Books

Two New OA Books (+1)

This has been a busy week for books on Open Access. On Wednesday I blogged about the book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo. Today Open Access News wrote about two more new Open Access books:

E. Canessa and M. Zennaro at the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste have put together an edited book Science Dissemination using Open Access.

From today’s announcement:

The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included.

The other book is a 144 pp. collection of articles on OA by 38 authors, edited by Barbara Malina entitled Open Access Opportunities and Challenges: A Handbook, the German UNESCO Commission, July 2008. This is an English translation of Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen – ein Handbuch (2007).

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The cultural significance of Free Software

Finding new books is always exiting and I am looking forward to reading Two Bits: The cultural significance of Free Software by Christopher M. Kelty

Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty shows how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge after the arrival of the Internet. Two Bits also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public” public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.

My only concern so far was that in the beginning of the book I found the sentence: This is a book about Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, and is meant for anyone who wants to understand the cultural significance of Free Software.

It is always disconcerting when people mix up free and open source software – to many the difference may not be important but when someone writes a book about the subject they should know that these are not synonymous terms. Despite this after browsing through the book – it looks very promising.

The book is available under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-sa) and can be downloaded from the book website.

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Books as decoration

For some books are more than just reading material they provide collectively a visual and tactile experience. Some would even go so far as to compare it to a fetish – Candida Höfer’s gorgeous book Libraries (some images here) is hot stuff! Others are more creative with their design of shelves – check out thirty creative bookshelves here.

Via Boing Boing another focus for books emerges – no longer is content king but over at Book Decor you can now buy old leather bound books by the meter. This is not really new but what I like is there different styles and their descriptions. In particular these two:

Hand Picked – This books are carefully Hand Picked for their beauty and craftsmanship. They are highly detailed with gilt (gold) with beautiful images such as flowers, animals, people, cherubs and intricate patterns, Embossed on wonderful leather, the workmanship is exquisite and rarely seen in today’s mass produced books. Our Hand Picked books are truly a small work of art. They will grace any home with there beauty for years too come. Available only in limited numbers and most likely will never be recreated. Truly a book anyone would be proud to have in there home.

Less Than Perfect – The Less Then Perfect books do not quite meet our usual standards. These books have bits and pieces of the spine missing, maybe a small tear. Sometime they may be in a color that is less desirable, however none of these books are falling apart. When put together they look beautiful and it is only on closer inspection that it is noticeable that these books have been lovingly used over many years, and as such have developed that worn patina look that some find very desirable.

Now its OK to love the books without caring to read them. How strange that the artifact has become greater than the content.

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Digital Culture book

The book Structures of Participation in Digital Culture is now available for download for free. Here is a part of the blurb:

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, …explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms…

The contents include some familiar and some unfamiliar names and a lot of chapters that seem worth reading, take a look at this:

  • The Past and the Internet (Geoffrey Bowker),
  • History, Memory, Place, and Technology: Plato’s Phaedrus Online (Gregory Crane),
  • Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South Asia (Ravi Sundaram),
  • Pirate Infrastructures (Brian Larkin),
  • Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production (Mizuko Ito),
  • Pushing the Borders: Player Participation and Game Culture (T. L. Taylor),
  • None of This Is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster (danah boyd),
  • Notes on Contagious Media (Jonah Peretti),
  • Picturing the Public (Warren Sack),
  • Toward Participatory Expertise (Shay David),
  • Game Engines as Open Networks (Robert F. Nideffer),
  • The Diablo Program (Doug Thomas),
  • Disciplining Markets in the Digital Age (Joe Karaganis),
  • Price Discrimination and the Shape of the Digital Commodity (Tarleton Gillespie),
  • The Ecology of Control: Filters, Digital Rights Management, and Trusted Computing (Joe Karaganis).

Download the Entire Book

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Book sale!

Columbia University Press are having a book sale – This is a great place to get those unnecessary impulse buys! I managed to find a list of books I didn’t know that I couldn’t live without:

Lesley A. Sharp: Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies – $12.75
Jeff Hughes: The Manhattan Project – $10.75
Edward W. Said: Humanism and Democratic Criticism – $4.39
Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel: What’s the Use of Truth? – $2.59
Katherine Verdery: The Political Lives of Dead Bodies – $12.50
David Carroll: Albert Camus the Algerian – $11.25

Considering the fact that the dollar is low this is a really good price but it could be very expensive if I keep doing this…

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Books not dead – bookshops are dying

For a long time there have been claims that the book is dead or at least terminally ill. The most recent revival of these claims was with the launch of the kindle ebook reader.

In the 1979 book The Micro Millennium, Christopher Evans forecasted that due to electronic media, “…the 1980s will see the book as we know it, and as our ancestors created and cherished it, begin a slow but steady slide into oblivion. . . . there are a number of reasons this is imminent.” Naturally Evans was wrong.

Again when the Internet became commonplace the book was given another obituary and again, judging from book sales, it was another premature prediction.

The thing is that technology will not kill the book. Technology has the ability to organize, reorganize information. It facilitates storage and searching but it will not kill the traditional book form. The book has other values that will not be easily replaced by technology. Steven Poole has written a great post on this.

Old Spines
Creative Commons License photo: Old Spines by brighterorange

So the book is not dying but the bookshop is! So this was nothing new but it was driven home to me in force when I happened to walk past one of my favorite small bookstores, it was having a moving sale (not a closing down sale).

News of a book sale usually makes me happy, but after browsing the generous 30-50% sale offers I realized that even with the discount the books were cheaper to buy new ones online. So this is not something new but I thought that a discount this large would even things out – but it didn’t.

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Overcrowding library reading rooms

The TimesOnline has this story about the overcrowding at the famed British Library Reading Room. The main problem is that there are too few places for all those who want to be there. Unfortunately the complaints about lazy students wanting to “hang out” and therefore occupying places for “better” people misses the importance of the story. For example parts like this:

Although there are 1,480 seats in the library, the author Christopher Hawtree was last week forced to perch on a windowsill … Lady Antonia said: “I had to queue for 20 minutes to get in, in freezing weather. Then I queued to leave my coat for 20 minutes [at the compulsory check-in]. Then half an hour to get my books and another 15 minutes to get my coat. I’m told it’s due to students having access now. Why can’t they go to their university libraries?”

Make most people feel like shouting: get a life, you can afford it!

But the reality of the problem is that access to reading rooms (at any library) should be kept within limits so that those there can actually get work done. Overcrowding affects service and makes access pointless.

So why overcrowd the reading rooms? Is it because of a genuine egalitarian urge? Maybe, but I suspect the truth is in the final sentence of the article:

…that the library’s directors received performance bonuses depending on the number of visits.

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Travel Fraud & Plagiarism

Just because it’s plagiarism doesn’t mean that it has to be bad writing. A travel writer for Lonely Planet, my favorite travel series, has admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that he has not been in the countries he has written about. He wrote his book on Colombia from San Francisco and has admittedly never been in that country he has also admitted to plagiarising  large sections of the book.

The Lonely Planet has fact checked his books but discovered no faults in them.

So what is the problem with a travel writer who has never been in the country? Well it is dishonest and fraudulent since the premise is that the writer is writing from personal experience. The fact that it is good writing is not the point. In fact, as most students are aware, a prerequisite for good plagiarism is good writing.

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New book: Wikiworld

The works on the causes and effects on the “new openness” are coming in fast. My most recent find is Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén (University of Tampere, Finland) who have published an open access book entitled Wikiworld – Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media:

In the digital world of learning there is a progressive transformation from the institutionalized and individualized forms of learning to open learning and collaboration. The book provides a view on the use of new technologies and learning practices in furthering socially just futures, while at the same time paying critical attention to the constants, or “unmoved movers” of the information society development; the West and Capitalism. The essential issue in the Wikiworld is one of freedom ­ levels and kinds of freedom. Our message is clear: we write for the radical openness of education for all.

It sounds interesting and  I will download it as soon as I get to a better connection. Right now I am on a train surfing via mobile not the best thing for downloading books… its online here.

Posted on by mklang