(Digital vs Physical) vs (Owned vs Licensed)

There are really two questions being discussed here, the question of format and the question of ownership. Cory Doctrow is only talking about the question of ownership, but I think both questions are interesting.

I am a total bibliophile, I have shelves lining all the available space in my tiny apartment. The feel of a physical book .. the pages under my fingers ... it's all part of the experience. But, when it comes right down to it, it is the story, and the content that is the most important. I have an even larger number of books on my computer as .txt or .pdf files. I own these books, and they are 'physical' just as much as a regular book is. I can pass these down to my children, I can lend them out, I can give them away ... I can also make an unhindered number of copies if I want to. And, in fact many of the electronic books I own have been downloaded from some site or another and are illegal to own.

Eventually, they will make ebook readers that are bound in leather, and are an artifact in and of themselves, rather than feeling like a stiff piece of plastic. I own a Kindle, and for the most part I'm pretty happy. It lets me read my electronic books in a more convenient way. Plus, free wireless :-)

Now, the other question, that of book ownership, is a huge deal. The first question is a matter of preference, and no one cares which way you like to read your books (well, they might care, but it's not really their business). Adding DRM to a book is to deny you complete ownership. If I buy a copy of a physical book, I can photocopy it, and then bind it up to make it into another copy. I just have to pay for the paper. There are devices that will let you do this very quickly and efficiently. Creating duplicate digital copies is much easier, but it is the same principle. Before this, book publishers just banked on the majority of their readers to be too lazy to go to all that trouble, and they would only loose a small percentage of sales. But, now that it is so easy anyone can do it in seconds, they are afraid that the percentage of people who won't go and buy a copy will skyrocket.

To solve this problem, they have tried to limit that facet of ownership, but in doing so they have also limited a large number of other ownership rights, for example the right to lend an item to another person, the right to pass down a copy to a relative, and the right to not have to worry that it will disappear if the company who sold it to you goes out of business. Some of these problems have been addressed, but the idea remains that you do not actually own the book that you purchased (or game, or movie, or song, or operating system, or whatever).

The World

I made the following map - it is not very scientific, and was done by eye. This is a map of browser preference by country. It is very interesting! Internet Explorer (Blue), Firefox (Orange) and Opera (Red) are the only browsers with a majority in any one country. Chrome shows up as a major contender in a few countries, but is never the top browser (yet).

TomeCat

Since 2000 I have personally been working on a program that I call TomeCat. It is just a very basic text reader built with PHP and MySQL. I'm not a programmer by any means, and so the going has been very slow. After my run-in with Libronix (see previous post), I have some new ideas tinkering around in my brain (see other previous post). I'd like to see some of those ideas incorporated into TomeCat.

TomeCat is running on a database right now. Every chapter in the book is a separate entry in the chapter table. This is fine, except that I want to be able to quickly create books, and copying and pasting chapters into a database isn't my idea of fun. It also brought up the question of embedded media such as images, audio, movies, links and so on. I would have to manually add code to the pristine database driven text files. That was kind of bad!

As a in-between step from TomeCat in a web browser to TomeCat as a desktop app, I think XML files are a better way to go. The texts could be converted to simple XML documents with markup tags like book, title, author, chapter, section, img, map, verse, p, audio, crossreference, link and so on. A browser would be able to read this, as well as a desktop app. This would let me get the markup straight before I leap off of the platform that I'm comfortable with.

A couple hurdles that I'm not quite sure how to jump over are how to show the existing table of contents, with separate pages for each chapter. I think this would be accomplished by searching for tags, and then replacing them with functions .. not sure.

The code would have to be manually added (although the basics could be parsed with a custom tool), which is kind of sad, but eventually, I know an editor could be created that took 'What You Mean Is What You Get' and turned it into properly formatted xml.

The reasons I want to eventually go with a desktop app are:

• The life of the product is extended past the time when I want a server running for it.
• Right click and multiple window interfaces, without using "AJAX". This also means it will work even after web browsers are no longer compatible with the code.
• User doesn't have to have anything but the program and documents to use in it. They will not have to install a MySQL database, or PHP, etc.

Wish me luck!

Electronic Text Interface Ideas

Back in 2007 I wrote a post about an ideal translation program. I would like to expand that idea into ideas for a better digital library system.

