Not everybody is sanguine about the blackout. On just-launched Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, Paul Carr writes in agreement with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s tweet calling the decision “foolish”. Carr blasts Wales for “[making] a mockery” of Wikipedia’s fundraising appeals to keep the service up and running, and also points out that this conflicts with Wikipedia’s insistence on neutrality in its articles.

The trouble with taking a political stance on one issue is that your silence on every issue becomes a stance. Human rights abuses in Libya? Not as important as SOPA. Roe v Wade? Not as important as SOPA. Everything else that’s happened in the world until now, and everything that will ever happen from this day forward? Not as important as SOPA.

Wales defended the decision to UK paper The Telegraph, explaining that the Wikipedia blackout went world-wide instead of US-only as a result of a vote among members of the Wikipedia community and that the protest is international because the US law has the potential to affect the Internet of the entire world by giving the Department of Justice the ability to seek court orders against websites outside US jurisdiction. He hopes that those who live outside the US but have friends or family who are US voters will ask them to complain to lawmakers on their behalf.

Blackout or not, it seems that the groundswell of opposition to SOPA is making itself felt. Bill opponent Darrell Issa has said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has told him that SOPA is effectively stalled until a “consensus” can be reached. Meanwhile, the bill’s sponsor, Lamar Smith, has announced he will be removing one of SOPA’s most controversial provisions, which would have allowed the aforementioned court orders against non-US websites.

And after being prodded by Internet petitions, President Obama issued a statement saying the administration would not support the online censorship that SOPA opponents feel the bill threatens, while apparently challenging those opponents to come up with their own solution that will meet the goals of fighting foreign piracy while not messing with Internet infrastructure or safe harbor provisions.

And even the head of the MPAA has been forced to admit that “DNS filtering is really off the table”—at least for now.

Still, this is not a time to let our guard down. And while I’ll be annoyed at losing access to Wikipedia for a day, given that it’s one of my few diversions at work, if the blackout helps hammer home the nails in SOPA’s coffin I will wholeheartedly support it.

For those who want to make a point on their own websites about SOPA censorship, CloudFlare has an app that lets people “self-censor” their websites in protest.

"We were excited to be involved with acquiring the Twitter archives because it’s a unique record of our time," [LoC digital initiatives program manager Bill] Lefurgy said. "It’s also a unique way of communication. It’s not so much that people are going to be interested in what you or I had for lunch, which some people like to say on Twitter."

Researchers will be able to search and data-mine the archives for interesting data. It will not include privacy-protected postings.

(Found via Slashdot.)

The reps point out that consumers really like reading free e-books (about half of e-book buyers read free e-books) and expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower. Half of all e-readers are given as gifts, but less than 1% of e-books are.

Barriers to widespread e-book adoption are limits on sharing, borrowing and reselling. These issues need to be addressed before more jump on the e-book bandwagon, Bowker’s Carl Kulo said. (Kindle library lending is on the way. You might see the ability to resell your e-books on Kindle roughly when hell freezes over.)

As I pointed out a few days ago, one of the drivers of casual “piracy” is readers’ feeling that they should be able to “lend” books they’ve paid for to friends or family. But in order to do that, the would-be pirates have to be savvy enough to strip the DRM (which has gotten easier, but still requires some nontrivial technical knowledge). The inability to share e-books without having to do all that could be keeping people from buying.

Of course, as the article points out, publishers will probably do something about that “roughly when hell freezes over.”

Here are some examples from the blog A New Kind of Book:

here’s what Reif wrote on July 19th:

Package from Serbia just arrived. I did not request such a package. I wonder the % of unrequested packages that end up being life-changing.

That’s odd, I thought. A little quirky, a little spooky in our post-Unabomber world. Next, came…well, what came next is I went away. I didn’t check Twitter for a day or so, determined to keep my vacation free of digital bits. I cheated, alas, and what I saw from Reif was a report that:

Package is actually a series of packages nestled inside of each other, like a matryoshka doll. I’m on package #13. No sign of the center.

Hmm. Interesting. Now he had me thinking. Partly it was journalist-type questions: What’s he up to with all this? Should I ping him and say “Not to be all Mom-ish, but, careful, man, ok? His next post arrived the following day:

I am at box #54, with still no sign of the center. At least the boxes are getting smaller. #54 was the size of old woman’s fist.

[...]

And yet in this new, serialized Twitter tale, Reif wove for me, and others, another kind of story. One that didn’t immerse us as deeply as a novel. But it showcased the quirky, elegant writing that seems to be Reif’s style. And part of the charm here stems from the spaces that Reif inserted. The way he let his story linger and unfurl. He didn’t, it’s worth noting, try to take an already-told tale and sprinkle it out via Twitter. He composed, for this new medium, a new kind of story.

Via A New Kind of Book

(Photo: chillihead)

The Float Reader provides access to a user’s Scribd documents, as well as to articles from 150 partners including The Atlantic, Time, Salon, and TechCrunch, and to excerpts of articles friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Scribd. It will also allow Instapaper-like slurping of content via a browser bookmarklet. One clever feature is that the app will support either scrolling of text by sliding your finger up and down on the screen, or flipping to a whole new page by sliding it left or right.

Scribd plans to start running ads against some content later this year, but also plans to offer a Netflix-style service where one flat fee allows access to paywalled content from a number of publishers. This is an idea with some potential—as TechCrunch points out, it seems more likely to succeed than requiring people to pay separately every time they want to read something—but time will tell if they can get enough publishers on board to make it appealing.

Although this doesn’t have anything directly to do with e-books, it points out a way that authors can use digital media to help raise money for worthy causes. Yesterday, tornadoes ripped through Joplin, Missouri, a city about 90 miles west of my home in Springfield, killing at least 89 people and leaving many more homeless.

Galleycat reports that to help raise money for a relief effort through Shelterbox, authors Maureen Johnson and Robin Wasserman are auctioning full book critiques on Twitter.

Johnson led a similar fundraiser for earthquake victims in New Zealand and Japan. Here’s more about the charity: “Shelterbox is an organization that goes into areas of the world affected by disaster with large green boxes that contain shelters and the materials needed for people to restart their lives on some level. The boxes always include a top-quality tent, and they usually include stoves, blankets, water purification systems, and tools. This is true, life-saving stuff, hand-delivered by volunteers trained in survival techniques.”

It’s one thing to hear about crises in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan, and quite another for something like this to strike a major city so close to home. Here’s hoping that many people can pitch in and help out.

But when it comes to important matters such as medical advice, there’s an amazing amount of misinformation out there. It seems a lot more people enjoy giving medical advice than are really qualified to give it.

One problem is, when it comes to giving out advice, doctors are sadly underrepresented in social media. A CNet report explains that a number of commonly-held perceptions about doctors often limit their ability to participate.

Part of it is that doctors are reluctant to make medical pronouncements on patients about whom they know very little. (Reputable doctors, anyway—that didn’t stop one alleged physician from declaring Steve Jobs had weeks to live based on looking at a picture of his butt!) Also, doctors are worried that if they are seen posting a lot of comments on-line, it will look as if they aren’t paying enough attention to their jobs in real life. One doctor who ceased blogging about his daily practice explained:

"I took a lot of heat from it among doctors, old doctors, and I actually stopped doing it because I thought I’d rather blog about the health care industry rather than what I was doing in my practice," [Dr. Jay] Parkinson told CNET. He also said that a doctor with a social-media presence may be more exposed to scrutiny from state authorities with the power to revoke a medical license. "Doctors are guilty until proven innocent in the eyes of the state. It has nothing to do with malpractice or anything like that…It’s your life on the line; it’s your livelihood."

As much spurious medical advice as there is floating around on-line, though, it would be good if doctors could find a way to balance their professional obligations with social media. Though nothing is going to prevent people from cherry-picking the advice they want in any event.

The new section is essentially a tweaked presentation of the @RollingStone twitter feed, adding a bent-back-magazine-style frame for the smaller version of the article rather than a scroll-up half-screen version. (This frame seems to be used for all their content partners’ publications, since they know the source will never be bigger than a tweet.) As a result, sometimes short-form tweets share the overview page with framed long-form articles.

The articles themselves are taken from the Rolling Stone website—they’re not content exclusive to Flipboard. (Indeed, Rolling Stone is quick to point out that most of the magazine’s content is still print-only, not on-line or on Flipboard.)

And Rolling Stone is far from the only major name to grace Flipboard’s magazine section. It boasts a number of other titles as well, including Elle, All Things Digital, and Washington Post Magazine. As well as, potentially, any magazine or other news source with a twitter feed.

Save for the custom framing, there’s really nothing here that a Flipboard user couldn’t do for himself just by adding the Twitter feed of any magazine or blog that has one (such as, for instance, TeleRead, or the long-form article aggregator “Give Me Something to Read”). But that just underscores how powerful Flipboard’s platform really is—and how much better it works for viewing magazine-style content than any of the bloated appgazines that big media have foisted off.

It’s just a 1st-generation model, and only 8 gigs where my original one was 32—but I’m not going to look this gift horse in the mouth. It was free, it is in good working order, and will work with my existing accessories including the case and the FM radio/charger. (Unlike later-generation iPods/iPhones, it will work with accessories meant for the old-style iPods.) It won’t work with iBooks, but then I don’t buy from the iBookstore anyway and Stanza will read all my EPUBs just as well and a remarkable number of other e-book options are still available.

(To my annoyance, I somehow managed to delete all my backups from the old iPod Touch some time ago, so some of the stuff I was hoping to recover, such as my Distant Shore message threads, is gone forever.)

And only on getting it did I truly realize just how much I’d missed having it. It’s great to be able to carry around e-books in my pocket for whip-out reading any time I want to—or knowing that I can check my e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, etc. from anywhere that has a wifi signal. The funny thing is, I haven’t even put any music on it yet. The iPod Touch really does represent something entirely different from the mp3 players of old. It would probably be more accurate to call it a mini-tablet. For those who don’t mind the screen size, it’s still a very good e-reading option.

And as I pointed out in a comment to my original post about losing the iPod, these devices really are becoming a part of our lives, an extension of our selves that we feel lost and violated without. When we invest them with a portion of our lives and then lose them, we essentially lose that portion of our lives.

Some things have changed in the months since I lost my original iPod Touch. I’m amazed at how easy jailbreaking was. I only had to go to JailbreakMe.com from the Touch’s browser and it did all the work via the web—no more downloading of images, connecting to the computer, and running command-line software. (It only supports up to iOS version 4.0.1, but then the first-gen Touch can’t be upgraded past OS 3 anyway.)

Also, in getting Stanza set up, I noticed that the method for creating a Dropbox-hosted downloadable Stanza library has changed since we originally covered it here and here. The old method does not work anymore at all, and has been replaced by a program called calibre2opds which, in fact, makes it much easier.

I still plan to purchase a 4th-generation iPod Touch when I can afford to, but until then this iPod Touch is going to make a very good alternative.

As Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb reports, it actually incorporates most of the functions possible in Google Reader, including starring items, sharing items, marking as read, and so on. That’s certainly a lot more than the Pulse RSS reader has yet managed to do.

I tried the new feature out, and it is really neat to see my Google Reader Feed appear as my own personalized magazine. Given that I don’t know many of the people who are my Facebook friends, but I personally selected every newsfeed I want to read, this feels more like a personalized “me-gazine” than ever.

On the other hand, I don’t think this is going to supplant Reeder as my normal Google Reader reading method any time soon. As the screenshot demonstrates, I can only see a few stories at a time, from all my sources put together, flipping backward through time—and given that I have to scan through literally hundreds of headlines per day seeking bloggable nuggets, I just don’t have the time for pleasure browsing all of them like that.

Reeder lets me focus on single sources and go through and check all their articles off one at a time, and I do that starting the moment I wake up—I take the iPad into bed with me since I use Easy Relax Ultimate to help me sleep, and go through my Reeder feed before I even get out of bed in the morning.

Of course, for the average person, who doesn’t have to worry about digging for gold, this could be the best way yet to read Google Reader.

However, Robert Scoble notes that this still isn’t quite the version of Flipboard he is waiting for.

What version is that? The one that will filter through all of these social networks and use the technology they purchased when they acquired the Ellerdale Project to really find the good stuff out of the thousands of items that are aimed at me every day.

If Flipboard is coming out with something like that, sometime next year, it could make an already great thing even better.

On a related note, Wired has a spotlight on Flipboard, talking about what makes it such a great way to read content on the iPad.

As Jay Yarow said on Business Insider:

From a higher level, it’s also illustrative of how Apple thinks about the iPad. Flipboard is an app that translates the web into something unique for iPad users. That’s exactly what Apple wants.

And consider what it might mean that the “iPad App of the Year” is all about reading, socially. Maybe the iPad isn’t meant only for reading, but it can change and enhance the reading experience in ways that more limited single-purpose readers can’t—making reading more social, and making social networks more about reading.

Similarly, we treat instant-messaging and social networking as extensions of the face-to-face conversations we used only to be able to have in close proximity to one another. It can be just as aggravating to think of some zinger and not be able to turn around and share it with a few hundred of our closest friends

But this Internet fact-checking and conversing has been causing problems for US courts ever since, A survey has shown that, since 1999, at least 90 verdicts have been challenged because jurors used the Internet in ways they weren’t supposed to. And with the convenience of the iPhone and 3G/4G Internet, the frequency of these results has been increasing: over half of the cases happened in the last two years.

And the contested results have not always come about as a result of something obvious, like publicly expressing a preconceived opinion before hearing the whole case or reading news coverage from outside the courtroom. One manslaughter conviction was overturned simply because the jury foreman looked up the definition of the word “prudent” in an online dictionary.

There are some efforts underway to restrict juror access to external information—confiscating technological devices at the courtroom door, or updating jury instructions to include specific technological prohibitions.

Last year, New York’s Office of Court Administration’s Committee on Criminal Jury Instructions also amended its recommended "jury admonitions" to include even more specific wording: "In this age of instant electronic communication and research, I want to emphasize that in addition to not conversing face to face with anyone about the case, you must not communicate with anyone about the case by any other means, including by telephone, text messages, email, internet chat or chat rooms, blogs, or social websites, such as facebook, myspace or twitter."

But others suggest that it might be a better idea to update the judicial understanding of the jury’s role in a case, given the changing mindset of the general public with regard to information access.

Georgia State University Law School professor Caren Myers Morrison says it’s frustrating for jurors when information presented at trial is confusing, especially when they know they can easily access more data online.

"We need to rethink the jury’s role for the 21st century and restore some of the jury’s active engagement in the process of fact-finding," she said.

As with so many cases of friction between the new Internet generation and the old way of doing things, this is a conflict that is only going to get worse as time goes on, unless some solution can be found. I wonder if it will be possible?

(Found via Slashdot.)

Krozser spends much of the essay talking about a proposed all-inclusive system for aggregating book-based conversation—”user-generated content” or “UGC” around books. Even Facebook and Twitter are too limiting, she explains, because they’re still “walled communities”, even if the areas enclosed by the walls are huge. Even though she admits she’s indulging in “magical thinking”, it’s an interesting thought experiment.

What she is fundamentally talking about is a way to combine every single public book-related conversation on the ‘net into one place. While it is hard to imagine this happening for every conversation, perhaps if such a system were designed right it could at least be a home to many of them.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that if such a thing were built anyone would actually come to it. As a friend who I was discussing the article with pointed out, if you want to find conversation around a book or e-book now, you simply type it into a search engine. And he also suggested that it sounded an awful lot like Google Sidewiki and other website-annotation services—ideas that seemed interesting at first but largely failed because almost nobody actually wanted to use them. (I know it’s very rare for me to see any Google Sidewiki posts about any but the most popular sites.)

The level of social discourse available around books on the Internet now is certainly way beyond anything we could manage before the Internet came along, and it is worth trying to figure out ways it could be greater—but it’s unclear whether we really need such a thing, or how many people would actually use it if we had it.

For one thing, it runs the risk of turning into specious “magical thinking”.

What do I mean? Well, consider the following essential truths about publishing: crap sells, except when it doesn’t. Quality never sells, except when it does. Good men die screaming in the gutter; the wicked flourish. To quote William Goldman: nobody knows anything. Given that we live in a state of total chaos, it is only natural that individuals study the chicken’s entrails for guidance. What’s that spelled out in the guts? Blogging! Facebook! Awesome! What could go wrong? Blogging is free, plus you can subvert the hierarchical media model and go direct to your readers. Wait for it, but here comes the magical thinking: Hey ma, lookit me! Any minute now I’m going to go viral and everybody’s going to buy my book!

The problem is, Kalder points out, if you build it they will not necessarily come. Or if they do come, they might not stick around very long—the next YouTube video is only a click away.

Further, blogging and social networking require skill sets that many writers simply don’t have. After all, writing is usually a solitary activity, meaning that the authors don’t have to interact that much with other people. And when everybody is blogging or social networking, how exactly are you going to stand out from the crowd?

If writers are going to engage in social media or blogging, Kalder says, they should do it for the right reasons. Whatever they do, it should be something they enjoy doing for its own sake, so they won’t burn out if it doesn’t pan out right away.

Kalder has some good advice here. While social networking, blogging, and other self-promotion has helped a number of authors, such as Joe Konrath or John Scalzi, it is not a magic bullet, and not only does it take effort on the part of the author, it also takes time in which he could be writing other books. And as I noted in May, too much community-building with fans can have its own pitfalls.

Still, if it’s something writers are comfortable with, it can certainly be a rewarding experience—especially for those whose works can easily be obtained electronically, while recent contact with the author still has readers in the mood to impulse-buy.

The Kindle already allows some integrated social network sharing, but does not seem to go as fully into the networking aspect as Rethink’s application. Certainly, social networking is one of the major drivers of Internet use nowadays, especially on mobile devices—and lack of it has been called out repeatedly as one of the major weaknesses of iPad magazine applications, while apps such as Flipboard effectively turn social networking into e-magazines.

It remains to be seen whether this technology will gain wider adoption, however. As TechCrunch notes, for it to work cross-platform, e-book companies such as Amazon or Apple would have to open their e-book marketplaces, which it does not appear any of them want to do.

Rethink Books is offering access to a limited beta of its iPad app via GetSocialBooks.com.