karen said:
Suggestion: have a competition to design an open-source cataloging system for e-books, where there are no physical constraints on "shelving." Publicize it in library schools. Major ego-boo for the teacher/graduate student whose scheme is accepted, free design for PG.
um, i don't know that i'm seeing much quality thinking coming out of the library schools, i am chagrined to say. besides, it's not so much the "design" that is so difficult, but rather the _implementation_, and the grunt work of assigning e-texts within the system. so it'd be far better to have the competition at the _programming_ level... and again, much of the design work has already been done, when this thread had an earlier incantation on this listserve. if no one is willing to check the archives, what's the point?... finally, i'm not sure that y'all understand the major need here. and i'm quite certain that library-school students will miss it. answer this question: why should we categorize the e-texts? i'm serious. formulate an answer. i'll wait... got one? ok, great... if your response runs along the lines of "so end-users can find the book they want, and download it", you're on the wrong path. that's the function catalogs used to serve, in the dead-tree world. after all, since a person had made a trip to a library to get a book, and would have to be making another trip to bring it back, it made a lot of sense for that person to find a book that they would enjoy. in that scenario, the catalog helped avoid the cost of a wrong choice. the physical nature of bound pages creates a situation of obligation. but in our new era of high-bandwidth and terrabyte hard-drives, it's silly for a person to spend even mere seconds trying to decide _whether_or_not_ to download a book. it's _far_ more convenient to download vast portions of the library, since they can have their computer do it automatically while they are partying, or sleeping... even the dial-up people can request the d.v.d., for free, and have the entire p.g. library sitting on their hard-disk in a week or so... not only is it not wise to make people spend any time "choosing", it's at odds with the important concept of _unlimited_distribution_. and that's why the library-school people don't understand this. because unlike them, we _want_ people to take a whole bunch! it's not just that there's "no shortage of shelf-space" with e-books, it's that we have an endless source of production. so take 'em all! we are all still trapped, to a large degree, by our history of scarcity, so it's difficult for us to realize how deeply it pervades our thinking. (especially since we all live in the real world too, where scarcity still is a hard fact of life.) but this is one place where we can shed that... these implications of unlimited-production-and-distribution turn our thinking on its head. instead of helping users choose what to _pick_ in the library, we have to help 'em choose what to _discard_. in many ways, this is a much easier task. human genome project files? ya, you probably won't want 'em. e-texts in a language that you cannot read? you can skip those. text-to-speech files? videos? magazines? maybe yes, maybe no. they start with 20,000 "possibles", weeding 'em out to their taste, thanks to our handy-dandy program, which then auto-downloads the ones that are left, in the background, with zero input needed. at that point, the cost of selecting a book is double-clicking it and starting to read it. and if it doesn't appeal to you, just stop reading and go on to the next one. you don't have much need for a catalog. oh sure, it might still be kind of handy to have be guided to e-texts, so some means of categorizing an e-text as being "similar to" others would be nice. but that's how we need to _approach_ this project, from the get-go, and not from our implicit notions about "a catalog", because those are outdated and irrelevant to the task now at hand. you're barking up the wrong tree if you don't rearrange that thinking. but anyway, as i said, a system of categorization would be handy, and i'll have some work to show in that regard in a separate post. i believe it's important to start out with the philosophical point... -bowerbird