shimenawa - Latest comments on The $58 paperback

In response to: The $58 paperback

Perry Willett [Visitor] — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:33:32 +0000

Just to follow up on the delivery discussion, most academic libraries have delivery services. University of Michigan has a free delivery service for faculty/staff. UC-Berkeley has a service called BAKER which hits Peter's price-point perfectly (and how's that for alliteration): $5. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/services/document_delivery.html

In response to: The $58 paperback

Adam Corson-Finnerty [Visitor] — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:31:56 +0000

Rachel,

I am pleased to finally hear from someone who has read (still reads) books online. I have been surprised that I cannot find any study of customer habits regarding reading online versus printing out.

At the Penn libraries, we have found these figures. In-library use of our web resources is about 10% of all use. So 90% of our customers are using our stuff in their homes, offices, dorms, Starbucks, and so on.

We can count 1.7 million print-outs from the library for last year. We know because students pay for the printing per page. So, to use a crude rule of thumb, you could surmise that our customers' total printing is in excess of 17 million pages!

A recent NYT article on HP's printing business indicates that their studies indicate over 50% of home printing is web pages. Only about 20% is from WORD and the like. I would love to get my hands on more of their data, but a call to HP's PR people yielded no response. Perhaps someone who reads this blog has an "in"?

In response to: The $58 paperback

Rachel Gollub [Visitor] — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 06:31:59 +0000

Adam and Peter,

Hey, wait, I read entire books online! I admit I don't know of anyone else who does, offhand, but it turns out that the bit of my brain that has trouble staying focused can be distracted by knitting. So knitting by itself may be boring, and reading online by itself may be difficult, but the simultaneous combination is quite comfortable, sustainable, and has the added advantage that it keeps my kids in sweaters. :) The point being that having text in digital format may take more than a simple switch in display technologies to implement successfully; it may also take a psychological or brain function shift to make it more efficient -- we retrain ourselves to adapt to the newest conditions.

To add to Adam's point, the combination of 3D environments and knowledge as separate from books allows us to integrate them in a more useful way. We're used to the traditional method of having a specific experience, making mental notes, and later having the opportunity to do some research and look up anything we had questions about. Cell phones with net connections make it faster, but a 3D environment like Second Life, or a computerized overlay system similar to some of Kurzweil's far-out predictions (a simple one is glasses/contacts that project an overlay onto a scene, while a complex example is a layer between our senses and the world that modifies our senses to fit our preferences) provides us the opportunity to essentially click on something as we're looking at it to learn more, and gives us links to follow to continue to acquire deeper knowledge. Imagine mentally clicking on a hammer to get instructions on how to use it, or clicking on a tie to get instructions to tie it, and being able to follow those links through a connected set of knowledge to find out as much as is known about a topic. That kind of interactive environment makes the dissolution of books into discrete bits of knowledge much more imaginable, since when we click on the history of ties, an advanced search engine could search aggregate knowledge to pull useful quotes from any number of sources, rather than just pointing to the works they appear in.

In response to: The $58 paperback

Adam Corson-Finnerty [Visitor] — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 12:41:45 +0000

Peter,
You and your friend got pretty deep there! Let me hike up my waders and see if I can add anything to the delightfully speculative side of this post.
Let's start with some grounding. No one reads a book online. We in academic libraryland know that even our youngest students don't read anything beyond about two pages of text--online. If they want to read more, they print the piece and read it on paper--just like you and I presumably do.
That is why POD is such an important link with digitized books. Having something bound and printed on two sides is a better portable access method than having 400 sheets of 8x11 computer paper in your bag. Easier to store and retrieve, too.
(As an aside, it is just astonishing to me that in all the public and academic exchange on Google Books, no one has mentioned that NO ONE reads entire books online. Instead, we act like lots of people out there are consuming books online, or soon will, and that's a very weak assumption.)
The book still holds its own as a piece of technology. That doesn't mean it always will, but your suggestions that libraries work with Lightning Source and other POD vendors is "right on."
I think where you and your friend were heading was into a discussion of the continued value of text itself. And into a discussion of whether, by "losing" the boundaries of the printed monograph, we are losing the ability to create and encounter a sustained argument.
It is certainly possible that we are heading into a post-text world; perhaps even a post-literate world. A world where works like McCullough's John Adams and Kingston's Woman Warrior have no cultural traction.
What we won't lose is the "story" device in human communication. Pre-literate societies used story-telling to convey cultural messages. Roman and Greek orators used their voices to convey complex ideas and extended argument. Then that moved to books (after the passage of a few years!).
Books may certainly be superseded by film, TV, video, multi-media online creations, video games.
Indeed,I think that if we want to find out where cultural creation is heading, we should probably be looking at video games, rather than Google Books, or "born-digital" e-journals.
And once again, Neil Stephenson has given us a vision of what this new world might look like. The entire plot of his lengthy Diamond Age revolves around a "book" that is in the possession of a little girl. This book is a multi-media, interactive, AI-directed, educational device that will take you all the way through graduate school--through conquering the world!
Thake his "book" and add to it the "metaverse" that he described in Snow Crash (now being realized in an online community called "Second Life") and do we have a glimpse of our future?

In response to: The $58 paperback

Karen Lofstrom [Visitor] — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 01:57:59 +0000

There are quite a few copies available through ABEbooks for $1 plus shipping.

In response to: The $58 paperback

pbrantley [Member] — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 20:02:49 +0000

Scott -

absolutely, I would be willing to pay. in the hypothetical, if I were an academic, I would want my department or my grant or my lab to pay. but as an individual, sure, I dunno, $5? if it was a library book that I had to return.

believe me, I am not suggesting that libraries take on new services without charging for them. and I would advocate for libraries cutting or redirecting services and staff in order to better respond to new opportunities, not just tacking on new responsibilities.

In response to: The $58 paperback

scott [Visitor] — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:55:51 +0000

So here's a question - you want the book delivered to you, what kind of price are you willing to pay for that convenience, which is exactly what delivery is. Powell's (or whomever the publisher is, I'm not bothering to look it up) prices that convenience at $58. Moffit, on the other hand says you can have it free (zero financial cost) but you pay in terms of your time. If Berkeley were to deliver it, someone somewhere would have to cover the financial cost of doing so. Do you think that cost should be passed on to the patron? If not, how is it somehow absorbed/budgeted for in an era of very very tight money within academic libraries? Paying in neither time or money is ideal, but in all likelyhood assumes that someone else is covering or absorbing the costs for you.

This question presumes that the book is not yet online. I'm curious about your thoughts regarding the costs of delivering stuff that's physical as of yet.

In response to: The $58 paperback

pbrantley [Member] — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:21:55 +0000

Jerry, you are right. And my wife, at least, is a good public library user, and the Berkeley public library is very convenient for our weekend schedules and trajectories for shopping. But it is telling, perhaps, that for me the library is not (imho) that convenient. Yes, I'm lazy - but I want the book brought or delivered to me, or I want it on my computer. To me, the Library might as well be on another planet. The cafe in Moffitt - now that's a nice place - but the library doesn't fit into my work day. My computer does.