Everybody's Libraries

July 30, 2012

In which I finally buy an ebook

Filed under: copyright,formats,online books,reading,science fiction — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 9:43 pm

In my last post, I discussed why I wanted to buy ebooks I could truly own, and my subsequent attempts to buy such a  copy of John Scalzi’s Redshirts from a readers’-rights-friendly retailer.  I initially had a hard time finding an ebook store that fulfilled three basic requirements:

  1. The store must sell a DRM-free copy of the book, in a convenient format.  That eliminated specialized ebook stores that didn’t carry the title at all.  Also, a number of major sites only had DRM-locked versions at first.
  2. The store must make the format and DRM-free status clear. Most mass-market ebooks are still locked down with DRM, and I don’t want to get stuck with that, either for this title or for other titles I might buy.  So the store had to make it clear what I was buying, either by a notation on the book’s catalog page, or by a general policy stating that books they offered were DRM-free.
  3. The store must not require me to agree to give up my rights as a reader under copyright law.  In particular, I would not consent to any terms of sale that significantly limited my rights of fair use or first sale.  Fair use allows me to make copies of copyrighted material under certain conditions, such as quoting and critiquing a small portion in my own work, or making a complete personal copy of a  TV show I’ve received or CD I’ve  bought, for more convenient consumption.  First sale lets me decide how to dispose of a book once I’ve bought it, including giving over the copy of something I’ve already lawfully acquired to someone else.  (First sale rights also let libraries lend out books without having to ask publishers first.)  Each of these rights has limits, and there are still disputes over how far these rights can be applied to digital content.  But I didn’t want to pre-emptively sign away rights that copyright law might give me.

I didn’t think it would be that hard to find a retailer to meet these requirements.  But here’s what I found when I went shopping:

Barnes and Noble: Since we owned a Nook, I first called up the store app on that device.  The ebook was simply marked as a “Nook Book”, with no clear differentation between a DRM-free and a DRM-locked copy.  (The current catalog page for the book now mentions in the overview that it’s being sold without DRM, though  not very prominently.)  I also recalled that to get access to the store in the first place, I had to click through a terms of service agreement.   Reviewing that on the web turned up a clause saying I couldn’t “copy, transfer, sublicense, assign, rent, lease, lend, resell or in any way transfer any rights to all or any portion of the Digital Content to any third party” except under certain explicit, very limited conditions.  In other words, give up first sale rights to anything I bought in the Nook store.  Rather than do that, I moved on to another retailer.

Amazon: There was no clear mention of DRM status on the book’s catalog page initially (even now, I don’t see it there until I click on “show more”).  Anazon uses its own Kindle (mobi) format for its books, so I’d need to convert it to a different format (possibly degrading the layout in the process) or get a Kindle reading program or device. The Kindle License Agreement and Terms of Use limits how I’m allowed to read books they sell, disallows third party transfers except by explicit permission, and in case I missed the point, explicitly states “Digital Content is licensed, not sold”.  No sale here, then.

Google:  Going over to Google Books, I find this book available through Google Play.  The catalog page doesn’t tell me what format it’s in, or whether it has DRM; it instead just asks me to sign in to buy it.  Google then tells me I have to agree to their terms, which again include no third party transfers, before it will give me access to whatever formats it may let me download.  If I read the book online within Google Play itself, its  privacy policy allows it to look over my shoulder to a limited extent while I’m reading.  Google pledges to use this power only for good, but personally I’d prefer to download and keep my reading details to myself in the first place, thanks.

Sony Reader store: Information on format and DRM status is not clear for its books.  Based on Sony’s past history with DRM, there’s no way I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt with the formats they might use.

Independent bookstores: I  also looked into whether I could buy an ebook through one of the independent bookstores I’ve liked shopping in.  Unfortunately, they don’t seem to offer much.  My local indie store doesn’t appear to sell ebooks at all, and Powell’s doesn’t offer seem to offer this title at present.  Independents in the IndeBound ebook program appear to just be referral agents for Google Books.

