Interesting Books In 2020

There have been a lot of things we haven’t been able to do during the last nine months. But it’s been a good time for reading ebooks and listening to audiobooks. So my on-again-off-again tradition of highlighting interesting books that I have read in the year is on again.

These books have not all been published during the last year, but are ones I’ve read this past year and thought worth mentioning to other folks who read this blog.  You’ll note that this is an eclectic combination of books on technology, government, the economy and other non-fiction – but that’s the range of topics that my blog is about.

Anyway, here’s my list for 2020 and a blurb as to why each book is on the list.  I have obviously eliminated from the list the many other books that I’ve read, which I would not recommend you spend your time on. 😊

Technology, AI/Machine Learning and Science

  1. David Carmona – The AI Organization: Learn from Real Companies and Microsoft’s Journey How to Redefine Your Organization with AI (2019). Perhaps too many examples from Microsoft, but it is a really good book from A to Z on artificial intelligence.
  2. Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant – User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play (2019). Very interesting review of the leading good (and sometimes bad) user interfaces.
  3. Matthew O. Jackson – The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors (2019). Good, understandable explanations of network measures and phenomena in various domains.
  4. Damon Centola – How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (2018). Provides a nuanced view of the best time to use weak or strong ties, especially in leading changes in an organization or community.
  5. Eric Topol – Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (2019). Although it is mostly about the ways that artificial intelligence can re-humanize the patient-doctor relationship, it even has a pretty good, understandable review of general artificial intelligence and machine learning concepts.
  6. Lisa Feldman Barrett – How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017). The title highlights emotions, but this book is not just about emotions. It instead offers a paradigm shift about how the brain works.
  7. Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers – The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of a Blockbuster Novel (2016). interesting book, better and more nuanced than the usual summaries about machine learning models to predict the success of books.
  8. Leonard Mlodinow – The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2009). Interesting explanations of the implications of probability theory and how most people get probability wrong.
  9. Scott Rigby and Richard M Ryan – Glued to games: how video games draw us in and hold us spellbound (2011). Good review of computer-based games, especially the psychological aspects.

Leadership And Business

  1. Jim McKelvey – The innovation stack: building an unbeatable business one crazy idea at a time (2020). Good, insightful and sometimes funny book by one of the co-founders of Square, with the proposition that success is the result of a chain (better word than stack) of innovations rather than just one big one.
  2. Scott Kupor – Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It (2019). If you want to know how venture capitalists look at startups, this tells you how.
  3. Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary – Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy – and How to Make Them Work for You (2017). While other books on the subject go more deeply into the broader policy implications of platforms, if you want to start a platform business, this is your best, almost required, user manual.
  4. Daniel Coyle – The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (2018). Culture is a frequently used word to explain the forces that drive behavior in organizations, but too often the concept is fuzzy. This book is one of the clearest and best on the subject.
  5. Dan Heath – Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (2020). Good, as usual for the Heath brothers, well written down to earth, but important concepts underneath and guidance at looking at the more fundamental part of problems that you are trying to solve.
  6. Matt Ridley – How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (2020). Includes many short histories of key innovations, not just invention, with an emphasis on the iterative and collaborative nature of the innovation process. Ridley advocates curtailing IP protections, thus providing more tolerance of risky experiments/innovations.
  7. Rita McGrath – Seeing Around Corners: How To Spot Inflection Points In Business Before They Happen (2019). Columbia Professor McGrath has made clear that no strategy is sustainable for a long time and in this book, she helps you figure out when you are at good or bad inflection points.

