the evolution of the ebook.

Books are slowing become computer games.  I keep hearing these futurists marveling at the infinite possibilities opening from the publishing of ebooks and gushing as if these improvements are something new.  But we know they are not. 

Computers games have done everything that ebooks are doing now.  The ereader is just a much more portable computer and the ebook is still just a story whether it's mostly words, or not.

• What if your book had moving or scrolling text? Computer games already did it.
• What if your book played music composed specifically for the current chapter of the story? Computer games already did it.
• What if your book included moving images, videos, changing backgrounds, mood lighting? Computer games already did it.
• What if there were no words at all, but sweeping musical scores, scenes performed by actors and explosions? Jerry Bruckheimer already did it..

eBooks are evolving to include music and video.

And one day your book will just be a movie, but you'll still tell everyone you're reading.

eBooks: How Libraries Got It Wrong

I just saw this:

"The staff at the Douglas County Libraries in Colorado have been implementing for the past year an innovative ebook lending model that gives the library actual ownership of the ebook file, rather than leasing access to it via a third party. The library has its own content server and after striking deals with various publishers it loads the files onto the server and applies the requisite DRM before lending."

And the word that should be kicking you in the ass right now is innovative.

This lending model should never have been view as innovative; this should have been the model since the beginning.  Libraries should only have ever managed their own e-content on their own servers and distributed only the books from publishers willing to accept how we do things.

The fact that this is considered new, means libraries fucked up.

We should have started with this model even if it meant that we would NEVER have bestsellers for our patrons.  Because this model is like our print lending model: we own the materials.

But it's not too late for some of you.  And maybe not most of you.  There still might be money for you to begin a project like this where you host your own content.  And then you can reduce your budget for all that leased crap from the Big 6 that you don't own and can't control until a few years down the road, you'll have a good ebook lending model.  And this should be your goal.

Because what libraries are doing now, chasing bestsellers, and begging publishers to play fair, is just fucked up and makes us look like punks, pussies, wimps -- pick your least or most offensive moniker.   Because I'm just trying to get your attention.

And librarians have too much money and knowledge and talent and innovation to not be finding new solutions to this problem.  And I'm glad Douglas County is sharing theirs.

Libraries: Crowdfunding our asses off.

Somebody always wants libraries to be different and they often try to scare us into changing what we do: "Libraries had no competition for most of our history. "

WE STILL HAVE NO COMPETITION.  Name one other source that takes a little bit of money from lots of people to offer a service like we do.  Parks? No.  I haven't been able to take a tree home for a month and then return it.  You can probably check out a basketball for an hour, but you can't take it to bed with you.  Or maybe you can, but I don't know what that's called.

Public Libraries are such a unique idea, that BUSINESSES ARE CONTINUALLY TRYING TO COPY US.  But for much more money than libraries collect.  Your cable company want $100 a month and so does your phone company.  Your streaming video company want $8 to $15 a month.  And the only advantage they have over libraries is a better delivery system.

But libraries provide crowdfunded wireless internet access.  And crowdfunded movies and music and reading. And so long as you are within our wireless distribution range, you get all that pretty damn fast.

We also offer free delivery with no minimum order.  You can get 1 or 50 items shipped throughout our lending area and delivered to locations near you.

The only way I see that libraries have competition is for your free time.  And in that way, yes, libraries are in trouble.  Because you are all lazy bastards.  You're willing to pay to have everything sent to you which is something libraries can't do.  Not for what you pay us, anyway.  Sure, we could make it easier, one-clickier, to get content to your phone or tablet while you eat your lunch while you're on the toilet.  Because you're so busy.  Not working.  From where do you get your money, anyway?

You don't have to believe me, but one day you will live in a world of panem et circenses and you will be happy.  Your phone will link to your Facebook account and for every poll or game you forward to a friend or everything you like or tag, or each new piece of private information you update will earn Facebook credits and that will be your job.  Because Facebook needs you now, more than ever, in order to keep their stock from slipping down the crapper.  And then you'll use your Facebook credits with the Facebook partners like McDonald's or Netflix and that's how you will get food and good times.  And you won't need a traditional job any more.  Well, traditional jobs won't exist, anyway.