Diesel eBooks: The slogan “More freedom, more ebooks” seemed promising when I found this site.  Diesel offers both DRM-locked and DRM-free titles, and their catalog pages make it very clear which is which.   Unfortunately, they only offered a DRM-locked version of Redshirts for weeks after it was first released.  However, I recently went back to the site and found they’d switched to the DRM-free version.  Buying that ebook consisted of registering my name and email address, giving them my credit card information, and downloading an EPub file.  No click-through agreements were involved, and when I went over to look at the general terms of use for the site, they basically amounted to “don’t abuse the site, or infringe copyright”.  In short, I gave them money, and they gave me an ebook, and said “Enjoy!”, with no further fuss. That’s the kind of book shopping I like.

So there’s at least one reasonably comprehensive and reader-friendly ebookstore out there.  I’d be happy to hear about others as well.  And I look forward to buying and owning more books, in both print and electronic formats.

July 29, 2012

In which I try to buy an ebook

Filed under: copyright,online books,reading,science fiction — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 9:52 pm

Not long ago I went to the bookstore and bought some books.

This is how: I found some books I liked on the shelves, brought them to the front counter, and handed the clerk some money.  The clerk put my books and a receipt into a bag, and ended the transaction by handing me the bag and saying “Enjoy!”

So that’s what I did.  As I left the store, I thought about which book I’d start on the train home, and about all the other things I could do with my new books.  I could read them to myself, read out load to my family, lend them out to friends, cite or briefly quote them in my own work, trade them in at the used bookshop, donate them to the local library, bequeath them to my heirs, cut things out from them and post them on my wall, make origami art out of the pages, or lots of other things that neither I nor the bookseller had yet imagined.  As long as I didn’t violate copyright or other laws, neither the bookstore, the publisher, nor anyone else had any further say in how I  enjoyed the books.  They were mine.

I also own a number of books on my computers, but not ones I’ve bought, at least not as ebooks.  (They’re all in the public domain, or came bundled with a print edition I bought, or are free authorized digital editions. I don’t do bootlegs.)  But I wanted to buy electronic books as well– books I liked that weren’t being offered for free or in bundles; books where I could support the authors and publishers through my purchase.

Unfortunately, there weren’t many ebooks of interest that I could buy– at least not if “buying” means “owning”.  Oh, I could call up a store app on my Nook, or go to Amazon online, where they offered me book files in return for some money and my consent to a take-it-or-leave-it agreement.   A file I paid for wouldn’t be a book I owned, it would be a file that I licensed under a non-negotiable contract, and I could only do with the file what the vendor, the publisher, and other parties to the agreement decreed I could do.  The file itself would be encrypted with “Digital Rights Management” (DRM), that would only allow display by approved programs that carefully controlled whether and how I could read the book. And if those programs stopped working, or decided to revoke my right to read the book, or if I wanted to use the books on some other system, or in some other way they didn’t anticipate and approve of, tough luck for me.  (Technically, I could break the encryption, but I would be breaking the law if I did.)   And I shouldn’t even think about trying to pass along the book to someone else– unless I was lucky enough to find a title eligible for some very limited lending experiments certain publishers and vendors were trying out.  I have books in my home that my grandparents read 100 years ago, but I had little hope my grandchildren would be able to read ebooks like these, at least not legally.

A few places offered DRM-free books for sale, but they tended either to offer titles I preferred to read in print (like the computer books published by O’Reilly), or they didn’t offer many titles of interest to me.  I wasn’t going to get into the habit of buying ebooks unless there was a critical mass of titles worth aggregating into a personal library.

