Cites & insights Crawford at large.

              Cites & Insights January 2007 1
Cites & Insights
Crawford at Large
Libraries • Policy • Technology • Media
Sponsored by YBP Library Services
Volume 7, Number 1: January 2007 ISSN 1534- 0937 Walt Crawford
Bibs & Blather
Navel Gazing Part 6
Few things have remained constant throughout Cites
& Insights’ history. There’s the title, the primary ( usu-ally
sole) author and publisher, the price and the
principal format. I was going to say “ and the ISSN,”
but it appears I didn’t have an ISSN until the fourth
issue. Technically, the subtitle’s remained constant—
but the banner typography implies ( correctly) that
“ Crawford at Large” remains mostly to avoid getting a
new ISSN, since it’s smaller than the motto beneath it.
There is one other constant since January 2002.
The first essay in the first issue of each volume is BIBS
& BLATHER, with a portion of the essay devoted to
self- examination: Looking back at the previous vol-ume
and offering predictions for the current volume.
Last year’s navel gazing exercise, “ No Year’s Reso-lutions,”
recounted each previous year’s stated plans
and how they worked out. I won’t repeat that. I will
note that this issue passes Crawford’s Guideline— C& I
has survived six years, making it a success within pe-riodical
literature even if it fails thereafter. Fortunately
( or unfortunately, depending on your preferences), it’s
not failing any time soon, barring even larger unfore-seen
circumstances than those of 2006.
Last Year in Review
Even though I said “ No year’s resolution” for 2006, I
did offer a very short list of “ modest expectations”:
No fewer than 12 and no more than 30 pages per issue;
no fewer than 12 and no more than 16 issues; continued
foci on copyright and net media without abandoning
other interesting areas. Maybe another reader’s survey
toward the end of the year; maybe not.
Later in that essay, I noted that I had “ said elsewhere
that I didn’t plan a January issue until very late in the
month… and didn’t plan an extra Midwinter issue
coming out just before the ALA Midwinter Meeting.” I
said that while wondering whether I’d be wrong on
both counts.
I was, in a manner that also blew the first of the
modest expectations. The January 2006 issue came
out on December 20, 2005— which isn’t very late in
the month. Not only was there a Midwinter 2006 is-sue,
it was the longest issue ever at 32 pages: LIBRARY
2.0 AND “ LIBRARY 2.0.” So much for “ no more than 30
pages per issue,” although no other issue exceeded 30
pages. That was also the most widely read C& I ever
( more than 10,000 PDF downloads and 11,800
HTML hits), and I regard it as a landmark in the lit-erature,
so I won’t apologize for the length.
Number of issues: That’s been fairly constant—
13 in 2001, 15 in 2002, and 14 each year since.
Inside This Issue
Perspective: Book Searching: OCA/ GBS Update................. 2
Trends & Quick Takes ....................................................... 8
Finding a Balance: Patrons and the Library...................... 11
Interesting & Peculiar Products ....................................... 18
Perspective: The Death of the Disc? ................................. 20
My Back Pages ................................................................. 23
Foci: I probably wrote as much about copyright
as in 2005, but the eight essays represented 10.3% of
the 2006 content, down from 12.9% in 2005, and
copyright occupied fifth or sixth place instead of sec-ond.
As for net media, that depends on your defini-tion:
Six essays representing 13.9% of the content
related to blogging, wikipedia and the like, but three
Library 2.0- related essays for another 15.6%. A little
more detail on coverage in 2006 follows later.
Survey: I didn’t do an overall survey because it’s
clear that I wouldn’t base future coverage primarily on
reader feedback— particularly given that it would be
difficult to get even 10% of readers to respond. I did
raise four specific issues in posts at Walt at random. In
no case did I receive more than seven responses.
Cites & Insights January 2007 2
Extent and coverage: My original hope for C& I
was to do 144 to 192 pages per year. What actually
happened: 224 pages in volume 1; 262 in volume 2;
278 in volume 3; 308 in volume 4; and 324 in vol-ume
5. Last year, I hoped for somewhere between 280
and 320 pages; the volume totaled 362 pages ( page
totals exclude indexes). Along the way I tweaked the
layout and typography— but most of those changes
increased the number of words per page. Last year to-taled
nearly 277,000 words.
Coverage was reasonably varied. Most copy
( 64%) was within PERSPECTIVES; a third was library-focused.
Heaviest topical coverage ( with some over-lap)
was ( in descending order) on balance, Library
2.0, net media ( including blogs), copyright, access,
and Google Book Search/ OCA. Frequent multitopic
sections included six LIBRARY STUFF, six TRENDS &
QUICK TAKES, eight MY BACK PAGES, three old movies,
two OLD MEDIA/ NEW MEDIA essays and four INTER-ESTING
& PECULIAR PRODUCTS.
This Year’s Plans
The mini- survey asked questions about four portions
of C& I I was actively considering dropping. Here’s the
results, informed by a handful of your comments:
􀂾 PC PROGRESS is gone. When there are Editors’
Choices ( PC Magazine) and Best Buys ( PC
World) that appear worth mentioning, I’ll in-clude
them in INTERESTING & PECULIAR
PRODUCTS.
􀂾 THE CENSORWARE CHRONICLES disappeared of
its own accord.
􀂾 LIBRARY ACCESS TO SCHOLARSHIP will stick
around This is one case where reader feed-back
changed my mind.
􀂾 INTERESTING & PECULIAR PRODUCTS overlaps
with TRENDS & QUICK TAKES and MY BACK
PAGES, but it has a place. It will continue.
As for frequency and length, I’ll stick with “ no fewer
than 12 and no more than 15 issues” and aim for issue
lengths between 16 and 30 pages.
Books
I’ve been threatening to do print- on- demand books
for some time now. My first idea was to reprint old
material ( columns and articles as well as C& I essays)
in updated value- added collections. The overwhelm-ing
flood of reader enthusiasm for such an idea has
encouraged me not to spend too much energy on that
idea just yet; “ collective yawn” overstates the interest.
I have six other book ideas that aren’t reprints-with-
commentary, all of them ones I believe would be
worth doing but none of them likely to achieve sales
that justify traditional publishing ( at least by ALA Edi-tions):
In other words, ideal candidates for Lulu or
Café Press ( or some other PoD provider).
I’ve started work on the first of the six, recogniz-ing
that there’s no better than a fifty- fifty chance of
completing it in a reasonable time frame. I’m hedging
my bets: Some of the draft chapters will appear as
PERSPECTIVES in Cites & Insights. If, after half a year or
so, I conclude that it’s not going to happen or
wouldn’t make a good book, I’ll probably use the rest
of the completed chapters that way. If the book does
prove workable, at least half of it will not have ap-peared
previously in C& I.
Working on the book shouldn’t hurt C& I,— but it
might reduce the number of extra issues and block-buster
essays. Then again, it might not.
I would love to have feedback on experiences
with Lulu, Café Press ( as a book fulfillment agency) or
direct competitors— how much they charge for ship-ping
( what gets added to the posted price), whether
the sites work well, the print quality of the books. I’ve
heard mostly good things about both of them, but I
have yet to set up an account with either. You know
the address: waltcrawford@ gmail. com.
Perspective
Book Searching:
OCA/ GBS Update
What’s happened since the last OCA/ GBS perspective
( C& I 6: 6, Spring 2006)? Less than might have been
expected. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever run out of
commentaries based on the notion that Open Content
Alliance and Google Library Project somehow mean
either the death of print books or the death of library
circulating collections.
