books

Books are the most personal of objects; we choose a book and we silently read, letting the author create a new world inside our minds. But books are the most social objects as well; we communicate all our important ideas in books and we’ve been doing that for almost 700 years; not all our culture has been in books, but a lot of it. And like gossip, books make for great talk.

Books make for great web too. You can find books; you can find out about books; you can get books – downloaded or delivered; you can trade books; you can even email books. And, as I suggested last week, we are only at the very beginning; soon, every book that ever was written and published will be available in some form online and there will be people in a chatroom talking about it.

Here are some sites that satisfy the old book itch with a new way to scratch:

BookMooch:

Aside from having the best name and a truly fantastic illustration to welcome you to their site (the same graphic that you see at the top of this post), BookMooch does a couple things very well. Their book-trading service enables you to turn your staid, old, wallpaper-style library into an active social resource. The concept is simple: you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. Here’s how BookMooch describes it:

Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.

No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.

Here’s the bigger thing I like about BookMooch: your collection of books shouldn’t be a dumb dust-collector; it should be as alive and interesting as the books themselves. BookMooch makes that possible. For all those readers that still crave the heft and scent of good reading, BookMooch is brilliant!

BookGlutton:

BookGlutton has designed a great way to read books online; if you can skip the ritual of holding a book in your hands, this is the way to go. You can do it as privately as trad reading and conveniently take notes in a side bar or you can chat with other readers while you read. It’s a book club built into a social network. Nice.

Goodreads:

The best way to find a good book is, of course, a recommendation from a friend. (Whenever I can, I tell someone that if they haven’t read John Berger’s To The Wedding, they should!) Goodreads puts the power of the web behind the process of recommending reading. In one visit, you can see who’s reading what and what they think of it. Simple and useful. Expand your mind.

Children’s Books Online - the Rosetta Project:

The Rosetta Project is proof that angels are at work somewhere on the web. Tons of old and wonderful children’s book, illustrated, some with audio, and available for free perusal and very inexpensive download.  The stories are often familiar and, just as often, strange and new. They are a delight! And, as if the words alone were not enough, there are illustrations! If you like kids’ books, don’t go here unless you have the rest of the day free. A dream – but real, and here’s a pic to prove it:

DailyLit:

You may be the kind of person who has no time for kids’ stuff and wants more stimulating stuff. OK. And what if you’re too busy to dig for the good dirt? Well, DailyLit can put tasty portions of Madame Bovary in your email’s inbox every day for 145 days in a row. If that doesn’t satisfy your cravings, perhaps books are just not your thing.

DailyLit has a huge range of books to choose from – new as well as old, fiction and non, completely free and for a very modest fee – and they will send you a chunk of the book everyday so that you actually read it! The folks who started DailyLit make their confession for all to read:

We created DailyLit because we spent hours each day on email but could not find the time to read a book. Now the books come to us by email. Problem solved.

Agreed. Now send me that carriage with Bovary in it.

Thwaite & Newton:

Real books require real readers and we are all very fortunate that some real readers have found their way to the web and ignored the anti-tech bullshit that many book reviewers waste their time on. Mark Thwaite and Maud Newton are the real thing: genuine, long-time readers and book-lovers who bring passion and knowledge to their sites. Anybody who loves to read will love these sites; they are filled everyday with gossip and outrage and insight and suggestions. Keep reading alive!

Google Book Search:

The Big Kahuna. Always go here first – because many other booksites do exactly that. Eventually they will have it all, in my opinion, and I’m fine with that as long as they hire Mark Thwaite and Maud Newton to run the new book world they are creating. Here’s how they describe themselves:

Search
Book Search works just like web search. Try a search on Google Book Search. When we find a book with content that contains a match for your search terms, we’ll link to it in your search results.

Browse books online
If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you’ll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it’s in the public domain, you’re free to download a PDF copy.

I tried an off-beat search: Michel Tournier’s Gemini. Here’s the link. Very impressive: an overview, a number of pages and links to his other stuff, including The Ogre, which is a much better read.

Book Search also has user-generated stuff such as MyLibrary. Users list books that they find interesting and possibly related to a theme. Some of the books are fully available from Book Search and you can download them immediately, others are still under copyright. Check out Magdelena’s list.

Google Scholar:  

Sometimes you want or need to go deeper and get medieval, or, at least, scholarly. The people at universities have had the benefit of our tax dollars but they have closed off their libraries to the great unwashed (you and me). Google Scholar is turning that world upside-down. But are they doing a good job?

A recent University of Toronto study compared Google Scholar with a number of established university library systems; they measured authority, objectivity, rigour, and transparency of each resource, with the judges being unaware of the source. The conclusion?

“for all practical purposes, Google Scholar equaled library e-searches in its capacity to yield high-quality sources in response to queries made by relatively inexperienced writers in an introductory EAP course”.

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Two Mondays of Books! This week: why the near future for books is all online and all-Google. Next week: a bunch of great sites from Google Scholar to BookMooch to Madame Bovary in your Inbox, courtesy of DailyLit.

My TESOL instructors were fond of saying – for reasons only they understand – that there are no books on the web! There are, of course, thousands of books available for free download and scores of publishers opening up their books to Google’s BookSearch and a mountain or two of useful and cool information about books. All of the above can be useful to teachers. And teachers better get used to more and more books starting and staying online and never seeing paper because the bookscape is inexorably changing.

