongs to them because they own the copyright. In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses, the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like this : if the rights to intellectual property were not defined and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks associated with publishing books, recording records, and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people will have suffered because they will have found no way to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the refrain. But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very limited group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation (most of them rock stars who own their labels - George Michael had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come close to deriving subsistence level income from their profession. All these can no longer be thought of as mostly creative people. Forced to defend their intellectual property rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least as much as they are artists. Economically and rationally, we should expect that the costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its market - the more emphasized its intellectual property rights. Consider a publishing house. A book which costs 50,000 DM to produce with a potential audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like this) - would have to be priced at a a minimum of 100 DM to recoup only the direct costs. If illegally copied (thereby shrinking the potential market as some people will prefer to buy the cheaper illegal copies) - its price would have to go up prohibitively to recoup costs, thus driving out potential buyers. The story is different if a book costs 10,000 DM to produce and is priced at 20 DM a copy with a potential readership of 1,000,000 readers. Piracy (illegal copying) should in this case be more readily tolerated as a marginal phenomenon. This is the theory. But the facts are tellingly different. The less the cost of production (brought down by digital technologies) - the fiercer the battle against piracy. The bigger the market the more pressure is applied to clamp down on samizdat entrepreneurs. Governments, from China to Macedonia, are introducing intellectual property laws (under pressure from rich world countries) and enforcing them belatedly. But where one factory is closed on shore (as has been the case in mainland China) - two sprout off shore (as is the case
Slide 50: in Hong Kong and in Bulgaria). But this defies logic : the market today is global, the costs of production are lower (with the exception of the music and film industries), the marketing channels more numerous (half of the income of movie studios emanates from video cassette sales), the speedy recouping of the investment virtually guaranteed. Moreover, piracy thrives in very poor markets in which the population would anyhow not have paid the legal price. The illegal product is inferior to the legal copy (it comes with no literature, warranties or support). So why should the big manufacturers, publishing houses, record companies, software companies and fashion houses worry? The answer lurks in history. Intellectual property is a relatively new notion. In the near past, no one considered knowledge or the fruits of creativity (art, design) as 'patentable', or as someone's 'property'. The artist was but a mere channel through which divine grace flowed. Texts, discoveries, inventions, works of art and music, designs - all belonged to the community and could be replicated freely. True, the chosen ones, the conduits, were honoured but were rarely financially rewarded. They were commissioned to produce their works of art and were salaried, in most cases. Only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution were the embryonic precursors of intellectual property introduced but they were still limited to industrial designs and processes, mainly as embedded in machinery. The patent was born. The more massive the market, the more sophisticated the sales and marketing techniques, the bigger the financial stakes - the larger loomed the issue of intellectual property. It spread from machinery to designs, processes, books, newspapers, any printed matter, works of art and music, films (which, at their beginning were not considered art), software, software embedded in hardware, processes, business methods, and even unto genetic material. Intellectual property rights - despite their noble title - are less about the intellect and more about property. This is Big Money : the markets in intellectual property outweigh the total industrial production in the world. The aim is to secure a monopoly on a specific work. This is an especially grave matter in academic publishing where small- circulation magazines do not allow their content to be quoted or published even for non-commercial purposes. The monopolists of knowledge and intellectual products cannot allow competition anywhere in the world - because theirs is a world market. A pirate in Skopje is in direct competition with Bill Gates. When he sells a pirated Microsoft product - he is depriving Microsoft not only of its income, but of a client (=future income), of its monopolistic status (cheap copies can be smuggled into other markets), and of its competition-deterring image (a major monopoly preserving asset). This is a threat which Microsoft cannot tolerate. Hence its efforts to eradicate piracy - successful in China and an utter failure in legally-relaxed Russia. But what Microsoft fails to understand is that the problem lies with its pricing policy - not with the pirates. When faced with a global marketplace, a company can adopt one of two policies: either to adjust the price of its products to a world average of purchasing power - or to use discretionary differential pricing (as pharmaceutical companies were forced to do in Brazil and South Africa). A Macedonian with an average monthly income of 160 USD clearly cannot afford to buy the Encyclopaedia Encarta Deluxe. In America, 50 USD is the income generated in 4 hours of an average job.
Slide 51: In Macedonian terms, therefore, the Encarta is 20 times more expensive. Either the price should be lowered in the Macedonian market - or an average world price should be fixed which will reflect an average global purchasing power. Something must be done about it not only from the economic point of view. Intellectual products are very price sensitive and highly elastic. Lower prices will be more than compensated for by a much higher sales volume. There is no other way to explain the pirate industries : evidently, at the right price a lot of people are willing to buy these products. High prices are an implicit trade-off favouring small, elite, select, rich world clientele. This raises a moral issue : are the children of Macedonia less worthy of education and access to the latest in human knowledge and creation ? Two developments threaten the future of intellectual property rights. One is the Internet. Academics, fed up with the monopolistic practices of professional publications - already publish on the web in big numbers. I published a few book on the Internet and they can be freely downloaded by anyone who has a computer or a modem. The full text of electronic magazines, trade journals, billboards, professional publications, and thousands of books is available online. Hackers even made sites available from which it is possible to download whole software and multimedia products. It is very easy and cheap to publish on the Internet, the barriers to entry are virtually nil. Web pages are hosted free of charge, and authoring and publishing software tools are incorporated in most word processors and browser applications. As the Internet acquires more impressive sound and video capabilities it will proceed to threaten the monopoly of the record companies, the movie studios and so on. The second development is also technological. The oft-vindicated Moore's law predicts the doubling of computer memory capacity every 18 months. But memory is only one aspect of computing power. Another is the rapid simultaneous advance on all technological fronts. Miniaturization and concurrent empowerment by software tools have made it possible for individuals to emulate much larger scale organizations successfully. A single person, sitting at home with 5000 USD worth of equipment can fully compete with the best products of the best printing houses anywhere. CD-ROMs can be written on, stamped and copied in house. A complete music studio with the latest in digital technology has been condensed to the dimensions of a single chip. This will lead to personal publishing, personal music recording, and the to the digitization of plastic art. But this is only one side of the story. The relative advantage of the intellectual property corporation does not consist exclusively in its technological prowess. Rather it lies in its vast pool of capital, its marketing clout, market positioning, sales organization, and distribution network. Nowadays, anyone can print a visually impressive book, using the above-mentioned cheap equipment. But in an age of information glut, it is the marketing, the media campaign, the distribution, and the sales that determine the economic outcome. This advantage, however, is also being eroded. First, there is a psychological shift, a reaction to the commercialization of intellect and spirit. Creative people are repelled by what they regard as an oligarchic establishment of institutionalized, lowest common denominator art and they are fighting back. Secondly, the Internet is a huge (200 million people), truly cosmopolitan market, with its own marketing channels freely available to all. Even by default, with a minimum investment, the
Slide 52: likelihood of being seen by surprisingly large numbers of consumers is high. I published one book the traditional way - and another on the Internet. In 50 months, I have received 6500 written responses regarding my electronic book. Well over 500,000 people read it (my Link Exchange meter registered c. 2,000,000 impressions since November 1998). It is a textbook (in psychopathology) - and 500,000 readers is a lot for this kind of publication. I am so satisfied that I am not sure that I will ever consider a traditional publisher again. Indeed, my last book was published in the very same way. The demise of intellectual property has lately become abundantly clear. The old intellectual property industries are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their monopolies (patents, trademarks, copyright) and their cost advantages in manufacturing and marketing. But they are faced with three inexorable processes which are likely to render their efforts vain: The Newspaper Packaging Print newspapers offer package deals of cheap content subsidized by advertising. In other words, the advertisers pay for content formation and generation and the reader has no choice but be exposed to commercial messages as he or she studies the content. This model - adopted earlier by radio and television - rules the internet now and will rule the wireless internet in the future. Content will be made available free of all pecuniary charges. The consumer will pay by providing his personal data (demographic data, consumption patterns and preferences and so on) and by being exposed to advertising. Subscription based models are bound to fail. Thus, content creators will benefit only by sharing in the advertising cake. They will find it increasingly difficult to implement the old models of royalties paid for access or of ownership of intellectual property. Disintermediation A lot of ink has been spilt regarding this important trend. The removal of layers of brokering and intermediation - mainly on the manufacturing and marketing levels - is a historic development (though the continuation of a long term trend). Consider music for instance. Streaming audio on the internet or downloadable MP3 files will render the CD obsolete. The internet also provides a venue for the marketing of niche products and reduces the barriers to entry previously imposed by the need to engage in costly marketing ("branding") campaigns and manufacturing activities. This trend is also likely to restore the balance between artist and the commercial exploiters of his product. The very definition of "artist" will expand to include all creative people. One will seek to distinguish oneself, to "brand" oneself and to auction off one's services, ideas, products, designs, experience, etc.
Slide 53: This is a return to pre-industrial times when artisans ruled the economic scene. Work stability will vanish and work mobility will increase in a landscape of shifting allegiances, head hunting, remote collaboration and similar labour market trends. Market Fragmentation In a fragmented market with a myriad of mutually exclusive market niches, consumer preferences and marketing and sales channels - economies of scale in manufacturing and distribution are meaningless. Narrowcasting replaces broadcasting, mass customization replaces mass production, a network of shifting affiliations replaces the rigid owned-branch system. The decentralized, intrapreneurship-based corporation is a late response to these trends. The mega-corporation of the future is more likely to act as a collective of start-ups than as a homogeneous, uniform (and, to conspiracy theorists, sinister) juggernaut it once was.
Slide 54: The Territorial Web By: Sam Vaknin The Net was supposed to dissolve anachronistic national borders and cultural boundaries. It was expected to vitiate distance - both physical and mental. It was hailed as the invention that will unify Mankind and harmonize (though not homogenize) civilizations, east and west. Yet, this was not to be. As dot.coms bombed, their more veteran and more experienced brick and mortar rivals took over the Net, transforming it in the process into a giant content delivery, marketing, supply chain management, and customer relationship management platform. This evolution all but demolished the non-local nature of the early Internet. It has also brought it into the remit of existing national laws. Moreover, governments throughout the world have become more assertive in exercising territorial jurisdiction over the hitherto ostensibly extraterritorial Net. A French court has prohibited Yahoo! from making certain content on its Web sites available to French citizens. An American court advised Yahoo! to ignore this decision. A Russian programmer was arrested by the FBI for offering a decryption software for sale in Russia (where it is perfectly legal). Governments from China to Saudi Arabia filter Web content regularly. Following the September 11 attacks, restrictive anti-terrorist legislation the world over targeted cyberspace. But the real territorialization of the Internet - the redrawing of its internal contours and the withdrawal of its libertarian foundations - is more pernicious, all-pervasive, quotidian, and surreptitiously gradual. This is not the outcome of legal revolutions and court-driven evolution. It is piecemeal, quiet, unnoticed, often inadvertent and unintended. It is an "afterthought" rather than a premeditated "plot". It happens e-tailer by e-tailer, one Web site after the other, like the spread of a virus. Consider these two - by no means exhaustive - examples. Amazon and Geocities (now, Yahoo!Geocities) are two Internet establishments, two gigantic communities of users that, between them, represent a sizable chunk of all the activity on the Internet. It has long been impossible for a non-US publisher to sell its wares (books, for instance) through Amazon or to Amazon directly. Amazon works exclusively with US publishers and distributors. To collaborate with Amazon - one of the members of a duopoly as far as B2C ecommerce goes - a non-US publisher (no matter how substantial) has to work with a US distributor and thus forgo a large portion of its revenues (payable to the distributor as commissions). Moreover, said publisher cannot even open a ZShop (Amazon's version of mom and pop store). One has to be a US resident to do so. Amazon is closed to the outside world, despite its (false) global image. It sells all over the world - but it only buys American. This discriminatory behaviour is partly profit-motivated. It is logistically easier and cheaper to deal only with US businesses. But Barnes and Noble works directly with foreign publishers and they preceded Amazon in the book business by decades.
Slide 55: Yahoo!Geocities has lately instituted a new policy. It limits the size of downloads from the free home pages of members of its community. If the downloaded content from a given home page exceeds 3 Gb (extrapolated based on hourly usage) - the "offending" member's page is shut down for an hour. The member is then prompted to pay a monthly subscription fee for a Premium Service in order avoid a recurrence of this unfortunate event. This "marketing drive" is intended to compensate Yahoo!Geocities for a precipitous drop in online advertising revenues. The "Premium" package includes "Premium Mail". But only US citizens or residents can subscribe to it. And, you guessed it right, without the Premium Mail component, one cannot complete the subscription process. Though not stated explicitly anywhere, the Premium services are closed to the outside world and are the exclusive reserve of Americans. One can get around this virtual ethnic cleansing by providing false data while registering, but this is besides the point. The Internet is a reflection of the outside world. As economies contract, unemployment soars, personal safety vanishes, the social fabric disintegrates, and consumption slumps - countries tend to isolate themselves politically, react aggressively, and protect their national economies. Protectionism, unilateralism, and isolationism are scourges the Internet was supposed to be immune to. Little did we know.
Slide 56: The In-Credible Web By: Sam Vaknin http://www.webcredibility.org/ People are conditioned to trust written words, not to mention images. "I read it in the paper" or "As seen on TV" are worn out but still effective clichés. The Internet combines both the written and the seen. It is both a textual and a visual (and audio) medium. Do people trust Internet content? Is the incredible Internet - credible? In the "brick and mortar" world, credibility is associated with brands. A brand, in effect, guarantees the quality and specifications of a product (think McDonald's hamburgers), its performance (think Palm), level of service and commitment to customer care (Amazon), variety, or price (Wal-Mart). Brands are sustained and enhanced by advertising campaigns. The content or sales pitch of specific ads are often less important than the message conveyed by the very existence of a campaign: "This company is rich enough (read: stable, reliable, trustworthy, here to stay) to spend millions on advertising". The Internet has very few brands (Yahoo!, Amazon) - and some of them are tarnished. Some "old media" brands have entered the fray (Barnes and Noble, The Wall Street Journal, the Britannica) - hitherto without much success. The overwhelming bulk of Web content is created or disseminated by small time entrepreneurs and monomaniacs. So, how does one establish or acquire credibility in such a diffuse and anarchic medium? Enter Stanford University's "Web Credibility Project". They define themselves thus: "Our goal is to understand what leads people to believe what they find on the Web. We hope this knowledge will enhance Web site design and promote future research on Web credibility. As part of this ongoing project we are: • • • • • Performing quantitative research on Web credibility. Collecting all public information on Web credibility. Acting as a clearinghouse for this information. Facilitating research and discussion about Web credibility. Helping designers create credible Web sites."
Slide 57: • Examples of current projects: Timeliness: How does having out-of-date content affect the credibility of a Web site? Interaction: How does having a personalized interaction with a Web site affect its credibility? Negative Content: How does displaying negative content associated with a branded web site affect the credibility of the brand? It is useful to confine ourselves to this definition of trust: "The subjective belief, perception, or conviction that information provided is true, factual, and objective, and that commitments undertaken, explicitly, or implicitly, will be honoured fully and in a timely manner". Such perception, belief, or conviction are based on: • Past experience in general (with spam, with merchants, or providers, with a similar product category, with the same type of content, etc.) and personal proclivity to trust or to distrust Experience with the specific merchant or provider (whether personal or gleaned from other people's feedback - reviews, complaints, and opinions) • There is little that a merchant can do about the former. The latter is, expectedly, influenced by: • Professionalism (as evident in Web site design, e-commerce facilities, userfriendliness, navigability, links to other relevant Web pages, links from other Web sites, ease and speed of download, updated content, proofreading, domain name which matches the company's name, availability, multilingualism, etc.) Trustworthiness (lack of bias, good intentions, truthfulness, thoroughness, objectivity, expertise and author credentials, knowledgeable sources and treatment, citations and bibliography), and what the authors of the research call "Real World Feel" (physical address, phone/fax numbers, non-Web e-mail address, photos of facilities and staff, audio recording, ownership by a not for profit organization, URL ending with ORG). Commercial Web sites are less trusted. Cluttered ads, paid subscriptions, e-commerce enabled forms - all reduce the site's credibility! This is especially true if the entire site is a one, big ad and when it is hard to distinguish ads from content. Track record (how veteran is the merchant, past financial performance, credit history, brand name recognition, lists of customers, etc.) Selection (how many products are carried, how often is inventory refreshed, etc.) Advertising (is the company's business sufficiently lucrative to support a campaign?) Service (good service indicates a reassuring readiness to sacrifice the bottom line to cater to the customer's legitimate concerns, feedback forms, live support, etc.) Full disclosure of rates, prices, privacy policy, security issues, etc. Feedback from other users (opinions, reviews, comments, FAQs, support groups, etc.) • • • • • • • •
Slide 58: • Site rating and certification by trustworthy agencies (like the Better Business Bureau BBB, VeriSign, TRUSTe) - or awards won (from credible and reputable organizations). Links from other, well-known and believable Web sites. The Credibility Web discovered that trust in e-commerce is also influenced by idiosyncratic factors. Certain domain names (org) are more trusted than others (com). Too many ads, broken links, typos, outdated or old content - all diminish trust. In the absence of proven markers and behavioral guidelines, people seem to resort to extrapolation ("if they can't maintain their own Web site ...") and stereotypes (e.g., NGO's are more trustworthy than corporations). As Web sites proliferate (Google indexes well over 3 billion now) and Web authoring becomes a routine task - the noise to signal ratio of garbage to useful information is bound to deteriorate. Search engines already incorporate crude measures of credibility in their rankings (e.g., the number of links from external Web sites). But, to remain useful, search engines (and Web directories) would do well to rate Web content more comprehensively and thoroughly. They should rank Web sites by authoritativeness, reliability, and objectivity, for instance. Research shows that 75% of all respondents resort to the Internet as a primary information provider. The inundation of irrelevant material caused most surfers to confine their surfing to 10 Web sites (the equivalent of "anchors" in shopping malls), which they deem reliable, timely, accurate, objective, authoritative, and credible. The rest of the Internet gets the leftovers. This worrying trend can be reversed only through the emergence of independent and commercially-viable rating agencies. Web sites (at least the business ones) should be willing to pay for credible rating to enhance their stickiness and attract monetizable "eyeballs". In the absence of such third party accreditation, the Internet risks both irrelevance and disrepute.
Slide 59: Does Free Content - Sell? By: Sam Vaknin The answer is: no one knows. Many self-styled "gurus" and "pundits" - authors of voluminous tomes they sell to the gullible - pretend to know. But their "expertise" is an admixture of guesswork, superstitions, anecdotal "evidence" and hearsay. The sad truth is that no methodical, long term, and systematic research has been attempted in the nascent field of epublishing and, more broadly, digital content on the Web. So, no one knows to say for sure whether free content sells, when, or how. There are two schools - apparently equally informed by the dearth of hard data. One is the "viral school". Its vocal proponents claim that the dissemination of free content fuels sales by creating "buzz" (word of mouth marketing driven by influential communicators). The "intellectual property" school roughly says that free content cannibalizes paid content mainly because it conditions potential consumers to expect free information. Free content also often serves as a substitute (imperfect but sufficient) to paid content. Experience - though patchy - confusingly seems to points both ways. Views and prejudices tend to converge around this consensus: whether free content sells or not depends on a few variables. They are: (1) The nature of the information. People are generally willing to pay for specific or customized information, tailored to their idiosyncratic needs, provided in a timely manner, and by authorities in the field. The more general and "featureless" the information, the more reluctant people are to dip into their pockets (probably because there are many free substitutes). (2) The nature of the audience. The more targeted the information, the more it caters to the needs of a unique, or specific group, the more often it has to be updated ("maintained"), the less indiscriminately applicable it is, and especially if it deals with money, health, sex, or relationships - the more valuable it is and the more people are willing to pay for it. The less computer savvy users - unable to find free alternatives - are more willing to pay. (3) Time dependent parameters. The more the content is linked to "hot" topics, "burning" issues, trends, fads, buzzwords, and "developments" - the more likely it is to sell regardless of the availability of free alternatives. (4) The "U" curve. People pay for content if the free information available to them is either (a) insufficient or (b) overwhelming. People will buy a book if the author's Web site provides only a few tantalizing excerpts. But they are equally likely to buy the book if its entire full text content is available online and overwhelms them. Packaged and indexed information carries a premium over the same information in bulk. Consumer willingness to pay for content seems to decline if the amount of content provided falls between these two extremes. They feel sated and the need to acquire further information vanishes. Additionally, free content must really be free. People resent having to pay for free content, even if the currency is their personal data. (5) Frills and bonuses. There seems to be a weak, albeit positive link between willingness to
Slide 60: pay for content and "members only" or "buyers only" frills, free add-ons, bonuses, and free maintenance. Free subscriptions, discount vouchers for additional products, volume discounts, add-on, or "piggyback" products - all seem to encourage sales. Qualitative free content is often perceived by consumers to be a BONUS - hence its enhancing effect on sales. (6) Credibility. The credibility and positive track record of both content creator and vendor are crucial factors. This is where testimonials and reviews come in. But their effect is particularly strong if the potential consumer finds himself in agreement with them. In other words, the motivating effect of a testimonial or a review is amplified when the customer can actually browse the content and form his or her own opinion. Free content encourages a latent dialog between the potential consumer and actual consumers (through their reviews and testimonials). (7) Money back warranties or guarantees. These are really forms of free content. The consumer is safe in the knowledge that he can always return the already consumed content and get his money back. In other words, it is the consumer who decides whether to transform the content from free to paid by not exercising the money back guarantee. (8) Relative pricing. Information available on the Web is assumed to be inherently inferior and consumers expect pricing to reflect this "fact". Free content is perceived to be even more shoddy. The coupling of free ("cheap", "gimcrack") content with paid content serves to enhance the RELATIVE VALUE of the paid content (and the price people are willing to pay for it). It is like pairing a medium height person with a midget - the former would look taller by comparison. (9) Price rigidity. Free content reduces the price elasticity of paid content. Normally, the cheaper the content - the more it sells. But the availability of free content alters this simple function. Paid content cannot be too cheap or it will come to resemble the free alternative ("shoddy", "dubious"). But free content is also a substitute (however partial and imperfect) to paid content. Thus, paid content cannot be priced too high - or people will prefer the free alternative. Free content, in other words, limits both the downside and the upside of the price of paid content. There are many other factors which determine the interaction of free and paid content. Culture plays an important role as do the law and technology. But as long as the field is not subject to a research agenda the best we can do is observe, collate - and guess. This article is, of course, free content...:o))
Slide 61: Copyright Law and Free Online Scholarship An Interview with Peter Suber By: Sam Vaknin Also published by United Press International (UPI) The battle between owners of content and its users extends to all corners of the publishing world. Following a brief period of enthusing about "synergies", most media companies, content aggregators, content providers - movie and recording studios, publishers, news organizations - came to view the digitization of content as a threat rather than an opportunity. In an effort to protect their intellectual property rights, publishing and recording corporations have fostered the radicalization of copyright law (mainly in the DMCA - the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). They have also retarded the fair use of copyrighted material and the rights and traditional privileges enjoyed by content users. This was achieved mainly by incorporating "rights management" or "asset management" technologies into readers of digital records (such as e-books). These technologies prevented users from copying the files they purchased, from converting them to audio, from lending them to others (as they would a print book), and from reading them on more than one device. Consider, for instance, scholarly publishing. It is in the throes of a protracted crisis. The price of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals has skyrocketed in the last three decades, often way out of the limited means of libraries, universities, individual scientists and scholars. A "scholarly divide" has opened between the haves (the negligible minority of academic institutions with rich endowments and well-heeled corporations) and the haves not (all the others). Paradoxically, due to rising costs, access to authoritative and authenticated knowledge has declined as the number of professional journals has proliferated. This is not to mention the long (and often crucial) delays in publishing research results and the shoddy work of many under-paid and over-worked peer reviewers. The Internet was suppose to change all that. Originally, a computer network for the exchange of (restricted and open) research results among scientists and academics in participating institutions - it was supposed to provide instant publishing, instant access, and instant gratification. It has delivered only partially. Preprints of academic papers are often placed online by their eager authors and subjected to peer scrutiny. But this haphazard publishing cottage industry did nothing to dethrone the print incumbents and their avaricious pricing. Peter Suber has both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a J.D. He is a professor of philosophy at Earlham College, where he also teaches law and computer science. This qualifies him uniquely to tackle the issue of free online scholarship, which cannot be divorced from the legal intricacies of copyright law. In the last 11 months, he has been writing and publishing the weekly the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter.
