Science Library Pad

finding France Culture radio audiobooks

These are abridged books, usually in five 30-minute episodes (2.5 hours).
For unabridged audiobooks, you may be able to get them on loan from your library, usually through the monopoly KKR OverDrive Libby app.

Finding French language audiobooks from France Culture is pretty easy since there is one main show,

Le Feuilleton

The Épisodes view lists the, well, episodes by air date.  Books are multi-part so you'll want to scroll down to part 1.

Although the Séries view may look useful, it isn't sorted by availability.  Unavailable books that are just listed for archival purposes are marked (in quite small letters) "Indisponible", but only when you click through to individual episodes.

Tintin!

Although part of the above show, France Culture has made a separate page collecting just the productions of Tintin books.

Les Aventures de Tintin

See also:
January 21, 2024  finding BBC Radio audiobooks

finding BBC Radio audiobooks

These are abridged books, usually in five 15-minute episodes (1.25 hours), although sometimes in ten parts.
For unabridged audiobooks, you may be able to get them on loan from your library, usually through the monopoly KKR OverDrive Libby app.

To find BBC Radio audiobooks that you can listen to outside the UK, go to

BBC - Programmes - Categories: Audiobooks - Available now

and then look for only the books that say "BBC Radio" after them.  Books that say "BBC Sounds" are not available outside the UK.

This doesn't cover all of the things you may consider to be audiobooks, as BBC categorizes many of them as "Drama".  The BBC website doesn't provide any way to filter out just drama based on books.  It also doesn't have any way to filter just drama presented on BBC Radio 4 Extra (which is mostly books).

Rather unexpectedly, BBC Radio 4 Extra has usefully collected many murder mysteries (a beloved comfort listen for the British) under "Whodunnits", possibly as a Christmas 2023 feature.

BBC Radio 4 Extra: Whodunnits

Even more unexpectedly, all episodes listed are still available, although they differ a bit in how they're grouped.  In any case see e.g.

• Miss Marple - They Do It With Mirrors, Episode 1 of 5 (2 days left to listen)
• Hercule Poirot - The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, in a single combined show (4 days left to listen)

Dramas are also not consistently named.  Sometimes it's by author.  Sometimes it's by author and book title.  Sometimes it's by character name.  e.g.

• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Dick Francis (author) - "Adaptations of the popular thrillers by the British steeplechase jockey turned crime writer."
• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Jack London - The Sea Wolf (author and title)
• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Miss Marple (character) - "June Whitfield stars as the iconic sleuth created by the queen of the whodunit, Agatha Christie."
• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Sherlock Holmes (character)

UPDATE 2024-01-21: The Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime pages are no longer being maintained.  So even though a book may be a "Book of the Week", it won't show up on the pages below.

• No longer maintained: Book of the Week – BBC Radio 4 – audiobooks, usually in 5 or 10 episodes
  • Note books are only available for a limited time; only books with a speaker icon are actually available online
• No longer maintained: Book at Bedtime – BBC Radio 4 – audiobooks, usually in 5 or 10 episodes

END UPDATE

Omnibus-eses

BBC Radio will -- sometimes -- publish an "omnibus" edition of a book, combining 5 days worth of episodes into a single continuous show.  Inexplicably, they almost never actually link the omnibus to the main page for the book.  The omnibus sometimes shows up on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and now these days sometimes shows up as e.g. "Episodes 1-5" on BBC Radio 4 itself.  There is no consistent pattern or linking.

UPDATE 2023-05-26: For a while BBC Radio 4 audiobooks weren't showing up on BBC Radio 4 Extra as combined omnibus episodes at the end of the week, but now it looks like that is happening again, although maybe mostly for older books being presented again.  END UPDATE

SIDEBAR: Don't use the very similar BBC Sounds - Category - Audiobooks page as it doesn't show which books are BBC Radio and which ones are BBC Sounds.  END SIDEBAR

See also:
January 21, 2024  finding France Culture radio audiobooks

review - Out of the Box web services

NOTE: This 2007 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Out of the Box by John Hagel III

# Hardcover: 240 pages
# Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (October 28, 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1578516803
# ISBN-13: 978-1578516803

The full title is Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today & Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services

The bottom line is that managers needs to develop more flexibility and collaboration capability to deliver continuing rounds of operating cost and asset savings as well as accelerated growth.  They need to escape from the high cost and inflexible infrastructures that make both cost reduction and growth such daunting challenges.

