Digital Reading, Subpoenas, and Privacy

In the c|Net blog, The Iconoclast, Declan McCullagh recounts that Amazon successfully resisted an effort by federal prosecutors in Madison, WI to obtain 24,000 customer records.

As c|Net notes, libraries and bookstores have recourse to special protections against the forced release of their users' data, and Amazon -- to its great credit -- has utilized that entrust of law to protect its customers. It should be applauded for that stance.

McCullagh writes,

It's important to note that the First Amendment gives online and offline bookstores a greater legal ability to resist law enforcement demands than say, banks or credit card companies enjoy. And Amazon is following the tradition of other booksellers, which have a tradition of--individually and through the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression--opposing requests from overzealous prosecutors.

In an important 2002 case, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that police could not serve a search warrant on Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store. Two years earlier, a judge denied the Drug Enforcement Administration's attempts to get sales records from a Borders bookstore as part of a grand jury investigation. And perhaps the most famous case came when independent counsel Kenneth Starr tried unsuccessfully to obtain Monica Lewinsky's purchase records from Kramerbooks, a popular neighborhood bookstore in Washington, D.C.

The issues worry me greatly: reading is tuning into a series of digital transactions, transitioning from a private matter of solitary, silent reading into an inherently social act suitable for data mining. Indeed, the fascinating historical work of Paul Saenger demonstrates how the revolutionary change wrought in the early Medieval Ages by the Arabs and the Irish of separating words with spaces and punctuation to ease the understanding of translated Latin texts enabled silent reading, which in turn created modern expectations for privacy in the matter of what we read and think. Unlike the historical precedent of spoken storytelling and dictation, silent reading, with its interior voice, enabled the wandering of mind and thought into private places. This newfound sense of privacy, sweeping through Europe, helped unleash a river of heretical criticism and speculation that was catalyst for the Western Renaissance, and midwife to the research library.

So we all must then inquire of publishers building online digital text libraries, and Microsoft and Google with their online books corpora: what happens when the police and courts of the state come to you? : Are you prepared to respect and reassert in a digital age -- an age in which the act of reading is inherently recordable -- the individual's control of privacy that has been maintained over the last 700 years? The alternative is to begin a retreat to the sunken expectations for the disclosure of our thoughts and writing that echo with eerie fidelity the cloistered labyrinths of the oral culture of 1200 AD -- a world far more inimical to free expression.

In the history of human society, the state's interest is rarely one in support of an individual's investigation of the nature of governance, but such inquiry may well be in the interest of its citizens. In our fear of terror we may cloud the rightful opportunity to consult criticism. In part on the demand for such a right for its own citizens did the country in which I live, at the moment of its proclamation, declare its independence. For this lesson we must have learned, that we must practice the privilege of asserting our privacy, and with it the ability to think heretically, against convention, away from the scrunity of unwelcome authority. If we lose that in the skein of automation's snares, we are wholly lost.

Kindle Economics

I'm pleased to bring the commentary of a couple of the publishing industry's most experienced and respected voices to conjecture on the economic ramifications of Amazon's Kindle.

First, Jason Epstein has kindly agreed to share a back-of-the-envelope analysis of the Kindle in light of the common "razor and blades" analogy, in which some observers argue that Amazon would be better off giving the Kindle away nearly for free and making it up on the volume of book sales; Jason demonstrates why this would be difficult under a generous range of assumptions.

Next, Mike Shatzkin considers the impact of the Amazon Kindle on future industry positioning, and the kinds of alliances that might prove to be necessary competitive responses to Amazon's unique combination of assets.

A short bio for introduction, followed in turn by the contribution.

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Kindle Fundamentals

Many of the conversations over the release of the Kindle have focused on its features, or perceived lack thereof; there has been some discussion of what reading might become, or how authorship might change. I was impressed with the rather complimentary review of Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. And, meanwhile, the Kindle is popular enough (despite a rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars from Amazon reviewers as I write) that Amazon promptly sold out of its first-day supply.

There has been less discussion of the business fundamentals associated with the Kindle, and little contemplation of how reading fits into long term trends in media consumption.

