If he is looking for One Last Thing, saving journalism would be the Holy Grail. … The device will have to make readers forget — really forget — the printed page. E-readers, for all that they do, don’t do this yet.

After detailing Jobs’ accomplishments in invigorating other industries, as mentioned above, Abell concludes with these words:

Even given this track record — and what we choose to believe is the all-trumping motivator of perfecting his legacy — a device-centric initiative that saves newspapers and magazines that seem to be in perpetual, some say irretrievable, decline, sounds next to impossible.

But is anybody seriously willing to bet against the house — of Jobs?

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

I was actually thinking of taking Dempsey’s thought a step further, and proposing the idea of including Google’s word clouds in library catalogs. But when I started looking more closely at GBS word clouds I found problems — The first thing I noticed in the cloud for Origin of Species (below and here at GBS [scroll down to Common terms and phrases]) is that it has the plant-related words “seeds,” “pistil,” and “pollen,” but does not have the word “plant(s).” Hmm, that’s odd — So I searched for “plants” and found that there are in fact 100 occurrences of it in the book. Then I clicked some of the terms in the cloud shown below, and found that the number of results often does not correlate well with the font size of the word (which is what’s supposed to happen in a word cloud) …

Note that the words “admit,” “cause,” and “male,” which are in the smallest font, have more occurrences than other terms with larger fonts — “Asa Gray” and “pistil” in particular.

I tried several books, and found similar results in all of them — The font size of terms in the word cloud does not show much correlation with the number of occurrences of words in the books. In Snippet view books (as at least one of the books in Dempsey’s article is) the problem is not apparent because the number of search results is limited to three links in the book, making it impossible to determine how many occurrences of the term there are.

I suspect that the GBS word cloud problem has not been noticed more because the word clouds are rather “buried” — Not on the default Read (Front cover) page, but inconspicuously down in the middle of the Overview page, probably not seen by the vast majority of users.

We need more documentation about word clouds in GBS — How are they derived? What exactly are they intended to mean? Google has said about other metadata problems that they are working on them, and that they’ll slowly get fixed. Hopefully, that will apply to word clouds also. Maybe Google thinks of word clouds as still being “in beta” — they were, after all, only launched in July — and that’s why they’re giving them a low profile.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

Google as Burglar of One Million books? – #GBS settlement, Steve Pociask, Amer Consumer Inst (Forbes) http://bit.ly/MqovK
10:55 AM Aug 28th from web

I also added the name of the author and his connection with the Amer Consumer Inst, which I think added interest to the tweet, and which had gotten little attention in previous tweets on the article.

So, the simple lesson — When tweeting a link to an article, remember there’s no rule that you have to use the title that the author used. If it’s boring and unexciting and you think your followers’ eyes will gloss over reading it, use something else! READ THE ARTICLE and see if it has an interesting theme that’s not brought out by the title, and base your tweet on that instead.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Readers will be the creators of the most important metadata describing books. Period. There is no second-guessing that conclusion, which has been proved again and again in every hypertext environment in human history. Defining the problem of book metadata without treating the reader as the fulcrum of the process is missing the point.

Poking around a bit more to find connections between “metadata” and the “metaphorical marginalia” of user annotations, I found interesting commentary in 2005 around David Weinberger’s article Crunching the metadata (Excerpt from Weinberger, boldface added):

We’re going to need massive collections of metadata about each book. Some of this metadata will come from the publishers. But much of it will come from users who write reviews, add comments and annotations to the digital text, and draw connections.

As the digital revolution continues, and as we generate more and more ways of organizing and linking books–integrating information from publishers, libraries and, most radically, other readers–all this metadata will not only let us find books, it will provide the context within which we read them. … The real challenge to traditional publishing today comes not from the digitizing of books, then, but from the very nature of the Web itself. Using metadata to assemble ideas and content from multiple sources, online readers become not passive recipients of bound ideas but active librarians, reviewers, anthologists, editors, commentators, even (re)publishers.

Weinberger doesn’t use the word “marginalia.” But the word IS used in Ben Vershbow’s articles commenting on Weinberger. In Vershbow’s first article (tagged with “marginalia”) he says:

The book in the network is a barnacled spirit, carrying with it the sum of its various accretions. Each book is also its own library by virtue not only of what it links to itself, but of what its readers are linking to, of what its readers are reading.

And in another article by Vershbow that continues on the same theme, Daniel Anderson, in a comment, is reminded of Billy Collins’ poem, “Marginalia,” which, he says, “points to the conversations that take place as readers jot their reactions in the margins of books.” Excerpt from the poem, as quoted by Anderson:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. …

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer . . .

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

****************

The Talmud page with marginalia at left is from Vershbow’s article Web marginalia.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Kelly’s comments parallel the static print libary of Borges and the flowing, connected library of Rushdie:

(Kelly) The common vision of the library’s future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Metadata as the real magic (cross-linked … extracted … indexed … analyzed …) — Mike Cane should like this! :

(Kelly) Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Clive Thompson says the community of digital book readers will transform books by building a web of linked commentaries. Kelly says much the same:

Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books. … Books, including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.