This book discusses how a new generation of IT and related architectures--known generally as Web services technology and distributed services architectures--will provide a significant catalyst in helping management break out of the boxes that confine it today.

The book is mainly targetted at managers, and talks mostly about business transformation challenges.  I liked the emphasis on bringing more flexibility to all aspects of business.  It doesn't talk about Service-Oriented Architecture directly at all, although it does talk sometimes about "Web service architectures".

If you're a manager and looking for ideas about how to transform your business, taking advantage of new technology and new IT processes, this would be a good book to read.

my review of The World is Flat

NOTE: This 2006 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Despite having a huge stack of books to read, I found myself on vacation without anything to read, so I ended up getting The World is Flat (Updated Edition) mostly by accident.

I had rushed into the mall to get the Globe, which no one was selling, so on a quick scan of the bookstore, I thought, hmm, if I'm going to sling around the term I should probably actually read the book.

At 566 pages, it's no light read, but Thomas Friedman presents a comprehensive framework for understanding the impact of technology on our societies.

I had assumed the book was mostly about outsourcing, but it actually covers a wide range of current developments in work and technology.  Friedman describes our society as experiencing "Globalization 3.0".

I was once again surprised, particularly given that he was even using "3.0" terminology, that there was no mention of Toffler's The Third Wave but other than that, the book is very strong.

It covers technology change with explanations that are both clear and comprehensive.  The last thing I would have expected in a book about globalization would be to get a good discussion of underlying technology change, but lo and behold, I read

"But then," added Microsoft's Mundie, "we said to ourselves, 'Geez, if we really want to automate everything, then we need to make it much easier not just for people to talk to people, but for machines to talk to machines -- for machines to interact with other machines about any subject without any humans involved at all or any a priori relationship between the different companies whose machines are communicating."  This was the next work flow breakthrough.

Technically, what made it possible was the development of a new data description language, called XML (extensible markup language) and its related transport protocol called SOAP (simple object access protocol).  Together, they allow any two computer programs to exchange formatted data or documents that contain any form of information.

(from "The Ten Forces that Flattened the World - #3 - Work Flow Software" - page 82)

Issues

"globalization" is missing from the index.

There is no comprehensive reference list or bibliography.  While he does a great job of citing things within the text, it would be nice to have them all gathered together at the end as well.

Every Blog Its Reader

I did a keynote in 2008 where I said "Every web resource its machine reader", reinterpreting Ranganathan for the computer age.

I want to look back on how we almost built an ecosystem of information for human and machine readers, and then it fell apart.

Below, I will see if I can tell the tale of the decline of the blogosphere and end up with thoughts about the Antikythera Mechanism and scholarly communication.

In 2007, Darren Barefoot wrote in The Tyee about an era that just 9 years later, is totally gone.

It begins:

I subscribe to the RSS feeds for about 175 blogs.

Later down, it says

Technology reporter and uber-geek Tod Maffin runs Inside the CBC. It's kind of an industry blog, in that it covers the world of Canadian public broadcasting...

The Rise and Fall of Inside the CBC

Let's have a look at Inside the CBC now, in 2016

It is definitely not by Tod Maffin, nor does it cover the world of Canadian public broadcasting.  It's more or less what we would call this year fake news.  More specifically, it's a kind of human content written for robots, but not at all in the way I intended.  It's most likely, given the jumble of topics (neopets, skates, weddings in Gatlinburg), a search-keyword-driven tasking of quick content creation.  "Neopets searches are peaking, quick, write something about neopets!"

Which is to say, the ecosystem of interlinking conversations that Barefoot describes in 2007 is quite gone.  It's clear there's some complicated history behind its demise, but for simplicity's sake, here's what we can find from the Internet Archive: by February 1, 2011 the blog has a posting from January 10, 2011 at 8:58 pm.  And that blog post remains, frozen in time at the top of the page until at least January 28, 2013.  By June 21, 2014 the page reads simply "The domain insidethecbc.com is no longer parked by GoDaddy." By December 21, 2014 it has become, rather unexpectedly, a blog in German: "Wir haben ein großes Forschungszentrum mit über 100 Mitarbeitern und Niederlassungen in Übersee und Asien." / "We have a large research center with over 100 employees and branches in overseas and Asia." By September 9, 2016 it has transformed again, writing in (sort-of) English about "The advantage of getting nucific bio x4 coupon codes" and by October 22, 2016 it has settled into its current format.