After a Thanksgiving with aunts and relatives who have seen the Newsweek article on the Kindle but continue to espouse the sanctity of print, it's useful to look at the Kindle and the greater transition it is part of -- a potentially fundamental and historically unique transformation in how we share knowledge and entertain, with a concomitant shift in the underlying economy of those transactions.

Here are some thoughts of Joe Esposito, Portable CEO and formerly an executive at Simon & Schuster and at Random House, a former President of Merriam-Webster, and CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica; and Bill Janssen, a senior researcher at Xerox PARC for many years in the fields of digital texts, ebooks, and the user experience.

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Kindling Openness and Impact

With the launch of the Kindle, I have little desire here to add to criticisms (e.g., the lack of support for the IDPF's epub standard, or PDF for that matter), or the whims of "service" designers who decided to charge for Kindle email services and blog subscriptions. Or even the size, shape, or aesthetics of it as an object (gee, does it come in black?).

However, this morning I was on a conference call with a few VPs from large publishing houses, and therein were a couple of comments that I thought particularly interesting. I'll generously extrapolate from both of them.

The first is one that I feel most closely: The Kindle may be a terrific single-use device, but it works with a closed (Amazon) shop. While it is understandable that Amazon would want to privilege the Amazon Store buying experience, monopolizing ebook transactions to the home port sharply limits the attractiveness of the Kindle among institutions that I care a lot about, like libraries; higher ed; and heck, even independent bookstores, where one could imagine an interesting channel press against B&N. But most importantly, the inability of a large institution to control the distribution pipe, even a secondary one, means that Kindles are going to be a direct-to-consumer device for a while, and the reader will be consuming primarily through Amazon and its partners, not via the Berkeley Public Library. That's a loss to the public, and I think to Amazon as well, which doesn't grok the broader conversation it could be defining.

The second commentary is a matter of market penetration. From the publishers' narrow but most fundamental perspective, the critical question of the moment is: "Will the Kindle sell books?" For it to be successful by this measure, at least one of two possible paths must find place:

1. The Kindle will convert people who are not presently book readers into people who do, lo and behold, read books; or
2. The Kindle will increase book reading due to the availability of titles in a more convenient format, coupled with spur of the moment purchasing capability.

When you consider (1), color me doubtful. It seems unlikely, in the overwhelming majority of reading markets, that the Kindle will turn people newly onto books in any significant degree. Arguably, (2) is more likely, and certainly I think everyone expects a mild up-tick in purchasing through spontaneous acquisition. But one of the problems with reading is that it is actually rather difficult: a lot of things have to be involved cognitively for a human to read, and driving is not one of the co-behaviors that anyone would encourage. Walking, much less navigating one's way through the Lexington line IRT after a flash flood, are also rather difficult while reading (as opposed to, say, listening to music, which might just make the latter situation bearable enough to avoid screaming). In sum, the convenience of ebooks will have to be sufficient to justify carrying a dedicated device (at present), and for the consumer to want to acquire additional things to read.

And finally there are two other issues: first, as Booksquare (among others) notes, Apple's iPhone is really, really close. It wouldn't take much.

Second: It isn't Amazon among publishers' new challengers that has the largest collection of digital text. It's Google. As Rex Hammock notes:

[...] Google is always the elephant in the room when it comes to digitized books. But if you think about such Google moves as Android and how it will affect mobile access to the web, it doesn't take rocket scientists [...] to conceive of how a more open platform than Amazon's will be available to the market.

And that will indeed be an interesting chapter to read, which is only now, one suspects, being written.

Other useful commentary on the Kindle:

Dear Author: Amazon Kindle Purported to Debut Tomorrow
Rex Hammock: What I'd rather have than an eBook reader: the iPod Touchbook
Booktwo: The Kindle Has Landed
Print is Dead: Amazon's Next of Kindle

Take the Money Out to Get It Back In

Last month, I wrote here about the death of the music file sharing system Oink, in a post called "Libraries or Pirate Places", which made note of Jace Clayton's observation that the high quality, finely described and deeply curated collection of Oink could just as easily have described a library as a conventional file sharing site.