Peter Brantley imagines a world in which digital books become connected as long winding rivers that flow together. Here’s Kelly sounding similar:  …

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. … This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together.

Rushdie describes the countless currents in the Stream of Stories “weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry” — Likewise Kelly:

When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. … In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book. … So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? …

What Happens When Books Connect? – This is the title for one of the sections of Kelly’s article from which most of the quotes above are taken, and it is really an overriding theme for all of the them — The digitized books of the future will talk easily to each other, which will transform books in the same way the Web has already transformed other aspects of culture.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

All of this hidden information — exploded out, made explicit — turns an ebook from a dumb object into a smart object. … With such exploded data, an eBook becomes a ticket for admission to a vast collection of databased information.

An eBook becomes a local terminal connected to a growing and living cloud of associated information, with meanings and implications no publisher or writer can currently imagine. It lets the reader make those connections. It’s an eBook that can do something. … And this is precisely why Google wants the Book Search settlement to go through: it sees that as the future. Google is staffed by geeks who juggle information with an expertise that print publishers lack. … Google makes information do things.

Print publishing freezes information into a static object — An object that stands alone, disconnected, unable to do anything. … There needs to be another layer slathered over [the Publisher]. The information geeks. The ones who will take the static objects, extract the hidden information, and database it. … They are new publishers for a new age.

This metadata has value. And that value will increase as it ages. As new connections are formed, and new data is added, its value increases exponentially. The metadata value of a publisher could equal, if not surpass, that of the works on which it’s based.

Metadata will become a multi-billion dollar business. … The entire global economy is built on metadata. And it’s accessing that metadata that would justify more than a five-dollar price for an eBook. Consumers would see [that] an investment has been made to turn a text data dump into something active and intelligent. … no longer a flat, linear collection of words. Dimensions have been added that breathe and grow. The eBook price becomes a ticket. People are … buying into an ongoing experience.

Metadata Librarians will Rule the World …

Metadata, of course, is a concept that’s near-and-dear to the hearts of librarians … Which led to a bit of serendipity in thinking about the title of this article. I found in Google that no one else has used the phrase “Metadata will Rule the World.” But in playing around with various combinations I did discover the phrase “Librarians will one day rule the world” — in a 2004 blog post by Robert Wolfe (@metametadata), who works in Metadata services at the MIT library.

Of course, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to use the picture here of Wolfe’s Librarian Trading Card — “That’s right, I’ve got special metadata related powers.” (How do you like that, Mike Cane!)

The last posting on the Metametametadata blog is August, 2006 — Too bad — Robert Wolfe has interesting ideas.

Cane: Metadata turns an eBook into an active, growing, living cloud …

Cane’s contrasting of living eBooks with print publishing’s static books is reminiscent of the language used in the articles I wrote in May on the Stream as the new metaphor of the Web, particularly the article on Salman Rushdie’s Stream library & JL Borges’ Print library — Rushdie’s vision of books twisting and stretching and weaving in and out of each other sounds much like Cane’s vision in the quote above.

Eric Rumsey is @ericrumsey

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

[eink, ereaders, eBooks]

Thompson had no link to Marshall’s work, so I got in touch with her, to get more details. As she describes in her papers (listed below), the motivation for her work is to discover effective methods of utilizing readers’ annotations of eBooks. In her early research, done mostly in the 1990’s, she observed students, and interviewed them, as they looked for used textbooks, to see if they favored books because of the nature of the annotations in them.

After confirming that students do, in fact, value annotations, Marshall went on to study the nature of the annotations to find patterns that could be used as models for eBook annotating. In the example below, on the left are four copies of the same page from different reader’s books with their annotations. On the right is the middle paragraph from the page, which all four readers annotated, to determine more precisely what was marked by each reader — which turns out to be the first sentence in all four cases. (The graphics are from the Marshall 2008 paper)

Kudos to Marshall for this ingenious, basic, application of crowdsourcing to books! It’s great that her little-noticed work, started way back in the mid-1990’s, is finally gaining recognition, as eBooks come closer to reality, and producers look for ways to make them more usable.

As Mitch Ratcliffe said in April, creating marginalia (an old name for the annotations of Marshall) is “an art made for the era of crowdsourcing.”

Selected papers of Cathy Marshall on annotations:

• Marshall, C.C. Collection-Level Analysis Tools for Books Online Proceedings of the 2008 CIKM Books Online Workshop. (Napa, California, October 30, 2008), ACM Press, New York. [Slides from presentation]
• Marshall, C. Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation in Proceedings of ACM Hypertext ‘98, Pittsburgh, PA (June 20-24, 1998) pp. 40-49.
• Marshall, C. “Annotation: from paper books to the digital library” in Proceedings of the ACM Digital Libraries ‘97 Conference, Philadelphia, PA (July 23-26, 1997), pp. 131-140.