The long and short of this is firstly, this is a disaster for a "many small pieces, loosely joined" ecosystem, and secondly, without Internet Archive, or even if the current owner of Inside the CBC changed their robots.txt, all of the original site would be gone.

The Other Shoe Drops

The story of Inside the CBC turned out to be more complicated than I thought.  Is it illustrative of the decline of the blogosphere?  Well just seven years after his article in The Tyee, Barefoot is blogging "In 2014, what is my blog for?"

Whither Alexandria?

What has happened?  Well, basically, it turned out that this world of interlinking blogs and feed reading at best fell apart, at worst was deliberately dismantled.

I realise the latter is a more compelling story than the former, but it's a combination of factors.  In the In Our Time episode The Library of Alexandria, we may look to hear again the story of how the library burned, but the conclusion is actually that it really just faded away.  With the rise of the Christian Roman Empire, the old knowledge and the old conversations, the dialogues between the books, just weren't of as much interest any more.

But one of the reasons we still have this discussion about the destruction of the library is because of the reality of so much loss of information.

In Reality Is Not What It Seems (BBC Radio 4 adaptation episode 1, Fiat Lux), Carlo Rovelli tells the history of physics in the conventional way that most western European scientists do, beginning with the Greeks.  In particular, he speaks of Democritus, and of his dismay at the loss of Democritus' original writings.  "We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas.  I often think that the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of Classical civilization."

SIDEBAR

This formulation of the history of physics is so common that The Big Bang Theory parodies it in episode 3x10, where in order to teach Penny about Leonard's current research, Sheldon will only present the topic by starting with "It is there in Ancient Greece that our story begins..."

The episode is entitled The Gorilla Experiment, it aired in 2009.  It's not to be confused with 7x23 The Gorilla Dissolution which aired in 2014.

ENDSIDEBAR

Consider that while Rovelli is lamenting the loss of writings from 2400 years ago, we are not even doing a good job of maintaining writings from 9 years ago.  In fact, some Internet content is only now available through quotations and references made by other bloggers.

(And its worth noting that when you read this, you probably won't be able to listen to Fiat Lux, because the BBC is only making it available online for another 25 days.  And depending on your local copyright laws, you may not be able to legally view a clip from The Big Bang Theory without having purchased access to the episode.)

Thanks Google and Facebook

It didn't help that Google closed Google Reader.  It's a minor miracle that Google FeedBurner still exists.  The demise of (Facebook-owned) FriendFeed removed a conversation option from the web.  Overall, the ecosystem has shifted to closed commercial services and to search results driving traffic to commercial sites.

Whither Quebec?

If you want an idea of how fragile this ecosystem is, turn to the Elections Quebec page on Electronic Voting.  It used to include four press releases.  These press releases have now been "archived", which in this particular case means removed entirely from the web.  This is what the page looked like September 16, 2016 with the press releases (page from the Internet Archive)

and this is what it looks like now, with no indication the press releases ever were there.

There is nothing insidious about this, this is just standard web procedure - the press releases are from 2006, probably they were rarely accessed, so you run your ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) analysis and conclude that ten years online was enough, it's time for the press releases to go.

But once they go, they're gone.  Are they in the Library and Archives Canada web archive?  Are they in the BAnQ web archive?  It's hard to know.  Neither provides a public search interface that can uncover the Elections Quebec pages.  Without coverage in the national archive, and in the provincial archive, and in the Internet Archive, content that is removed from the web is just simply gone forever.

So this is where we find ourselves.  We have a single main service, the Internet Archive, that depends on private funding and that is attempting to make a backup of itself in Canada.  Coverage from other web archives is unclear and may be nonexistent.  Every day, as websites are reorganised, or content is deliberately removed for various reasons, or websites are simply neglected until the domain expires, our online Library of Alexandria fades.  Not in some blaze of destruction, but more from lost interest, the same as the original.

You might think this is not a problem, because we can get the press releases from the Internet Archive, but it never indexed them.  So for all intents and purposes they are gone now.

SIDEBAR

Because I happened to be paying particular attention to Canadian electronic voting information over the past few months, I was able to recover three of the press releases using a combination of Pinboard, Google and Bing caches.  The search engine caches would have been replaced very quickly, so it's only good fortune that I was able to grab the content before it was lost.