The Economy And Government

  1. Robert H. Frank – Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work (2020). Frank is one of the most creative economists around and in this review of behavioral economics, he highlights how people pursue relative positions of wealth, rather than merely being rational maximizers of wealth.  He also offers a good discussion of public policies to pursue, that are based on this understanding of economic behavior.
  2. Stephanie Kelton – The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (2020). Well written, clear exposition of modern monetary theory and the positive and negative consequences of having completely fiat money (no gold standard or fixed currency exchanges). Professor Kelton is an increasingly influential economist and her ideas – whether or not she is given credit – have enabled the US Government to spend more with less angst than used to be the case.
  3. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo – Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems (2019). A review of economics research – and, more important, its limits – in addressing major socio-economic problems.
  4. Matthew Yglesias – One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (2020). Although no one (including me) will agree with everything he proposes, this is an interesting book with some original forward thinking – something we need more of as we face a very changed future.
  5. Michael Hallsworth and Elspeth Kirkman – Behavioral Insights (2020). This is a good overview of the application of behavior research to mostly public policy, especially about the UK.
  6. Paul Begala – You’re fired: the perfect guide to beating Donald Trump (2020). Smart and realistic proposals for the campaign to oppose Trump with many very funny lines.
  7. Jane Kleeb – Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America (2020). Along with Begala, explains her own success in rural America and more generally what needs to be done by Democrats to regain their old reputation as the party of the majority of people.
  8. Mark Lilla – The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017). Short review of how the Democratic party became dominated by identity politics and, for that reason, provides a bit of background for the previous too books.

Have a happy holiday season and a great, much better, year in 2021!

© 2020 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

What Comes After Curation?

[Note: I’m President of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, but this post is only my own view.]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the second chance given to libraries, as Google’s role in the life of web users slowly diminishes. Of course, for at least a few years, one of the responses of librarians to the growth of the digital world has been to re-envision libraries as curators of knowledge, instead of mere collectors of documents. It’s not a bad start in a transition.

Indeed, this idea has also been picked up by all kinds of online sites, not just libraries. Everyone it seems wants to aggregate just the right mix of articles from other sources that might interest you.

But, from my perspective, curation is an inadequate solution to the bigger problem this digital knowledge century has created – we don’t have time to read everything. Filtering out the many things I might not want to read at all doesn’t help me much. I still end up having too much to read.

And we end up in the situation summed up succinctly by the acronym TL;DR, too long, didn’t read. (Or my version in response to getting millions of Google hits – TMI, TLK “too much information, too little knowledge”.)

The AQAINT project (2010) of the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) stated this problem very well:

“How do we find topically relevant, semantically related, timely information in massive amounts of data in diverse languages, formats, and genres? Given the incredible amounts of information available today, merely reducing the size of the haystack is not enough; information professionals … require timely, focused answers to complex questions.”

Like NIST, what I really want – maybe what you want or need too? – is someone to summarize everything out there and create a new body of work that tells me just what I need to know in as few words as possible.

Researchers call this abstractive summarization and this is not an easy problem to solve. But there has been some interesting work going on in various universities and research labs.

At Columbia University, Professor Kathleen McKeown and her research colleagues developed “NewsBlaster” several years ago to organize and summarize the day’s news.

Among other companies, Automated Insights has developed some practical solutions to the overall problem. Their Wordsmith software has been used, for example, by the Associated Press “to transform raw earnings data into thousands of publishable stories, covering hundreds more quarterly earnings stories than previous manual efforts”.

For all their clients, they claim to produce “over 1.5 billion narratives annually”. And these are so well done that the New York Times had an article about it that was titled “If An Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?”.

The next step, of course, is to combine many different data sources and generate articles about them for each person interested in that combination of sources.

Just a few months ago, Salesforce’s research team announced a major advance in summarization. Their motivation, by the way, is the same as mine:

“In 2017, the average person is expected to spend 12 hours and 7 minutes every day consuming some form of media and that number will only go up from here… Today the struggle is not getting access to information, it is keeping up with the influx of news, social media, email, and texts. But what if you could get accurate and succinct summaries of the key points…?”

Maluuba, acquired by Microsoft, has been continuing earlier research too. As they describe their research on “information-seeking behaviour”:

“The research at Maluuba is tackling major milestones to create AI agents that can efficiently and autonomously understand the world, look for information, and communicate their findings to humans.”

Librarians have skills that can contribute to the development of this branch of artificial intelligence. While those skills are necessary, they aren’t sufficient and a joint effort between AI researchers and the library world is required.

However, if librarians joined in this adventure, they could also offer the means of delivering this focused knowledge to the public in a more useful way than just dumping it into the Internet.

As I’ve blogged a few months ago:

Librarians have many skills to add to the task of “organizing the world’s information, and making it universally accessible”. But as non-profit organizations interested in the public good, libraries can also ensure that the next generation of knowledge tools – surpassing Google search – is developed for non-commercial purposes.