Through Alan Wexelbalt's mention of the work, I chanced upon demonbaby's more encompassing criticism of Oink's shutdown, which not only notes the high value of Oink for both musicians and music fans, but also discourses in a long and very insightful blog piece on the changes that have ripped through the music industry's economic model. Nothing earthshattering - but it is all well and truly put.

I have linearly excerpted a few good parts that I think well trace the evolution of demonbaby's thinking toward music distribution and acquisition, but I encourage readers to make it over to "When Pigs Fly" and read through the entire post (and therein trace the allusion to this blog entry's title as well).

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Going Legal on CC-0

CC-0 is a brand new Creative Commons license, whose official launch is expected in December, that signals the absence of any copyright or related rights associated with a work.

The creation of CC-0 is heralded by the release into the public domain of a free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754, through Carl Malamud's Public.Resource.Org.

The data is being provided by Fastcase, a provider of next-generation American legal research, which has agreed to provide Public.Resource.Org with 1.8 million pages of federal case law. This is a marked departure for the online legal research industry, much of which charges libraries, institutions, legal firms, and courts very expensive subscription fees to access this information.

The transaction represents a one-time purchase of the data; the corpus will be integrated into on-going services provided by AltLaw and the Legal Information Institute, ensuring continuity into the future. Further releases of data, including Federal District and pre-1949 Appellate decisions, may be forthcoming.

More information at Public.Resource.Org.

Kindling eBooks

With the Amazon Kindle ebook reader announcement increasingly looking like it is imminent, and with a review at Ars Tecnica of the latest generation Sony ebook reader ready to stoke a smoldering fire, it is an interesting time to speculate about the future direction and utility of ebook readers.

Booksquare today had an interesting muse about what makes the ebook experience potentially viable, and it is not the kind of DRM-laden entrapment that many vendors are providing now. Rather, the model should be that developed in other content areas, such as video.

[Start] with the expectation that media -- whatever kind -- will be accessible on demand. For my money, no matter what cool this or that is launched by major entertainment media, it's the YouTube model that exemplifies today's environment. Love it, hate it, don't understand it, YouTube works. You don't have to do anything special to access programming. This "just works" ability is what today's consumer desires ... and it's the base level expectation of today's youth.

The blog's authors observe how potentially capable the Apple iPhone is as a platform for ebooks, with its native support for reflowable text (including, potentially, IDPF's ebook format, .epub). But with Amazon pushing Kindle hard, how much attention is being paid to alternative channels, such as the iPhone, or the not-quite-here-yet promise of Google's open stack, Android?

Quick show of hands: how many publishers out there are actively engaged in discussions with Apple to ensure that the iTunes store stocks and promotes ebooks? Making sure that the iPhone has the right technology to facilitate reading ebooks? Or heck, any other kind of text? How many of you are making your voices heard when it comes to making certain that iPhone customers are able to download and read books on their phones?

With the bevy of press starting to ride herd on the new generation of dedicated readers, I've begun to try to think through how I feel about their potential success or failure, with the inevitable comparisons to the iPod and the music industry. (Alert! Speculation rampant below!).

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NASA Plays Games

At the DLF Fall Forum, we unfortunately missed a presentation from NASA's Daniel Laughlin, who wound up stuck in traffic on I95 for way too many hours (not the worst travel incident of the Forum, but in the top 5). Nonetheless, Dan kindly sent his slides, which we are making available via SlideShare.

Dan and I first met at a conference at the Hewlett Foundation, sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation and the Federation of American Scientists. When I saw Dan across the room, sitting in front of a large Windows laptop with a very impressive-size screen, with a back littered by WOW and gaming stickers, I thought Kaufman had found a gamer to attend the summit. They had; I just didn't imagine he worked at Goddard Space Flight Center.

NASA is interested in immersive synthetic environments (ISEs) because they have the capacity of providing greatly enriched educational opportunities and outreach. The organization maintains an Immersive Synthetic Environment Research (NISER) team that has members from NASA sites across the country; it meets monthly. NASA uses SecondLife for much of its internal collaboration; as Dan notes, there were virtual environments others before SL, and others will follow, but right now Second Life is the best commercial, widely available ISE for education, training and collaboration.

The power and intent of NASA's vision became more real to me after I watched a YouTube video that Dan forwarded entitled "NASA's CoLab Second Life Mission." The vision of earth-bound avatars being able to converse in real-time with a next-generation Moon- or Mars-mission astronaut, asking questions within an ISE about what rests on the surface or is flowing across the skies of a distant body in our solar system is an incredibly compelling one, all the more so because it is not beyond the realm of possibility in the next decade.

Dan says:

When NASA returns to the moon in 2020, the people of Earth will be able to share that experience. Not just through the passive medium of television like the last time we went to the moon, but through the virtual experience of a persistent immersive synthetic environment. Kids are starting to use PISE at a very early age already. Nickelodeon and Disney each run their own online worlds. The children who play in those worlds are going to expect more from both their work and play as adult than 2D interactivity. They will expect 3D the same way people today expect cable television and those in the 1970s expected color television.

Dan's slides point out that there are probably between 20-30 million Americans who are involved with a ISE, whereas only around 26 million play golf (I would personally wager there is not a lot of overlap between those communities, but who knows).

Immersive environments are inherently social; they provide a sense of place and togetherness that more closely approximates the "real" than any other technology we have been able to generate, and yet their evolution is just beginning. We are on the threshold of being able to generate new virtual environments with alternative physics engines, flexible representations, radically different bandwidth requirements, and interoperability.

NASA will generate a Learning Technologies call in FY2008 to help deliver on their eEducation roadmap. Integral to the roadmap is a set of components that will help build a firm foundation for an immersive, synthetic 3D Web application for NASA science education: a Massively Multi-player Online Game (MMOG) that acts as a front-end to a larger synthetic environment; a developers toolkit to support expansion; and a powerful physics engine to support accurate science and engineering concepts and challenges. These components are intended to support both formal and informal education.

This is a great thing to see come out of NASA; they are to be applauded for their continuing embrace of distant horizons that will be our near-lying shores before we can possibly imagine.

Mapping Philly

One of the most engaging sessions at the Digital Library Federation Fall Forum meeting in Philadelphia this week was a panel discussing a georeference-supportive project from the City of Philadelphia itself. We were thrilled to have representatives from Philadelphia's Department of Records, who have been gradually developing a project called PhillyHistory.org with several technology partners including Avencia, a firm in Philadelphia; it is Avencia's presentation [pdf] that I highlight in this entry.

The Department of Records in Philadelphia has one of the best historical image archives in the country, with over two million photographs. To date, some 47,000 pictures have been digitized, with descriptive metadata; the Department is digitizing photos at a rate of approximately 2000 each month. The most critical information associated with the images are locational data that facilitate mapping and georeference services.

An image search can be delimited by time period and location, and relevant results are returned as thumbnails with brief descriptions. Advanced search operations on many other metadata fields are also available. Location based searches are mapped, and presented as a tile on a nearest-to-furtherest scale. Clicking on an image's descriptive information will provide a screen of detailed metadata, and clicking the image itself produces a higher resolution version of the picture.

The most attractive features of the site are social; images can be shared with others (via email, right now, although theoretically it would be possible to export out to other social environments or provide internal community social site features, such as neighborhood blogs). Images can also be collected in a Favorites list.

PhillyHistory also has a mobile interface, so one of the things that I've most wanted to see in a metropolitan image archive application -- standing on a street corner, and being able to retrieve both historical and contemporary information about the location -- is within reach of this project. PhillyHistory is not integrated into the mobile stack, and so a location must be manually entered, but it is still pretty cool.

PhillyHistory also has a blog, where interesting archival images are discussed, as well as general application updates and news. The site also provides advanced sections where it provides detailed information on how to construct url query strings against specific metadata fields, such as location or time period. Searches can be named ("bookmarked" in the site's nomenclature) and then made available as an RSS. Using GeoRSS, a set of images can be easily displayed within Google Maps.

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Checking Copyright

At the DLF Fall Forum today in Philadelphia, Mimi Calter [pdf] presented a paper on an examination of the Copyright Registration database, which Carl Malamud and I have been active in "liberating."