So stop scaring the librarians.  They're already scared enough.  With all the kids drinking the hand sanitizer, there's hardly enough left to kill all the germs.

Why Clifford Stoll is RIGHT about the internet

Clifford Stoll is a kook.  And I'm sure he'd be the first to admit it.  But he was right about the internet.

"No, he's wrong," you say,  "He even admitted he was wrong in a comment on BoingBoing."

No, I think he was being kind.  Like when someone really really stupid manages to accomplish some remedial task and we say, "Good.  Good, for you."  What he really tells us is here, the saddest part about how our lives have been influenced by the internet, "important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued."

You can laugh at his naivete, but you can't deny that the internet has devalued our interactions.  And I'm assuming that you've ever "Like"d  something or tweeted your feelings in 140 characters.

But technologically, Stoll was way, way off.  Everything Stoll claimed computers couldn't be, computers have become. They are small; they are fast; they store more data and perform more complex and esoteric functions than he could have conceived.

In 1995, Stoll wrote that

• no online database will replace your daily newspaper,
• no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and
• no computer network will change the way government works.

source: Newsweek

And he was wrong on all 3 counts.

But that's only because technology gives the appearance of his wrongness: replacement never truly happened .  Ask any librarian if online databases are easier to use than newspapers and you won't get a clear consensus. And teachers use technology to teach, but the teacher is still essential to the learning process.  And government is tied to computers in ways we could never understand, but government progress still moves at the traditional bureaucratic glacial pace.

I think how Stoll could see what we can't is based on his perspective on the evolution of the internet.  He is someone old enough to see it from outside.  He could compare it to a different world and didn't like what he saw.  But fewer of us know his world.  We've been deep in the internet for almost 20 years.  For many, the internet can't be removed from real life. But someone his age would have seen the doorways and windows to the internet from outside, whereas most of us have never stood in his place.

Stoll predicted wrongly because he underestimated people and how people actually wanted all that "unfiltered data."  People became the filter.  Wikipedia is one result.  

I like to use the movie The Matrix to think about how we view the internet.  Neo was born into the matrix and didn't know there was something outside of it. And when he learned, it changed him.  But Cypher knew that the matrix wasn't real, and he didn't care.  To him, the real world sucked.

And in our world, computers have replaced human interaction.  Virtual people have replaced people.

And this is absolutely where Stoll predicted correctly.  He concluded in his Newsweek article, "What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact."  He could never have imagined that in the 10 years following those words that we have successfully replaced physical contact with emotional contact and that emotional contact would be derived from tweets and pokes and updates and texts.

Those people Stoll spoke to in 1995 are dead.  If I had the time, I might argue that they died in 2001 when the people of the world decided they were too afraid to go outside.  And I don't I'd be wrong.  One day, some other weirdo will prove that 9/11 influenced the iPhone.

Apart from technology, mobile devices, wifi, broadband internet and HD video, everything Stoll said is true:

•  "Cybershopping" is dangerous. That hasn't changed. Probably never will.
• We continue to buy more and more "expensive toys"while convincing ourselves they will change our lives.
• And sifting through data on the Internet is still difficult just as it was 2 years before Google.

All true. But also untrue.  The internet has changed us.  We are all willing to do things online in 2012 that not one of you would have imagined you would do in 1992 (the first year I went online).  Simply, you play computer games.  You play games with people you've never seen or met.  The movie WarGames was from 1983 and even 10 years later, computer games were still only for nerds.  Now you find attractive people tapping away at games on their phones, beautiful people, people who should be fucking each other!  What happened to us?

We have been changed by the internet.  You laugh at Stoll, but you are not the same species.  He is analog and you are digital.

So where is this leading? There is discussion today about whether the internet has anything new left to offer.  As if innovation has stagnated behind the Apple-Amazon-Google-Facebook turf wars.  These companies seem to want to keep their users locked into proprietary domains.  From where will innovation come when these innovators won't share?

But maybe that's where the next generation of innovation will happen -- in breaking down those walls.

Yet for his goofs, Stoll gave me one of the wisest pieces of wisdom, ever.  On one television program, he espoused having two computers, one for online and one that never touches an outside network. Because that was the only way to guarantee that your data would be safe. One day, you'll wish you'd listened to him.

