Electronic media

[Apollonius]

Let’s start with something simple.


What are the advantages of an ebook over a printed book?

[Nonc Hilaire]

Depends on the software and file format, which is less than consistent.

I have a bunch of Bible texts and commentaries, etc. which makes it very convenient to search with a dedicated program. Saves days of work over traditional methods.

DevonThink is great for PDF files. It has an intelligent agent which will scan a PDF for recurrent phrases, then use those results to do a fuzzy search of other PDF's for those results. DevonAgent does the same thing for online PDF's.

[Typhoon]

Similar to NH, with different content, an ebook is a good way to store a lot of journal papers and books.

This makes it very convenient when travelling.

[Enki]

Having an entire library in your pocket.

[Demon of Undoing]

Just the free stuff on iBooks and elsewhere will supply literally a lifetime of reading. I don't carry a book any more, though I am about to start back.

[Sparky]

Some advantages are ebook hardware and software dependent:
* Variable font sizes.
* Annotation and multiple bookmarking without ruining your book.
* Buy once, read on any device.

[Apollonius]

Thanks all, for your replies.


Yes. That electronic texts are easily searchable is certainly an advantage for doing research, as is having access to so many sources saved to a device that will travel easily.


With issues of copyright being in the news I guess my question was really prompted from thinking about how well these texts save from one set of hardware and software to another. I got to thinking about how often a person would need to replace their computer, as opposed to replacing an old-fashioned book.

Libraries have been replacing print editions of journal subscriptions with online versions for many years now, but more recently they have also begun to “collect” electronic media, and that also had me reflecting about how readable these would be in future years with different hardware, software, with changing companies involved and their evolving licensing agreements.


Another unrelated question comes down to ergonomics. Personally, having spent the better part of the last twenty-five years staring at a computer screen, I’m a little tired of it and feel more comfortable reading a printed book. Maybe there aren’t too many people who read novels, biographies, or histories cover to cover for no more compelling reason than interest in the story, and no desire to bookmark anything there for research. You can store hundreds or thousands of books on your computer, but how many can you read at one time?

[jerryberry]

Well, I am all for embracing technology and e readers are just wonderful tools, I love 'em! Having said that I don't leave the house without 2-4 books in tow. I'm like Linus with a blanket in that I need a book (or two) to feel whole.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Another unrelated question comes down to ergonomics. Personally, having spent the better part of the last twenty-five years staring at a computer screen, I’m a little tired of it and feel more comfortable reading a printed book. Maybe there aren’t too many people who read novels, biographies, or histories cover to cover for no more compelling reason than interest in the story, and no desire to bookmark anything there for research. You can store hundreds or thousands of books on your computer, but how many can you read at one time?

Looking at a backlit screen is tiring. There is also a problem even in the look of modern printed books, and it is worse in electronic versions. The type and leading are typically poorly chosen, and almost no one knows how to properly lay out a book now that the trade has been taken over by amateurs. Trying to follow a paragraph longer than three sentences is a chore. Scanning through electronic versions is much more difficult too.

The loss of serendipity is probably the worst fault. I can go to an encyclopedia, skim an open volume and find something interesting I never expected. Hopefully somebody will invent a Wikipedia interface which uses a yarrow stalk algorithm.

[Nonc Hilaire]

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[Ibrahim]

Let’s start with something simple.


What are the advantages of an ebook over a printed book?

Scalable fonts and adjustable color/contrast for people with deteriorating eyesight. I know people who use this.

[Antipatros]

Let’s start with something simple.


What are the advantages of an ebook over a printed book?

Scalable fonts and adjustable color/contrast for people with deteriorating eyesight. I know people who use this.

The free AMIS program reads ebooks in Daisy format aloud. My eyes are fine, but sometimes it's easier to listen to a book than to read it.

DAISY Consortium home.

[Apollonius]

How books will survive Amazon - Jason Epstein, New York Review of Books, 26 April 2012
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/20 ... ve-amazon/

So far discussion of the Justice Department’s suit against Apple and several major book publishers for conspiring to fix retail prices of e-books has omitted the major issue: the impact of digitization on the book industry generally. The immediate symptoms are Amazon’s own pricing strategy—which, unlike Apple’s and the publishers’, is to sell e-books below cost to achieve market share and perhaps a monopoly—and the federal suit challenging Apple’s and the publishers’ counterattack.

The revolutionary process by which all books, old and new, in all languages, will soon be available digitally, at practically no cost for storage and delivery, to a radically decentralized world-wide market at the click of a mouse is irreversible. The technologically obsolete system, in which physical inventory is stored in publishers’ warehouses and trucked to fixed retail locations, will sooner or later be replaced by the more efficient digital alternative. The government’s case against book publishers arises from this continuing transformation—Amazon’s pricing model for e-books reflects the digital imperative while Apple’s and the publishers’ response attempts to delay it.

