Monthly Archives: March 2007

Who doesn’t like a good map?

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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

Canongate buys rights to Obama’s book

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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.

If you only read one article this week

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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

The Economist, cool? Who saw that coming?

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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

Customer service bodywork: LibraryThing & Tim Spalding impress me & repair denting

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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