Monthly Archives: January 2009

Book Stumpers

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Loganberry BooksBook stumpers! Those books that you recall but just can’t quite remember. Maybe it’s a childhood book you read, or something you picked up while on vacation a decade ago on a white sandy beach. You know the characters and the plot. You know when you read it and might even know the color of the book, but for the life of you … you can’t remember the author or title.

It’s right there on the tip of your tongue!

Try as you might you can’t remember it and Google has failed to turn up anything except odds and ends, many of which you may have preferred not to have discovered.

That’s a book stumper.

From time to time I get email from readers who have run into a book stumper. Just the other day I got one.

It was written in the 70s about a painter who lost his family in a car crash, met a new woman, then found he had a terminal disease. I think he was named Paul. Last line is “Black,” said the painter “is the purest of all colors.” It is in a dream of him looking into his grave. I thought it was “The Place He Made” But after looking at the author’s site I wasn’t so sure. I don’t know if I can read a book in 1979 that was printed in 1995! Please help, thank you.

I’ll do some poking around on my own to see if I can help, but most of the time I hand them off to the book stumper experts at Loganberry Books. Since 2003 they’ve been accepting book stumpers for the paltry sum of $2. The book stumper is then posted and literary crowdsourcing begins. Over 5,000 book stumpers have been submitted, with nearly 51% of them being solved.

Trust me, it’s more difficult than it seems. Sometimes the clues provided are scant at best.

I’m a fan of book stumpers for a number of reasons.

It is confirmation that what we read sticks with us for longer than we imagine. I find that both comforting and frightening. Comforting that some of my favorite books have influenced me and become part of who I am. Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land still surface as reference points today. It’s frightening in that some may not read at all or may read absolute drivel. The latter still being far superior to the former.

Book stumpers are also a testament to the inability of the almighty search engine to solve all our problems and answer all our questions. I make my living on the Internet (and I’m grateful for that), but at the same time I like that technology is still unable to interpret the clues locked in our heads and pinpoint the correct author and title. Where’s the fun in that?

There is still mystery in the world … and isn’t that what a good book can reveal.

Got a book stumper? Submit one to Loganberry today.

gBooks

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The future of ebooks may in fact by gBooks. What’s gBooks? It’s Google’s iTunes like interface for books.

gBooks logo

No, it doesn’t exist yet but the settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers makes this a likely scenario.

Once this agreement has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future.

Millions of books. That’s right. In one fell swoop Google will have five to ten times the titles currently available on Kindle.

Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to “turn off” that title. We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace.

Out-of-print books is the long-tail of the book industry and it makes perfect sense for Google to enable this part of the market. Google has been scanning books for years through the Google Library Project. In 2008, Microsoft finally ceded this space, shuttering its own Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. The only real competitor that remains is Amazon.

Some of you may be wondering why I’m writing about this now. It’s not breaking news, right? Here’s the thing. In the last year Google has finally determined that they need to focus and find new revenue streams, particularly with a maturing search market. Here’s a quick listing of Google projects or properties that have recently been closed.

  • Lively
  • Google Video Uploads
  • Google Notebook
  • Jaiku
  • Dodgeball
  • Google Catalog Search

The latter might make you think that Google is abandoning books. But a quick look at the farewell post shows the exact opposite.

It was a great experiment. Nonetheless, in recent years, Catalog Search hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products. So tomorrow, we’re bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.

And of course, books.

That’s right, Google is very keen on books and not just because it is part of their mission to help organize information. It’s about revenue. The revenue share on consumer sales under the agreement will be 37% for Google and 63% for the publishers and/or authors. Frankly, this seems like a win for both sides.

Unlike Amazon, I doubt Google is going to restrict how and where these books are read. It could be on your desktop or downloaded to your phone. You might read it on Stanza or perhaps on the new G1.

Google sees dollars in books and has been developing book related projects for five or more years. Here’s a prime example. Anyone poking at Google Base will see that it was built with specific book related fields. I happened to have a front row seat for the transition from Froogle to Google Base and it was obvious that books was a top priority.

Now, what do you think happens when publishers begin to see more dollars from their backlist titles via gBooks versus their frontlist titles via Kindle?

gBooks might not be as sexy as Kindle. It’s not a gadget that can be endlessly debated. Instead gBooks is the quiet tropical depression off the coast of Florida that could quickly turn into a hurricane.

Stacey’s Bookstore Closes

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Stacey’s Bookstore LogoStacey’s Bookstore announced that it will be closing in March after 85 years in business. This is sad news to anyone who cherishes independent bookstores and to San Francisco readers in particular. The SFGate has all the details.

The San Francisco area has seen a number of independent bookstores close in the last few years. Stacey’s follows Cody’s Books and Black Oak Books in particular. Both were excellent stores and Cody’s in particular was another long-time fixture. In my own neighborhood both Diablo Books and Bonanza Street Books closed their doors in the last few years. (Readers, please use the comments section to detail any other Bay Area bookstore closings in the last 3 to 5 years.)

I try to think about how books may find a wider audience through the Internet and through new social reading sites that allow exploration and discovery as you might find in a physical bookstore. It’s still unsettling to see these stores disappear from the landscape. It feels like a society that doesn’t value literature.

The continuing difficulties for Barnes & Noble and the prospect of Borders Books going out of business perpetuate the impression that books are not as valued as they once were in America. The new booksellers extraordinaire are Costco, Target and Walmart. And while I am happy to have books and literature of any sort survive, these retailers are not stocking a broad range or diverse selection of titles.

It’s at times like these that I’m proud to have worked at Alibris for 3 years, helping independent booksellers survive, and more importantly, keeping the long-tail of books in circulation.  Aggregators like Alibris, Abebooks and Biblio, online store providers like Bibliopolis, as well as social reading sites like LibraryThing, Goodreads and Shelfari should be looked upon as the ‘keepers of the flame’ so to speak.

Because the homogenization of books is a scary prospect.

Rapidshare Textbooks

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Rapidshare TextbooksWith the demise of Textbook Torrents students have been looking for other ways to obtain free textbooks. Rapidshare textbooks may be filling that void.

What is Rapidshare?

Rapidshare is a file-hosting site. A really big one. What makes Rapidshare popular is the ability to share those files. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the sharing capability.

On uploading the user is supplied with a unique download URL which enables anyone, with whom the uploader shares it, to download the file. No user is allowed to search the server for content; all files have to be downloaded by following a given URL.

As you might expect, Rapidshare search engines have sprung up to collect and publish these unique URLs. To my knowledge there isn’t a search engine specifically for textbooks. That means you’ll be hunting and pecking for textbooks along with music, movies, games and porn.

Rapidshare Textbook Search Engines

Here’s a small list of Rapidshare search engines that have some degree of textbook content.

Fileshunt
Rapid Library
LoadingVault

Is Rapidshare Legal?

Depends on how you use it. If you’re using it to distribute copyrighted material (e.g. – textbooks) … no. And like Textbook Torrents, Rapidshare has been the center of a lot of legal activity. Rapidshare walks a fine line as evidenced in a October 26, 2008 quasi-blog post.

If, for example, it had been regulated by law to control all copies before the first photo copier was invented, it is very likely that these machines would have never hit the market. That’s why we are doing everything to enable this new technology – which is still very young, but already inspires millions of people every day – to be part of our future and make life more comfortable.

RapidShare, of course, is against the distribution of illegal files and as soon as we are informed about illegal distribution, we delete these files and put them on a filter.

The thing is, going after Rapidshare seems a bit like using ice cubes to put out a raging fire. A flock of similar sites have sprung up like weeds using the same technology. The folks at FreeFileHosts have a great and very detailed list of all of the file-hosting sites.

Like Torrents (which are still out there mind you, there’s just not a hub for textbook torrents which was a bit like putting a neon bullseye on your back), Rapidshare will survive and the debate over digital rights will rage on.

I see both sides of the issue on this one. The cost of textbooks is … exorbitant and publishers have exploited this captive audience for great profit. So I have little sympathy (at this point) for publishers who cry foul as a small portion of sales are siphoned off. The pendulum has yet to swing back to the point where I feel the production of textbooks is in jeopardy or that publishers are truly being hurt.