For those in a hurry, here’s a quick summary:
􀂾 Google continues to scan books at unknown
rates and Google Book Search now includes
enough of those books that we can see both
the uses and limits of GBS. Google is making
public- domain books downloadable, if you
don’t mind PDFs with “ Scanned by Google”
on every page. GBS now makes Worldcat and
other library searching available more often.
Cites & Insights January 2007 3
􀂾 The big October Open Content Alliance spec-tacular
didn’t happen. The OCA website
shows signs of inattention. If there’s an OCA
site searching scanned books, it’s well hidden.
􀂾 Despite its early public lead, Yahoo! doesn’t
have any visible presence as a source of book-related
information or scans. Microsoft has in-troduced
a beta version of Live Search Books,
part of the rebranding of MSN Search and
based on Microsoft’s OCA scans. Those books
are also available as downloadable PDFs— if
you don’t mind a “ Digitized by Microsoft” wa-termark
on each page. So far, the interface
only offers the books themselves, with no
“ Find in a library” or “ Buy this book” links.
􀂾 The Internet Archive includes 35,000 books
scanned as part of OCA ( as of early Decem-ber),
including some— but apparently not
all— of those at Live Search Books. These are
also downloadable as PDFs— the exact same
PDFs as on Live Search Books, for those
books scanned thanks to Microsoft.
􀂾 The Google copyright suits are still active and
not yet in court. Google is attempting to sub-poena
information from Yahoo! and others
regarding their book digitization efforts.
That’s the gist. Detailed comments follow.
First, however, there’s Barbara Fister’s December
9, 2006 ACRLog post, “ The big book has missing
pages.” This charmer references Kevin Kelly’s silly
manifesto and notes that Kelly’s “ Big Book
o’Everything” is “ a long way from reality” and some
reasons why— e. g., even if Google and OCA complete
their projects, roughly 80% of the books out there
would not be available in anything more than snip-pets.
“ Even if Google can convince the courts what
they’re doing is legal, the user will only be able to
view scraps, and certainly won’t be able to do any of
the interactive remixing that Kelly envisions.” Fister
notes the “ school of thought” ( based on limited real-world
experience) that full- text online access to book
content “ is not going to destroy the industry— it
might just save it.” I’m not sure that a $ 55 billion in-dustry
( U. S., which suggests around $ 110 billion
worldwide) growing at 3.4% a year ( U. S.) needs “ sav-ing,”
but it’s also far from destruction.
Google Book Search
An April 18, 2006 item at OptimizationWeek. com offers
notes from John Wilkin’s April 3 talk on the Univer-sity
of Michigan and Google, held at Ann Arbor’s pub-lic
library. Wilkin estimated that the UM portion of
Google’s project, digitizing seven million bound vol-umes,
would be completed by July 2011— and noted
that UM had been digitizing books at a rate of 5,000
to 8,000 volumes per year until Google came along.
Google Librarian Newsletter
Google issued a short series of Google Librarian News-letters,
the final one appearing in June 2006. That is-sue
included an introduction to GBS by Jen Grant
( product marketing manager), with noting that foun-ders
Page and Brin asked this question early on:
“ What if every book in the world could be scanned
and sorted for relevance by analyzing the number and
quality of citations from other books?” Apart from the
usual Googlish simplification as to what “ relevance”
means, it’s an interesting way to lead into GBS. Dis-cussing
problems inherent in the fact ( credited to
OCLC) that only 20% of extant books are in the pub-lic
domain, Grant cites an estimate that only 5% are in
print— which seems likely. “ That leaves 75 percent or
more of the world’s book in [ a twilight zone].” Given
the GBS goal “ to build a comprehensive index that
enables people to discover all books,” Google needed
a way to handle the “ twilight zone” books— thus the
snippet approach.
Ben Bunnell ( another Google manager) offers
“ Find a page from your past” in the same issue, be-ginning
“ The idea that within our lifetimes, people
everywhere will be able to search all the world’s books
from their desktops thrills me.” Bunnell notes exam-ples
of “ interesting uses” of GBS for family research;
it’s an interesting commentary that stresses GBS as a
way of locating books that might be of interest, not
primarily a way of reading them.
I contributed “ Libraries and Google/ Google Book
Search: No competition!” to the same issue. I focused
on locality, expertise, community, and resources— four
“ reasons libraries don’t need to fear Google Book
Search or Google itself.” Briefly ( since the article’s
readily available):
􀂾 Every good library is a local library— and li-braries
do local better than Google.
􀂾 GBS “ will be a fine way to discover the more
obscure portions of books, and obscure books
in general. But librarians and library catalogs
offer expertise— professional education and
knowledge to guide users whose needs are
out of the ordinary, and classification methods
Cites & Insights January 2007 4
to support comprehensive retrieval and guide
people to the materials they need.”
􀂾 “ Good libraries aren't just local libraries.
They're places that serve their communities in
that regard. Good libraries build and preserve
communities. ‘ Cybercommunities’ can be fas-cinating—
but the physical community con-tinues
to be vital.” I note that Google can
strengthen a library’s role in the community.
􀂾 “ Need I state the obvious? Google Book
Search helps people discover books. Libraries
help them read books.”
I also took Google to task somewhat— which delayed
publication of the article and resulted in a Google re-sponse
from the editor. My grumps:
􀂾 Many Google Book Search books published
prior to 1923, necessarily in the public do-main,
show only snippets when they should
show the whole book. The same is true for
quite a few government publications almost
certainly in the public domain within the U. S.
􀂾 There should be a “ Find this book in a li-brary”
link for every book that originates in
the Google Library Project and for every book
in the public domain. That wasn't the case the
last time I tried date- limited searching.
􀂾 Ideally, every result in Google Book Search
should include a “ Find this book in a library”
link— after all, even books supplied by pub-lishers
show purchase links for sources other
than the publisher. If Google Book Search is
to be a great way to discover books, it should
include all the great ways to get the books.
Summarizing the responses, the editor said Google
was digitizing quickly and would change some books
from “ snippet view” to “ full view” later on— and
Google agreed on the second and third points. Google
Book Search does now show either “ Find this book in
a library” or “ Find libraries” on all or almost all book
results, and that’s a significant improvement.
John Dupuis noted my article in a June 27, 2006
post at Confessions of a science librarian, “ Google Book
Search @ your reference desk.” He recounted an inci-dent
in which a young woman was writing a paper on
space elevators and needed a book reference. The
catalog didn’t help.
Well, I immediately went into Google Book Search and
searched on “ space elevator.” Lo and behold, we imme-diately
found a few books which seemed to have signifi-cant
sections on space elevators. Checking our
catalogue, we figured out which ones are in our collec-tion.
The student went away very happy…. I also im-mediately
ordered a bunch of the books that we
discovered that aren’t in our collection.
With “ Find in a library” fully active, Dupuis should be
able to handle both pieces of that transaction from the
Google interface— showing the university’s online cata-log
as books are found. That’s a win- win situation.
Search me?
That’s the title of Bob Thompson’s August 13, 2006
Washington Post story, a long story ( nine print pages)
that begins and ends with This is our land, a slim blue
1950 family travelogue by Lillian Dean found in Stan-ford’s
stacks at E169 D3. Thompson discusses the
journey that book will eventually make to an “ undis-closed
location” to be scanned. He considers the
copyright controversies— and Andrew Herkovic
( Stanford) notes this “ Vantage Press” book as a “ great
example,” since it’s highly probable ( say 90%) that the
copyright was never renewed— but “ if you were the
corporate counsel for Stanford, Google or anybody
else, is 10 to 1 good enough?”
