I Hired a Book

I have an article up at Library Journal about startups that have been getting hired for reading ecosystem jobs over the past three years. The startups that I profile are GoodReads, Wattpad, Readmill, SIPX and Zolabooks.

This view of hiring companies for jobs comes from Clayton Christensen's concept of Milkshake Marketing, explained here.

Christensen describes the case of a fast food restaurant that wanted to improve sales of its milkshakes, but really didn't understand the job that consumers were hiring it for. Customer observations revealed that almost half of the milkshakes sold were to early morning customers who had long boring commutes; the milkshake was being hired to relieve boredom and postpone hunger.

Libraries too need to think about the jobs their users are hiring them to do. Sometimes it's just to relieve boredom or escape bad weather.

silo schematics
by Jerry Yeti

Over Labor Day weekend, I hired a book for a very specific job. I went to an actual bookstore and bought a book to occupy myself during a cross country flight from LAX to EWR, with a connection I was sure to miss in DFW. I chose Hugh Howey's Wool. Given the book's publishing history, you might think it perverse that I bought the print version. Wool was, for a long while, an ebook-only self-published series; Howey did a precedent-setting deal with Simon & Schuster for the print rights only. But consider the job I was hiring it to do: why would I buy an ebook that I couldn't read during the long waits on the runways? (My son had dibs on the window seat.)

Having spent the outbound trip coding new features for unglue.it, I needed a mental break, and Wool enveloped me in a completely absorbing self-contained world that did the job I hired it for quite nicely. Wool tells the story of the inhabitants of an isolated post-apocalyptic silo, built and supplied with technology from the year 2012. "IT" is the villain.

There was one continual distraction for me. My engineer's brain couldn't stop calculating the dimensions of the silo. The narrative made the silo seem large- after all it's the whole world for its inhabitants. But of necessity, it has to be compact. But how compact? Towards the end of the fifth part, I get some measurements: the bottom 8 floors are flooded, a depth of "70 to 80 feet". So 10 feet per level. That's pretty cramped!

Wool seems so relevant to our current environment, especially today's revelations about the extent of the NSA's decryption effort. Books have a way of doing jobs other than what you hired them for, just like the best employees. Just like libraries. Think about it.

Update 9/9: I purchased the DRM-free ebook package for Shift, the second book in the series. Which so far reveals that the silo tech is supposed to be from 2050 and that the top level is 10 meters, not feet.

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Library Journal: Explosive Change in the Library

One more essay is up at Library Journal:

As the library staff collected across the street at their designated meeting spot, they heard a loud noise and saw a smoking manhole cover in front of them pop. Later, they found that an underground explosion had lifted and broken a concrete floor of the library, buckling walls and blowing doors off their hinges.

The latest news on the Morristown library is that the local power company, whose lines were probably the cause of the explosion, can't figure out how to get a new connection wired, causing further delay to the reopening.

After writing this piece, it occurred to me that there ought to be established an "Emergency Response Digital Public Library" that could be deployed wherever and whenever needed. A library that experiences a loss by fire, flood or other disaster such as Morristown's has enough work on its hands in trying to clean up the mess and to re-establish service to be able to provide for all of its community's library needs. A large number of libraries on the gulf coast simply closed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Certainly many publishers would be willing to provide free licenses to content is such situations- not only would it generate good will, but it would expose audiences to all the good stuff they have to offer. In fact, aggregators such as EBSCO and Proquest have made content available this way; but to my knowledge, there's not been a library organization to organize and promote the content for patrons of libraries that have experienced disaster loss. The Health Library for Disasters is a good example of what's posssible, though with a much narrower focus.

An additional benefit of establishing an emergency response digital public library would be that it could serve as a laboratory for libraries as they make their own transitions into digital information. Extensive "instrumentation" and careful compilation of statistics and usage patterns could be used to improve non-emergency digital libraries.

Too often, people are willing to donate money to relief efforts when a disaster occurs, but the infrastructure needed to absorb that aid doesn't exist. Modest expenditures on preparation before a disaster occurs can greatly increase the effectiveness of that aid. It seems to me that a broad-based digital library would be a useful part of that preparation.

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Library Journal: If Librarians Ran the Supermarket

My essay on food replicators for Library Journal, published back in 2010, is posted.

