Cites & insights Crawford at large.

              Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 1
Cites & Insights:
Crawford at Large
Volume 2, Number 10: August 2002 ISSN 1534- 0937 Walt Crawford
Bibs & Blather
I Just Don’t Know…
Some articles and postings don’t seem to belong
anywhere in my regular slots, but I feel obliged to
make some comment. Take, for example, Abby
Kalan’s “ On my mind” commentary in the May
2002 American Libraries, “ Are we sabotaging ourselves
with our ‘ professional’ image?” She says librarians do
wear “ last century’s clothing” (“ We’re all guilty,” one
of those universal phrases that sets me off) and that
librarians need to “ think like capitalists.” Focusing
on “ customers” makes sense to me. It’s the start of
the column that got to me. She notes a friend’s “ li-brarian
fantasy”— the one where a cliché librarian,
“ suddenly overcome with desire, casts off the glasses,
unpins the hair, and voilà, she is every heterosexual
man’s fantasy woman. Of course, this friend would
never have created such a fantasy about a doctor or
a lawyer.”
Read that last sentence again. Maybe she’s only
talking her about her friend. But if she’s really say-ing
men don’t fantasize about prim female lawyers
or doctors being overcome with desire and turning
into fantasy women— it seems to me there are
enough TV shows and movies to indicate otherwise.
Glib Naysaying
Peter Suber prepared an interesting response to the
lead essay in last month’s Cites & Insights. You’ll find
that response “ Feedback: Your Insights.”
That wasn’t the only fallout from my essay. Ste-van
Harnad wrote a well- argued post to Septem-ber98-
Forum@ listserver. sigmaxi. org, which made its
way to me. Since he didn’t submit it as feedback to
Cites & Insights, I won’t quote the whole thing ( it
was posted on July 2, and you may be able to find it
in list archives), but I will quote one paragraph:
Slow progress? Researchers and their institutions are
to blame, for being so slow to realize what the opti-mal
and inevitable solution is, and just going ahead
and doing it. They will realize it, sooner or later. But
glib nay- saying like Walt’s will get some of the his-toric
credit for having helped to make it a little later
rather than sooner.
I went back and read that again, then waited a few
days to see whether Stevan Harnad would issue a
post claiming that someone had forged his email
address. Since that never happened, I went back to
the original essay to examine my “ glib nay- saying,”
apparently so potent that this Webzine is slowing
the whole pace of scholarly progress!
Here’s what I said about Harnad and his self-archiving
solution:
While I’ve consistently questioned Stevan Harnad’s
economic assertions, his proposed network of archi-val
repositories makes sense as part of the scholarly
system— and it’s also ( I think) a key part of FOS.
Note “ as part of.” [ Followed by other pieces of the
puzzle.]… Maybe I’m wrong and Peter Suber and/ or
Stevan Harnad are right. Harnad is fond of ‘ inevita-ble’
to define his preferred future, a huge strike
against it in my vocabulary…. Both sets of initia-tives
look good to me as portions of a complex mix,
but not as overall solutions.
That’s it. I dislike “ inevitable” ( from Harnad or
anyone else), I question the economic assertions
Harnad’s always made and I don’t believe a network
of archival repositories is a total solution. That’s
some naysaying!
Inside This Issue
Feedback: Your Insights...................................................... 2
The Filtering Follies............................................................ 4
disContent: “ Dear AT& T Broadband…”........................... 7
More Literacy Notes .......................................................... 9
Ebooks and Etext.............................................................. 10
PC Group Reviews............................................................ 13
I don’t care for being scapegoated. If failing to
fall in line 100% with a crusade, even while support-ing
the primary technique of the crusader, is “ glib
naysaying,” then I’m guilty. If anything in Cites &
Insights is keeping scholars from self- archiving, an
activity that I have never once opposed, then some-thing’s
gone horribly wrong. We already know
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 2
they’re serving snowcones in Hades these days, but
this is truly bizarre. Maybe those really are flocks of
pigs flying overhead, not crows…
I do owe an apology to Andrew Odlyzko, with
no “ s”— I have trouble spelling his name right. Sorry.
Feedback: Your Insights
Scholarly Journals and
Grand Solutions
Peter Suber prepared a thoughtful commentary on
my July 2002 essay, which he distributed to a Topica
group related to the FOS movement. Here it is, in
full, followed by my off- the- cuff response, his addi-tional
note, and my last word ( this time around).
Peter Suber’s Comments
In the July issue of Cites & Insights, Walt Crawford
devotes his opening essay to reflections on the FOS
movement.
In the process he comments on:
( 1) my essay on why FOS progress has been
slow, from FOSN for 5/ 15/ 02,
( 2) my follow- up in FOSN for 5/ 23/ 02,
( 3) Jeffrey Young’s article in the Chronicle of
Higher Education on the Public Library of Science,
( 4) and his own article in the May 2002 ECon-tent,
“ Electronic Access to Scientific Articles: An-other
Perspective.”
He also comments on FOS positions taken by
Stevan Harnad and Andrew Odlyzko. Here are some
responses.
Walt writes:
If, after you read these articles [ by Suber and
Young], you’re satisfied that your Grand Solution
works for the future, keeps scholarship healthy,
keeps previous resources available and libraries
healthy, supports indexing and abstracting, and has a
solid chance of success— well, then, I wish you well.
Yes, I’m still satisfied. That may go without saying.
But Walt implies that my articles, at least together
with Young’s, cast doubt on the merits of FOS.
( Young’s article reported that the PLoS boycott was
a “ bust”, but that the PLoS founders have not given
up and plan to launch a series of open- access jour-nals.)
What they do instead is show why progress has been
slow. It’s important to distinguish explanations of slow pro-gress,
and even recognition of obstacles, from grounds for
pessimism. Martin Luther King repeatedly pointed
out that progress toward civil rights was slow, but he
never interpreted the obstacles as reasons to think
civil rights were unattainable or undesirable. The
analogy doesn’t have to hold on all points to hold on
the important point. Compared to the pace permit-ted
by our opportunities, progress toward FOS has
been slow. I enumerated eight reasons why, but none
them implies that FOS is unattainable or undesir-able.
Neither does the failure of the PLoS boycott
and the PLoS shift to a new strategy.
Like Walt, I want to keep scholarship and libraries
healthy and preserve support for indexing and abstracting.
I believe that all other FOS proponents do as well. FOS is
not in conflict with these goals, just moving more
slowly than it might. Or, if anyone does see a con-flict
between these goals and the goals of FOS, then
I’d like to see a more specific account of it.
[ Later], after summarizing my list of reasons
why FOS progress slow, Walt adds,
If I take issue with any of these, it’s the concept that
print journals are inherently undesirable, and I’m
not sure that’s what Suber is saying.
Walt’s suspicion is correct; that’s not what I was say-ing.
I criticized journals that still demand that au-thors
transfer their copyright, but otherwise I didn’t
criticize any kind of journal. I merely pointed out
that most of the prestigious journals are still priced
and printed, which explains why most authors con-tinue
to submit articles to them. I also pointed out
that journals might be daunted by the prospect of
adopting a novel funding model that would allow
them to dispense with subscription and licensing
fees.
Because print journals cost much more to pro-duce
than online- only journals, print journals rarely
have open- access editions. However, it’s important
that there is a growing number of exceptions, for
example BMJ, Cortex, and the BMC journals. The
main reason why print journals are not “ inherently
undesirable” is that they are compatible with open-access,
even if the conjunction is uncommon. I’ve
made this case in many places, most recently in the
inaugural issue of the BMC’s Journal of Biology.
While print journals are not “ inherently unde-sirable,”
most of them are too expensive to adopt
open access, the form of distribution required to
maximize impact for authors and access for readers.
But rather than cast them as enemies or obstacles,
it’s more constructive to see them simply as the
competition.
As the BOAI says in its FAQ,
Journals that do not wish to provide open access
have nothing to fear from BOAI except competition.
We do not endorse the piracy or expropriation of
their intellectual property. We do not demand that
they change their access policies and do not threaten
them with boycotts or other sanctions if they do not
change. We encourage them to offer open access,
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 3
and will help find the money to defray the costs of
the transition to open access for journals willing to
make the change.... Our project is constructive, not
destructive.... For our constructive activity to suc-ceed,
no institution or business needs to change its
policies. However, we welcome the assistance of all
who share our vision.
[ Later], Walt criticizes Stevan Harnad:
[ H] is proposed network of archival repositories
makes sense as part of the scholarly system— and it’s
also ( I think) a key part of FOS.
Stevan can speak for himself; but as I read him, he
agrees with this. Self- archiving is only part of the
solution and must be complemented by journals. It’s
not self- sufficient because it doesn’t include peer
review. Self- archiving is the component of the solu-tion
that provides immediate open access to new
work, and that doesn’t depend on the ( slow) adop-tion
of new funding models by journals. It’s the
component of the solution that doesn’t depend on
anyone but the author and to some extent the au-thor’s
institution. But it needs another component
to provide peer review, and Steven is emphatic that
peer review must be part of any complete solution.
[ Again quoting from the July essay:]
But SPARC also serves a purpose — and SPARC
leads to priced journals, some of them in print form,
not the pure “ free online” model that Suber favors.
As part of a network of efforts to make access to
STM articles more affordable and more assured in
the long term, SPARC is a good tool; in FOS terms, I
have to assume that it’s a negative force.
I love SPARC; it’s a very positive force.
First, SPARC lends its assistance to both free
and affordable journals, not just the latter….
Second, even affordable journals count as pro-gress.
Again, to quote the BOAI FAQ:
We hope these initiatives [ to make journals afford-able]
succeed, because their success will make schol-arly
literature more accessible than it is today.
However, we believe that the specific literature on
which BOAI focuses, the peer- reviewed research lit-erature
in all disciplines, can and should be entirely
free for readers. If the initiatives working on afford-able
literature are persuaded by the case we have
made, then we welcome them to join us. If they are
not persuaded, then we wish them success in making
progress toward wider access.
If Walt’s suspicion of grand solutions is based on a
suspicion of haste in making fundamental change
where the stakes are high, then I share it. However, I
wouldn’t characterize the goal of open- access to
peer- reviewed research literature as a grand solution
in this sense. The main reason is that gradualism
and flexibility are possible in selecting the means to
this end. I endorse both.