The story covers a lot of ground, including
Google’s semi- humble beginnings ( it wasn’t just a ga-rage,
and the owner who rented the garage, three bed-rooms
and two bathrooms to Google is now Google’s
VP for product management) and the founding of
GBS. Stanford’s Michael Keller was enthusiastic. He
notes reasons— one of which, preservation, seems a
bit iffy given the apparent quality of GBS scans. Cur-rently,
Stanford only provides out- of- print materials,
but Keller believes Google’s scanning is fair use.
Thompson talks to Allan Adler ( AAP) and Paul
Aiken ( Authors Guild), both of whom make question-able
claims about GBS. Adler says the Google database
“ in essence would be the world’s largest digital library”
and Aiken says “ it’s an attempt to avoid licensing.
Without the ability to say no, a rights holder really
has nothing to license.” It would be interesting to
poke at Aiken about fair use, but I suspect the an-swers
would be unsatisfactory. As Thompson summa-rizes,
“ Permission, permission is their refrain.”
There’s more— Google’s analogy between web
searching and GBS, publishers’ denial that the analogy
works, and so on. It’s a good piece, worth reading.
University of California joins
Google Library Project
In August, UC announced it would join the Google
Library Project. One early commentary struck me as
extreme: “ Google ‘ Showtimes’ the UC library system,”
Cites & Insights January 2007 5
posted August 13, 2006 by Jeff Ubois at Television ar-chiving.
Immediately noting that this was a “ secret
agreement,” Ubois presumes the agreement “ may en-rich
Google’s shareholders at public expense.” After
quoting Brewster Kahle about providing “ universal
access to all human knowledge, within our lifetime,”
Ubois says “[ I] t’s troubling to see public institutions
transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds,
into private hands without disclosing the terms of the
transaction.” [ Emphasis added.]
How is UC transferring assets? It’s lending books,
which will be returned ( they never leave the building
in most cases). That’s ( part of) what libraries do. As
for “ without disclosing,” it doesn’t take much research
to find out that California is ( like Michigan) a state in
which that “ secret” contract was only secret until
someone filed a formal request to see it, since it in-volved
a public agency. “ UC should expect and wel-come
public comment if its inventory is effectively
being privatized”— but that’s not what’s happening.
Ubois presumes that Google’s contract must be
like Showtime’s offensive contract with the Smith-sonian,
which did provide exclusive access for some
length of time— thus the neoverb in the post title.
UC’s agreement is probably not explicitly exclusive. But
as a practical matter, scanning doesn’t happen twice…
This deal will be costly for UC in staff time and other re-sources,
and the chances that another vendor will come
through and duplicate the work are slim.
This discussion is based on pure speculation— and
happens to be false, since UC was already an OCA
partner and Microsoft was already scanning UC books
and documents!
Ubois makes things worse: Assuming Google’s ef-ficient,
it won’t scan a Berkeley copy of something it’s
scanned at Harvard, and restrictions may make it dif-ficult
for Berkeley to borrow Harvard’s digital copy.
“ The student of 2012 will have a choice: go to the
complete digital library, owned by Google, or go to
the partial digital library of his or her own university.”
That’s nonsense. The student of 2012 won’t be
able to get the book from Google’s so- called digital
library anyway if the book’s not in the public domain,
which means the student can do exactly what he or
she can do now: Go read the actual, honest- to- trees,
printed book, either UC’s copy ( if there is one) or one
loaned from another library.
Then Ubois asks a series of questions, at least
some of which make the same assumptions. For ex-ample:
“ Is it reasonable to ask the public to pay a sec-ond
time… for material already purchased, simply
because it’s now necessary to convert the format in
which it is stored?” But UC is not “ converting the
format” in which books are stored. It’s adding new
search capabilities to find print books, which still ex-ist
as print books.
Ubois concludes, “ By acquiescing to Google’s
demands for secrecy, UC has compromised the public
interest, and set a dangerous precedent for the rest of
the academic community.” Which is truly strange,
given that UC is by no means the first academic insti-tution
to sign a confidential Google contract, unless
we assume that Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford aren’t
prestigious enough to set precedent. And given that
UC knew the “ secret agreement” could not be kept
secret. As with Michigan, both UC and Google must
have known that the confidentiality clause was not
enforceable and the contract would be secret only un-til
someone asked to see it. ( UM says it always
planned to post its contract.)
The contract was posted later in August. A Com-puterworld
story notes that the contract grants Google
sole discretion over use of the scanned material in
Google’s services, which is scarcely surprising— and
that it explicitly prevents charging end- user fees for
searching and viewing search results or for access to
the full text of public domain works. UC also agrees
not to charge for services using the scanned material
( excluding value- added services) and that it won’t
license or sell the digital material provided by Google
to a third party, or distribute more than 10% of it to
other libraries and educational institutions. Finally,
Google promises to return the books in the same con-dition
( or pay for or replace them) and has 15 busi-ness
days ( three weeks) to scan a given book.
Karen Coyle compared Michigan and UC con-tracts
carefully. She notes that UC’s contract is silent
about quality control for the scans ( probably a good
thing, given GLP’s early results)— and that UC man-aged
to get “ image coordinates” so they can highlight
searched words on displayed pages ( not in Michigan’s
contract). There’s a lot more to Coyle’s analysis, posted
August 29, 2006 at Coyle’s InFormation.
Later notes and developments:
A chronological potpourri
Phil Bradley spent some time with GBS and com-mented
in an August 31, 2006 search on his blog,
“ Google Book Search— to download or not
download?” You’ll get the tone from the beginning:
Cites & Insights January 2007 6
In theory Google Book Search now allows users to
download out of copyright books for nothing. In prac-tice,
it’s the usual Google botched disaster that we’re get-ting
used to.
Bradley notes that it’s difficult to find books you can
download— and when you do, “ they’re often either so
old [ as] to be illegible, or they’ve been badly scanned
so it’s almost impossible to read.” Bradley tried some
Shakespeare, to compare the results “ with the Google
disaster that is Google’s Shakespeare Collection.” He
found 14 ( of 23 searched) that he could immediately
download, although “ most of the editions would have
been difficult to read, to say the very least”— but that’s
better than the three at the special collection.
An August 31, 2006 press release from the Uni-versity
of Michigan notes that digital works from the
Google project are now enhancing UM’s online catalog
via MBooks, a system “ intended to support scholarly
research.” Mbooks provides a page- turning function,
the ability to change resolution and change format,
updated bibliographic information, and persistent
URLs. Users may determine the number of times a
search term appears on each page of any scanned
book but apparently even UM researchers won’t be
able to view the entirety of books still in copyright.
Finding a downloadable book at Google, I noted
the special page that comes along. It’s an interesting
document and includes usage guidelines, fortunately
after saying “ Public domain books belong to the pub-lic
and we are merely their custodians.” One interest-ing
guideline: “ Maintain attribution”— specifically,
don’t remove the Google watermark from each page.