Books may be the single most valuable artefact of civilization – next to non-fat plain yogurt and a Bialetti coffee machine. Something so important doesn’t deserve our nostalgia. Somewhere at sometime in every situation…somebody is reading a book, or, at least, a part of a book. Books make the world go round but, like fruit, they’re a gamble (to quote from Seinfeld.) Even a paperback costs $20; so only the financially-relaxed folks of the middle-class are going to be regular bookbuyers, sadly. It’s even more regrettable when you think what an incredible bargain a book is as entertainment. If movies were as good, they’d cost about two bucks!

The dream to make such an important cultural tool more accessible and more affordable is worthwhile. So a flood of gadgets, both hardware and software, pours forth on a regular basis. The specialized hardware seems unnecessary to me. The New York Times recently hyped a bunch of new gadgets but it all ended up sounding like flabby ad copy or wishful thinking. The best line belonged to a New Jersey lawyer who

“…takes his cellphone to bed with him. ‘If I’m reading in bed and I don’t want to wake up my wife, I can use my phone and read in total darkness,’ he said.”

This seems to be the tone of the tech side of bookworld; if you can’t simply eliminate the painfully slow reading aspect of books, you can at least turn it into a kind of low-energy extreme sport to be performed in total darkness. This is what infuriates the real book people, of course, and correctly so. Alan Wall, writing a guest column in Mark Thwaite’s wonderful book site, ReadySteadyBook, told the story of encountering one of the deadly new book geeks:

This particular enthusiast for all things speedy, simultaneous and multi-tasking, anything that flashed and bleeped and interfaced, appeared to have no interest whatsoever in what I in my quaintness still call knowledge and learning. He was a representative of that new and potent ideology which claims that it is not the internalisation of knowledge that should be the aim of education, simply the acquisition of techniques for effectively accessing it. In other words, the skills do not have to be ‘learnt’, simply located, downloaded, then stored for future use. As long as a student can find where the knowledge lies, and process it for the task presently in hand, then that, it would appear, is acceptable. This is cant, and dangerous cant too. I would like to explain why.

Real learning modifies the human being who undergoes it. We change; we grow; we see reality differently. If we don’t, then we have not, in fact, learnt: we have merely skimmed the surface of a learning subject. Learning is participatory…

All of which sounds right to me. But, like the over-enthusiastic geek, the over-protective Professor Wall wants to turn the book-lined library into the Alamo (or whatever the Brit version is); he claims the book empowers students because a book enables students to turn the pages themselves as opposed to those nasty computers that keep locking us into PowerPoint presentations. An idea that doesn’t click with the Prof is that electronic information is easier to store and search and reference. If he would come clean, I think he’d admit that he simply likes the smell of books better than the silicone scent of his laptop! In this, I agree wholeheartedly.

While Old Book fights with New Book, sales keep dropping. The reasons are: the TV is easier to succumb to; the wider public has less disposable cash; and our high schools are turning out half their ‘graduates’ who are unable to really read.

Into the twitch & bitch of books, rides Google. It’s not surprising they’re interested in books; I’m not sure when the back-of-book index was first invented but we are clearly ready for an upgrade. And Google has not been shy. Book Search assumes the entire history of written communication is just a part of the web that’s slightly more difficult to access. By copying all the books that exist, the Library Project is designed to make the access much easier. Google Scholar is trying to do the same thing with all the scholary literature hidden away in journals.

Publishers are like ostriches except they are noisier - and they own copyrights. From the beginning, they have hidden from technical change while complaining loudly in response to Google’s argument that making all the material more available would help to promote it. I’m sure the publishers would feel better if they could somehow see a familiar cash register midst all the advanced optimism. The astonishing thing is this: Google is slowly convincing people. As recently as 2005, RandomHouse was suing, now they are signing up to Book Search. And they are not alone: the program now has 10,000 publishers and 27 academic reference libraries.

In spite of some bookpeople making tentative steps toward the future, I think the hassles are going to continue for Google; book people would rather bitch than twitch (see today’s NYT, for instance). However, we all can see where we are headed and, just for fun, let’s imagine how it might play out:

1. Books on paper keep not selling so well.
2. The big media conglomerates that own the publishers take a moment out from their problems with their recording companies where music is not selling so well and realize they don’t want to hear anymore bitching about books!
3. Google’s stock, currently at $600, rises modestly to $1,200…then $1,800…
4. Google buys the book industry. Aside from the convincing argument of giving the media companies a chance to own some Google stock, Google shows the oligopolistic publishing sector that if they were to buy one of the group, they could effectively set prices for the whole industry. So why not get everyone at the table and make them an offer they can’t refuse?
5. Anti-trust? Google announces that if they are allowed to own the entire collected written works of mankind, they will make these things we once called ‘books’ available on-line for free! And, did we say that everything will be searchable?
6. But what about the authors!!! Free books yield zero royalties. And when it comes to bitch, authors are heavyweights. But do you think it might be possible to interest authors in being included in the Google Stock Option Plan? Maybe.

Next week, some more-near-term fun: along with personal Google Book Searches and Google Scholar, I’ll take a look at things a teacher might do with Project Gutenberg, BookMooch, Goodreads, Rosetta: Books for Kids, DailyLit, Maud Newton and ReadySteadyBook.

 

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