So, what comes after everyone has tried curation? Abstractive summarization aided by artificial intelligence software, that’s what!

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

Books That Link Analytics, Big Data And Leading Change

Last week, at the end of my class in Analytics and Leading Change, one of the required courses in Columbia University’s Masters Program in Applied Analytics, my students asked for books I’d recommend that provide more detail than we could cover in the course. It turns out that others are also interested in a good library of books about analytics from the viewpoint of an organization’s leaders.

You’ll see that these are not textbooks about analytics or machine learning techniques – there are plenty of those. Instead, this reading list is the next step for those folks who understand the techniques and now want the insights from their work to have an impact on and provide value to their world.

Although most of these books were published in the last decade, there are also some classics on the list going back fifty years. And I’ve chosen mostly popular books because frankly they are written in a compelling way that is accessible to all leaders.

With that introduction, here are my recommendations.

1.     On the experience of doing analytics and seeing its impact:

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The movie, Moneyball, starred Brad Pitt as the hero of the first and most storied use of analytics in professional baseball. For people in the field of analytics, what could be better than a movie about your skills helping the underdog. But like all movies, it tended to gloss over or exaggerate situations for the benefit of a good, simple plot.

The book that Lewis wrote originally is subtler and is a good case study of the human side of introducing analytics in a tradition-bound field. Tying it all up, his more recent book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, is the story of the collaboration between Kahneman (see below) and Tversky.

The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t by Nate Silver

Nate Silver is probably the best-known analytics practitioner by those not in the business themselves, due to his work over the years, especially for the New York Times and in relation to high visibility elections. This is his review of the ups and downs in using analytics, offering lessons especially from sports and politics.

Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns by Sasha Issenberg

Although sometimes a bit over the top and now five years old, it is a thorough description of the use of analytics in election campaigns. Election campaigns are good examples of analytics because they are both well-known and there is a huge amount of data concerning elections and the voters who determine their outcomes.

Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves by Christian Rudder

The author is the co-founder and former analytics lead for OkCupid. Not surprisingly, much of the book is about dating choices, but he goes way beyond that to uncover insights about various social attitudes, including racism, from the large amount of data he had in his hands both at his former company and elsewhere.

How Not To Be Wrong: The Power Of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

Since analytics is essentially a mathematical art, Ellenberg’s book about mathematical thinking is important preparation for the field. It also provides numerous examples of how to present quantitative insights in a way that non-experts would understand.

2.    On expanding the normal range of analytics:

Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social Sciences by Eugene Webb, et al

I’ve added this fifty year old classic to the list because even in a world of big data we don’t necessarily have all the data we need, either in our computer systems or in the physical world.  This book reminds us to observe indications of phenomenon that are not already available – such as the influence of an individual measured by the wear and tear on the entry to his/her office space. It also points out the need to always include metadata in our analysis since that is often revealing.

How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard

Somewhat picking up the same theme, this book helps both the business executive and the analytics practitioner to be more creative in measurement, especially when it comes to things that people haven’t so far been able to offer good metrics for.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler

This is a book about how social networks influence us in ways we hadn’t considered before. As they say: “How your friends’ friends’ friends affect everything you think, feel and do.” I suppose a good example is how their observation that you’ll gain weight by being connected to overweight people in a social network has itself become a meme. In its own way, this book is an interesting work of analytics.

Just as important is its elaboration of how to study social networks since an understanding of the network of influencers in any organization is essential to anyone who wants to change the behavior of the people in that organization.

Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

The author was part of Google’s analytics team, which is the analytics equivalent of working at the Vatican if you’re a Roman Catholic theologian.  Her emphasis in on how to show the insights of analytics work and to tell a story about those insights. In a world of all kinds of data visualization tools and fads, her advice is clear and evidence-based.

3.    On the way that the human mind perceives the insights of analytics and might or might change as a result:

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely

Professor Ariely, formerly of MIT and now at Duke, is one of the more creative experimenters in psychology and he quickly reviews both his own and others’ research results. The theme of this short book is that the payoff which often makes a difference in human behavior is not necessarily a financial reward and that sometimes financial incentives even backfire. This is important for leaders of change in organizations, particularly big corporations, to understand.