Slide 62: Apart from writing the FOS Newsletter, Suber is working to realize FOS on several fronts. He is a consultant to the Open Society Institute on FOS issues. He is the general editor of the Web's foremost philosophy search engine Hippias and co-editor of Noesis, both available online free of charge. He serves on the Committee on Philosophy and Computers of the American Philosophical Association. He is on the board of governors of the International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publishing. With Tony Beavers, He is working on software to collect, index, and search the literature at distributed online journal sites and text archives. Q: In "Revolt of the Poor", I wrote: "If the rights to intellectual property were not defined and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks associated with publishing books, recording records, and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people will have suffered because they will have found no way to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which pays the price of piracy." Is there any proven connection between the enforcement (or even the existence) of intellectual property rights and the preponderance of creativity and/or of media entrepreneurship (publishing, etc.)? A: I don't have the relevant expertise to answer for music, software, general literature, or even scholarly books. But for scholarly journal articles (the main focus of the FOS movement), there seems to be very little or no connection between copyright and the productivity and creativity of authors. I say this for two reasons. First, scholarly authors tend to transfer copyright in their articles to the journals that publish them. (Most scholars don't realize that they could probably negotiate a different arrangement, but that's another issue.) For most journal articles, then, copyright protects publishers, not authors. But this hasn't stopped scholars from writing journal articles. Second, authors of scholarly journal articles are not paid for them, whether they transfer copyright or not. Authors consent to this practice and willingly submit their articles to journals that don't pay for submissions. Scholarly authors are paid by their institutions, not by readers, which frees them from the market in deciding what to write. They are rewarded by making a contribution to knowledge and advancing their own careers, not by cash. Hence, the "unauthorized copying" prohibited by copyright law doesn't deprive these authors of money, but only readers. Copyright law (at least when used in the traditional way to restrict access to paying customers) gets in the way. Widespread copying with or without permission would give authors of journal articles more readers and more impact, without depriving them of any revenue. But copyright law generally prohibits this kind of copying. Even though this limit on free distribution is contrary to their interests, it clearly hasn't deterred authors from writing more articles. Having said that, let me add that the FOS movement doesn't need to abolish or even reform copyright law. If authors of scholarly journal articles retain the copyright to their articles (transferring only, say, the right of first print publication, and perhaps some other rights), then authors can consent to widespread copying and finally let copyright advance their interests rather than those of publishers. In particular, authors could consent to put their writings on the internet without any financial, legal, or technical barriers to access. This is what the FOS movement is trying to achieve, and it can all happen within the boundaries of existing copyright law. Q: Could you describe the crisis in scholarly publishing?
Slide 63: A: The main problem is that the prices of journals (both print and online journals) have risen faster than inflation and faster than library budgets for three decades. Libraries cope by canceling subscriptions, or by taking from their book budgets to enlarge their serials (journal) budgets, or both. One result is that even researchers at the wealthiest institutions do not have access to all the journals they need for their research. Or, from the other end of the authorreader relationship, authors of journal articles cannot reach all the readers who would benefit from the results of their research. When research is slowed and obstructed in this way, so are all the benefits of research, such as new medicines. Another way to put the underlying economic problem is that the huge savings that can be achieved by publishing to the internet haven't yet done anything to bring down the costs of scholarly journals. One reason is that most journals still have print editions whose costs are unaffected by the internet revolution. Another reason is that the online editions of most journals use expensive software to permit access to paying subscribers and block access to everyone else. The internet is only a revolutionary medium of nearly costless dissemination for those who don't manage subscription lists and don't try to distinguish between authorized and unauthorized readers. There are other dimensions to the scholarly publishing crisis. One is that journal publishers (like software publishers) are moving beyond copyright law to licensing contracts give them even more protection. Publishers don't let libraries "buy" or "own" copies of electronic journals, but only "license" them. As a result, libraries aren't assured that they have long-term access rights to these journals, they have diminished rights to lend their copies, and their patrons have diminished fair-use rights. They are getting much less and paying much more. If there were no alternative, that would be one thing. But there is an alternative to the near monopoly concentration in the scholarly publishing industry. There is an alternative to harsh licensing contracts. And above all, the internet gives us an alternative method of dissemination that widens distribution and lowers cost at the same time. Even if there were no crisis, the opportunity afforded by the internet would be too beautiful to ignore. Given the crisis, it's inexcusable. Q: What is Free Online Scholarship and how can it be reconciled with rights to intellectual property? Can the current revenue models of publishers be replaced with viable alternative revenue models - and, if yes, which are they? What the risks of abuse of FOS? Is FOS an instance of a larger "free content" movement (Napster, etc.)? If so, can Free Online Content principles be applied to music, books, and film. for instance? A: Free online scholarship is scientific and scholarly literature which is made available free of charge on the internet. The FOS movement singles out this body of literature not because it is useful (because other kinds of literature are useful too), but because it has the relevant peculiarity that its authors don't expect to be paid. If authors want to make money from their works, we don't criticize or pressure them. But when authors consent to do without royalties, then there's no reason not to make their writings freely available on the internet. When the literature is as useful as research articles are, then free online access is a public good worth every effort to realize. Once we understand that the scope of the FOS movement is limited to works that authors
Slide 64: consent to give away, or to publish without payment, then we can understand why this movement is completely compatible with intellectual property rights. When authors write articles, they are the copyright holders. A growing number of journals will use their peer review process to vet and validate articles, and ultimately publish them, without demanding that authors give up copyright --and we hope to launch more journals with this enlightened policy. If the authors of peer-reviewed articles holds the copyright to them, then they have the right to decide whether to make access free or restricted. If they choose to make it free and open, that is their right, not an infringement of their right. The FOS movement is about using copyright to authorize free and open access, not about piracy that creates free access without the consent of the copyright holder. This movement has nothing interesting in common with the movement created by Napster. The all-important difference is that researchers give away their journal articles and musicians don't give away their music. We work entirely within the consent of the copyright holder. Q: The major missing element seems to be perceived respectability. But there are others. No agreed upon content or knowledge classification method has emerged. Some web sites (such as Suite101) use the Dewey decimal system. Others invented and implemented systems of their making. Additionally, one click publishing technology (such as Webseed's or Blogger's) came to be identified strictly with non-scholarly material: personal reminiscences, correspondence, articles, and news. Above all, no feasible alternative revenue models seem to have emerged. A: Regarding respectability: There is a growing number of free online *peer-reviewed* journals, and growing number of highly respected academics willing to serve on their editorial boards. As measured by impact (citations) or informal prestige, some online journals surpass many print journals. It's true that print journals still have greater impact and prestige than online journals, but only if we average the two classes. The factors that create respectability are medium-independent, and can easily belong to online journals. A growing number of online journals are as respectable as any print journal. BMJ (formerly called the British Medical Journal) is eminently respectable. It offers 100% of its print copy online free of charge. There are other examples in every field. My view is that the lack of an agreed upon classification method is not a problem. That's a long conversation. But it's not true that the need for such a classification method is widely felt. Indexing and organization are desirable, but there is free and priced software to index and organize any online content in any way that users want. This software will only get better as time goes on. It's not true that no feasible alternative revenue models have emerged. FOS doesn't depend on volunteer labor. The general revenue model is to pay for outgoing articles (dissemination) rather than incoming articles (access). There are many variations on the theme, depending on who pays. But it's perfectly feasible to regard the costs of dissemination as part of the cost of research, to be paid by the grant that funds the research --for example. (This is just one variation on the theme.) BioMed Central is a *for-profit* provider of FOS implementing one variation on this theme.
Slide 65: In a general introduction to the FOS movement I'm writing for another journal, I'm putting it this way. The economic feasibility of FOS is no more mysterious than the economic feasibility of Public TV. Donors pay the costs of dissemination so that it will be free for everyone. For that matter, it's no more mysterious than the economics of commercial TV, which is identical except that advertisers are among the donors. There are many successful and sustainable examples in our economy in which some people pay to make a good free for everyone rather than pay only for their own private access or consumption. Q. Can you summarize for us the major developments and trends in FOS? A: Here are some trends in the FOS movement: A growing number of disciplines have free online preprint archives. Every discipline now has a growing number of free online peer-reviewed journals. A growing number of universities have free online archives for faculty research papers. Journal publishers are experimenting with ways to offer more of their content online, some of it free of charge. They are also experimenting with different ways to fund the costs of the online content. More journal publishers are allowing authors to put their published papers online free of charge e.g. on their own home pages. It is increasingly common to see journal editors rebel against journal publishers that refuse to lower subscription prices or widen online access. They rebel by resigning and launching new journals on the same topics and usually gather the same subscribers and a superior "impact factor" very quickly. More scholars and researchers are demanding that journals offer free online access to their contents. The Public Library of Science open letter has so far gathered more than 29,000 signatures from 175 countries. More online repositories of digital articles are participating in the Open Archives Initiative, and more scholars and task forces are endorsing it. It is the emerging standard for making separate archives "interoperable" --for example, searchable as if they were one. More serious, feasible solutions are emerging to the problem of long-term preservation of digital content. More journals and special initiatives are seeking ways to provide developing countries with free online access to scientific and scholarly literature. More software tools exist to automate the operation of online journals (hence, to keep costs low). Just about all tasks can now be automated except editorial judgment (which shouldn't be, of course). More hiring and tenure committees are giving weight to peer-reviewed publications without regard to the medium of publication (print or electronic). More journal publishers are seeking ways to accommodate the scholarly demand for online access (though not always to accommodate the demand for free online access). The serials pricing crisis which has long alarmed and mobilized librarians is starting to alarm and mobilize university administrators and faculty. Copyright law is changing from a balance between publishers and readers toward a severe imbalance favoring publishers. (See next question below.) The recent Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is promising for several reasons. It brings together FOS proponents from many disciplines and nations, FOS initiatives from many fronts, and foundations with serious resources to help advance the cause. These foundations are led by George Soros' Open Society Institute, which convened the meeting that gave birth to the BOAI.
Slide 66: One thing I like about the BOAI is its friendliness. It doesn't demand that journals or publishers join the cause or face sanctions. It offers to help them make the transition if they are willing to do so. But if they aren't willing, it simply says it will pursue the cause without their help. The BOAI doesn't demand any changes from publishers, markets, or legislation, and doesn't criticize anyone for not joining. It articulates two strategies that scholars can pursue on their own. One is self-archiving, by which scholars deposit their papers in institutional or disciplinary archives. (These archives are interoperable, or they cooperate with one another, by virtue of their compliance with the standards of the Open Archives Initiative.) The second is the launch of a new generation of journals that are committed to making their contents freely accessible online. The long-term economic sustainability of free online scholarship is not a problem. We know this because creating open online access to this literature costs much less than traditional forms of dissemination and much less than the money currently spent on journal subscriptions. The only problem is the transition from here to there. The BOAI is especially promising because it understands this and mobilizes the financial resources to help make the transition possible for existing journals that would like to change their business model, new journals that need to establish themselves, and universities that don't yet participate in selfarchiving. In this sense the BOAI is not just a statement of principles or ideals, but a serious and effective plan to achieve this very important public good. Q. Copyright laws are being revamped the world over (but mainly in the USA). What would be the impact of the likes of the DMCA on scholarship and on the economics of publishing? A. The DMCA has several harmful consequences for scholarship. First, it prevents some scientists who happen to specialize in encryption and data security from publishing their research. Edward Felten of Princeton has so far been unable to get a court to declare that he has a First Amendment right to publish his research on certain methods of copy protection. Taken at face value, the DMCA would punish Felten for publishing his research. Until courts settle the question whether the relevant sections of the DMCA are constitutional, the free expression rights of scholars like Felten will be chilled. And of course if the question is resolved in favor of the DMCA, then the free expression rights of scholars like Felten will be repealed. Second, it prevents some computer scientists from publishing their research in the form of source code, the technical language of their field. While some courts have held that source code is protected as a kind of speech, other courts are giving it a low level of protection in order to give effect to DMCA prohibitions on certain kinds of software. Third, it supports strong copy-protection schemes that deprive readers of their fair-use rights. For the same reason, it deprives purchasers of digital content of the right to bypass copy protection in order to make personal back-up copies or to keep the content readable when they move to a new computer. For the same reason, it prevents libraries from taking necessary measures to assure the long-term access and preservation of digital literature. The DMCA is even worse for software developers and consumers than it is for scholars. This week Felten dropped his appeal. So currently no court is even considering his question whether scholars have a First Amendment right to publish their research, or whether the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA (which seems to prohibit Felten from publishing) is unconstitutional. Note that the FOS movement has no problem with the strong protection of intellectual
Slide 67: property, which is at the heart of the DMCA. That's not the problem. The problem is the way the DMCA upsets a long-standing (and constitutionally mandated) balance between publishers and readers and gives nearly everything to publishers. Because internet content crosses national boundaries, one nation will often want to enforce the copyright judgments of its own courts, interpreting its own laws, in another country. Worldwide developments in parallel to the DMCA, like the still evolving Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments, are giving effect to these desires. The problem is that these efforts, like the DMCA, put intellectual property rights above free speech rights. The same rules that let a nation enforce a copyright judgment beyond its own boundaries also let it enforce a censorship judgment beyond its own boundaries. Until recently, the border-crossing potential of the internet was a feature; now it's a bug. Until recently, it subjected less-free nations to the free speech of the most-free nations. New developments threaten to subject the most-free nations to the censorship rules of the least-free nations. In the name of copyright enforcement, worldwide speech rights are sinking to the lowest standard in use anywhere. Another development in copyright law that harms scholarship is the extension of copyright terms, even retroactively. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (1998) retroactively added 20 years to existing copyrights. This harms scholarship by greatly delaying the transition of copyrighted works into the public domain. By shrinking the public domain, it shrinks the number of modern classics that volunteers can lawfully digitize and make freely available on the internet. For the same reason, it tilts the balance of copyright law even further in the direction of publishers and against the interests of readers and researchers. Those who have looked into it believe that the Bono Act was motivated to protect the Disney copyright on Mickey Mouse, which would have expired in 2003. If so, this is a grotesque inversion of values. The Uruguay Round Agreements Act (1994) is even worse, and can remove works from the public domain and retroactively grant them copyrights. In short, whatever harms the rights and interests of readers harms scholarship and research, and recent trends in copyright law increasingly favor the rights and interests of publishers over those of readers. Copyright law is increasingly hostile to fair-use rights, the first sale doctrine, limited terms, and the public domain. Q. To summarize: is the Internet a boon or a bane as far as publishing and scholarly exchange are concerned? It would seem that its existence brought about the RETARDATION of users' rights - rather than the user empowerment everyone was hoping for. A. The Internet is an unprecedented boon to scholarly publishing. The only problem is that we have barely begun to realize its full potential, including its potential to make scholarly literature freely available to everyone with an internet connection. We may never take full advantage of the ways it can transform scholarly research and publication. That requires an endless approximation process, deep imagination, and time. But if we could just take advantage of the opportunity it affords for free online research literature, then the internet will have a greater beneficial impact on research and education than lending libraries or the Gutenberg press.
Slide 68: The Second Gutenberg Interview with Michael Hart By: Sam Vaknin Also published by United Press International (UPI) "Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg is a visionary who was quite ahead of his time. In fact, it may still be several years before his dream of universally-available literature comes true. Nevertheless, Michael's efforts have inspired thousands of people around the world who now share his vision. The progress of Project Gutenberg has been slower than many hoped, but it has definitely helped to push forward the great eBook dream which I share. Unfortunately, the technology, infrastructure, and market are lagging way behind Michael's vision, a common hazard of being a pioneer." - says Glenn Sanders, Director of eBookWeb.org. Michael S. Hart is a Professor of Electronic Text at Benedictine University (Illinois, U.S.A.) and a former Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University was a Fellow of the Internet Archive for the year 2000. He founded Project Gutenberg in 1971 and is currently its Executive Coordinator. In more ways than one, he is the father of e-publishing and e-books. He pioneered not only the dissemination of electronic texts - but also some of the working models that underpinned the Internet until the dot.com crash two years ago. The ethos of the early Internet owes a lot to Hart. He created a mass movement of volunteers, remote-collaborating on a project of free access to content. There is no better encapsulation of the gist of the Net. And PG books can be replicated at no cost - a precursor of viral and buzz marketing. Project Gutenberg is, by now, an integral part of the myth and history of our networked world. It is a worldwide library created and maintained by a small army of dedicated volunteers who scan, proofread, and upload dozens of new e-texts every week. Most of these texts are in the public domain. But a few are copyrighted - with permission to store the work granted by authors and publishers or other copyright holders. There are many imitators and copycats - but only one Project Gutenberg, in scope, perseverance, dedication, and thoroughness. As copyright expires, thousands of works are added monthly to the public domain and can be freely replicated and distributed. Most of these books are out of print and saved by the Project from obscurity and ultimate oblivion. The recurrent extension of copyright terms by Congress hampers this work by restricting the growth of the public domain or even by removing texts from it. It benefits very few copyright holders at the expense of universal access to literature and knowledge. Hart mourns the rapidly dwindling public domain:
Slide 69: "In the USA, no copyrights will expire from now to 2019!!! It is even much worse in many other countries, where they actually removed 20 years from the public domain. Books that had been legal to publish all of a sudden were not. Friends told me that in Italy, for example, all the great Italian operas that had entered the public domain are no longer there. . . Same goes for the United Kingdom. Germany increased their copyright term to more than 70 years back in the 1960's. It is a domino effect. Australia is the only country I know of that has officially stated they will not extend the copyright term by 20 years to more than 70." Hart is a visionary and a pioneer. Such vocations carry a heavy price tag in recurrent frustration and cumulative exhaustion. Hart may be tired, but he does not sound bitter. He is still a fount of brilliant ideas, thought provoking insights, exuberant optimism, and titillating predictions. Three decades of constant battle ended in partial victory - but Hart is as energetic as ever, straining at the next, seemingly implausible target. "A million books to a billion people in all corners of the globe." Inevitably, he sometimes feels cornered. "They" figure in many of his statements - the cynical and avaricious establishment that will sacrifice anything to secure the diminishing returns of a few more copies sold. In the Project's life time, the period of copyright has been extended from an average of 30 years to an inane 95 years. Moreover, no notice of renewal is required in order to enjoy the copyright extensions. This protectionism hinders the spread of literacy, deprives the masses of much needed knowledge, discriminates against the poor, and, ultimately, undermines democracy - believes Hart. Q. Project "Gutenberg" is a self-conscious name. In which ways is the Project comparable to Gutenberg's revolution? A. When I chose the name, the major factor in mind was that publishing e-Books would change the map of literacy and education as much as did the Gutenberg Press which reduced the price of books to 1/400th their previous price tag. From the equivalent of the cost of an average family farm, books became so inexpensive that you could see a wagonload of them in the weekend marketplace in small villages at prices that even these people could afford. My second choice was Project Alexandria. The major difference is that the Alexandrians *collect* e-Books, while the Gutenbergers *produce* e-Books. Another way our Project compares to Gutenberg's revolution is that copyright laws were created to stop both. When we only had a dozen e-Books online, the price of putting one on a computer was about 1/400th the price of a paperback. But obviously with 100 gigabyte drives coming down to $100, the price of putting e-Books on computers has fallen so low as to be literally "too cheap to meter." Those who like to meter everything on the cash scale are incredibly upset about Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is the first example of a "paradigm shift" from "Limited Distribution" to "Unlimited Distribution", now touted as "The Information Age". However, you should be aware that this is the 4th such Information Age.
Slide 70: Each such phase has been stifled by making it illegal to use new technologies to copy texts. In 1710, the Statute of Anne copyright made it illegal for any but members of the ancient Stationers' Guild to use a Gutenberg Press. Then, in 1909, the US doubled the term of all copyrights to eliminate "reprint houses" who were using the new steam and electric powered presses to compete with the old boy publishing network. The third Information Age came in 1976 when the US increased the copyright term to 75 years and eliminated the requirement to file copyright renewals, to stifle changes brought on by Xerox machines. In 1998, the US extended the copyright term yet again, to 95 years, to eliminate publication via the Internet. Q. The concept of e-texts or e-books back in 1971 was novel. What made you think of this particular use for the $100 million in spare computer time you were given by the University of Illinois? A. What allowed me to think of this particular use for computers so long before anyone else did is the same thing that allows every other inventor to create their inventions: being at the right place, at the right time, with the right background. As Lermontov said in The Red Shoes: "Not even the greatest magician in the world can pull a rabbit out of a hat if there isn't already a rabbit in it." I owe this background to my parents, and to my brother. I grew up in a house full of books and electronics, so the idea of combining the two was obviously not as great a leap as it would have been for someone else. I repaired my Dad's hi-fi the first time when I was in the second grade, and was also the kid who adjusted everyone's TV and antennas when they were so new everyone was scared of them. I have always had a knack for electronics, and built and rebuilt radios and other electronics all my life, even though I never read an electronics book or manuals. . .it was just natural. Let me tell you a story about how the Project started: I happened to stop at our local IGA grocery store on the way. We were just coming up on the American Bicentennial and they put faux parchment historical documents in with the groceries. So, as I fumbled through my backpack for something to eat, I found the US Declaration of Independence and had a light bulb moment. I thought for a while to see if I could figure out anything I could do with the computer that would be more important than typing in the Declaration of Independence, something that would still be there 100 years later, but couldn't come up with anything, and so Project Gutenberg was born. You have to remember that the Internet had just gone transcontinental and this was one of the very first computers on it. Somehow I had envisioned the Net in my mind very much as it would become 30 years later. I envisioned sending the Declaration of Independence to everyone on the Net. . .all 100 of them. . .which would have crashed the whole thing, but luckily Fred Ranck stopped me, and we just posted a notice in what would later become comp.gen I think about 6 out of the 100 users at the time downloaded it. . . .