That’s not an entirely unreasonable request, and it’s
stated as a request, not a demand. There’s another:
“ Make non- commercial use of the files.” The books
themselves are in the public domain, which means
you’re perfectly free to make any use of them— but
Google’s asserting a right in the scanned version. A
September 4, 2006 post by Bill McCoy on his Adobe
blog questions Google’s “ pseudo- license” and repeats
Ubois’ assertion, in a different manner: “ Just because
you’ve got a huge pile of cash and were first in line
with a cozy no- bid deal to do this scanning— a deal
that cannot even be repeated given the wear and tear on
collection items— doesn’t create a special exemption to
[ public domain].” [ Emphasis added.] But Google and
OCA both assert that their scanning methods create
no more wear and tear than reading a book. McCoy’s
assertion doesn’t work for books that are ever circu-lated,
and certainly doesn’t work for UC ( as one ex-ample).
McCoy’s counter- examples are flawed. Google
is not claiming ownership of public domain works,
only of its scans. Google isn’t preventing libraries from
lending the books that Google scanned and anyone
( Microsoft, Yahoo, me) is free to scan a borrowed
book and, if it’s in the public domain, do anything we
want with our scan.
Christina Pikas responded to some of the nega-tive
posts on GBS in a September 4, 2006 post at
Christina’s LIS rant. “ In my world, I’ve found [ GBS] to
be pretty helpful.” She deals with scientific informa-tion,
where “ you go from less reliable but close to the
research to nailed down but far from the cutting
edge.” She��s used GBS to improve access to her li-brary’s
collection, e. g., searching the scientific name of
an uncommon bacterium, which pointed to a molecu-lar
biology textbook the library owned. As she con-cludes,
“ YMMV,” a basic principle for GBS.
By October, some publishers were beginning to
admit that GBS is helping sales, as reported by Jeffrey
Goldfarb in an October 6, 2006 Reuters story. Oxford
University Press estimates that a million customers
have viewed 12,000 OUP titles ( from the Google Pub-lisher
segment of GBS). Springer Science + Business
reports growth in backlist sales based on GBS. Pen-guin
finds more success from Amazon— and special-ized
publisher Osprey found healthy growth from
both sources.
Karen Coyle posts an important lesson from early
GBS scanning in an October 24, 2006 post at Coyle’s
InFormation: “ Google Book Search is NOT a library
backup.” GBS uses uncorrected OCR, which “ means
that there are many errors that remain in the extracted
text” ( including all line- break hyphenation). Also, it’s
not digitizing everything: Some books are too delicate,
some will be problematic. “ Quality control is generally
low” ( she provides egregious examples). None of this
came as a surprise to most digital librarians, according
to a comment from Dorothea Salo.
Péter Jacsó reviewed GBS for Péter’s digital refer-ence
shelf ( downloaded November 3, 2006); it’s an
extensive and negative review, well worth reading.
He notes the “ ignorance, illiteracy and innumeracy” of
the software—“ OR” searches yielding fewer results
than one of the two terms ( or more results than the
sum of the two terms!), limits that don’t work, incon-sistent
handling of full- view books, confusing hit
counts. Google doesn’t say how many books are in
GBS ( or in the full- view portion), always problematic
for a database. There’s a lot more here, and although
Cites & Insights January 2007 7
some of it seems based on using GBS as a source for
actual reference information rather than a way to find
books, it’s nonetheless a good, tough review.
Mick O’Leary wasn’t thrilled with GBS either, as
he recounts in a November 2006 Information Today
review. I’m not sure why O’Leary believes that GBS
and Amazon’s Search Inside! “ promise to affect the
future of library book collections profoundly.”
( O’Leary repeats the claim that you can get past three-page
and five- page limitations on in- copyright views
by searching for distinctive words on the last page of
the excerpt. I’ve never seen that work, at least not in
Google, and would love to see repeatable examples.)
He says correctly that GBS, if completed, “ will be use-ful
primarily as a library finding tool”— and seems to
dismiss the importance of that, saying “ these books
have already lost much of their value” because knowl-edge
advances so rapidly. O’Leary dismisses public
domain books as being “ of interest only to scholars
and other specialized researchers.” I’m not sure what
to make of this review, but the synopsis is flat- out
wrong: “ Google Book Search is Google’s grand project
to create a universal full- text e- book library.” That’s
simply not true, according to everything Google’s said,
unless by “ library” you mean “ collection whose con-tents
you can determine but not see.”
In October, the University of Wisconsin at Madi-son
became the eighth library in the Google project,
focusing on public domain materials, following the
Complutense University of Madrid ( which announced
its participation on September 26). The University of
Virginia Library announced its participation on No-vember
14, 2006, focusing on American history, lit-erature,
and humanities.
Finally, for now, November news coverage indi-cates
that Google has subpoenaed information on the
book digitization efforts of Yahoo! and Amazon— and
that both have denied access to the information.
OCA and Live Search Books
There’s not a lot to say about OCA since this Spring
other than the summary notes at the top of this piece.
The promised October rollout didn’t happen. 60- odd
people attended an OCA workshop in October
2006— but as of mid- December, the OCA website
shows the October 20 event as being in the future.
The website for the OCA workshops has a faulty digi-tal
certificate; the “ discussion area” has eight discus-sion
sections, only one of which has any topics ( that
topic consisting of one anonymous post with no re-sponses).
On the home site, the “ press page” shows
stories through November 2005. The “ Next Steps”
page claims a November 2006 update date but ap-pears
to date from late 2005. The FAQ says “ All con-tent
in the OCA archive will be available through the
website. In addition, Yahoo! will index all content
stored by the OCA to make it available to the broadest
set of Internet users”— but there’s no search function
on the OCA site. ( A recent note: the Sloan Founda-tion’s
kicking in $ 1 million, directly to Internet Ar-chive,
to support OCA digitizing.)
Fortunately, while the OCA level seems mori-bund,
there’s some action within the ranks— although
not, as far as I can tell, by Yahoo!, the partner with the
highest initial profile.
Microsoft made good on its October 2005 prom-ise
to join OCA and to release a book search service.
Books. live. com went live ( in beta) on December 6,
2006. “ Microsoft Live Search Books” ( LSB) may be
awkward, but it’s part of Microsoft’s general rebrand-ing
from MSN to Windows Live. A December 6 post
at ResourceShelf offers an excellent brief history of LSB,
including links to earlier stories. Gary Price focuses
less on competition than on choices: “ The more op-tions
and tools information professionals have the
better. Even Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, has said that
search is NOT a zero- sum game.”
Microsoft plans to integrate book content with
the rest of Windows Live Search, presumably with an
available limit for books only. The beta release in-cludes
“ noncopyright” books from UC, Toronto and
the British Library, with books from NYPL, Cornell,
and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine
coming soon. ( NYPL is also involved in both OCA
and Google Library Project.) Price notes some features
of LSB and that “ Scanning looks nice from what we’ve
seen.” ( I put “ noncopyright” in quotes because LSB
includes quite a few oral histories from Bancroft’s Re-gional
Oral History project that are much more recent
than 1923, and those don’t appear to be in the public
domain.)
CDLINFO Newsletter for December 14, 2006 of-fers
an update on UC’s participation in OCA, noting
LSB as a “ new portal to access UC libraries books
scanned by the Internet Archive for the Open Content
Alliance.” The discussion calls LSB “ serendipitously
fruitful” and notes some interesting local searches.
The scanning facilities for UC books are hosted at the
two UC regional storage facilities. The article identi-fies
the original focus as Americana, says books pro-
Cites & Insights January 2007 8
vided are identified based on catalog searches ( they’re
not just taking a shelf at a time), and says the non-damaging
nature of Internet Archive’s scanning was
affirmed by a test of 800 Berkeley mathematics books.
