SingularityHub’s Peter Murray has a feature on this fascinating library that stores 3.5 million books and journal volumes in a five-story-tall system of bins that only needs one-seventh as much space to house the books as a normal library. The bins are organized by book size, not by category or other classification, and books are retrieved and returned through a system of robotic cranes. Murray writes:

The library’s unique construction is meant to accommodate the way research is done today: online. In the case an old journal article isn’t available online or a book hasn’t been scanned due to copyright limitations, for example, then the student can request the book right there on the computer. The automated storage and retrieval system will deliver the volume to the circulation desk, usually within the five minutes it takes for the student to walk there. Oversized and novelty books are also stored for retrieval.

The university touts the library as having lowered operating costs, energy efficiency, and better archival and preservation of delicate materials thanks to the sealed, airtight bins.

Murray also speculates on the future of the library in general, noting Seth Godin’s vision of a future library as being something very like the book-free lobby and collaboration space of the Mansueto, only without the 5 stories of books beneath it. Murray thinks that physical libraries will become less prevalent as many of the research tasks that were formerly done there are taken over by the computer at home instead.

For myself, I find the idea of the Mansueto library rather impressive, though I do have to wonder what happens when the robot cranes break down, as they inevitably will. (Maybe that’s why there are five of them, so that if one goes out the others can take up the slack.) And as some complain is the case with e-books, the system also eliminates the possibility of shelf browsing and unexpected serendipity. But for catering to those who know or know how to find exactly what they want, this type of system does offer some advantages—though whether the advantages are sufficient to offset the costs is less clear.

Doctor Who

The episode in question is the season 4 two-parter “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead”, written by now-showrunner Stephen Moffat. It can be viewed streaming as part of the Doctor Who collection on Netflix, or in a low-resolution form via YouTube; there’s also a transcript here. You don’t really need any context to enjoy it beyond knowing that the Doctor is an eccentric time traveler who likes to travel with human companions. I’m going to spoil it a bit, so perhaps you should just take my word that it’s good and watch it first.

This isn’t really a full “review” of the episode, as I only touch on a couple of e-book-related plot elements, but suffice it to say it’s very creepy and atmospheric, with a number of interesting characters and ideas—well worth watching. But as for those plot elements…

“People never really stopped loving books,” the Doctor explains as he leads his companion Donna Noble out of the Tardis into a library. “51st century. By now you’ve got holovids, direct to brain downloads, fiction mist, but you need the smell. The smell of books, Donna. Deep breath.” I cannot now recall my exact feelings the first time I heard that line, but I would like to think I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or throw something at the screen. Even in Doctor Who do you find “the smell of books.”

And you also find the contention that printed books will never die. While Doctor Who’s chronology can be a bit suspect at times (another episode had 20th century TV shows being re-staged in the year 100,000 AD!), book-lovers can take solace in the fact that, in the Doctor Who universe, three thousand years from now there will be a library the size of a planet. (At the rate people publish books, there will probably have to be a library the size of a planet to hold them all, if they all come out in print!)

But it turns out that this is not necessarily a good thing (and here come those spoilers), because the books carried along with them a sort of infection or infestation. The trees that were pulped to make the books had been the home of sentient piranha-like living shadow creatures called the vashta nerada, that can strip all the flesh off a person’s skeleton in less than a second. And the Doctor is faced with having to protect a team of archaeologists from the threat and find out what happened to the thousands of staff and patrons who had previously inhabited the library, who the library computer rather ominously explains were “saved” even though there were “no survivors.”

So you could say that one subtext of the episode is that e-books are better because they are guaranteed 100% shadow-piranha-free. But perhaps that’s not the only e-book-related thing that’s worth pointing out about this episode. It turns out (another spoiler) that those staff and patrons had been “saved” by being digitized onto the library’s hard drive via the library’s transmat system—much the way print books can be “saved” by being digitized into e-books on hard drives.

I may be reaching a little here (given that the episode never explicitly makes this parallel), but it’s an amusing interpretation, isn’t it? And it does go right along with the way the episode subverts the love of print books even in an age of “fiction mist” by making those print books home to the monster of the week. (And who knows how many other giant libraries are similarly-infected?)