WHAT THEY SHOULDA DONE: SUPERNATURAL

At the start of Season 7 ("Meet the New Boss") in the television show Supernatural when Castiel releases all of the souls back into Purgatory, what they shoulda done is make Castiel also damage the flow of time itself.

So that for part of the season, these distortions in time catch Sam and Dean and they could time-travel and fight Nazis and dinosaurs and just have fun with the episodes. 

And on one episode, they could end up on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. 

And DEAN would say, "Oh, Sam, I think this is the ..."

SAM: Don't say it.

THEY EXIT THE BRIDGE TO A HALLWAY

DEAN: No.  This IS ...

SAM:  Don't say it.  This cannot be the [gestures to everything].  Because that's not real.  That's just a TV show; it's not real.  So if we were there, then that would mean that we weren't real, that we're a TV show.  And that's not true because we're real.

A FEMALE CREW MEMBER PASSES IN STANDARD StarTrek:TOS MINI-DRESS UNIFORM

And the usual sexual double entendres follow. 

That episode would have been a blast.

The Nude Model's Library

Surprise, I look at online porn.  But it's for research.

And, as if you didn't know, there are naked ladies on the internet.  As you yourself might be a naked lady on the internet.  I'd like to think so.

But sometimes, when I'm not looking at naked ladies, for research, I look around the naked ladies for books.  There are many naked lady photos online where they pose with or near collections of books.  And I often wonder how this collection was acquired, whether by random used bookstore bargain bins or if this is an actual collection from some personal library.  In many photos, the book tittles, ... oh, look, I accidentally wrote "tittles" instead of titles.  Silly me.  Many of the book titles are in Russian or German or some other language I don't really need for my research, so I don't pay too much attention.  But then there are books in English and I take notice.  I don't have any research on what the Nude Gentlemen are reading. 

IN THIS ONE PHOTO which I won't post (okay, I will) , I can read some titles clearly:

Connelly, Michael. Brass Verdict, The
Coonts, Stephen. Disciple, The
Douglas, John. Anatomy of Motive, The
Flynn, Vince. [can't read title]
Green, Simon R. Daemons Are Forever
Green, Simon R. Unnatural
Lansdale, Joe R. Captains Outrageous
Marshall, Micheal. Intruders, The
McGarrity, Micheal. Death Song
Morrison, Helen. My Life Among the Serial Killers
Neuro-linguistic Programming for DUMMIES
Parker, Robert B.  Pale Kings and Princes
Parker, Robert B. Back Story
Parker, Robert B. Chance
Parker, Robert B. Cold Service
Parker, Robert B. Hugger Mugger
Parker, Robert B. Hush Money
Patterson, James. Double Cross
Rosenberg, Joel C. Twelfth Imam, The
Thomas, Ross. Cold War Swap, The
Thomas, Ross. Money Harvest, The
Thor, Brad. Last Patriot, The

Do these book titles say anything about the nude model?  Are they meant to convey some meaning?  Am I looking at the entirely wrong area of the photo?

So my question is this, and this for research:
As a librarian, when you see images of naked people posing with books, do you look at the titles to see what the naked people are reading?

Is there a future in pursuing this area of library research?  Do you think I could earn a Ph.D.for recording and analyzing the books found in nudie and porn photos and videos?  Because I probably already have enough research for three.

WHAT THEY SHOULDA DONE: 30 Rock

Since the NBC television show 30 Rock is ending soon, it's too bad they never included this scene.  But this is what they shoulda done:

Tracy should have won a Nobel Prize so he could wear a chain with a pendant that says NEGROT (Nobel, Emmy, Grammy, Razzie, Oscar, Tony) and be proud while Liz is appalled.

LIZ: Do you see what that says, Tracy?

TRACY: Nobel. Emmy. Grammy. Razzie. Oscar. Tony.  N-E-G-R-O-T.  Damn.  The "T" is silent, isn't it,  Liz Lemon?  Damn.

LIZ: Yes, Tracy.

TRACY:  As I already had my other awards, it just shows that the Nobel Committee is racist.