Thoughts on Technology and Society

I really hate when people lie. And I hate it even more when the press reproduces those lies. For example Bryce Johnson of Fourteen40 in a press release about selling his company to Folletts is quoted as saying he came up with the idea about a year ago. Well they pitched my employer about a year ago so I did some research and discovered that they have been failing in the ebook space. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=41458 Many of the pages I found at that time seem to have disappeared, or are buried under the new stories about the acquisition. But here is one. http://www.vcsmart.com/2006/02/fourteen40.html Not that the product being over a year old makes it bad. But why lie.

Trip Report: Google and Libraries: An international Conference From Timothy Murray On March 10 th I attended Google and Libraries An international Conference Held at Columbia University in New York City . The Key note was delivered by Yakov Shraiber of International Library Information and Analytical Center http://www.iliac.org/ This talk highlighted the rapid growth of Google in Russia . Google has only been in Russia for two years and now is the second most used search in Russia and has 30% of all searches in the Russian language. The national libraies of Russia are engaged in large scale digitization projects and are making content freely available online. These projects are complicated by Russia ’s recent decision to conform their copyright law to those of the EU. Jill Cirasella of Brooklyn College Library gave a presentation on the use of online tools in the library. The presentation is available: http://userhome.brook

Last week I was in the UK talking with a colleague about what the future of electronic books will be. I believe that this paper is addressing in a more abstract way than my talk about an abstract page for books or book-parts, one of my key points. The point is that scholarly works need to be citable and addressable. (I am hugely antagonistic of IRs which are mentioned and seem to be foundational to the ORE technology) And I think this is in some ways on on the topic of what he thinks is important about updates to a book.

I just read an interesting case study for metered access to online content in Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community Pay-per-view article access: a viable replacement for subscriptions? Apparently Trinity saved more money than they planned to save. Some people who I respect have for a number of years now held the belief that a shift to use based pricing for online journals. But the community of libraries and publishers know that the short term outcome of such a shift would need to be relatively revenue neutral. (As the shift from print to online was. And some publishers created insurance of this during the transition by basing online pricing on past print spend at least for the transition.) The Trinity case shows an example where the total spend with Elsevier declined by even more than was intended. They attribute this in part to who at Trinity was authorized (students has to ask a librarian). This was not a revenue neutral transition. And it was also not access neutra