At any rate, if you want to explain to someone why e-books are better than print books, you can point to this episode and explain that e-books won’t eat the flesh off your bones. (They’ll just eat up all your free time, if you let them.)

Shatzkin notes that the infrastructure for e-book distribution is currently sketchy by comparison to that for printed books which has grown up over the decades—but that won’t always be the case. And when that infrastructure for e-books arrives, the state of the world will look very different than it does now.

In a “fully e-booked world,” we will own or have access to many screens, replacing many instances that would formerly have used print. We’ll take them with us when we leave home, or we’ll borrow them in places like medical waiting rooms. We won’t need to carry as many paper items around anymore once much of our personal business lives on these screens.

The core purpose — the founding purpose — of a library, around which other things have grown, is to deliver access to printed words. Even the smallest local library almost certainly had more content housed within it than any individual had in their home and, in most cases, far more content than would be available at any local store. It was the books in the library that initially defined the library and attracted a core of patrons to it. When all of us have access to more books on our screens than are in the library, what’s the point to the library?

At least, that’s what I was thinking.

Responding to a post by library professional Gary D. Price in response to his quoted remarks, Shatzkin brings up some other points. He expects libraries to vanish faster than the poor’s need will, whether that’s a good thing or not. He points out that communities could convert libraries into community centers that provide everything except books, and other community centers might be opened in the vacant storefronts left by closing bookstores—but he wonders whether a community center with few or no books could still be called a “library”.

He also notes that academic and special-purpose libraries will still be around, and there will still be a need for librarians even when printed books are in the minority. Librarians are trained in finding information in all media, after all; their association with books is only because they’ve been the major form of searchable media for so long.

An interesting take on this idea can be found in David Drake’s Republic of Cinnabar Navy series\, which features librarian Adele Mundy as one of the main characters. Though Mundy doesn’t have books to reshelve (most of the time), she is an expert information search specialist, just like librarians of today. (She’s also handy with a gun, which is a much rarer librarian trait.)

When I showed this article to my mother, a school librarian, she found it interesting but doubted that it would happen in only fifteen years. But as Dr. Francis Collins of the Human Genome project said, we tend to overestimate the short term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term impact. I wonder what public libraries will look like in fifteen years?

In Newport Beach, which has four city libraries, officials analyzed how patrons use them. Most visit the branches to study, to plug their laptops into work spaces or to use computers with Internet connections.

Few, however, actually pulled books from the shelves.

The Motherboard blog follows up, pointing out the library system’s response to the inevitable firestorm provoked by the LA Times article. The library points out that the Balboa branch only accounts for 6% of the overall usage of the 4-library system, and was thinking of moving the facilities out of their current 82-year-old building and into a new community center. The people who do use the branch use it for a lot more than just books

Thus, the concept of a study center with computers, Wi-Fi, study tables, comfy chairs, and DVD and CD loans began to develop. The branch might not house stacks of books (it still could – we’re still reviewing our options), but library patrons could “order” books from the large Central Library (located about four miles away) and have them delivered to Marina Park the next day. This branch could be construed as a “digital library,” but the Newport Beach Public Library system would have plenty of books and other printed materials readily available for borrowing

Certainly modern libraries do a lot more than just books. And given how much library book collections can cost to maintain, and how much usage patterns are shifting toward other media, it’s not surprising that some libraries might be considering doing away with books altogether at some of their locations. (Found via Slashdot.)

My own Springfield Missouri library system has a small satellite branch located on the historic downtown Park Central Square. It doesn’t have more than one or two traditional “shelves”—mostly just racks lining the walls with individual books faced out—and I don’t think it has more than a few hundred books altogether, but it does have a dozen computer workstations, wifi, and plenty of comfortable chairs. It’s also only a few hundred feet from the downtown terminal where all the bus routes intersect, which makes it a very convenient place to request books be sent via the web for later pickup.

As e-books become more common and paper books less used, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more libraries moving this direction in the future.

So what does a library do?  Remember, the choices they make will ultimtely affect you, the eBook buyer, reader and enthusiast!

Ultimately, I think libraries should focus for now on the free repositories available for use.  Given the advances in Google Books, Hathi Trust, the Open Library and others, this course of action will help them stabilize their budgets, offer more choices to their patrons (YOU!) and not  be locked into a vendor’s approach to the eBook world.

Is that realistic?  In some cases yes, in others no….here’s why.  The massive repositories now online or going online are promising to multiply a library’s local collection by 10, 20, even a 100 times more than what they could get from a vendor–all in a multiplicity of formats.  Almost any subject under the sun is now available for library patrons.

Looking for classic American and English literature?  Check–got that here.  How about common non-fiction subjects such as gardening, pirates, and even science fairs?  Yep-all of those are available!  These sample subjects are just the tip of the iceberg as to what is out available.

However, this free approach can be unrealistic if the patron demand is for the best sellers, the hot new fiction that only the vendor can offer.  Would this demand be better served by a real paper version?  There’s really no right or wrong at this point, as libraries alone know what their patrons really want.

I guess the upshot here is that given the uncertainties of the current eBook situation, I feel it would be better for libraries to minimize their eBook purchasing until some sort of standard can be worked out–but still use the (sometimes, often) free resources to enhance and stabilize their local collections.

This way, eBook enthusiasts like you and me can still find lots of goodies for our ebook readers.  Colllection integration of various free resources seems to be a better approach than a one shot only approach from any particular vendor.  Given the public API’s and integration with library standards such as OCLC and others, this doesn’t seem to be too arduous to implement.

So what do you think?  Realistic or just “pie-in-the sky”?  My thoughts?  I think it’s workable, but secretly, I’m holding out for the Digital Public Library myself!

In the last couple of days, Google has rolled out a new tweak called “Rich Results,” which presents one extra-large search result if Google thinks that you’re searching for a specific book title.

Rich Results is the latest in a series of smaller front-end tweaks that have been matched by backend improvements. Now, the book search algorithm takes into account more than 100 "signals," individual data categories that Google statistically integrates to rank your results. When you search for a book, Google Books doesn’t just look at word frequency or how closely your query matches the title of a book. They now take into account web search frequency, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted.

Google Books is becoming a better and better for finding the knowledge you want within the books that are available. Leaving the copyright controversy aside, there has never been a better way to search for material inside books; the old card catalog system (or even digital card catalog) just pales by comparison.

And perhaps we should leave the copyright controversy aside. At least, that’s the perspective offered by the other article that caught my eye. On The Guardian, Robert McCrum looks at the question of creating national digital libraries. He points to a recent presentation (reprinted in The New York Review of Books) by Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, which proposes the idea.

What’s remarkable about Darnton’s very short paper – a call to arms, really – is that by placing the "vexed question of copyright" in a national perspective, and by putting the idea of "cultural commons" to the service of the common good, Darnton debates an issue that usually generates heat not light in a way that sounds supremely rational. Neither Britain nor the US has plans for a national digital library but Japan, France and the Netherlands all do and, as Darnton remarks, if they "can do it, why can’t the United States?" I would add: why can’t Britain?

Darnton’s reprinted speech is worth reading in its own right. He points out that freedom of access to information was an important principle to founding fathers Jefferson (who said “Knowledge is the common property of mankind,” and also made the oft-quoted analogy of knowledge to candles) and Adams.

And unlike in the 18th century, the Internet offers the potential of enormous freedom of access to information. So, Darnton suggests, we should take advantage of that freedom and create a national electronic library. For all the copyright controversy surrounding Google, it has at least shown what is possible. If a corporation can do it, why can’t the government, or other organizations that work toward public interests?

I propose that we dismiss the notion that a National Digital Library of America is far-fetched, and that we concentrate instead on what we can learn from others about issues such as: How can we deal with the problem of copyright and of orphan books, i.e., books whose copyright holders can’t be located? How can we cope with the complexities of metadata—that is, catalog-type information necessary to locate digital texts in the ever-changing environment of cyberspace? How can we find funding and develop a business plan that will resolve the long-term difficulties of collection management and preservation?

McCrum suspects that publishers are still too much in shock from Google’s “audacious copyright snatch” to consider the idea, but points out that all that Google has really done is privatize what a national government or culture should be doing to begin with. It makes sense to me—after all, in the US we have a Library of Congress; why not an E-Library of Congress?

The Amplified Author of 2010 (term coined for authors engaged in the social web) can sit at her desk and speak directly to her readership through a blog, can expand that circle of readers gradually by using Twitter and other social networks, can find an active readership interested in offering criticism and ideas, can publish work through print on demand and put it on the global bookshelf of the web, can set out her stall of publications and services on a website where she can also offer to run workshops, teach, write reviews, perform; she can take her work to publishers and broadcasters able to give detailed evidence of who her readership is and what they think of her work. Once she makes it into print, she can use her own energies and laptop to promote her masterpiece.

Of course, we have already heard much of this sort of thing, especially in the wake of established authors such as J.A. Konrath or Seth Godin deciding to go it alone and move away from traditional publishing. But the FutureEBook piece explains that thinktank if:book (The Institute for the Future of the Book) is creating “a new kind of hub for writing in the community".

They call this hub a “Unilibrary”. It is to be located in Hornsey Library in London and is planned to to include a “co-working space” with a voluntary social network, aimed at helping local creative types get together and create.

Meade explains:

The axe hovers over libraries because today our laptops are seen to provide us with access to a wealth of free material – but we need libraries more than ever, not just to bridge the digital divide for those without wi-fi, but to be somewhere we can all bring our laptops for guidance on how to get the most from the web, and to share our responses to what we find.

UK libraries are currently in danger from proposed budget cuts to the Public Lending Right, the fund that pays authors modest sums when their books are checked out of libraries. Author advocacy groups are urging authors to mobilize against the planned budget cuts.

We’re in a sort of transitional period right now, as publishers, authors, and retailers wait to see what the nascent self-publishing industry is going to become. I personally think the name “Unilibrary” sounds kind of silly, and I don’t think the article really supports its point very well—it says we need libraries where we can come together in person, even though the rest of it is all about how promotionally we’re using the web—but nonetheless, it’s worth keeping an eye on this kind of effort.

To decide which 10,000 books made the cut, Stanford librarians checked check-out records to see which books were most frequently checked out. It turned out that the vast majority of the library’s books had not been checked out in five years.

The e-book replacements will also have a side benefit, given the rapidly-changing nature of the engineering field. By the time traditional textbooks come into print, they are often at least partly obsolete. This change will enable Stanford to keep its textbooks and examples more current, the dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering explains.

And other libraries may soon follow suit, both at Stanford and elsewhere. Stanford library director Michael Keller sees a trend at work in the way current students are interacting with libraries and technology.

"They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online," he says. "I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going."

NPR reports that, while few libraries are getting rid of so many printed books, many American libraries are starting to shift funding away from paper books and toward electronic resources.

(Found via Gizmodo.)

We like to talk about how e-books may be a boon to the older generations for such factors as ease of page-turning and increasing font size. However, I feel that the voice of that generation may not be heard as much as it should in these discussions, since they may not have as much time or inclination to participate in on-line forums. It is also good to remember that they may not have as full an understanding of e-books as we do. This is a great example of a viewpoint we’re missing.

—Chris Meadows

A couple of months ago, Jess and I saw a cartoon where a little boy was asking his father, "Daddy.  What’s a library?"  For some reason, that cartoon stuck in our minds and the more we thought about it the more we realized how true that could become.  Then when the Carthage library cut back on its hours making it horribly difficult for me, a working person, to use the library, the more we thought that cartoon just might become true sooner than we thought.

I’m real frustrated with the Carthage library especially after being used to the Barry/Lawrence library system.  I think there could be other ways to reduce costs besides cutting the hours and even if they have to cut hours, why do they not try to have hours that working people could also use!  If I were retired or independently wealthy and didn’t have to work I could go to the library any time but unfortunately that’s not the case.

Judy:

I didn’t mean that libraries will be shutting down next week any more than the US Post office will be shutting down. But as more and more people are getting computers and learning to use the Internet, fewer and fewer people will even need to go to a library to use a computer. A couple of weeks ago a friend showed us what looked like a covered legal pad notebook. Her husband had gotten it for her for Christmas from Amazon. I don’t remember the exact name of it but I have it written down somewhere. Anyway, you could order a book for one dollar from Amazon and they would download it for you onto this notebook. She had put the Bible on it. I also don’t remember how many books it would hold but seems like it was somewhere in the 300 or 600 range. I know it was more books than I will probably ever have time to read in the rest of my life.

I was fortunate to grow up with the Barry/Lawrence library system as you currently have available for your use. But Jasper County libraries are a whole different animal. First of all, here in Carthage, only those people to live inside the city limits have free access to the Carthage Library and we have to pay $40.00 a year on our taxes for that ‘free’ library access whether we use it or not. For those folks living outside the city limits, they have to pay a yearly fee of $10.00 to have access to use the library. Now, they can still go in and read a newspaper or a magazine but they can’t check anything out or use a computer without paying the fee. If I would like a particular book and Carthage doesn’t have the book but the Joplin library does, I have to pay a fee plus shipping charges to have the book sent to Carthage from any other library. It would be cheaper to buy one of those notebook things and have Amazon download the book for $1 plus I would now own the book and wouldn’t have to return it in two weeks.  And if I could get current books downloaded for only $1, bookstores may soon be on the extinction list also.

Carthage library says the economy is effecting their services. They are now no longer open on Mondays at all. Tuesdays are their regular hours of 9 am to 8 pm but Wed, Thurs, and Friday they close at 6p.m. Saturday they are only open from 9 am to 1 p.m. Since we usually don’t get out of the office on weekdays until at least 6 pm, Tuesdays are the only evening I have to use the library. I might be able to go on Thursdays but usually my Thursdays are so crammed full of everything else I don’t even think about going to the library. On Saturday, again we don’t get off work until at least 1:00 or later. I now haven’t been to the Carthage library since last October when they changed their hours. With the use of the Internet and ebooks, I don’t really even need to go to a library.

I don’t know about elementary schools because when I was in elementary school, I went to a two room country school and we had the book mobile come out once a month to bring books. I don’t ever remember even going to the high school library except for study hall. In college, I mostly went to the library for a quiet place to study when I was living in the dorm. I do remember using the college library to look up references for term papers but never to check out a reading book just for pleasure. I suppose with student access to the Internet, they don’t even have to use the library to write papers.

Anyway, I can see libraries being in danger in another 30 to 50 years whereas some of the things on the list are in danger just in the next 10 or so years. We have a friend who owns a video rental store and she is already starting to sweat bullets about having to close her store because downloading movies off the Internet will soon be taking over. She is about my age and she is just hoping the store will last until she is old enough to retire. We have another friend who commented that his postman is also hoping the post office will stay in business long enough for him to reach retirement. And we, just last month, cancelled our dial-up access to the Internet, so there is another customer they lost.

I don’t think your job will be in jeopardy anytime soon but your grandchildren might have a tough time finding a job if they major in library science.

pjk

The university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas. …

“We’re already starting to see a move on the part of university libraries… to outsource virtually all the services [they have] developed and maintained over the years,” Greenstein said. Now, with universities everywhere still ailing from last year’s economic meltdown, administrators are more likely than ever to explore the dramatic restructuring of library operations.

Within the decade, he said, groups of universities will have shared print and digital repositories where they store books they no longer care to manage.

The above is from a conference that Inside Higher Ed reported on. The whole article is here.

So ask some in publishing, They even wonder if the new tech shouldn’t nuke the old business models. Why not jut have private rental plans? Or just let children and families use online bookstores?

Because, dear publishers, free library books are among your best marketing tools. Hook ‘em while they’re young.

Bookless libraries ahead?

In fact, publishers should worry less about competition from libraries and more about a less-than-happy trend that CNN discusses in a piece headlined The Future of libraries, with or without books.

Excerpt: “Books are being pushed aside for digital learning centers and gaming areas. ‘Loud rooms’ that promote public discourse and group projects are taking over the bookish quiet. Hipster staffers who blog, chat on Twitter and care little about the Dewey Decimal System are edging out old-school librarians.”

So now what happens if the libraries can’t even offer e-books under reasonable terms?

Optimal scenario: TeleRead

The optimal scenario, as I see it, would be a mix of for-profit activities and a well-stocked national digital library system carefully integrated with local schools and libraries—and with a definite agenda: the encouragement of reading and other forms of learning.

Meanwhile here’s something else to chew on: “In the United States, libraries are largely funded by local governments, many of which have been hit hard by the recession.

“That means some libraries may not get to take part in technological advances. It also could mean some of the nation’s 16,000 public libraries could be shut down or privatized. Schultz, of the Berkeley Law School, said it would be easy for public officials to point to the growing amount of free information online as further reason to cut public funding for libraries.”

Related: Cushing Academy getting rid of all its books, by Paul Biba.

Image: CC-licensed photo from the San Jose public library.

For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page.

I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I can only find a few references to it on TeleRead. E-books—and some modern issues relating to e-books—actually play a pretty prominent part in the book’s plot, in a number of ways.

Vinge’s Other Work

Those who only know Vinge from his recent work prior to Rainbows End might be surprised at his return to the relatively-near future, more commonly the province of Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, and Neal Stephenson. After all, his books A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky take place thousands of years in the future, when Earth is barely even a memory and humans have spread out across the galaxy.

But long before he wrote those, Vinge wrote another near-future book, The Peace War—and before that, his 1981 novella True Names helped to define the entire cyberpunk genre. With Rainbows End, Vinge returned to the near-future, adjusting and updating his predictions to fit the present-day.

(It is refreshing, by the way, to read a near-future extrapolation story for once that is not written in the present tense, or bombastic in the way that the authors like Doctorow can be. Vinge is old-school in his writing approach, which means I can appreciate his technological extrapolations all the more.)

The Plot

The story of Rainbows End is a third-person narrative woven together from the perspectives of several characters. The overall plot concerns an intelligence agency’s infiltration of a research lab that someone is using to perfect a workable mind-control technology—but unbeknownst to most of the intelligence agency, the mind-control mastermind happens to be the very man in charge of the search.

The infiltration plays out against a backdrop of fascinating new technology, culture clashes between fandoms, and protests against destruction of old media in favor of new. There are a number of memorable characters who get caught up in all these events.

The closest thing to a sole protagonist the book has is Robert Gu, an Alzheimer’s victim who is returned to lucidity by one experimental medical process, and returned to a youthful body by another. He lives with his son and daughter-in-law, Bob and Alice, and his grand-daughter Miri (another character of importance). Robert starts out as a fairly unsympathetic character—he used to be a real bastard, abusive of his wife and others around him—and it seems as though he is set to resume where he left off…until something changes him.

Since he was last lucid in our era, and has spent fifteen years or so in a mental fugue before being revived like Lazarus, he serves as a viewpoint character for modern readers. We learn about the startling technological advances in this new world just as he does, and we can sympathize with his future shock as he gradually grows accustomed to his new life.

Another important character is the mysterious Rabbit, a shadowy fixer (and trickster)from the Internet world who specializes in getting things done by getting people with complimentary talents together. His identity—indeed, even his very nature—is unclear, as are his motivations. However, he is a vital part of the plot to infiltrate the lab—whether the intelligence agency thinks it’s a good idea or not.

There are actually several different narratives within the story that interweave and cross over with one another in the most unusual ways. Characters watch others in secret, and exchange private messages to hold conversations behind each other’s backs. In the end, it all comes together in ways that are unexpected even by the participants.

Vinge’s Cyberspace

Rainbows End is an expansion and reworking of ideas found in Vinge’s 2001 short story, “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (found in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge). “Fast Times” features characters who would later appear in Rainbows End, though some of them have different names (or even entirely different species), and the plots are almost entirely unrelated. The technology is the same, however, as far as it goes.

However, Rainbows End also owes a lot to True Names. Both feature consensus fantasy realities constructed within computer networks. Both of these fantasy worlds have geographical correspondences to real-world locations—though True Names’s world is one that can only be observed from within while Rainbows End’s can be seen by anyone wearing special glasses.

Interactive Fiction: If You Build It, Will They Come?

And both True Names and Rainbows End also feature interactive “books”. The protagonist in True Names writes what another character refers to as “games” but he calls “novels”—apparently advanced multimedia versions of the text adventure games that were just reaching the height of their popularity at the time True Names was written.

Vinge has long held that the e-book medium of the future would be “interactive” in some respect. In 1993, when Vinge wrote an introduction for an “annotated” edition of his book A Fire Upon the Deep, he believed that hypertext (at the time, the newest new computer thing) was going to be the future of fiction:

I believe hypertext fiction will ultimately be an entirely new art form, as different from novels as motion pictures are from oil paintings. […] Guessing: There may not be hypertext sequels so much as the instantiation of new windows on the “reality” of the story. Group participation both during initial construction and in expanding the ongoing reality may be one of the most striking features of the art form. […] Hypertext fiction may evolve into immense art works that combine the essence of professional production teams with independent artists with the interests and efforts of the ultimate viewers.

This has, of course, never really come to pass. (And, as pnh noted in his interview, probably never will.) I always think of it as an example of the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy—projecting the popularity of something based on the ability to do it rather than the demand for it.

We can do hypertext fiction today very easily—but apart from a few Internet writing sites like Ficly or Writing.com, nobody seems to bother. Wikis would seem to fit best of all with Vinge’s vision for expanding upon someone else’s story, but there have not been many uses of them exactly like the ones he imagined. The closest things would be the forest of wikis that have sprung up to cover select interests or fandoms, such as the Avatar: The Last Airbender wiki, but these are usually reference rather than creative works.

On the other hand, there has been at least some serious study of the idea, as I found when searching TeleRead for another link. But it does not seem to have led to any commercial success outside of a few isolated experiments.

Belief Circles

With Rainbows End, Vinge’s conception of the interactive book of the future has evolved again, into a fully multimedia, virtual reality experience—though in most other respects it has a lot in common with his hypertext prediction quoted above. In Rainbows End, fans of published works create “belief circles”, which seem to be a mash-up of fanfic, Internet shared-universe writing circles, live-action roleplaying, and virtual multi-user environments such as Second Life.

In the virtual world that overlays the real world (and is viewed through displays embedded in contact lenses and controlled via sensors in clothing), fans of a given fictional or historical setting (members of that setting’s “belief circle”) create their own avatars and overlays for themselves and everything around them based on that setting. A skyscraper might be painted as a medieval tower, and cars might become horse-drawn carriages or low-flying magic carpets. Multiple different belief circles’ worldviews can overlap the same area; onlookers can switch between them like changing channels on a TV set.

For settings that are still under copyright, micropayments are charged to belief-circle members and credited toward the owner for each use of something relating to that world. (Though apparently there has been some copyright reform in Vinge’s cyber-fantasy world: at one point movies are said to have five-year copyright terms. I guess we can at least dream.)

One of the central conflicts of the book involves a clash between two belief circles over which one will dominate the University of California San Diego Library building—the “Dangerous Knowledge” setting in which librarians are knight-guardians of knowledge, and the Pokémon-ish “Scooch-a-mouti” children’s-fantasy-monsters setting. At one point the clash escalates into an out-and-out battle, with millions of viewers world-wide tuning in to see the outcome.

An Object Lesson in Obsolete Objects

The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.

So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before.

Vinge wrote Rainbows End just as Google was beginning its own massive scanning project (which does get a mention in passing in the book), but well before the settlement with the Authors Guild (and the attendant controversy) was on the horizon. Thus, some of the predictions are already slightly obsolete. (It is amusing how little controversy there is over the idea of China digitizing the entire contents of the British Museum and Library, compared to how much uproar there is in Europe right now over Google.)

Still, it’s easy to see how this global scanning project inspired Vinge’s future version—scanning books a page at a time is a time-intensive process, even if you saw the spine off and put the stack of paper in a sheet-feeding scanner. With better computers it would be much faster to scan them in windblown fragments, and digitize all the world’s knowledge in a matter of weeks.

This does, of course, depend on printed books getting so deprecated that nobody minds if scores upon scores of them—some possibly valuable antiques—go through the shredder in the name of digital reincarnation. It is difficult to see that happening now—but on the other hand, if technology marches on as quickly as Rainbows End predicts, before long entire generations may come to think of printed books as akin to papyrus scrolls and stone tablets. (Even for an e-book fan like myself, that’s a scary thought.)

Faulty Crystal Balls

Still, I’m doubtful it will happen. Predicting the future is always an inaccurate game—if we go by True Names, we should already have direct-brain-stimulation cyberspace and mandatory computing licenses by now. Rainbows End is set as far in our future now as True Names was then—and if it seems like books written now are “more accurate” predictors, that is only because hindsight is 20/20. Things that didn’t come to pass in a book written thirty years ago are easy to spot—but those same things in a book written now will have to wait another thirty years.

There are already a few “predictions” (for the 2005-2010 years) that did not come true—and one irony. At one point in Rainbows End, a character refers to a (fictitious) Terry Pratchett book written after Robert Gu succumbed to Alzheimer’s Disease. Of course, we now know that Terry Pratchett himself has been diagnosed with latent Alzheimer’s.

But as far as prognostication goes, Vinge also isn’t above poking a little fun at himself. As the battle between belief circles rages at the library, one character reflects:

There had been a few debacles in the late Teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or the Zones of Thought?

The Tines and Zones of Thought are, of course, major elements from A Fire Upon the Deep.

Conclusion

Rainbows End is an interesting book for the future it predicts. It presents a fully-realized world, very well fleshed out and with more interesting predictions and characters than I have been able to cover in this review. I highly recommend it.

Ironically for a book where e-books are important, Rainbows End does not seem to be commercially available as an e-book—not on eReader, Fictionwise, or even for Amazon’s Kindle. The HTML version at the Internet Archive appears to be the only way to read it electronically.

Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch, whom we have mentioned within only the last couple of days as a possible investor in Plastic Logic e-readers, made the remarks at an industry trade show in Washington. “People reading news for free on the web, that’s got to change,” Murdoch said.

However, as the Wired article points out, there is no sign yet that Murdoch’s talk is anything more than hot air. He has certainly not asked Google or Yahoo to remove any of his publications from their news aggregation services, let alone moved to sue them. And if such a suit were filed, it is anyone’s guess how it would come out.

Google Books

Those objecting to the Google settlement have a somewhat stronger case. They contend that Google has gamed the legal system, making a huge rights-grab by way of court settlement, unsupported by any act of legislature.

Under the terms of the settlement, only Google would be able to profit from the out-of-print “orphan works” it has scanned in—it could not license them out to others the way it could out-of-print books or books with permission granted by their authors. Anyone else who wanted to do something similar with out-of-print books would need to work its own deals with libraries, scan and proofread the books themselves, get sued, and work out a settlement of their own. Meanwhile, Google has a seven-million-book head start.

Critics have raised the spectacle of Google as a potential monopoly power over orphan works, with the ability to charge whatever price they liked. However, Google representatives claim they would be keeping prices reasonable in an effort to reach as many customers as possible.

Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School. It is not clear that any group will oppose the settlement outright.

As we pointed out recently, the New York Law School group is partly funded by Microsoft.

Taiwan has teamed up with Ingram Digital to digitize the nation’s libraries. From the press release:

The Taiwan Library Consortium, in conjunction with the government of Taiwan, has selected Ingram Digital, an Ingram content company focused on solutions for digital content management, hosting and distribution, to provide e-books and audio books to a majority of the nation’s libraries.

The Taiwan Library Consortium will provide 88, or about 75 percent, of the country’s libraries with access to e-books through this agreement. E-book titles will be accessible to member libraries via Ingram Digital’s e-content aggregation platform, MyiLibrary®. Under the terms of the three-year agreement, Ingram Digital will supply 250,000 users with access to 5,000 digital titles covering a wide spectrum of subject matter. …

Titles that will be available through this agreement were methodically chosen after a one-year survey evaluating usage patterns of print titles. Content will be available in both Chinese and English, continuing a longstanding tradition of providing citizens with access to education through the highest quality reference materials available. …

The agreement marks the third international government-funded deal for Ingram Digital. Ingram Digital is also currently engaged in partnerships with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network and the Joint Information Systems Committee in the United Kingdom.