Thinking, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman

I’ve written about the work of Nobel Prize winner and Princeton Professor Kahneman before, most recently in “What Do We Know About Change”. This describes what Kahneman has learned from a lifetime of research about thinking and decision making. His work on how people process – distort – quantitative statements is especially relevant to analytics experts who need understand the cognitive biases he describes.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

The Heath brothers, popular business writers, have done a good job in this book of explaining what’s been learned in recent psychological research – see Kahneman and Ariely, for instance – without dumbing it down so much that the key points are lost. In doing that well, they also provide the leader of change and analytics some good ideas on how to present their own results and getting their organizations to switch to a more analytics-oriented outlook.

4.     On the strategic linkage between leading change and analytics

The Dance of Change by Peter Senge, et al

This is another classic that goes beyond the usual cookbook approach found in most books on “change management”. Yet, Senge and his colleagues anticipated the more recent approaches to change management which is about something more than just getting a single project done. For Senge, the goal he established was to help create learning organizations. While he does not focus on analytics, this book should particularly resonate with analytics professionals since they now have the tools to take that learning to new and more useful levels than in the past.

I could easily expand this list, as could many others, but this “baker’s dozen” books will provide a good rounded education to start.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved @NormanJacknis

Creativity Versus Copyright

In the Industrial Age, the fight between labor and the owners of industry (“capital”) was the overarching political issue. As we move away from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge that debate is likely to diminish.

Instead, among the big battles to be fought in this century, will be about intellectual property — who controls it, who gets paid for it, how much they get paid, who owns it and whether ideas can properly be considered property in the same way we consider land to be property.

I’ve written about this before, but a recent story about the settlement of a suit by Star Trek was settled recently, as reported in the NY Times, brought this to mind, especially as I came across an interesting series of posts that provide some new perspectives.

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These were written at the end of last year and the beginning of this year by the former chair of the Australian Film Critics Association, Rich Haridy.

His aim was to “examine how 21st century digital technology has given artists a set of tools that have dismantled traditional definitions of originality and is challenging the notions of copyright that came to dominate much of the 20th century.”

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Here’s a quick, broad-brush summary of his argument for a more modern and fairer copyright system:

  • Not just in today’s digital world of remixes, but going back to Shakespeare and Bach and even before that, creative works have always been derivative from previous works. They clearly have originality, but no work is even close to being 100% original.
  • The tightening of copyright laws has undermined the original goal of copyrights — to encourage creativity and the spread of knowledge.
  • This reflects the failure of policy makers and the courts to understand the nature of creativity. This is getting worse in our digital world.
  • While the creators and distributors deserve compensation for their works, this shouldn’t be used as a reason to punish other artists who build and transform those works.
  • The enforcement is unequal. While bloggers and artists with limited financial means are easy targets for IP lawyers, the current system “while [theoretically] allowing for fair use, still privileges the rich and powerful, be they distributors or artists.”

It’s worth reading the series to understand his argument, which makes a lot of sense:

Haridy is not proposing destruction of copyrights. But if arguments, like his, are not heeded, don’t be surprised if more radical stances are taken by others — just as happened in the past in the conflict between labor and capital.

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© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/157274980178/creativity-versus-copyright]

Good Books Read In 2015

At the end of the year, there are many top 10 lists of the best
movies, best books, etc. of the year. Here’s my list of the best
non-fiction books I’ve read this year. But it has only eight books and
some were published earlier than this year since, like the rest of you,
I’m always behind in my reading no matter how many books, articles, and
blogs I read.

Although some are better than others, none of these
books is perfect. What book is perfect? But they each provide the reader
with a new way of looking at the world, which in turn is, at a minimum,
thought provoking and, even better, helps us to be more innovative.

I’ve
highlighted the major theme of each, but these are books that have many
layers and depth so my summary only touches on what they offer.

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Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

We’ve
had a few scary books out this past year or so about how robots are
going to take our work from us and enslave us. Kaplan’s brilliant book,
published this year, is much more nuanced and sophisticated. It is not
just “ripped from today’s headlines”. Instead, Kaplan provides history
and deep context. Especially interesting is his discussion of the legal
and ethical issues that arise when we use more of these
artificially-intelligent devices.