Slide 71: Q. Between 1971 and 1993 you produced 100 e-texts. And then, in less than 9 years, an additional few thousand. What happened? A. People rarely understand the power of doubling something every so often. In 1991 we were doing one e-Book per month. This was totally revolutionary at the time. People kept predicting that we couldn't continue, but we were planning on doubling production every year, which we did for most years. We are now adding 200 e-texts a month. Q. Can you give us some current download statistics? A. As for stats, this is pretty much impossible since we don't directly control any but one or two of what I presume are hundreds of sites around the world that have our files up for download. What I can tell you is that the one site we have the most control of gives away over a million e-Books per month. Q. The Internet is often castigated as an English-language, affluent people's toy. PG includes predominantly English language, Western world, texts. Do you intend to make it more multicultural and multilingual? A. I encourage all languages as hard as I possibly can. So far we have English, Latin, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Welsh, Portuguese, Old Dutch, Bulgarian, Dutch/Flemish, Greek, Hebrew. We have texts in Old French, Polish, Russian, Romanian, and Farsi in progress. I wonder if we should count mathematics as a language? I was surprised at how many people were interested when we first uploaded Pi to a million places. . . Q. Why are stand-alone images (e.g., films, photographs) and sound excluded or rare? A. We have tried some, but haven't received much feedback. Still, we will continue to experiment with all formats. Also, these files are total hogs for drives and bandwidth. Our short movie of the lunar landing is twice as big as Shakespeare and the Bible combined in uncompressed format. It's only a couple minutes long, and low-resolution. Think how big a whole movie would be, even not at hi-resolution. It would take up a couple CD- ROMs. . . . Q. PG now makes files available as DOC/RTF and HTML - as well as plain vanilla ASCII. Yet, plain text delivery seemed to have been a basic tenet of the Project. What made you change your mind? A. We're willing to post in all kinds of file formats, but the only format everyone can read is Plain Vanilla ASCII, so we always try to include that. PG has been available on CDs for years. Q. The failure of the advertising-sponsored revenue model forces Internet-based content generators and aggregators to charge for their wares. Will PG continue to be free - and, if so, how will it finance itself? Example: who is paying for the hosting and bandwidth now?
Slide 72: A. It's all volunteer. . . . And the number of sites continues to grow, and to reach more and more regions around the world for easier local access. Actually, all the hosting, bandwidth, etc. are voluntary, too. However, we desperately need donations to do copyright research, cataloging, to hire librarians and Library and Information Science professors, to support the Project Gutenberg spin-offs in other languages and countries, not to mention mundane things such as phone and utility bills, computers, drives, backups, etc. We need volunteers equally desperately. Volunteering is perhaps the only way for one person to work for a week or a month on a book and get it to a hundred million people. . . . Q. The reaction to e-books fluctuates wildly between euphoria and gloom. A. This is only the commercial point of view. . . They want to take it over or sink it to the bottom. . .There are no other commercial perspectives. Between 1500-1550, thanks to the Gutenberg Press, more books were printed than in all of history previous to Gutenberg. I have hopes like that for e-Books. . . . Q. Some say that e-books are doomed, having miserably failed to capture the public's imagination and devotion. Others predict a future of ubiquitous, ATM-printed, e-books, replete with olfactory, tactile, audio, and 3-D effects. What is your scenario? A. The main trouble with these predictions is not only that they are made solely with the commercial aspects in mind, but that they are made by an assortment of people from pre-eBook generations, who have no idea that you could use the same gizmo to play MP3s as to read or listen to e-Books. The younger generations have no doubt about e-Books. It's only the dinosaurs that have no idea what's going on. We are still getting email stating that not one person is ever going to read books from computers! Who will be the more well-read - those who can carry at most a dozen books with them, or those who have a PDA in their pocket with a hundred or more e-Books in it? Who will look up more quotations in context? Who will use the dictionary more often? Who will look up geographical information more often? These are all things I do with my little antique PDA and the new ones are already a dozen times more powerful. I want to tell you the story of when I first realized that Project Gutenberg was going to work. It was about 10 years before we published our 2,000th E-text. We had only about a dozen ebooks online. At the beginning of 1989 there were only 80,000 host computers in the entire Internet - though by October that year the number had doubled. I was on the phone one day, with the Executive Director of Common Knowledge, a project to put the Library of Congress catalogs into public domain MARC (Machine Accessible Record Catalog) records. During the conversation, there was this huge noise. She dropped the phone and ran off. She was back in a minute, and laughing her head off, she told me: Her son had been playing around with her computer, and found this copy of Project
Slide 73: Gutenberg's "Alice in Wonderland" and had started to read it. He mentioned this at school, and a few of the kids followed him home to see it. The next day even more kids followed. Eventually the number of kids grew so great that they were hanging off this huge oak chair. Eventually this oak chair had so many kids all over it, reading "Alice in Wonderland"...that it literally separated into all its parts and kids went tumbling in all directions....At that very moment, in 1989, I realized that E-books were going to succeed, no matter what any of a number of adults thought. To the next generation, this will be how they remember Alice in Wonderland, just as my memory of it was a golden inscribed red leather edition my family used to read from together. Four years later, in 1993, there were still under 100 Project Gutenberg e-Books. A neighbor dropped by to talk to me one day and in the course of the conversation mentioned he had read the Project Gutenberg Alice in Wonderland. I had no idea his interests even included computers. He had found a few errors. I hurried home to correct them and to put the new edition online. At first I was in happy shock just because I could improve our edition, but then it occurred to me that perhaps the more important aspect was that someone I knew had downloaded Alice all on his own, then read the entire book from "cover to cover" on his computer thus putting paid to the naysayers who said no one my age would read e-Books. There are lots of stories like this: professors who tell me their students will not read paper textbooks, Texas preparing for all textbooks to be e-Books. . . . Q. PG is a prime example of two phenomena characteristic to the early Internet: collaborative efforts and volunteering. With the crass commercialization of the Net - will people continue to volunteer and collaborate - or will corporate, brick and mortar, behemoths take over? A. Well, the commercialization of the Web started in 1994, and that didn't wipe us out. It took us 30 years to do our first 5,000 e-Books, and I'll bet you a pizza that it will only take 30 months to do our second 5,000!!! Then we write up a schedule for 1,000,000!!!!!!! Q. In other words: PG is the reification of the spirit of the Internet. A. Definitely. . .So was "Ask Dr. Internet", another of my personas. . . Q. Should the Internet change dramatically - what will happen to PG? Will you ever consider going commercial, for instance? If not, how do you plan to adapt? A. Why should we go commercial. . .that just invites a downfall if the money goes away. Which they would love to happen -and would probably encourage it. It's hard to kill off something that doesn't have a physical plant or a budget. . .and cannot be bought. We will adapt by doing the entire public domain, including graphics, music, movies, sculpture, paintings, photographs, etc. . . . Q. PG makes obscure and inaccessible texts as well as seminal works - easily and globally available. Doesn't this lead to an embarrassment of riches or to confusion? In other words: all PG e-texts are "equal". It is a "democratic" system. There is no "text rating", historical context, peer review, quality control, censorship ... A. This is because I am not a very bossy boss. . .I encourage our volunteers to choose their
Slide 74: own favorites, not just what "I" think they should do. However, I am sure we will get all the warhorses done. Q. The e-texts posted on PG are copyright free or with permission from their authors and publishers. How do you cope with the inordinately extended copyright period in the USA? A. I just finished up years of working on an Amicus Brief for the Supreme Court in the hope of overturning the latest copyright extensions. As for coping, you just do the best you can with the cards you are dealt. Q. What are the effects of such legislation on public literacy? A. The US used to say we would send aid to the entire world, in the form of food, clothing, medical supplies, as much as we could afford. But now that literacy can be disseminated at no expense, we refuse to do it by pretty much stifling the public domain. Q. PG has a mirror site in Australia where copyright law is less stringent. A. Actually, they are a totally separate organization, using our name with permission, just as does the Gutenberg Projekt-DE in Germany. Q. Are such "backdoors" the solution? What about the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)? A. I am so a-political that you could call me anti-political. I would prefer a copyright of 10 years or so. . Only the biggest of the best sellers might make 10% more after 10 years, and they don't need it. Do we really want laws that support only the biggest and richest? I love "The Bridges of Madison County", but I don't think 95 years, or even 75 years, or even 56 years of corporations, family and other heirs should be supported by it. It then becomes the "Duchy of Madison County" and we are stuck with generations of "Dukes of Madison County." What we will end up with under these copyright laws is a "landed gentry of the information age" who just keep inheriting ... Copyright should expire soon enough that the authors, if they want to keep getting paid, have to come back to work again. After all, there is no other job in the world in which one piece of work can keep paying off for 95 years. By the way, do you realize that Ted Turner made millions, probably hundreds of millions, from the copyright extension of just "Gone With The Wind", not counting the hundreds of other movies he owns. . .all from one vote of Congress. . . . . Congress should not be allowed to write laws that create windfall profits for 1% of the population and take away a million books from all the rest.
Slide 75: Q. What does PG intend to do about the legislative asymmetry between content producers and creators - and content consumers? Lobby Congress? Testify? Protest? Organize petitions? Place "Gone with the Wind" on the Internet and wait for a show trial? A. PG Australia already has done Gone With The Wind, as their 50th e-Book, that's good enough for me at the moment. Eldred v. Ashcroft was originally drafted as Hart V. Reno, but the lawyers, Lessig & co, wouldn't include one word of mine in the case, so I fired them. Q. Gutenberg texts are sometimes used as freebies within a commercial (Monolithic, Wallnut Creek) or semi-commercial product (such as the Public Domain Reader). Is this acceptable? Why don't you charge them a license fee? A. Walnut Creek PG CD's weren't free and they sent us nice donations. The commercial outfits have to pay for a license, the non- commercial ones usually don't. Each case is separately decided. While we don't do any ads on our sites, we don't insist that others don't. Q. Technology is often considered the antonym of "culture". TV, for instance, is berated for its vulgar, low-brow, programming. Hollywood is often chastised for its indulgence in gratuitous violence and sex. A. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of their audience. As long as these are "commercial applications" that's what you will get. What else could you possibly expect? These are all examples of "capitalism gone awry". By the way, I'm not anti-capitalism, I really am an Ayn Rand freak, figure that out. . .hee hee! I am doing Project Gutenberg for the most selfish of reasons - because I want a world that has Project Gutenberg in it. Q. E-books are equated with low-quality vanity publishing. Yet, PG seems to embody the conviction that technology can do wonders for the dissemination of culture, literacy, democracy, civil society and so on. A. e-Books do wonders for the dissemination of culture, literacy, democracy, civil society and so on. You do realize that the Declaration of Independence is/was the FIRST man-made item in all of history that everyone can have, in as many copies as they want. Do you realize that a 5 gigabyte section of a hard drive can hold a million copies of that file, uncompressed? Terabyte drive systems are already available for only around $2,500. Ten years from now 5T hard disk partitions will be able to hold a billion copies. Q. Are you a romantic believer in the power of technology to bring progress? A. Well, I'm certainly an incurable romantic, and I believe that technology can bring progress, but I don't know if they are, or have to be, related. . . . Q. And do you see any dangers in e-books and freely available e-texts (e.g., hate speech)? A. Once you start censoring, you are playing with Pandora's Box. Just look at what they are doing with Little Black Sambo, who wasn't even black, and with Uncle Remus, who was? This is awful. "Song of the South" was required viewing when I was in school and now I can't even show this generation what we were required to study when I was a kid. . .1984 really did
Slide 76: arrive. . . . Q. In some ways, you "compete" directly with other bastions of education - libraries and universities. How do you get along? What about other repositories of knowledge such as Project Bartleby? Governments?
Slide 77: A. Actually, we cooperate with them, not compete with them. We make all our files available to them and encourage them to make the texts available to everyone. Some of them view this as competition, but we don't. Some prefer to control distribution. . .to be a gate that they can open and close at will. . .We prefer the doors always to be open. Have you ever considered why, with the hundred millions of dollars granted to found eLibraries at the major universities some ten years ago, and undoubtedly hundreds of millions more donated since then, why you are doing an interview with someone sitting at a basement, running computer hardware and software that is 10 and 20 years old? If any college, or company, much less university, city, county, state or country was willing to do this, you would have never heard of me. Q. What has been the personal cost? It must have been frustrating and exhausting and elating and rewarding ... In retrospect: are you happy with it? Would you have done it again? A. I can't think of anything more rewarding to do as a career than Project Gutenberg. It is something that will reach more people than any other project in all of history. It is as powerful as The Bomb, but everyone can benefit from it. And it doesn't make a decent weapon. It doesn't cost anyone anything and it is the very first, though obviously primitive, example of The Neo-Industrial Revolution, when everyone can have everything - though they are sure to pass a law against it. I said this in 1971, in the very first week of PG, that by the end of my lifetime you would be able to carry every word in the Library of Congress in one hand - but they will pass a law against it. I realized they would never let us have that much access to so much information. I never heard that they passed the copyright extension 5 years later. It was pretty much a secret, just as is the current one, unless the Supreme Court strikes it down. Only then will it make the news. Congress passed that copyright law together with impeachment proceedings of President Clinton, just to make sure it never made the news. As far as the cost, the happiness, the frustration - I am a natural born workaholic and idealist, so I overcome the technical frustrations. It's the social frustrations that are the hardest to deal with, the people who want permanent copyright, even though the extensions are already bringing about "The Landed Gentry of the Information Age." Q. Any thought about the future? Precedents set by the Sonny Bono Copyright Law could well have an enormous unpredicted effect on computer applications of the future. One such application is the "printing" of solid three dimensional objects, often referred to as Rapid Prototyping, or RP. These printers have been with us since the 1980's and now are in a price range of the 5 megabyte hard drives on the first computer to house Project Gutenberg in 1971. If you count the inflation factor, they obviously are much more affordable. In addition to cost reductions, these 3-D printers now can print on a variety of materials. The list of printable substances should expand over the years until we can eventually print out actual working items, rather than the models we print out today.
Slide 78: Given that very inexpensive printers today can print in millions of colors, and that color computer printers were pretty much non-existent 30 years ago, we should at least consider the possibility that printers 30 years from now might be able to "print" on an extremely wide variety of materials, and that someday we will be able to "print out" a car and drive it away. This copyright law covers 95 years. Let's look back to 95 years and see the "copyright" to what things we may want to print out would have just now expired: 1. The Wright-Brothers' airplane and blueprints. 2. A dozen brands of early automobiles. 3. Everything Edison invented until he was nearly 60. Obviously there are many more. The point here is that under current intellectual property law, it would be difficult to print out anything invented today that reached the market in two years - until 2100, a time when these items would no longer have any use. When the Star Trek Replicators become a reality, will it be illegal to actually use them? Will all food items be Genetically Manipulated Organisms so that it will be impossible to find natural foods that could be copied? When I grew up in Washington state, there were plenty of wild blackberries, raspberries, apple trees, pear trees, plum trees, grapes. I never even considered buying any of these at a store. But today there has been a serious effort to discourage free food supplies, and not only in Washington, but also in most other states. Last night at dinner, one of our volunteers remarked that he expected that by the end of his lifetime he might be eating a dinner of replicated food. I pointed out that by that time - "they" would make it very difficult to find any kind of food not protected against replication by intellectual property laws and that THAT was one of the major reasons for extending copyright, so that WHEN it would be possible for everyone to be well-read & well-fed, they will have made it illegal to do so. The trend is that everything should cost something. In some places there are even machines that dispense a breath of fresh air. . .for a price. Do we really want to create a civilization in which everything has a price. . .when there are machines that could copy anything?
Slide 79: The E-Books Evangelist Interview with Glenn Sanders By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. Also published by United Press International (UPI) Q. Why electronic publishing? A. I was first introduced to electronic publishing on the Internet in the late 1980s and became intrigued by the power of this revolutionary development. Then, when Mosaic released the first Web browser in 1992, the Internet finally had a visual aspect. Suddenly, the vast Internet was transformed from a dimly lit warehouse for data storage and exchange, to a visible library and gallery for information. I was hooked. In 1994, while teaching at a university in Japan, I created what was probably one of the first (if not the first) paperless reading classes. I taught myself HTML and built 26 Web-based reading lessons for the "comparative cultures" course I taught there. The reading material in each lesson linked to related websites and information. Instructions were included for the exercises, which usually included finding information or doing research somewhere on the Web. Students emailed their results to me, and I emailed feedback and grades to them. Students were not required to come to class, but were required to turn in their "class work" results to me by Friday evening. Since then, I have created numerous Web sites, published a number of electronic & print books, and hundreds of articles. In the late 1990's I saw the confluence of three factors that foretold the electronic publishing and e-book revolution. The first was the imminent ubiquity of the Internet. Next, was the growing need for mobile access to information, and the availability of so much data in the digital domain. Finally, I could see the day when technology would catch up with my vision of a portable information tablet. As of summer 2002, I am still waiting, but technological developments are rapidly nearing the time, probably somewhere around 2005, when affordable, portable, readable, wireless reading devices will reach the mass markets. The company where I work, Rolltronics Corporation, is developing thin, flexible electronics technology that will enable many of these devices in the future. While living in Japan and working at Fujitsu, Inc., I founded eBookNet and began toying with the design of a next-generation information display device. In 1998, I founded eBookNet.com, which became a renowned Web site that provided news and community services for the e-book and e-publishing industry for several years. In 1999, NuvoMedia (the company that pioneered the current generation of electronic reading devices with its "Rocket eBook" in 1998) acquired eBookNet and hired me. NuvoMedia supported eBookNet until April 2001. A few months later, with the support of the Rolltronics Foundation, Wade Roush (former
Slide 80: managing editor of eBookNet) and I founded the Electronic Publishing Resource Center (EPRC), an industry-sponsored, non-profit organization, and launched eBookWeb.org on the 4th of July 2001. I see myself as an e-book evangelist, seeking to inform and educate the world about electronic publishing. My vision is of a world where information, entertainment, and books are readily available to professionals, researchers, students, and readers everywhere. So, even though I work full time for Rolltronics doing business development, I continue my daily efforts to help build the e-Book industry through eBookWeb.org. The Website now leads in providing news, information, resources, and community services to the e-media industries. Q. This has been a bad year for e-publishing. Leading brands vanished, industry leaders retreated, technology gurus bemoaned yet another missed prognosis - that e-books will dethrone print books. What went wrong? A. Ever since I first realized the need for portable information devices, my belief in the future of e-books has never been shaken. Despite the fact that e-book reality replaced hype in 2000, and 2001 brought a temporary cyclical economic downturn, I firmly believe and know that ebooks and e-publishing, or more generally portable information devices, will play a primary role in the way that people write, create, design, read, learn, access news and information, communicate, interact, travel, enjoy art and entertainment, and experience their world. It is just taking longer to get there than many had hoped around the turn of the century. There are still several factors that need to come together to make e-books a reality. The hardware is still not there. We need affordable, light, thin, readable displays with battery life measured in days or weeks, not hours. To be truly useful and portable, the devices need to be wireless and perhaps with a backup cellular connection for remote locales. Next, there needs to be much more content available for distribution to these devices. Secure but accessible infrastructure and standards need to be in place for mass-market appeal. Then, adoption by libraries and educational institutions will spread the use of e-books at the grassroots level. Q. Questions of device compatibility and standards have plagued the industry from its inception. Will we end up with an oligopoly of 2-3 formats and 2-3 corresponding readers, or do you have a different take on the industry's future? A. We may be destined to have several formats and platforms, each of which is used for certain applications and types of content. The reason is that there are basically four major players, each with their own plan to dominate the e-Publishing market. Despite the fact that, in my opinion, Adobe's PDF is lacking as an e-Book format, there are hundreds of millions of documents in PDF in publishing companies, governments, corporations, and schools. These will not be replaced instantly, even if a unified format were agreed upon. Then there is Microsoft, the 800-pound gorilla, who is slowly and silently insinuating their reading platform into their software and Windows operating system. The interoperability of MS Reader software with MS Office products will make it possible for many millions of documents to be converted to MS Reader format. Of course, there will need to be a portable device to display all those e-documents. Despite
Slide 81: the fact that many Pocket PCs have been sold, they don't seem to be a major factor in econtent sales. Now the timing of Microsoft's big push for the MS tablet PC begins to make more sense. The Gemstar format has an established base of customers and actual dedicated devices, the Rocket eBook and REB1100 and REB1200s. Gemstar's format actually has a lot of popular content going for it, and their displays are much better than the average computer display. Therefore they are more suitable for portable reading. And not surprisingly, the largest sales of electronic content are going to the Palm Pilot compatible devices. The established base of many millions of "Palm OS" customers has been buying hundreds of thousands of e-books each year, and the e-content sales are growing steadily. How to unify these four goliaths? The Open eBook Forum's standard is good for the formatting of the original document. Microsoft and Gemstar adhere to the OeBF standard. But each company has its own way of converting and displaying the OeBF format in its device or software. So what is the answer? The only way to rectify all of these heavyweight solutions is to create a unified standard for displaying electronic content that is the same across all platforms. Is this possible? That is a question better answered by the experts at the OeBF... Q. Some analysts blame the recent bloodbath on a dearth of good content and wrong pricing. They derisively equate e-publishing with vanity publishing. Do you find these criticisms correct? A. The amount of content is growing slowly but steadily. There are two major problems that contribute to the relative dearth of titles becoming available. One is that extra negotiations and agreements are necessary to publish e-books, or to price them differently from "pbooks." Another is that since the market still isn't there, many publishers do not have the resources, or haven't budgeted enough money to aggressively convert content. And many veteran publishers still produce the final version of a book in a format that is not easy to convert for electronic publication. As far as vanity publishing goes, that is not defined by the medium. Of course electronic publishing makes it easier to distribute "vanity-published" works. And it is easier to become self-published. And there are a few vanity publishers out there, but they usually don't last long. Still, most publishers and electronic publishers strive to produce top quality titles. They know that this is the only long-term viable business model. They screen and edit the titles that they publish. They actively promote their authors' works. In this sense, a publisher's name brand will become much more important to customers than is presently the case. Q. Traditional print publishers treat e-books (the content, not the devices) as electronic facsimiles of the print editions. Can e-books offer a different reading experience? In what way are they different to print books?
