Literacy: October 2003 Archive Page

How Amazon can make money from books you already own.

We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of "find me something I've never seen before." But real-life search is often different: You're looking for something you have seen before, but you've somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution's impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it's in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can't remember which one. | "Search inside" could be the perfect solution to this common problem. --Steven Johnson --The Best Search Idea Since Google (Slate)

Amazon's "Search Inside" is starting to feel more and more like Vannevar Bush's memex.

For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google's database, say people close to the discussions. | How that content would be presented is not clear, but it would likely not be provided in excerpted passages to customers, as it is on Amazon. Instead, the material would go into a database that Google spiders would comb, then turning up relevant links. If a user clicks through, they would be sent to a separate page that contains a book abstract and the opportunity to buy the title. Who would actually be responsible for the sale would be a decision presumably left to the publisher. --Steven Zeitchik --Google Studies Creation of Book Database (Publishers Weekly)

If Google is following Amazon.com's lead, it's a sign of Amazon's strength, and a sign of yet another New Media assault on the fortress of Old Media.

P.S. A breaking new story by Steven Zeitchick? Really? ("Zeit" = German for "time," as in "Zeitgeist".)

Edgar Allan Poe's most popular poem, "The Raven," tells the story of a man who gets a late-night visit from a mysterious bird that speaks only one word: "Nevermore." | Sounds like a pretty simple story, right? | Guess again! --Knowing Poe [Annotated Version of 'The Raven']Maryland Public Television)

Once upon a Tuesday weary, while I pondered, bleak and bleary,
Over many a quaint and curious entry of unblogged lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my office door.
"'Tis some advisee," I muttered, "tapping at my office door--
Only this and nothing more."

...Quoth my keyboard, "Blog some more!"

Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it's still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books. --Gary Wolf --The Great Library of Amazonia  (Wired)

Superintendent Wilfredo T. Laboy finally passed the Communication and Literacy Skills Test, reportedly with flying colors. --Lawrence schools boss passes language skills test  (Boston Herald)

It's only fair to follow up with the good news, since I've already blogged the bad.

Convincing medical school faculties that a professional actor can teach empathy to doctors might sound like a losing battle. However, the directors of many residency programs are starting to acknowledge that they need help in this area. New national requirements, recently set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), list interpersonal and communication skills as one of six areas of core competency in which programs must educate physicians as part of their training. --Susan Okie --An Act of Empathy (WashPost (registration, will expire))

Good article focusing on the actress who created the role of Vivian Bearing, the English professor dying of cancer in Margaret Edson's moving play Wit.

What does one do when the book is wrong? Should the book's authority outweigh the professor's? In the mind of the student, the book is usually the "law" of the class, in many ways, and the teacher the lawyer. Obviously, I can't hold the student accountable for missing a question when the book mislead her -- and I did later give her full credit for her answer -- but now I see another way in which grading is revision... not of the test, but of the textbook! --Mike Arnzen --When the Book is Wrong (PEDABLOGUE)

Just as a shark must swim to breathe, a hard drive must be in motion to receive or return data. This air bearing technology, as it is called (pioneered at IBM in the 1950s), explains why dust and other contaminants must be kept out of the drive casing at all costs. If the heads touch the surface of the drive while it is in motion the result is what is known as a head crash: the head, which it must be remembered is moving at speeds upward of one hundred miles per hour, will plow a furrow across the platter, and data is almost impossible to recover. Thus, a key aspect of the hard drive'smateriality as an agent of digital inscription is quite literally created out of thin air. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms: Grammatology of the Hard Drive (MGK)

Kirshenbaum is publishing excerpts from his forthcoming book, which examines the hard drive as an inscription machine. Here's part of a somewhat rambling comment I posted on his site:

I was at a zoo today and suddenly realized that the term "fledgling" has an orinthological origin -- it's not a metaphor to apply the term to birds. It's amazing that I've been using that word for decades and it never occurred to me. Thanks for similarly making me understand the term "hard drive crash".

A post on netwoman reads:

Dale Spender and Helen Fallon (1998) also assert that terminology such as 'abort', 'chaining', 'thrashing', 'execute', 'head crash', and 'kill' portray negative images of sex and violence to women, creating an uncomfortable and unfamiliar terrain. http://www.netwomen.ca/Blog/2003_09_01_archive.html#106427418616569858

I haven't read the specific article referenced, but I wonder if your description of the technology of computers as a physical environment (on the micro level) would place the percieved violence of computer terminology into another context.

At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap. | But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book. --Paul Majendie --Bubble bursts for electronic books (SignOnSanDiego)

"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says. | But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues. --Jo Twist --Web guru fights info pollution (BBC)

A good interview with Jakob Nielsen. The bit about procrastination isn't new to anyone who's spent time on a college campus recently... and I'm definitely guilty of using my blog as a way to convince myself I'm being productive when I've got ten or fifteen minutes to kill... when in reality, I often read gad about online for an hour or more before I find something that really motivates me to blog.

P.S. Jo Twist? Really?

--Facing and Fessing Up to Old Age (MetaFilter)

A pleasant, if late, birthday present... a reminder on MetaFilter that I am not alone.

A note from C.M. Worth reminds me to blog that Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death died this weekend. --Neil Postman, Mass Media Critic, Dies (NY Times)

Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi's search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws were. All this, while his pages remained well ranked on Google. "I lost a quarter of my traffic," says Spooner. --Ben Elgin --Web Searches: The Fix Is In  (Business Week)