I have also become a bit obsessed about adding manually adding pages to the Archive, which you can do by going to https://web.archive.org/ and pasting the URL into the box under Save Page Now and clicking Save Page.

ENDSIDEBAR

The Loss of the Immune System

Blogging, with its interlinked web of discussions, was a kind of web immune system.  It wasn't perfect, but it was a way to have a conversation, and a way to provide signals to Google about what was and wasn't important, and to some extent, about what was and wasn't true.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get discovered through the network of blogs, to get added to feed readers, to become a new information source.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get good Google search ranking, to be discovered through search and thus be an important contributor to the conversation.

This is all basically gone.  Many of the blogs are gone, the blog discovery ecosystem is gone, the feed readers are gone, and Google search rank is very hard to get.

The Post- Era

Here's a quote

For some, this past election year was about the slow death of the current political system.

Can you place it in time? It's from... 1997.  Jon Katz wrote enthusiastically in Wired about how online conversations were going to transform political discourse.

On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who – in jarring contrast to the offline world – line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.

...

I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when people were suddenly able to talk directly to one another, rather than through journalists, politicians, or ideological mercenaries.

I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation – the Digital Nation – and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy.

Jon Katz, in 2016, now writes books about dogs.

So how did the hopes for online conversation and engagement go to the dogs?  How did we get from a postpolitical philosophy to post-truth as the word of the year?

Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2016

2007 may have been the tipping point.  The iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

Sitting in front of a desktop, you have a keyboard and a mouse and a screen.  This drives a certain kind of text-based, highlight-and-insert content creation.

Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are terrible at long text and inserting content.  They are great for creating photos and videos.  And so now that's the world we have, the photo and video world. 

All of the signals that we needed to rank and sort and link and discover are gone.  Now it's just bam! image, bam! video.  No context, no links, just endless streams of content.  The web now is, in short, television rather than a library.  And the consequences of this are huge.

In MIT Technology Review, Hossein Derakhshan writes

Before I went to prison [in 2008], I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.

...

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy.

In other words, we used to be able to use the web to have a conversation, and now we are basically using the web to amuse ourselves to death.

The blog ecosystem helped to create a kind of web immune system, an immune system that Google could use to surface healthy information.  With that gone, it's no wonder that false news can spread easily.

Finding the Antikythera Mechanism

Science depends on a web of citations, a web of knowledge.  Without a web of knowledge on the actual web, how can we hope to make discoveries and determine what is of interest.  How can we challenge information when we're in our filter bubbles, Facebooking to one another, off of the public web?

In 2008 (remember my talk from 2008? it's way back at the start of this blog post), I thought we might be able to meld human and machine understandings in order to advance the conversation.  I promoted the idea of better formatting information for machine processing, in order that we could benefit from machine-aided search and discovery.

I deliberately chose not to emphasize automatically-generated information.  Depending on the era, I've heard that the Semantic Web would solve discovery, or that OAI-ORE was going to link everything together, or now that Artificial Intelligence and Big Data will discover all connections automatically.

Would that this were so.

In Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Adrienne LaFrance writes

What if other objects like the Antikythera Mechanism have already been discovered and forgotten? There may well be documented evidence of such finds somewhere in the world, in the vast archives of human research, scholarly and otherwise, but simply no way to search for them. Until now.

This is a compelling vision of knowledge that we don't even know that we have, that could be unearthed if we just digitized and translated everything, and then sent our AIs digging for connections.  Maybe Democritus is out there, in some copy of a copy of an Arabic translation.  Maybe this whole lost world of complex mechanical devices is out there on paper somewhere, just waiting to be found.

But there is a pretty harsh collision between that vision and the reality of the web we've created.

We were on a path that might have enabled this scholarly discovery, although probably with a lot more human intervention than techno-utopians would like.  But now we can't even find things from a few years ago.  We were assembling the book-to-book conversations of a new Library of Alexandria, and now we're scraping down the pages like in the Archimedes Palimpsest

This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204.^[7] There, in 1229, the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book.

But we're doing far far worse than writing over thousand-year-old knowledge.  We're erasing completely information from last year, with no xray to recover it.

Which is to say, as much as I love the vision of recovering the lost history of the Antikythera Mechanism, I'm more worried we won't even have a history of last year.

Remaking the Web We Made

This is the web now

The Web of Desperate Popup Intrusion.