Slide 82: A. E-books that are nothing more than electronic copies of the print version offer only portability and access as advantages. Of course e-books can be searched and annotated. The vision impaired can read with large fonts. Students can look up words in a built-in dictionary. But, similar to popular movie DVDs that include many extras, e-books should really take advantage of the flexibility and capacity of the electronic medium. Publishers could include the author's notes, rough sketches, background, audio or video from the author or the scene of the books. Reference works should be electronically updateable via the Internet. Book club members might be able to send each other their annotations and comments. Readers might send feedback to the author and/or publisher. Fans might write and distribute alternate endings, or add characters or scenes. Q. E-publishing is at the nexus of sea changes in copyright laws. Does e-publishing encourage piracy? Have publishers gone overboard in an effort to preserve their intellectual property rights? Do you foresee new models of revenues and royalties and a novel definition of intellectual property? A. E-publishing does not encourage piracy, but being in electronic format, it certainly becomes susceptible to the same kind of piracy that all other kinds of e-content experience. A number of models, or rather experiments, are being tried with respect to the level of control of intellectual property and the associated financial model. So far, there has not been a clear answer as to which experiment yields the best results. One factor is that the market is still in its infancy and therefore is in a state of flux. The continuum runs from strict and limited control offered by digital rights management systems, to free e-content (hopefully) supported by either stimulating sales of print books, or advertisements. In the middle are publishers who provide limited security, or those who use no security and depend on the basic honesty of most people. As the market grows, we will discover which models work best in which situations for which types of content. Q. E-books were supposed to bring about disintermediation and foster a direct dialog between author and readership. Have they succeeded? What is the future of content brokers, such as publishers and record companies? A. Yes, there is an enhanced dialog between author and audience. On eBookWeb.org, we provide space for authors to have a personal page. These are some of the most popular pages on the site. On other Websites and through the publications themselves, authors are coming in closer digital contact with their readers through email or other forms of dialog. For low volumes of messages, this is a good thing. But top-selling writers could not handle email from thousands of dedicated fans. Even in an electronic world, it is still true that as one becomes more popular, one has to become less and less accessible in order to conserve one's time.
Slide 83: Yes, it is also much easier to become self-published electronically. However, there is usually a huge difference between simply being published, and actually reaching a large audience and reaping significant sales of your title. The Web continues to grow exponentially, but our time and attention span remain limited. These two opposing dynamics mean that we are forced to narrow our attention to a relatively few reliable content providers, representing an ever smaller proportion of the total content available. How can an author be heard above the noise? Get a publisher who will promote your work. But before that, get an editor or publisher who will help you polish your work until it shines brightly enough to gain popularity once it secures the attention of your audience. The dynamics and demands of the free market, and the reasons for having publishing companies do not disappear on the Internet. In fact, they may become more important as the amount of content and choices continues to grow. One important change that I do foresee is that small, independent niche publishers will make a resurgence due to the electronic medium. This is definitely a good thing for readers. Independent publishers who build a reputation for unique, quality content, will develop a following of faithful customers over time. Q. Some marketing pundits believe in viral or buzz marketing. They advocate giving away free content to generate "buzz". They believe that sales will follow. Do you subscribe to this view? A. This relates to the question of copyright laws and which model is best for a particular situation. It also has to do with previous models on the Web. If the goal is to gain an audience and fame, then giving it away to hopefully millions of people is a good idea. The popular dynamic of the Internet is to build a massive audience by giving away something of value. Then, one slowly begins to charge for some content or service, while still providing something for free, to continue to attract a large following. The results of the late 1990s indicate a mixed success, probably due in part to the origins of the Internet, where everything was free. The expectation was that if it was on the Net, it was free. The beginnings of commercialism on the Net in the early 1990's were met with vehement resistance from the "old timers" who strongly opposed the commercialization of their beloved network. Of course, a number of companies such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo, attracted and kept a large audience. But only a few are truly profitable today. If the goal is to make maximum profit from each unit of content that is downloaded, then one must charge money, or sell advertisements. Unfortunately, the revenues from advertising on the Net have fallen dramatically in the last few years. So if you put a price tag on your content, how much should you charge? Most independent electronic publishers charge a few dollars for their titles, anywhere from $1 each to about $5 or $7 per e-book. These relatively low prices reflect the desire to attract a large pool of customers. They also reflect the belief common among readers that since it is electronic and not print content, the price should be lower. They feel that without the cost of printing and transporting books, the publisher should set a lower price...
Slide 84: Q. As you see it, is the Internet merely another content distribution channel or is there more to it then this? The hype of synergy and collapsing barriers to entry has largely evaporated together with the fortunes of the likes of AOL Time Warner. Is the Internet a revolution - or barely an evolution? A. In the beginning, the Internet was a revolution. Email brought the people of our Earth closer together. The Net enabled telecommuting and now as much as 10% of the world works at home via computer and Internet. The Internet makes it possible for artists to publish their own books, music, videos and Websites. Video conferencing has enabled conversations without limitations of space. The Internet has made vast amounts of information available to students and researchers at the click of the mouse. The 24/7 access and ease of ordering products has stimulated online commerce and sales at retail stores. But it is not a cure-all. And, now that the Net is part of our everyday lives, it is subject to the same cycles of media hype, as well as social, emotional, and business factors. Things will never be the same, and the changes have just begun. The present generation has never known a world without computers. When they reach working age, they will be much more inclined to use the Net for a majority of their reading and entertainment needs. Then, e-books will truly take hold and become ubiquitous. Between now and then, we have work to do, building the foundation of this remarkable industry.
Slide 85: Germany's Copyright Levy By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. Also published by United Press International (UPI) Also Read: The Future of Electronic Publishing Revolt of the Scholars The Kidnapping of Content Will Content Ever be Profitable? The Disintermediation of Content The Internet and the Library The Future of the Book Free Online Scholarship - Interview with Peter Suber Based on the recommendation of its Patent Office and following fierce lobbying by VG Wort, an association of German composers, authors and publishers, Germany is poised to enforce a three years old law and impose a copyright levy of $13 plus 16 percent in value added tax per new computer sold in the country. The money will be used to reimburse copyright holders - artists, performers, recording companies, publishers and movie studios - for unauthorized copying thought to adversely weigh on sales. This is the nonbinding outcome of a one year mediation effort by the Patent Office between VG Wort, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Germany's largest computer manufacturer and other makers. VG Wort initially sought a levy of $33 per unit sold. But Fujitsu and the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (Bitkom) - including Microsoft, IBM, Alcatel, Nokia, Siemens and 1300 other member firms - intend to challenge even the more modest fee in court. They claim that it will add close to $80 million to the cost of purchasing computers without conferring real benefits on the levy's intended beneficiaries. They repeated similar assertions in a letter they have recently dispatched to the European Commission. The problems of peer-to-peer file sharing, file swapping, the cracking and hacking of software, music and, lately, even e-books - are serious. Bundesverband Phono, Germany's recording industry trade association, reported that music sales plunged for the fifth consecutive year - this time, by more than by 11 percent.
Slide 86: According to figures offered by the, admittedly biased, group, 55 percent of the 486 million blank CDs sold in Germany last year - c. 267 million - were used for illicit purposes. For every "legal" music CD sold - there are 1.7 "illegal" ones. Efforts by the industries effected are underway to extend the levy to computer peripherals and, where not yet implemented, photocopying machines. Similar charges are applied today by many European countries to other types of equipment: tape recorders, photocopiers, videocassettes and scanners, for instance. Blank magnetic and optical media, especially recordable CDs, are - or were - taxed in more than 40 countries, including Canada and the United States. Nor is Germany alone in this attempt to ameliorate the pernicious effects of piracy by taxing the hardware used to affect it. The European Union's Directive on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society, passed in 2001, is strenuous, though not prescriptive. It demands that member states ensure "fair compensation" to copyright holders for copies made by means of digital equipment - but fails to specify or proscribe how. It has been incorporated into local law only by Greece and Denmark hitherto. In Austria, Literar-Mechana, the copyright fees collection agency, negotiated with hardware manufacturers and importers the introduction of a levy on personal computers and printers. The Swiss are pushing through an amendment to the copyright law to collect a levy on PCs sold within their territory. The Belgian, Finnish, Spanish and French authorities are still debating the issue. So do Luxemburg and Norway. According to Wired, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, the music industry trade group, has proposed "new levies to be applied to any device that can store music, such as removable hard drives, recordable DVDs, Compact Flash memory cards and MP3 players." Precedent is hardly encouraging. The aforementioned Canadian Collective has yet to distribute to its members even one tax dollar of the tens of millions it inexplicably hoards. In Greece, a 2 percent levy on all manner of computer equipment provoked a hail of legal challenges, still to be sorted out in the courts. The amounts collected hardly cover the government's legal expenses hitherto. The United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Denmark are against the levy, claiming, correctly, that hardware is used for purposes other than pilfering intellectual property digitally. The Italians, Portuguese and Dutch haven't even considered the option.
Slide 87: Hardware manufacturers are livid. In a buyers' market, their razor-thin profit margins on the commoditized goods they are peddling are bound to be erased by a copyright levy. The European Information and Communications Trade Association (EICTA) implausibly threatens to pass on such extra costs to consumers and recommends to stick to technological means of prevention, collectively known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, or to novel CD copy protection measures. Moreover, the fuzzy nature of the surcharge leaves a lot to be desired. Peter Suber, a prominent advocate of free online scholarship, analyzed the various post-levy scenarios in his FOS blog: "What I can't tell is whether the copyright levy on hardware will come with universal permission to copy. If so, that's a big gain for a small cost ... If the levy does not imply permission to copy, then which copying does it cover? If it covers copying without prior permission, then users will simply stop asking for permission, and convert all copying to prepaid copying. If it covers copying without pre-payment, then that begs the question: what does the levy pre-pay? (It's not clear) how the plan would continue to distinguish authorized from unauthorized copying." Yet, at this stage, it is difficult to see how to avoid the kind of rough justice meted out by Germany. Even the most advanced DRM systems lack a reliable model of remunerating copyright holders. Hence the conspicuous absence of DRM in the EU's Copyright Directive. Suber raises some practical concerns, though he broadly supports a copyright levy on hardware: "To make the system fair, we would need reasonably accurate measurements of the amount of copying. Otherwise we wouldn't know whether to bump up the price of a computer $35 or $350 or whether to give Elsevier 1% or 10%. Download counters wouldn't catch the peer-topeer traffic. So would you put up with packet sniffers or other eavesdropping technologies to take random samples of the copy traffic, as long as your identity was not recorded?" Even what constitutes copyrighted work is not entirely clear. The European Court of Justice heard arguments last week in a case pitting two American companies, IMS Health and NDCHealth, against each other. IMS Health vends aggregated German data pertaining to the sales of pharmaceuticals. NDCHealth tried to emulate an organizational element of the IMS Health database. The Court is faced with seemingly intractable questions: Can IMS Health be compelled to license its database to a potential competitor? Is the structure of the database - the way Germany is divided to 1860 reporting zones - protected in any way? In essence, copyright is a temporary monopoly on creative work granted to the authors, publishers and distributors of such products. It is intended to compensate them for their efforts and to encourage them to continue to originate in future. Yet, the disintermediation brought on by digital technologies threatens to link author and public directly, cutting out traditional content brokers such as record companies or publishers. This is the crux of the battle royal. The middlemen are attempting - in vain - to sustain their dying and increasingly parasitic industries and refusing to adapt and re-invent themselves. Everyone else watches in amazement and dismay the consequences of this grand folly: innovation is thwarted, consumers penalized, access to works of art, literature and research
Slide 88: constrained.
Slide 89: The Future of Online Reference By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. Also published by United Press International (UPI) Also Read: The Future of Electronic Publishing Revolt of the Scholars The Idea of Reference Will Content Ever be Profitable? The Disintermediation of Content The Internet and the Library The Future of the Book Free Online Scholarship - Interview with Peter Suber November 9, 2003 These are momentous times in the digital content industry. Within the past 60 days, Barnes and Noble withdrew from the e-books business, peddling its electronic publishing house to iUniverse and terminating the sale of digital titles from its barnesandnoble.com Web site. It then proceeded to take private its publicly listed online arm. To the consternation of many authors, Amazon, its chief Internet competitor, introduced a "search inside the book" feature with an initial database of 120,000 titles. It was preceded by eBooks.com's less comprehensive but otherwise similar search engine. Project Gutenberg - the pioneering and largest depository of free, mostly "plain-vanilla" (text only) e-books - added the 10,000-th title to its unsurpassed collection. In the meantime, ebook aggregators, such as blackmask.com, now proffer tens of thousands of free titles for download in up to 8 file formats. Even Microsoft has spent the last few months offering a free weekly selection of 3 commercial titles each, exclusively readable on its MS-Reader application. Buffeted by these winds of e-commerce, vendors of online reference - textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias - are eyeing the market warily and wearily. Patrick Spain is Chairman and CEO of Alacritude, publisher of eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com. eLibrary is a digital archive of more than 13 million documents culled from over 2000 publications. It includes newswires, newspapers, magazines, journals, transcripts, photographs, maps and books - major works of literature, art, and reference.
Slide 90: Troy Williams founded Questia in 1998 and has served as its President & CEO ever since. Questia is a massive online library of over 400,000 books, journals, and articles organized into more than 4000 research topics. It caters mainly to students and offers cool features such as online annotation, page printing for free, and bibliography generator. Tom Panelas is the Director of Corporate Communications of the Encyclopaedia Britannica the Rolls Royce of reference works. It has been available online for a few years now - the 32 volumes, an interactive atlas, a student's version, a links directory, and a topical compilation of thousands of magazine articles and multimedia. The Britannica has alternated between revenue models: subscriptions only, then free access with advertising, and back to subscriptions. First I asked these pivotal industry players how they saw the future of paid access to online reference works, textbooks, and scholarly material? Spain: Online reference is being consumerized or "Wal-Marted." That which used to be delivered to a limited audience of thousands (librarians and large companies) is now available to a huge audience in the tens, maybe hundreds, of millions. This affects prices, business models, and the very structure of the industry. Many generic reference materials (encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, etc.) are available for free and will remain so for the indefinite future. They serve either to market print and other electronic products or they generate advertising. Good models do both. Some very specialized titles with limited audiences may continue to be able to charge. But most cannot. This means that people won't pay or won't pay much for "content" - but they will pay small amounts for services that help them find, organize and publish answers to their questions especially when those relate to wealth (finance and career), health, and certain types of entertainment. Panelas: We've seen in the past three years a reaction to the meme of the middle- and late1990s, that all information on the Internet has to be free and that people won't pay for it. For a few years it held somewhat true, but as the Internet population became more experienced, their interests and preferences inevitably changed. People who were using free information on the Web eventually became fed up. Many of the sites they used disappeared because they had no self-sustaining economic model. Much of the information online was worthless. It became difficult to tell whether information on the Web was reliable.
Slide 91: As a result we've seen a growing realization among Internet users that not all types of information are equal, that authoritative information is valuable, somewhat rare, costs money to create, and for these reasons it's worth paying for. Many more people are willing to pay for high-quality information on the Internet than four years ago, especially since the price of online reference is at a nadir. We see online as the area that will grow the fastest, as far as the vending of reference goes. Many people will subscribe through third-party organizations such as Internet service providers with whom we have established relationships. Subscribers to SBC Yahoo! DSL service, for example, can choose a subscription to Britannica.com along with their service. In the future, publishers will probably provide one kind of service to such third-party distributors and create others, with better, premium offerings, for customers who pay them directly, since there's more revenue in such subscriptions. Increasingly, information Web sites will "aggregate" content - that is, incorporate sources that go well together but could not be integrated before the Internet. Britannica.com, for example, includes three encyclopedias, magazines and journals, a guide to the best Web sites on various subjects, and other information. Thus sources that were previously spread throughout the library stacks, requiring the wearing out of much shoe leather to bring them together, now come to rest in one place, on the screen of your computer. This trend will no doubt continue. Williams: Online reference resources, i.e., eLibraries, will become an indispensable part of education over the next 20 years. There are a number of discernible trends: first, electronic access will be the primary method of accessing scholarly information within a decade or two. It removes the need to be near a physical copy of the title one needs to access, it resolves multiple-user issues, and greatly increases the ability of a researcher to find what he or she is looking for. Second, online access to scholarly information is an integral part of the trend towards online and distance education. The undergraduate population is diversifying and now includes students enrolled in distance learning programs, rural students without physical access to an adequate library, and older, community college students who work or have family obligations that prevent them from spending time in their campus library. Third, the Internet has engendered a powerful trend toward personalization. Elibraries such as Questia enables its users to personalize their library. Notes and highlights in various colors in each book and article can be saved for future reference. Documents, “virtual bookshelves” and even previous term papers and bibliographies can be saved online and organized in various folders. Fourth, people increasingly expect complete mobility. ELibraries such as Questia enables researchers to access their personalized copies of books and journals as well as old term papers and current work-in-progress from anywhere.
Slide 92: Q: Who are Alacritude's main competitors? Spain: Alacritude competes with Google on the low end and Nexis on the high end. Google is in the throes of creating a marketplace and, only incidentally, allows its users to find knowledge. Nexis provides very specialized (and expensive) information services to enterprises. Alacritude's eLibrary helps our users to locate pretty good answers inexpensively. We are different in that we are evolving our service to tightly integrate tools and content and to let our customers search anywhere, even other services, from a single easy-to-use online research interface. Q. Questia competes with the likes of NetLibrary and Alacritude's eLibrary. What differentiates it from its competitors? Williams: Questia's and netLibrary's collections are very different. The Questia collection was developed specifically for undergraduate research in the humanities and social sciences. A staff of academic librarians determined which books are most important and useful for undergraduate coursework in these fields. Digital copyrights were negotiated with the publishers or author of the titles. Many publishers feared e-books and digital copies of their titles would cannibalize their hard copy print sales. Making them understand the benefits of placing their titles in the Questia online library was an education process. Having obtained the digital copyrights we digitized the books since most of the content was unavailable in electronic format. The resultant book collection contains the complete text and original pagination of more than 45,000 books from the 19th through the 21st centuries. Our goal is to build a collection that includes important works from all time periods and provides our users with a full range of resources just as any quality library does. We want to build a true research collection, not just a compilation of recent publications. The entire Questia collection has more than 400,000 titles – including 360,000 journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. In contrast, the 37,000-title netLibrary collection was developed by incorporating books that were already available in electronic formats. As a result, it lacks many important retrospective titles. Additionally, netLibrary was developed with the view of selling individual titles. Consequently, although it has titles in a broader range of subjects than Questia, it was not developed as a “collection.” Questia specifically excludes titles in the natural sciences, technical and medical fields. We have a strong focus on “collection development” so that we can support rigorous academic research in thousands of social science and humanities specific topic areas. A second important point of difference is the business model. Questia's is direct to the consumer. Individuals purchase subscriptions. We do not sell institutional site licenses to colleges or universities. NetLibrary sells to institutions. Public, private, and academic libraries, or consortia thereof, buy specific titles that it vends, similar to the way they purchase print copies. Third, with Questia, there is no limit on the number of simultaneous users for any given book or article. No book is ever checked out or unavailable to a subscriber. With NetLibrary, the number of users is restricted to the number of electronic copies of a book purchased by a library.
Slide 93: The advantage of netLibrary is that it significantly reduces the costs of owning and maintaining books, i.e. the overhead associated with shelf-space such as lighting, the costs of checking books in and out manually, reshelving them, rebinding them, lost and misplaced copies, etc. Lastly, the research environment is very different. Questia provides a set of tools that enable a user to do better research and organize their work - to highlight, jot down notes or bookmark a page, look up items in a dictionary, encyclopedia, and thesaurus, and create properly formatted citations and bibliographies in MLA, APA, ASA, Chicago, and Turabian styles. All these can be filed in a user’s customizable personal workspace, which is akin to an online filing cabinet. Users can create multiple project folders to organize their research, “shelve” frequently accessed books or articles, and refer back to their bookshelf at any time. NetLibrary offers four dictionaries as a reference tool but does not provide the type of customizable personal research environment that Questia does. Alacritude’s eLibrary is a subscription-based reference tool with newspapers, magazines, books, and transcripts. Their collection is not a research library but rather a compilation of recently published content on a variety of subjects. eLibrary can be used as an informational supplement. It seems to me to be more focused at the junior high school level or as an inexpensive alternative to Lexis. Q: The Britannica has three types of products - print, online and digital-offline (CD-ROM/ DVD). Do they augment each other - or cannibalize each other's sales? Panelas: In the past decade we've seen huge increases in sales of all electronic formats at the expense of print, which has declined. The proportions have stabilized, however, and most people are choosing their medium based on the way they like to look for information. Prices of electronic encyclopedias are lower than print, but the value proposition of print is different, and people who continue to buy print do so because they like it. Meanwhile the declining price of reference information in general has put reference works in many more homes than before. So today rather than cannibalization, there's an expansion of the overall market, with more people buying reference products than ever before and people choosing the form they prefer.
Slide 94: Q: The web offers a plethora of highly authoritative information authored and released by the leading names in every field of human knowledge and endeavor. Some say that the Internet, is, in effect, an Encyclopaedia - far more detailed, far more authoritative, and far more comprehensive that any Encyclopaedia can ever hope to be. The web is also fully accessible and fully searchable. What it lacks in organization it compensates in breadth and depth and recently emergent subject portals (directories such as Google, Yahoo! or The Open Directory) have become the indices of the Internet. The aforementioned anticompetition barriers to entry are gone: web publishing is cheap and immediate. Technologies such as web communities, chat, and e-mail enable massive collaborative efforts. And, most important, the bulk of the Internet is free. Users pay only the communication costs. The long-heralded transition from free content to fee-based information may revive the fortunes of online reference vendors. But as long as the Internet - with its 2,000,000,000 visible pages (and 5 times as many pages in its databases) is free, encyclopedias have little by way of a competitive advantage. Could you please comment on these statements? Spain: I agree. Still, Open Directories and free powerful search engines (which, let's remember, make their money by trying to sell you goods and services relating to the keywords used in your search) only constitute 5% (or less) of what amounts to "research." First you have to find it; we have made good progress here. Then you have to organize it; there are few good tools for this. Finally you have to publish it, likely using one of Microsoft's applications. This entire process from search results to answers delivered in publishable form remains painful and time consuming. The opportunity lies in making research as easy as search. It seems simple, but it's very hard. Williams: The real issue here is previously published material. There is certainly a lot of information on the Internet and that is a wonderful thing. However, there is virtually no place an individual who is not part of a major college or university can go online and find the fulltext of books, including contemporary and recent ones. To say that the information that is available online is equivalent to the information stored in the Library of Congress is absurd. I’m not talking only about the range of information but also about the value of the editorial process. There is clearly a huge difference between someone posting something on a website and someone rigorously researching a book for five or ten years and then submitting it to peer review and the careful attention of editors. Virtually none of the fruits of this serious research and editorial process is available on the Web. The material on the Net suffers from a chronic issue of questionable credibility and is ephemeral. The material published by leading publishers is reliable and has lasting importance. Panelas: It simply isn't true that the Internet is an encyclopedia. It's an aggregation of information by anyone who wants to put it up there. An encyclopedia is the product of a unified idea, a single editorial intelligence. The people who create it are skilled in their craft. It seeks to cover all areas of human knowledge and to do so in a way that both gives each area its due proportion and integrates it all so the various parts work well together. It reflects many choices that are made consciously and in a consistent way, and since it represents a summary of human knowledge rather than its sum total, the choices editors make about what to leave out are as important as the ones about what to put in.
