Brainstorming w. Cory Doctorow

So I had the idea to supplement a display with a digital collection supplemented by novels licensed through Creative Commons, and on a whim–just to be honest: to see if it’d get through–I emailed Cory Doctorow (Little Brother / Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom [my thoughts] / I, Robot [etc …]) to pick his brain for digitally likeminded authors, because I’d come out of the gooters (that’s google + gutters) with only the vast gutenburg.org-bible of lit in the public domain and fanfic.

He wrote that none sprang to mind – said authors are still pretty rare, and YA publishers will probably bottleneck creative commons.

“That said, I think it’d be pretty easy to find at least a back-catalog in ebook form donated by writers for use on library terminals only…,” — hmm, as through programs like Adobe Digital Editions, which requires the owner [say, the library] to manually authenticate the computers the files can be read on and printed from. The latter is the biggie – would authors let their ebooks be *printed*? Maybe – if for library programs only. Then Cory: “Hey, Michael! I wouldn’t want to use Adobe DRM (or any DRM!). I wasthinking more like, “Here’s a password-protected site that we ask you not to share access to …,” which made a lot of duhhh sense to me.

The other day, I accessed my Greenstone Digital Library for the first time through SSH via PuTTY, which required a headache and a beer and an entirely new prompt vocabulary as a crash course. The biggest obstacle among poorly budgeted and highly politicized smalltowners [re: libraries] against a digital collection beyond the scare around a whole new system of cataloguing is its cost.

I figure that if you could supplement a collection with works licensed in creative commons and those already in the public domain [the classics], then a library could build a pretty substantial (if modest) collection available through its website, racking-up the hit counter while sparing their savvy patrons the pain-in-the-neck of DRM.

Cory Doctorow is the best-selling author of Little Brother & loads more.

So I had the idea to complement a display with a digital collection supplemented by novels licensed through Creative Commons, and on a whim–just to be honest: to see if it’d get through–I emailed Cory Doctorow (Little Brother / Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom [my thoughts] / I, Robot [etc …]) to pick his brain for digitally likeminded authors, because I’d come out of the gooters (that’s google + gutters) with only the vast gutenberg.org-bible of lit-in-the-public-domain and fanfic.

He wrote that none sprang to mind – said authors are still pretty rare, and YA publishers will probably bottleneck creative commons. “That said, I think it’d be pretty easy to find at least a back-catalog in ebook form donated by writers for use on library terminals only…,” — huh, as through programs like Adobe Digital Editions, which requires the owner [say, the library] to manually authenticate the computers the files can be read on and printed from. The latter is the biggie – would authors let their ebooks be printed? Maybe – if for library programs only. Then, Cory: “Hey, Michael! I wouldn’t want to use Adobe DRM (or any DRM!). I wasthinking more like, “Here’s a password-protected site that we ask you not to share access to …,” which made a lot of duhhh sense to me….

The other day, I accessed my Greenstone Digital Library for the first time through SSH via PuTTY, which required a headache and a beer and an entirely new prompt vocabulary as a crash course. The biggest obstacle among poorly budgeted and highly politicized smalltowners [re: libraries] against a digital collection beyond the scare around a whole new system of cataloguing is its cost.

I figure that if you could supplement a collection with works licensed under creative commons and those already in the public domain (the classics), then a library could build a pretty substantial (if modest) collection available through its website, racking-up the hit counter while sparing their savvy patrons the pain-in-the-neck of DRM.

Sometime over the next week I think I’ll start work collecting public-domain and CC YA oriented works to supplement the library programs with online analogues at the BL[ing]–“the Bradford County Public Library Youth & Teen Services 2.0” that Could Use Some Color!–and at the end of my semester with Dr. P J[orgensen], when [if] I’ve my head around Greenstone, I’ll transfer the “collection” to the digital library I will have built through the University.

In the singularity, the “cure for death” is a series of digital backups …

Ported from S-is-For-Somewhere.

Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

On Wednesday I [legitimately] finished Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom (available in loads of downloadable formats [free]) – read as an etext on my ipod touch. I’d argued before my uncertainty that the broadly sermonized smell and weight of a book-proper was all it was cracked-up to be, but now I’ve first-hand experience. Honestly, I am not too voracious a reader; I’m easily distracted by my own projects and bright lights, so reading’s always been a thrill of convenience during the inbetweens in my day. So, it took me a couple weeks to swipe through it, but that’s with the ability to adapt my random-reading to my random-taste, sifting between maybe seventeen novels (most from the public domain) I carry around – in my pocket.

Down & Out made me rehash machine functionalism, which I was briefed-on during an Intro. Philosophy course, and the haunting potential that we could digitally replicate human consciousness. Doctorow’s “cure for death” is a series of digital backups coupled with tissue restoration; in the Singularity, death means having lost a day, a week, a year-at-most – but an hour-long data-dump will bring you up to speed. Flashbake —

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Etc.: I’m still half-diligently working toward a Glimmer Train deadline, and I’ve almost finished drafting an article for the Bradford Telegraph re: the future of book banning. I’ll throw-it up here in a jiffy. I am writing a reflection paper on As We May Think, and — even though I tend to totally rush through those — I think I may start web-publishing my gradwork as it comes around.

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Kristen loved Lisa See’s Peony in Love, so I am going to smother her with Snow Flower & the Secret Fan (which I loved, re: “nu shu” secret phonetic writing developed by women) in an hour or so. — and googling those, I had no idea Lisa See had written so many novels.

Zamyatin’s tangible threat that 2+2=4 [yikes]

Originally @ S-is-For-Somewhere

I’m admittedly biased against DRM-locked digitized books and audio, and so when it was announced that Amazon–which, otherwise, I like a ton–axed copies of 1984 from owners’ kindles, I was less at odds with the particular action than what it meant & symbolized regarding threats to ownership and autonomy in the digital culture.

Skim “Why 2024 Will Be like Nineteen Eighty-Four: How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future” published @ Slate.

Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely. Zittrain writes: “Imagine a world in which all copies of once-censored books like Candide, The Call of the Wild, and Ulysseshad been permanently destroyed at the time of the censoring and could not be studied or enjoyed after subsequent decision-makers lifted the ban.” This may sound like an exaggeration; after all, we’ll surely always have file-sharing networks and other online repositories for works that have been decreed illegal. But it seems like small comfort to rely on BitTorrent to save banned art. The anonymous underground movements that have long sustained banned works will be a lot harder to keep up in the world of the Kindle and the iPhone.