With all the business models in my salad, I started to think about how dinner would be different if vegetables were somehow digital products. All the hours of my youth wasted on Star Trek reruns began to flash before my eyes. What business models might evolve to make the food replicators of the future work? My brain gears started turning...

I learned about purslane from a radio segment on WNYC. Apparently it's really high in omega-3 fatty acids (the good kind) and vitamins. After years of pulling it out of the lawn I thought it would be fun to put it in a salad, and it turned out to be quite good.

For the salad shown, I paired it with mango, carrots, cabbage and a bit of the red amaranth which has aggressively self-seeded from last year's crop, making itself into another sort of weed. Red amaranth leaves work well in recipes designed for spinach, and it's really quite delicious. You can eat the young leaves raw. Last year I harvested the amaranth seed, which can add a poppy-seed like texture to cookies or pound cake.

A couple of weeks ago, I told a friend about purslane. She's well known locally for her organic garden, which supplies her with all her family's vegetables year round, and she periodically gives tours of her garden as a form of evangelism. She was aghast at the idea of eating purslane, though; even organic gardeners hate weeds!

Real Trekkies will be aware that the "replicators" aboard 24th century starships such as the one captained by Jean-Luc Picard weren't restricted to replicating food; they were more like 3-d copying machines. It's not clear if this would make the intellectual property rights to the food any different. If it were possible to copy an avocado, would it be possible to copyright it? If you can copyright a 2-d photo, why would a 3-d photo be any different?

The "food synthesizers" of Jim Kirk's 23rd century worked more on the lines of the food replicators in my essay. Unlike replicators, which understood voice commands ("tea, Earl Grey, hot") food synthesizers used program tapes or cards inserted into a slot. Clearly the food patterns used more petabytes than could be transmitted over the giga-ultra-wifi in use at that time.

In 2010, food recipes can't be copyrighted. Fortunately, clothing designs are also not subject to copyright; making them so would kill off fashion as we know it.

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Library Journal: Should Kids Get eBooks in School?

My second piece for Library Journal is now up. Here's the beginning:

Searching for information is NOT like trolling for fish. You know the saying: "Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for life." Answer someone's question, and most likely they'll go away for today. Teach someone how to search for the answer, and they'll continually hunger for more.

What didn't fit into the article was more of Doug Achterman's story. He's the Teacher-Librarian at Hollister High School in California who did his Ph. D. dissertation on his work unraveling the data on how school library staffing affects student performance. This year, his school library has had its staffing slashed. This year, it will be staffed with a half time professional, (Achterman) and an 80% time clerical worker. This is for a high school with 3000 students in an economically mixed community. The other half of Achterman's time will be spent teaching English.

It's ironic that Achterman will be witnessing the negative side of his conclusion that school libraries require adequate staffing to have a positive impact on student performance; he'll be doing his best to prove that conclusion wrong, at least in one California high school. Despite very strong community support for the school library at several school board meetings, the budget cutting axe could not be averted.

Despite his library's unenviable budget situation, Achterman was upbeat. He emphasized that he viewed his most important role was working with other teachers. He has a long term goal of creating tutorials, videos and other resources for his teaching colleagues. Take a look at his library's web page if you need inspiration for what a dedicated library professional can do in a school library, budget cuts be damned.

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Library Journal: Libraries, Ebooks, and Competition

My first piece for Library Journal is now available online. Here's the key sentence:

Well, doh. Of course libraries are important. What people are overlooking is that the reason libraries are having such fits dealing with a changing environment is not that libraries are unrecognized as fountains of value, it's that libraries are so valuable that they attract voracious new competition with every technological advance.

One reader of the print version emailed me to complain about a too-far fantasy that I included:

Today, it's likely a teenager would get the same book from Project Gutenberg and read it on a smartphone without ever visiting a library.

I checked with my resident teenager, and no, that would never happen. Teenagers don't read books on smartphones. For the most part, they don't have smartphones. (Though I suspect the answer might be different in Tokyo.) They do, however, do a lot of reading on screens. Teenagers have been reading on screens for years, and don't mind it. Those screens are not Kindles, however. I have yet to see any self-respecting teenager reading on a Kindle. The greatest adoption of Kindles has been reported be in the over 50 age group.

The Project Gutenberg bit is only half fantastical, at least with respect to Crime and Punishment. A teenager would have used the Wikisource version.

Comments on the article are welcome, either here or here.

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