Slide 95: True, there are people who are hostile to this idea, and, again, we saw some of this in the '90s enthusiasm for the Internet and the related belief that it would literally transform every aspect of life overnight. A sophisticated world such as ours, which relies on knowledge and information to function, can tolerate only so much bad information before problems arise, and we saw some of that in the early years of the Web, which is why more people today see the virtues of an encyclopedia than did a few years ago. The collaborative possibilities of the Internet are very interesting, and we'll see in due time what their implications are for publishing. Some people are predicting that everything will be utterly transformed, but that usually doesn't happen. Q: What are eLibrary's future plans regarding online reference? Spain: Alacritude, through its encyclopedia.com, Researchville and eLibrary services is already addressing head on the need to create an easy to use and cost effective research service for individuals. Q: What are the Britannica's future plans regarding online reference? Panelas: We plan to keep improving what we offer, with new sources of information, more "non-text media," better search and navigation, and ease of use. Q. What are Questia's future plans regarding online reference? Williams: We are not focused on the traditional reference area. Reference books tend to be far more costly to acquire rights to. In addition, they are far more difficult to get into a web-ready format. As a result, we do not feel that the benefits warrant focusing on this area today. Our strategy is simple. We want to build a massive online library of carefully selected highquality, full-text books. Q. There are rumors about Questia's (lack of) financial muscle. Its future is said to be in doubt. Is there truth to it? Questia is in the best financial position that it has ever been in. We are cash flow positive. We more than tripled revenue last year and we will nearly do so again this year. Today we have subscribers in 170 countries. In the US, we have individual subscribers on over 2,000 college and university campuses. And those are just the ones we know of. Most of our users don’t give us that information. Our customer satisfaction levels are extremely high as you can see from the feedback on our site. We see the result of that high satisfaction in that once someone subscribes, typically they stay subscribed for quite a while. Any recent rumors about Questia are probably the echoes of older stories from a few years ago and would not be accurate.
Slide 96: Old Reference Works Revived By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. There is no source of reference remotely as authoritative as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There is no brand as venerable and as veteran as this mammoth labour of knowledge and ideas established in 1768. It numbered the likes of Einstein and Freud among its authors. Dozens of classic articles written by such luminaries are available on the Britannica's Web Site and included in its CD-ROM and DVD editions. This is the tip of an iceberg of revival of old reference works. The full text of the venerable 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is now available online and is in the public domain. Regrettably, there is no CD-ROM or DVD to be had of this opus magnum written by the best minds at the turn of the 20th century. Nor can one download the Encyclopedia as separate compressed files. Additionally, the transcription is far from perfect with many an article either truncated or mysteriously divided. Still, it is a grand and welcome undertaking. Another sorely needed contribution is the Jewish Encyclopedia online. The only other project of this scope, the Encyclopedia Judaica on CD-ROM will be withdrawn from the market by January 2006 and is anyhow incompatible with any operating system later than Windows ME. Exactly like the Britannica, the Jewish Encyclopedia was compiled at the turn of the previous century and, therefore, lacks any coverage of the important events that took place in the life of the Jewish people - from the Holocaust to the State of Israel. But, with 4000 years of history to go on, the Jewish Encyclopedia is still a vast, indispensable, and deeply researched resource. It is also better adapted to the technological constraints of the Web. Still, it, too, offers no way of acquiring the whole work: no CD-ROM or DVD, no downloadable compressed files. By far the best among the three is the Catholic Encyclopedia. The 1904 edition of this magnificent work of reference is fully and freely available online. The commercial CD-ROM includes all 11,600 articles (which I found to be surprisingly objective and free of religious bias). But both the Web site and the CD contain reams of additional material: from the writings of the Church Fathers to numerous foundational texts in the history of Catholicism. The Web site itself is rich, easy to navigate, expertly done - but not cluttered or cutesy. The CD is a faithful rendition of the Encyclopedia's Web presence - yet not a mere mirror. It takes advantage of search and other CD-only features and is userfriendly, not resource-hogging, easy to install and to run even on the Windows 98 SE 1996 laptop I used as a worst-scenario test bench.
Slide 97: Why are people so interested in outdated and outmoded reference, typically rendered obsolete by subsequent research? Nostalgia is part of the answer. These works of reference are refreshingly direct, politically incorrect, opinionated, and innocently naive. They are reminiscent of another, more promising, age. Curiosity is another reason. What did our forefathers know or thought they knew about heredity, nationalism, the atom, the Jews, and germs? It is startling to discover both how far we have progressed and how much we have forgotten. Then there is the trivia. Mountains of little-known facts about long-forgotten people, countries, politics, arts, and crafts. It is the closest we can get to time-travel and, so it seems, equally exciting. By exploring our roots, we get to know ourselves and in this narcissistic age and civilization - who can resist such a proposition?
Slide 98: The Six Sins of the Wikipedia By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. (The author was among the first contributors to Nupedia, the Wikipedia's peer-reviewed predecessor, and spent six years, on and off, studying the Wikipedia) It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as "contributors" and "editors", not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life. People who are regularly excluded or at least moderated in every other Internet community are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-styled "encyclopedia" Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague this online venture. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators. 1. The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness The overwhelming majority of contributors to and editors of the Wikipedia remain anonymous throughout the process. Anyone can register and members' screennames (handles) mean nothing and lead nowhere. Thus, no one is forced to take responsibility for what he or she adds to the "encyclopedia" or subtracts from it. This amounts to an impenetrable smokescreen: identities can rarely be established and evading the legal consequences of one's actions or omissions is easy. As the exposure of the confabulated professional biography of Wikipedia Arbitrator Essjay in March 2007 demonstrates, some prominent editors and senior administrators probably claim fake credentials as well. Everything in the Wikipedia can be and frequently is edited, re-written and erased and this includes the talk pages and even, to my utter amazement, in some cases, the history pages! In other words, one cannot gain an impartial view of the editorial process by sifting through the talk and history pages of articles (most of which are typically monopolized by fiercely territorial "editors"). History, not unlike in certain authoritarian regimes, is being constantly re-jigged on the Wikipedia! 2. The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic The Wikipedia is not an experiment in online democracy, but a form of pernicious anarchy. It espouses two misconceptions: (a) That chaos can and does lead to the generation of artifacts with lasting value and (b) That knowledge is an emergent, mass phenomenon. But The Wikipedia is not conducive to the unfettered exchange of information and opinion that is a prerequisite to both (a) and (b). It is a war zone
Slide 99: where many fear to tread. the Wikipedia is a negative filter (see the next point). 3. The Might is Right Editorial Principle Lacking quality control by design, the Wikipedia rewards quantity. The more one posts and interacts with others, the higher one's status, both informal and official. In the Wikipedia planet, authority is a function of the number of edits, no matter how frivolous. The more aggressive (even violent) a member is; the more prone to flame, bully, and harass; the more inclined to form coalitions with like-minded trolls; the less of a life he or she has outside the Wikipedia, the more they are likely to end up being administrators. The result is erratic editing. Many entries are completely re-written (not to say vandalized) with the arrival of new kids on the Wikipedia block. Contrary to advertently-fostered impressions, the Wikipedia is not a cumulative process. Its text goes through dizzyingly rapid and oft-repeated cycles of destruction and the initial contributions are at times far deeper and more comprehensive than later, "edited", editions of same. Wikipedia is misrepresented as an open source endeavor. Nothing can be further from the truth. Open source efforts, such as Linux, involve a group of last-instance decision-makers that coordinate, vet, and cull the flow of suggestions, improvements, criticism, and offers from the public. Open source communities are hierarchical, not stochastic. Moreover, it is far easier to evaluate the quality of a given snippet of software code than it is to judge the truth-content of an edit to an article, especially if it deals with "soft" and "fuzzy" topics, which involve the weighing of opinions and the wellinformed exercise of value judgments. 4. Wikipedia is against real knowledge The Wikipedia's ethos is malignantly anti-elitist. Experts are scorned and rebuffed, attacked, and abused with official sanction and blessing. Since everyone is assumed to be equally qualified to edit and contribute, no one is entitled to a privileged position by virtue of scholarship, academic credentials, or even life experience. The Wikipedia is the epitome and the reification of an ominous trend: Internet surfing came to replace research, online eclecticism supplanted scholarship, and trivia passes for erudition. Everyone's an instant scholar. If you know how to use a search engine, you are an authority. Recently, on a discussion list dedicated to books with a largely academic membership, I pointed out an error in one of the Wikipedia's articles. The responses I received were chilling. One member told me that he uses the Wikipedia to get a rough idea about topics that are not worth the time needed to visit the library. Whether the rough ideas he was provided with courtesy the Wikipedia were correct
Slide 100: or counterfactual seemed not to matter to him. Others expressed a mystical belief in the veracity of "knowledge" assembled by the masses of anonymous contributors to the Wikipedia. Everyone professed to prefer the content proffered by the Wikipedia to the information afforded by the Britannica Encyclopedia or by established experts! Two members attempted to disproved my assertion (regarding the error in the Wikipedia) by pointing to a haphazard selection of links to a variety of Internet sources. Not one of them referred to a reputable authority on the subject, yet, based largely on the Wikipedia and a sporadic trip in cyberspace, they felt sufficiently confident to challenge my observation (which is supported by virtually all the leading luminaries in the field). These gut reactions mirror the Wikipedia's "editorial" process. To the best of my knowledge, none of my respondents was qualified to comment. None of them holds a relevant academic degree. Neither do I. But I strove to stand on the shoulders of giants when I spotted the error while my respondents explicitly and proudly refused to do so as a matter of principle! This may reflect the difference in academic traditions between the United States and the rest of the world. Members of individualistic, self-reliant and narcissistic societies inevitably rebel against authority and tend to believe in their own omnipotence and omniscience. Conversely, the denizens of more collectivist and consensus-seeking cultures, are less sanguine and grandiose and more willing to accept teachings ex-cathedra. So said Theodore Millon, a great scholar and an undisputed authority on personality disorders. 5. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia Truth in advertising is not the Wikipedia's strong suit. It presents itself, egregiously, as an encyclopedia. Yet, at best it is a community of users who exchange eclectic "information" on a regular and semi-structured basis. This deliberate misrepresentation snags most occasional visitors who are not acquainted with the arcane ways of the Wikipedia and trust it implicitly and explicitly to deliver facts and well-founded opinions. There is a lot the Wikipedia can do to dispel such dangerous misconceptions (for instance, it could post disclaimers on all its articles and not only on a few selected pages). That it chooses to propagate the deception is telling and renders it the equivalent of an intellectual scam, a colossal act of con-artistry. The Wikipedia thus retards genuine learning by serving as the path of least resistance and as a substitute to the real thing: edited, peer-reviewed works of reference. High school and university students now make the Wikipedia not only their first but their exclusive "research" destination. Moreover, the Wikipedia's content is often reproduced on thousands of other
Slide 101: Website WITHOUT any of its disclaimers and without attribution or identification of the source. The other day I visited www.allexpert.com and clicked on its "free encyclopedia". It is a mirror of the Wikipedia, but without anything to indicate that it is not a true, authoritative, peer-reviewed encyclopedia. The origin of the articles - Wikipedia - was not indicated anywhere. It could have been different. Consider, for instance the online and free Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Each entry is written by an expert but is frequently revised based on input from members of the public. It combines the best elements of the Wikipedia (feedbackdriven evolution) with none of its deficiencies. 6. The Wikipedia is rife with libel and violations of copyrights As recent events clearly demonstrate, the Wikipedia is a hotbed of slander and libel. It is regularly manipulated by interns, political staffers, public relations consultants, marketing personnel, special interest groups, political parties, business firms, brand managers, and others with an axe to grind. It serves as a platform for settling personal accounts, defaming, distorting the truth, and re-writing history. Less known is the fact that the Wikipedia is potentially and arguably the greatest single repository of copyright infringements. A study conducted in 2006 put the number of completely plagiarized articles at 1% of the total - a whopping 15,000 in all. Books - from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, through David Irving's controversial work, down to my own, far humbler, tomes - are regularly ripped off and sizable chunks are posted in various articles, with and without attribution. The Wikipedia resembles P2P (peer-to-peer) networks such as the first incarnation of Napster: it allows users to illegally share pirated content using an application (Wiki) and a central Website (the Wikipedia). The Wikipedia does not provide any effective mechanism to redress wrongs, address problems, and remedy libel and copyright infringements. Editing the offending articles is useless as these are often "reverted" (restored) by the offenders themselves. My personal experience is that correspondence with and complaints to Wikimedia and to Jimmy Wales go unanswered or stonewalled by a variety of minions. Even when (rarely) the offending content is removed from the body of an article it remains available in its history pages. The Wikipedia has been legally shielded from litigation because, hitherto, it enjoyed the same status that Bulletin Boards Services (BBS) and other, free for all, communities have. In short: where no editorial oversight is exerted, no legal liability arises to the host even in cases of proven libel and breaches of copyright. But the Wikipedia has been treading a thin line here as well. Anyone who ever tried
Slide 102: to contribute to this "encyclopedia" discovered soon enough that it is micromanaged by a cabal of c. 1000 administrators (not to mention the Wikimedia's full-time staff, fuelled by 2 million US dollars in public donations). These senior editors regularly interfere in the contents of articles. They do so often without any rhyme or reason and on a whim (hence the anarchy) - but edit they do. This fact and recent statements by Wales to the effect that the Wikipedia is actually regularly edited may provoke victims of the Wikipedia into considering class action lawsuits against the Wikimedia, Jimmy Wales personally, and their Web hosting company. The Wikipedia is an edited publication. The New-York Times is responsible for anything it publishes in its op-ed section. Radio stations pay fines for airing obscenities in call-in shows. Why treat the Wikipedia any differently? Perhaps, hit in the wallet, it will develop the minimal norms of responsibility and truthfulness that are routinely expected of less presumptuous and more inconspicuous undertakings on the Internet. Addendum - Google-Wikipedia-MySpace - How Teenagers Hijacked the Internet A recent (late 2006) study by Heather Hopkins from Hitwise demonstrates the existence of a pernicious feedback loop between Google, Wikipedia, MySpace, and Blogspot. Wikipedia gets 54% of its traffic from Google search results. The majority of Wikipedia visitors then proceed to MySpace or Blogspot, both of which use Google as their search service and serve Google-generated advertisements. Google has changed its search algorithm in late 2005-early 2006. I have been monitoring 154 keywords on Google since 1999. Of these, the number one (#1) search result in 128 keywords is now a Wikipedia article. More than a quarter (38 out of 128) of these "articles" are what the Wikipedia calls "stubs" (one or two sentences to be expanded by Wikipedians in the future). Between 7 and 10 of the articles that made it to the much-coveted number one spot are ... empty pages, placeholders, yet to be written! This is Google's policy now: Wikipedia articles regardless of their length or quality or even mere existence are placed by Google's algorithm high up in the search results. Google even makes a Wikipedia search engine available to Webmasters for their Websites. The relationship between Google and Wikipedia is clearly intimate and mutually-reinforcing. Google's new algorithm, codenamed Big Daddy, still calculates the popularity of Websites by counting incoming links. An incoming link is a link to a given Website placed on an unrelated page somewhere on the Web. The more numerous such links - the higher the placement in Google's search results pages. To avoid spamming and link farms, Google now rates the quality of "good and bad Internet neighborhoods". Not all incoming links are treated equally. Some Internet
Slide 103: properties are shunned. Links from such "bad" Websites actually contribute negatively to the overall score. The top results in all 154 keywords I have been diligently monitoring since 1999 have changed dramatically since April 2006. The only common thread in all these upheavals is one: the more incoming links from MySpace a Website has - the higher it is placed in the search results. In other words: if Website A has 700 incoming links from 700 different Websites and website B has 700 incoming links, all of them from various pages on MySpace, Website B is ranked (much) higher in the search results. This holds true even when both Websites A and B sport the same PageRank. This holds true even if the bulk of Website A's incoming links come from "good properties" in "good Internet neighborhoods". Incoming links from MySpace trump every other category of incoming links. An unsettling pattern emerges: Wikipedia, the "encyclopedia" whose "editors" are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults is touted by Google as an authoritative source of information. In search results, it is placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on. MySpace whose 110 million users are predominantly prepubescent and adolescents now dictates what Websites will occupy the first search results in Google's search results pages. It is very easy to spam MySpace. It is considered by some experts to be a vast storehouse of link farms masquerading as "social networks". Google has vested, though unofficial and unannounced and, therefore, undisclosed interests in both Wikipedia and MySpace. Wikipedia visitors end up on various properties whose search and ad placement technologies are Google's and Wikipedia would have shriveled into insignificance had it not been to Google's relentless promotion of its content. Can Teenagers Contribute to an Encyclopedia? The truth is that teenagers cannot do the referencing and research that are the prerequisite to serious scholarship - unless you stretch these words to an absurd limit. Research is not about hoarding facts. It is about identifying and applying context and about possessing a synoptic view of ostensibly unrelated data. Moreover, teenagers can't tell hype from fact and fad from fixture. They lack the perspectives that life and learning -structured, frontal, hierarchical learning - bring with them.
Slide 104: Knowledge is not another democratic institution. It is hierarchical for good reason and the hierarchy is built on merit and the merit is founded on learning. It is not surprising that the Wikipedia emerged in the USA whose "culture" consists of truncated attention spans, snippets and soundbites, shortcuts and cliff notes. The Wikipedia is a pernicious counter-cultural phenomenon. It does not elevate or celebrate knowledge. The Wikipedia degrades knowledge by commoditizing it and by removing the filters and the barriers to entry that have proven so essential hitherto. The Wikipedians Fight Back This is the fifth essay I have written about the Wikipedia. Evidently, Wikipedians, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia are vehemently opposed to free speech when it is directed against them. Judge for yourselves: A group of Wikipedians apparently decided to take revenge and/or to warn me off. They have authored a defamatory and slanderous article about "Sam Vaknin" in their "encyclopedia'. To leave no room for doubt, at the bottom of this new entry about me, they listed all my articles against the Wikipedia. After repeated complaints, the article was removed, though any "editor" can still write an equallyslanderous new one at any time. Additionally, I received an e-mail message from Brad Patrick, the Wikimedia's General Counsel (attorney), asking me to copy him on all future correspondence with Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, or anyone else associated with the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. I declined his "request". He then proceeded to ask to communicate with my lawyer since "I raised the issue of suing his client." Couldn't be subtler. I was also banned from posting to the Wikipedia - my punishment for what the Wikipedia calls "sockpuppetry" (essentially, editing articles without first logging in to one's account). It is ironic, since the vast majority of Wikipedians - including the administrator who banned me - edit articles anonymously or hide behind utterly meaningless handles and screen names. There is not a shred of proof, of course, that I have edited any article, with or without logging in. Finally, my name as well as references to my work were removed from a few articles (for instance, from the entries about the Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Narcissism (Psychology)). At least one of the "editors" who were responsible for what appears to be a vindictive act ("Danny") claims to be somehow associated with the Wikimedia's grants commission. Interview with Tom Panelas - Encyclopedia Britannica (September 2006)
Slide 105: Tom Panelas is the Encyclopedia Britannica's Director of Corporate Communications Q. Is the Wikipedia an encyclopedia in any sense of the word? A. I don't think it's crucial that everyone agree on whether Wikipedia is or is not an encyclopedia. What's important is that people who might use it understand what it is and how it differs from the reference works they're used to. Wikipedia allows anyone to write and edit articles, regardless of their knowledge of the subjects on which they're writing, their ability to write, or their commitment to truth. This policy has allowed Wikipedia to grow large very fast, but it's come at a price. The price is that many of its articles are inaccurate, poorly written, long and bloated, or laden with bias and spin. Despite what some people would like to believe about Wikipedia, that its system is self-correcting, many inaccuracies remain for long periods of time, new ones are added, and, judging from quite a few media reports, sound information posted by people knowledgeable on a subject is often undone by others who know nothing about it. This is a natural result of the way Wikipedia is put together, its willingness to let anyone write and edit and unwillingness to give precedence to people who know what they're talking about. People who use Wikipedia should be aware of these liabilities. Q. The Britannica used to be freely accessible until it was converted, a few years back, into a subscriber-only resource. Do you regret this decision? Perhaps if the Britannica were to provide a free authoritative alternative to the Wikipedia, it would still be the first stop of seekers of information online? A. We don't regret the decision to charge a subscription fee for the premium portions of Britannica Online. Today our site has thousands of free articles, and those who subscribe to our premium service pay a fraction of what it cost for access to a high-quality, reliable encyclopedia only a few years ago. About a hundred million people worldwide have access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online, through schools, libraries, and universities, and they don't pay for it at all. Britannica has indeed become an alternative - not just to Wikipedia but to all of the unreliable information that courses through the public sphere these days, much of it on the Internet. The Web has been great for enabling publishers like us to reach many more people than we ever could before, but it's also made it possible for errors, propaganda, and urban myths to appear in the guise of factual truth. As more people realize that the contents of the Internet are often not what they seem to be, they've turned to sources like Britannica, which apply the same rigorous standards to our online products that we have always used in all of our products. Q. "Nature" compared the Wikipedia to the Britannica and resolved that both suffer, more or less, from the same rate of errors. You hotly disputed these findings. Can you elaborate?
Slide 106: A. The Nature article was bogus. Responsible people who paid attention to the facts understand that it's been discredited and don't even cite it. We spent twenty singlespaced pages rebutting it, so there's little need for elaboration beyond that. You can read what we said here http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf You can also read what USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2006-03-30-naturebritannica_x.htm and Nicholas Carr http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/britannicas_ind.php had to say about it. Q. Peer-reviewed, professionally-edited reference works do have their shortcomings (elitism, conservatism, lack of pluralism, limitations of information available to the scholars involved). "Egalitarian" communal efforts like the Wikipedia do unearth, at times, data not available in "old-fashioned" encyclopedias. Moreover, the Wikipedia offers a far wider range of coverage and real-time updates. Can't it complement the Britannica? Can't the two even collaborate in some ways? A. It's a myth that professionally edited reference works are limited or elitist. On the contrary, using a rigorous editorial method that draws on people who have spent their lives mastering their subjects produces an excellent balance in perspective. We always direct our contributors to include all major controversies in their surveys of a subject, whether those points of view are fashionable or not. This approach produces good articles for lay readers, who are the people who use encyclopedias. When the work is done by volunteers who aren't adept at this kind of work, the results often settle into a comfortable consensus that favors the viewpoint in vogue among the group of people doing the work. Usually, it's the people who are trained and experienced in going beyond their own points of view that manage to do it well.
