In the last month, there’s been a lot of mainstream media attention on the borderlands between paper print and digital print, between text and etext. Google seems to be the focus of much of this interest, and my guess is that the announcement and proposal of a settlement between Google and a broad class of authors and publishers and [. . .] library partners is making a lot of people nervous.

It was easy to believe that the future of the book, not just its electronic advent but its commercial feasability, was in fact a distant future, somewhere between an Apple-branded tablet device and flying automobiles.1 As long as the present day ability of readers to curl up in the bathtub with their favorite gathering of toxically produced wood pulp remained unchallenged, no one really considered the economic and social impact of etext and ebooks.2 The day people realized Google was moving its books project out of the academic cloister toward commercial respectability was the day everyone crapped their paper print diapers.

The US Department of Justice feels that the breadth of the settlement raised ‘significant legal concerns’, especially the problem that the agreement seems to give publishers the power to restrict price competition and drive other digital distributors from the market. The DOJ believes that the settlement in its current form fails to comply with Rule 23 of a federal law governing class-action settlements. As Tom Krazit of CNET observes, it seems the DOJ wants Congress to determine the fate of copyright orphaned works and the public’s ability to access such works rather than market forces to find a solution on their own. To my eyes, media incumbents know they cannot force Google to do its bidding and Google is keenly interested in granting public access to this information. Siccing the DOJ on the settlement is one way to express incumbent corporate interests. If these interests prevail, we all get to stay curled up in the bathtub.

Or do we?

It would be one thing if Google only wanted to offer access to these orphaned works, but Google has a broad range of initiatives whose target is the shadowy realm between paper and digital print. First, to smooth the feathers of its competitors, Google announced it would allow rivals full commercial access to its etext archives so companies like Amazon and Barnes and Noble could sell users access.3 Google also wants to help readers stay in the tub, announcing in the last days of summer 2009 that the direction of textual flow can be reversed, from digital to paper. Ebooks? We ain’t got no ebooks. We don’t need no stinkin’ ebooks!

And in case you missed it, Google even has come up with a way to help dead-tree news dealers relinquish their toxic hold on the world’s water resources with a new service called Fast Flip.4 RSS clients are too electrotexty for the partially bleached newsprint hordes. They need something more visual. For my money, I think Fast Flip is pretty slick and that it will help the electronically challenged get a better sense of the news available on the Internet. I’d love to see this kind of functionality available in a clientside RSS reader.

The recent and ongiong mainstream media concern with the flow of information from paper to electronic media—the concern with the transduction of material across disparate ontological orders—signals to me that electronic text is almost here. One of the largest commercial interests in the world is bringing its energy and vision to accelerating the nascent market for electronic texts, while the DOJ’s puppet masters think it’s best to encourage the parties to continue negotiations to modify it.5 A few more rounds of just this kind of judicial heel-dragging and paper print laggards will find themselves in exactly the same place that the captains of the music industry are in today.

It’s unfair, though, to suggest this is a problem limited to US media incumbents. Across the pond, Hachette Audio and Digital Media are using the abridged audio book version of Iain M. Banks’s latest novel Transition (hardcover by Orbit, a Hachette imprint) to sell paper print copies of the book. This strikes me precisely the kind of thinking one can expect from the benficiaries and proponents of incumbent media because the transition that’s really called for is not from audio to back paper. If paper print publishers truly understood the nature of media shift, they would give customers free audio versions of the paper print books they purchase. The reason publishers do not do this is because they want to believe that the new media can be used as a means to preserve the old media. The beneficiaries of paper print are blind to the possibility of using the old media to way to accelerate the shift to the new media and, by doing so, advantageously positioning themselves in relation to new media. They believe the old business can be maintained, impossibily, by routing through the new business. They do not see that the new business is inevitable.

They do not see that there is no other side.