So I was thrilled when Tor, a major science fiction publisher and an imprint of one of the Big Six publishing companies, announced that all of their books would soon be sold DRM-free.  They weren’t the first SF imprint to take this route– Baen, for instance, has been offering DRM-free titles for years– but Tor had enough authors I liked that I could see myself buying ebooks from them fairly regularly.  Tor’s first DRM-free release would be John Scalzi’s Redshirts, a book I’d already been hoping to buy, and which I now decided to buy as an ebook.  That would let me try out the new format, and also thank Tor and Scalzi for taking the initiative to let readers just own their books.  (And if Tor’s initiative does well, other imprints might follow.)

I originally planned to buy the ebook on its release date.  But even when an author and a publisher are ready to go, it can take a while to get the retailers on board.  On the day Redshirts came out, many ebook stores delivered DRM-locked files instead of the DRM-free edition readers expected.  (Thankfully, Tor offered free exchanges almost right away.)  More worrisome to me, though, was that many of the major ebook retailer sites wouldn’t complete a transaction unless I first indicated consent to a “take it or leave it” agreement that appeared to sign away important rights readers normally have to books they buy.  Unlike the print books I bought in the bookstore, my enjoyment of the ebooks I got from these sellers would be restricted by their contractual demands, above and beyond the standard constraints of copyright law.  DRM or no DRM, the ebooks would not  truly be my own if I agreed to those demands.

Eventually, though, I found a retailer that offered what I wanted without any unacceptable strings attached, and I’m now a happy Redshirts ebook owner and reader.  I’ll describe my experience buying the book from that retailer, and not buying the book from some better-known retailers, in my next post.

May 5, 2009

Do we need a “reader’s rights registry”?

Filed under: censorship,copyright,metadata,online books,open access,reading,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 4:18 pm

This spring’s Digital Library Federation forum, the last under DLF as an independent organization,  included a session for “lightning talks”, where speakers take 5 minutes or less to present an idea or make a demonstration.  Here are the remarks I prepared for the one I gave, building on some recent discussion of the Google Books Settlement.  I’ve added some links to provide a bit more context to these remarks.

Like many other folks, I’m excited about the Google Books settlement, and the possibility that millions of out of print books may become available for our patrons to search and read online.  I think the services that Google proposes could greatly expand the scope and the usability of our book collections.

But I also appreciate the concern expressed over some of the details of the settlement:  in particular, the concerns over the monopolies that it creates.  Monopolies have a tendency to impose increasingly onerous terms on consumers.   They may raise prices to levels that make it difficult for libraries to fulfill their independent missions.  They may also pay insufficient attention to concerns like privacy or intellectual freedom that are important for many of our readers.

A lot of people have commented on Google’s monopoly here, but the settlement actually creates another monopoly, one that may be more problematic, and that’s the Book Rights Registry.  The name suggests a passive store of information, but in fact it’s an active agent that has the power to negotiate and set terms of access on behalf of publishers and authors for millions of out of print books.  This is the body—and the only body—that will set the default wholesale prices for copyrighted books, whether they’re provided by Google or by anyone else that might get similar rights in the future.

And the information the registry maintains might not be what’s most useful to libraries and the public.   As agents for copyright holders, they’re likely to keep very good records about who claims rights to various books, and who you should pay if you want to use them.   But they won’t have much incentive to determine, for instance, that a particular work is actually in the public domain.  As we saw in yesterday’s first panel, many works published after 1922 actually are public domain, but it’s often very difficult for someone to find this out. And I’ve already heard some folks advise publishers to claim anything they might have rights to, if there’s any uncertainty about its status.  So there needs to be some counterbalance to the claims made by commercial publishers and rightsholder organizations.

That’s why I wonder whether it might be a good idea to imagine a sort of “Reader’s Rights Registry”, that would serve as a counterbalance to the Book Rights Registry.  The reader’s registry would track information and advocate on behalf of readers and libraries.  For instance, it could compile facts related to public domain status or open content licenses, and share these facts widely with the community.  It could press Google and other vendors to keep prices affordable, and to make it easy for readers to protect their privacy.   It could track books withheld or withdrawn from full text access, for whatever reason, and work to provide access through alternative channels where appropriate.  It could press Congress or the Justice Department for reasonable and nondiscriminatory blanket licensing of orphan works and out of print works.

I’m not saying we necessarily have to create a brand new organization to do these things.   They could be done by an existing organization, or set of organizations, or a newly merged organization.  What’s; important is that we find a way to articulate what our readers need from mass-digitized book services, gather appropriate information to support these needs, and organize the resources to make that a reality.  We shouldn’t wait for someone else, whether Google or the courts, to do it for us.

Now, there’s already work underway along these lines.  Many of you may be aware, for instance, of OCLC’s Copyright Evidence Registry.   It collects facts relevant to determining whether a book is in copyright or in the public domain.  At the moment, it’s just a pilot, and the pilot runs until the end of June, with an uncertain future afterwards.  And unfortunately, its user interface is limited, and its complex and restrictive terms of use looks to me even more convoluted that what they’re proposing for WorldCat.  And I worry that those constraints will effectively choke off the project before it can get sufficient participation.  In general, I think the library community is severely handicapping itself by keeping its metadata locked up, but that’s a whole other talk.

There’s also more work to be done in digitizing copyright registrations and renewals. I’m working on some of that now, and would be glad to talk about it later on.  Google also is doing its own digitization of the complete Catalog of Copyright Entries, and plans to release it publicly. I’m looking forward to that.

Hathi Trust is also doing important work.   As we heard yesterday, they’re doing their own copyright research on their books, and I hope they’ll eventually open up their research registry for the library community to use and contribute to.  The scope of activities one might imagine for a Reader’s Rights Registry is a bit broader than what Hathi Trust is currently doing, and it would require a broader base of support that what Hathi Trust has now.  But they’ve made a very good start on many of the kinds of independent activities I think we’ll need.

I know that all our libraries are going through difficult times in this economy, and any sort of external investment or organizational overhead can be hard to justify these days.  But these mass-digitized collections could seriously reshape the nature of research and reading in the years to come.  So I think it’s worth our putting some careful thought into how we want to influence that reshaping.  Whatever happens in the courtroom in the next few months, we should marshal the information, the will, and the organization to make sure our readers will be well-served.

March 18, 2009

The Google Books settlement: A symposium, and a call for library action

Filed under: libraries,metadata,online books,open access,reading,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 2:14 pm

Last Friday I went to a fascinating symposium at the Columbia Law School: “The Google Books Settlement: What Will it Mean for the Long Term?” The symposium included presentations by US copyright register Marybeth Peters, and antitrust expert Randal Picker [slides], followed by panels featuring speakers from the legal, publishing, and library world, as well as a few folks representing Google, authors, international publishing groups, and photographers.  The audience filled most of a large room, and included listeners from all these communities.  I prepared for the day by going through Walt Crawford’s lengthy summary of the settlement and its commentators, which I recommend to anyone needing to get up to speed on the issues.

Cornell’s Peter Hirtle has posted a useful summary of the proceedings, and I’ve also seen some interesting commentary on aspects of the meeting from Peter Brantley and Adam Hodgkin.  (The session was also live-Twittered.)

What I heard from audience members, both during and between sessions, was interesting as well.  Like Peter Hirtle, I didn’t hear many people saying directly that the settlement should not go forward (though I did hear that from a few people who were there but not on the stage).  I did hear repeated concerns over how the deal came about, and how it made substantial changes to the contours of copyright through class action litigation rather than legislation; and I also heard substantial concerns over the monopolies given to Google and the Book Rights Registry, and how those monopolies might stifle innovation and competition, drive up prices for online access to books, and infringe on rights of readers.  (Despite its name, the Book Rights Registry is not simply a passive store of information; it also actively negotiates terms and prices of online book uses on behalf of rightsholders, and manages the distribution of revenues from these uses.)

There was also some concern about whether those not involved in the negotiations, such as small publishers, unknowing owners of out-of-print works, foreign authors and publishers, and illustrators and photographers, were being properly respected.  Though with these latter concerns, there seemed to be more of a desire for a voice and piece of the action than a desire to stop the settlement from happening.

My basic take on the settlement didn’t change much. I’m guardedly hopeful about it, and would much rather see the settlement go forward than fail, because of the new and enhanced access it will give to millions of books for readers throughout the US.   That’s not to say it doesn’t pose some problems and dangers, many of the relevant ones having been  well-expressed by James Grimmelmann back in November. (Grimmelmann made additional remarks in one of the panels.)  The symposium did give me some new appreciation of some of the pitfalls to watch for, and some more ideas on how libraries might respond to them.  It also gave me a stronger impression that trying to modify the settlement itself is not likely to be a very fruitful response; my lay understanding is that the judge will likely just rule up or down on it with little or no modifications, with any major changes in terms requiring starting over negotiations with all the parties involved.

Still, there were some important constituencies that weren’t really addressed in the formal sessions.  One of them, noted late in the day by Harvard’s Robert Darnton, was individual readers.  (If you haven’t read Darnton’s pessimistic take on the settlement, or the response from Michigan’s Paul Courant, who was also there, you should.)  But another, I’d argue, was libraries as active agents in shaping the future of reading in the electronic age.  For libraries, I kept hearing questions like: Should they endorse or protest the settlement?  Should they buy or forgo the institutional subscriptions that will be offered?  Should they accept or pass on any of four digitization partnership deals that the settlement allows?  These are important questions, but they’re basically all reactive: choosing to go with or against the flow, without considering how we might shape or rechannel it.

How might libraries reshape this flow? Going into full detail would require a number of additional blog posts at least, but among other things, we can work individually and collectively to

  • Safeguard readers’ privacy (as we do now to some extent via proxy servers).
  • Ensure the preservation of digital and print books (through efforts like Hathi Trust and shared print collection management).
  • Collectively press for reasonable pricing and terms of use, respecting traditional user rights under copyright law, for institutional subscriptions.
  • Encourage Congress to pass legislation that would give other digitizers the rights to offer similar services to what Google will; enable the more widespread use of orphan works; and apply appropriate oversight to the monopolistic aspects of the Book Rights Registry.  In her talk, Marybeth Peters said that no one from Congress had asked the Copyright Office for comment on the proposed settlement.  While her office doesn’t appear interested in petitioning Congress, libraries can and should do so.
  • Integrate book digitization (and not just Google’s) with our library’s operations and services, so our users can make the most of what’s available digitally.   This can include integrating digital copy information and links in our catalogs, and pressing for links from those copies back to our library services (not just indirectly via OCLC’s “find in a library” link, but also direct links through technologies like OpenURL).
  • Promote and support the widespread, open sharing of information about digital books and their rights.  This information will make it easier to expand and improve what’s available online, and bring it to the widest possible audience.  We can’t rely on Google and the Registry to do all the work for us. Google’s own digitizations and metadata will not be perfect or incomplete.  The Book Rights Registry will not be freely sharing all of its information, and in any case will be more interested in paying rights claimants than in, say, enhancing access to the public domain.  If we want to solve this problem, we’ll need to continue to address some more general issues with sharing metadata more broadly.

We don’t have to wait for the settlement to go forward, or break down, to start thinking and experimenting in these areas.  I hope that a lot of libraries will be considering the issues raised in the Columbia symposium, and deciding how best to act (and not just react) to best serve our readers in a world where millions of books are accessible online.

September 29, 2008

Why Banned Books Week matters

Filed under: censorship,crimes and misdemeanors,libraries,online books,reading — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 4:35 pm

It’s Banned Books Week again, and Amnesty International, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the American Library Association are among the groups noting the occasion. I’ve also updated the links on my ongoing exhibit Banned Books Online in preparation for this week, a time when the exhibit gets an especially large volume of visits.

Banned Books Week is really about two different, but related, things. The first of these, the focus of sites like Amnesty’s and the “Books Suppressed or Censored by Legal Authorities” section of my exhibit, deals with attempts to restrict who is allowed to speak about what matters to them. And in a lot of the world, the right to speak out is severely and violently repressed. The other day I added to my online books collection a number of titles from Human Rights Watch, which has many books, press releases, and other publications about grave threats to freedom of the press and freedom to protest in places like Burma, Chile, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela, various Middle Eastern and African countries, former Soviet republics, and many other places around the world.

Americans enjoy a country with a much freer press than the countries above (and indeed, a freer press than we had in my grandparents’ day). We’re not perfect; our legal system does sometimes suppress legitimate expression, for a time at least, in the name of security, copyright, or “the children”. (And sometimes the threat of criminal violence can suppress books when the law does not.) It is worth remembering the important books that can be published thanks to the free press, and not to take them for granted.

But the banned books lists you’ll find in many libraries and bookstores (or in dubious chain emails) doesn’t focus much on the political samizdat, security exposés, or portrayals of Mohammed that are the objects of forcible suppression today. Instead, they’re often full of classics and popular titles sold widely in bookstores and online– or dominated by books written for young readers, or assigned for school reading. Some of the titles in these lists have been the targets of publication suppression at some point, but many (like those in the Harry Potter series) have not.

So is it wrong to call these books banned? Are lists like these just “shameless propaganda”, as some conservatives charge, or a hapless attempt to market classic literature to teens, as satirized in an Onion piece?

Not if you take readers seriously. An unread book, after all, has as little impact as an unpublished book. The bans that dominate the ALA lists are the obverse of publication bans: they’re attempts to restrict who is allowed to hear about what matters to them. True, their reach may be smaller than the government bans that can keep a book out of an entire state or country. And it may often be easier to circumvent these kinds of bans. (Particularly if you have a driver’s license, a credit card, and easy Internet access, things that adults often take for granted but that many kids lack.) But censorship at the reader’s end can be just as injurious as censorship at the writer’s end.

Librarians and teachers necessarily select certain books, and not others, for their collections and classes, and decide where they will best work. And it’s right for patrons of the schools and libraries to have some say in these selections (even if the professionals should generally be allowed to do their jobs). So simply counting “challenges” to a book isn’t very informative. But there’s a world of difference between saying “isn’t this more appropriate for the YA shelves than for the early readers section?” or “Would this title be a better fourth-grade book on this topic than the one currently being used?”, and insisting “None of our kids should be reading about this kind of thing!” when “this kind of thing” is already on the minds of those kids, or something that they should be thinking about. The “Unfit for Schools and Minors?” section of my Banned Books online exhibit describes some of the more dubious attempts to keep books out of the hands of young readers.

My oldest child is only 8, but he’s already coming up with new and challenging questions on an almost-daily basis. By the time kids reach double-digit ages (which is the young end of the audience for most of the controversial books) they have lots of questions about life, death, sexuality, unfairness, hatred, violence, drugs, and religion. They deserve the chance to explore answers to these questions in their reading and in their conversations.

In the process, they may encounter some ideas they’re not ready to deal with fully. (But encounters with text are often naturally self-regulated. When I was a young precocious reader, I’d usually skim over difficult parts or lose interest in a book that had them. More than once I’ve been surprised going back to a book as an adult and seeing what I’d missed as a kid.) Kids will also certainly encounter lots of dubious ideas and counsels. But mainstream culture is full of these as well, and I hope that I and other parents will teach our kids how to evaluate those wisely, whether or not they come from sources we usually think of as “controversial”.

Banned Books Week is thus about twin freedoms: the freedom to write about what matters to you, and the freedom to read about what matters to you. In this week’s observance, I hope we grow to better appreciate these freedoms and the power of books and ideas.

June 5, 2008

A break, and coming attractions

Filed under: architecture,online books,reading — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 11:16 pm

I’m about to head off to the wilds (okay, the farms) of Saskatchewan to relax with family on a much-welcomed break. I’ve got to the point in packing where we’re trying to figure out which books to bring. (Which involves some careful selection to narrow it down to the number of books we can bring on the ever-more-limited-space airlines without excess baggage problems.)

I leave the ILS-Discovery Interface work in good hands, and there should be good news shortly (hopefully, quite shortly, and well before I return) for folks who are interested in this initiative. I’ll have more to say on what comes next after I get back. Also after I come back, a couple of weeks from now, I’ll be picking up on the repositories series I started last month, with a review of the what-why-who-and-where of the various kinds of repositories that libraries may find of use.

Online book fans may also be interested in following a debate going on now about ebook publishing, business models, and piracy. Author David Pogue had a Times Blog post a couple of weeks ago giving his reasons for not issuing electronic editions of his titles, that drew a long set of reader comments. Now Adam Engst has posted an interesting and detailed rebuttal, where he describes his own sales successes with his ebooks (piracy notwithstanding).

You might also enjoy “Reading sets you free”, an article posted about a month ago by K. G. Schneider (who I had the pleasure of meeting in person recently at a NISO discovery forum.) I was reminded of it again just now as I was trying to think of what books the kids might bring. As in the picture accompanying her article, both of them are very much read-under-the-covers kids at this point, as were both their parents. We’re all looking forward to spending a lot of time conversing with each other and with our books these next couple of weeks.

January 28, 2008

Close readers

Filed under: open access,reading,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 9:46 pm

There’s been a lot of public fretting lately over the state of reading. People don’t read as much as they once did, we’re told. When it’s pointed out that in fact lots of people are reading online, we’re sometimes told it’s the wrong kind of reading– “inanities” of “blogging and blugging”, to quote a recent Nobel laureate. I get the impression from some essays that on the one hand there’s offline reading, deep, solitary, and contemplative, and on the other hand online reading, shallow, social, and mercurial. The two seem to have little in common, by this sort of account.

Of course, it’s not that simple. And I’ve recently encountered a few initiatives that cut right across that dichotomy, gathering people together to closely read and discuss texts with each other.

At a recent lunchtime get-together, JT Waldman told me about the Jewish Publication Society‘s new Yavnet web site, now in alpha. It’s a project to create “a living and breathing commentary” on the Torah, by encouraging readers to look at particular passages, and join online, moderated discussions on them. Drawing on the JPS’s Tanakh translations, its published, scholarly commentaries, and online discussions, readers will be able to read and participate in conversations that help bring out the meaning of Biblical passages. The basic idea isn’t new– the Talmud, after all, is a centuries-old multi-layered commentary on the scriptures– but the Yavnet folks hope to use the Internet to grow and propagate fresh understandings and appreciations of the Torah in online communities.

Another recently announced site is Book Glutton (this one says it’s in beta), which aims to bring groups of people together to discuss a book as they read it. Their reader software is also designed for close reading; instead of just reviewing or discussing a book in general, readers can attach comments to specific passages of a book, and have live chats with people reading the same sections. They appear to be built largely on public domain texts, which lend themselves well to new interfaces and purposes.

Mind you, with openly accessible texts, you don’t have to limit your discussion to a single site. Jon Udell recently wrote about how discussions of scientific articles are often widely distributed over the blog network. An active discussion ensued, and just a couple of days later, he made a followup post showing some of the tools now available to track such discussions online. That was quick!

Close reading, whether of books or other text, may sometimes be solitary, but it doesn’t have to be. And the Net can bring together close discussions of text from far-flung participants, discussions that were not practical to convene offline. As Ursula Le Guin put it in the new (February) issue of Harper’s, “Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it.” (You’ll have to subscribe online or find a copy at your library or news-stand to read the full article, but it’s already being discussed online in various places. I first saw her quote in this Mediabistro post, which also points to some related discussions elsewhere.)

I look forward to seeing the new directions that the social vectors of books and texts take online, as the sites above and others like them develop further.

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