The problem began when Amazon set out to charge $9.99 per e-book download, considerably less than it was paying publishers for their e-book inventory. Since Amazon’s competitors could not afford such a costly strategy, Amazon hoped to dominate (or even monopolize) the e-book market and dictate future e-book pricing. Should Amazon’s $9.99 price become the industry standard—a reasonable assumption since e-books like iTunes are merely disembodied electronic information—publishers might then be obliged to sell e-book content to Amazon for perhaps as little as $6.00, too little to contribute their share of pre-digital legacy costs for warehousing, inventory and traditional marketing. Publishers, unable to support these residual costs by physical book sales alone, might eventually submit to the digital imperative and market their books directly to the web to be read on digital screens or printed on demand one copy at a time at diverse locations. Though Amazon’s strategy, if successful, might force publishers to shrink or even abandon their old infrastructure, demand for physical books, printed and bound, will not disappear. Publishers might thus find it necessary to subcontract their physical inventory to specialized distributors.


Independent editorial start-ups posting their books on appropriate web sites have already begun to emerge and more will follow. The cost of entry will be slight. The essential capital will be editorial talent and energy, as it had been in the glory days before conglomeration when editors were themselves de facto publishers, publicists, and marketers. Many start-ups will fail. Some will not. Specificity, reflecting the structure of the web, will matter: a guide to the cultivation of daffodils will more likely succeed than a more diffuse gardening title.

Amazon may also attempt to reduce or eliminate its own inventory expenses by printing orders for backlist titles on demand on its own presses. Traditional publishers have resisted this proposal and Amazon has responded by threatening not to stock slower-selling backlist titles.

To counter Amazon’s pricing policy, publishers have adopted the so-called agency pricing model, in which inventory is not sold to retailers, including Amazon, but consigned to them as agents who are compensated by a fee. Since Amazon in this scheme does not purchase content but acts only as the publishers’ representative, it has no right to determine the retail price. This defense seems to have been suggested to the publishers by Steve Jobs, whose own products are sold either by Apple’s own stores or by the agency method, and who did not want to match Amazon’s costly strategy for his iPad e-book sales.


The Justice Department has sued Apple and the publishers not because the agency model is illegal—it is not—but because Apple and the publishers may illegally have conspired to adopt the agency model to restrain Amazon from creating a monopoly by determining its own pricing. The outcome of the Justice Department’s suit is unclear: some publishers have admitted the government’s charges, others have not. But what seems inevitable is that this tangled web in which the government helped give Amazon a possible monopoly, will be chuckled over by law students and their professors for many years.

The underlying issue is more significant than the lawsuit and its outcome. What matters is Amazon’s attempt to force publishers to conform to the digital imperative by resisting prices that include traditional publishing costs. This is more than a conflict between Amazon and publishers. It is a vivid expression of how the logic of a radical new and more efficient technology impels institutional change.

Few technological victories are ever complete, and in the case of books this will be especially true. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves. So will libraries, whose vast and arcane holdings will soon be available to everyone everywhere. E-books have been aggressively marketed for five or six years in the United States. Yet despite rapidly acquiring market share they show no sign of displacing actual books, with which they will comfortably coexist in the digital future.

Today’s publishers, still entangled in the dying Gutenberg age, will, one hopes, spin off their talented editors as semi-autonomous units and gradually disencumber themselves of their obsolete infrastructure. Barring a nuclear disaster, life will go on as it always has: past, present, and future all at once.

[YMix]

New reporter? Call him Al, for algorithm

The new reporter on the US media scene takes no coffee breaks, churns out articles at lightning speed, and has no pension plan.

That's because the reporter is not a person, but a computer algorithm, honed to translate raw data such as corporate earnings reports and previews or sports statistics into readable prose.

Algorithms are producing a growing number of articles for newspapers and websites, such as this one produced by Narrative Science:

"Wall Street is high on Wells Fargo, expecting it to report earnings that are up 15.7 percent from a year ago when it reports its second quarter earnings on Friday, July 13, 2012," said the article on Forbes.com.

While computers cannot parse the subtleties of each story, they can take vast amounts of raw data and turn it into what passes for news, analysts say.

"This can work for anything that is basic and formulaic," says Ken Doctor, an analyst with the media research firm Outsell.

And with media companies under intense financial pressure, the move to automate some news production "does speak directly to the rebuilding of the cost economics of journalism," said Doctor.

Stephen Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who has used computer systems to sift through data which is then provided to reporters, said the new computer-generated writing is a logical next step.

"I don't have a philosophical objection to that kind of writing being outsourced to a computer, if the reporter who would have been writing it could use the time for something more interesting," Doig said.

Scott Frederick, chief operating officer of Automated Insights, another firm in the sector, said he sees this as "the next generation of content creation."