Slide 107: Battle of the Titans - Encarta vs. the Britannica By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. The Encarta Encyclopedia - and even more so, the Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005 is an impressive reference library. It caters effectively (and, at $70, cheaply) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, colorful, replete with tens of thousands of images, video clips, and audio snippets. The Encarta is extremely user-friendly, with its search bar and novel Visual Browser. It comes equipped with a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, and an Encarta Kids interface. Installation is easy. The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings. The Encyclopedia Britannica (established in 1768) sports Student and Elementary versions of its venerable flagship product - but it is far better geared to tackle the information needs of adults and, even more so, professionals. Its 100,000 articles are long and deep, supported by impressive bibliographies, and written by the best scholars in their respective fields. The Britannica, too, come bundled with an atlas (less detailed than the Encarta's), dictionary, thesaurus, classic articles from previous editions, an Interactive Timeline, a Research Organizer, and a Knowledge Navigator (a Brain Stormer). It is as user-friendly as the Encarta. The Britannica, though, is updated only 2-4 times a year, a serious drawback, only partially compensated for by 3 months of free access to the its unequalled powerhouse online Web site. It seems that the Britannica and the Encarta cater to different market segments and that the Britannica provides more in-depth coverage of its topics while the Encarta is a more complete, PC-orientated reference experience. The market positioning of the Britannica's Elementary and Student Encyclopedias is, therefore, problematic. Encarta has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets. Both encyclopedias offer an embarrassment of riches. Users of both find the wealth and breadth of information daunting and data mining is fast becoming an art form. Encarta introduced the Visual (Virtual) Browser and Britannica incorporated the Brain Stormer to cope with this predicament. But few know how to deploy them effectively. Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing and Britannica fully supports serious research. These preferences are reflected in the design of the two products. The Encarta is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet. The Britannica is a sober assemblage of first-rate texts, up to date bibliographies, and minimal multimedia. It is a desktop university library: thorough, well-researched, comprehensive, trustworthy. Indeed, the Encarta and the Britannica offer competing models for interacting with the Internet. Both provide content updates - the Encarta weekly or bi-weekly and the Britannica 2-4 times a year. Both offer additional and timely content and revisions on dedicated Web
Slide 108: sites. But the Encarta conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club. The Britannica doesn't. The Encarta incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including dozens of Discovery Channel videos, hundreds of newspaper articles, and a plethora of Scientific American features). The Encarta's multimedia offerings are also impressive with thousands of video and audio clips, maps, tables, and animations. The Britannica provides considerably more text - though it has noticeably enhanced it non-textual content over the year (the 1994-7 editions had nothing or very little but text). Both reference products would do well to integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. A seamless experience is in the cards. Users must and will be able to ferret content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web using a single, intuitive interface. The new Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product this past year, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc) without having the application open. Definitely a step in the right direction. Having used both products extensively in the last few months, I found myself entertaining some minor gripes: The Encarta offers 3-D tours which gobble up computer resources and are essentially noninteractive a limited. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer? The editorial process is not transparent. It is not clear how both products cope with contemporary and recent developments, minority-sensitive issues, and controversial topics (such as abortion and gay rights). The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visually-impaired - but is still far from doing a good job of it. The Britannica doesn't even bother. The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in both products are surprisingly outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity. Both encyclopedias consume (not to say) hog computer resource far in excess of the official specifications. This makes them less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. Despite the hype, relatively few users possess DVD drives (but those who do find, in both products, the entire encyclopedia available on one DVD). But that's it. Don't think twice. Run to the closest retail outlet (or surf the relevant Web sites) and purchase both products now. Combined, these reference suites offer the best value for money around and significantly enhance you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. Interview with Tom Panelas (Britannica) January, 2005
Slide 109: Q: Would you agree that the Britannica and the Encarta cater to different market segments and that the Britannica provides more in-depth coverage of its topics while the Encarta is a more complete, PC-orientated reference experience? If so, what is the market positioning of the Britannica's Elementary and Student Encyclopedias? TP: The most important thing about Britannica's Ultimate Reference Suite is that is has three encyclopedias -- one for every reading level - and therefore can be used profitably by the whole family. So, yes, the Encyclopaedia Britannica itself is the more comprehensive encyclopedia, but realize also that the Ultimate Reference Suite also has Britannica Student Encyclopedia, created for the same age range as Encarta, and Britannica Elementary Encyclopedia, for younger readers. So our positioning is that Britannica serves you from grade school to graduate school and beyond. Q: Both encyclopedias offer an embarrassment of riches. Users find the wealth and breadth of information daunting and data mining is fast becoming an art form. Encarta introduced the Visual (Virtual) Browser and Britannica introduced the BrainStormer to cope with this predicament. Are there any improvements - or alternative solutions - planned in future editions? TP: The 2006 edition will include search enhancements to BrainStormer. They're under development right now, so I don't have too many details. We also have some unique indexing systems that underlie the structure of the Britannica database, which our indexers have been at work on for years. We expect these to be the basis of some powerful search and browse applications in the years ahead. Q: How does your product strike a balance between browsing and research? Is one activity encouraged over the other? TP: Most people like to do keyword searching, so we try to keep that working sharply, but we have also tried to introduce as many other ways to access information as possible, such as subject browse, index browse, atlas, timelines, and BrainStormer. People have different learning styles and different preferences for how to find information. We try to indulge all of them. Q: The Encarta and the Britannica offer competing models for interacting with the Internet. Both offer updates - the Encarta weekly or bi-weekly and the Britannica 2-4 times a year. Both provide additional and timely content and revisions on dedicated Web sites. But the Encarta conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates on registration with its Plus Club. The Britannica doesn't. Are you considering a change in your approach? TP: We're not. Q: The Encarta incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including dozens of Discovery Channel videos, hundreds of newspaper articles, and a plethora of Scientific American features). The Encarta's multimedia offerings are also impressive with thousands of video and audio clips, maps, tables, and animations. The Britannica provides considerably more text. Is the Britannica planning to follow suit or will it remain mainly text based?
Slide 110: TP: Well, I wouldn't say we're "mainly" text based - we have added a lot of multimedia over the years, and we've won some awards for our multimedia - but we will continue to offer comprehensive information for all ages. When you come down to it, the information that really matters in reference works is words. We'll continue to add multimedia as well, space permitting, but covering a topic thoroughly and properly comes first. Q: Will the Encarta/Britannica integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, and others? TP: Yes, that's a priority for 2006. Q: In the editorial process, how do you cope with contemporary and recent developments, minority-sensitive issues, and controversial topics (such as abortion and gay rights)? TP: This question calls for a treatise of its own. We have advisers all over the world consisting of the top scholars and experts in all fields, and with their help we try to bring reason and evidence to bear on developing the best approximation of truth that is humanly possible. Yes, it's hard work, because people disagree on many things, but it can be done reasonably well if you're determined. We strive to the extent possible for coverage that are universal - that is, it takes all major perspectives around the world into account and does not favor one "civilization" over another. One thing we insist on in all of our encyclopedias, regardless of language or what country they are published in, and that is that coverage of a topic be consistent everywhere. Like our eighteenth-century forebears, we believe that there is such a thing as truth and it is possible for humans to know it. Creating an encyclopedia is one of the ways humans do that. So we don't have different "truths," plural, for different countries or markets. We don't pander to local sensitivities or myths by covering a topic one way in one country and a different way in another. Q: What features cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visually-impaired? TP: Most of the navigational features for which most people use the mouse have keyboard equivalents. We plan to do more in this area. We have concentrated in recent years on making our school and library products compliant with the U.S. Americans With Disabilities Act because the demand for this in that area is so strong. We are now turning to doing similar things with our consumer products. Q: The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in both products are outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? TP: Sam, Can you give me examples of outdated dictionary information? We haven't seen much demand from our customers in specialized dictionaries. Q: Both encyclopedias consume (not to say) hog computer resource far in excess of the official specifications. This makes them less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. The Mackintosh interfaces are also clunky. How can and will these limitations be tackled? TP: We plan to improve speed and performance in 2006, especially for Mac, since we seem
Slide 111: to be the only ones these days with a Mac version. Also Read: Revolt of the Scholars The Idea of Reference The Future of the Book The Kidnapping of Content The Internet and the Library The Future of Online Reference Will Content Ever be Profitable? The Disintermediation of Content The Future of Electronic Publishing Free Online Scholarship - Interview with Peter Suber
Slide 112: Microsoft Embraces the Web Encarta and MS Student 2006 By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. July, 2005 Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006 Microsoft was long derided by its critics for having failed to fully grasp the Internet revolution. It was late in developing Net technologies such as a proprietary search engine and in coping with security threats propagated through the Web. Not any more. Earlier this year MSN rolled out a great search engine and now Microsoft has fundamentally revamped its reference products. By committing itself to this overhaul, Microsoft embraced reality: nine out of ten children (between the ages of 5 and 17) use computers (USA figures) - and 85% of these get their information online. The Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006 is a breathtaking resource. It caters effectively (and, at $50, affordably) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, and colorful. The 2006 Encarta's User Interface is far less cluttered than in previous editions. Content is arranged by topics and then by relevancy and medium. Add to this the Encarta's Visual Browser and you get only relevant data in response to your queries. The Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product two years ago, and is resident in the Task Pane even when Encarta is closed, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc). The Encarta's new Web Companion is a (giant) step in the right direction. It obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (like a browser). Content from both the Encarta and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference. It may raise important and interesting issues of intellectual property, though. Web content copyright-holders may demand royalties from Microsoft for the use it makes of their wares in its commercial products. Encarta would do well to also integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Users should be able to seamlessly access content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.
Slide 113: The Encarta Premium includes a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, 32 Discovery Channel videos, 25,000 photos and illustrations, 2800 sound and audio clips, hundreds of maps and tables, and 400 videos and animations. It incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including hundreds of newspaper articles and a plethora of Scientific American features). The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings. Unfortunately, the Encarta still conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club. The Encarta is the most comprehensive, PC-orientated reference experience there is. No wonder it has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets. Particularly enchanting is the Encarta Kids interface an area replete with interactive quizzes, pictures, large icons, hundreds of articles, and links to the full version of the Encarta. A veritable and colorful sandbox. Those kids are going to get addicted to the Encarta, that's for sure! Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing. It is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet. Inevitably, in such a mammoth undertaking, not everything is peachy. A few gripes: Regrettably, installation is not as easy as before. The Encarta 2006 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by Encarta 2006 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers. Fully installed, the Encarta Premium 2006 gobbles up more than 3.5 Gb. That's a lot - even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 20-40 Gb hard disks. This makes the Encarta less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. Despite the hype, relatively few users possess DVD drives (but those who do, find the entire encyclopedia available on one DVD). The Encarta DVD 3-D tours have improved but they still hog computer resources and are essentially non-interactive. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer? The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visuallyimpaired - but is still far from doing a good job of it.
Slide 114: The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Encarta are outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity. But that's it. Encarta is a must-buy (especially if you have children). The Encarta is the best value for money around and significantly enhances you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. The amount and quality of content squeezed into a $50 package (before rebate) defies belief. I am a 44 years old adult but when I received my Encarta Premium 2006, I was once more a child in a land of wonders. How much is such an experience worth to you? Microsoft Student 2006 The previous versions of Encarta included a host of homework tools. These have now been made into a separate product called Microsoft Student. Homework assignments are the bane of most students I know (not to mention their hard-pressed and nescient parents). This is mainly because of the tedious and mindnumbing chores of data mining and composition. Additionally, as knowledge multiplies every 5-10 years, few parents and teachers are able to keep up. Enter Microsoft Student 2006 - a productivity suite which includes the Encarta Encyclopedia, assignment templates, tutorials, graphing calculator software and a Web Companion. Similar to the Encarta, MS Student's Web Companion obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (like a browser). Content from both the Encyclopedia (the full Encarta encyclopedia is built into MS Student) and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference - as 80% of students have already done. This may raise important and interesting issues of intellectual property, though. Web content copyright-holders may demand royalties from Microsoft for the use it makes of their wares in its commercial products. MS Student would do well to also integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Students will benefit from seamless access to content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface. MS Student's templates are actually clever adaptations of the popular Office suite of products - Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They help the student produce homework plans and schedules, projects, book reports, presentations, research reports, charts, and analyses of problems in math, physics, and chemistry. Detailed
Slide 115: step-by-step tutorials, Quick Starters, and pop-up toolbars (menus) guide the student along the way in a friendly, non-intrusive manner. The graphing calculator is a wonder. It has both 2-D and 3-D capabilities and makes use of the full screen. Aided by an extensive Equations Library, it does everything except cook: trigonometry, calculus, math, charting, geometry, physics, and chemistry. And everything in full color! And if this is not enough, the lucky owner is entitled to one year of Online Math Homework Help: step by step instructions and hints for solving math problems (including algebra and geometry). The program addresses most math textbooks and more are added all the time. For the student keen on the liberal arts and the humanities, Student 2006 provides detailed Book Summaries of dozens of classic works. Besides plot synopses, the student gets acquainted with the author's life, themes and characters in the tomes, and ideas for book reports. This is buttressed by a Book of Quotations and the entire corpus of the Encarta Encyclopedia, dictionary, and thesaurus. This is the first release of a great contribution to learning. Inevitably, it has a few flaws and glitches. Start with the price. As productivity suites go, it is reasonably priced had its target population been adult professional users. But, at $100, it is beyond the reach of most poor students and parents - its most immediate market niches. Installation is not easy. MS Student 2006 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by Encarta 2006 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers. Fully installed, Microsoft Student 2006 gobbles up more than 4 Gb. That's a lot even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 20-40 Gb hard disks. This makes the Encarta less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. Despite the hype, relatively few users possess DVD drives (but those who do, find the entire encyclopedia available on one DVD). Finally, there is the question of personal creativity and originality. Luckily, MS Student does not spoon-feed its users. It does not substitute for thinking or for study. On the contrary, by providing structured stimuli, it encourages the student to express his or her ideas. It does not do the homework assignments for the student it merely helps rid them of time-consuming and machine-like functions. And it opens up to both student and family the wonderful twin universes of knowledge: the Encarta and the Web.
Slide 116: Microsoft's Encarta and MS Student 2007 By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. July, 2006 Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 While Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006 marked Microsoft's commitment to the Web - Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 marks its commitments to its own technology. The new Encarta relies on Microsoft's powerful, flexible, scalable, and adaptable .Net Framework 2.0. There is a price to pay, of course: the time it takes to install the product is much longer and the user is henceforth prompted to constantly download security updates from Microsoft. It is also recommended to turn off your firewall and anti-virus products during installation. More than ever, the Encarta is a breathtaking resource. With 68,000 articles (compared to 64,000 last year), it is much expanded (though about 1000 photos and illustrations and 500 music and sound clips were removed from this edition). Certain, resource-hogging features disappeared from last year (for example: the Read Aloud and Live News functions). The Encarta caters effectively (and, at $30-50, affordably) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, and colorful. Kids have their own encyclopedia-within-encyclopedia, dubbed Encarta Kids with ageappropriate, appetizingly presented content and games to boot! The 2007 Encarta's User Interface is far less cluttered than in previous editions. Content is arranged by topics and then by relevancy and medium. Add to this the Encarta's Visual Browser and you get only relevant data in response to your queries. The Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product two years ago, and is resident in the Task Pane even when Encarta is closed, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc). The Encarta's newish Web Companion obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (like a browser). Content from both the Encarta and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference. I am not sure how Microsoft solved the weighty and interesting issues of intellectual property that the Web Companion raises, though. Copyright-holders of Web content may feel that they have the right to be compensated by Microsoft for the use it makes of their wares in its commercial products. Encarta would do well to also integrate with new desktop search tools from
Slide 117: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Users should be able to seamlessly access content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface. The Encarta Premium includes a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, Discovery Channel videos, 25,000 photos and illustrations, 2500 sound and audio clips, hundreds of maps and tables (with a staggering 1.8 million map locations), and 300 videos and animations. It incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including hundreds of newspaper articles and a plethora of Scientific American features). The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings. Unfortunately, the Encarta still conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club. Moreover, last year Encarta released only 26 updates, compared to its annual average of 50-60. The Encarta is the most comprehensive, PC-orientated reference experience there is. No wonder it has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets. Particularly enchanting is the aforementioned Encarta Kids interface - an area replete with interactive quizzes, pictures, large icons, hundreds of articles, and links to the full version of the Encarta. A veritable and colorful sandbox. Those kids are going to get addicted to the Encarta, that's for sure! Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing. It is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet. Inevitably, in such a mammoth undertaking, not everything is peachy. A few gripes: As I said, installation is not as easy as before. The Encarta 2007 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by Encarta 2007 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers. Fully installed on the hard disk, the Encarta Premium 2007 gobbles up less than its predecessors but still a whopping 3 Gb. That's a lot - even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 20-40 Gb hard disks. This makes the Encarta less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. The Encarta DVD 3-D tours have improved but they still hog computer resources
Slide 118: and are essentially non-interactive. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer? The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visuallyimpaired - but it is far from doing a good or full job of it. The dictionary has been greatly improved in this edition. Actually, the Encarta 2007 comes equipped with five foreign language dictionaries and verb conjugating applications. Still, the atlas, English language dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Encarta are somewhat outdated. Why not use a more current and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity. But that's it. Encarta is a must-buy (especially if you have children). The Encarta is the best value for money around and significantly enhances you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. The amount and quality of content squeezed into a $50 package (before rebate) defies belief. I am a 45 years old adult but when I received my Encarta Premium 2007, I was once more a child in a land of wonders. How much is such an experience worth to you? Microsoft Student 2007 The previous versions of Encarta included a host of homework tools. Last year, these have been made into a separate product called Microsoft Student. It has now been gainfully repackaged and very much enhanced. Among the new or revamped features: free online access to MSN Encarta Premium, Step-by-Step Math Solutions calculator, Step-by-Step Math Textbook Solutions, Triangle Solver, Equations Library, tutorials, and foreign language help. MS Student comes replete with the entire Encarta Premium encyclopedia! Homework assignments are the bane of most students I know (not to mention their hard-pressed and nescient parents). This is mainly because of the tedious and mindnumbing chores of data mining and composition. Additionally, as knowledge multiplies every 5-10 years, few parents and teachers are able to keep up. Enter Microsoft Student 2007 - a productivity suite which, as we mentioned, includes the Encarta Encyclopedia, English and foreign language dictionaries, thesaurus, quotations library, assignment templates, tutorials, graphing calculator software and a Web Companion. Similar to the Encarta, MS Student's Web Companion obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (like a browser). Content from both the Encyclopedia and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference - as 80% of students have already done.
Slide 119: I am not sure how Microsoft solved the weighty and interesting issues of intellectual property that the Web Companion raises, though. Copyright-holders of Web content may feel that they have the right to be compensated by Microsoft for the use it makes of their wares in its commercial products. MS Student would do well to also integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Students will benefit from seamless access to content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface. MS Student's templates are actually clever adaptations of the popular Office suite of products - Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They help the student produce homework plans and schedules, projects, book reports, presentations, research reports, charts, and analyses of problems in math, physics, and chemistry. Detailed step-by-step tutorials, Quick Starters, and pop-up toolbars (menus) guide the student along the way in a friendly, non-intrusive manner. The graphing calculator is a wonder. It has both 2-D and 3-D capabilities and makes use of the full screen. Aided by an extensive Equations Library, it does everything except cook: trigonometry, calculus, math, charting, geometry, physics, and chemistry. And everything in full color! For the student keen on the liberal arts and the humanities, Student 2007 provides detailed Book Summaries of almost 1000 classic works. Besides plot synopses, the student gets acquainted with the author's life, themes and characters in the tomes, and ideas for book reports. MS Student 2007 is a great contribution to learning. Inevitably, it has a few flaws and glitches. Start with the price. As productivity suites go, it is reasonably priced had its target population been adult professional users. But, at $70-100, it is beyond the reach of most poor students and parents - its most immediate market niches. MS Student 2007 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by MS Student 2007 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers. Fully installed on the hard disk, MS Student 2007 gobbles up less than its predecessors but still a whopping 4 Gb. That's a lot - even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 20-40 Gb hard disks. This makes MS Student less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. Finally, there is the question of personal creativity and originality. Luckily, MS
Slide 120: Student does not spoon-feed its users. It does not substitute for thinking or for study. On the contrary, by providing structured stimuli, it encourages the student to express his or her ideas. It does not do the homework assignments for the student it merely helps rid them of time-consuming and machine-like functions. And it opens up to both student and family the wonderful twin universes of knowledge: the Encarta and the Web.
Slide 121: The Encyclopedia Britannica 2006 By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. September, 2005 The Encyclopedia Britannica 2006 (established in 1768) is a completely revamped product. Its interface is intuitive and uncluttered. It is far more fun to use. For instance, it now offers a date-based daily selection of relevant articles. The search box is persistent - no need to click on the toolbar's "search" button every time you want to find something in this vast storehouse. The new Britannica's display is tab-based, avoiding the erstwhile confusing proliferation of new windows with every move. Most importantly, articles appear in full - not in sections. This major improvement facilitates finding relevant keywords in and the printing of entire texts. These are only a few of dozens of userfriendly alterations and enhancements. The 2006 edition is a breakthrough. The Britannica seemed to have finally got it entirely right. The Britannica provides considerably more text than any other extant encyclopedia, print or digital. But its has noticeably enhanced it non-textual content over the years (the 1994-7 editions had nothing or very little but words, words, and more words). The Britannica fully supports serious research. It is a sober assemblage of first-rate essays, up to date bibliographies, and relevant multimedia. It is a desktop university library: thorough, well-researched, comprehensive, trustworthy. The Britannica's 80-100,000 articles (depending on the version) are long and thorough, supported by impressive bibliographies, and written by the best scholars in their respective fields. The company's Editorial Board of Advisors reads like the who's who of the global intellectual and scientific community. The Britannica comes bundled with an atlas (and 287 World data Profiles of individual countries and territories), the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus, classic articles from previous editions, eleven yearbooks, an Interactive Timeline, a Research Organizer, and a Knowledge Navigator (a Brain Stormer). In its new form, the Britannica is as user-friendly as the Encarta. Regrettably, it is updated only 2-4 times a year, a serious drawback, only partially compensated for by 3 months of free access to the its impressive powerhouse online Web site. The Britannica is an embarrassment of riches. Users often find the wealth and breadth of information daunting and data mining is fast becoming an art form. This is why the Britannica incorporated the Brain Stormer to cope with this predicament. But an informal poll I conducted online shows that few know how to deploy it effectively.
