Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow’s

From SEEDMAGAZINE.COM…

Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.

To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority. More…

Google, copyright, and our future

From Lawrence Lessig at The New Republic…

In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim–the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch). Some were forgotten but incredibly important for understanding American history in the twentieth century (A Time for Justice). And some were just remarkably beautiful (D-Day Remembered). So, as curator of his work, Grace Guggenheim decided to remaster the collection and make it all available on DVD, which was then the emerging platform for film.

Her project faced two challenges, one obvious, one not. The obvious challenge was technical: gathering fifty years of film and restoring it digitally. The non-obvious challenge was legal: clearing the rights to move this creative work onto this new platform for distribution. Most people might be puzzled about just why there would be any legal issue with a child restoring her father’s life’s work. After all, when we decide to repaint our grandfather’s old desk, or sell it to a neighbor, or use it as a workbench or a kitchen table, no one thinks to call a lawyer first. But the property that Grace Guggenheim curates is of a special kind. It is protected by copyright law. More…

Imagining the future of libraries

By Lisbet Rausing at The New Republic…

Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West—our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data—as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world’s civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.

Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google. More…

Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display atEmory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

For the article…

The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.

From BBC News…

Up to one million antiquarian books - including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo - will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.

There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.

The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence. More…

The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 2, of The International Journal of the Book includes:

• Corduroy Mansions in Cyberspace: Online Novels and Their Implications to Print Publishing and the Traditional Novel by Jaime Robles.
• Features of Scholarly Publishing in Small Multilingual Publishing Markets: The Case of Greece by Christina Banou.
• The Impact of Cinema on the Contemporary Francophone Novel by Lucille Roy-Hewitson.
• Exploring Occupational Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books by Cindy Hendricks, James Hendricks, Trinka Messenheimer, M Sue Houston and Julian Williford.
• Books versus e-Books: The Indian Perspective by Basavadatta Mitra, Nishant Singh, H.S. Ramya, Adwait Gandhe and Vivek Jha.

The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 2, of The International Journal of the Book includes:

• Is Bibliography Reactionary? by Vincent Giroud.
• If u txt 2 much, duz it mean u cant spell: Exploring the Connection between SMS Use and Lowered Performance in Spelling by Rosalind Raymond Gann, Karin Bartoszuk and Jillian H. Anderson.
• The Conditions Required to Enable the Reader to Approach a Text by Gilly Perel-Dayan.
• Brand Concepts in Publishing by Irini Pitsaki.
• Finding American Ideals in Early Primers by Laurie Andes.

Steve Jobs discussing the iBooks application for the Apple iPad at its debut in San Francisco, January 27, 2010 (Tom Avelar/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

From Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books:

The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

Though Gutenberg’s invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter’s overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

For the full article…

The second issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of the Book is now available.

Volume 7, Number 2 includes:

• Travels with More’s Utopia: Provenance Discovery through Marginalia and Annotations by Robin Smith.
• Young Adult Fiction in 1980s (West) Germany The Paperback Series “Rororo Panther” (Rowohlt) “Problem-oriented Novels” for Young Adult Readers by Corinna Norrick.
• Ghosts between the Pages: The Devolution of Medb from Sovereignty Goddess to Comic Book Villainess and the Potential Dangers of the Transcription of Oral Tales by Megan Amber Condis.
• Media Rich PDF Publishing: Bridging the Gap Between Traditional Print and Multimedia Publishing by Jason Lisi.
• Disruptive Innovations in Book Publishing - Threat or Opportunity? by Bozena Izabela Mierzejewska.

In another blow to Google’s plan to create a giant digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department on Thursday said that a class-action settlement between the company and groups representing authors and publishers had significant legal problems, even after recent revisions.

In a 31-page filing that could influence a federal judge’s ruling on the settlement, the department said the new agreement was much improved from an earlier version. But it said the changes were not enough to placate concerns that the deal would grant Google a monopoly over millions of orphan works, meaning books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.

The department also indicated that the revised agreement, like its predecessor, appeared to run afoul of authors’ copyrights and was too broad in scope.

The revised agreement “suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation,” the department wrote.

The department asked the court to encourage the parties to continue discussions on further changes to the settlement, which it said had many public benefits.

For the full article…