Category Archives: Media ecology

The Digital Public Library of America Project

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From the The Harvard Crimson.

Harvard is solidifying plans to lead one of the largest national efforts to create a digitized public library.

The proposed Digital Public Library of America will serve as an open online collection of digitized books and texts that project leaders hope could one day incorporate every volume ever published.

Guided by a Steering Committee at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the project remains in its initial planning phase. But in the wake of a New York District Court’s ruling last month against the Google Books Library Project, citing concerns of monopoly power, the spotlight has fallen on the DPLA, which will allow free access to the volumes.

There is a “need to pivot very quickly from the discussion phase to the implementation phase,” said Harvard Law Professor John G. Palfrey ’94, a co-director of the Berkman Center and a leader in the DPLA project.

The DPLA will be the product of a collaboration between the largest library systems in the nation, already including Harvard, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution.

“The promise of the idea is attracting a lot of people at least to be involved even if they are skeptical of our ability to pull it off,” he said. “We have many of the biggest players at the table.”

If implemented successfully, the project will “make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all,” according to its online concept note.

Well, at least it gives the Crimson something to write about other than who’s suing Mark Zuckerberg at the moment.

Another Times, another paywall

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Today the New York Times disappears behind a paywall. Introductory pricing is 99c for first four weeks, but the non-discounted rates seem steep, even for such a good journalistic product. After reading 20 articles over 4 weeks, you hit the wall. Then you must choose between: $15/month for web viewing + smartphone; $20/month for web access + app on a tablet; or $35/month for accessing the NYTimes on all devices

Lots of commentary around on this. I liked Frederic Filloux’s analysis which includes the observation that the NYT paywall pricing “is like the French tax system: expensive, utterly complicated, disconnected from the reality and designed to be bypassed”.

In another post, Filloux explores an intriguing option: that the Times continues to print its blockbuster Sunday Edition (which makes tons of money), while going online-only for the rest of the week. His conclusion is that this could result in annual revenue of $1 billion compared with the $1.5 billion the Times has been earning to date.

Google booked by judge

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last week, a US judge in Manhattan made a landmark decision. As to what it means, opinions vary. Some see it as arresting the cultural progress that began with the Enlightenment; others are celebrating Judge Denny Chin’s ruling as the blocking of a predatory move by a giant corporation to control access to the world’s cultural heritage. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between…

LATER: Interesting comment by Tim O’Reilly:

I think that when we look back at the history of the e-book market one of the classic business school cases is going to be how stupid it was for publishers to sue Google. Here you have a powerful, monopolistic company, and then you have another company that comes in really as a white knight, and the publishers sued the white knight. And the thing that was wrong about this was that the publishers’ settlement basically made Google into an ineffective competitor to Amazon. It took away all of Google’s strength. It made their model like Amazon’s, in which it had no advantages.

There were some really interesting things that Google could have done like algorithmic pricing. They were talking about taking a much smaller cut of the transaction, building the marketplace in a very different way. They were talking about open standards. Google ideally should have been building a book search engine that searched all e-books where they were and not just on Google’s site. They made mistakes. If the settlement had pushed them in that way it would have been really, really interesting. But it made Google a book retailer, which they aren’t, and now we have one dominant player, and the publishers are going to really come to regret that. Apple may end up being a big player, but it’s hard to tell.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

“Information overload” — pshaw: that’s old hat

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Interesting interview in Inside Higher Ed.

Preamble:

As modern as the problem may seem, information overload wasn’t born in the dorm rooms of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (let alone Mark Zuckerberg). In fact, says Ann M. Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard University, the idea that more textual information exists than could possible be useful or manageable predates not only Project Gutenberg, but the printing press itself. In her new book, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Blair cites sources as far back as Seneca — “the abundance of books is distraction” — to show that the notion dates to antiquity.

While the book’s context is broad, Blair’s primary focus is on the information management strategies employed by scholars in early modern Europe, whose enthusiasm for and anxiety about textual overabundance may sound surprisingly familiar all these hundreds of years (and hundreds of millions of Google searches) later. Inside Higher Ed conducted an e-mail interview with Blair to find out more about information management in the Renaissance and today…

Nuclear power accidents: listed, visualised and ranked since 1952

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Terrific piece of data journalism in the Guardian.

We have identified 33 serious incidents and accidents at nuclear power stations since the first recorded one in 1952 at Chalk River in Ontario, Canada.

The information is partially from the International Atomic Energy Authority – which, astonishingly, fails to keep a complete historical database – and partially from reports. Of those we have identified, six happened in the US and five in Japan. The UK and Russia have had three apiece.

Using Google Fusion tables, we’ve put these on a map, so you can see how they’re spread around the globe: