I could swear this had been resolved already !?!?

From the On-Line Edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education (10-28-2008):

Google, Publishers, and Authors Settle Huge Lawsuit Over Book-Scanning Project

Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced today that they had settled their longstanding legal battle over Google’s mass scanning of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal costs.

The settlement, which still needs court approval to go into effect, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought in 2005 by the Authors Guild as well as a separate lawsuit filed on behalf of the publishers’ association. Publishers and authors argued that Google’s scanning of books for its Google Book Search program was a flagrant violation of copyright law's provisions governing fair use.

“We had a major disagreement with Google about copyright law,” Paul Aiken, the guild’s executive director, said during a joint teleconference that Google and the publishers held with reporters today. “We still do, and probably always will.” But he said that the parties had been “able to set those issues aside” for what “may be the biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history.”

The deal goes far beyond money. Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the publishers’ association, described it to reporters as “breathtaking in scope, groundbreaking for publishers and authors, and trailblazing for intellectual property in general.”

Unlocking Millions of Texts

If approved by a judge, the accord would allow users of Google Book Search in the United States to see the full texts of books they can read only in snippets now. The deal would also have the potential to put millions more out-of-print or hard-to-find titles within the reach of readers and researchers. Institutions would be able to buy subscriptions so that their students and faculty members could have full access to complete texts. All public libraries in the United States would be given free portals for their patrons. (The settlement does not apply to the use of Google Book Search outside the United States.)

Users without library or institutional access would pay a fee to preview the full text of a book. Google and the copyright holders—the publishers and authors—would share the proceeds from subscriptions and individual use. Authors and publishers could opt out of the program.

The deal will “unlock millions of these texts for users,” said David Drummond, chief legal officer of Google, during the teleconference. Google, he said, considered the deal a great leap forward as well. “Search simply isn’t complete without this content,” he said.

Early reaction from academe has been enthusiastic. Stanford University, the University of California, and the University of Michigan issued a joint statement of support for the agreement, praising its “outstanding public benefits.” The libraries of the three universities have been among a number working with the plaintiffs and Google “to shape this agreement for the public good,” said Michael A. Keller, Stanford’s university librarian and director of the Stanford University Press.

Paul N. Courant, university librarian at the University of Michigan, said in the statement that “the opportunity to search and preview millions of books online” was especially valuable. “This is a service that libraries, because of copyright restrictions, could not offer on their own and goes well beyond what would have been possible, even if Google had prevailed in defending the lawsuit,” Mr. Courant said.

Google’s library partners also stand to benefit because Google will provide them with digitized copies of scanned materials, which will help in their long-term preservation efforts.

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Here is the Wired take on this story
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/google-authors.html

And, of course, the information direct from Google:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/

Blackboard Hitches to Google’s Wagon (Campus Technology.com)

From Campus Technology.com

Blackboard Inc. said last week it would integrate Google Inc.’s search technology into its campus management systems. Blackboard joined Google’s Enterprise Professional Program. The move will provide “a tremendous value to people across a campus community, allowing them to develop greater search literacy to find information within academic departments, across disciplines, and even on campuses in other locations,” said Blackboard president Michael Chasen.

A first priority of the deal will be to integrate the Blackboard Learning System and Google Scholar, the firms said. Google Scholar provides a way to search for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers and articles, from academic publishers and universities. The integration through the Blackboard Building Block for Google Scholar will provide access to these scholarly references from courses within the Blackboard environment.

Blackboard will also offer a set of Google OneBox for Enterprise modules through a Blackboard Building Block for Google OneBox. The integration will enable targeted searches of an institution’s course catalogue, organization catalogue, and learning objects repository. Google OneBox for Enterprise is a feature of the Google Search Appliance which allows users to retrieve real-time content from various data sources across their institution.

More from the ...

Washington Business Journal - October 10, 2006
Blackboard teams up with Google by Neil Adler
Staff Reporter

Blackboard, a provider of software and related services to the education industry, is partnering with online search giant Google. The D.C.-based company will launch a series of efforts to enhance search capabilities for students and faculty at thousands of academic institutions worldwide. Blackboard says it will integrate various services with Google's enterprise search technology to help facilitate deeper, more meaningful search capabilities for members of the academic community.

Blackboard is joining the Google Enterprise Professional program, becoming the first member of the program to focus on educational institutions. As part of the partnership, Blackboard's learning system will be integrated with Google Scholar, providing quick access to millions of scholarly references directly from courses within the Blackboard system. As a Google partner, Blackboard will also offer consulting services to assist academic institutions looking to leverage search capabilities across their organization.

Google makes thousands of classics available for downloading - The Boston Globe

From the Business Section of the Boston Globe -

Just in time for the start of a new school year, the popular Google search service is making available thousands of classic books free. For now, the Google Book Search service offers full downloads only of "public domain" books, whose copyrights have expired. These include many of the most famous titles of all time, such as the writings of Dickens, Shakespeare, and Dante.

It's the latest milestone in Google's campaign to do for books what it has done for
websites. "Our goal is to create a comprehensive, full-text index of all the world's books," said Google Book Search group business product manager Adam Smith.

Discussion about the Google Book Search project has taken place [on and off] on various listservs and at professional get togethers and till now the general consensus has been "well ... that's nice - but it doesn't do much for us." Because, you see, the Google project creates digital books that are inaccessible for our needs. They are locked-formated and cannot be run through OCR or read by a Text-to-Speech program. The on-line library being created by Google was akin to the "look inside" samples one finds on the Amazon.com catalog. You could see more then just a few pages, but they were only available on-line with no downloading or other hanky-panky allowed. many were missing key passages and pages in order to comply with "fair use" doctrine that doesn't actually say how much of a given work is 'fair' to 'use' but merely stipulates that as long is it ain't the whole kit-n-kaboodle you can get away with it.

But now it appears that Google has found it's booksharing backbone -- sorta. They have decided to offer downloadable PDF versions of out-of-copyright public domain (orphan?) works. Interesting, but nothing earth shattering to folks who have come to rely for years upon good ol' Gutenbgrg.net for the occasional title. Andthe best part - Gutenberg is years ahead of Google in having available clean versions that do need to be futzed with in order to prep them for further processing.

Anyway - getting back to the texts available as complete PDF's, I semi-randomly chose "Flatland" from the 'download the classics' post at the GoogleBlog. Downloaded it and ran it through Abby FineReader (v.8). The output is just as good as any other PDF we have run through OCR. Google has stamped each page with "Scanned by Google" which we would likely keep on the pages and convert to page number tags in the DAISY production process. Just when I was weighing the odds of the liklihood we would need to actually access any of the books Google has available, one of my student staff walked into the alt-media lab, saw what I was doing and said, "Yuck! I had to read that book for a math class and hated it!". This, of course, led to a discussion of what it was about, which led to a discussion of mid-19th cen. literature, which led to a discussion of the less well known works of Rousseau and from there onto the novel-before-movie version of The Princess Bride. But around here -- pretty much every discussion leads to TPB ... huuuum ... funny that.

Well --- it looks like the Google Book Search and ones we can download for free is going to become part of my usual search for materials ritual.

Additional Information on the Google v. Publisher Resolution

The Google v. Publisher lawsuits have been going on for quite some time now. I have written about this previously and one of the better posts is titled E-Book versus E-Text Update.
At present, the digital books provided by Google are both incomplete and inaccessible to screen readers and text to speech programs. They are not PDF images per se but on-line formats that can merely be viewed visually. Prior to this resolution, Google was not able to provide books in their entirety. The backbone reason for their work was to provide public access to portions of books on-line and if someone wanted the full book they could order it through Amazon.com or a Google partner. The idea was that the public could leaf through materials digitally and decide if they wanted to make a purchase.

It remains to be seen what this resolution will mean for students with print impairments but I have to doubt that Google will encroach upon the textbook market as their focus has been on the out-of-print market. Keep in mind that even though Google states that its "mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" - their definition of "accessible and useful" does not necessarily jive with what our profession deems as "accessible and useful".

Several in our filed have tried to convert items available through Google to more accessible formats but to no avail. Will this change in the future? Who knows at this point. As fast as technology moves these days Google could announce its own web based text to speech screen reader tomorrow and I would not be surprised.
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What the world needs now -- is OCR ... sweet OCR....

The uber-geeks of Google have announced their intention to release (re-release?) Tesseract OCR. Interesting, but nothing to get very excited about at this point - unless you are truly into the whole open-source/linux movement. There may be promise here one day - especially considering that everything Google touches tends to turn to gold. The Google team brings to mind a slew of Indiana Jones types scouring the digital-Amazon (the river, not the shop-at-home site) for lost relics of a bygone era.

Outside of the announcement by Google I had a hellava time finding anything on "Tesseract OCR". Plenty of neat stuff on Tesseracts, but not much on the OCR namesake - and I have the library resources of a major university to play with. I am actually suprised I did not find more flash based sites with Tesseracts - it would seem that math types would spend more time creating little tessies and releasing them into the wild - but they are all probably playing with SodaRace.

I finally found something on Linux.com that provides a fairly decent overview of the program (history, what it does, tech notes, etc.). This article puzzles me as it seems like these folks have been hiding in a server closet for years having never heard of some of the exceptional commercial OCR programs available in 2006 instead of harkening back to a program that was "one of the top-tier performers at UNLV's OCR competition in 1995"

NINTEEN-NINETY-FIVE!!! Are you sh**ting me?!?! And there are people out in the world excited about resurrecting this thing. What - I ask - is the point! I remember OCR technology in 1995 and it sucked compared to what we have today. Give me my Abbyy Fine Reader and a sweet scanner anyday over some long forgotten OpenSource OCR program.

The SourceForge.net dowload site provides merely a one-line description: "A commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP between 1985 and 1995. In 1995, this engine was among the top 3 evaluated by UNLV. It was open-sourced by HP and UNLV in 2005." Of course it was open-sourced by UNLV - they were probably cleaning out old storage and figured something this good should not be tossed. Hey, I know - let's give it to Google (he, he) they'll take anything! After all - it did win their in-house competition more than a decade ago. And, of course, we all know how well things are going over at HP - they have bigger things to worry about then where UNLV tosses their trash. [off the record - UNLV will only acknowledge a long-term platonic relationship with Tesseract].

Thanks Google - but I'll pass. Please bring us more nifty stuff like the Google Personalized HomePage. I have basically shunned all other options and am working on moving several years worth of PDA dated into the trusted hands of Google. If you have not yet discovered the tabs in the GPHP you are truly missing out! I am also very much looking forward to where Google Scholar is headed - even the reference librarian for my program is excited.

Google gets into book sales [ars technica]

Heads up regarding on-line book sales [and possible accessibility issues]:

Google intends to begin selling the full text of books indexed via its Google Book Search in the near future. In a new entry on the Google Book Search Help Center, the search giant outlines how publishers will be able to sell online access to the contents of their books.

Users who discover a book they wish to purchase through Google Book Search will be able to pay for access to the full contents. The book will only be available to the user once they’ve signed in with their personal account, and will only be available through their browser. Users will not be able to save a copy on their computer nor copy pages from the book.

Amazon trying to steal Google Print's thunder with new service
Forget Google Print, Amazon wants to one-up Google's newly unveiled search service by offering what it can't: online access to complete works. While Google Print has been embroiled in controversy since day one, Amazon looks to be out to scratch two itches with the problem: make the publishers happy, and give users complete access.

Google Voice Search is wikked cool!

Google Voice Search -- pretty damn cool! Of course you need to have an iPhone for this one - but keep in mind all of the other Google apps that work on a wide variety of phones. I regularly use Gmail, Google Search, Google News, Google Maps and others on my Blackberry.

Google keeps hitting them out of the park. My favorite aspect of Google Apps is that end-users can pick and choose what they want to use. Gmail is only one of my addresses yet I use iGoogle as my customized homepage. I have documents saved on GoogleDocs and make use of some of the other apps as I see fit.

eBook versus E-Text Updates

Time now for a roundup/update of recent eBook activities and information - we'll start with the latest in the EduCause "7 Things You Should Know About ... " series on "... E-Books". From the EduCause site:

E-books offer new ways for readers to interact with content. An e-book that abandons the notion of reading from front to back, for example, encourages readers to take an active, self-directed role in how they learn. E-books
incorporating audio, movies, and simulations facilitate deeper understanding of
subject matter, while annotation features let users customize a text.

Before we go any farther, I should point out the differences [in my experience] between eBooks and E-Text [my preferred spellings]. In general, there are technical differences between the more generalized commercial eBook and the academically based E-Text. Though both can be described as digital and accessible­, the former is designed and distributed for a commercial purpose and the latter for an academic purpose. The former is not designed nor designated to be useable by individuals with print disabilities (though availability does not preclude such individuals from enjoying access) while the latter is specifically designed and designated to be used within the academic environment by individuals with a variety of disabling conditions.

In 'The soundproof book: Exploration of rights conflict and access to commercial ebooks for people with disabilities' (2002), Kerscher & Fruchterman describe these differences as more than merely semantic, but having to do quite literally with the misunderstandings and misperceptions of our society as to how individuals with disabilities can (and do) connect with the world most often taken for granted by those without disabilities. In other words, far too often in our society are these terms inaptly interchanged. What it comes down to, in general, is the individuals ability to access the material in a manner suited to their needs.

Unfortunately, the eBook as described in the above EduCause quote sounds like the ultimate educational panacea, but in present reality comes off as a pretty wrapping for most students and a hard shell for the majority of those with disabilities. But enough of my soapboxin' ... On with the roundup ...

Apparently Google does not feel it has enough of the eBook market and is planning a coup. According to the Times-OnLine "The internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry. With 380m people using Google each month, the move would give a significant boost to the development of e-books and have a big impact on the publishing industry and book retailers. "

I would most heartily welcome this were it not for the issue of the print inaccessibility of books within the Google Book Search (fmr. Google Print Project) as this paper titled Comments on Accessibility of Google Print and Google’s Library Project points out. [blog post with download]. However, since this paper was written, Google has made it clear that providing a complete internet/digital library is not their intention. The Book Search is designed to increase book sales by providing just enough of the title being searched to make the end-user go out and purchase their own copy. Need an example -- do a search for Old Yeller and check out what portion is missing. You can see for yourself that one would want to go get the book for themsleves (out of the library or from a bookstore) just to find out what the heck happened!

Anyway -- the way I see it, as long as Google keeps improving the Scholar Search and it doesn't crash my Personalized Home Page -- I guess I can forgive them for the accessibility issue.

Admittedly the eBook v. E-Text debate can be confusing - especially with a concrete to establish what these terms mean. this is all further muddled by the NIMAS protocols and publishers trying to figure out where they fit in and what they are supposed to do. A pretty good synopsis from the publisher perspective was presented at the Joint IDPF/Association of American Publishers (AAP) Meeting in November, 2006. Under the theme Managing and Delivering Digital Assets, the speakers tackled the topic of utilizing emerging standards to leverage publishing assets: practical application of workflows from production to distribution. Specific to the interests of this blog, Ken Brooks of Thompson Learning spoke about Delivering Digital Files: What Publishers Can Do To Get Started. The PPT is well worth reviewing.

Another resource worth mentioning is the NIMAC site under NIMAS. Herein are several presentations (static and audible) that provide information on many aspects of NIMAS & NIMAC.

Google Labs Accessible Search Engine

From the FAQ page:

Accessible Search is an early Google Labs product designed to identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users. Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set.

Developed by T.V. Raman, a Google research scientist who is himself blind, this is yet another example of how Google is changing the face of the web. Here is a link from ars-technica.

You might be digitzing books on the Web without knowing it thanks to this stealthy anti-spam technology | NetworkWorld.com Community

Again with the Carnegie Mellon where a scientist is looking to create a new type of security check that will assist in a project meant to digitize and make searchable text from books and printed materials. Above and beyond that, the offering would probably be more secure than most current systems. You know those CAPTCHA's we all dislike so very much --- thanks to them (and some behind the scenes stealth) you may be helping to digitize books on the web.

According to NetWorkWorld:

"Instead of requiring visitors to retype random numbers and letters, they would retype text that otherwise is difficult for the optical character recognition systems to decipher when being used to digitize books and other printed materials. The translated text would then go toward the digitization of the printed material on behalf of the Internet Archive project."

This reminds me of a Google Tech Talks lecture by Luis von Ahn (Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon) on the topic of Human Based Computation. This talk (available via Google Video):

introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. [von Ahn] advocate[s] a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it. I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge.

While poking around the Google Tech Talks site I discovered the Authors [at] Google site and the following lecture by Daniel H. Wilson discussing his book "How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips On Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion". I highly recommend this book as a combination of fact, fantasy and humor. I especially recommend the audio version as read by Stefan Rudnicki and available through Audible.com. By the way -- the video is captioned.

Announcing the OCRopus Open Source OCR System (Google Research)

From the good people of /. [Slashdot]

Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will "advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies". The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use."

Google is "hoping for contributions by the open source community in areas such as adapting the system to additional languages, creating a Gnome desktop application, integration with Gnome desktop search, web-based tools for proofing and training, language modeling, additional character recognition engines, and other useful tools and add-ons."

Late last year Google announced their intention to release (re-release?) Tesseract OCR, an obscure open-source program apparently familiar to only the most ardent Linux developer.

Happy Birthday Google

Yes indeed -- the search engine that is also a Verb turns Ten years old today! Interested to find out what has happened in the past ten years? Google has a timeline of events in their life. Check it out and let me know what you were doing in the pre-Google era.

By the way - has anyone out there begun using the new Google Chrome (beta)? I probably should be using it with an eye towards accessibility, but I am just too darn comfortable with the current one. Though you gotta admit that the comic book they put together to explain how it came togather and what it does is wikked cool.
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An Alternative to the Google Print Project

This one nearly slipped by without any notice --
"When Google announced a major expansion of its Library Project this month, attracting widespread attention, Emory University announced a different approach to digitizing collections. Unlike the Google model, Emory was only digitizing works that are no longer under copyright, and was retaining control over sale of the works (through print on demand)."

Google Continues to Make Accessibility a Priority

A quick link to Google's current accessibility page. I see new things every time I look to see what's been updated.

Google Accessibility

Multimedia Edition

Several items of multimedia interest cropped up recently and in looking back through the 'drafts' folder I discovered a few more that deserve mentioning. I'll start by blowing my own horn (and those of a few fellow ATHEN members).

Back in November of '06 I did a workshop at the Carroll Center for the Blind on Accessible Textbooks for Persons with Print Disabilities. This was recorded by the Talking Information Center of Massachusetts and broadcast to their listeners. I have done similar presentations at other conferences but this was my first time being recorded into a podcast [mp3 download]. Ye gads I hate the sound of my own voice, but at least I am in good company with my compadre' Brian Charlson of the Carroll Center. Speaking of multimedia, I may have posted on this before but the slide-show at Boston.com featureing Brian and Keegan on GPS Navigation Systems for the Blind deserves another look.

Now then ... enough about me ... how about these podcast and video stars from among the ATHEN membership. First up is Dan Comden of DO-IT in a video detailing the Universal Design of Computer Labs (available on Google Video). Produced by the Research Channel.org, this 11 minute video does an excellent job of covering the basics. Speaking of Google Video - it was pointed to me recently that do-it-yourselfers can caption and subtitle their own videos when they are put up on the web.

Dan Comden also makes an appearance in a podcast at the EmpTech site where he discuses automated tactile image production software being developed at the University of Washington. You can link directly to the podcast here [mp3 format] and also link to further information on the project. Also available through EmpTech is a podcast interview with ATHEN President Ron Stewart [mp3 format] regarding the use of electronic documents in various formats, including Daisy. This is actually a mirror download of the interview originally done for the Disability 411 podcast. The podcast includes a transcript of the conversation with Ron -- the info is great but those of us who know Ron know that listening to his delivery is half the fun.

The use of podcasts in education is definitely expanding as a recent story at CNN.com describes - Publishers cater to growing use of MP3s for schoolwork describes efforts at community colleges and universities through the use of iTunes and audible.com. Unfortunately, this story 9as per usual) misses the point of accessibility in regards to these efforts. When it comes to accessibility in podcasts, the processes and technology necessary to make them so is readily available. A good pair of tutorials on making podcasts and vodcasts accessible is available through the High Tech Center of the College of the Redwoods. And from the Napa Valley Register comes a story about the growing number of students using MP3 players as a study tool.

If you are interested in checking out more podcasts on technology and access issues, check out our list of favorites in the right column of this blog -->

Everything to Everyone [Inside Higher Ed]

Busy day on the listservs yesterday with parallel conversations taking place on DSSHE, ICU, and Alt-Media around issues of alternate-text production with asides continuing the conversation around copyright issues. Members of the Alt-Media list are aware of my interest (and views) on such issues as is anyone who visits this blog. I believe this is an important area for us to understand as part of our professional responsibilities and it does not get nearly as much attention as it deserves. I do not expect any of us to be copyright experts - but having a basic understanding the issues is very important - and especially true in todays digital era.

With such in mind, I want to bring to your attention the article Everything to Everyone by Tarleton Gillespie in todays issue of Insider Higher Ed.

Unlike battles around digital music that have occupied the courts’ attention of late, [the Google] case will be of vital importance for the academic community. What is at stake is the possibility of a digital database of all written knowledge, and the question of who gets to produce it and under what conditions. But the case will live or die not on the question of the value of such a database to users, but on the narrower legal question of whether Google has the right to scan the books to begin with.

Dr. Gillespie's comments make me wonder how soon the textbook version of the RIAA will come sniffing around our alt-text productions? It could happen folks - if the RIAA is willing to go to the lengths they have for a few downloaded tunes the copyright equivalent may be planning to come after one of our high-profile bretheren in order to set an example. The American Foundation for the Blind saw this as a possibility a couple of years ago when they responded to the Copyright Office's Notice of Inquiry with respect to proceedings mandated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and again last year as they sought an extension to the exemption for literary works.

AFB understands and remains firmly committed to insuring the rights of producers of digital materials. However, we are equally committed to insuring non-infringing, fair use of materials in all of these formats including access to the technological measures that control access to copyrighted works.

The American Library Association has also chimed in:

Although many federal and state laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are generally construed to guarantee access to library materials and services, the current copyright laws do not ensure that librarians can easily purchase accessible versions of library materials for patrons. This disconnect between the accessibility mandates in federal law and the limits imposed by the copyright law make providing accessible library materials a daunting task for many librarians.

For an extremely good overview of all this - in language that even I can understand - take the time to read The Soundproof Book by Kerscher and Fruchterman.

I ran into a DRM issues just today. A blind student eMailed me with a request to convert a book she purchased at eBooks.com. I was able to download the .pdf but unable to convert it to .txt for use with her BrailleLite. The book can be read using the Adobe Reader - but this is a Doctoral candidate working on her Dissertation for goodness sake - being forced to plod along with the crappy Adobe "accessibility features" is insulting. Digital it may be - but certainly not what we consider to be accessible.

I figured someone out there had cracked the eBooks DRM but a quick search came up with nothing. The student and I eMailed durring the day and realized it will be easier just to buy the darn thing and scan it. My search, however, did provide me with a couple of interesting links. One brief blog post on why DRM is bad for books and another chronicling one poor souls efforts to actual purchase, download, and use a digital book.

eBooks.com cannot be blamed for not anticipating that a blind Ph.D. student would one day need this particular title in a format accessible with her refreshable braille display. Who woulda thunk it? But that is precisely the problem with all of this - few outside of our profession understand what is meant by accessibility. Why should this student have to go through such hassles to read this or any book in a manner that will allow her to access and make use of it just as easily as any of her sighted colleagues? What will it take for entites to understand that just because a textbook is digital does not mean it is accessible.

WSJ.com - Building an Online Library, One Volume at a Time

As per the post a few days ago on foot soldiers in the scan-wars - an article from the Wall Street Journal on the daze (er...days) in the lives of scanners for the Internet Archive Million Book Project. Read the article for yourself and then ...

1. thank your lucky stars that we can de-spine our projects
2. assume none of us would likely have this equipment is it cost THIS much
3. ask yourself if we come off as being this -- unique -- to our professional peers?
4. know that the Internet Archive* proves - once again - to be the coolest site on the internet! [check out video of the Book Scanning Robot in action]

Now, if we could only figure out a way to easily convert these files to a useable format [at least uesable in our world]. Some are already somewhat accessible in that the text comes in a variety of flavors [see FAQ page and randomly check a book for yourself]. Those that have .rtf /.tif files are candidates for access but such availability seems almost random. Hopefully one of our members can take the time to explore further and make sense of the system.

Keep in mind that this is not the same as the Google Print Project. Google's unrelated book-scanning efforts have come under fire because some publishers and authors say the search giant is violating copyright law. But the Open Content Alliance has sidestepped legal troubles by focusing on books published before 1923--and therefore out of copyright in the U.S.--as well as some newer books publishers have allowed it to scan. [University Business Magazine]

Could this and other articles be the start of making our profession (part of it anyway) cool to the masses? Doubtful - but how often do you read something in the WSJ that you can actually relate to on a personal level?

*If you have not already done so go immediately to the Live Music Archive [you can thank me later].

Inside Bay Area - University working to put world's library online

Courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog:

Scanning for the Future

In the eyes of most librarians and archivists, digitizing books is an important and timely task. Unfortunately, it is also a tedious one, as the Tri-Valley Herald points out.

The Herald stopped by the University of California's Northern Regional Library Facility and found about 12 young men and women [employees of San Francisco-based Internet Archive] each wearing headphones and "sitting under black tents that keep out extraneous light," quietly scanning page upon page. Building the library of the future is not a glamorous task, says Scott Miller, the facility's operations manager: "We kind of think of it as a 21st-century Industrial Revolution type of job."

Since the university partnered with Google last summer, the company has scanned about 130,000 UC volumes at its Mountain View headquarters. Every afternoon, a panel truck arrives at the Richmond site to drop off one load of books and pick up 3,000 more.

Just a day late - but still interesting.

This video was brought to my attention a couple of days ago and I am only now getting around to posting it. The gist is that John McCain has stated that he does not use a computer and does not know how to use e-mail. This idea is defended by Karl Rove who says that because of McCain's physical injuries he is unable to type or use a computer. In the video this is followed by several video scenes of individuals with various disabilities effectively and effortlessly using computers.

Whether the claim about his war injuries and computer use is true or not, it is still rather concerning that this topic has even been discussed in regards to a presidential candidate. On the side of the Republicans, Washington is full of these guys, and it is quite depressing. Larry Craig once said "I've never used the internet". Ted Stevens thinks the internet is a series of tubes. Bush uses "the Google." How long until we have a computer-literate generation of leaders in our Capitol.

A Logic Named Joe

At dinner this evening my younger son asked me a question to which I did not have a ready answer - and as usual my response was to inform him that if he is still interested after dinner we will look up an answer on the Internet. He agreed, paused for a moment, and asked me how the Internet knows all this stuff. Well, I started to explain that the Internet does not 'know' all of this stuff per se', but rather the Internet is made up of a vast array of resources within which may be the answers to the questions he is asking. This led to him asking where the Internet came from - and for that matter - who invented the Internet. My wife joked that it was Al Gore and my older son chimed in with Bill Gates. She was joking -- he was confused. The conversation quickly turned to disputing any claim Mr. Bill has on the creation of the Internet and explaining the joke about Mr. Gore.

After dinner -- the original question being forgotten -- we did a quick search for the history of the Internet. I knew beforehand about MIT and ARPANET, but was a bit suprised to learn that like so many other technologies we take for granted today, the Internet owes a portion of its origin to science fiction. I grew up reading Asimov, Harrison, and Heinlein while watching Star Trek [TOS] and others, and am delighted every time some new gadget or gizmo hits the market that can be traced right back to its fantastical fictional origin. Though I consider myself to be pretty well read in science fiction literature, I had never heard of the short story "A Logic Named Joe" until I came across it in the Wikipedia entry for Internet.

Published in 1946 by Murray Leinster [the pseudoname of writer Will F. Jenkins], when computer technology was still in its trying to procreate stage, "A Logic Named Joe" is a unique story even by today's standards in that it combines possibility of too much information with a quietly efficient Artificial Intelligence bringing together disparate bits of information. Replace the word 'logic' every time it appears in the story with the word 'computer' and the term 'central tank' with 'Google' and you've got a tale worthy of today's "information age". Heck, within the first few paragraphs there is enough expository premonition to make you expect that by the end of the story the author will pinpoint the location of Bigfoots cave.

I'm a maintenance man for the Logics Company. My job is servicing logics, and I admit modestly that I am pretty good. I was servicing televisions before that guy Carson invented his trick circuit that will select any of 'steenteen million other circuits—in theory there ain't no limit—and before the Logics Company hooked it into the tank-and-integrator set-up they were usin' 'em as business-machine service. They added a vision screen for speed—an' they found out they'd made logics. They were surprised an' pleased. They're still findin' out what logics will do, but everybody's got 'em.

See what I mean. Written in a gutteral tone and at a time when computers were so rare they were given individual names, the story unfolds that "Joe" has somehow developed an independent personality and decides that he can do better than thems that are maintainin' him. Joe decides that information should be shared openly and freely - security protocols and logical reasoning be damned.

In just a few pages, the story introduces and predicts a plethora of innovations and uses we take for granted today, including:

• Internet access from a desktop computer
• Fully searchable networks
• Video databases (fully searchable)
• On-line accounting software
• Television available via desktop computers
• Real-time news, weather, stock quotes, etc.
• Internet telephone and televid service
• Personal Internet addresses
• Individual phone numbers (in a time of party lines)
• The ability to censor content for users
• On-line and On-screen technical support
• Web based software programs
• Cyber Cafes (for a fee)
• Log-In screens
• Pop-up ads
• Viruses

I cannot believe that in my life to this day I had never even heard of this story let alone read it. It's like finding a band that was not known by me in their heyday but now I cannot get enough of because I love a cover of one of their tunes and am thrilled to hear the original. Now I need to find everything written by Will F. Jenkins [a.k.a Murray Lenister].

By the way - the story is available for reading through Baen Books and a 1950 radio recording in MP3 is available through Archive.org.