Amazon Kindles a new love of eBooks

Amazon's new Kindle eBook reader

Amazon has been getting quite a buzz from its new wireless reading device. Although it would be easy to dismiss the Kindle as just another useless eBook reader, Mike Elgan of Computerworld magazine begs to differ:

Opinion: Why Amazon's Kindle is revolutionary

Last April, I wrote a column titled, “Why e-books are bound to fail.” My reasons: cost, the availability of better alternatives and, most importantly, book lovers love paper books.

I was wrong.

Last week, I set out to deflate the hype about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader and to tell you why it will fail. But while researching this column, I became convinced of the opposite: Kindle is revolutionary and will succeed in the market. Some percentage of book lovers, including me, will buy one to replace their beloved paper books, magazines and newspapers.

Read the rest!

Self-service in public libraries

Found a new blog: A Neo-Traditional Librarian. His latest post has some interesting thoughts on expanding self-service options for library customers:

1. A great deal of library service has always been self-service. Many patrons use the library without assistance and with minimal contact with staff and like it that way. They are not unsocial or dysfunctional. Many shoppers don’t like sales associates hanging around them either.

2. Some core functions can not be provided well by self-service. Reference. Reader’s advisory. Teaching people to use the library’s resources. Arts and cultural programming. Libraries should focus on making staff support of these as available and visible as possible.

3. Some core functions work quite well as self-service. Internet access with patron self-registration. Holds pickup. Wireless Internet access. Community gathering space. Displays. Remote use and placing of holds. These all require considerable work to make them function properly, but not at Point of Service.

Check out the rest!

Looking for Marian

A colleague brought this to my attention. A vocational video on the librarian profession from 1947:



It's actually pretty good how it covers so many aspects of the profession that are still relevant today. The technology obviously has changed, but the basics seem to be more or less the same.

It's also generated some interesting discussion.

Suddenly Seeking Search Engine

Cross-posted at False Prophecy.

At work, I've been asked to train one of the library board members on "advanced Google searching". I'm not entirely sure what he means by that (the training session has yet to materialize), but I suspect he wants to go somewhat beyond typing one or two words into Google's search field.

In the hopes of providing a full exploration of the topic, and to show exactly why I'm worth the (not so) big bucks they're paying, I've been doing a bit of research on the Google phenomenon. Two books on the search engine king were released in 2005, probably to capitalize on Google's initial public offering and some of the fallout in the year following that seemed to tarnish the seemingly-untouchable lustre of the Internet's fasting-rising company and its likeable founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (as of October 2007, both men are tied for 26th richest person in the world, worth about $16.6 billion US each). I read one at the time, that being The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle. Like many non-fiction authors these days, Battelle maintained a website detailing some of his research and writing, and continues to use the site to promote his book as well as blog on internet search more generally.

The other book, which I just finished, was The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time, by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, whose authors also maintain a website.

Both books are valuable for anyone who wants to learn more about the current master of internet search, and complement each other very well. Both books focus on Google and how it used internet search, a feature the rest of the internet industry had dismissed as useless and unprofitable, to rise above the bursting of the dot-com bubble and become the fastest-rising technology company in history. But I would call The Google Story more of a business biography, while Battelle's book is more of technological history.

Vise and Malseed focus on Brin and Page and the business they built, from their fated meeting in the computer science graduate program at Stanford, to the humble beginnings of Google on campus, tracing the company's development to its IPO and some of its legal and public image troubles following that, ending with some of Brin and Page's hopes for the future of search. While the account is thorough, there is a mood of triumphalism that permeates the text, a narrative of two smart kids with a new idea done good. The focus is more on how Google transformed business culture with its very different approach. Brin and Page, academics and the children of academics, run Google more like a college campus than a business (the PageRank system at the core of Google's search technology is based on the citing practices and impact factors of academic journal articles). One of their more revolutionary practices is the 20% rule. In the academic world, professors are given 20% of their time (generally, one day a week) away from lecturing and administrative work to work on their own research and projects. Employees at Google are also given 20% of their time to work on their own projects. Sometimes these go nowhere, but other times they result in new applications like Froogle and Google News. Vise and Malseed even devote a chapter to Google's former head chef, Employee #53, Charlie Ayers, as part of their description of Google's corporate culture. Google is also known for its humour, evidenced by its regular April Fools Day jokes and the Google Labs Aptitude Test, or GLAT, a spoof of the battery of standard tests used by other firms.

Meanwhile, Battelle begins with the history of internet search, tracing the development of some of Google's more noteworthy forefathers, from Archie at McGill University, to the web's "first truly good search engine", AltaVista, to those other two Stanford PhDs at Yahoo!, Jerry Yang and David Filo. While the spotlight of his text then shifts to Google, his overall focus is on internet search and search engines. In the mid and late-90s, other dot-coms were trying to build "portals", which were actually destinations. The idea was to draw in users and keep them on the site, which was awash in visual and pop-up ads. Anyone who remembers Yahoo!, Excite and Altavista back then remembers the slew of ads, internal links and flashy banner ads splashed over every square inch of the site. Search was seen as just another service provided by the portal, along with email, personal ads, weather reports, and so on.

