Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig's lengthy article in the American magazine The New Republic has caused quite a stir in the internet community as he outlines the larger issue in the Google Book Search settlement and the dangerous precedent it sets for metered access to books and other cultural creations. We need similar commentaries in Australia.
The full article is here.
Lessig echoes to some extent another Harvard Professor, Professor Robert Darnton, who in The Case for Books writes "we live in a world where information is power; it's a real force in society".
I am currently reviewing this book for The Canberra Times and certainly in historical terms, whoever dominated the trade routes dominated the world, as exemplified by the Dutch, French and British empires. In the 20th century, control of natural resources, such as oil and gas, emerged as major factors in global power structures. Who owns and controls information in the digital world of the 21st century is increasingly important, as the China-Google dispute and the Rupert Murdoch news paywall debate illustrate.
I've also just had published a long chapter on E-Books and scholarly communications futures in a new UK Book, Digital Information: Order or Anarchy? (Facet, 2009). I begin my chapter with words from the novelist Anthony Trollope, which still reasonate today. ‘Given the absolute faculty of reading, the task of going through the pages of a book must be, of all tasks, the most certainly within the grasp of the man or woman who attempts it! Alas, no; - if the habit be not there, of all tasks it is the most difficult. If a man have not acquired the habit of reading till he be old, he shall sooner in his old age learn to make shoes than learn the adequate use of a book. And worse again; - under such circumstances the making of shoes shall be more pleasant to him than the reading of a book. Let those who are not old, - who are still young, ponder this well’ (Trollope, 1866).
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10 best songs about libraries and librarians
There are some fascinating titles in the list. Everybody knows the Beach Boys one, but some of the others were new to me. Four listed here.
“There She Goes, My Beautiful World” by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
This song runs through a gamut of writers and the difficulties that they overcame in their careers — including Philip Larkin “sticking it out” in a library in Hull.
“Library Card” by Frank Zappa
Pianist Hermann Kretzschmar begins Zappa’s experimental album Everything is Healing Nicely (a posthumous work culled from The Yellow Shark sessions) by reading the information from his library card.
“Fun Fun Fun” by The Beach Boys
True story: Brian Wilson and Mike Love wrote this song about a rich girl who Dennis Wilson was dating. She’d tell her father that she needed to borrow his T-bird to get to the library when really she was hanging out with Dennis at his apartment. Until daddy took the car away.
“Library Rap” by MC Poindexter & The Study Crew
Because we had to include one rap song in the mix; it comes from an episode of the ’90s sci-fi TV series Sliders. Our favorite lyric? “And I give you one warnin’/There will be no repeats:/Get out of my face/While I’m readin’ my Keats.”
More here.
Peter Carey's American picaresque
'Parrot and Olivier in America' is reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement by Professor Tom Shippey who says that it "has the feel of a roman à clef where the keys don't quite fit".
He concludes, "One final thought is that the master-man pairings, so fertile in the novel tradition and so often recalled by Carey, from Don Quixote and Sancho to Jeeves and Bertie, usually achieve a kind of balance. Parrot and Olivier ends with Olivier summing up furiously on the future of America, and getting everything at least 90 per cent wrong – notably the remarks about art being impossible in a democracy – and Parrot gently correcting him in a post-narrative “Dedication” to Olivier as his anti-patron. Perhaps that is the way an American Revolution works, not a dramatic turn of the wheel but a slow spiral, on the whole upwards."
More here.
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Are free e-books a good idea or not?
An article in The New York Times explores whether downloads of free books affect sales. "Kindle is certainly engendering a lot of confusion by billboarding the downloads of free ebooks as sales... There really are three separate questions to consider, which get elided in these conversations. 1. What is the impact of giving away ebooks as a promotional device, either to boost the word of mouth on the book being given away or to promote an author’s other titles? 2. What is the potential impact on the industry overall of ubiquitous giveaways of ebooks that would apparently have commercial value? 3. When ebooks are given away, how should that sale be scored in any measurement of the book’s popularity?"
More here.
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Thomas Edison's Metal Books - a Kindle from 1911
The Technologizer blog notes that "Thanks to Google Books’ archives of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, LIFE, and other magazines that frequently reported on futuristic gizmos, we have a readily accessible record of technology that failed to live up to the initial hype–including random notions that never got off the drawing board, startlingly advanced products that didn’t find a market, and very rough drafts of concepts that eventually became a big deal. The best of them are fascinating, even when it’s not the least bit surprising that they flopped.
Herewith, 15 inventions – not that all of them ever got built – that were at least a decade ahead of their time. They’re in chronological order. The first is
1. Thomas Edison’s Metal Books
As described in: Cosmopolitan, February 1911.
What it was: Among the numerous brainstorms and predictions that Thomas Alva Edison shared with Cosmopolitan readers in an exclusive interview was his vision of 40,000-page books that would be two inches thick and weigh a pound–because their pages would be made of metal, not paper...
Modern counterpart: The Kindle, the Nook, Sony’s Readers, and every other current gadget for reading digital tomes…even though they all cost a lot more than $2. And is it going too far to say that Edison had a 1911 version of the upcoming Apple tablet in mind?"
More here.
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Odd book title
The Goldfish of China in the 18th Century. By George John Frangopulo Hervery. China Society, 1950.
Debbie Campbell at The National Library indicates that the correct title for this work is rendered in Roman numerals. See it on Trove here.
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