Slide 122: The Britannica also sports Student and Elementary versions of its venerable flagship product, replete with a Homework Helpdesk - but it is far better geared to tackle the information needs of adults and, even more so, professionals. It provides unequalled coverage of its topics. Ironically, this is precisely why the market positioning of the Britannica's Elementary and Student Encyclopedias is problematic. The current edition is fully integrated with the Internet. Apart from the updates, it offers additional and timely content and revisions on a dedicated Web site. The digital product includes a staggering number of links (165,808!) to third party content on the Web. The GeoAnalyzer (compares national statistical data and generates charts and graphs) is now Web-based and greatly enhanced. The Britannica would do well to offer a browser add-on search bar and integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. A seamless experience is in the cards. Users must and will be able to ferret content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface. Having used the product extensively in the last two weeks and on different platforms and operating systems, I find myself entertaining some minor gripes: The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Britannica are surprisingly outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? Despite considerable improvement over the previous edition, the Britannica still consumes (not to say hogs) computer resource far in excess of the official specifications. This makes it it less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. The Britannica now uses a new graphic and text renderer. On some systems, the user needs to modify his or her desktop settings to get rid of jagged fonts and blurry photos. Moreover, despite the hype, relatively few users possess DVD drives (but those who do find the entire reference suite available on one DVD). But that's it. Don't think twice. Run to the closest retail outlet (or surf to the Britannica's Web site) and purchase the 2006 edition now. It offers excellent value for money (less than $50) and significantly enhances you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2007 Opens to the Web By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Slide 123: September, 2006 The Encyclopedia Britannica 2007 (established in 1768) is again a completely revamped product. The rate of innovation in the last two editions is impressive and welcome. Its interface is intuitive and uncluttered and it is great fun to use. For instance, it offers a date-based daily selection of relevant information and highly edifying interactive tours of articles and attendant media. The search box is persistent - no need to click on the toolbar's "search" button every time you want to find something in this vast storehouse of knowledge. Moreover, the user can save search results onto handy "Virtual Notecards". The new Britannica's display is tab-based, avoiding the erstwhile confusing proliferation of new windows with every move. Most importantly, articles appear in full, not in sections. This major improvement facilitates the finding of relevant keywords in and the printing of entire texts. These are only a few of the numerous user-friendly alterations and enhancements. The Britannica seems to have got it entirely right. Perhaps the most refreshing change is the Britannica's Update Center. Dozens of monthly updates and new, timely articles are made available online (subject to free registration). A special button alerts the user when an article in the base product has been updated. Regrettably, unlike in the Encarta, the updates cannot be downloaded to the user's computer or otherwise incorporated into the vast encyclopedia. The Britannica provides considerably more text than any other extant encyclopedia, print or digital. But its has noticeably enhanced it non-textual content over the years (the 1994-7 editions had nothing or very little but words, words, and more words): it now boasts more than 17,000 images and illustrations and 700 video and audio clips. The Britannica fully supports serious research. It is a sober assemblage of first-rate essays, up to date bibliographies, and relevant multimedia. It is a desktop university library: thorough, well-researched, comprehensive, trustworthy. The Britannica's 80-100,000 articles (depending on the version) are long and thorough, supported by impressive bibliographies, and written by the best scholars in their respective fields. The company's Editorial Board of Advisors reads like the who's who of the global intellectual and scientific community. The Britannica comes bundled with an atlas (between 1600 and 2530 maps and 287 World data Profiles of individual countries and territories), the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus, classic articles from previous editions, ten yearbooks, an Interactive Timeline, a Research Organizer, and a Knowledge Navigator (a Brain Stormer). In its new form, the Britannica is as user-friendly as the Encarta. With monthly updates and 3 months of free access to its impressive powerhouse online Web site,
Slide 124: it is bound to give the former close competition. The Britannica is an embarrassment of riches. Users often find the wealth and breadth of information daunting and data mining is fast becoming an art form. This is why the Britannica incorporated the Brain Stormer to cope with this predicament. But an informal poll I conducted online shows that few know how to deploy it effectively. The Britannica also sports Student and Elementary versions of its venerable flagship product, replete with a Homework Helpdesk - but it is far better geared to tackle the information needs of adults and, even more so, professionals. It provides unequalled coverage of its topics. Ironically, this is precisely why the market positioning of the Britannica's Elementary and Student Encyclopedias is problematic. The current edition is fully integrated with the Internet. Apart from the updates, it offers additional and timely content and revisions on a dedicated Web site. The digital product includes a staggering number of links (165,808!) to third party content and articles on the Web. The GeoAnalyzer (compares national statistical data and generates charts and graphs) is now Web-based and greatly enhanced. The Britannica would do well to offer a browser add-on search bar and integrate with desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. A seamless experience is in the cards. Users must and will be able to ferret content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface. Some minor gripes: The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Britannica are surprisingly outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? Despite considerable improvement over the previous edition, the Britannica still consumes (not to say hogs) computer resource far in excess of the official specifications. This makes it less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. The Britannica uses a new graphic and text renderer. On some systems, the user needs to modify his or her desktop settings to get rid of jagged fonts and blurry photos. But that's it. Don't think twice. Run to the closest retail outlet (or surf to the Britannica's Web site) and purchase the 2007 edition now. It offers excellent value for money (less than $50) and significantly enhances you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world.
Slide 126: Project Gutenberg's Anabasis By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. Also published by United Press International (UPI) Last October, Project Gutenberg (PG) - the Web's first and largest online library of free electronic books - released a long-awaited DVD containing close to 10,000 of its titles. Since then, another 1000 texts were added to its burgeoning archives. The Project spawned numerous other Web sites. Some of them - such as Blackmask - offer free downloads and sell their own DVD with mostly Project Gutenberg eBooks in multiple formats. Others provide free browsers and library applications specific to PG's content. The man behind the Project - and, thus, the inventor of the ebook in 1971 - is Michael Hart. Always available to preach the gospel of free content and its benefits, he responded to UPI's questions, joined by Greg Newby, Chief Executive of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Q. In October 2003, you set a new target for Project Gutenberg of one million free ebooks by the year 2015. Are there so many books in the public domain? And what then? Michael: Archimedes said, "give me a lever long enough, and I will move the world." Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.net) is just such a lever, enabling a single person to create something of immense value that is made available to millions of people. If we have reached a mere 1.5% of the world's population, we have already given away a trillion eBooks. Project Gutenberg is a grass roots operation, never having had real funding or grants. For 30 years people said that we won't be around next year. When we started to get close to 10,000 eBooks, they finally stopped. There are lots of pretend eBook operations, but none of them produce all of their eBooks themselves, or have 10,000 of their own eBooks that can be read by virtually any text reader and word processor The next big step, after we have reached a million eBooks, will be to translate each of them into as many as 100 languages, thus making them available to an even larger audience. Regarding the number of titles in the public domain, during the 20th Century, there were many years in which over 50,000 books were published and the rate has been increasing throughout. Certainly there were a million titles published before 1923 that we can get our hands on, not to mention non-book items such as newspapers, magazines, brochures and advertisements, court records and other government documents, unpublished manuscripts and diaries, music, film, photographs, audio, and other art forms. Greg: My calculation, based on the US Library of Congress' copyright renewal records, is that there are about 1 million books published from 1923 - 1964 that are demonstrably in the public domain. We are seeking to "discover" these items. The copyrights of only 10% of all
Slide 127: published items are ever renewed. Q. Libraries on CD-ROMs are at least a decade old. Why did Project Gutenberg wait until now to issue its own DVD? Michael: Because there was always someone out there willing to do it for us. Because CD burners and DVD burners finally got so cost effective that we could afford to give away this kind of media. Because today you can't buy a computer off the shelf without a DVD drive. Until now, physical media could not compete on a cost effective basis with Internet downloads. Greg: We have some volunteers willing to create CD and DVD images and we now distribute them. But we hope to find many other channels to distribute our content for free or for a small fee. Q. Why don't simple scans or raw OCR (optical character recognition) output qualify as ebooks? What is the technological future of ebooks - is it Machine Translation and, if yes, why? Michael: Book scanning is outsourced half way across the world and the results are shoddy and often cannot be used as input for OCR programs, to create a text file, for instance. In contrast, once a true eBook is created, it has more value than a paper copy, because it can be copied ad infinitum, sent all over the world, even to a billion readers, and can be the basis for hundreds of new paper and eBook editions, all at virtually no cost. Moreover, people are not interested in scans. Some Project Gutenberg sites each hand out 10 million eBooks per year - impossible with scanned images or full text eBooks due to their bandwidth-consuming oversize. The "scanners" want to be the only source for "their" books, even when those books are in the public domain - and are willing to claim copyright on the public domain works of Project Gutenberg in the process. They deny themselves true access to the public. Our Unlimited Distribution Model calls for everyone to have a library of 10,000 eBooks, stored on a single DVD that costs only $1. People find this appealing. There are perhaps 10,000 volunteers to create our kind of ebooks - against only a few hundred people, all paid, working to create libraries of scans. Additionally, the huge scan files hold just a single book, are not searchable, cannot be copied, indexed, or cited by off the shelf applications, typos can't be corrected, and are not truly portable due to their size.
Slide 128: Project Gutenberg eBooks can be read in any manner the reader chooses - favorite fonts, margination, number of lines per page can all be modified. The reader becomes his or her own publisher. People with disabilities can use a speech engine to read the texts aloud. The visually challenged can change the font size. This is impossible to do with scans. With CD burners available for under $15, and DVD burners for $100, with blank media so cheap - the cost of individual books becomes literally "too cheap to meter." And that is the whole point of the Project Gutenberg eBook library. Greg: EBooks are editable and suitable for creating derivative works. They are not intended to be a depiction of a printed artifact, but a direct means of experiencing the author's writing. Today's best OCR still makes (on average) several errors per page of text, and requires human intervention to handle things like page headings and footnotes. We plan to make PG's ebooks easily transformable among different digital formats - XML, HTML, PDF, Braille, audiobooks, TeX, RTF and others. Features - such as fonts, or background colors - will be selectable. Machine translation (MT) will be another of these "formats", but it is currently technologically premature and immature. In cooperation with partner organizations in Europe and elsewhere, we hope to help to develop better MT software. We are supporting a project in Europe to augment MT with human translation, much as today's OCR must be helped by human proofreaders to achieve a low error rate. Q. How would you suggest to balance the need to protect the intellectual property rights of authors and the need to disseminate knowledge? Michael: The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in cahoots with commercial interests, leave no quarter for anyone, and seem to want permanent copyright. How do you achieve balance with someone who wants it all? Originally, copyright came about because the Stationers' Guild wanted to entrench their monopoly on the written word after it was shattered by the Gutenberg Press. Similarly, in the United States, every copyright extension has had the same purpose, to destroy the effectiveness of a new publishing technology. The 1909 Copyright Act destroyed the reprint houses made possible by the new steam and electric presses. The 1976 Copyright Act was enacted merely to stifle the effect of the Xerox machine. The 1998 Copyright Act was a response to the effects of the Internet. When it is difficult to make copies, it is legal because only the rich can do it. As soon as it becomes easy enough for the masses to have copies it is made illegal! Greg: Publishers and media houses are adept at appropriating the intellectual property rights of authors for their own profits. They are insensitive to the social contract of copyright that should result in the release of items to the public domain after a reasonable period. Life of the author + 70 years is not a reasonable period, neither is 95 or 120 years after the creation of the copyrighted work. Only a fraction of the items currently under copyright are actually available, from anyone at
Slide 129: any price. The only benefit accrues to media producers, who restrict the quantity of available prior materials so that their new material is more likely to be purchased. Q. The commercial ebook industry is going through a bloodbath. Cracked versions of the newest books are available online. Do you believe that ebooks, by nature, should be free or is there a place for commercial digital content? Greg: I favor the development of a commercial eBook industry. Project Gutenberg should be seen as a benefit to that industry, not an adversary. Similarly, I see commercial eBooks as being able to benefit Project Gutenberg, simply by getting more people to read eBooks. The industry is a victim of its own incompetence. They did not suffer from a lack of publicity or advertising, but from a lack of usability, standard formats, and sufficient content. They also adopted a crippling cost model that artificially keeps the price of a new hardcover at $20 or so, and a crippling industry model that necessitates enormous overhead to get their everdecreasing catalog of items, printed on dead trees, delivered to shopping malls. Fear of illicit copying (music and video) seems to dominate their thinking. At the same time, the leading organizations (the Author's Guild, the MPAA and the RIAA) are seeking to reduce the realm of fair use. Had these organizations embraced fair use, and introduced reasonable products at reasonable prices, they would not have needed to worry so much about piracy. The failure of the eBook is the failure of the industries behind it, not the failure of the idea or lack of a market. I think it will take new thinkers, and new companies, to garner success. Michael: Most of the bloodbath I have seen was among the commercial hardware eBook industry, people who wanted to control the reading habits of their customers, who did not want them to read anything that was not paid for and delivered by same commercial interests. When upgrades turn into downgrades to WIPOut access to public domain eBooks that used to be accessible before - that is a "Bad Thing." The beauty, the purpose, of eBooks is to re-create the Gutenberg Press. Books whose replication and dissemination all over the world cost nothing, that require no deforestation, warehousing and shipping, that do not end up in the landfills of the world. The purpose of eBooks is to create a library anyone can carry, weighing under one ounce per ten thousand volumes on standard writable DVDs, or one ounce per 25,000 books on double sided or double leveled DVDs. One kilo of these newer DVDs can hold 1,000,000 eBooks! And I plan to have just such double sided DVDs to hand out for the holidays two years from now. . . .
Slide 130: The Ubiquitous Project Gutenberg Interview with Michael Hart, Its Founder By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. November 15, 2005 Michael Hart conceived of electronic books (e-books) back in 1971. Most pundits agree that in the history of knowledge and scholarship, e-books are as important as the Gutenberg press, invented five centuries ago. Many would say that they constitute a far larger quantum leap. As opposed to their print equivalents, e-books are public goods: cost close to nothing to produce, replicate, and disseminate. Anyone with access to minimal technology or even the oldest computers can read e-books. Hart established Project Gutenberg - a repository of tens of thousands of public domain texts, freely available online. It is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind and has spawned numerous imitators, emulators, and mirror sites. E-books became a mainstream item with giant commercial enterprises - from Microsoft through Yahoo and Amazon to Google - entering the fray. "Now that e-books are becoming mainstream, the giant commercial enterprises such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Random House are attempting to co-opt the e-book world from its 'Unlimited Distribution' origin to the old 'Limited Distribution' paradigm of the common business plan." - says Hart. The Industry 1. As the man who pioneered e-books, how do you feel about Google Print Library, MSN Book Search, Wikibooks, and Yahoo's Open Content Alliance? Do you feel vindicated - or unjustly ignored? A. Actually both, and quite thoroughly in both cases. Each time an organization claims to have invented eBooks or eLibraries, I feel both vindicated and ignored, not that either one of these is new. However, vindication, for me, comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Project Gutenberg is the perfect example of a "grass roots" opposite of "The Trickle-Down Theories" that run the world today. We are truly, "Of the people, by the people, for the people." We are truly a "Trickle-UP" project, which has been virtually ignored simply because of those who follow the first rule of reporting:
Slide 131: "Follow The Money" can never follow Project Gutenberg, since we've never had any money whatsoever. However, if we DID get just a penny for every one of the trillion plus eBooks we have given away, based on reaching just 1% of the population, we would have enough to buy out Donald Trump, and the press would beat our doors down to give us coverage. Still, it is MUCH more important to show that Project Gutenberg has changed the world. . .without money. . .without being co-opted by the Big Boys, simply by continuing to do this job for 35 years. Today you can get over 50,000 titles from the Project Gutenberg sites, with no hassle, no money, no cookies, many even with no Internet. (via SneakerNet - This is when you put on your sneakers to run across the street with a CD-ROM or DVD. Our target audience is the person on the street, not the ivory tower scholars, who all want to take over how our books should look, and not the corporations, who will only want to take over in the same way they took over music downloads only AFTER they proved to be successful. Most business plans target the 1% of the population that is most geared towards their product, and this is why they consider a "million seller" to be a great success, while Project Gutenberg targets 100 million as a reasonable success. Most business plans are elitist by their very nature, as they target an extremely small portion of the population. Project Gutenberg was a new business plan, targeting virtually everyone and it has proven to be the most successful plan of how to use the Internet. Google? Google made lots of predictions and promises: "Today is the day the world changes," But as of now, Google hadn't really even gotten started, with only 3 downloadable eBooks we could find. However, in response to Yahoo's Open Content Alliance, Google had to finally start releasing books, over 300 days into their project. I would have LOVED to see Google put up 10,000 eBooks per week in the 10 months since their zillion dollar media blitz last December 14th (2004). They would be now approaching their 500,000th eBook, and Project Gutenberg would be working on ways to distribute them even more widely, do more proofreading, more formats, and all the other things that would keep the ball rolling.
Slide 132: Yahoo? Sad to say, the media, once burned, twice shy, seem to have pretty much ignored The Alliance. . .and Brewster Kahle, whom I KNOW could do more than Google has done, has ignored my requests for any information, so I can't tell you anything more than you've already heard. Obviously, the real test of any such effort is not in the first 10 months, but perhaps in the last 10 months. It would be GREAT to see the "10 million eBooks drive" end with 10 months in which millions of eBooks were created and put freely online but right now we have to wait to see how they do with the first few percent. I feel a need to quote myself here, something I said on July 4th, 1971, when I first invented eBooks and thought about the repercussions: "You will be able to hold the Library of Congress in one hand, but I am sure they will stop us from being able to do that." (Said at The Materials Research Lab, University of Illinois, in the Xerox Sigma V computer room) 2. How do you feel about e-book piracy? Is it partly a reaction to overly onerous copyright laws? Does PG work with intellectual property lawyers? A. I used to mention in my emails that there were thousands of "Pirates' Coves" online, but not one of them did eBooks, and that we would know when eBooks had finally "made it" when such things came into existence, just as the sales of the first million selling book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, were largely due to pirated editions. Anyone who says the publishers' history doesn't include piracy, just isn't looking. Pirated editions of Uncle Tom did the same for the publishing industry as Napster did for the music download industry. As for the book industry, the news media is constantly filled with stories about how a gallon of gas that was $.25 in 1955 has gone up 10 times over, but the price of paperbacks that were $.25 in 1955 is now $10, not $2.50, about 40 times as much, yet this is never mentioned. I can only remark here that readers of these books have been victims of price increases four times as much as drivers. Yet, you never once have seen a news story about the high prices book stores are charging as compared to gas stations, have you? So, some piracy indeed has to do with the price of books spiraling out of control and out of the reach of many readers.
Slide 133: The real question is: "Who is the victim of piracy here?" Is it the publishers, who have spent a billion dollars to make you think so - or the public, who is paying 4 times as much for paperback books as for gas, when they were the same price when paperbacks first came out? Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, some piracy has to do with translations that aren't available to the public, and some of it thrives in places where no legitimate copies are available at all. I have been to locations in Asia and Europe where the publishers simply don't care to sell - no matter how hard one looked - and then they complain that someone is making copies. In the US is it legal for libraries to make copies for patrons when there is no copy readily available, either due to being hard to get or because the price is too high. I presume this might also be the case in other countries. I think you will find this in Section 108 of the US Copyright Law. Obviously when materials are not readily available, people might be expected to take things into their own hands as the law above obviously provides for. As far as our "legal eagles" go, each Project Gutenberg has guidelines to stay within their local copyright. The really hard copyright research is handed over to our legal experts. 3. Do you think that Project Gutenberg - the largest online repository of public domain and copyrighted books - threatens the publishing industry's and media conglomerates' vested interests? PG is now distributed on DVD as well. Can this be construed as an incursion into traditional publishers' turf? Is disintermediation on the cards - the blurring of lines between author, publisher, and reader? A. The publishers view any competition as an incursion on their turf, particularly the expiration of any copyrights, whether the books were still in print or not. The publishers want to be the ONLY source of information, and to make it available on a "pay per" basis, so the greatest effect of these copyright extensions is not to have MORE books in bookstores, but FEWER, as that new copyright law prevents us from having public domain editions from the millions of books covered by the new copyright terms. If people knew the copyright laws were being manipulated each time a new technology comes along that COULD actually bring the public domain to the masses, then they probably would say or do something about it. But copyright laws are enacted quietly and behind smokescreens. The US Copyright Act of 1998 was passed in the same 24 hours as President Clinton was impeached, and behind closed doors - I tried to testify - with a voice vote only so there would be no voting
Slide 134: record. Thus, a common person would never have heard about it. Even I, who was trying to go testify, didn't learn about it for three weeks after the fact. Every time a new technology was invented that would stop the publishers' monopoly, copyright laws were enacted to stifle it. After all, the first copyright was simply reactionary political maneuvering by The Stationers' Guild to get their monopoly over the written word back, and the same reactionary politics caused the US Copyright Acts to counteract steam printing presses, electric printing presses, the Xerox machine, and now the Internet. US Copyright Acts were enacted: 1831 to stop the first high speed steam printing press of 1830 and because the first 28 year copyrights from the 1790 Copyright Act were starting to expire. Heaven forbid a copyright should expire! 1909 to stop electric presses from reprinting public domain works, etc. 1976 to stop public domain from flowing through xeroxes 1998 to stop public domain from flowing through the Internet Every time WE could copy the public domain, they extend copyright time after time after time. It couldn't BE any more obvious, except that the media won't say anything to us about copyright, so how could we know. . .it's not taught. We have been threatened with a number of lawsuits, mostly by lawyers who seem to know very little about copyright. After we explained what we are doing, under which laws, it turns out they were just "blowing smoke" at us, trying to make us honor rights they don't have, with any legal explanation of what law[s] would give them rights over the material in question. We're thinking of starting the OED, Oxford English Dictionary, and we expect more smoke from them, since they reacted this way at our initial announcement of this years ago, and threatened us when we posted "The Oxford Book Of English Verse," but they went away after getting me called on the carpet by a local University of Illinois Chancellor who happened to be Tom Cruise's uncle, and so worth the visit. By the way, this fellow was so Luddite he said he would quit the day he had to use e-mail. We don't have any affiliation with the UI, but Oxford was going to use all the muscle they could muster, we'll see what they do when we do our first OED posting. Regarding the DVD, anything that is free can be said to threaten that which is not
Slide 135: free, just as anything that is not free can be said to threaten that which is free. If you study the history of copyright, this will become quite obvious. As for disintermediation, it has been there all along. If you have computers you can be a publisher, an author, a reader. . .with a potential audience larger than any paper medium. Recently this has been exemplified by the first million selling music download by Gwen Stefani. . .. Just think what is going to happen when we have our first million selling music download that isn't run through a major music label! Think it can't happen? Just watch, and remember what happened after Dido's initial CD flopped with no push from her label: it became a multimillion seller after it was sampled in that famous music video. Not to mention that Lisa Loeb had a million seller on CD without ever being signed to a label. The day is coming when artists, musicians, authors, and other artists will be free from the contracts of the publishing industry that give them $50,000 out of each million dollars in sales. 4. Books are now being read on more platforms than ever - PDAs, iPods, cell phones, and even Sony Play Stations. How does this affect the very definition of the book? In other words, what is the future of the book in terms of format? A. My own view has always been to support as many ways to read eBooks as possible, so this doesn't change anything about my definition of eBooks. I LOVE it when I get an email from someone reading a PG eBook in Urdu on a cell phone in the Serengeti Plain in Africa! THAT is what PG is all about!!! We just added our 47th language at http://www.gutenberg.org and we have 104 languages at http://www.gutenberg.cc and 65 languages at http://pge.rastko.net (Project Gutenberg Europe), and are coming up on 500 eBooks at PG of Australia. (BTW, that 47th language above, is from New South Wales, Australia!). I can't wait until I get an email from someone reading in Kamilaroi! Regarding the various formats and platforms: We are working on a system to create the eBooks in an XMLish format that can be converted into dozens of other formats, on the fly, so that anyone can instantly get any of our eBooks in any popular format. Usually there are Project Gutenberg eBooks available for any new platform, such as the iPod, only a week after it comes out. We can't take credit for this, our readers and volunteers are the ones to come up with these instant versions, and who come up with nearly everything Project Gutenberg does. My own contribution is now mainly to hold things together, to make eBooks really
Slide 136: take off, to make sure everyone can get tens of thousands of free eBooks, someday tens of millions. 5. What is the most important thing you have learned in the 35 years that you have spent considering the world of eBooks? I would have to say the most important thing I learned in the past 35 years of thinking about eBooks is that the underlying philosophy since time immemorial is: "It is better if I have it, and YOU do NOT have it." The Philosophy of Limited Distribution. The primary quality of eBooks is that everyone can have them. The philosophy of Unlimited Distribution. This is perhaps the largest paradigm shift possible in world thought, shifting from the ideal that all things can be had only in limited supply ("supply side economics") to a new ideal that things can be produced such that everyone can have all they want. With eBooks, everyone can have all they want without any effort to limit what other people can have. Before eBooks this was only possible with the air supply. The real question is going to become more and more obvious as we move closer and closer to the technology of The Star Trek Replicator. What will happen when EVERYone CAN have everyTHING??? Will they pass laws against that, too??? 6. What should be the role of government in all this? We have had governments for ages that have SAID they would be delighted to feed, clothe, house, and educate the world, if it were not so expensive. Yet for 35 years no government has taken the steps to provide an electronic public library for the people. Add to this the number of academic institutions, cities, states, and nations, as well as charities, and you begin to realize that eBooks in some sense are being ignored by thousands of institutions who SAY their interest lies in providing for the masses. We have been capable of bringing every word ever written to a wider audience than
Slide 137: ever before for years, but the truth is a movement to deny access to this information has been underway for even longer in the form of continuous copyright extensions. The prime example, obviously the one I name my own work after when I started Project Gutenberg, is The Gutenberg Press. Before Gutenberg the average book cost as much as the average family farm, and thus was out of the question for the average person on the street, much less for the even more persons who lived in places that didn't have any paved streets. Books were virtually inaccessible before The Gutenberg Press, other than to the elite of wealth, education, and religion. Not only were books inaccessible to the person on the street, but even if they could manage to get a book the vast majority couldn't even come close to reading it. This provided a great wall insulating Haves from Haves-not. The Haves could read, the Haves-not could not read, and the advantage to the Haves is incalculable. If you look at the attitudes toward Unlimited Distribution of eBooks you will find that the primary motivation here is wall preservation: preserving Haves and Haves-not as classes in a time when billions could have every word ever written. There have been well over a billion computers made. There have been one billion cell phones added since the beginning of last year, and a another billion, or more, may be made before the end of next year, and each is going to be capable to serve an eBook reader. And this does not include millions of PDAs, iPods, etc., much less millions of game consoles that can be used for eBooks. The truth is that there have been enough eBook capable devices made that everyone who can read could have one and still some would be left over. At the time of The Gutenberg Press, hardly anyone could read, and yet it would have been impossible to deliver one copy for each of them, of whatever your favorite book was. But AFTER Gutenberg the number of books printed each year was greater than the population of the places that made them. Books, and thus literacy, had finally come to the masses. However, this did not appeal to those who had previously held monopoly power over all publication: The Stationers Company. By the time The Gutenberg Press had gotten a strong foothold, publishing millions of books per year, The Stationers had bid for new laws to make all publication, other than their own, a violation of the law.