Along comes Google with its bare bones white screen and a single search field, but that simple field offered the keys to the World Wide Web. While others were adding to the clutter of the internet's closet, Google provided the sense of organization to all that clutter, while making billions from advertising that was so unobtrusive, few people recognized the ads when they saw them. In just a few short years, the search engine named for the impossibly large number garnered the greatest brand recognition in the online world, even becoming a verb related to internet searching in the process (e.g., "I Googled him last night").

Both books offer a very comprehensive coverage of Google's rise and dominance of the market, while focusing on different aspects of the company. The Google Story, true to its title, is a biographical narrative of the company's "life", largely holding to a tone of triumphalism throughout. Only in a handful of later chapters, when discussing threats to Google's public image and through the courts, is the clarion call muted. The Search is more illustrative of the search technologies involved, without getting overly technical, and is probably more interesting to my fellow library and information science professionals.

Google continues to maintain a high profile in the public eye, as even the company's former masseuse is ready to tell her story:

Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

“I’m happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” said Ms. Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.

Losing our edge...or just more to sharpen?

So I went to an information session at work for Ask Ontario, the new proposed IM/chat reference service the province is starting up under the Knowledge Ontario umbrella. I'll speak more to the service itself when I've actually been trained on it. But among the inserts in the information package we were given by the project coordinator was a print-out of this article from the Toronto Star:

We're quickly losing our edge in the digital world
Oct 08, 2007 04:30 AM
David Crane

The speed at which the Internet has already transformed the world is truly amazing. The World Wide Web, which made the Internet a mass participation network, wasn't even developed until the early 1990s and only began to take off in the mid-1990s.

But the Internet today is an essential part of our economy, our social networks and even our politics and media.

Crane then launches into a discussion about how important the internet is to the economy and new industry, before launching into a diatribe of doom and gloom about how far behind the pack Canada is in providing broadband access:

While about 95 per cent of South Korean households have access to high-speed broadband, and other countries are achieving high levels of broadband penetration, Canada ranks 10th in the industrial world, with only about 50 per cent of households having broadband access.

The downloading speeds for broadband in Canada are also much slower than in the leading nations. The fastest download speed offered by the largest cable operator in Canada last year was 10 megabits per second. This compares with 30 mb/s in Japan, 26 in Norway and 25 in Sweden. The fastest download speed offered by a telecommunications company was 18 mb/s in Canada, compared to 100 mb/s in Japan and Korea.

You can get a clearer idea of the numbers here (2006 figures). Like many statistics, context is important. Crane laments that in Canada, "only" 50% of households have broadband access, whereas others laud the fact that Canada has 50% compared to only 34% in the United States.

Look at the chart of broadband penetration and consider the countries that are allegedly kicking Canada's ass: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, a host of other East Asian nations that are not much bigger than a major North American city with its metropolitan area, and some of the Scandinavian countries. Is there some reason why Canada doesn't have as much broadband penetration as these countries?

Could it be that these are all small nations with a fairly consistent physical geography and generally a single, dominant ethnic or national population? Could it be because South Korea's land area is less than the island of Newfoundland? Is it really fair to compare a huge, continental nation that encompasses mountains, a cornucopia of lakes and rivers, tundra and massive forests with the likes of South Korea and Norway?

To be fair, Canada should be compared to other large continental nations with diverse geography, like the United States, Australia, mainland China, India and Brazil. And we're far ahead of all of them. Our closest competitor in this regard, the US, has some ways to go to catch up. Now there are reasons the US lags behind, both practical (the US has 10 times the population of Canada, spread out across the whole country, while the vast majority of our population is found in a handful of major urban centres) and policy (many jurisdictions in the US have a single broadband provider holding a monopoly over the area, whereas some places in South Korea have a dozen engaging in cutthroat competition to provide better services and prices). Our historical focus on communications may have also served us well here, and our federal government has actually done a good job at leading the way.

Now, I think Crane has a point, that we shouldn't be resting on our laurels. We certainly can get our broadband speeds up, and I think more competition would help: currently, most Canadian jurisdictions have only two broadband providers: the cable company and the phone company. Both of them draw their profits from other areas and might not be inclined to improve broadband services very much. A more competitive market could help.

Who ya gonna call?

Is this what William Gibson had in mind for the Turing Police?

The digital divide

The San Clemente library system has an interesting way of dealing with internet filtering:

A new king of search?

I dug up this year-old post from Librarian In Black:

Ten Reasons Librarians Should Use Ask.com Instead of Google

We've all read the jokes like "I don't remember how I did reference before Google!" (which I'm hoping is a joke and not a serious statement). Google is a tool, and it's only one tool. I think many librarians forget that, and rely on Google as their sole search engine, forgetting other search tools and forgetting the wealth of information that's out there in the invisible web: web content that is not indexed by the big search engines (like Library of Congress content, huge image databases, other gateway sites). But there is one search engine that I've come to rely on in addition to the big G: Ask.com. So, here are my ten reasons that librarians should use Ask.com instead of Google. See what you think.

How much is your library worth?

The state library of Maine has set up a calculator to determine how much library services would cost if you paid for them.

How a blog gets its name

This blog's name is based on the title of the song "Map of the Problematique" by one of my favourite bands, Muse. The song is believed to refer to the concept of the World Problematique, created by the Club of Rome.

Much as the World Problematique refers to a series of interconnected problems facing humanity, with this blog I hope to address problems and solutions in the world of information and librarianship.