Data Doesn’t Captivate Audiences, Storytellers Do

Posted on February 14, 2013 by laura

After the launch of the first eReaders, it didn’t take long for people to realize that the ability to track reading habits could provide useful information for publishers and authors interested in understanding how readers react to their work.

In the Harvard Business Review this week, Grant McCracken asked “Will Netflix Flourish Where Hollywood Failed?”. He pointed out Netflix’s trump card, detailed data about viewing habits, and explained why he thinks the data play is a dangerous gamble,

Netflix has so much data that they are going to be tempted to climb into the creative tent and start offering “advice.” I mean, what is all that data (and power) for, if it doesn’t let you call some shots? They can claim to know exactly what works and what does not. Well, sorry, no. Knowing that something works leaves us a long way from knowing why something works. And this leaves us a long way from knowing how to reproduce it in another movie. The only thing this data can be absolutely sure to produce is arrogance.

I think this observation may be even truer for a medium where most of the action takes place in the reader’s mind. Readers can stop, start, reread or skip, and it doesn’t really tell you anything unless you know what is happening in their heads. The data can also be misleading because it doesn’t take into account the context. If I’m reading on the bus or the train, for example, I have to close my book when I reach my stop. Chances are, I’ll still be thinking about the story though, even if I don’t pick the book up again until a week later. When that happens I might or might not go back a few pages to refresh my memory. I can think of dozens of similar scenarios that could be very misleading.

Data about reading habits is going to be hard to understand. I think it will be much more useful in the aggregate for cultural, anthropological or demographic studies than to help publishers or authors create works that have more appeal to readers.

Further reading

E-Readers Track How We Read, But Is The Data Useful To Authors?

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Aaron Swartz Freed Over 900,000 Public Domain Books From Google’s Restrictions

Posted on February 7, 2013 by laura

Today, via Lionel Maurel’s S.I. Lex blog, I learned that in addition to having downloaded over 5 million articles from JSTOR at MIT and releasing them into the public domain, Aaron Swartz also downloaded over 900,000 books from Google Books in 2010: Révélation: C’est Aaron Swartz Qui Libérait Les Livres De Google Books Sur Internet Archive.

Although Google provided free online access to the works (in the US), it maintained restrictions against commercial use. According to the story told by Brewster Kahle at the memorial service on Jan. 24th in San Francisco, Aaron had found a way to bypass the mechanisms Google put in place to prevent automatic downloading and subsequently transferred all the books he downloaded to the Internet Archive as Public Domain works with no restriction on their use.

I have not heard this story elsewhere. For more information, there is a partial transcript (translated into French) in Lionel Maurel’s post. If you don’t read French, try Google Translate or you can watch the video of the service on YouTube.

Posted in Books, Copyright, Google, Transformation | Tagged | 1 Comment

Is Facebook Planning To Screen Identities?

Posted on February 3, 2013 by laura

It was on one of the overhead monitors at the gym last week. I didn’t see the whole thing. I don’t remember which channel it was on. Probably CNN International or Bloomberg TV. I thought it was a Facebook commercial, but maybe it was a commercial for something else. Maybe it wasn’t a commercial at all.

I can’t tell you exactly what I saw. As I recall, there was a screen flow of typing an account name on Facebook. The name was obviously a pseudonym, and after typing it, what seemed like a red error message or alert appeared. It said something like “false name.” Then there was a date. I think it said February 21st.

I had assumed this was a Facebook new policy announcement, and I found it significant that they were advertising it via a commercial on TV. Since I haven’t been able to find any mention of this on the web, I now question that interpretation. I did lots of Google searches and checked Facebook blogs, developer pages and several related independent blogs.

Perhaps what I saw was just a news story about the recent reports of Instagram and Facebook users being asked to submit government issued photo ids, but I’m not convinced. I don’t know what this means. If I see it again, I’ll post an update.

Posted in Facebook, Privacy, Social Media | Tagged | 2 Comments

Saving History: Lessons From The People Of Timbuktu

Posted on February 2, 2013 by laura

The destruction of thousands of valuable Islamic manuscripts held in the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu was one of the top stories on French TV on Monday and Tuesday, including video from reporters inside the library. According to the reports, the library had been ransacked and the manuscripts, some dating from the period when Timbuktu was the intellectual and spiritual capital of Islam in Western Africa, were burned by Islamic extremists before they fled the city out of spite for the inhabitants who welcomed the arrival of French and Mali forces sent to oust them. The video showed the broken empty cases where the manuscripts had been held, but it was obvious that the pile of ashes was too small to be the remains of the entire collection.

My first thought had been to wonder if these texts had been digitized. Oddly enough, some of the initial reports mentioned the inconsistency between the size of the ashes and the extent of the collection but appeared to assume the remaining manuscripts had been stolen. None mentioned any of the conservation projects or the availability of the digitized texts online.