Slide 138: They did this in two very powerful ways: 1. Everyone else's printing presses were declared illegal. 2. A "copyright" patent was granted The Stationers, to "own" the only license for publication of all words ever written. The first few attempts at such laws were met with such hatred that they were never enforced, and finally were withdrawn. However, after over 150 years of trying to convince dozens of courtiers and monarchs, and failing, "The Stationers Company" was finally granted a royal patent, and became the only legal operators of the dreaded Gutenberg Press that had ruined such monopoly powers they had had since the dawn of time Project Gutenberg 7. Is PG self-financing? Does it rely on donations? Does it receive any support or sponsorship from publishers and authors? A. We don't really deal with money all that much or with financing as most people see it. We are nearly all volunteers, so there is very little in the way of finances. We rely more on donations of time and energy than on donations of money. I, myself, haven't received my monthly paycheck for about 2.5 years. We don't receive any corporate sponsorship, or the various grants you hear about for making digital libraries. In fact, just this week, I received a copy of a small magazine about eBooks that mentioned a conference of some 30 eBook makers, but did not mention Project Gutenberg at all. Interestingly enough, they included a poster of a few dozen logos of eBook makers, and it appears they cut off the poster exactly where the words "Project Gutenberg" were in our own logo. They TALK about global information sharing, but they are really a collection of insiders doing insider things, and they are not really interested in getting eBooks to the common person , but rather mostly to those who are well-read and being welleducated already. In this sense, I agree with those who say there is still a great deal of Digital Divide. However, we aren't going to go under, either, as they always say we will. Those who are used to living with no money, don't depend on it. 8. What are the legal and operational relationships between PG, PG Australia, PG Europe, and Distributed Proofreaders? How does PG collaborate and fit in with P2P file sharing networks such as BitTorrent?
Slide 139: A. There are no legal or operational relationships that I know of, we don't even email each other very often. . .not for months at a time. Project Gutenberg is only registered as a trademark in the US and, as far as I know, we have no legal control over it in other countries, though the other Project Gutenberg efforts have been mostly very nice about using it the same way we do. Regarding P2P networks, we pretty much allow anyone to do filesharing with our eBooks, as long as they aren't charging anything. . .it's not something specific to BitTorrent or any specific system. We do happen to run both BitTorrent and provide MagnetLinks (p2p) ourselves, but we're open to essentially any file sharing. Although we have a rather lengthy trademark licensing policy, it allows essentially any non-commercial use, including p2p and other filesharing methods. 9. What is the future role of machine translation in PG and other e-text databases? A. This is perhaps the most important question you have raised, other than the issue that copyright will become permanent, and then we won't have any more public domain entries to work with. My personal prediction is that when we have 10 million eBooks online, MT (Machine Translation) will be about where OCR (Optical Character Recognition) was when the world first started to become really aware of Project Gutenberg in 1989, some 16 years ago. Then the next big project will be to translate those 10 million books into 100 different languages, so we will have a billion books to send to a billion potential readers. . . . For those who love big numbers, that's a QUADRILLION books given away. 10 million titles in 100 languages = 1 billion books 1 billion books to 1 billion people = 1 quadrillion books 10. What are you, at PG, planning for your 35th anniversary on July 4, 2006? We have only 7 months left to the 35th Anniversary of Project Gutenberg. If you have any particular ideals or ideas you would like to have included in these events surrounding July 4th, 2006, please let me know so I will be able to coordinate efforts to insure they will be all ready to go for a timely release and maximum dispersals to our various audiences. These would hopefully include: I. The 35th Anniversary Of Project Gutenberg II. The 20,000th Title Added at http://www.gutenberg.org
Slide 140: III. The 50,000th Title Added at http://www.gutenberg.cc IV. The 500th Title was just added at Project Gutenberg of Australia V. The 500th Title Added at Project Gutenberg of Europe VI. The xxth Title Added at Project Gutenberg of Canada VII. The Grand Opening of Project Gutenberg of the Philippines VIII. The Official Release of the first "Million Dollar DVD" In closing, I would like to say that we stand now at the REAL Digital Divide. . .the choice between free copying, from a free public domain. . .and only commercial copying from commercial sources. When everything is copyrighted, patented, trademarked, etc., what difference will it make if someone invents a Replicator, if it is illegal to copy anything? Will the copyright laws continue to be extended over and over and over and over again? Or will there someday be a world in which the promise of new technology is not reined in, or reigned over, by an old system designed to preserve the separation between the Haves and the Haves-not?
Slide 141: The Media Downloader's Profile By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. April, 2005 Interview granted to Tim Emmerling, a student at Eastern Illinois University. Q. What do you know about people illegally downloading files over the internet? A. I know what everyone knows from being exposed to the news media and to lawsuits filed by publishers: the phenomenon is widespread and most of the millions of exchanged files are music tracks and films (though book rip-offs are not unknown as well). Q. Why do you think people are taking part in these electronic transactions? Does the cost of purchasing the media come into play? A. It's a complex canvass of motivations, I guess. Many media products (especially in developing and poor countries) are overpriced in terms of the local purchasing power. Illegally downloading them is often an act of protest or defiance against what disgruntled consumers perceive as excessive profiteering. It may also be the only realistic way to gain ownership of coveted content. The fact that everything - from text to images - is digital makes replication facile and enticing. Illegal downloading also probably confers an aura of daring and mystique on the "pirates" involved (whose life may otherwise be a lot drearier and mundane). Additionally, these products resemble public goods in that they are nonrivalrous (the cost of extending the service or providing the good to another person is (close to) zero) and largely nonexcludable. Most products are rivalrous (scarce) - zero sum games. Having been consumed, they are gone and are not available to others. Public goods, in contrast, are accessible to growing numbers of people without any additional marginal cost. This wide dispersion of benefits renders them unsuitable for private entrepreneurship. It is impossible to recapture the full returns they engender. As Samuelson observed, they are extreme forms of positive externalities (spillover effects). Moreover, it is impossible to exclude anyone from enjoying the benefits of a public good, or from defraying its costs (positive and negative externalities). Neither can anyone willingly exclude himself from their remit. Needless to emphasize that media products are not public goods at all! They only superficially resemble public goods. Still, the fact that many books, music, and some films are, indeed, in the public domain further exacerbates the consumer's
Slide 142: confusion. "Why can I (legally) download certain books and music tracks free of charge - but not others?" - wonders the baffled surfer, who is rarely versed in the intricacies of copyright laws. Q. Do you think this leads to a feeling of disrespect toward the various pieces of media by the person that steals it so frequently? (If I download music all the time, will I lose interest in it?) A. I am not sure that the word "respect" is relevant here. People don't respect or disrespect music - they enjoy it, like it, or dislike it. But frequent illegal downloading of media products is, probably, the outcome of disrespect towards content intermediaries such as publishers, producers, and retail outlets. I don't know for sure because there is no research to guide us in this matter, but I would imagine that these people (wrongly) perceive content intermediaries as parasitic and avaricious. Q. Downloading is still a widespread act today. The threats of lawsuits and legal action against downloaders hasn't stopped the problem. What, in your opinion, needs to be done to stop this behavior? A. Law enforcement activities and lawsuits are already having an effect. But you cannot prosecute thousands of people on a regular basis without suffering a commensurate drop in popularity and a tarnished image. People do not perceive these acts as self-defense but as David vs. Goliath bullying. Sooner or later, the efficacy of such measures is bound to decline. Media companies would do better to adopt new technologies rather than fight them. They must come forth with new business models and new venues of dissemination of content. They have to show more generosity in the management of digital rights. They have to adopt differential pricing of their products across the board, to reflect disparities in earnings and purchasing power in the global marketplace. They have to transform themselves rather than try to coerce the world into their antiquated and Procrustean ways of doing things. Q. Psychologically speaking, is there a certain kind of person who is more likely to take part in this behavior? Do you feel that this is a generational issue? A. I cannot but speculate. There is a dearth of data at this early stage. I would imagine that illegal downloaders are hoarders. They are into owning things rather than into using or consuming them. They are into building libraries and collections. They are young and intelligent, but not affluent. They are irreverent, rebellious, and non-conformist. They may be loners who network socially only online. Some of them love culture and its artifacts but they need not be particularly computersavvy.
Slide 144: WEB TECHNOLOGIES AND TRENDS Thoughts on the Internet's Founding Myths By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. Whenever I put forth on the Internet's numerous newsgroups, discussion fora and Websites a controversial view, an iconoclastic opinion, or a much-disputed thesis, the winning argument against my propositions starts with "everyone knows that ...". For a self-styled nonconformist medium, the Internet is the reification of herd mentality. Actually, it is founded on the rather explicit belief in the implicit wisdom of the masses. This particularly pernicious strong version of egalitarianism postulates that veracity, accuracy, and truth are emergent phenomena, the inevitable and, therefore, guaranteed outcome of multiple interactions between users. But the population of Internet users is not comprised of representative samples of experts in every discipline. Quite the contrary. The barriers to entry are so low that the Internet attracts those less gifted intellectually. It is a filter that lets in the stupid, the mentally ill, the charlatan and scammer, the very young, the bored, and the unqualified. It is far easier to publish a blog, for instance, than to write for the New York Times. Putting up a Website with all manner of spurious claims for knowledge or experience is easy compared to the peer review process that vets and culls scientific papers. One can ever "contribute" to an online "encyclopedia", the Wikipedia, without the slightest acquaintance the topic one is "editing". Consequently, the other day, I discovered, to my utter shock, that Eichmann changed his name, posthumously, to Otto. It used to be Karl Adolf, at least until he was executed in 1962. Granted, there are on the Internet isolated islands of academic merit, intellectually challenging and invigorating discourse, and true erudition or even scholarship. But they are mere islets in the tsunami of falsities, fatuity, and inanities that constitutes the bulk of User Generated Content (UGC). Which leads me to the second myth: that access is progress. Oceans of information are today at the fingertips of one and sundry. This is undisputed. The Internet is a vast storehouse of texts, images, audio recordings, and databases. But what matters is whether people make good use of this serendipitous cornucopia. A savage who finds himself amidst the collections of the Library of Congress is unlikely to benefit much. Alas, most people today are cultural savages, Internet users the more so. They are lost among the dazzling riches that surround them. Rather than admit to their inferiority and accept their need to learn and improve, they claim "equal status". It
Slide 145: is a form of rampant pathological narcissism, a defense mechanism that is aimed to fend off the injury of admitting to one's inadequacies and limitations. Internet users have developed an ethos of anti-elitism. There are no experts, only opinions, there are no hard data, only poll results. Everyone is equally suited to contribute to any subject. Learning and scholarship are frowned on or even actively discouraged. The public's taste has completely substituted for good taste. Yardsticks, classics, science - have all been discarded. Study after study have demonstrated clearly the decline of functional literacy (the ability to read and understand labels, simple instructions, and very basic texts) even as literacy (in other words, repeated exposure to the alphabet) has increased dramatically all over the world. In other words: most people know how to read but precious few understand what they are reading. Yet, even the most illiterate, bolstered by the Internet's mob-rule, insist that their interpretation of the texts they do not comprehend is as potent and valid as anyone else's. When I was growing up in a slum in Israel, I devoutly believed that knowledge and education will set me free and catapult me from my miserable circumstances into a glamorous world of happy learning. But now, as an adult, I find myself in an alien universe where "culture" means merely sports and music, where science is decried as evil and feared by increasingly hostile and aggressive masses, and where irrationality in all its forms (religiosity, the occult, conspiracy theories) flourishes. The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the retreat, back into the ivory towers of a century ago. Increasingly, their place is taken by self-taught "experts", narcissistic bloggers, wannabe "authors" and "auteurs", and partisan promoters of (often self-beneficial) "causes". Dismal results ensue: fads like environmentalism and alternative "medicine" spread malignantly and seek to silence dissidents, sometimes by violent means; the fare served by the media now consists exclusively of soap operas and reality TV shows; Reading is on terminal decline; with few exceptions, the "new media" are a hodgepodge of sectarian view and fabricated "news"; the few credible sources of reliable information have long been drowned in a cacophony of fakes and phonies. It is a sad mockery of the idea of progress. The more texts we make available online, the more research is published, the more books are written - the less educated people are, the more they rely on visuals and sounds rather than the written word, the more they seek to escape reality and be anesthetized rather than be challenged and provoked. Even the ever-sliming minority who do wish to be enlightened are inundated by a suffocating and unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data, comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no way to tell the two apart, so a "democracy of
Slide 146: knowledge" reins where everyone is equally qualified and everything goes and is equally merited. This relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new "Dark Age", hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine enlightenment. The New Dark Ages Michael Hart's Response When I was growing up in a slum in Israel, I devoutly believed that knowledge and education will set me free and catapult me from my miserable circumstances into a glamorous world of happy learning. But now, as an adult, I find myself in an alien universe where functional literacy is non-existent even in developed countries, where "culture" means merely sports and music, where science is decried as evil and feared by increasingly hostile and aggressive masses, and where irrationality in all its forms (religiosity, the occult, conspiracy theories) flourishes. The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the retreat, back into the ivory towers of a century ago. Increasingly, their place is taken by self-taught "experts", narcissistic bloggers, wannabe "authors" and "auteurs", and partisan promoters of (often self-beneficial) "causes". The mob thus empowered and complimented feels vindicated and triumphant. But history cautions us that mobs have never produced enlightenment - only concentration camps and bloodied revolutions. the Internet can and will be used against us if we don't regulate it. Dismal results ensue: The Wikipedia "encyclopedia" - a repository of millions of factoids, interspersed with juvenile trivia, plagiarism, bigotry, and malice - is "edited" by anonymous users with unlimited access to its contents and absent or fake credentials. Hoarding has replaced erudition everywhere. People hoard e-books, mp3 tracks, and photos. They memorize numerous fact and "facts" but can't tell the difference between them or connect the dots. The synoptic view of knowledge, the interconnectivity of data, the emergence of insight from treasure-troves of information are all lost arts; In an interview in early 2007, the publisher of the New-York Times said that he wouldn't mourn the death of the print edition of the venerable paper and its replacement by a digital one. This nonchalant utterance betrays unfathomable ignorance. Online readers are vastly different to consumers of printed matter: they are younger, their attention span is far shorter, their interests far more restricted and frivolous. The New-York Times online will be forced into becoming a tabloid - or perish altogether; Fads like environmentalism and alternative "medicine" spread malignantly and seek to silence dissidents, sometimes by violent means; The fare served by the electronic media everywhere now consists largely of soap operas, interminable sports events, and reality TV shows. True, niche cable channels cater to the preferences of special audiences. But, as a result of this inauspicious fragmentation, far fewer viewers are exposed to programs and features on science, literature, arts, or international affairs; Reading is on terminal decline. People spend far more in front of screens - both television's
Slide 147: and computer - than leafing through pages. Granted, they read online: jokes, anecdotes, puzzles, porn, and e-mail or IM chit-chat. Those who try to tackle longer bits of text, tire soon and revert to images or sounds; With few exceptions, the "new media" are a hodgepodge of sectarian views and fabricated "news". The few credible sources of reliable information have long been drowned in a cacophony of fakes and phonies or gone out of business. It is a sad mockery of the idea of progress. The more texts we make available online, the more research is published, the more books are written - the less educated people are, the more they rely on visuals and soundbites rather than the written word, the more they seek to escape reality and be anesthetized rather than be challenged and provoked. Even the ever-slimming minority who do wish to be enlightened are inundated by a suffocating and unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data, comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no way to tell the two apart, so a "democracy of knowledge" reigns where everyone is equally qualified and everything goes and is equally merited. This relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new "Dark Age", hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine enlightenment. Bright Planet, Deep Web By: Sam Vaknin www.allwatchers.com and www.allreaders.com are web sites in the sense that a file is downloaded to the user's browser when he or she surfs to these addresses. But that's where the similarity ends. These web pages are front-ends, gates to underlying databases. The databases contain records regarding the plots, themes, characters and other features of, respectively, movies and books. Every user-query generates a unique web page whose contents are determined by the query parameters.The number of singular pages thus capable of being generated is mind boggling. Search engines operate on the same principle - vary the search parameters slightly and totally new pages are generated. It is a dynamic, user-responsive and chimerical sort of web. These are good examples of what www.brightplanet.com call the "Deep Web" (previously inaccurately described as the "Unknown or Invisible Internet"). They believe that the Deep Web is 500 times the size of the "Surface Internet" (a portion of which is spidered by traditional search engines). This translates to c. 7500 TERAbytes of data (versus 19 terabytes in the whole known web, excluding the databases of the search engines themselves) - or 550 billion documents organized in 100,000 deep web sites. By comparison, Google, the most comprehensive search engine ever, stores 1.4 billion documents in its immense caches at www.google.com. The natural inclination to dismiss these pages of data as mere re-arrangements of the same information is wrong. Actually, this underground ocean of covertintelligence is often more valuable than the information freely available or easily accessible on the surface. Hence the ability of c. 5% of these databases to charge their users subscription and membership fees. The average deep web site receives 50% more traffic than a typical surface site and is much more linked to by other sites. Yet it is transparent to classic search engines and little known to the surfing public.
Slide 148: It was only a question of time before someone came up with a search technology to tap these depths (www.completeplanet.com). LexiBot, in the words of its inventors, is... "...the first and only search technology capable of identifying, retrieving, qualifying, classifying and organizing "deep" and "surface" content from the World Wide Web. The LexiBot allows searchers to dive deep and explore hidden data from multiple sources simultaneously using directed queries. Businesses, researchers and consumers now have access to the most valuable and hard-to-find information on the Web and can retrieve it with pinpoint accuracy."
Slide 149: It places dozens of queries, in dozens of threads simultaneously and spiders the results (rather as a "first generation" search engine would do). This could prove very useful with massive databases such as the human genome, weather patterns, simulations of nuclear explosions, thematic, multi-featured databases, intelligent agents (e.g., shopping bots) and third generation search engines. It could also have implications on the wireless internet (for instance, in analysing and generating location-specific advertising) and on e-commerce (which amounts to the dynamic serving of web documents). This transition from the static to the dynamic, from the given to the generated, from the onedimensionally linked to the multi-dimensionally hyperlinked, from the deterministic content to the contingent, heuristically-created and uncertain content - is the real revolution and the future of the web. Search engines have lost their efficacy as gateways. Portals have taken over but most people now use internal links (within the same web site) to get from one place to another. This is where the deep web comes in. Databases are about internal links. Hitherto they existed in splendid isolation, universes closed but to the most persistent and knowledgeable. This may be about to change. The flood of quality relevant information this will unleash will dramatically dwarf anything that preceded it.
Slide 150: The Seamless Internet By: Sam Vaknin http://www.enfish.com/ The hype over ubiquitous (or pervasive) computing (computers everywhere) has masked a potentially more momentous development. It is the convergence of computing devices interfaces with web (or other) content. Years ago - after Bill Gates overcame his misplaced scepticism - Microsoft introduced their "internet-ready" applications. Its word processing software ("Word"), other Office applications, and the Windows operating system handle both "local" documents (resident on the user's computer) and web pages smoothly and seamlessly. The transition between the desktop or laptop interfaces and the web is today effortlessly transparent. The introduction of e-book readers and MP3 players has blurred the anachronistic distinction between hardware and software. Common speech reflects this fact. When we say "e-book", we mean both the device and the content we access on it. As technologies such as digital ink and printable integrated circuits mature - hardware and software will have completed their inevitable merger. This erasure of boundaries has led to the emergence of knowledge management solutions and personal and shared workspaces. The LOCATION of a document (one's own computer, a colleague's PDA, or a web page) has become irrelevant. The NATURE of the document (email message, text file, video snippet, soundbite) is equally unimportant. The SOURCE of the document (its extension, which tells us on which software it was created and can be read) is increasingly meaningless. Universal languages (such as Java) allow devices and applications to talk to each other. What matters are accessibility and logical and user-friendly work-flows. Enter Enfish. In its own words, it provides: "...Personalized portal solution linking personal and corporate knowledge with relevant information from the Internet, ...live-in desktop environment providing co-branding and customization opportunities on and offline, a unique, private communication channel to users that can be used also for eBusiness solutions, ...Knowledge Management solution that requires no user set-up or configuration." The principle is simple enough - but the experience is liberating (try their online flash demo). Suddenly, instead of juggling dozens of windows, a single interface provides the tortured user (that's I) with access to all his applications: e-mail, contacts, documents, the company's intranet or network, the web and OPC's (other people's computers, other networks, other intranets). There is only a single screen and it is dynamically and automatically updated to respond to the changing information needs of the user. "The power underlying Enfish Onespace is its patented DEX 'engine.' This technology creates a master, cross-referenced index of the contents of a user's email, documents and Internet information.