That used to be the web of users deciding to subscribe to feeds, instead of being badgered to sign up to email newsletters, or to view ads, or to pay up immediately.

So let's try to unwind some of our mistakes.  Rather than some AI utopia that will unearth lost connections from millenia past, let's deliberately build a human reality of intentional reconnection.  Some suggestions:

• more slow, less fast
• more longform, less shortform
• more blogging, less Twitter
• open your feedreader, not your email
• less reaction to images, more thought about text
• get more sleep
• read more books
• put the smartphone down
• more services that let us pay for them, less ad-supported data-mining intrusion
• more public broadcaster support
• systematic public investment in web archiving
• less closed conversation, more open public conversation
• a more realistic blend of human-created metadata and machine analysis

I will readily admit that I got pulled away into the quick rewards of Twitter from the slow work of blogging.  And it's become a self-reinforcing system.  As blogging and feedreading faded, blog hits and links and comments faded.  Blog rank in Google faded.  Wearing another hat, I wrote 595 blog posts about online voting from 2004 to 2016.  All that work, and (for the particular Google results I see today on this computer), the blog shows up once on page 5 of results for "online voting" canada.  It's hard to maintain one's enthusiasm for 5th page ranking.  It's hard to maintain one's blogging for two web hits a day.

But then I remember I originally started blogging just for myself.  I didn't anticipate my blog would grow and connect in the way that it did for a while.  So I am going to try to get back to blogging, because everywhere I go now, even for the few seconds of an elevator ride, I see people lost in their smartphone screens.  I don't see how we can continue on losing ourselves in those little personalized screens.

Ursula K. Le Guin tells me if Americans are Still Afraid of Dragons

Two years ago, I wrote a post about running across an article called "Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Day by day, month by month, the traffic comes in to that post.  For example, in my stats for today, the search phrase

why are americans afraid of dragons

is the third most popular phrase in incoming searches.  I have tried to figure out what's driving this traffic (other than curiousity) but I can't find any one source.

So when I saw Le Guin was coming to the Ottawa Writers Festival, I knew I had to go and ask her about her thoughts, 35 (!) years after her 1974 article.  (Plus, of course, I have enjoyed her books.)

With some preamble, in particular mentioning the popularity of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, I asked: Are Americans Still Afraid of Dragons?

Her answer, as I understood it, was twofold.

Firstly, that fantasy is still dismissed by the dominant business culture as "stories for children".

Secondly, however, that authors of science fiction and fantasy are increasingly being recognized by the mainstream of literature, that the genres are blurring.  (She mentioned a particular author who had won a particular mainstream award, but I don't remember the details.)

I should also mention that during the Q&A before the audience questions, there was also a lot of talk about finding truth through fiction, and about the dubious "facts" that capitalism and American businessmen prefer.

On the issue of blurring of genres, I can certainly comment on my amusement that mainstream lit and critics had to invent a "new genre" of speculative fiction, so that it could avoid calling literary giants like Margaret Atwood fantasy writers.  The only difference between fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction appears to be who writes it, not the actual content.

So I think in conclusion the answer to the question is: somewhat less than they used to be, but the dismissal of fantasy and fiction in general is still a very real aspect of our society.

I don't know how much of the festival will go online, but it's possible that
* audio of her talk may show up at http://oiwf.squarespace.com/listen/
* video clips may show up at http://oiwf.squarespace.com/festival-on-youtube/

Sidebar: I just remembered one discussion in the Q&A where things went a bit off track.  Sean Wilson asked her about hard science fiction versus soft science fiction.  The answer was that hard science fiction is about the hard sciences, physics, chemistry etc. which is not the usual definition of hard SF.  The difference as I have always understood it is about the nature of the imagined world.  In soft science fiction, you're allowed to bend the rules of what is currently known to be possible.  You might have time travel, or faster than light travel, or telepathy, or teleportation.  As they say, you can "play with the net down".  If you drop the net way down, you edge into fantasy, where the rules of the physical world may be dramatically different from what we currently know to be true.

Hard science fiction, on the other hand, is about obeying the rules of the physical world.  In the hardest of hard SF, you can't break any currently known scientific laws or go too far beyond current known technology limitations.  No faster than light, no teleportation, no super laser guns that fit in your pocket, etc.  But that's not to say hard SF can't be very character driven.  It often isn't, but something like Battlestar Galactica is actually quite hard SF - they do allow FTL for the purposes of moving the story along, but they fire bullets and missiles from their space ships, and they use nuclear weapons.  No ray guns.  They even try to do some reasonably realistic physics for the space fights.  All of that hard SF is however, only background detail, because BSG is actually all about the characters, not about the technology.