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Posted in Culture, Digital Books, Libraries, Technology | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

I Am Glowing

Posted on January 23, 2013 by laura

Playing around with a thermal imaging camera yesterday:

IR000069

Posted in Science | 2 Comments

Now You Are Free

Posted on January 15, 2013 by laura

It’s been several weeks since the mad rush to Christmas. I managed to finish writing up some thoughts about Amazon and alternate publishing models in the last hours before the holidays. The article had been waiting for about three weeks before I was able to write a few last bits and do the fact checking. It wasn’t the greatest timing for the post, but it was the best I could do. My routine seemed so hectic. Now it all seems so long ago.

On Christmas Day, I left for a two-week holiday in Morocco, and I confess I’ve had a hard time getting back to my normal routine. Those of you who follow me on Twitter may also have noticed that I’ve been even less active than usual. I haven’t even looked in on CES yet to see what new technologies were announced this year.

The details of my trip probably aren’t of interest to many of you, but disconnecting completely made me think about many things some of which will certainly influence what I talk about here.

One of my favorite photos from the trip is this one:

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Why Amazon May End Up Unglued

Posted on December 24, 2012 by laura

I was surprised by the number of people interested in my short post about Amazon’s treatment of the unglued book Oral Literature in Africa. Last weekend I was in France and decided to check the price of the book on Amazon from there. It was listed at $2.31. Yes, the price was shown in dollars, despite my IP address, which clearly tells Amazon I’m visiting from France. Not sure what’s up with that, but I also see the price in dollars from Switzerland. That seems odd, since apparently Amazon has now set the Kindle edition to free in the US, so the only reason to display a price to me at all is if I won’t be buying it in dollars. Besides, Amazon doesn’t seem to let me buy items from the US store with a non-US credit card anymore, but that’s another story.

I was also surprised by some of the comments on the story I read both here and elsewhere. A good number of people came to Amazon’s defense in charging for the eBook even though the publisher wants to offer it for free. While it might be that people’s values have been shaped by beliefs in the virtues of business, prompting them to defend the exercise of capitalism in the face of free cultural movements, I suspect there may also be other factors at work here.

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Posted in Amazon, eBooks | Tagged , | 3 Comments

An Aspiring Writer’s Thanksgiving

Posted on November 23, 2012 by laura

For some reason Americans are often surprised to learn that Thanksgiving isn’t observed in Switzerland. I’m always amazed by that, since I wasn’t taught in school that the Pilgrims also sailed to Switzerland, established a colony and celebrated their first harvest in the Alps with a big feast to which they invited the unruly native tribesmen in lederhosen who serenaded them with a chorus of We Gather Together on alphorns. Go figure. I know, some of you may be wondering, didn’t Switzerland have something to do with the Protestant Reformation that beget the Pilgrims? Ok, I’ll admit it’s confusing. For those of you who actually knew that John Calvin lived and preached in Geneva for several years in the sixteenth century, I’ll give you a Joker this time.

So I won’t be writing today about spending a big family holiday or preparing turkey, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie. However as I think about America sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner and the warm memories of Thanksgivings past, it occurs to me that one of my draft posts would be appropriate to publish today, and so I’ve set about finishing it off (during the interstices in my day) as a wish to everyone lucky enough to give thanks with their families. Or not.

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Can Remembering Be Programmed?

Posted on November 20, 2012 by laura

Something peculiar happened today; I forgot to put clean socks in my gym bag again. While that may not seem odd in and of itself, what I found peculiar was rather my reaction upon discovering this.

As I unpacked my gym bag and set about changing, half-distracted, I found myself wondering how I could make sure I wouldn’t forget the socks the third day running. Almost unconsciously I found myself thinking about how I’d have to wear my shoes home without socks, and then I was picturing my feet as I removed my shoes at the door. Without realizing what I was doing I found myself thinking (more or less wordlessly of course) “when I see my bare feet, I’ll remember to go put clean socks in my gym bag right away.” Yesterday, when I got home, as I took off my shoes, I remembered having forgotten the socks, but it didn’t occur to me to put a clean pair in the bag right away, and I forgot again this morning.

No sooner had that thought formed than I had the sensation of having programmed a reminder in my brain, like a posthypnotic suggestion I made to myself without having consciously thought about it.

The moment I became aware of what I was thinking I wondered if it might be a rare glimpse into understanding how we naturally remember things. Here I’m not talking about memories that come unbidden; I mean things that we want to remember at a future point in time. I wonder if this experience was a clue, or was it just an acquired habit that comes from using technology? I don’t recall having felt this sensation before.

In any case, I’ll never know if it actually worked because I wrote most of this post on the metro on the way home. By the time I arrived and could take off my shoes, I could hardly think of anything other than putting a pair of clean socks in my gym bag.

Posted in Personal Interest | Tagged | 2 Comments

Amazon Really Doesn’t Like Free eBooks

Posted on November 14, 2012 by laura

I’m on the Unglue.it mailing list. There was a message from founder Eric Hellman in my inbox today letting me know that the world’s first unglued eBook, Oral Literature in Africa, is available in the iBookstore.

I took a few minutes to check the Swiss store, and sure enough there it was:

Since it has been unglued, I was able to download it for free. Here is a snap of the copyright page from iBooks.

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Posted in Amazon, Copyright, eBooks | Tagged | 10 Comments