Showing posts with label digital books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital books. Show all posts

17 September 2009

Analogue or Digital? - Both, Please

Recently, I bought the complete works of Brahms. Of course, I was faced with the by-now common problem of whether to buy nostalgic CDs, or evanescent MP3s. The price was about the same, so there was no guidance there. Of course, ecologically, I should have gone for the downloads, but in the end I choose the CDs - partly for the liner stuff you never get with an MP3, and partly because I have the option of degrading the CD bits to lossy MP3, which doesn't work so well the other way.

So imagine my surprise - and delight - when I discovered after paying for said CDs that the company - Deutsche Grammophon - had also given me access to most of the CDs as streams from its Web site, for no extra cost (I imagine the same would have been true of the MP3s). This was a shrewd move because (a) it made me feel good about the company, even though it cost them very little, and (b) I'm now telling people about this fact, which is great publicity for them.

But maybe my delight is actually a symptom of something deeper: that having access to both analogue and digital instantiations of information is getting the best of both worlds.

This struck me when I read the following story:

Google will make some 2 million out-of-copyright books that it has digitally scanned available for on-demand printing in a deal announced Thursday. The deal with On Demand Books, a private New York-based company, lets consumers print a book in about 10 minutes, and any title will cost around $8.

The books are part of a 10 million title corpus of texts that Google ( GOOG - news - people ) has scanned from libraries in the U.S. and Europe. The books were published before 1923, and therefore do not fall under the copyright dispute that pits Google against interests in technology, publishing and the public sector that oppose the company's plans to allow access to the full corpus.

That in itself, is intriguing: Google getting into analogue goods? But the real importance of this move is hinted at in the following:

On Demand already has 1.6 million titles available for print, but the Google books are likely to be more popular, as they can be searched for and examined through Google's popular engine.

That's true, but not really the key point, which is that as well as being able to search *for* books, you can search *through* them. That is, Google is giving you an online search capability for the physical books you buy from them.

This is a huge breakthrough. At the moment, you have to choose between the pleasure of reading an analogue artefact, and the convenience of its digital equivalent. With this new scheme, Google will let you find a particular phrase - or even word - in the book you have in your hands, because the latter is a physical embodiment of the one you use on the screen to search through its text.

The trouble is, of course, that this amazing facility is only available for those books out of copyright that Google has scanned. Which gives us yet another reason for repealing the extraordinarily stupid copyright laws that stop this kind of powerful service being offered for *all* text.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

23 November 2007

We Demand Books on Demand

One of the interesting results of the move to digital texts is a growing realisation that analogue books still have a role to play. Similarly, it's clear that analogue books serve different functions, and that feeds into their particular physical form. So some books may be created as works of art, produced to the very highest physical standards, while others may simply be convenient analogue instantiations of digital text.

Public domain books are likely to fall into the latter class, which means that ideally there should be an easy way to turn such e-texts into physical copies. Here's one:

This is an experiment to see what the demand for reprints of public domain books would be. This free service can take any book from the Internet Archive (that is in public domain) and reprint it using Lulu.com. Prices of the books are rounded up from Lulu.com cost prices to the nearest $0.99 to cover the bandwidth and processing power that we rent from Amazon using their EC2 service. There is also a short post on my blog about it.

How Does It Work

Anyone with an email address can place a request on this page using an Internet Archive link or ID. Your request will be forwarded to our conversion server which will convert the appropriate book to printable form, and sends it off to Lulu.com. When the book has been uploaded, it will be made for immideate ordering and shipping, and you will receive a link to it via email. Currently, only soft cover books are supported in 6"x9", 6.625"x10.25" or 8"x11" trim sizes.

Interesting to see Lulu.com here, confirming its important place as a mediator between the digital and analogue worlds. (Via Open Access News.)