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Creating the Learning Society by Joseph Stiglitz & Bruce Greenwald

Joseph
Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, has been better known for
“The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them”
which was published this year and is a sequel to his earlier book on the
subject, “The Price of Inequality” (2012). While those deal with the
important issue of economic inequality, at this point, that’s not news
to most of us.

Less well known, if more rigorous as a work of
economics, is his 2013 book “Creating the Learning Society”. With all
the talk about the importance of lifelong learning and innovation to
succeed in the economy of this century, there have been few in-depth
analyses of how that translates into economic growth and greater
incomes. Nor has there been much about what are the appropriate
government policies to have a modern economy to grow. Stiglitz provides
both in this book.

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The End Of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Talking
about lifelong learning, I found this book thought-provoking,
especially as a college trustee. Published this year, the rap on it is
that it’s all about massive open online courses (MOOCs), but it is
actually about much more than that. It provides a good history of the
roles that colleges have been asked to play and describes a variety of
ways that many people are trying to improve the education of students.

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BiblioTech by John Palfrey

John
Palfrey was the patron of Harvard Law School’s Library Lab, one of the
nation’s leading intellectual property experts and now chairman of the Digital Public Library of America,
among other important positions.  BiblioTech, which was published
earlier this year, describes a hopeful future for libraries – including a
national network of libraries. (Readers of this blog won’t be surprised
that Palfrey and I share many views, although he put these ideas all
together in a book and, of course, elaborated on them much more than I
do in these relatively short posts.)

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Too Big To Know by David Weinberger

About
five years ago, I got to work a bit with David Weinberger when he was
one of the leaders of the library innovation lab at Harvard Law School,
in addition to his work at Harvard’s Berkman Center. When I was
introduced to the library lab’s ambitious projects, I joked with David
that his ultimate ambition was to do nothing less than organize all of
the world’s knowledge for the 21st century. This book, which was
published a year later is, I suppose, a kind of response to that
thought.

My reading of Weinberger’s big theme is that we can no
longer organize the world’s knowledge completely. The network itself has
the knowledge. As the subtitle says: now “the smartest person in the
room is the room” itself. Since not all parts of the network are
directly connected, there’s also knowledge yet to be realized.

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Breakpoint by Jeff Stibel

Despite
the overheated subtitle this book, this book, published in 2013, is
somewhat related to Weinberger’s book in that it focuses on the network.
Using analogies from ant colonies and the neuron network of the human
mind, Stibel tries to explain the recent past and the future of the
Internet. As the title indicates, a key concept of the book is the
breakpoint – the point at which the extraordinary growth of networks
stops and its survival depends upon enrichment, rather than attempts at
continuing growth. As a brain scientists, he also argues that the
Internet, rather than any single artificially intelligent computer, is
really the digital equivalent of the human brain.

Previously I’ve devoted whole posts to two other significant books.  Just follow the links below:

© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/134268683548/good-books-read-in-2015]

Libraries & Open Publishing

My last post was about the fight over intellectual property.  A few weeks before that I wrote about what a book is in a digital age and suggested that librarians could become the equivalent of DJs for books.

Pulling those two themes together, this post is about what some libraries are already doing that can shift the balance in book publishing.

But, first a bit of history.  When public libraries were first established well over a hundred years ago, one of their primary responsibilities was purchase books on behalf of their community.  Then the community members could share all these books, without having to buy separate copies.

Until the mid-20th Century, this worked in favor of publishers since libraries were, in general, their most reliable market for books.  Libraries also helped build markets of readers that the publishers would sell to or that many people eventually bought the books they borrowed because they liked them so much.  The library was a kind of try-and-buy location.

As the industry grew, selling direct to an ever more educated public in the latter half of the 20th Century, many book publishers started thinking that libraries reduced their sales, rather than enhancing them.  But that was a battle the publishers had lost long ago and couldn’t do much about.  

Moreover, it is a moot point in this century when e-books have overtaking traditional print book publishing.  Even if that growth trend has slowed a bit recently, the battle between publishers and libraries has been renewed around e-books, not printed books.