So does the BOAI:
There is no need to favor one of these solutions [ for
funding journals] over the others for all disciplines
or nations, and no need to stop looking for other,
creative alternatives... While we endorse the two
strategies [ of self- archiving and open- access jour-nals],
we also encourage experimentation with fur-ther
ways to make the transition from the present
methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility,
experimentation, and adaptation to local circum-stances
are the best ways to assure that progress in
diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long- lived.
( If I keep quoting the BOAI, it’s because it repre-sents
the kind of FOS I advocate. This is no acci-dent;
I was one the drafters.)
Here’s how I put the case for gradualism— and
incidentally, the benefits of slow progress— in a letter
to the Chronicle of Higher Education for October 12,
2001. The letter responds to a Chronicle article by
John Ewing and a Nature article by Richard Kaser
[ references omitted here], which both argued against
haste in making fundamental changes to the schol-arly
communication system.
It is far- fetched to assume that the journal system
will change suddenly or before we adequately under-stand
what is happening. Free online scholarship is
emerging gradually, one journal or archive at a time.
The slow pace of change provides all the time we
need to monitor our experiment, measure its impact,
make midcourse corrections, and chart an informed
future course.
[ Finally], Walt: Thanks for your public reflections
on FOS. I wish that all those who were unpersuaded
were as open to persuasion as you are, and as willing
to read and respond to the arguments.
Best wishes, Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy
Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374, Email
peters@ earlham. edu.
My Response
Peter,
I appreciate your thoughtful response to my es-say.
With your permission— I always ask permission
these days— I’d like to include part or all of it as Fol-lowup
in a future Cites & Insights. If I do so, I think
my only real demurrers might be:
1. I don’t argue that FOS is a bust or will be a
bust. I only argue that it is not a Grand Solution,
but part of a network of efforts that should and
probably will improve the price- of- access problem.
This may be a terminology question.
2. Ditto OAI and Stevan Harnad’s self- archiving
initiatives. I tend to take issue with Harnad because
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 4
he tends to make sweeping ( and sometimes unsup-portable)
statements, and particularly when, for ex-ample,
he asserts that digital archiving is simply not
a problem. ( Cf. the text- e e- conference.)
3. I believe that the PLoS petition was demon-strably
a bust, one that may have done more harm
than good: It showed that hundreds of thousands of
scientists were not, in fact, willing to back their as-serted
belief with action. My poker analogy was
carefully drawn.
I don’t need to be persuaded that FOS is a valu-able
piece of the puzzle, a valuable small- s “ solution”
to the complex access situation. Even as a non-scholar,
but one deeply interested and involved in
libraries and the pricing puzzle, I see that it’s a wor-thy
set of ideas that’s made a difference and will
probably make more difference in the future.
The distinction is between small- s “ solution,” of
which there are many, some of which do more good
than others but most of which improve the situa-tion,
and the big- S Grand Solution, the “ inevitable
optimal” future of all scholarly communications ( the
quoted phrase being one of Harnad’s favorites).
I believe that many small- s solutions, including
all but one of the ones I named in my commentary,
will help-- indeed, that they’ve already helped con-vince
some of the big international publishers to
moderate their enthusiastic price increases and, in
some cases, improve long- term access.
I don’t believe that any one Solution makes
sense as a universal, comprehensive answer. The
world doesn’t work that way.
Based on this commentary, it appears that you
don’t, either— in which case, there’s no argument
between us.
Another Note from Peter Suber
I don’t argue that FOS is a stand- alone or self-sufficient
solution. There are many kinds of schol-arly
literature unsuited to open access— all the writ-ings
for which authors expect payment, including
textbooks, some monographs, and some software.
But I do argue that open access is the best solution
for the special body of literature for which authors
do not expect payment— journal literature mostly,
but also theses and dissertations, some monographs,
some software, most gray literature, and all statutes
and judicial opinions.
If arguing that open access is the best solution
for a certain category of literature is a Grand Solu-tion,
at least for that category, then I’m advocating a
Grand Solution. If recognizing other categories
where open access is inappropriate means that I’m
not advocating a Grand Solution, then I’m not. This
may clarify the terminological problem.
In this sense I fully agree with your “ network of
efforts” position. But within the category of litera-ture
that authors give away, I support pluralism and
experimentation of means to the end of open access,
but no forms of pricing or distribution other than
open access.
Getting In The Last Word
There is, in fact, a disagreement— but it’s such an
arcane one that it isn’t worth pursuing. Peter Suber
argues that open access is the best solution for writ-ings
for which authors do not expect payment. I
don’t disagree in principle. Is that achievable for all
such literature? I doubt it, but that doesn’t make it
undesirable— particularly when pursued the way Pe-ter
Suber and other FOS people do. In essence, the
disagreement is one of those “ big bets” that would
take longer to settle than either of us is likely to be
alive. Peter explicitly appreciates other “ pieces of the
puzzle” that work in other ways to reduce the cost
of access to scholarship and improve its long- term
prospects. What more can I ask?
Peter Suber is a serious participant in this com-plex
situation. I’m an observer. I appreciate the time
he took to respond to my commentary, his immedi-ate
posting of my reply to the same list, and his im-mediate
permission to publish his comments here.
I’ll continue to check the FOS Weblog ( which re-placed
the FOS Newsletter, no longer feasible now
that Suber’s sabbatical has ended) and include ap-propriate
material here. The access situation isn’t
going away any time soon, and I’ll continue to men-tion
some of the many ways of alleviating intolerable
costs and access restrictions— and, of course, making
sometimes- ignorant comments on them as well.
The Filtering Follies
As expected, the government appealed the CIPA de-cision
to the Supreme Court. I devote half of the
October “ Crawford Files” in American Libraries to the
real issues in CIPA, excerpted from the plaintiff’s
joint post- trial brief. The second half of that column
is a challenge for facts behind the folklore that ALA
ostracizes pro- filtering librarians or punishes libraries
that filter. If you’re not a member of ALA, join— but,
short of that, “ Crawford Files” shows up about a
week before issue date at ALOnline and stays avail-able
online permanently, as far as I can tell. I won’t
repeat the summary here. The post- trial brief is
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 5
available from ALA on the CIPA page on its Website
( www. ala. org, which also leads to ALOnline).
CIPA Notes
First came the news reports. WiredNews. com posted a
Declan McCullagh report at 7: 01 a. m. PDT on May
31, 16 minutes after AP’s story hit the wires. The
AP story quotes a single key sentence from the mas-sive
district court ruling: “ Any public library that
adheres to CIPA’s conditions will necessarily restrict
patrons’ access to a substantial amount of protected
speech in violation of the First Amendment.” That
story summarizes the Justice Department argument
thusly: “ Internet smut is so pervasive that protec-tions
are necessary to keep it away from youngsters,
and… the law simply calls for libraries to use the
same care in selecting online content that they use
for books and magazines. They also point out that
libraries can turn down the federal funding if they
want to provide unfiltered Web access.” The first
sentence, if taken literally, would suggest that the
only reasonable way for public libraries to offer
Internet access is through a mechanism that goes
only to sites specifically selected by librarians.
McCullagh’s report notes other court comments,
including this one: “ Filtering products’ shortcomings
will not be solved through a technical solution in the
foreseeable future.” He quotes Justice Department
attorney Rupa Bhattacharyya: “ There is no constitu-tional
right to immediate, anonymous access to
speech, for free, in a public library.” But a key previ-ous
ruling— one that upheld a restriction on Federal
funding— stated that Congressional spending power
“ may not be used to induce the states to engage in
activities that would themselves be unconstitu-tional.”
Both reports note two previous Congres-sional
attempts to restrict online porn, both partially
or wholly overturned.
That same day, ALA issued a news release enti-tled
“ ALA applauds federal court ruling on the Chil-dren’s
Internet Protection Act,” which offers a
succinct statement of ALA’s reasons for suing and
ends, “ We commend the judges for affirming that
local libraries, working with families and trustees,
should continue to determine what works best in
their communities.”
A CNN. com article by Terry Frieden included a
charming quote from John Ashcroft, appearing on
“ Larry King Live”:
Very frankly, I think the courts need to find a way to
respect the Constitution and defend our children.
And we’ve got to be very careful that we don’t ener-gize
individuals whose object it is to abuse the chil-dren
of America, and to have that happen on the
Internet.
The courts did find a way to respect the Constitu-tion.
Your guess as to the meaning of the second
sentence is as good as mine.
The Legal Intelligencer offered a longer summary
of the decision on June 3 ( downloaded from
www. law. com), “ Children’s Internet Protection Act
struck down.” The magnitude of overblocking shows
in excerpts selected from the decision: “ Commer-cially
available filtering programs erroneously block
a huge amount of speech that is protected by the
First Amendment.” Somehow, “ huge” strikes me as
more definitive than “ substantial.” This report also
included this note: “ Stefan Presser, the ACLU’s legal
director in Pennsylvania, said he hopes the ruling
will convince Congress to give up its effort to regu-late
speech on the Internet since the courts have also
struck down two previous laws.” If you don’t have
time for the full decision, this summary shows a
lawyer’s insights and points out where the District
Court “ took the easy way out” and ducked some
ALA/ ACLU arguments. For example, the Feds
claimed that the law should stand unless plaintiffs
could show that any public library complying with
CIPA necessarily violated the First Amendment,
while the plaintiffs thought the test shouldn’t be
that strict. The court basically said, “ Since the strict
test [ urged by the government] fails, we won’t
bother with the looser test.” The decision also clari-fies
the “ public forum” issue, asserting that the
Internet is an open forum and not directly compara-ble
to a library’s collection.
Analyses and Commentary
Seth Finkelstein, the researcher who argues convinc-ingly
that “ censorware” is a better name for filtering
software, popped in to Web4Lib on May 31 to note
the CIPA decision and his pleasure that the court
seems to have used some of his anticensorware work
in the decision. Specifically, the decision discusses
“ loophole” sites ( e. g., Google’s cached copies and
anonymizers), one of Finkelstein’s specialties.
( Finkelstein’s also a fast reader, as this posting ap-peared
at 7: 41 a. m. PDT on the same day the deci-sion
was handed down.) I don’t flag the posting with
“ Recommended” because it’s just a list posting, but
will once again recommend that you visit Finkel-stein’s
site, sethf. com/ anticensorware/. Finkelstein’s
own analysis of the decision, “ CIPA ruling as cen-sorware
argument handbook,” appears at
sethf. com/ freespeech/ censorware/ essays/ cipa_ analysis
. php. This essay, prepared a few days later, calls the
decision “ notable for thoroughly demolishing virtu-
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 6
ally every legal argument in favor of censorware in
public libraries” and focuses on specific elements of
the decision. Recommended.
Dan Gilmor of the Mercury News offered a
straightforward commentary at SiliconValley. com
the next day, “ Three judges stand up for First
Amendment.” The first sentence is sad but, I fear,
true: “ The federal judiciary remains the only branch
of government with the slightest appreciation of
constitutional rights.” Later he notes, “ Libraries
aren’t in the business of watching over the shoulders
of their customers. They are in the business of mak-ing
sure people have access to a broad variety of in-formation.
Librarians are under constant pressure
from the blue- nosed elements of society. They pro-tect
our liberty on a routine basis, with insufficient
credit. The next time you stop at the library, say
thanks.” Recommended.
I’m never quite sure what to make of The Register
( www. theregister. co. uk), with its vulture icon, but
the commentaries are frequently fascinating. One
such is “ Why Net filtering is an abomination,”
posted by Thomas C. Greene on June 6, 2002. He
notes the CIPA ruling and its background ( and notes
that censorware at one time blocked The Register “ in
fear that the world’s tender sprouts might be cor-rupted
by our cynicism”). He might be wrong on
one account: “ Congress, no doubt bamboozled by
numerous rigged demonstrations cheerfully proffered
by the vendors, superstitiously believed that the
technology would work as advertised.” ( There’s
more, and it’s hilarious.) I wonder whether Congress
needed demonstrations, flawed or otherwise, or
whether “ We Must Shield the Children at All Costs���
was, as usual, enough to sell the bill.
Tech Central Station has a June 6 article by
Eugene Volokh, “ Where obscenity meets speech,”
that I’ve seen mentioned often in other postings.
Volock is a professor at UCLA School of Law. He
summarizes the decision and the reasoning neatly,
from the perspective of an established expert on free
speech law, including an absolutely key point: “ The
court held that under the First Amendment, public
libraries, whether or not funded by the federal gov-ernment,
may not filter access for adults.” Barring abso-lute
idiocy from the Supremes, that finding is an
open invitation to plaintiffs to sue any library that
does filter adult access. There’s more at techcentral-station.
com; recommended.
It took a week for most analysts to digest the
decision and draw conclusions; I see at least two
more commentaries also dated June 6. Don Wood
forwarded Steve Chapman’s “ On Internet speech,
librarians to the rescue,” which appeared in the Chi-cago
Tribune ( chicagotribune. com). It’s a fine column
that recognizes that properly- working filters are “ a
fantasy.” Recommended, and I trust quoting the
first paragraph won’t exceed fair use limitations:
The people who have advanced the cause of free
speech have often been wild, radical or dangerous
types— communists, anti- Semites, pornographers,
war resisters, flag- burners, and the like. Today,
storming the barricades of censorship and rejecting
the demands of conformity, we have a different
group of firebrands: America’s librarians.
PCWorld. com posted “ Can the Net even be made safe
for kids” by Anne Ju of Medill News Service. Al-though
“ ever” would seem a better word than
“ even,” it’s an interesting piece that focuses on cen-sorware
companies as much as the decision itself.
“ Supporters say the law should stand, because future
technology will meet its requirements.” Even if true,
which I don’t believe, that would be an idiotic argu-ment:
You don’t establish legal requirements in 2000
that can only be satisfied by technology that might
be available in 2008. She quotes Bruce Taylor of the
National Law Center for Families and Children, who
claims that overturning CIPA “ disenfranchises the
most needy kids from working families” and that
CIPA aimed “ to protect the rights of children.” He
also claims that the court could find only “ a few
thousand sites out of two billion online” that were
mistakenly blocked. That should give you a sense as
to Taylor’s credibility. Ju ends a basically pro-filtering
report by noting Gordon Ross of Net
Nanny’s assertion: “ Today’s technological shortfalls
in filtering shouldn’t cloud the fact that future tech-nical
solutions will likely solve the impasse defined
by last week’s ruling.” I’d bet Ross knows better.
Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald is sympa-thetic
to the aims of CIPA in his June 11, 2002
“ History didn’t foresee cyber sleaze” ( downloaded
from siliconvalley. com). But he recognizes that the
decision was correct and suggests other means, ones
that don’t involve legislation. Those include filtered
children’s terminals with parental permission to turn
off filtering, and privacy screens— just the kind of
things that libraries have been doing.
Here’s one I strongly recommend, from
llrx. com ( www. llrx. com): Mary Minow’s “ The Chil-dren’s
Internet Protection Act: The recent district
court decision in context, for librarians and library
patrons,” posted June 17. The six- page analysis,
done in FAQ form with a table of contents for the
16 questions, is much more succinct than the title—
and it’s an expert analysis. Minow is an attorney
and former librarian. If you only want to read one
analysis of the CIPA ruling, make it this one.
The Justice Department appealed the decision
on June 21, not very many days before the deadline.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 7
A Wired News report by Julia Scheeres notes the con-fidence
of ALA and ACLU that the Supreme Court
will uphold the district court’s ruling, quotes physi-cian
Jonathan Burt of Afraidtoask. com ( a blocked
site that deals with tough health issues) who’s “ dis-appointed
the government is going to waste our time
and taxpayer money on a law that clearly tramples
on my rights of free speech,” and goes on to quote
two “ family” and “ community” types. As usual, they
know better than the courts. Stephen Crampton,
chief counsel for American Family Association: “ The
issue is not whether patrons have been denied First
Amendment rights but rather, whether public librar-ies
must be forced to become purveyors of pornog-raphy
and deliver obscene material to innocent
children.” David Miller of Citizens for Community
Values: “ They already pick and choose which books
their patrons have access to. Why are they unwilling
to filter out Internet material that is harmful to
children?” ( By the way, not that AFA would care, but
obscenity is illegal; obscene material is simply not
part of the issue.)
That same day, Karen Schneider, “ filtering ex-pert
emeritus,” posted an excellent commentary,
“ CIPA and a backwards glance,” on Publib. I rec-ommend
it, but it doesn’t excerpt neatly. You should
be able to find the posting in the Publib archives at
sunsite. Berkeley. edu.
The Opinion Itself
Don’t be too frightened by the “ 190- page” claim. It
all depends. The HTML version I downloaded was a
mess but a mere 110 single- spaced pages.
I find myself exhausted by any attempt to pro-vide
excerpts. We’re talking about a book- length de-cision
here; if I entered the portions I flagged while
reading, it would fill the rest of this issue. The com-mentaries
noted above provide many of the key ele-ments
( and, again, if you don’t have time for all of
them, get Mary Minow’s first). Beyond that, it is a
well- written decision that shows careful attention to
the arguments, the technology, and the law.
I’m not a lawyer or an expert on these issues.
The more I look at the decision, the more I despair
of providing added value by doing my own set of
excerpts. Sorry.
Beyond CIPA
Seth Finkelstein has a wonderful piece at
sethf. com/ anticensorware/ websense/ free_ sex. php:
“ Websense— free sex sites and ‘ blacklist wars.’” The
gist: Websense, one of the censorware companies,
has become a great place to find sex sites! It’s “ now
distributing daily lists of sex sites supposedly not
blacklisted by other censorware companies. This is
hilarious. I am not making this up.” Maybe they’ve
stopped by now ( I didn’t check), but you gotta love
these people. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve never en-countered
porn accidentally ( or intentionally) on the
Web, but Laura Morgan’s postings to various lists
certainly gave me great URLs to try if I did want
nasty stuff. Websense as smut peddler, even if only
to make its competition look bad? Why not? As
Finkelstein notes, “ I can hardly imagine how cen-sorware
critics would be pilloried if they pulled a
stunt like this. Think of the children!”
How long did it take our honorable representa-tives
to try again, after CPPA was struck down? Not
long. Orrin Hatch and others introduced a new pro-posal
on May 15 that would “ outlaw the distribu-tion
of images that have been digitally ‘ morphed’ to
look like child pornography,” according to a Wash-ington
Post report. A similar bill has already come
out of a House committee, but that bill ( an Ashcroft
special) is probably as unconstitutional as its prede-cessors.
The Senate bill uses a “ guilty until proven
innocent” approach: you can be arrested if “ the peo-ple
portrayed in the images are virtually indistin-guishable
from real people,” but pornographers have
a safe harbor if they can “ prove that they did not use
real children to create their images.” It’s a start. The
House approved COPPA 2002 on June 27. That bill
also uses a “ guilty until proven innocent�� approach.
disContent
Dear AT& T
Broadband…
What follows is a hypothetical letter, but it illus-trates
a real quandary— not for me or other custom-ers,
but for the content’n’convergence megacorpora-tions
counting on big monthly fees to pay back their
investments. Whether the specifics below refer to
me or to a hypothetical composite in my high- tech
middle- class Silicon Valley neighborhood doesn’t
matter; the point remains.
“ Dear AT& T Broadband,
“ I’m a little confused. I hope I have the name right
this month. ‘ Dear striped blue deathstar’ seems too
informal ( and may infringe on a high school class-mate’s
intellectual property— sorry, George). ‘ AT& T’
I understand; ‘ Broadband’ I’m not so sure about.
But never mind. I’m one of your customers and, I
suspect, a hot prospect to get where you and other
convergence operators need to be— and I just don’t
see it.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 8
The Goal?
“ I’m no businessman, but I read the business sec-tion.
Don’t we all? As I understand it, you and your
primary competitors are investing tens of billions in
infrastructure and content with the expectation that
you’ll get it back ( and more) in monthly fees. I’ve
seen a target number floating around $ 150 to $ 170
per month for a middle- class household, for a full
range of ‘ broadband’ services and content.
“ Maybe your goals are more modest. Would
$ 120 per month be enough? I know you’re not the
only ones in the game; the frequency with which
they tear up El Camino Real to lay new fiber dem-onstrates
that.
The Quandary
“ Here’s my question: How do we get there from
here? To put it another way, what combination of
services and content will convince a moderately
skeptical, college- educated, literate householder to
pay you $ 150 to $ 170 per month?
“ I should be an easy sell. Consider where you
touch me already:
􀂾 You know I use your cable TV. There’s no de-cent
rooftop reception around here and your
competition is typically nonexistent. That’s
$ 32 a month. Your customer service is no
worse than TCI was— but then, how could it
be?
􀂾 You’re not as big a player in the Internet busi-ness,
but you’re my ISP, and in that area I think
you’re great. Consistent 50K connections, fast
connections, good Web hosting with plenty of
space: I see why you come in tops on PC
magazine studies. That’s another $ 19.50 a
month.
􀂾 I still use your long distance, mostly because
we don’t do enough long distance calling to
justify any fancy plan— and I even carry one of
your credit card/ calling card combinations
( with the $ 1/ month plan to reduce calling- card
costs).
“ That’s $ 52 a month, plus maybe another $ 3 to $ 6
in long distance revenues. I notice that there are no
price breaks for using multiple AT& T services,
which doesn’t entice me to consolidate more stuff
with you.
The Possibilities
“ Sure, I know you want my local phone service and
keep throwing that “ digital” line at me. But I like
having some competition, thank you— and you’d
only get another $ 12 or so if I did switch.
“ You’d love to have me add $ 10 for digital cable
and $ 20 for @ Home Net access. Given the lack of
bundling price breaks, that would bring me up to
$ 82, or even $ 94 with local phone service.
“ But that highlights one of our problems. Offer
me ‘ all the cable I can eat,’ TV and high- speed net
alike, for ( say) $ 55 a month and we might have a
deal. Otherwise— well, I know the reputation of TCI
Digital for overcompressing signals; if I had enough
Net use to justify @ Home, I wouldn’t have time for
digital cable ( and vice versa); it just doesn’t add up.
“ Even if it did, $ 94 is a long way from $ 150. I
don’t comprehend what you’re going to offer that
makes $ 1,800 a year sound like a great deal. Some
kind of content? You’re doing that already, with the
expanded cable service that proves Bruce Spring-steen’s
point. Once I knock the shopping, foreign
language, sports, and ultraconservative news stations
off my TV’s channel- surfing list, I come up with al-most
exactly 57 stations— and sure enough, most of
the time nothing much is on.
Tell Me More— Or Don’t Bother
“ Here’s the thing. Silicon Valley isn’t really the sub-urban
wasteland you may think it is. Mountain
View has good local restaurants, good local stores,
good local libraries. We rent our DVDs or videocas-settes
from a personable type at a neighborhood
store, and we have at least three chain rental opera-tions
within a three- minute drive. We’re not good
candidates for video- on- demand— particularly since
I’m not convinced you will provide DVD quality and
I’m pretty certain you won’t offer the range of
choices we get at the store.
“ Maybe you hope we’ll move all our ‘ content’
shopping online so that you can get a piece of the
action. Probably not. Like most people, I suspect, we
might do as much as 10% of our shopping online—
but given a local store we like ( and given that the
price differentials have disappeared), the Net doesn’t
compete. Offer me all the ebooks I can read and all
the music I want to hear for $ 50 a month? Sorry;
not interested.
“ I’ve read about suburbanites back east who ac-tually
pay $ 150 to $ 170 per month for some glori-ous
package of services and content. They’re thrilled
at having everything in one big pot, with one check
going to one provider. I don’t see it. Even if I wanted
to get more stuff online, I’d like to have options—
and that means supporting competition.
“ I look at our cable TV bill and how much TV
we actually watch. I look at the Internet bill and
how much time I spend on the Internet ( at home). I
think about rental videos and purchased CDs and
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 9
books. It comes out to about $ 1 per hour, a little
more for rental DVDs and a lot less for the books we
get from the library.
“ That means you need to sell me 150 to 170
hours a month of your services. That’s at least five
hours a day. The only way we’ll spend that much
time on your stuff is if you consume 100% of our
free time.
“ That’s not going to happen. I don’t believe
there’s enough online and cable content in the world
to convince us to devote all our free time to taking it
in. Not when there are libraries, local businesses,
parks, and a world to experience in non- virtual real-ity.
“ Now that I think about it, I’m a little nervous
about the number of services you already sell me.
You know, Pac Bell and Sprint and MCI would be
only too happy to take over our long distance;
Earthlink has a fine reputation as an ISP; we don’t
seem to be hurting for credit card offers; and… well,
there’s the Dish.”
“ Yours, but only up to a point— and that point
appears to be about $ 60 per month,
“ Fred Middleclass, Mountain View, CA.”
This “ disContent” column originally appeared in
EContent 24: 5 ( July 2001), pp. 48- 50.
PostScript and Update
@ Home went under, but AT& T Broadband contin-ues
to push high- speed cable Internet access, still
$ 20 extra if you own your modem, $ 35 otherwise.
There’s a new gimmick for AT& T long distance:
Spend $ 20 a month and you can talk to other
AT& T subscribers as long as you want. The com-pany
has tried to make its local service attractive by
bundling several features in a $ 25 monthly rate—
but none of them are features we want or need, mak-ing
the rate about twice what we currently pay.
Oops, sorry, what Fred Middleclass pays.
The message stands. For people who live in
communities with good libraries, who understand
the implications of monopolies, and who lead bal-anced
lives, it’s hard to see how any company gets to
$ 150 a month. As the players are finding out, much
to their dismay.
More Literacy Notes
It’s been four months since I devoted five pages to
confused commentary on adult functional literacy���
and more than five months since the Chronicle of
Higher Education article that got me interested in this
topic. I’ve been waiting for public reassessments of
the 1993 claims of massively poor functional literacy
in the U. S., possibly literacy organizations changing
their home pages, possibly admissions that the
original numbers simply don’t make sense in terms
of how America has functioned in the last decade.
I’ve seen almost nothing. My guess is that the
literacy establishment is dealing with the situation
by ignoring it. Sensible people can’t really believe
that 22% or 47% of adult Americans “ can’t read” or
aren’t literate enough to fill out job applications or
function in society, but that doesn’t seem to bother
some literacy organizations. That’s a shame.
I had another stack of articles, chapters, and
postings in hand when the April commentary ap-peared.
I haven’t added to that stack, and it’s finally
time to dispose of it. These notes don’t amount to
much. I’m still not enlightened on the subject.
Google led me to a posting on “ NIFL-POVRACELIT,”
a government- hosted list on some
aspect of literacy: Tom Sticht’s response to Scott
Murray’s Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post
commenting on Jay Mathews’ “ Adult literacy, rewrit-ten,”
one of the few newspaper reports on the 2001
reassessment of the 1992 study. Thomas G. Sticht is
an international consultant in adult education.
Murray is an official at Statistics Canada. Sticht en-countered
this paragraph in Murray’s letter:
Specifically, I want to take exception with the state-ment
that the results of the original National Adult
Literacy Survey were wrong. The comments attrib-uted
to Messrs. Kolstad and Sticht reveal a profound
misunderstanding of the aims of the study and leave
the mistaken impression that the methods employed
to profile and report the literacy proficiency of
American adults were flawed. Nothing could be fur-ther
from the truth.
Dr. Kolstad was the director of the original project.
Murray’s dismissal of Kolstad’s rethinking seems
implausible on its face. For his part, Sticht cites his
quotes from the Post article and defends each of
them ably. He notes that most adults pegged as hav-ing
low literacy said they could read and write Eng-lish
well or very well, with only about 6% saying
otherwise, and adds, “ It seems a bit arrogant for re-searchers
to just dismiss what adults say as ‘ response
bias’ in these national assessments.” Then he adds a
key comment:
And I would think it particularly galling to a
“ learner centered” adult literacy practitioner to read
the Secretary of Education’s remarks at the Septem-ber
8, 1993 release of the NALS. After he states:
“ This report is a wake- up call to the sheer magni-
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 10
tude of illiteracy in this country” he goes on to say:
“ It paints a picture of a society in which the vast ma-jority
of Americans do not know that they do not
have the skills they need to earn a living in our in-creasingly
technological society and international
marketplace.” Such extraordinary arrogance based
on very fragile social science!
Look again at that second sentence from 1993: “ The
vast majority of Americans do not know that they
do not have the skills they need to earn a living…”
The statement is true, but not as the Secretary
of Education intended. Based on the unemployment
rates, productivity gains, and overall functioning of
the economy between 1993 and 2000, the vast ma-jority
of Americans didn’t know they lacked the
skills needed to earn a living— because it wasn’t so.
It could not have been so.
Looking at the NAAL site ( nces. ed. gov/ naal/),
one chart suggests that definitions may have gotten
out of hand. Namely, census figures show an adult
illiteracy rate of 0.6% in 1979, as compared to 1.0%
in 1969, 2.2% in 1959, and 2.5% in 1952. While I
found various explanations of the study methodol-ogy
at the site, the FAQ on sampling and scoring is
completely silent on the 80% response probability
issue, the key weakness in the 1993 numbers. It
does, however, include language that strongly sug-gests
( to this reader) that attempts to break results
down at anything lower than the state level can’t be
justified based on the original data.
Given that, I went back to the startling assertion
at one Web site that “ Forty- nine percent of the
adults in Camden, New Jersey can’t read.” I
downloaded samples from the report used as the
basis for that claim, along with an FAQ on “ the state
of literacy in America” and a paper by the statisti-cian
whose methods were used. I’m defaulting on
my promise to comment on the methods used for
“ synthetic estimates” of functional literacy at the
city level, but it’s fair to say I read “ synthetic esti-mate”
as “ Guesswork justified by presuming that
correlation is always meaningful.” The overview of
the local estimates is remarkable for one item I’d
missed, the Congressional definition of literacy in
the 1991 National Literacy Act:
An individual’s ability to read, write, and speak in
English, and compute and solve problems at levels of
proficiency necessary to function on the job and in
society, to achieve one’s goals, and develop one’s
knowledge and potential.
Once you include “ develop one’s knowledge and
potential” you’ve opened the floodgates for the most
extreme definitions of functional illiteracy. On the
other hand, “ to achieve one’s goals” seems entirely
at odds with the attitudes of researchers that peo-ple’s
opinions of their own abilities are meaningless.
I looked at adult literacy estimates— nine years
out of date, of course— for various places that I’m
familiar with, as well as Camden, New Jersey. The
Camden figures are astonishing: 49% Level 1, 87%
Level 1 and 2, even though 50% of adults had at
least a high school education, 86% speak English
very well, and only 9% are unemployed.
Go to www. nifl. gov/ reders/ and try cities you’re
familiar with. Remember that, if you’re not at Level
3 or higher, you can’t function well in today’s soci-ety.
See if these estimates make sense.
What to say about all this?
􀂾 Of course there are adults who read and calcu-late
so badly that they’re not able to function
well in society. It’s possible that those adults
make up 5% or even 10% of American adults.
It’s improbable that they total nearly half of
the country.
􀂾 Needing help with English as a second lan-guage
isn’t the same as being illiterate. Two dif-ferent
situations. Lumping them together is
insulting to Latinos, Hmong, and all the others
who bring their talents and education to the
U. S. but aren’t yet proficient in English.
􀂾 The cry that adult literacy must be everyone’s
top priority— or, as one NIFL paper puts it, “ All
Americans can and should be doing much more
to address our nation’s literacy needs”— turns
an ongoing situation into an unsolvable crisis,
and damages efforts at improving literacy. We
are not all, individually, going to “ do much
more to address our nation’s literacy needs”—
and if you start by telling us that half of us
need help, we’ll walk away from the situation
( and possibly label you as innumerate as well).
I’m done. This isn’t a core interest of mine, and it’s
clear that people interested in exaggerating the level
of functional illiteracy have chosen to ignore the
evidence or deny that the original numbers could be
faulty. Faced with that attitude, and since I have no
interest in leading an “ anti- literacy” crusade, I’m
walking away— at least for now.
Ebooks and Etext
There’s no hook for this edition of “ Ebooks and
etext.” With the exception of a few true believers,
comprehension may have set in. Some aspects of
what we loosely call “ ebooks” will succeed ( are suc-ceeding),
but— barring that revolutionary textbook
appliance and agreements with the text publishers—
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 11
on a relatively modest scale. The revolution hasn’t
been postponed; it was never going to happen.
‘ Brary Developments
I haven’t heard a word about Questia in months,
either final closure or any sign of success. Walking
right on by…
The May 28, 2002 Chronicle for Higher Education
has a brief update on netLibrary, “ NetLibrary’s new
owners hope newer e- books will be more attractive
to academe.” I didn’t realize so many of netLibrary’s
7,300 customers are academic: 3,000! “ Some of
those libraries joined on a trial basis, however, or
have ordered only small numbers of e- books.” Jeffery
R. Young, author of the article, puts it right on the
line: “ The question now is whether OCLC can make
the e- book service work.” He notes Rich Rosy’s
comment that netLibrary began with mostly backlist
titles, many 10 years old or older— and adds that the
company has added 4,400 newer book recently,
making a total of 42,800 titles. One clear advantage
of OCLC’s purchase, which I’ve noted before: Al-though
OCLC can and does drop services, it’s ex-tremely
unlikely to disappear as a corporation. Rosy
( head of the netLibrary division) also notes that
some publishers are ready to consider “ all- you- can-read”
services rather than the one- at- a- time business.
Two comments from librarians on ebrary appear
in the April 2002 Charleston Advisor. Margaret
Landsman ( University of Utah) finds the ebrary
model promising, criticizes the netLibrary model as
too traditional, and rejects subscription models as
too expensive. I’m surprised by a section of the arti-cle
that seems to dismiss backsets of print serials as
being irrelevant for a library, but I may be misread-ing.
I wonder whether Landsman is accepting
ebrary’s promise ( that the “ subscription component”
of its pricing, which wasn’t even part of its original
model, won’t increase in direct relationship to the
number of titles) a little too easily. She says “ com-panies,
like libraries, have their ideals and the de-mocratization
of information is ebrary’s.” That
sounds good; one can only hope it proves out in
practice.
Evan A. Reader of Cal State’s SEIR program of-fers
a shorter commentary that’s less enthusiastic.
He— or, rather, the CSU EAR Committee— doesn’t
like the InfoTools Reader plugin required to use
ebrary texts. The cost for “ eMARC” records to go
with the ebrary records is too high, $ 52,500 for the
initial 5,000 titles for the 21 CSU campuses. There
are other issues, including the fact that libraries pay
a subscription fee while individual consumers can
access ebrary’s collection for free ( until they copy or
print, as with library use). Reader would prefer a
fixed- price model covering use as well as access— the
subscription model that Landsman finds objection-able.
I don’t know what to make of all this— or of
ebrary itself.
Mighty Like a Rose
Give me a break. M. J. Rose’s weekly Wired News col-umn
is the most interesting material about e-publishing
around, and her name does lend itself to
a little humor. The column really isn’t about ebooks
most of the time, but it’s always an interesting read.
Some notes:
􀂾 The Frankfurt E- book Awards were discontin-ued
and an honest discussion of that an-nouncement
leads Rose’s April 23. 2002
column. “ Nut much about e- books has met the
over- hyped expectations that greeted the birth
of the new form in early 2000.” ( Some of us
would put the birth, and particularly the hype,
many years earlier!) The biggest problem with
the awards is that they were “ created for a new
technological form, yet judged on literary
merit.” Judges either didn’t recognize or, more
likely, care about ebook features that print
can’t duplicate, and 80% of award finalists
were ebook editions of print books. Originally,
a company had to publish more than 20 titles a
year to enter, an absurd requirement for a new
medium. Even a winner of a $ 50,000 prize,
one of only two that hadn’t already been pub-lished
by a big company, was soured by the lack
of promised help in making big- time print hap-pen:
“ It was a terrible experience.” In other
items, there’s possible good news: Microsoft,
which dropped its Frankfurt funding, launched
a new European ebook association with a new
set of awards. And Xlibris now offers color
print- on- demand ( PoD) publishing, but it isn’t
cheap: Setup takes a few months, the book
length is limited to 24 to 60 pages, and the au-thor
pays $ 999 to $ 2,499 before the first PoD
“ book” appears.
􀂾 Remember the magazine that was offering
book reviews for a price? Now Moxie, an online
magazine, is charging writers $ 10 per article for
submissions. If the zine accepts the article, you
get $ 20 ( they refund the fee and pay you $ 10).
That’s the lead item for April 30, followed by a
mention of yet another new ebook appliance,
this time from Samsung. Once again, we shall
see— or not.
􀂾 May 7’ s headline is “ Looking for the ‘ E’ at
BEA,” a reference to Book Expo America.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 12
There weren’t many ebook vendors among
2,000 exhibitors, but the Open eBook Forum
made the most of the event, launching its
“ Open an eBook Campaign.” Publishing execu-tives
wonder whether it will make a difference,
since it’s based on offering free ebooks. As they
note, people already download free e- texts— but
will they buy them? The column ends with a
striking number for the healthiest ( and least
“ e”) part of digital book distribution: Xerox
printed 20 million b& w PoD books last year—
and is demonstrating a $ 200,000 full- color
PoD system. Twenty million in 2001: that’s a
real business.
􀂾 You might have missed this three- week wonder,
noted on May 14: Salon was going to be the ex-clusive
outlet for John Dean’s e- book “ that will
reveal Deep Throat’s identity.” Salon could use
the hype— but as June 7 came and passed, the
truth emerged: Dean ducked, naming a group
of possibilities.
􀂾 First a Web zine, then a publishing house:
MobyLives has spawned Melville House Publish-ing,
with two titles out this September. That’s
not the lead item in Rose’s May 21 column—
but it’s one that leaves out a key detail: Will
the Melville House titles be print books or
ebooks? I love the subhead on an item about
John Riddle’s suggestion that Congress declare
November 15 “ I love to write day.” The sub-head:
“ Do we need more writers?” And here’s
an interesting one: John Scalzi’s science fiction
ebook, Agent to the Stars, appears as shareware:
Download it and pay what you think it’s worth
via PayPal. So far, those who’ve paid average
$ 3.80 each. Since Scalzi gets it all, those are
great royalties.
􀂾 May 28 features Michael Kel Thompkins’ at-tempt
“ to disguise content in marketing via
eBay”: each week for 17 weeks, this guy’s put-ting
one used designer item up for auction, ac-companied
by a brief installment from The
Neon Klintukh of Patusan City, his serial work.
Rose also discusses the Eldred v. Ashcroft case
and notes the Palm eBook Studio, a $ 29 pro-gram
so you can create, distribute and sell
ebooks for the Palm OS platform.
􀂾 June 4 brings “ M is for Nottingham?” from the
trace Online Writing Centre, an “ interactive
collaborative Web drama” that unfolds in real
time that “ hopes to trace the lines of continu-ity
between the book, electronic hypertext and
live drama.” The creator says, “ The notion that
the printed word has to be confined to print on
paper is to disregard all of the other important
forms of storytelling— from oral tales told
around a fire to Egyptian tomb paintings to
manuscripts on vellum to radio broadcasts.”
Assuming, charitably, that Marjorie Coverley
Luesebrink really meant “ stories” rather than
“ the printed word” ( which doesn’t work worth
a damn on radio broadcasts, for example), my
question is: “ Who ever claimed that print on
paper was the only narrative medium?”
􀂾 The lead item for June 25 is “ USA Today’s news
is fiction.” The story: The paper’s online Open
Book Program, which serializes an original
story every eight weeks. It’s a great idea— but
it’s another stretch of the last four letters in
“ ebook.” The current installment, for which
the writer was paid less than $ 10,000 ( but re-tains
all other rights), is all of 7,000 words.
7,000 words is not a book. Also, Bowker wants
to do PoD as a form of test marketing for out-of-
print books— and Powell’s Books is getting
into the PoD business with the Oregon Cul-tural
Heritage Commission, using Lightning
Press for fulfillment.
Miscellany
KnowBetter. com is one of several sites dedicated to
all things ebook. J. Alan Hartman has done the first
two pieces of an eight- part article, “ 8 stupid things
publishers to do mess up their sales,” and it’s not
bad. He’s talking about epublishers, of course.
Number 8, posted May 24, is “ formats”— mostly a
complaint that epublishers don’t make their wares
available in all eight or more ebook formats. Num-ber
7, posted June 11, is delivery options for
ebooks— which he finds bizarre compared to real-world
purchasing. I didn’t realize most small epub-lishers
don’t provide instant download once your
credit card is entered, and can only wonder why the
big players can handle this. If you’re hankering to
publish your own ebooks, Hartman’s worth reading.
I’ve been hearing about the Baen Free Library,
and as a long- time science fiction reader I’m cer-tainly
aware of Jim Baen. The site is
www. baen. com/ library/ and there’s some interesting
stuff there. Baen Books puts some of its print titles
up in ebook format. Free. “ No conditions, no strings
attached.” Eric Flint’s introductory essay gives the
reasoning behind the decision, and I find it convinc-ing.
“ Losses any author suffers from piracy are al-most
certainly offset by the additional publicity
which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book
usually engender.” Sensible authors know that pub-lic
library circulation improves book sales; why
wouldn’t selective free versions work that way? Baen
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 13
Books isn’t the only print publisher to figure this
one out; National Academies makes its books avail-able
online, free, and finds that enhances sales. If
people prefer to read booklength works as bound
books, as I believe they do, this all makes enormous
sense— and, so far, it’s working for Baen Books. The
Baen Free Library is voluntary for Baen’s authors;
they can choose not to participate and they can take
books down after a while. Baen suggests that the
first book in an ongoing series be posted— which
makes sense, as it generates interest in the whole
series. Baen Books expects the Free Library “ to make
us money by selling books.” ( Jim Baen also believes
that “ most people would rather be honest than dis-honest”—
as do I. Too bad RIAA and MPAA, and
apparently AAP, seem to believe just the opposite.)
Eric Flint is doing a series of “ Prime Palaver”
pieces at the site; he’s an engaging writer and the
experiment is proving out nicely. The sixth in the
series ( with a Web title showing it as # 3— Flint’s as
good with HTML as I am, apparently!) appeared on
April 15. He takes the facts of the first 18 months’
experience with the Baen Free Library ( the introduc-tory
essay was posted in October 2000; I’m slow
sometimes) and makes a convincing hard- figures
case that it’s working.
Two years ago, Donald T. Hawkins published a
two- part article on ebooks in Online and called them
“ a new publishing revolution.” My August 2001
“ disContent” column was largely an update on the
companies mentioned in Hawkins’ article. Now he’s
back, in the July/ August 2002 Online, with “ Elec-tronic
books: Reports of their death have been exag-gerated.”
It’s an interesting article. “ It is now
apparent that the e- book shot missed its mark, and
the e- book revolution has fizzled. Indeed, it never
really got off the ground.” He notes that attendance
at the 2001 NIST ebook conference was down 50%-
- and goes on to say ( correctly) that “ e- books are not
dead.” This article is, to my taste, more balanced
and interesting than his original, possibly because it
lacks the “ revolutionary” tone of that one. He now
admits, “ Most people don’t like to read from a
screen, and it will be extremely difficult to change
that perception.” He does suggest Questia is still
around, but down to two dozen staff members. He
then notes some signs of life for ebooks and suggests
appropriate markets, among which he doesn’t in-clude
books for “ consumers.” Most of Hawkins’ cur-rent
analysis is pretty much on the money.
It’s always fun to see market forecasters “ dis-tancing
themselves” from their earlier forecasts. A
Reuters piece posted May 8, 2002 includes the fol-lowing
from David Card of Jupiter Media Metrix:
“ We haven’t issued forecasts for the [ ebook] indus-try
in two years, because the market’s going no-where.
E- books were a dumb idea. I am very
negative on this market.” And a Simon & Schuster
VP says “ everyone who works in this industry did
not really think” that the aggressive sales forecasts
were “ what the future held.” Naturally enough, S& S
won’t disclose ebook sales but says that they’re
“ meeting its own internal forecasts, with year over
year growth in the double digit percentage range.”
PC Group Reviews
Desktop Computers
Atkin, Denny, and others, “ The studio sys-tems,”
Computer Shopper 22: 6 ( June 2002), pp.
104- 9.
This roundup features “ video- editing desktops,”
which means PCs with IEEE1394 ports, recordable
DVD drives, some form of digital video editing or
mastering software, and loads of hard disk space: the
bar is 100GB. No CPU limit was set, 256MB RAM
was required, and the video card only needed 32MB
RAM. Two systems cost roughly $ 2,500-$ 2,600, an-other
two in the “ low $ 3,000s,” while the last was
$ 2,499— but without a display.
Highest rating goes to the $ 2,599 ABS All U
Can DV, which features a 17" LCD display and the
ability to accept analog as well as digital video. Best
among the brand- name units is Dell’s $ 3,399 Di-mension
8200 with Dell Movie Studio; it includes a
120GB 7200RPM hard disk, a 2.2GHz Pentium 4,
and an 18"- viewable Trinitron display, along with a
Philips DVD+ RW burner— but it doesn’t have a
second optical drive ( all the others do), it’s the only
one with 256MB RAM instead of 512MB or more,
and that price includes a mere one- year warranty.
Atkin, Denny, and Rick Broida, “ Sweet deals for
sensible gamers,” Computer Shopper 22: 7 ( July
2002), pp. 102- 7.
A little offbeat for Cites & Insights readers, if not
possibly an oxymoron: Computers for dedicated
game- players who won’t spend more than two big
ones for their hot gaming system. As you might ex-pect
for a bunch of price- trimming power systems,
these are all AMD Athlon XP- based, using either the
1.53GHz 1800+ or the 1.67GHz 2000+, mostly
the latter. All five come with 18"- viewable displays
and four to six- part speaker systems. Four of five
have 256MB DDR RAM, one has 512MB; hard
disks ( all 7200rpm) range from 40GB to 100GB.
Surprisingly for gaming systems, two of the five use
nVidia’s GeForce3 Ti500 with 64MB display RAM;
the others use today’s hot card, the GeForce4 Ti
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 14
4600 with 128MB. They all include CD- RW burn-ers
and all but one also has a DVD- ROM drive.
Editors’ Choices are the two most expensive ma-chines:
Alienware’s Aurora DDR and Vicious’ PC
Phantom. Should your next PC be Vicious or Alien-ware?
Don’t ask me; I still haven’t loaded the DVD-ROM
game that came with my PC in 1999.
Karagiannis, Konstantinos, “ Celeron gets seri-ous,”
PC Magazine 21: 12 ( June 30, 2002), pp.
30- 1.
The first two top- tier desktop PCs using 1.7GHz
Celerons, for the first time based on the Pentium4
logic core. As the title suggests, PC likes the chip,
saying that “ the time has finally come to bury the
desktop Pentium III.” The new Celeron outperforms
the older models on some benchmarks, while trailing
on pure business applications. ( The explanation for
that failing, the deeper pipeline of the P4 architec-ture
and the “ branchy” nature of business applica-tions,
is at my eyes- glaze- over stage.)
The odd aspect is in a July 2002 PC World news-section
commentary on the new Celeron with this
contrary heading: “ New 1.7- GHz Celeron: a bad
buy.” Why? Because PC World’s “ PC Worldbench”
number yields poor results— although, in this case,
the comparison isn’t to the earlier Celeron but to a
1.7GHz P4. So it all depends whose benchmarks
you believe.
Dell’s $ 799 Dimension 4500S is a “ stripper,” a
system that cuts corners to meet an aggressive price
point. It has no available PCI slots or drive bays and
doesn’t include a CD burner, and the 14" CRT is
mediocre. On the other hand, Gateway’s $ 1,099
300X is well equipped, with both CD- RW and
DVD- ROM drives, a larger hard disk ( 40GB,
7200RPM), six USB2.0 ports, expansion slots, and a
15" LCD display. Despite costing $ 300 more, it’s a
better deal and wins the Editors’ Choice.
Steers, Kirk, “ Buying budget PCs: Dollars and
sense,” PC World 20: 7 ( July 2002), p. 64
What do you get for $ 749 or $ 833 ($ 658 after
rebate)? A 1.3GHz Celeron CPU, 128MB RAM,
Windows XP, and a fairly handsome minitower. The
EMachines T1150 ( cheaper after rebate) adds a
40GB disk, CD- RW burner, and 16" CRT; it rates
3.5 stars. Compaq’s Presario 4000 has a better key-board
and has a slot to allow a graphics- card up-grade,
but the display’s only 14", the disk 20GB,
and the optical drive read- only.
But the latest PC World reliability and service
survey gave EMachines an Unacceptable rating,
while Compaq squeaked by with a Poor. I guess Un-acceptable
doesn’t really mean unacceptable.
Digital Audio
Kumin, Daniel, “ May we serve you?” Sound &
Vision 67: 4 ( May 2002), pp. 66- 73.
It’s hard to believe that this new product cate-gory—
digital audio servers— already has five com-petitors.
It’s part of “ convergence” but in an oddly
divergent way. A digital audio server is a box that
looks like an audio receiver or big DVD player, con-tains
a hard disk and CD or DVD drive ( maybe a
CD burner), usually includes network/ Internet con-nectivity,
and has the software and controls to rip
tracks from CDs and compress them into MP3 or
another compressed audio format, identify them
( usually using Internet databases), organize them,
and play them back to a home audio system. Prices
range from $ 800 to $ 1,500. The advantage: you
don’t need a computer to do any of this.
If you want this sort of device, the article offers
a good set of reviews and, being in an audio maga-zine,
includes lab reports. They’re not that useful;
the nature of MP3 is such that audio defects only
show up in standard tests as a rolloff at 15.3 to
16KHz. Comments on sound quality are what you’d
expect from a reviewer with functioning ears:
128kbps, the default MP3 encoding rate, offers near-
CD sound “ with only occasional telltale compression
artifacts.” At each player’s maximum bit rate ( always
at least 192k), it was essentially impossible to dis-tinguish
compressed tracks from originals.
Should you pay $ 1,500 for a box with a 40GB
hard disk, CD burner, Internet connection, and au-dio
software? That depends in part on how you feel
about computers, and some PC writers have pointed
out that it would be far more economical to attach a
cheap PC to your audio system— after all, those
specs define part of an entry- level PC, selling these
days for $ 600 to $ 800 including a display and soft-ware.
But the PC will be bulkier and probably nois-ier,
and may not be as convenient.
DVD Hardware and Software
Jacobi, Jon L., “ Author, author: Burn video onto
DVDs,” PC World 20: 6 ( June 2002), pp. 60- 1.
This mini- roundup might not be noteworthy ex-cept
that it offers a second opinion on DVD author-ing.
It’s an odd second opinion: Sonic MyDVD 3.1,
PowerDirector 2 Pro, and DVD Workshop from
Ulead all earn 3- star reviews; MyDVD ($ 79) and
PowerDirector ($ 120-$ 135) are less expensive.
Jacobi, Jon L., “ DVD burners: The right time to
buy?” PC World 20: 7 ( July 2002), pp. 62- 3.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 15
Another mini- roundup, this time covering two
DVD+ RW drives. They both cost $ 499, they both
earn three- star ratings, they both write faster than
DVD- RW— but the discs are likely to be less com-patible
than DVD- R, based on Jacoby’s experiments.
The HP Dvd200i DVD+ RW/+ R and Sony DRU-
120A are actually the same drive with different face-plates;
the difference is software, and that turns out
to be a mixed bag. Jacobi’s advice is to wait a while
before buying any flavor DVD burner.
Jacobi, Jon L., and Don Labriola and Alfred
Poor, “ The right writer,” Computer Shopper 22: 7
( July 2002), pp. 116- 20.
This review of three DVD burners, covering four
of the five possible standards ( DVD- R, DVD- RW,
DVD- RAM, and DVD+ RW), omits DVD+ R be-cause
it “ isn’t yet shipping”— even though a colum-nist
in the same issue talks about the DVD+ R’s he’s
already burned. I wonder about Jacobi’s internal
consistency; this review says that DVD+ RW discs
“ will play on most DVD players,” but that’s not
what he says in PC World ( above).
Oh, never mind; why should I expect consis-tency,
particularly when the same writer does reviews
in competing publications? This time around, there
are no Best Buys. Highest- rated of the three drives is
Panasonic’s $ 350 DVDBurner, but it won’t write
CD- R or CD- RW discs, which makes it a thoroughly
odd choice. ( It burns DVD- RAM and DVD- R.)
Ozer, Jan, and Bill Howard, “ Making your own
DVDs just got easier,” PC Magazine 21: 10 ( May
21, 2002), pp. 28- 33.
This “ first looks” article includes three group re-views
related to DVD burning on Windows PCs.
There are three different incompatible “ standards”
for rewritable DVD. In the hardware area, Pioneer’s
DVR- A04 updates the first affordable DVD burner,
the DVR- A03 ( if you’re a Mac user, the SuperDrive
is a DVR- A03), at a lower price and with strong re-sistance
to underrun problems. It writes DVD- RW,
DVD- R, CD- R, and CD- RW; DVD burning speed is
good and data CD- R speed is very good at 7X meas-ured
rate. That $ 499 unit earns a perfect five- dot
rating; the Vivastar RS- 111, a $ 399 DVD- RAM and
DVD- R writer, is slower and offers inferior software.
For DVD authoring, there’s finally a competitor
to DVDit! in the consumer- priced category. Ulead’s
$ 299 DVD Workshop appears to have more ease
and flexibility than DVDit! but lacks Dolby Digital
Import and DLT output, the latter omission mean-ing
you may not be able to use Ulead to master a
replicatable DVD. Ulead earns four dots to DVDit! s
three. Three other products are grouped under
“ DVD utilities.” MedioStream’s neoDVD offers
simple ways to capture videotape and create DVDs
in a $ 30 program. Pinnacle’s $ 299 Bungee DVD
offers “ TiVo- like” PVR functions for a PC along with
DVD and SVCD authoring in an external box.
Stomp’s $ 79 RecordNow MAX Platinum is essen-tially
a competitor to Roxio’s Easy CD Creator, but
it also includes some DVD authoring facilities ( by
bundling MedioStream neoDVD, actually). See the
“ Utility Software” section for further ntoes.
Sauer, Jeff, “ Amateur hour,” EMedia 15: 4 ( April
2002), pp. 30- 9.
No point ratings, but good comparative reviews
of under-$ 100 DVD authoring tools from a profes-sional
perspective. “ Are these products serious
enough for corporate users as well?” The answer
seems to be a definite “ Maybe,” particularly in the
case of Dazzle DVD Complete. These thoughtful
discussions approach programs differently than re-views
in computing magazines; as a result, the article
offers an excellent complement to the other reviews.
Winkle, William Van, “ DVDs on your PC,” PC
Magazine 21: 11 ( June 11, 2002), pp. 156- 7.
This one isn’t about creating DVDs— it’s about
playing them. Your DVD- ROM drive probably came
with one of these five programs, unless it relies on
Windows XP’s Media Player support— but if you
watch movies on your PC a lot, you might read this
roundup. WinDVD 3.1 ($ 50) is the Editors’ Choice,
with PowerDVD XP 4.0 Deluxe a close second.
Notebook Computers
Behr, Mary E., “ Power to the portable,” PC
Magazine 21: 12 ( June 30, 2002), pp. 98- 115,
and Howard, Bill, “ IBM T30: the best business
notebook,” p. 38.
Why two stories? Because “ First looks�� has a
later copy deadline than the main portion of the
magazine, which allowed them to test the late-arriving
IBM T30 along with the 13 notebooks in
the roundup. The single review gives the T30 an
Editors’ Choice, unusual for standalone reviews; the
$ 3,499 unit is expensive, but it’s powerful, well-equipped,
and for the first time in an IBM offers a
touch pad along with the traditional IBM stick.
The primary review covers two segments of
notebook computing: desktop replacements ( which
aren’t quite) and “ mainstream” notebooks ( last
year’s thin- and- light notebooks). The other seg-ments
are value notebooks (“ last year’s model at a
discount”) and ultraportables.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 16
Dell Latitude models take both Editors’ Choices.
The Latitude C840, $ 3,256 with a P4- 1800 CPU,
37GB disk, CD- RW/ DVD combo, 15" display,
nVidia GeForce4 graphics with 32MB RAM, and
256MB DDR RAM, “ comes very close to replacing
your desktop PC.” It weighs 8 pounds, 9.3 travel
weight; the screen is one of Dell’s high- density units,
showing 1600x1200 on a 12x9" screen ( 15" diago-nal):
that’s 133dpi resolution, the highest I’ve seen
on a large LCD. ( IBM, Sony, and Toshiba use similar
high- definition screens).
The $ 2,756 Latitude C610 is slower, has a
slightly smaller screen with slower graphics, and a
smaller hard disk— but it’s also lighter ( 5.7 pounds
or 6.5 travel weight) and cheaper.
Optical Character
Recognition
Breen, Christopher, “ Optical character recogni-tion
applications,” Macworld 19: 6 ( June 2002),
pp. 31- 2.
This little review is a comprehensive roundup of
professional OCR programs for the Mac, appar-ently—
both of them. (“ Professional” as opposed to
the cut- down versions bundled with scanners.)
While FineReader Pro 5 is cheaper at $ 129, Omni-
Page Pro X has a better spell- check interface, more
flexible recognition, PDF import, and a native OS X
version. As a Windows user, I continue to be be-mused
by the comment that OS X native status
doesn’t matter much “ because few scanners work
with OS X,” given how long it’s now been since it
became the standard Mac OS. Technically, Omni-
Page sells for $ 499, but you’d have to be a complete
idiot to pay that much since the upgrade from any
OCR package is $ 149. Even if you don’t have a
scanner- bundled program, just by FineReader first
and save $ 222! For those looking for nirvana, the
last phrase in the first paragraph is critical: “ turning
paper into pixels remains an imperfect process.” Ex-pect
to spend a lot of time correcting words.
PDAs, Pocket PCs, Cell
Phones, Pagers
“ A show of handhelds,” Consumer Reports 67: 6
( June 2002), pp. 22- 25.
This overview doesn’t provide detailed specifica-tions
but does offer a good summary of the market
and which units might best serve your needs. One
illustration makes a point about thin PDAs that I’d
never read before: While superthin units like Sony’s
Clié PEG- 745 ft more easily in your pocket, they
may be less comfortable to hold than the inch- thick
Handspring and its ilk. The reviews give top marks
to Sony���s Clié PEG- S360 ($ 200) among Palm OS
models and HP’s Jornada 565 ($ 550) among Pocket
PC models, with Palm OS models generally ranked
higher and a slew of units just behind the Sony.
Nadel, Brian, “ Waiting for the wireless revolu-tion,”
PC Magazine 21: 10 ( May 21, 2002), pp.
84- 98.
Make up your own mind about the inevitability
of all the stuff discussed here— the “ liberating” ef-fects
of being at work ( or close to it) 24 hours a day,
the likelihood of useful videoconferencing on wire-less
devices in the next few years. “ Enrich our lives
through constant communications” is one of those
phrases that either resonates or raises hackles.
Worldviews aside, this long article includes use-ful
background along with three group reviews:
smart phones, PDA modems, and email devices. Edi-tors’
Choice among smart phones is Motorola’s
$ 299 V200 Personal Communicator, a cross between
an overgrown two- way pager and a phone. Sierra’s
$ 300 Wireless AirCard 550/ 555, tested with the
Compaq iPAQ 3800, is the Editors’ Choice among
PDA modems— at least partly because the device is
also a cell phone ( although it can’t use the iPAQ’s
built- in microphone and speaker, relying instead on
a headset jack). Finally, in a two- item roundup, the
$ 500 BlackBerry RIM 957 gains the email device
award; it’s not a great PDA but the monochrome
screen and real ( albeit tiny) keyboard make it a fine
email device.
Thornton, Carla, and Grace Aquino, “ Next-generation
PDAs,” PC World 20: 4 ( April 2002),
pp. 84- 94.
This review covers a lot of ground, including 16
units in three groups: Basic PDAs ( all Palm OS), ad-vanced
PDAs ( mostly Pocket PC), and PDA/ cell
phone combinations. You need to understand your
needs and read this and other articles to make sense
of this field. For the record, the Best Buy among ba-sic
units is the $ 299 HandEra 330 ( from a company
I’ve never heard of), with a larger- than- usual screen
( 2.9x2.2", 320x240 pixels) and strong expansion
capabilities, although it has a gray- scale screen.
Casio’s $ 545 Cassiopeia E- 200 is the winner among
advanced units, again for expansion as well as a
bright screen and lots of RAM. There’s no Best Buy
among the combo units; they’re strange hybrids that
require careful consideration. The two highest rat-ings
among the five are for Handspring’s $ 399 Treo
180 and Samsung’s $ 499 SPH- 1300, wildly dissimi-lar
devices.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 17
Portable MP3 Players
Brown, Bruce, and Pete Brown, “ Move with the
music,” PC Magazine 21: 9 ( May 7, 2002), pp.
146- 8.
If you’re willing to deal with a little more weight
and size than “ standard” MP3 portables, you can
carry a lot more music a lot more flexibly. This re-view
includes four CD/ MP3 players ( units that play
CDs, either as audio carriers or encoded with MP3
tracks), one jukebox ( with a 20GB hard disk), and
three somewhat traditional small portables. Four- dot
ratings go to the $ 400 SonicBlue RioRiot, the 20GB
“ jukebox” ( a hardened battery- operated hard disk
with MP3 electronics, a tuner, and a display), and
iRiver’s $ 200 iMP- 350 SlimX, a CD/ MP3 player
that’s slightly bigger than a CD at 5.5x5.25x0.75" ( it
weighs 8.8oz. and includes an FM receiver; the LCD
is on the remote). Oddest unit? Probably the $ 150
Philips eXp401— it’s the smallest and lightest of the
CD players, but that’s because it plays 8cm ( 3")
CDs, hard to find and almost certainly more expen-sive
for comparable capacity, since each one holds
180MB. For that matter, how many prerecorded 3"
CDs have you seen? Most problematic: the $ 150
TDK Mojo 620 didn’t read CD- RW discs— not un-usual
for an older CD player, but questionable for a
modern MP3 unit.
Printers
Blachere, Kristina, and others, “ Color coordi-nated,”
Computer Shopper 22: 5 ( May 2002), pp.
114- 20.
This roundup includes a sampling of inkjet
printers in three different price categories— but with
only two budget, three midrange, and one high- end
choice, it’s hard to do much with the results. Maybe
it’s news that you can get a decent printer for
$ 100— but you’ll do better in the $ 150-$ 180 range.
Given reviews elsewhere, I’m a little surprised to see
Epson’s Stylus C80 get the lowest rating in the
roundup ( tied with HP’s Deskjet 940C), but it’s
hard to explain Computer Shopper’s numeric ratings.
Carlson, Kyla K., and Sean Timberlake, “ The
fine print,” Computer Shopper 22: 3 ( March
2002), pp. 110- 14.
Inkjets may dominate the home market for good
reason— but if most of your printing is black and
white, today’s low- priced lasers will save money in
the long run and probably print faster. This roundup
includes five lasers that cost less than $ 300, print at
600dpi or better, and claim at least 10 pages per
minute— although those speed claims are almost al-ways
exaggerated. Brother’s $ 299 HL- 1440 takes
the Editors’ Choice for speed and print quality.
Snell, Jason, “ Turn pixels into print,” Macworld
19: 6 ( June 2002), pp. 70- 8.
This surprisingly long article ( no ad pages) isn’t
primarily about printers, but it’s a convenient cate-gory.
There are two sets of comparisons: one of
twelve online photo services, one of five photo-oriented
inkjets. It’s a solid article if you’re consider-ing
online services, particularly if you’re a Mac
owner ( although most of these services work equally
well with Windows); a comparative table and text
support allow reasonable comparison, but there are
no mouse ratings. For print quality, Shutterfly comes
in best, with PhotoAccess, Snapfish, and Kodak Pic-ture
Center just behind. Worst of the lot was
PhotoWorks: “ the photos we ordered were savagely
autocorrected… PhotoWorks also heavily oversharp-ened
our images.”
The printer roundup includes two each from
Canon and Epson, one from HP; the two Epsons
cost $ 150 to $ 200 while the other three are $ 399
each. The two Epsons, the Stylus Photo 785EPX
and Stylus Photo 820, share something else: the
highest rating because of superior color fidelity and
print quality. If you do much printing, you’re better
off with the $ 200 785EPX and its larger ink tanks.
Utility Software
“ Cyberspace invaders,” Consumer Reports 67: 6
( June 2002), pp. 16- 20.
Sure, it’s an odd venue, but it’s also a good
commentary on threats to home computers with
broadband Internet connections. Ratings include
seven firewalls ( six software, one hardware) and four
antivirus packages. The article says six of the seven
firewalls offered excellent protection against incom-ing
threats ( Sygate’s Personal Firewall was the excep-tion),
while only two provided solid protection
against outgoing threats. Outgoing threats may not
be problematic if you also use antivirus software
“ and practice good computer hygiene,” but if you
use IM or file sharing, you need it. The two products
with excellent protection in both directions are
ZoneAlarm Pro 3.0 and Norton Personal Firewall
2002. ZoneAlarm ( also highly rated by PC Magazine
in a recent standalone review) offers more features
and rates slightly higher. The firewall included with
MS Windows XP does fine for incoming threats but
has no protection against outgoing problems. Among
antivirus products, Norton Antivirus and McAfee
VirusScan both offer outstanding performance. Nor-
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large August 2002 18
ton does full- disk scans faster than McAfee, but
McAfee’s a little easier to use.
Luhn, Robert, and Scott Spanbaurer, “ Protect
your PC,” PC World 20: 7 ( July 2002), pp. 92-
106.
This four- part article discusses dangers to your
PC and rates 26 antivirus, firewall, “ stealthware”
elimination, and “ spam- busting” programs. As usual,
Norton AntiVirus gets the Best Buy mark for virus
protection among a surprisingly broad range of seven
programs. For firewalls, Sygate Personal Firewall Pro
5 and Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Pro 3 both get Best
Buy seals. Lavasoft Ad- aware Plus 5 is the preferred
stealthware finder; McAfee. com SpamKiller 2.87 the
highest- rated spam fither.
Spector, Lincoln, “ Tools for trouble- free com-puting,”
PC World 20: 5 ( May 2002), pp. 72- 80.
This review considers several categories of sys-tem
utility, reviewing Windows XP components
alongside suite components and standalone pro-grams.
As with most utility software reviews, you
need to read the article carefully before taking its
advice. PowerQuest PartitionMagic is still the best
tool for partitioning a hard disk. Surprisingly, Win-dows
XP’s built- in disk defragmenter gets the nod
over Norton SpeedDisk— and, for the first time,
tests under XP do not show speed improvement from
defragging. OnTrack SystemSuite 4 offers the best
disk cleanup and diagnostics, while PowerQuest
Drive Image 5 offers the best tool to build a disk
image. Although none of the tests showed Norton
tools as Best Buys ( virus protection wasn’t in-cluded),
SystemWorks 2002 gets the nod over On-track
SystemSuite— largely because it’s more
reliable. One reason may be that Ontrack still in-cludes
CrashProof; back when Norton included a
“ crash guard,” it seemed to be the most destabilizing
program on my PC!
“ 10th annual utility guide,” PC Magazine 21: 11
( June 11, 2002), pp. 94- 141.
This section has 36 pages of reviews— nothing
compared to the good old days when PC Magazine
could break your desk if you dropped it from a
height, but still a monster review. “ 94 ways to make
your computer work better,” divided into 16 sec-tions—
from Personal Antivirus to Zip Utilities.
Don’t expect a detailed summary; too much de-pends
on your Windows version and particular
needs. You absolutely need antivirus software, of
course, and Norton AntiVirus is Editors’ Choice
among ten personal choices. ( If you think you don’t
need antivirus software, please don’t send me email!
NAV quarantines at least two attachments a week on
my work PC, even though they’re always attach-ments
I wouldn’t open on a bet— NAV flags them as
I’m marking them for deletion in Notes Mail.)
You might want to add Trojan horse protection.
There’s no Editors’ Choice, but PestPatrol and Taus-can
1.6 both got perfect five- dot ratings. PC Maga-zine
thinks disk partitioning is a great idea, and
PartitionMagic 7.0 is a clear Editors’ Choice.
The utility suite category has fallen on hard
times, as Network Associates discontinued McAfee
Office. Editors’ Choice may be unexpected: Ontrack
SystemSuite 4.0 gets the nod over Norton System-
Works for better integration, useful extras, and a
more coherent approach to Windows XP. In this
roundup, Easy CD Creator 5.1 Platinum is Editors’
Choice for CD & DVD writing. FTP Voyager 9.0
gets the award as an FTP solution, Kontiki 1.02 is
the best download manager ( and it’s free), and
PKZip 4.5 is the choice as a Zip utility. Some cate-gories
lack an Editors’ Choice either because there’s
more than one excellent choice or no choice scores
high enough for the honor.
Vamosi, Robert, “ Subtract the ads,” Computer
Shopper 22: 7 ( July 2002), pp. 130- 2.
The problem with blocking pop- ups is that some
software blocks all pop- ups, including those that
make Web sites work properly. Still, some people get
frustrated enough by ads and unexpected pop- ups
and pop- unders ( which seem to be a remarkable
combination of annoyance and uselessness) to add
special software. According to this review, your best
bet is InterMute’s $ 30 AdSubtract Pro. ( In this test,
Ad- Aware didn’t stop pop- up ads.)
The Details
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 2, Num-ber
10, Whole Issue 24, ISSN 1534- 0937, is written
and produced at least monthly by Walt Crawford, a
senior analyst at RLG Opinions herein do not reflect
those of RLG. Comments should be sent to
wcc@ notes. rlg. org. Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large
is copyright © 2002 by Walt Crawford. It may be
copied in its entirety and is free ( but not public do-main).
URL: cites. boisestate. edu/ civ2i10. pdf