London light years

London in the UK is light years ahead of the rest of the world in encouraging ereading. Through the London Evening Standard, Barnes and Noble agreed to donate 1,000 Nooks to a charity (Beanstalk) and now major publishers are donating their books on those Nooks to make this cause — called Get London Reading — a success for schoolchildren. What a wonderful combination of collaborators — ereader-maker for the devices, newspaper for the promotion, and publishers for the content. It's a win—win-win for students. According to The Bookseller story: "Hachette UK, HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House have signed up to donate titles from bestselling children’s authors, including Michael Morpurgo’s A Medal for Leroy (HarperCollins) and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Penguin).

Bookless in San Antonio

I first blogged about a bookless library in San Antonio last January 16, 2013. Now it's getting closer. Bibliotech in Bexar County should be live in August, according to Goodereader. Update: "The publicly funded library has raised over $200,000 to finance its new digital library and will feature 48 computers, 300 e-readers, and three Discovery Terminals via 3M." This is a first in the world as far as I know.

Google's World Brain

I've often wondered how Google convinces libraries, such as Harvard, to allow the super-rich company to digitize books for free. Now I know. A new documentary "Google and the World Brain", which, by the way, is described by TechCrunch as a very anti-Google movie, explains: "They pitch it as a way to avert disasters like the burning of Alexandria or the flooding of Tulane University’s library during Hurricane Katrina." Of course, any librarian worth his or her salt would want to avoid a disaster. But authors, in particular the Author's Guild, have objected and asked the courts for $3 billion from Google for scanning copyrighted books. However the Guild settled for $125 million; but then a District Court judge dismissed the settlement. So we are unresolved. The bottom line to understand about all this is that Google is not interested in making books available for reading as much wanting to mine the data for all its worth.

Africa as in tiny

We've all seen people read novels on a tiny cellphone screen. Maybe we should realize that they obviously really wanted to read that title. That's called motivation and we often underestimate the value of motivation, or just plain need. So here comes Africa where cellphones are "a huge component of how consumption is happening," says Angela Wachuka, executive director of Kenya’s Kwani Trust, which publishes the popular Kwani? literary journal. Ms. Wachuka notes, in a Christian Science Monitor story, that she's seen Kenyans devour hundreds of pages of text on their tiny screens, plowing through tell-all memoirs and other accounts of the country's recent political turmoil. In the U.S. we are obsessed with the newest trend in e-reader devices (of which the newest is Microsoft buying Nook) as if the perfect device will render the perfect reading experience, as opposed to the perfect content rendering the perfect reading experience, the device be damned. Even here in the U.S. though things are changing: Microsoft, rumor has it, will use Nook to develop apps for somebody else's device. Mmmm.

Asia as in mobile

No surprise that when you look at ebook adoption in Asia it is mobile generated and not ereader-centric. Check out this report from Publishing Perspectives. that deals with Korea (see earlier post), Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. Korea -- meaning South Korea, of course -- clearly is the growth center, but to put things in perspective in those four countries ebook sales remain less than 2% of the local book market. I would summarize: Just as in the Western culture, there is not enough time for people to enjoy long-form blogging; in the East there are not enough devices for people to enjoy long-from anything.

Library brouhaha

The controversial PEW report on libraries, has the information I deem most important: The report shows that parents are largely in support of expanding both e-book offerings (62 percent) and interactive experiences (54 percent). That information has just been ignored because of the so-called much larger brouhaha caused by whether libraries should focus on reading or other services to the community.

Change, no more?

Hard to believe that there will no longer be a Tools of Change conference. Although I never attended any one of the seven, because I am not really a technologist and am definitely a cheapscate, I had great respect for people who did. And I avidly read everything that I could understand that came out of the Change practice area, as Brian O'Leary described it in Magellan Media. O'Leary is very critical of Tim O'Reilly's decision, but you have to take O'Reilly at his word -- that it may be more important, more satisfying to create tools of change for publishers rather than host the discussion and dissemination of tools of change for publishers. I wish Tim Oreilly continued leadership.