What’s New at Open Book Systems

This week’s Newsweek devoted its cover story to Kindle, a new product recently released from Amazon, a $400 e-reader to follow in the footsteps of similar devices such as Sony’s Reader Digital Book and the Rocketbook, promising clear readability thanks to sharp e-ink contrasts, interactive functionality similar to that found in the old Voyager Expanded Books, and, best of all, huge storage capacity and persistent wireless connectivity.

The “always on” aspect is exciting, for there is nothing more frustrating than traveling from hotspot to hotspot and having to pay for each connection. Based on our own airport bookstore purchases last year, we’d save money by paying $400 for the device and then $10 for each e-book title. But we’d have less on the bookshelves in the end, to share with families and friends. Doing all one’s e-info shopping through Amazon promises one-click ease and benefits, to be sure; it will be interesting to see how their portal approach will allow content from diverse sources to propagate through their commercial channel.

While this device represents one further step in freeing books from containers, it also hints at the dark side of the digital divide. On one hand, in the Newsweek article cited above, Google’s Dan Lansing notes: “Say you are trying to learn more about the Middle East, and you start reading a book, which claims that something happened in a particular event in Lebanon in ’81, where the author was using his view on what happened. But actually his view is not what [really] happened. …there are other people who have written about it who disagree with him, there are other perspectives”—and your e-book’s connectivity could provide instant access to those competing perspectives. On the other hand, objectivity is not always the goal: there is the case of Tiananmen Square, where Google apparently helped the Chinese government make sure that a Google search on this placename conducted from within China yields a quiet park rather than the scene of the bloody student revolt in Spring 1989.

Without a foundation in physical containers such as books, all is mutable, as the inhabitants of Orwell’s Animal Farm learned when they watched their 7 Commandments written on the barn wall mutate from “all animals are equal” to “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Roland Clement, artist, naturalist, and former Audubon Society Vice President, gave a presentation in Gloucester today to celebrate Rachel Carson’s 100th, and specifically her book that launched today’s environmental movement, Silent Spring. He noted that the local, U.S.-only ban on DDT that resulted from this book’s publication has had little impact on the chemical’s deadly global effects, and that in fact, today there is more DDT manufactured and sold than in the 1960s. “We are witnessing its effects in terms of diminishing fish and fowl all around us.” He noted that the chemical companies have a far broader reach than they did back when Kennedy was president, when Clement himself testified to a Senate committee on the poisonous effects of DDT. He noted that now these companies participate in and donate to many of the organizations (such as, we assume, his own Audubon Society) which are tasked with preserving nature rather than controlling it through chemicals. He counseled his audience not to get emotional about the loss of birdlife all around us, but to wait for the proper time before acting in concert.

He recently donated his papers to a New England university and is considering publication of further work on environmental activism.

The “content imperative”—the need for ideas and information to find and serve readers in whatever medium possible—came home today, when Joseph E. Garland formally asked us to publish his Unknown Soldiers, a collective memoir of infantrymen whose World War II “battle books” include Sicily, Salerno, and four straight months spent on the open, flat Anzio Beachhead, being shot at and bombed ceaselessly and around the clock. The book ends after the 45th Thunderbirds liberate the Dachau concentration camp.

Joe wants the book published now, not only to honor his fellow authors (four remain from the original 30 he interviewed), but in time to make a difference to a country again engaged in war. The 87 hours of conversations he taped with his platoon mates will contribute to the online version. It will appear under OBS’s Protean Press imprint.

A publisher recently sought out our advice about “the value question” of offshore production opportunities. He is being courted by a company offering online publishing services at significantly less than the going stateside rate. His local vendor has built up trust with his staff and familiarity with his publications; this value is easy to appreciate but more difficult to quantify. “Where is the best business value for my company?” he asked. To reduce risk and maintain stability, he opted for a blended solution, continuing to rely on the local vendor for in-depth domain knowledge and information services, and experimenting with outsourcing for non-mission-critical tasks with clear specifications, like file tagging and conversion.

He also began to refocus his organizational vision to begin solving his publishing issues enterprise-wide, rather than on a project-by-project basis, by building an infrastructure that can automate repeat tasks across many projects. To facilitate this thinking, we set up a demo to show how adoption of an Open Source Framework solution could help streamline and centralize operations, and reduce costs, while leveraging the distinctly human attributes which “Hal” hasn’t demonstrated yet—knowledge, trust, and a sense of humor.