END SIDEBAR

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

Ottawa Writers Festival Spring 2009 - Science and Big Ideas

There are lots of authors coming to the Spring Writers Festival, I am just highlighting the science ones below.  You can see the full programme at

http://www.writersfestival.org/events.html

You have to pay, except some events are free for Carleton students.

Wednesday April 22, 2009 - 7 PM - Earth Day - New Science Series: Washing the Water

Alanna Mitchell discusses Seasick: The Hidden Ecological Crisis of the Global Ocean;

Wayne Grady discusses The Great Lakes: The Natural History of a Changing Region

Thursday April 23, 2009 - 7 PM - The Big Idea: Carbon Shift

Join editor Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, and contributor William Marsden, author of Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care) for a conversation on their new book Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future.

Sunday April 26, 2009 - 2 PM - New Science Series: How Mathematics Orders Our Lives - with Jason I. Brown, hosted by Stephen Brockwell

Thursday April 30, 2009 - noon - Masterclass Series: Why Poetry Antimatters - Metaphor, Entanglement and Particle Poetics

Join two stellar poets for a team Masterclass on poetry. Jeramy Dodds, recently shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, and Matthew Tierney, author of The Hayflick Unit and Full speed through the morning dark, for an exploration of the intersection of science and poetry.

Saturday May 2, 2009 - 4 PM - New Science Series - Cyburbia: Consciousness, Communication and Community in the Digital Age

The way we live has apparently been transformed by new ways of communicating. But where did these trends start? And if they can change our behaviour, can they also change the way we think? In Cyburbia James Harkin describes how the architecture of our digital lives was built over seventy years.

I have also added these events to LibraryThing, you can see them e.g. attached to the Saint Brigid's venue:

http://www.librarything.com/venue/40511

It was a bit of a pain transcribing all this stuff - organisations need to get smarter about providing information in machine-readable formats.  I can't think of an easier standard format than calendars.  Jon Udell is trying to address some of this with his community calendar project.

Galileo would have been a blogger

Observing with his 20-power telescope in late 1609 and early 1610, writing a letter about what he observed on 7 January 1610, and publishing in book form a first ever description of phenomena such as Jupiter's moons, just 9 weeks later.

Galileo continued his observations of the new planets [moons] as the printing progressed. His last observation is dated 2 March 1610.

On 13 March 1610 he sent an unbound copy to the Tuscan court, with a properly bound copy following on 19 March 1610. The book was Sidereus Nuncius, usually translated as Sidereal Messenger, although I prefer the more evocative Starry Messenger.

How's that for time between observations and publication.

The book is a short and clear read, full of excitement.
I was inspired to read it after hearing quotes from it in the amazing Tafelmusik Galileo Project.
It's a pleasure to be able to blog about it, almost 400 years later.

Accordingly, on the seventh day of January of the present year 1610, at the first hour of the night, when I inspected the celestial constellations through a spyglass, Jupiter presented himself. And since I had prepared for myself a superlative instrument, I saw (which earlier had not happened because of the weakness of the other instruments) that three little stars were positioned near him--small but yet very bright.

Kindle 2 burns on the horizon

Front page news on Amazon.com and being promoted to Amazon Associates, the Kindle 2 has arrived.
Personally, I don't see why you would buy books you can only license, never own.  Books on a device that's available only in the United States.  Isn't technology amazing?  It can create arbitrary barriers that never existed before in the physical world.

But if you want one, here you go.  It's US$359 and will be released February 24, 2009.

pre-order Kindle 2 from Amazon.com

 

I do have to admire Amazon for understanding a deep truth of the digital world - in the end, you can only monetize physical things.  Apple understood this by making their money on the iPod, not the music.