It’s an interesting article.
Tom Peters comments on LSB in a December 12,
2006 post at ALA TechSource. “ After playing around
for an hour or so… I have to admit— against some
vague sense that my better judgment is failing me—
that I like it.” Unfortunately, Peters follows that by
repeating a report that “ LSB does not work well— or
at all— when using browsing software other than
Internet Explorer.” That’s generally not the case; most
users of other browsers ( certainly including Firefox)
have used LSB without difficulty. Peters does interest-ing
searches— and offers interesting comments. He
doesn’t like the name of the service, but that’s really
an issue with Microsoft’s online services in general. He
wonders why there’s no overall count for the collec-tion—
as do I, although the same can be said of GBS
and Amazon. ( Internet Archive does provide a count
for its American Libraries text collection, just over
35,000 at this writing— but that collection does not
include everything on LSB.)
After reading Peters’ post, I did a little experi-menting
using his favorite search terms (“ phrenology”
and “ spontaneous combustion”). Here’s what I found:
􀂾 LSB yielded 687 items for “ phrenology” and
was only willing to show the first 250 of
them. It yielded 219 for “ spontaneous com-bustion”
( as a phrase; Peters’ 660 must be the
two words, which yield 887 on December 15,
2006), and would show all 219 of those.
( There appears to be a firm limit of 250 view-able
results in the current LSB, as the 887-
book result also stops at 250.)
􀂾 Neither of those searches yielded any results
in Internet Archive’s text collection or Ameri-can
Libraries collection, even though the LSB
PDF downloads come from IA servers; the
two are clearly out of synch.
􀂾 Google Book Search yielded 2,618 for “ phre-nology”—
but would show only 139 books,
indicating a typically wifty total result count.
For the phrase “ spontaneous combustion,”
GBS showed 1,041, of which 512 were actu-ally
available.
􀂾 Restricting GBS to full- view books reduced
the first result to 1,603 and the actual result
to a mere 63, either one- quarter or one- tenth
of LSB’s result. The second search came down
to 699 claimed, 489 actual.
Rick Roche discussed experiments using LSB as a ge-nealogy
tool in a December 18, 2006 post at rickli-brarian.
Some searches came up empty, others did
better. He urges Microsoft to add a proximity search. I
suspect a California genealogist might do better at this
point, given the source of most early material in the
database— and it’s clear that the database has just be-gun.
Roche suggests LSB as a tool even in its current
state, since it’s free and can yield surprising results.
Conclusions
Microsoft has posted a significant ( and presumably
growing) collection of public domain materials in Live
Search Books. The scans appear to be more carefully
done than some at GBS, although Karen Coyle indi-cates
that the OCR is still pretty poor. As with GBS,
the PDF downloads include watermarks on each page
( Microsoft’s watermark is light and small).
Otherwise, OCA seems to be missing in action.
That may change over the next few months.
The reality of Google Book Search is much less
enchanting than the promise; many of the scans seem
pretty poor. None of this should be terribly surpris-ing,
although it may be disappointing.
Both projects can enhance discoverability for li-brary
collections, although LSB must first add “ Find a
library” functionality. Enhanced discoverability should
mean increased use of print collections. Neither pro-ject,
as far as I can tell, has any serious potential to
disrupt libraries or make their print collections less
valuable. Neither project will yield a universal digital
library. Nor should they be expected to.
Trends & Quick Takes
The True Face of Piracy
“ Inside DVD piracy” by Rob Medich in the November
2006 Sound & Vision tells an interesting story— how
“ cammers” videotape new movies at preview show-ings
and pass the goods along to illicit manufacturers,
distributors and dealers. The FBI arrested more than a
dozen people in what the article calls an “ interna-tional
crime ring” and possibly the biggest DVD pi-racy
operation around.
Supposedly, this operation has “ deprived the
movie studios of an estimated $ 5.8 billion in revenues
over the years.” That’s a tricky claim ( would people
Cites & Insights January 2007 9
buying the third- rate pirate DVDs from guys in front
of theatres really pay $ 20 or $ 10 a ticket to see the
legit movie?), but let’s assume it’s correct ( noting that
it’s not $ 5.8 billion per year, but still a nice chunk of
change). The claim is that this one group of pirates
accounts for 80% of the piracy.
I believe commercial pirates should be prose-cuted.
I thought the law against using ( or possessing)
camcorders in movie theaters was perfectly reason-able.
What’s great here, though, is one specific figure,
given the absolute paranoia of MPAA about copy pro-tection,
DRM, and peer- to- peer copying:
According to the Motion Picture Association of America,
roughly 97% of movie pirating starts with theater cam-mers,
who make about $ 400,000 a year from their ef-forts.
[ Emphasis added.]
In other words, even leaving out other sources of
commercial piracy, casual “ piracy” is not a big deal:
maybe $ 175 million “ over the years” for an industry
that grosses better than $ 30 billion a year between
theaters and DVD sales. If “ over the years” means six
years, that’s less than one- tenth of one percent.
Public Library Use
The November 2006 American Libraries includes fig-ures
from the annual Index of American Public Li-brary
Circulation. According to that study, adult
circulation grew by 1.8% between 2004 and 2005
and juvenile circulation was flat— but expenditures
grew by 5.1%.
A caveat: These figures are based on a stratified
sampling of larger public libraries ( serving 25,000 or
more), this year including 283 libraries. It completely
ignores the huge range of smaller libraries and should
be considered indicative, not conclusive.
Thomas J. Hennen, Jr. offers the 2006 version of
his public library ratings in the same issue. These rat-ings
attempt to be reasonably comprehensive. The
“ 2006 version” is primarily calendar 2003 numbers,
and includes just over 9,000 libraries. Those libraries
show a circulation increase of 2.3% over the previous
year, topping two billion circulations ( up from about
1.6 billion a decade earlier). Operating expenditures
were up 4.2%, and circulation per capita was up
1.2%, breaking seven items per capita.
The two studies use different time periods and
different populations, so it’s a little hard to make
comparisons. In any case, public libraries continue to
serve the public well on a massive scale and at a rea-sonable
price, even if that price does go up.
The Future Past
Harry McCracken’s “ Techlog” in the November 2006
PC World is a charming look back at some technologi-cal
predictions the magazine has made over the last
23 years. They were on the money about the com-puter
mouse— in 1983! But they were also enthusias-tic
about Windows 1.0 and thought it would emerge
in April 1984 ( it came out in November 1984, but the
first useful Windows was years later). They predicted
IBM’s PCjr “ will revolutionize the way we live and
learn”— and printed the 1987 prediction of a display-company
honcho that “ within 15 years, LCD moni-tors
will be common and may reach 1000 lines of
resolution.” So far so good. “ He also says they’ll be
monochrome.” Seen many high- def monochrome
LCD displays lately ( or ever)?
In 1998, PC World guessed executives might
dump laptops in favor of Windows CE- based PDA-like
mininotebooks. In 1999, they touted the Device
Bay standard for hotswapping PC components— and
in 2002 they anticipated that the new version of Win-dows
( then called Longhorn, now Vista) would ship
in late 2004 or 2005. Overall, their track record was
pretty decent as forecasts go.