First, a list of features for a great electronic text reader. There are many programs that already fall into this category.

• Simple interface
• Bookmarks to keep your place
• no page turning - this is contrived, you are on a computer, scroll already!
• Changeable text sizes / fonts alignment.
• Unicode is a must!
• Can read many different text-file types, especially open ones.
• can also read PDF files that have no text (each page is an image)
• Can convert all of these formats to a standard electronic text format.
• Has support for images and other media with captions.
• Can have media galleries attached to a paragraph (many different pictures, all in the same place shown as thumbnails)
• The ability to have multiple books open at once, and to view them side by side
• The ability to look up words in associated dictionaries / encyclopedias (this ability would NOT be dependent on the TEXT, but on the dictionary/etc.)
• The ability to add in new dictionaries / encyclopedias.
• The ability to easily create a new text in the proper format, as well as edit existing books. This will let the user fix any formating mistakes the converter makes.
• Free or at least cheap
• Free books to load into it
• sets of books that you can download. Such as the Complete Kipling, or Masonic History, or Sophia's random favorite public domain Fiction
• tagging and organizing of books into shelves and sections
• more than one library of books possible
• integrate with library thing where possible!
• The ability to sell books to other users where they aren't able to edit the text.
• All text will be copy and pasteable - if a publisher isn't cool with that - too bad - that's why people want their book - so that they can copy and paste sections.
• A way to unobtrusively keep track of who has bought what. The fear of pirating should not make the program hard to use! Giving each user an ID, and then inserting that number into their encrypted book would work. They can use their customer ID on many computers / devices.
• The internet is not required for use or activation.
• If the books are on a CD, they will work.
• Keeping all of the files for a book together is n interesting problem. On one hand, you want to keep it open. On the other hand, you don't want people to loose track of their files. A standard archive file would work - as long as the program can read unopened archive files. OOo can read them.
• Open standards for the creation of plug ins and modules that anyone can create.
• A fully working demo with a time limit to register before only the reader works.

Okay, now features for a reader with research capabilities

• all of the above.
• The ability to look up phrases to see where else it is referenced in your library.
• the ability to look up any word in a concordance - original language and translation and meaning (ie, there are many different words that mean the same thing in most languages, this would include them all under separate result entries.)
• the ability to compare different translations of the same work, as well as the original. This would be paragraph by paragraph
• Interlinear comparisons, as above.
• maps, with coordinates coded into various texts
• if a text does not have the coordinates coded in, a basic search is done in the applicable maps for those words. The map itself is coded to know various spellings and variations of place names.
• the ability to look up a word by sound, and by the root of a word.
• combination search, with an instant tree view of the search results by #
• the ability to search by book, collection, library(s) or open documents.
• A customizable keyboard mapper so that you can type in any language.
• A special character picker for things like cuneiform, where there are too many characters to use a keyboard.
• all (or most) of the ideas in my earlier post - I now think that the english language should also have a numbered reference system, like Strong's - that way words can be referenced by number.
• simple, easy to use option in the context menu for each word - the menu is customizable through an option ON the menu.
• Although many people will be using this for the bible, it should work with any modern or ancient text in any language.
• the ability to back track

I know there are more ideas to be had, but this is a good start!

Chimp Spears

I recently read an article about Chimps in Senegal using spears to hunt small animals. While fascinating in itself, there is one point that relates especially to this blog:

What makes the discovery all the more remarkable, project leader Pruetz said, is who the hunters are: predominantly mature females and immature-youngsters between about two and ten years old.

In normal Chimpanzee social structure, the males do the hunting rather than the females. To see the females taking the initiative with this new technology is intriguing. In modern human society, the males are expected to be the ones who "invent" or discover new technologies. While we are taking steps to address this inequality, if you made a list of famous or influential inventors of the last 100 years, it would consist primarily of men.

Were the females the leading inventors in early human development? If so, what has changed? Why has innovation been labeled as a male activity? Are women still endowed with the power of invention? Or, do the value a different sort of invention - one that directly benefits their lives, rather than abstract acquisition of knowledge?

To answer these questions I think we need to examine the next generation of women - give them a chance to test their skills. Ask the question and see if they will bear out the answer, then ask another question.