The company got its start in 2007 as StatSheet, which generates news stories from raw feeds of play-by-play data from major sports events.

The company generates advertising on its own website and is now beginning to sell its services to other organizations for sports and real estate news.

"Over the next 12 to 24 months, every media property will need some automation strategy," Frederick told AFP.

To mimic the effect of the hometown newspaper, the company generates articles with a different "tonality" depending on the reader's preference or location.

For the 2012 Super Bowl, the article for New York Giants' fans read like this: "Hakeem Nicks had a big night, paving the way to a victory for the Giants over the Patriots, 21-17 in Indianapolis. With the victory, New York is the champion of Super Bowl XLVI."

For New England fans, the story was different: "Behind an average day from Tom Brady, the Patriots lost to the Giants, 21-17 at home. With the loss, New England falls short of a Super Bowl ring."

"Data becomes the seeds of the content trees. When you can create an entire story out of raw data, that is technologically impressive," Frederick said.

Kristian Hammond, chief technology officer at Chicago-based Narrative Science, said he had been involved in computer content generation for more than a decade.

Hammond is on leave from Northwestern University, where he was on the computer science faculty and headed a joint project generating content with the university's journalism school.

The company formed in 2010 has 40 clients including Forbes, and some corporate clients which use the technology to take spreadsheets or other data for internal reports that are more readable.

"We're about two-thirds engineering and one-third journalism," he said.

"We knew there were places in traditional journalism where raw data was used as the driver for telling stories, and we wanted to take that model and turn it into something a machine can do," he told AFP.

While some articles are reviewed by editors, others are automatically delivered without human intervention because of client preference or because the task is too voluminous: Narrative Science, he said, produced stories on 370,000 Little League baseball games in the past year.

The computers cannot pick up on certain things, such as if an injury or weather affects the game.

"If it's not in the data, we can't say anything about it. We're very aware of that, but more of what goes on is data-driven," Hammond said.

"The feedback has been very positive. We haven't done anything goofy or embarrassing so far."

One goof came from a company called Journatic, a partner of the Chicago Tribune, which uses a combination of human editors in the US and overseas and computer algorithms to generated "hyperlocal" news.

Some news organizations complained when they discovered the "bylines" generated were made-up names, not real journalists, in the Tribune, Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, a violation of ethics policies for the dailies.

Journatic chief executive Brian Timpone said the flap stemmed from a misunderstanding with news clients and the fact that bylines were needed to be seen on Google News.

"We're taking them off," Timpone said, arguing that should not distract attention from the business model which can help media companies.

"The way news is produced has not changed in 50 years," he told AFP.

Timpone said his company can produce news more efficiently "with technology, lots of local news gathering, and a distributed writing team."

"It's not about algorithms. Algorithms only work if the data is structured. There's no way to automate everything."

[Apollonius]

The last renaissance man - Ron Rosenbaum, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2012
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-cult ... 43751.html

Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper's, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age.


With his erudite Quarterly, the legendary Harper’s editor aims for an antidote to digital-age ignorance.




The counter­revolution has its embattled forward outpost on a genteel New York street called Irving Place, home to Lapham’s Quarterly. The street is named after Washington Irving, the 19th-century American author best known for creating the Headless Horseman in his short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The cavalry charge that Lewis Lapham is now leading could be said to be one against headlessness—against the historically illiterate, heedless hordesmen of the digital revolution ignorant of our intellectual heritage; against the “Internet intellectuals” and hucksters of the purportedly utopian digital future who are decapitating our culture, trading in the ideas of some 3,000 years of civilization for...BuzzFeed.


Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper’s, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age. Suddenly thanks to Google Books, JSTOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all the civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexus of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet—here is the paradox—the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever. There has been no great librarian of Alexandria, no accessible finder’s guide, until Lapham created his quarterly five years ago with the quixotic mission of serving as a highly selective search engine for the wisdom of the past.



[...]


Lapham has no love for what web culture is doing. He laments Google for inadvertent censorship in the way search engine optimization indiscrim­inately buries what is of value beneath millions of search results of crap. Even if that was not the purpose, it’s been the result, he avers.

“And that aspect of the Internet I think is going to get worse.”

[Simple Minded]

Great thread Apollonius, thanks for starting.

The other paradox of the information age is that as information has become more accessible, expertise has become valued less. As long as people think they can get the superficial gist of something from a few clicks on Google, the storefront window marketability of actual expertise, mastery, or discipline is reduced.

Kinda like the reverse engineering of a product that one was not genius enough to invent.

And of course after a few clicks and ten minutes of reading on any given subject..... "we are all experts!"

"Information is not knowledge. People these day are not readers, but researchers. They float on the surface. This new thinking erases context." Sorry, I forgot the author's name.