Everybody Talkin’ Bout Heaven
Ain’t Goin’ There
That was the lyric that went through my mind as I
read Heidi Dawley’s November 7, 2006 article at Me-dia
Life, “ With web TV, more glimmer than gold.” The
tease: “ Lots of talk of people watching TV online.” The
substance: “ For all the talk it turns out a small share
of web users are actually doing it, watching television
online. And while that may change over time, it will
still be a ways off.” The article reports on a recent
Consumer Internet Barometer study, finding that
about 10% of internet users had watched TV on the
internet in the third quarter— and most of that was
news. “ Perhaps more significant, that viewing was in
addition to regular TV watching, not at its expense.”
That helps explain why networks are putting lots
of their stuff on the internet. We were surprised by
the quality when we watched a missed episode of one
network show on my 19" Sony LCD: If anything, it
seemed higher quality than our first- rate 32" Sony XBR
TV— maybe because our cable system does a medio-cre
job with broadcast signals. The networks are co-operating
because they’re finding this is incremental
traffic, not replacement traffic.
Cites & Insights January 2007 10
None of this has much to do with YouTube and
its ilk. Do you watch YouTube videos in preference to
( say) Men in Trees or Bones or Studio 60 or whatever
shows you like? More likely, the internet video is bits
and pieces of extra fun, a time- waster that doesn’t re-duce
your broadcast- TV time.
Multitasking Continued
I find it interesting that more and more people are
recognizing ( and studies continue to demonstrate)
that multitasking is, to use my phrase, “ a great way to
do several things badly.” Not that it matters much to
people who always multitask— but they’re not really
paying attention anyway. Two more data points…
􀂾 Mary Ellen Bates writes “ Emails and IMs and
feeds— oh, my!” in the November 2006 ECon-tent,
talking about the “ deluge of information
that comes at us each and every day.” While
it’s not the focus of the column, I was taken
with this statement: “ No, I do not believe it is
possible to read email effectively while also
talking on the phone and IMing a friend on
the side. Each activity gets one- third of the at-tention
it deserves; our brains can’t truly mul-titask.”
If I would disagree with anything
here, it’s the fraction: In practice, context
switching uses enough attention that each ac-tivity
is probably getting at most one- fourth of
the attention it deserves.
􀂾 Barbara Fister writes “ Paying attention” on
ACRLog ( October 28, 2006), noting a Business
Week article in which someone says the adver-tising
in MySpace “ can be so subtle that kids
don’t distinguish it from content.” Fister
rightly worries about this blurring of the
lines. “ In a similar way, TV stations which
identify their programs as ‘ news’ are in fact of-fering
documentary and even ‘ infotainment,’
while staunchly clinging to the ‘ news’ desig-nator.
This is, of course, one of the tasks of
information fluency librarians: to alert folks to
the ways the lines are blurred.” But Fister also
suspects one culprit: “ I think this blurring is
an offshoot of ‘ continuous partial attention”…
While multitasking can be useful, there is still
value in the ability to focus on one task, and
educators have a role in conveying that mes-sage.”
It gets worse: “ A group of students told
me that the one thing they’d find most chal-lenging
about the voluntary simplicity move-ment
was not giving up things. It was
spending time alone to think, relax, and get to
know themselves and their values.” Marc
Meola commented, wondering how libraries
can create environments that “ promote focus-ing
on one task” and notes, “ even the corpo-rate
world realizes that multitasking doesn’t
work, and that ‘ what now passes for multi-tasking
used to be called not paying attention’
[ quoting a Wall Street Journal article].”
Quicker Takes
In the most recent ( and final) PC PROGRESS, C& I No-vember
2006, I grumped about a PC World digital
camera roundup that gave the highest rating to a cam-era
with the worst image quality among the top 10. I
wasn’t the only one appalled by that; a letter in the
November issue suggests, “[ M] ost people would agree
that the most important job of any camera is to pro-duce
a high- quality image.” There’s an editorial re-sponse:
“ We acknowledge that our camera ratings
may need reweighting. We are doing a regularly
scheduled review of our ratings and believe readers
will like the changes that should result.” It’s a start.
􀂾 Seth Finkelstein writes about “ search engine
optimization and the commodification of so-cial
relationships” at Infothought ( October 20,
2006). He’s discussing the uproar over blog-ging-
for- bucks schemes and noting that such
schemes are as much about search engine op-timization
as about good publicity. The peo-ple
paying for posts don’t care if you post
mean things about their product, as long as
the post results in higher search engine rank-ings.
He wonders about the whole issue of
commercializing social relationships— e. g., A-list
blogs that are really commercial maga-zines
in blog form, paid writers and all. And
he offers a variation on the old “ would you
have sex for a million dollars?” joke. Briefly,
company asks blogger: “ Would you write
about me in return for an advisory board
membership?” Blogger says yes. Company:
“ Would you write about me for ten bucks?”
Blogger: “ What kind of a flack do you think I
am?” Company: “ We’ve established that. Now
we’re just arguing over price.” ( Sorry if I
mangled the joke, Seth— but you make excel-lent
points here.)
Cites & Insights January 2007 11
􀂾 Mark Lindner struck a nerve with “ habitually
probing generalist” at Off the mark ( October
20, 2006— a good day for quicker takes!).
He’s reading assigned articles for an LIS
course, including an article by C. L. Palmer,
“ Structures and strategies of interdisciplinary
science.” Palmer discusses the research prac-tices
of such scientists, identifying four pri-mary
research modes, one of which is
“ generalist.” Briefly, generalists use individual-istic
approaches, tend to work alone, habitu-ally
probe ( often in unfamiliar domains),
build their own knowledge bases through
learning and asking broad questions, and
strive for synthesis. We don’t all spend all our
time in one mode— but boy, do I recognize
my own frequently- solitary habits in that de-scription.
If Lindner offers his “ habitually
probing generalist” shirts for sale, I might buy
one— and I never buy message shirts.
Finding a Balance
Patrons and the Library
Here’s a novel idea: Organizations should pay atten-tion
to the people who use their services and pay their
bills. Here’s another one: Organizations should find
ways to involve all the people within their community
who could or should use their services.
Those ideas don’t seem novel? Maybe not. To
hear some people talk about it, you’d think being pa-tron-
oriented is a startling change for libraries and
librarianship. Here’s how one radical librarian put it:
“ Every reader his book. Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.” [ Emphasis added.]
You know the source: S. R. Ranganathan, 1931,
Five Laws of Library Science. The laws still make sense,
especially if “ book” is defined more broadly. I can’t
imagine there are too many librarians who haven’t
read those laws— and I don’t imagine there are too
many librarians who don’t care about their patrons.
What’s the Problem?
Maybe there isn’t a problem. Some libraries are doing
a fine job of staying in touch with their patrons’ needs
and desires. But I’m sure some librarians pay lip ser-vice
to patron orientation more than they actively seek
ways to maintain better contact, and that some librar-ies
are good at “ listening” to patrons but not quite so
good at hearing them.
As with most of today’s pushes for transforma-tion,
maybe it’s not so much principles as techniques.
Technology provides new ways to stay in touch with
patrons, new ways to provide service. Technology can
also enable patrons to be active parts of the library
community in ways that weren’t previously feasible.
It’s not difficult to go overboard in patron orienta-tion.