UPDATE: Also the note at Amazon that "original Kindle owners are first in line to receive Kindle 2 [if they order one]" reminds me that this is new technology.  That means unlike paper, which is rather well-established, the Kindle will become obsolete.  Rapidly.  Those books that have been sitting on your bookshelf for 20 years - no problem, reach over and open them up.  In 20 years, how many generations of book-reading technology do you think you will have to go through, between upgrades and failures?  At hundreds of dollars for every replacement.  For content that you don't even own in any meaningful way.  I don't think that's progress.  ENDUPDATE

Personally I think a more interesting development is Google Book Search Mobile.  As well, the New York Times reports that Amazon is also working on delivering "Kindle books" to cellphones, presumably with the same DRM.  There is no sign of that being available from Amazon today (and I don't see what their incentive would be, since it breaks the "you only make money from physical things" model).

Full disclosure: The above are Amazon Affiliate links (price and everything are identical, I just get a percentage of your purchase).

science book audio from Ottawa International Writers Festival

Lots of great audio of authors talking about their books, including

• Gwynne Dyer talking about Climate Wars
• Leonard Susskind on Black Holes, October 24, 2008

Writers Festival New Science Series - October 2008

The Ottawa International Writers Festival has a jam-packed lineup, including a New Science Series.
As usual when these sort of things happen in Ottawa, I just discovered I will be away for all of it.

Friday October 24, 2008

6:00 PM

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES: Dan Falk on Understanding Time
Nature Network: Dan Falk

7:00 PM

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES: THE BLACK HOLE WAR:
      Leonard Susskind on Quantum Mechanics and Black Holes

Saturday October 25, 2008

NOON

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES:
      Stephen Pinker on Language as a Window into Human Nature

2:00 PM

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES: CLIMATE CHANGE
      With Jay Ingram and Andrew Weaver

Sunday October 26, 2008

NOON

* NEW SCIENCE SERIES:
      John W. Moffat on Reinventing Gravity

LibraryThing Local Ottawa + Writers Festival

All of a sudden a bunch of events have shown up in

http://www.librarything.com/local/place/Ottawa%2C+Ontario

mostly relating to the upcoming Ottawa International Writers Festival 2008.

You can also find the Writers Festival in Facebook.

Ronald Wright will be speaking at LAC this week, unfortunately between the website and the social sites, it's not clear whether it's on September 5 or 6.

Celebridée – Ottawa - May 2 to 19, 2008 - Chris Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Kunstler...

As part of the tulip festival, a collection of thinkers and music and stuff.

In 2008, Celebridée will come into full bloom in the Tulip Festival Mirror Tent headlining Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the world's most celebrated and controversial novelists. Other headliners include Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond.

...

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Yale University's Amy Chua will present World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, ..., the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics will present The Mystery of Dark Matter, and Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City, will discuss Creative Cities.

Celebridée will also feature several partner events including 1783 – Subject or Citizen? an event on the Treaty of Paris by Library and Archives Canada and musical concerts including two evenings with Angela Hewitt: The Well-Tempered Clavier and Janina Fialkowska & The Chamber Players of Canada, all at St. Andrew's Church.

from http://www.celebridee.com/

Richard Florida's blog is also mirrored at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass

UPDATE: I see Ottawa's own Clive Doucet will also be speaking.  I liked his book Urban Meltdown.

UPDATE: Since Colin mentioned he had some trouble finding the actual schedule, it's hidden away at http://www.tulipfestival.ca/en/Celeb_Events/

Trouble with Medical Journals?

Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian newsanchor, interviews Richard Smith, former BMJ editor, author of The Trouble with Medical Journals.

30 minute Windows Media video

http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/oneonone/20071124.wmv

Book info at

http://www.rsmpress.co.uk/bksmith.htm

Google Book Search API

The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:

                   

• Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
• Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
• Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
• Generate links to an informational page about a book
• Generate links to a preview of a book

http://code.google.com/apis/books/

via LibraryThing blog - Google Books in LibraryThing - March 13, 2008

We need APIs everywhere for everything.

Chapters invites you to their content acquisition community

Chapters-Indigo is the major bookstore chain in Canada.  What do they provide for booklovers online?

Chapters Indigo Community, "Acceptable Use Policy"

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/Legal-Statement/legal-art.html

Emphasis mine.