Codex Books, Audiobooks, and Assistive Devices: A Tale of Near Misses

The last book I checked out of Alden Library while still a faculty at Ohio University was Clay Shirky’s 2008 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. I had planned on scanning the book and turning it into an OCRed PDF file but I ran out of time, had to tear down and pack my digitizing rig, a large-format flatbed scanner and the dual G5 it was connected to. When Pam and I made our way back to California from Ohio in July, I was without a workstation class computer for over a month, using niblet and numbskull (respectively my smart phone and trusty MacBook Air) as a combined mobile computing solution. Good enough.

Two days ago, I was listening to an audiobook version of Clay Shirky’s book stored on eggplant, a black 160GB classic iPod.

I’ve never really been that into audiobooks. First, I am was a scholar of paper print texts, primarily texts classifiable as postmodern American literature and post-psychoanalytic philosophy. I did lots of non-print media, such as film and digital print, but my primary training and identity was with codex books, the old-skool kind. In fact, until Pam and I drove from San Francisco, California, to Athens, Ohio, at the end of 2008 and early 2009, I had never listened to an audiobook. The first audiobook I ever listened to was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road narrated by Tom Stechschulte. The performance and story were gripping, and we hooted over our alternating renditions of Stechschulte’s version of “the man” and “the boy.” Still not hooked.

On Monday, 14 September, I walked to the main branch of the SFPL and applied and received a library card. Shirky’s book, which was on the shelf in the main branch the Friday before (I think), was out. The nearest available copy was at the Golden Gate Valley Branch, a 1.8 mile walk.

On the morning of Tuesday, 15 September, I discovered there existed Federal regulations which do not allow insurers to pay for assistive devices if those devices had functionality beyond what was required for assistive services. Besides the regrettable and unsurprising waste forced by such regulations, I was on fire to find out more about the $150 text-to-speech software Ms. Lynn used on her iPhone to convert text to speech.

My search didn’t turn up the iPhone software, but I did see a number of text-to-speech softwares for the desktop, most of which were clearly garbage. I remembered a piece of software that had caught my interest several months back, a program called Textcast. I had tried the software out, but considered it to be too narrow. I couldn’t imagine selecting text snippets from various web pages, sending those snippets to Textcast, and synchronizing them with iTunes and then my iPod. Besides that the process involved four distinct steps from selection to iPod, many web-accessible articles span multiple pages. Getting those articles into a single podcast on an iPod would be too much work for too little payoff. I filed Textcast as interesting-idea-but-not-worth-the-effort.

The Pitfalls of Professional Narcissism

So two days ago on my walk to the main branch of the SFPL, I was listening to a self-generated audiobook version of Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations stored on eggplant. Shirky is a canny analyst of new media, one who understands the effect new media have on incumbents, especially professionals.

In Everyone is a Media Outlet, Shirky notes that newspaper publishers didn’t see websites such as Craigslist and eBay as threats to their business, despite that anyone with eyes in 1998 could see that both sites (and others) were eating the newspapers’ lunch.

Shirky notes There was a kind of narcissistic bias in the [newspaper] profession; the only threats they tended to take seriously were from other professional media outlets, whether newspapers, TV, or radio stations (56). Incumbents were blind to the threat posed by the Internet to their business, even though that threat had a direct effect on their bottom line. The threat posed by the Internet was not just that web audiences want their news for free, though that would have an affect on subscriber revenue. The existence of a site like eBay combined with a moratorium on the taxation of Internet commerce that crossed state lines meant that eBay, Amazon, Apple, and Craigslist could give the traditional customer base of classified ads more for their money—more reach, more buyers, more flexibility—in addition to the simple fact of more money (no taxes).

So it goes.

Shirky also traces the effect of the printing press on scribal culture, identifying the instructive hypocrisy of Johannes Trithemius’s decision to publish De Laude Scriptorum, which praises the kind of lives that scribes lead, by means of movable type and a printing press rather than by employing a group of scribes. The Abott of Sponheim (Trithemius) provided the perfect example of why scribal culture was lost in the age of the printing press. Faced with the urgent need to save scribal culture, the Abott of Sponheim could think of nothing better than to accelerate the obsolecence of scribal culture with a eulogy on the virtues of scribal life. Today we would call this scribal FAIL.

Shirky put it this way.

Continued Cultural Relevance? There’s an App for That.