Library users can be as mistaken and wrong-headed
as librarians and frequently are: They may not
be “ broken” but they can certainly be wrong. “ Give
‘ em what they want” is a great idea in moderation, but
potentially disastrous if it becomes the overriding
principle for all library decisions. If librarians don’t
know more than patrons about some things, why are
they being paid to be librarians? For that matter,
keeping touch with who “ they” are and what “ they”
want— or, more to the point, what they expect from
the library— is neither simple nor likely to be perfect.
Making Patrons Part of the Library
Here’s one way to look at patron orientation within a
balanced library:
Patrons should be part of the library, and the li-brary
community should include the broadest feasible
range of patrons from within the service community.
􀂾 As part of your library, patron needs are
clearly important— but so are other needs
within the library community.
􀂾 As part of your library, patrons can contribute
intellectual effort as well as tax money and
volunteer hours ( and Friends membership),
in ways that can improve and enhance ( but
probably not replace) traditional cataloging
and recommendation services.
􀂾 As part of your library, some subset of patrons
should be involved in much of your planning
and decision- making— but librarians need to
lead the library community just as specialists
lead other specialized communities.
􀂾 Reaching out to bring more patrons into your
library community means respecting the ex-isting
community as well; that’s balance.
Joshua M. Neff, in discussing “ beta is forever” in a
September 10, 2006 post at The goblin in the library,
notes “ libraries have always tried to gear their services
and programming to their users… and done their best
to tweak… their services and programs” ( emphasis
added)— but worries about the felt need to “ have all
Cites & Insights January 2007 12
the wrinkles ironed out before we present anything to
the public.”
Neff looks at “ beta is forever” differently, saying it
“ means always being mindful that what we do, we do
for our patrons” and “ means openly bringing our pa-trons
in on what we do.” Later, he rewords that:
We need to include our patrons, because who better to
improve services and programs than the people who ac-tually
take advantage of them?
While the thrust of the post is the need for continuing
refinement ( which you can either call “ beta is forever”
or, more familiarly, continuous monitoring and im-provement:
Google and Microsoft don’t stop refining
and improving software just because they drop the
“ beta” label), I find that it fits here. Including patrons
as part of the process, making them integral to the
library rather than merely customers, may be key to
balanced improvement.
Laura Cohen thinks along the same lines in a Sep-tember
19, 2006 post at Library 2.0: An academic’s per-spective:
“ Library 2.0 and the academic conundrum.”
Library 2.0 turns the role of academic librarians on its
head. In the library 2.0 world view, user needs, prefer-ences,
practices, comfort zones, interests and skills in
their handling of information converge to drive library
services. Their participation in the creation and use of
these services forges the library. Ultimately, users be-come
our peers.
“ Ultimately, users become our peers.” I would disagree
that current user needs should drive all of an aca-demic
library’s practices, but making the patrons
peers of the librarians in some respects makes sense.
On the other hand, the next paragraph in the post
strikes me oddly. It lists some of the traditional roles
of academic librarians— but where those roles are le-gitimate
( instructors, guides to researchers, classifi-ers),
they continue to be vital. Academic librarians
have always been more “ guide on the side” than “ sage
on the stage” ( to use a contrast popular a few years
ago). Realistically, student needs, preferences, and
practices also drive “ classroom services” ( very few
academic institutions keep teaching classes with no
students)— but that doesn’t negate the special skills
and roles of faculty members.
What Do Patrons Want?
That question comes up repeatedly in blogs and else-where.
There are no easy answers, given the basic
confounding factors:
􀂾 The patrons of each community are unique.
􀂾 Very few patron communities are homogene-ous;
different patrons have different wants
and needs.
􀂾 Patron desires and needs change over time,
and those needs they believe the library
should fulfill are influenced by previous ex-perience
with this library and other libraries.
􀂾 There are no ways to gain complete pictures
of patron wants and needs. Feedback mecha-nisms
providing more than anecdotal evi-dence
are expensive and clumsy— and they
need to be continual, since the makeup of the
community and tools available to the library
continue to change.
None of these says it’s hopeless or that librarians
shouldn’t keep as much in touch with patrons as pos-sible.
They do, I believe, argue against knee- jerk
“ whatever patrons want” reactions.
What do freshmen want?
The ubiquitous librarian asked that question in an Au-gust
7, 2006 post. Faced with a new incoming class at
Georgia Tech, he wondered, “ So what do they want
from us?” He asked 30 random students within the
appropriate Facebook group that very question; 16
responded. That’s anecdotal, but still useful.
The top expectation? Resources! Just about all of the re-spondents
expressed desire for a quality collection, with
five mentioning a wide range of materials on all topics.
Nothing shocking, but the words that kept surfacing
were fast, online, and easy.
The second most frequently mentioned desire was quiet
space. The library world ( or maybe just us?) has been so
focused on creating group and social spaces, but stu-dents
definitely expect to use the library for escape.
Specific responses included the desire for “ nooks and
crannies so that I can study without seeing my friends
every two minutes,” “ a quiet place for me to study,” “ a
place to study where silence is enforced”— but also
“ research resources and such” and “ a large range of
books on every topic, a helpful library staff.” Anecdo-tally,
place— more specifically a quiet place— matters a
lot, and so do books ( as well as online resources).
Working with the patrons
Laura Cohen set down a list of “ twenty things I want
to ask our users” in an October 6, 2006 post at Li-brary
2.0: An academic’s perspective. She expresses the
need to “ work actively with our constituencies to find
out what they need and how they want these needs to
be delivered” and wants to ask questions ranging from
the philosophical to the practical. When balanced
Cites & Insights January 2007 13
with the long- term goals of the library, this form of
direct user involvement as part of the library could be
particularly beneficial in academic libraries, where the
connections between librarians and patrons may have
frayed over the decades. A few of the questions:
5. Why do you go to the library?
7. Do you want the library Web site to be more like
Google, Yahoo!, or something in between?
8. What’s useful about the library Web site? What’s
problematic? What’s missing?
13. Do you blog? If so, what service or software do you
use, and what do you blog about?
14. Do you engage in tagging? If so, where? Would tag-ging
of library research materials be useful to you?
16. If the library created a browser toolbar, what kinds
of things would you like it to include?
It’s worth reading and thinking about the whole list,
but consider some of these. Number 5 does refer to
library as place ( the first question asks users to ex-plain
the role of the library in their life); its open-endedness
is interesting. Number 7 may be difficult,
particularly since— while Google is the most promi-nent
search engine— Yahoo! is used more commonly
than Google, indicating that both models work for
tens of millions of users. Number 8 ( and 9, which
asks the same questions about the catalog) should
elicit worthwhile feedback, although it’s difficult for
people to suggest what’s missing unless possibilities
are offered.
Number 16 is incomplete, or could be usefully
modified: A more crucial question, I believe, is “ What
functionality would make a library browser toolbar
useful enough for you to download and use it?”
Number 14 is tricky: It assumes patrons know what
“ tagging” means, and that they understand the social-software
meaning, not the graffiti artist’s meaning. On
the other hand, it’s a vital question if a library’s con-sidering
opening the catalog to folksonomy.
Then there’s number 13— and I admit to puzzle-ment.
If I was a student asked that question, I think
my answer might be “ What business is that of
yours— and how does it relate to my use of the li-brary?”
While libraries need to find ways to make pa-trons
part of the library, there are limits. I wonder
whether question 13 doesn’t fall into the same cate-gory
( NOYDB, to use an acronym) as “ Do you date?
What is your sexual preference?”