The User acknowledges that any content, e-mails, postings, offers, software, videos, photos, text, graphics, music, sounds, questions, creative suggestions, messages, feedback, ideas, recipes, notes, drawings, articles, stories or other information, data, materials and opinions (including, without limitation any postings on community forums) ("Submissions") that he or she may provide, e-mail, post, upload or otherwise transmit to the Website shall be deemed and shall remain the property of Indigo, including all copyright, without reservation, and User waives in favour of Indigo any and all moral rights in such Submissions. Except as provided in the Privacy Policy, none of the Submissions shall be subject to any obligation of confidence on Indigo’s part, and We shall not be liable for any use or disclosure of any Submissions. Without limitation of the foregoing, the User acknowledges and agrees that all or any portion of the Submissions may be used, edited, reproduced, published, translated, sublicensed, copied and distributed and/or incorporated into other works in any form, media, or technology now known or hereafter developed for the full term of any copyright that may exist in such Submissions, without compensation of any kind to the User. When You post Submissions to the Website, You authorize and direct Indigo to make such copies thereof as We deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the Submissions on the Website. By posting Submissions to any part of the Website, You automatically grant, and You represent and warrant that You have the right to grant, to Indigo an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such Submissions for any purpose on or in connection with the Website or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Submissions, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You agree to defend, indemnify and hold Indigo, its subsidiaries and affiliates, and each of their directors, officers, agents, contractors, partners and employees, harmless from and against any loss, liability, threatened or actual claim, demand, damages, costs and expenses, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of or in connection with any of Your Submissions.

Err thanks, but my idea of community doesn't involve transferring my ideas to a private corporation for reproduction in formats yet to be invented, until the end of time.

Way to miss the point of social networking, Chapter-Sin-digo.

They say they have 80,000 members, I don't see how that is even possible, considering that even the older, well-established, and wildly popular LibraryThing only has 368,000 members.

audiobook DRM on the way out

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

...

Random House was the first to announce it was backing away from D.R.M., or digital rights management software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States behind Random House, now appears set to follow suit. Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, said the company would make all of its audio book titles available for download in the MP3 format on eMusic, the Web’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes.

...

Mr. Heffernan said the company changed its mind partly after watching the major music labels, like Warner Brothers and Sony BMG, abandon D.R.M. on the digital music they sell on Amazon.com. “I’m looking at this as a test,” he said. “But I do believe the audio book market without D.R.M. is going to be the future.”

New York Times - Publishers Phase Out [AntiCopying] - March 3, 2008

(The actual NYT headline "publishers phase out piracy protection", while alliterative, is stupid.  Copying is not piracy.)

I think it's a shame that more libraries didn't push back harder on publishers about DRM, but it appears that it is dying a well-deserved death anyway.

LibraryThing 1200

The 1200th book in my LibraryThing library is Brunelleschi's Dome.  It's quite interesting so far.

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

Rainbows End free online - Nippon 2007 Hugo science fiction nominee

There's a lot to like about Vernor Vinge's visionary novel Rainbows End.  I reviewed it in August of 2006 (I could have sworn it wasn't that long ago, time flies).

It's now available in its entirety, free online.

via Boing Boing

A nice year-end present.

As I mentioned in the title, it is a nominee for the Nippon 2007 Hugos.

If you get a taste of it and decide to buy it, here are my Amazon USA and Canada affiliate links:

   

Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

tag cloud on book cover

I was kind of amused to notice this tag cloud on the cover of the Lonely Planet Lyon travel guide

I assume it's a pseudo-cloud, rather than being based on the actual book text, but it has all elements of a typical cloud: terms vary both in size and brightness.  It would be interesting to compare it with a real tag cloud for the book, but I'm the only one on LibraryThing with it (most people don't put travel guides in their LT, let alone travel guides en français).

27th Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair - Oct 27-28, 2007

They don't seem to have a website, but the Ottawa Congress Centre events site says

The Twenty Seventh Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair has become an exciting fall event for book lovers from across Canada. A display and sale, recognized as one of the finest book fairs in the country, features rare, unusual and collectible books. The fair will include over 40,000 items, dating from the 15th century to the present day, displayed by over 65 booksellers from across Canada.

Alvin Toffler interviewed by Allen Gregg

ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock. The Third Wave. Two classics that revolutionized the way we think about our rapidly changing world. They established Alvin Toffler as one of the world's most influential futurists. In his new book, Toffler once again takes us back to the future. It's called Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be Created and How it will Change our Lives.

Web Exclusive Preview: Allan Gregg in Conversation with Alvin Toffler

Allen Gregg in Conversation (on TVO) - August 31, 2007

Note: a lot of the links on the TVO site won't work if you have cookies turned off.

Previously:
October 1, 2006  Alvin Toffler on Big Ideas