Stanford has been working on creating a full-text database of copyright renewal records for books published between 1923 and 1963; renewals are required after 28 years, so the relevant examination period for this paper was 1950-1992. The project tracks books only (no serials, music, etc.), and is supported by the Mellon Foundation.

1950-1977 data was compiled from published Catalog of Copyright Records, and Project Gutenberg transcripts. Edits to internal Copyright Office records could not be incorporated in the database. 1978 -> records were harvested from the online database, and per the work of Joel Hardi at Public Resource, are now available at http://rss.resource.org. The Stanford datafile, which was indexed with Lucene, is available by request.

This project is important because it is a critical input to an online copyright analysis system; since renewals were required during this period for copyright extension, there are potentially large numbers of works which have fallen into the public domain. The analysis is particularly valuable because of the lack of database records prior to 1978.

From the selected period, 545 records were examined manually, about 100 records were searched online for a comparison.

Startlingly, over 30 percent of the searched items had been renewed; this was higher than many people anticipated.

Although gross, crippling errors were relatively low, there were many inconsistencies: internal CO formats change from one year to another; fields are sometimes concatenated or left unlabeled; unique identifiers were often missing; registration numbers and dates were often omitted.

This important work points out two critical things for me. The first, and in some ways the most critical, is to figure out how to merge the Copyright Renewal database with a major bibliographic database, such as the Library of Congress, or a major university catalog, such as the Univ. of California's Melvyl. This would both enrich the Copyright database, as well as augment the ability of book catalogs to provide authoritative information on copyright status. As my friend Karen Coyle said in comments on my blog post, "Making a Brouhaha in the Blogosphere," "If we ever do get MARC records connected to these, we need to upgrade the copyright database with decent bibliographic data." (I have heard that Brewster Kahle and the OpenLibrary are working on this problem).

This data merge is tremendously complicated by the lack of unique identifiers in the Copyright database, requiring a multi-stage or fuzzy merge. A merge based on something like Bowker's Books in Print would be unsuccessful as ISBNs were only assigned prospectively from 1967 onwards.

The other thing that I feel is a requisite is an ongoing service provided by the Copyright Office, on behalf of the public.

Here is the text of a letter (mildly edited) that I wrote to Deanna Marcum, the Associate Librarian for Library Services, and one of the DLF Board members, requesting a conversation about these kinds of services:

The desire is not to get the registration records on a one time basis, but the ability to continuously obtain the records, such that [they] are offered as a service on the network by the CO. Users could elect the whole db, or update, or new records; a feed would be available even through such a simple means as RSS on a daily basis. [N.B.: Public Resource is doing this as a fallback until the CO office initiates such a service directly].

There may be ways of designing a service such that the library community as a whole could enrich these records with bibliographic data, or correct simple mistakes that impede their use and lessen their value. In fact, Karen Coyle related that the first record she looked at had a spelling error in the title. There may be a way to work with the registration records; certainly, day-lighting them more openly will enrich immeasurably their value [for] all of us, permitting the construction of services that recognize and honor the rights of these materials far more faithfully.

At any rate, I [have] only begun to think through such [mutually beneficial] community based solutions, and should have tried to focus more on them earlier, but they exist for the Library to exploit to everyone's advantage. I think there would be tremendous enthusiasm among research libraries to hold a conversation with the CO and the Library [of Congress] on how such services might be constructed, and I am happy to aid such dialogue in whatever way might be useful, such as facilitating such a meeting among our members.

I am still looking forward to engaging the Copyright Office.

Recent Posts

• Publishing Digital Fair Use on November 3, 2007
• Libraries or Pirate Places on October 31, 2007
• Books on the Border on October 24, 2007
• Digital ILL and the Open Library on October 22, 2007
• Catalog Tree on October 22, 2007
• Machinima Mash on October 21, 2007
• Take the A Train on October 19, 2007
• Copyright via RSS on October 18, 2007
• The New Stacks on October 18, 2007
• Finding the House on October 15, 2007
• Documents In-Stream on October 14, 2007
• Open Grants on October 14, 2007