The traditional publishers – the Big 5 – have taken an especially restrictive approach to e-books, perhaps in the hopes of turning away from the historical role that public libraries have played for printed books.  Until less than two years ago, some publishers even refused to sell e-books to libraries.  They still restrict the number of times an e-book could be lent or charge extraordinary prices for them.  

This pattern continues despite some good arguments that publishers could benefit from a more supportive relationship with libraries, as laid out by the marketing expert, David Vinjamuri.  

But any significant change, like e-books, can be a two-edged sword.  They may be an opportunity for big publishers to change the rules.  But they are also an opportunity for libraries.  

Unlike printed books, there is effectively no limitation on how many e-books a library can store.  And librarians have noticed that many of their patrons are writing e-books.  Much of the spectacular growth in e-books has been among self-published authors.  (Amazon even makes this easy with its Createspace service.)

With this background, there has developed a movement among libraries to become the publishing platform for authors or to, at least, partner with self-publishing services.

Although he lost by a little, one of the candidates in the election a few days ago for president of the American Library Association was Jamie LaRue, who has built his reputation in large part as a leader of the library publishing movement.  

There are already several interesting examples across the country.  The Los Gatos Public Library has joined with the Smashwords self-publishing company.  The Provincetown, Massachusetts library – proudly “Ranked #1 in the US by Library Journal” – has created its own self-publishing agency, Provincetown Press.

The much larger Los Angeles Public Library is using the Self-e platform from Library Journal and BiblioBoard.  The February 2015 issue of Library Journal quotes John Szabo, LAPL’s director and one of the most innovative national library leaders:

“We are and will continue to be a place for content creation… It’s a huge role for libraries. … I want to see our authors not just all over California but circulating from Pascagoula, MS, to Keokuk, IA.”

Too often, news of new library services does not get widely publicized and is only seen by those already patronizing libraries.  So it was helpful that LAPL’s platform for local authors was reported a couple of weeks ago in a publication they might well read – LA Weekly.  

With the Internet enabling easier collaboration and co-creation than ever before, as I’ve noted in this blog, we are also seeing examples of self-publishing that go beyond an individual author.  

Topeka Community Novel Project describes its ideal: “A community novel is one that is collaboratively conceptualized, written, illustrated, narrated, edited and published by members of your community.”

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Publishing by academic libraries and other non-traditional publishers is an increasing factor in research, as well.  While it publishes papers that are peer-reviewed as in traditional journals, PLOS (Public Library of Science) is perhaps the best known adherent of “open access” publishing.  Open Access means that there are no restrictions on the use of the articles, available online, free to read.  

Academic journals and books have been very expensive and not all of that cost can be eliminated by this new approach.  For example, the peer review process still has to be managed.  However, the cost is much lower.   PLOS charges authors a relatively minimal fee.

Rebecca Kennison of Columbia University Libraries and Lisa Norberg of the Barnard College Library have plans to extend the PLOS model, with a more cooperative funding arrangement, to “A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and Archiving for Humanities and Social Sciences”.

Overall, all of the initiatives that I’ve highlighted here are a part of a digital age trend in which we’ll see more librarians going beyond being mere collectors of big publishing companies’ books to being curators and creators of content. 

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/118945402119/libraries-open-publishing]

What Is A Book?

A few days ago, I was in a meeting of library leaders watching a presentation about the current status of the Digital Public Library of America and the Empire State Digital Network.

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With all the work going on in libraries to digitize materials and also to manage materials that are born digital, someone asked what this means for the traditional role of librarians as collectors on behalf of their patrons.

Someone else pointed out that librarians are beyond being collectors of materials to being curators.  OK, but what does curation mean now and going forward into the future?

In many ways, the deeper question is “what is a book” in the digital age?

To provide some context, imagine all the books that have been written are each envisioned as a highway.  Reading the traditional printed book of the pre-digital era was like getting on a highway and not getting off until it ends – unless, of course, you just stopped reading it at all.

But when you’re reading a digital book, you might see something interesting from this highway – at any point – and get off for a look. You might return quickly or keep going further and further away from the highway (i.e., the original book you started reading).  You might also want to follow a meandering path that someone else charted or “discovered” before you.

So we are practically past the age when the book as a body of written material was siloed between hard covers and stood in isolation from other books.  The book is no longer a discrete and fixed product.

