Eoin Purcell's Blog

Eoin Purcell

Multi-authored Text
Experiments with wiki-text, networked books and multi-authored texts have been going well. Penguin have had the most high profile effort with their Million Penguins wikinovel. Last week I highlighted Ficlets which takes the idea of multi-authored texts to a news slick level allowing prequels and sequels to already written shorts [Speaking of which this one on Caesar caught my eye]

The future is Scribd
Techcrunch carried an interesting piece today discussing the early success of one of the more interesting new arrivals to this space Scribd. You can upload, search for and read documents on Scribd and it also allows for an embed function but I cannot seem to make that work on wordpress.com. What it lacks is online editing of documents. I can see how this seems a retrograde step in some regards but will certainly encourage people to post their content. Techcrunch also has some interesting points re copyright. It is a fascinating site with very nice features. One I found on DIY Book Binding is worth a look as is so much more.

Enjoying the break still
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Depressing & Excellent
One of my favourite blogs Twenty Major (Tagline: Still Smoking in Dublin’s Bars) has, if Sinead Gleeson is to be belived, gotten a two book deal with Hodder Headline.

One half of me is really happy and the other sad becuase there is little chance of me competing with Headline for those books and I would dearly have loved to be the publisher of such an irreverent, comic and talented writer. If Headline were willing to secure one Irish Blogger no doubt others will follow to the big publishers. But thems is the breaks I suppose.

Seems like the old Blog to Book trend is no Fad (though I echo James’ thoughts earlier)

Loving this Cardigans album not enjoying looking for a new place to live
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Future History
Last week I mentioned this article that was conerned over the future of non-commercial items trapped in non-digital formats. This weekend the FT has an really excellent long feature on protecting our current digital heritage. From the piece:

Like Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, love-letters between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and John Lennon’s scrawled first draft of “Ticket to Ride”, these superannuated machines, and the equally venerable computer files boxed next to them, are now part of the world’s greatest library collection. Digital texts – whether e-mails, research projects or literary drafts – are easy to create and even easier to discard. But as John, the library’s first curator of digital manuscripts, is aware, they constitute an increasingly large part of our cultural record – treasures which, if not properly archived, could soon be lost to future generations.

It’s a sobering thought that the Domesday book, written in 1086 on pages of stretched sheepskin, has lasted more than 900 years. Scholars with a permission slip and a sound grasp of Latin can visit the public records office in Kew, leaf through the book’s pages and decipher its inventory of the manor houses and livestock in William the Conqueror’s Britain just as they did in the 11th century. But the BBC’s attempts to create a new Domesday book chronicling British life in 1986 – capturing fleeting historical records such as adolescent diaries and a video tour of a council house – was more problematic. The £2.5m project, stored on huge laser discs and readable only by a brick-like, mid-1980s vintage BBC microcomputer, became obsolete within a decade. Both the laser- disc player and the software it relied on have long since been abandoned. A specialist team from the national archives had to spend more than a year rewriting the software to rescue it from oblivion.

Go read it!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Slow coming but worth the wait
One of the successful developments in Irish Publishing recently has been the evolution of a truly national and truly useful book awards. The Irish Book Awards were held last night in Dublin and the winners were:

Novel of the Year: ‘Winterwood’ by Patrick McCabe.

Popular Fiction Book of the Year: ‘Should Have Got Off At Sydney Parade’ by Paul Howard.

Tubridy Show Listeners’ Choice Award: ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ by John Boyne.

Sports Book of the Year: ‘Back From The Brink’ by Paul McGrath.

Newcomer of the Year Award: ‘The Goddess Guide’ by Gisele Scanlon.

Non-Fiction Book of the Year: ‘Connemara’ by Tim Robinson.

Irish Published Book of the Year: ‘Lifelines, New and Collected’ edited by Niall MacMonagle.

Children’s Book of the Year:
(Junior) ‘The Incredible Book-Eating Boy’ by Oliver Jeffers; (Senior) ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ by John Boyne.

Special Award For Distinguished Contribution to Irish Children’s Book Illustration: artist PJ Lynch.

Lifetime Achievement Award: posthumously awarded to John McGahern for his distinguished contribution to Irish literature.

Now they have yet to add a press release to their website (seems like a bit of an oversight) but at least there was some press coverage today which is always nice. It is also very encouraging that at last there is some broadcast support with the Tubirdy Award. Its no Oprah or Richard & Judy but at least it is something!

Enjoying improvements today
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Thanks to James @ BookTwo for directing me here.

And via Open Access this is cool too.

Eoin

Eoin Purcell

And Google Serve some really good ones up today
In what has to be my all time favourite Inside Google Book Search post, relatively new Google employee Mathew Grey says:

We’ve all seen views of the Earth from space, where the numerous pinpoints of light on the ground combine to yield a speckled map of the world. I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations in books combine to yield another interpretation of the globe. The intensity of each pixel is proportional to the number of times the location at a given set of coordinates is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search.

Go look at the maps they really are something, though I’d love some higher res versions.

Damn I love cool stuff
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

From the BookSeller Bulletin
I was reading over the daily e-mail I get as part of my Bookseller subscription (Not extortionate and quite valuable) and this caught my eye:

Canongate has bought UK rights in The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, a leading Democrat contender for the nomination to run for US President. In the US, the book — described by Anya Serota of Canongate as “truly inspiring and important” — has sold 1.3 million copies. Canongate bought it from Crown, the world rights holder, and will publish on 10th May 2007.

As a total US Politics nut this really interests me. I have seen the Obama book as someone I know has an american edition and I will no doubt read it soon but I wonder how well this effort will work in the UK. I can see a lot of interest and I hope sales but I wait to see if the star power that Barak is generating in the US follows his publication here.

All very interesting
Eoin

PS: In Canongate are very cool and you can look at their website here.

Eoin Purcell

Make it this one
Tyhe New Yok Times has an incredible piece on digitisation of historial records which will I think put into perspective everyone’s thoughts on the subject. The money quotes:

At the Library of Congress, for example, despite continuing and ambitious digitization efforts, perhaps only 10 percent of the 132 million objects held will be digitized in the foreseeable future. For one thing, costs are prohibitive. Scanning alone on smaller items ranges from $6 to $9 for a 35-millimeter slide, to $7 to $11 a page for presidential papers, to $12 to $25 for poster-size pieces. (The cost of scanning an object can be a relatively minor part of the entire expense of digitizing and making an item accessible online.)

Similarly, at the National Archives, the repository for some nine billion documents, only a small fraction are likely to be digitized and put online. And at thousands of smaller, local collections around the country, the bulk of the material is languishing on yesterday’s media: paper, LPs, magnetic tape and film.

And:

Consider the Library of Congress archive of one million photo prints from The New York World-Telegram & Sun; only 5,407 have been digitized. Of the 1.2 million images from U.S. News and World Report, the library has digitized only 366. Its collection of five million images from Look magazine, spanning the period from 1937 to 1971, creates what Jeremy E. Adamson, director of collections and services at the library, calls “a fascinating portrait of America through photo stories on social and political subjects, personalities, food, fashion and sports.” Yet only 313 of those images have been digitized.

Yup, its well worth the reading time invested!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Project Red Stripe
Maybe its the inter-company rivallry (what with a million penguins at penguin) in the Pearson stable (though they only own 50%), maybe its just a heady year or two in media but THIS is definitely a cool idea:

We’re a small team set up by The Economist Group, the parent company of the eponymous newspaper. Our mission is to develop truly innovative services online. We already have some ideas, of course. But as champions of free markets, we abhor the concept of a closed system. This is why we would like you to submit your idea (or ideas). Just think big – and we’ll do the rest.

They are accepting ideas here and have suggestions and hints here oh and Jeff Jarvis mentions them here.

Loving the name and the cool-ness of it all
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

One hour and thirty-nine minutes
That was the time it took Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing to respond personally to my post on the news of data sales and commercial usage. I posted at 12.17pm GMT and he e-mailed me at 1.46pm GMT! What is more he invited me into a dialogue and offered a full and genuine explanation of his position. So I read what he said and e-mailed back to say that I would think on it and reply later. To which he replied with some more comments and said he looked forward to discussing it with me.

I think I overreacted (I was wrong)
Tim really made a great case for LibraryThing’s perspective and changed my mind on how I feel regarding the selling of aggregate information. He also made it clear to me that:

members have a right to expect development. And I think they should start lobbying for clarity and generosity when it comes to what data we sell and what we give away.

I am behind that and suspect the best way to do it is to get more involved in the site’s forum.

Outcome?
I will leave my post up but link to this statement, I think the headline says it all. In terms of customer service LibraryThing have really exceeded any expectation I had!

Thanks Tim, faith restored and denting repaired.
Eoin