Complete list of Marshall’s publications

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn’t embraced the digital age. … Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe? … To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers … stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading. … Every other form of media that’s gone digital has been transformed by its audience. … The only reason the same thing doesn’t happen to books is that they’re locked into ink on paper. … Release them, and you release the crowd.

Thompson says that “the crowd” of readers is already at work transforming even print books. He reports on research done by e-Book researcher Cathy Marshall on students buying used textbooks — She has found that they examine books in the bookstore to find ones that have notes by previous readers — high-lighting and handwritten notes on the pages — and they prefer the ones that they judge to have the “smartest” notes. This rudimentary utilization of “the crowd,” says Thompson, is really nothing new: “Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia.” Thompson cites current digital examples of the transformative use of the crowd:

BookGlutton, a site that launched last year, has put 1,660 books online and created tools that let readers form groups to discuss their favorite titles. Meanwhile, Bob Stein, an e-publishing veteran from the CD-ROM days, put the Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook online with an elegant commenting system and hired seven writers to collaboratively read it.

Thompson closes with this: “Books have been held hostage offline for far too long. Taking them digital will unlock their real hidden value: the readers.”

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Haroun looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and [the Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

Pow! Isn’t this a strikingly clear metaphorical description of the Web Stream that we all swim in every day? My first idea of a title for this article was “Did Salman Rushdie predict the Web?” I decided that was a bit too presumptuous  — But not by much — The passage does indeed verge on prediction. It was written in 1990 — Interestingly, the same year that Tim Berners-Lee “invented” the Web. It’s tempting to imagine the left-brained engineer (Berners-Lee) and the right-brained artist-seer (Rushdie) both envisioning the future Web in their own ways — Berners-Lee in outlining his Web ideas at CERN, and Rushdie in writing Haroun.

How has this passage and its Webishness gone unnoticed for so many years? Haroun is a story on many levels — Rushdie wrote it for his young son, and it’s often put in the category of “childrens’ literature.” I suspect this is the main reason it hasn’t been read often enough by grown-up Web users for someone to have seen Rushdie’s Stream of the Web metaphor. (Note that Haroun is on a prominent list of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time)

How about the library connections in the passage? As a librarian, it certainly occurs to me that it could be viewed as being especially about libraries, maybe even seen as a threat to the traditional print library (”storeroom of yarns”). But I think, to the contrary, that Rushdie’s passage does the library world a great service, ushering us into the “liquid tapestry” of the digital Ocean, in which the Stream of “the library” will be able to “weave in and out” with the “thousand thousand and one different currents” outside of the traditional library world. Recent discussions of Google Book Search and orphan books show that the world is eagerly anticipating the stories in libraries being put into “fluid form.” And, in fact, library leader Peter Brantley, in commentary on GBS written in January 2009, talking about the coming age of digital books, uses language reminiscent of Rushdie: “We stride into a world where books are narratives in long winding rivers … and seas from which all rivers and rain coalesce.”

Speaking of the library world — As mentioned, there has been a notable lack of anyone else seeing a connection between the Rushdie passage and the Web. But the closest I’ve seen is in a paper co-authored by an engineer (JH Lienhard) and two librarians (JE Myers, TC Wilson), that was written in 1992, Surfing the Sea of Stories: Riding the Information Revolution (Mechanical Engineering 1992 Oct; 114(10): 60-65). This does an excellent job of connecting the Rushdie passage to the coming digital revolution, as it was seen in 1992, and contains the perceptively-done graphic in this article (above). But of course the full-blown Web was not born until 1995, so this view is limited. (The paper is summarized in the transcript of a radio program about it.)

Nudges for writing about this in the last week: First, In his blog article, Is The Stream What Comes After the Web?, Nova Spivack suggests that the metaphor of The Stream may soon replace The Web. The article doesn’t mention Rushdie, but it has elicited much discussion on Twitter, and someone would surely make the connection soon. Spivack does mention Twitter, saying that it and other microblogging systems are “the best example of the Stream,” which is related to the other nudge I’ve gotten, a blog article by Joff Redfern, Twitter is becoming the Ocean of the Stream of Stories. This is short , consisting mainly of the Rushdie quote above, but with its title it would likely be connected to Spivack’s Stream and Rushdie’s Streams of Stories sooner or later. Taken together, I think the articles by Spivack and Redfern indicate that Twitter is bringing to peoples’ minds the “stream-like” nature of the Web — The way big streams (e.g. swine flu 2 weeks ago) weave in and out with the day-to-day small streams of peoples’ lives on the Twitter ocean, with the stories constantly rewriting themselves.

Related articles:

• The Stream of Streams has arrived, 2009 – Nova Spivack says that the new metaphor of the Web is the Stream
• Digital books: Narratives in long winding streams, Peter Brantley, 2009
• The Web as a Stream of Stories – Spivack and Brantley flow together into Rushdie’s Stream
• Rushdie’s Stream library & Borges’ print library

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey