However, there’s a sleeper feature in the iTunes Music Store that has truly disruptive potential for book publishing, if publishers are innovative enough to embrace it: rental. Right now, you can rent access to a movie in iTunes – the file downloads to your device, you can start watching whenever you want, and you have 24 hours from the first time you hit play to finish before the file becomes unplayable. Imagine the same model, completely mundane for a film industry used to the role of video stores in the landscape, applied to books. If a book costs $13 to “buy” in iTunes (one rumor I’ve seen), what’s the right price point for a rental of, say, two weeks?

“But doesn’t that kill libraries,” one might ask? It definitely expands the market for books beyond those who want to pay full price and have access in perpetuity, but this isn’t necessarily bad for libraries IF there’s a mechanism for institutional funding of user rentals. In other words, imagine an option for an institutional iTunes account, where a given user would add a library card number to their iTunes account and their library would pick up the tab when they “rent” books (or, plausibly, even other media)? This isn’t so far afield from current trends toward licensing print and electronic collections for circulation, and in fact might ultimately be a much cleaner business model for circulating collections: a given library has a fixed budget every year to subsidize access, which can be rationed among users according to any number of schemes.

Of course, this would rely on a clear decoupling of the “preservation” mandate of libraries from the “access” mandate, and some parallel ability to ensure long-term preservation of digital book files beyond the particular life of iTunes or even Apple, but that’s a separate issue. I’d argue there a business here that could ultimately grow the market (even if cannibalizing a percentage of conventional “sales”), an opportunity to be explored which might be good for libraries, good for publishers, and good for books.

Lucky me, then, that Khoi Vin and Allan Cole went ahead and created Basic Maths. $30 and a tiny bit of tweaking later (sorry for my bastardizations, guys), and I’ve got a blog that represents the way I like information to look: stark and dense. It’s a little weird to have bought an off-the-rack wordpress theme (I keep thinking of the cookie-cutter avatars in Neil Stephensen’s Snow Crash ), but it feels comfortable enough and beats agonizing over a blank canvas.

Oh, and please pardon the mess while I clean up categories and other bits of residual debris….

1. In general over the past few years, the net flow has been inward, with me taking in more than I’m putting out in a productive way. I’ve always been okay with this, under the assumption that the synthetic way that my brain works means that I’ve got to trawl with a pretty big net and understand that not everything will fit together nicely (or necessarily be useful).
2. Before I joined NYPL in 2007, I was still writing in public, both in discussion fora and on this blog. I can’t say that I wrote meaningful stuff beyond a handful of posts, but it was a way for me to get ideas out in front of a broader audience, and the act of writing (even informally) made me sit down and really chew through the ideas in my head. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage the discipline to continue writing when I jumped on the moving treadmill that was the NYPL (not to mention life with a newborn). Blink your eyes, and we’re almost 3 years later.
   
3. Over the past couple of years, most of the knowledge I’ve been putting out for the world has taken the form of spoken words, either in meetings or in formal presentations. I’ve always loved discussion, and do believe that my best intellectual work happens in a conversational back-and-forth, but I’ve grown concerned that I’ve been indulging overmuch. Back when I was a proper academic, I was never much for publishing articles (my cv only lists one peer-reviewed article and one book review alongside my book), but that preference is starting to do me and my ideas a disservice, in that spoken words simply doesn’t scale to a broader audience (at least, not the way I’ve been doing them – more on that later).
4. Another thought about my time thus far at NYPL; the best persuasive writing I’ve done has been for an audience of a relative handful, whether Senior Management or Trustees. As I think about it, there’s a real shame here; at some point, it’d be great to publish a “greatest Hits” compilation of some of the long, impassioned missives I’ve fired off arguing one point or another, not to mention the white paper I wrote in 2008 on NYPL’s Digital Strategy that never really left the nest (but was pretty influential in charting the next two year’s work).
5. Like a lot of folks I know, my sense of how to convey information in written words has been retracting to a 140-character window over the past year; I’ve got Tweetdeck open constantly, and find in it boundless opportunity for inbound information and lazyweb requests, but I’m suddenly very conscious of what’s been happening to me cognitively. When I first started blogging, I found that when an idea occurred to me I’d start to mentally construct a post; even if it never got “to paper” (and most didn’t), the blog as a structure/genre to think with was a useful tool. Twitter’s appealing in its haiku-like economy, but at this point I do believe that it’s no good for the kind of modern, Enlightment, literate, rational argumentation that I still value immensely (hold the gasps from the back of the room).

So, all this adds up to two intertwined problems: my thinking’s been getting lazier/sloppier/less rigorous, and what I do have to contribute to the discussion isn’t getting out in a productive way that’s useful at scale to the various communities that I want to engage. Ironically, I’ve spent the past two years arguing that the smartest strategy for a cultural heritage organization is to leverage its staff’s expertise by getting them to author knowledge that’s discoverable online, and my own thoughts have been warrened away in spoken words and private emails.

With that in mind, I’m resurrecting this blog, knowing that it’s going to be a painful and lurching process to get my writing (and discipline) back into shape. As I look around, there are two bloggers who particularly inspire me right now; my old friend and colleague Dan Cohen, and my friend Chris Dixon. Both are doing great writing that’s on point for their respective communities, and both blogs are rich with ideas and provocative discussion. At the same time, I’ll see if I can start exposing more of the information-trawling I do every day in a more raw form, with the hope of providing something of use for whoever might be interested (check out the right sidebars for more of that coming online in the next few weeks).

One of the emerging themes in the digital book world that has shown up prominently in several big news stories over the past few weeks has been the idea of lending, and its place in the digital world. First Barnes & Noble’s new Nook promised the ability to lend an ebook from one device to another, while still only allowing one reader (in both the device and user sense) to read a given purchased copy at a time. This has been hailed as one of the big advancements over either the Kindle or the Sony Reader, and fits with our general sense of what it means to “buy” a book (however applicable that word actually is in the digital realm).

Then, the Internet Archive, in announcing its new BookServer architecture, made a sidelong claim that their book trading zone would enable an owner of a digital copy to “lend” it to another user; moreover, Brewster Kahle advanced a claim he’s been nursing for a while, that in fact the spirit of first sale implies that the owner of a physical book should be able to “lend” a digital copy of that purchased book so long as she didn’t use the physical book while the virtual one was “out for circulation”…essentially, that the IA had put the technology in place to enable users to treat the purchase of a book as a one-simultaneous-user license for that book, regardless of whether that use was physical or digital.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, so what? It’s an interesting argument, and I like the principle of lending, but it’s just another example of treating digital books like physical ones, a little bit of sugar to make the DRM go down. There’s nothing transformational here.”

Except that we forget that lending only works because most people don’t. Lend, that is. Most physical books spend the vast majority of their existence sitting on shelves, waiting to be read. Now, imagine that lending can happen in a digitally-networked, global ecosystem in which the borrower of a book doesn’t need to know the lender, and which can be optimized so that the moment that a book is no longer being used, it’s immediately available to be borrowed again. Push further – what does “use” mean in such a context? If borrowing and returning happen at Twitter-speed in a persistently-networked environment, then the moment that the borrower’s eyeballs aren’t scanning a book, it could be considered “returned” and thus available for another user.

In short, assuming a hyper-efficient distribution system, how many truly simultaneous users are there for a given text? And if Brewster’s logic holds and the purchase of a physical book is understood under a reading of first sale to effectively constitute a single-simultaneous-user license, then the market for sales of a given book retracts from the number of people or institutions who might want to read a book (and thus buy it in anticipation of use) to the maximum number of people worldwide who are *actively reading* that book at any given moment in time. This also means that those individuals and institutions (like libraries) that have large stores of books could be sitting on top of a huge amount of untapped value in the form of potential readers for their materials, provided a scan could be created.

There are a number of places this could lead, but there’s one that I find most intriguing and unexpected: what if this very idea is what pushes small-run publishing out of the fabrication of print books altogether, and wholly into the arms of digital-only licensing models with their much-less-leaky rights regimes? Who’d have thought that the physical book might turn out to be way more flexible and subversive than a born-digital copy? Either way, there’s a huge, open question as to how efficient networked digital lending will be allowed to become.

For a project we’ve got going on at NYPL, I need to get about 1200 references from spreadsheets into Zotero; I’m figuring it’s generously maybe 15-20 hours of work, since roughly half are represented in NYPL’s catalog (and thus are easy fodder for ingesting). I’ve been asking around, and keep coming up short…anyone out there in the blogosphere want to do a little freelancing or have a student who they’d like to refer? Timeframe is very short (ideally within a week turnaround, maybe two)…if interested, leave a comment below and I’ll e-mail regarding money stuff.

Until I encountered Roy and the Center he’d created, I had a diverse collection of academic and technological interests, and it took three years of quiet osmosis and subtle mentoring for them to cohere. It wasn’t until I left GMU earlier this year that I began to truly appreciate what he did for me, and I’ll spend the rest of my career paying that forward. For now, though it’s just a beginning, this is dedicated to Roy…

…that big sigh of relief I just heaved (which might have been audible all the way down the east coast) was prompted by a happy little green light on my Airport Extreme, letting me know that our DSL is now up and running (two days ahead of Verizon’s schedule, nonetheless!) – w00t!

One caveat – if you click around this site, you’ll discover that a) “poky” doesn’t begin to describe how slow it can be, and b) there are a few spots here and there that are works in progress. The former is a function of a web host with whom I’m increasingly dissatisfied, but the latter is more problematic – there’s something rather embarrassing about being heralded as a digital visionary of sorts while at the same having let my own online presentation of self fall into disrepair. All I can do is plead my own current state of transition, and hope that as I get my feet under me at NYPL, this site will grow into my new identity.