Impressions Scholarcast

Occasional mentions of downloadable books for electronic readers from my public libraries (GCCC Libraries) have passed in my tweet stream from one of my Twitter friends, librarian Kate Davis (@katiedavis). It was not until I received the email newsletter this week from the libraries that I realised how far the Overdrive service for ebooks (and audiobooks) had come (past services were limited in media types and range of devices). Effectively it heralds the start of a 24/7 library service for time-limited, electronic borrowings – the way of the future.

From the virtual library page we are told the range of media is the impressive:

• Adobe® EPUB eBooks
• Adobe® PDF eBooks
• Mobipocket® eBooks
• OverDrive WMA Audiobooks
• OverDrive MP3 Audiobooks
• OverDrive Music

I immediately searched the epub/PDF catalogue which is understandably limited as it to be expected. Neverthe less I discovered quickly that Qualman’s Socialnomics title was available in epub format. Only a week previously I had tweeted my thanks to the library for ordering this same title for me in print. [Eric Qualman also tweeted me back.] What a coincidence! Another less significant coincidence is I already had Adobe Digital Editions installed on my PC, the recommended reader for the epub format of the ebook. For many months the free Digital Editions software has been my reader of choice for all my PDF documents, reports, papers, manuals and so on. This meant the download of the Socialnomics ebook was seamless and within less than a minute the book was on my PC screen – really great.

In a first for me I now have both the print and epub versions of the same book available while I am reading it. I can directly compare the two reading processes to see which I prefer. Since I don’t yet have a dedicated ebook reader capable of displaying epub format the comparison is between reading on my PC and the print form.

On the PC the usual huge advantages of ebooks become quickly apparent:

• the links in the table of contents (always visible on the left in Digital Editions) take you straight to the major book sections
• search takes you immediately to information you require (the index is no longer needed)
• change the page and font size to suit you reading comfort
• links in the text, footnotes, endnotes and so on all work
• limited text copy allows for note taking

I quickly set up my netbooks and laptops to share the same ebook using the Adobe authorisation mechanism to its allowed limit of 5 devices. Netbooks extend the range of contexts for reading ebooks but of course are still not as convenient as dedicated ebook readers (and the printed book) in bed for example.

In the 48 hours of my print/ebook reading duality the ebook is winning. Both have to go back in 14 days when this first experiment will end and I will be able to report again.

I must give a big shoutout to Kate who I suspect had a really big part in bringing the beginnings of our local virtual 24/7 library to fruition. It will revolutionise reading habits.

I have been meaning to report on the outcomes of a question I set in the final theory exam of our CORE subject Information Technology 1 in our May 2009 semester. This subject is taken by virtually all students enrolled in my university at some stage in their degrees. The short answer question was:

There appears to be a trend for printed text books to be replaced by electronic books that must be read on digital devices. Indicate whether or not you are in favour of this trend. Give several reasons for your choice.

I was about 150 scripts into marking the total of 372 scripts and I happened to tweet my impression of the answers to that point:

This sparked a positive response from Peta who discussed it with her fellow librarians. Because of this interest a proper count of the students’ answers was in order to confirm if my first impressions were accurate. I decided to put each answer into 5 categories:

• For: answer and reasons given were wholly in favour of ebooks replacing printed books
• For-but: in favour overall but recognised some disadvantages that were described in the answer
• Neutral: neither for or against with reasons given on each side
• Against-but: not in favour but recognised some advantages to ebooks
• Against: answer and reasons given were wholly against the use of ebooks

In the end, my first impressions proved incorrect although the result was close. Combining both ‘for’ categories and both ‘against’ categories the numbers are 50% in favour and 44% against with 6% in the neutral category.

The more detailed results show that 17% of students recognised that the choice was not entirely clear cut and there were both advantages and disadvantages with ebooks.

So as far as this particular class of students is concerned ebooks are favoured by a small majority. Hopefully our librarians can take something useful from this result. For the record I place myself in the ‘For but’ category.

Postscript: I tried to use Twitter search on this day (27 October 2009) to find my original tweet to no avail – it turns out that 19 August 2009 is too far in the past for Twitter! Fortunately our institutional Yammer service was quickly able to find my tweet text (use of the #yam hashtag), but did not provide the unique link to the Twitter tweet. Using Google search with a phrase from the tweet returned a single result from dipity.com (maybe the recently heralded Google Social Search would have helped me). This dipity service keeps a timeline of chosen social network activity. I had all but forgotten about them except they emailed me about updated features this week. Going back to 19 August in my dipity timeline shows the tweet in all it glory together with the Twitter status link. Well done dipity.

PPS Update: Google just announced general availability of experimental Social Search

I commented on my initial efforts to share the Zotero database and storage files across several machines using the Live Mesh sync service. This worked very well with the Zotero files captured in the ‘storage’ folder, as once created these files and their folders did not change across machines. The downside occurred with the zotero.sqlite database file and its extra backup file copy zotero.sqlite.bak which is updated when the last Firefox browser window is closed.

On many occasions I became lazy and left Firefox browser windows open on two or more machines. These machines are left running so the Live Mesh sync service can keep them up to date on the many other folders of documents that I use. It is not surprising that Live Mesh, which starts syncing as soon as a change is detected, can cause file update conflicts when the same Zotero database file is being updated over the same time period on different machines. Later versions of Live Mesh detect this and append the machine name to the file when in conflict. While safe this leads to a plethora of different Zotero database files which have to be managed manually – somewhat of a pain.

At the beginning of February I must have transgressed and installed a virgin copy of Zotero 1.0 with a totally empty ‘storage’ folder. This caused Live Mesh to sync and delete all files in the ‘storage’ folder, about 75 MB of vital PDF files and web page pieces used to create the Zotero page snapshots. Disaster! Fortunately I have a Windows Home Server and was eventually able to recover a consistent copy of the Zotero database and files, having lost about 2 weeks of reference collection – better than nothing, but a new approach was needed.

I turned to the beta of Zotero 1.5 that offers online syncing of the database across different machines. This solves the zotero.sqlite file problem and also keeps a free online backup copy on the Zotero Sync Server. However the ‘storage’ folder requires you to use your own WebDAV file storage server:

Not having easy access to a WebDAV server I thought once again to give Live Mesh a try. This time I only sync the ‘storage’ folder, and after about a month of usage no problems of any kind have been encountered. I thus now offer up this recommendation for others to try, and will be interested in the experience of others.

As usual Kent Anderson at ‘the scholarly kitchen’ is spotting new trends in publishing in a recent blog post. He leads with the recommendation in the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers that print no longer be treated as the default medium. Rather the MLA suggest ‘the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry’, a fairly major change.

However much more significant in my view is the recommendation about the use of URLs in cited entries. They point to the well-known facts that a URL is likely to rot, ie no longer be functional, over time, and people rarely will actually attempt to actually type a URL into a browser. My feeling is that the latter point is valid but since I and others will more usually be reading an electronic version of every work, clicking on the link will usually work or a simple copy-and-paste will suffice.

The first problem of link rot is the more serious. In detail:

the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to locate the source otherwise. “Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value… for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors’ names than by typing URLs

What the MLA is saying is that if the URL fails people will simply use Google or their favourite search service to search for title or name fragments to locate the cited work. This is something with which I agree and it will force me to think twice about using URLs in citations in future.

Here are a couple of examples of a tagcloud ‘abstract’ (see my earlier post) of the paper entitled ‘Towards the Integration of Social Media with Traditional Information Systems’ presented by Peta Hopkins and myself at ICCMSN2008. Commenting on the earlier blog post Natasha Baker liked the tagcloud abstract idea and pointed me to TagCrowd which allows you to upload a text file of a document. I reduced our paper to text and TagCrowd generated:

Note that only the top 50 of the 962 different words are shown.

Of course I couldn’t resist running the same words through my favourite Wordle site, although here you have to copy and paste the text into a web form rather than nominating a text file.

Note how the Wordle tagcloud abstract is more detailed and picturesque. I must say that as an abstract I prefer the TagCrowd version.

From another gem of a post by Kathryn Greenhill she points us to Clay Shirky’s guest BoingBoing blog post about publishers perishing. In turn he comments on the controversial James Gleick post entitled ‘How to Publish Without Perishing’ – the glaring quote being:

Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

Clay Shirky put a concise and compelling argument about why is just not a reasonable position. Kathryn amplifies Clay’s reasoning, but for me this quote from Clay is the most telling, more so because it applies not just to books and newspapers, but many other aspects of modern living like the business of education, commerce and government:

Businesses don’t survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors …

[Via tweet from @sirexkathryn – you’ll have to seek Kathryn’s permission on Twitter to see these links]