Some developments have already begun to recognize this change.  For example, there are the “adaptive textbooks” from McGraw Hill Education and Harvard’s H20 Adaptable Digital Textbooks.

Indeed, over the last few years, the Harvard University Library Innovation Lab has been doing some of the most interesting work along these lines anywhere in the world.   Its relevant projects and experiments include:

  • Highbrow: A Textual Annotation Browser
  • Consilience:  which “provides an interactive user interface to help users discover different ways of grouping sets of documents, to zoom into each cluster within a selected group, and to zoom in further into individual documents”
  • Atlas Viewer:  a way to explore geographic materials spatially, rather than one page at a time
  • StackLife: which “lets you browse all of the items in Harvard’s 73 libraries and Book Depository as if they were on a single shelf.”

In the new world of digital reading paths, how can the reader not get totally lost and confused? – Or perhaps get lost enough to discover new things for himself/herself.  Better yet how can people be helped to discover new things and new connections that no one had discovered before, that we would all benefit from?

How many of the people who have traditionally been trying to help readers – librarians, reviewers, editors, writers and others – are prepared to deal with the fact this is even a question they have to answer?

Perhaps librarians and editors should start thinking of themselves as the equivalent of digital DJs who organize and often mash-up music from a variety of artists.  These DJs become star entertainers themselves – way more than mere musical curators.  (Librarians should also note that the most successful of these DJs earn millions of dollars.  See Forbes’ review “The World’s Highest-Paid DJs”.)

With a new mindset about the role of a librarian and more of the kind of experimentation and technology Harvard has created and the rest of us will be better able to navigate the digital reading highways and byways.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/114580547778/what-is-a-book]

Intellectual Property?

Last, the Metropolitan New York Library Council held its Annual Meeting at the vertical campus of Baruch College/CUNY.  [Disclosure: I’m President of the board, although the staff does all the real work.]

METRO has turned this into quite an event, filled all day with various breakout sessions.  But there is still a keynote address, given this year by Jessamyn West who discussed her views on copyrights and how libraries are and will continue to be affected by copyright law.

You can see the slides from her presentation at http://www.librarian.net/talks/metro/ , although you can’t see and hear what she had to say about each.  You can get a flavor for her entertaining presentation style by noting her concluding slide.

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If I had to summarize her message to the library world and to others in one sentence, it is this: aggressively apply your “fair use” rights for copyrighted material.  (You can read this article for a summary of “fair use”.)

The Wikipedia entry on fair use provides this conventional summary:

“In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship.”

The traditional copyright that the writers of the US Constitution had in mind – fourteen years for printed material – has been buffeted by the pressures of copyright owners, on the one hand, and developments in technology on the other.

The copyright owners have succeeded in extending the life of copyrights to seven decades after the death of the original copyright holder.  They have also tended to generalize what was a fairly limited monopoly into the much larger concept of “intellectual property”, which often translates into a monopoly on an idea. 

The Internet, of course, has made things more complicated. There is the increasing digitization (scanning) of existing printed material.  There is also an ever increasing percentage of published material that is born digital.  The Internet has also made possible a boom in self-published works, usually in e-book form.

All of these trends mean that traditional copyrights, which were managed by a small set of big publishers of printed books can no longer be so easily managed.  Readers can more easily copy digital books than printed books, so having a copyright is no longer as strong a protection of a monopoly as it used to be.

Indeed, the very idea of a fixed book – something with a finite number of printed pages, contained within hard covers – is challenged by the digital form.  We are already seen and can expect to see more mash-ups that might take a paragraph or a chapter here and another from there and so on in order to create something that some readers might find more efficient than reading all the original material.

Who owns what in that mash-up? How much can be used from the original sources?  How are rights affected if the original material is modified in some way?  What if those original sources are also some form of mash-up?   These are just some of the questions that will grist for the legal mills in the future.

Indeed, whether ideas can be considered non-sharable, protectable property will be one of the big policy debates of this century – perhaps on a par with the labor vs. capital conflicts of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Ms. West’s presentation gave the attendees of METRO’s meeting a taste of what that battle will be like.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/74279930335/intellectual-property ]