Despite my problems with three of the twenty
questions and sense that # 13 is out of place, it makes
sense to formulate this year’s list of things a library
would like to know— as long as you recognize it
would be impractical to expect all, or a significant
fraction, of your patrons to answer such a lengthy set
of questions. If 1,000 students and 100 faculty mem-bers
did answer all 20 questions, what would you do
with the responses? The set can, as Cohen suggests,
“ get us thinking”— and part of that thinking should be
how you can use narrower surveys and other feed-back
mechanisms to integrate patrons into your li-brary.
I’d suggest being as nonintrusive as possible; if
there’s no clear connection between the question and
library services, why ask the question?
What do writers and readers expect of the library?
“ What do patrons want?” is an overbroad question, to
be sure. Lorcan Dempsey gets the question right in
this September 20, 2006 post at Lorcan Dempsey’s we-blog,
discussing a Danish study of library perceptions
and expectations by Birte Christensen- Dalsgaard. Pa-trons
may want many things that they would never
expect the library to supply ( and might be appalled if
the library attempted to supply them). While it’s
wonderful to speak of exceeding expectations, we
may go too far if we exceed reasonable boundaries.
Dempsey doesn’t summarize the entire report
( which I haven’t yet read). Some of his notes are par-ticularly
relevant as you think about integrating pa-trons
into the library and the limits of such
integration. The study categorized three library- usage
persona: the “ drive- in user” ( using the library in a
goal- oriented way), the “ worker bee” ( using the
physical space but not necessarily using library re-sources),
and the library enthusiast ( knowledgeable,
uses library services, interacts with staff). “ Library staff
tend to be disappointed that the drive- in users do not
make user of other services; not unsurprisingly, they
‘ express delight’ about library enthusiasts.” But all
three personae represent legitimate segments of the
patron community. A balanced library will find ways
to integrate all of them while encouraging, but not
forcing, the first two to expand their connections with
the library. I’ve never asked the reference librarians at
my public library for help; that doesn’t make them
less valuable or me less whole as a library user.
The Christensen- Dalsgaard report notes,
“[ P] eople tend not to use the library for searching, but
once something is found, they do look to the library
to get it.” That makes Google and the library not direct
competitors— but I wonder how many of you read
Cites & Insights January 2007 14
that as a failure on the part of libraries? I don’t. If pa-trons
use some library tools as part of the patrons’
overall research toolkits, how is it a failure that they
don’t use all of them?
Other findings of the report may also be useful in
seeking balance, while recognizing that every user
community is distinct. “ Users expect library instruc-tion
to be goal- oriented.” Is this a surprise? “ Students
appreciated the physical locale of the library as a
workplace…”
Will they tell us? Do they want change?
“ Library 2.0” appeared on Life as I know it on Septem-ber
4, 2006. Jennifer, the blogger, notes Nicole En-gard’s
musing about making her patrons ( lawyers) part
of the library: “ I sometimes wonder if our audience
( lawyers) will ever want to participate in the creation
of ‘ both the physical and virtual services’ in the li-brary.”
Extending that thought to academic libraries,
Jennifer notes:
College students are often uninterested in participating
in user groups, focus groups, taking surveys or offering
constructive thoughts. They are much more likely to tell
you what they do not like. As such, they are not neces-sarily
thinking about how the library can serve them
better— just about what doesn’t work for them. This
presents an interesting challenge.
As the writer notes, there are limits to “ Build it and
[ they] will come”: “ Implementing new services just to
get a reaction one way or the other isn’t a great way to
make changes— actually, it is an awful way.”
What happens if patrons won’t indicate a need for
the new? Jennifer finds that situation locally:
I don’t have patrons rallying for new services— they ap-pear
( through surveys, etc.) to be content with what we
offer. As such, library staff don’t see any particular need to
try new services. Without patrons demanding some of
these new library 2.0 services or engaged library staff, it is
difficult to justify them to the administration. So, in the
meantime, I keep watching all of the exciting things that
are happening and making small changes one at a time.
Maybe the patrons are part of that library, and maybe
the appropriate balance in that case does call for con-tinuity
more than change. There’s nothing wrong with
“ making small changes one at a time”— and there’s a
lot right with paying attention to patrons who seem
satisfied with what they’re getting, as long as that
doesn’t mean an unwillingness to consider extensions
to what’s working well. It’s possible— it’s likely— that
for many libraries, the best course of action in 2007 is
to do what they did in 2006 very well and keep
thinking about what changes might make sense for
2008. Balanced change may be slower than revolu-tionary
change, but it’s also a lot less bloody.
Laura Cohen raises similar questions in an aca-demic
library context in “ Collaboration in Library 2.0:
Can it really happen?” ( posted October 13, 2006 at
Library 2.0: An academic’s perspective). She notes that
“ Library 2.0” requires active collaboration between
librarians and patrons— and wonders whether patrons
are interested in such collaboration.
We’d like them to help us develop our Web sites, tag our
content, comment on our blogs, collaborate with us in
developing library services, provide advice to their peers
about library resources and services, podcast with us,
and so on. We expect that they’ll be happy to see us on
“ their” community sites and will actively engage us in
these spaces.
Cohen notes MyLibrary as a cautionary tale: Big when
first released, many MyLibrary systems never really
caught on with students. Cohen’s “ waiting to see how
much use is made of the review writing, table of con-tents
and notes features in WorldCat.” She notes that
adding social networking takes effort on the part of
librarians— but also on the part of users. “ So what if
we launch Library 2.0. Will anyone come in the way
that we hope?”
The Balanced Approach
It’s a matter of balance— not only making patrons in-tegral
to the library community, but balancing what
you hear from anecdotal and survey feedback with
known needs and long- term issues.
The customer is always… what?
Jessamyn West is surely as patron- oriented as any li-brarian
I know of, but she wonders just how far pa-tron
orientation can go in this October 21, 2006 post.
She links to a post on InfoBreakers in which a patron
felt that the library should automatically renew books
that were due while she was on vacation, particularly
since she had “ told someone” she would be on vaca-tion.
The writer at InfoBreaker noted:
I know, I know, customer service is at the core of Library
2.0. Finding new ways to connect with customers and
redefining how we connected in the old channels. But
where are the boundaries of Library 2.0? At what point
do we say, “ You’re just going to have to look elsewhere
for help on that.”?
As West put it, “ As we try to open our communities
and have patrons ‘ join the conversation’ and be more
interactive with users, how do we learn to set new
boundaries?” West continues:
Cites & Insights January 2007 15
If the library was totally democratic, would users still
fine themselves? Implement noise policies? Shirt/ shoes
dress codes? We know they would be unlikely to, as a
group, create their own ILS or their own classification
system ( no, folksonomy is not a classification system,
yes it is very useful on its own). So my question is and
has been, what is the role for the librarian, the supposed
“ information expert” in our 2.0 vision of ourselves? We
facilitate access to information surely. However, there are
many people, librarians and patrons, deeply in love with
the idea of library as place.
After some other comments, West closes: “ How much
do we bend to meet our users? How much do we ex-pect
them to bend to meet us?” Both questions must
be asked if libraries are to find a balanced approach
that integrates patrons into libraries. The patron is
part of the library community; that doesn’t mean they
always behave appropriately, and it certainly doesn’t
make any patron the boss of the library community.
InfoBreaker continued the discussion on October
24 with “ The customer is always right… except when
they’re wrong.” The writer wonders whether librarians
are being neutered as a profession— and notes that
patron expectations need to be balanced against other
patron expectations. Waive the fines for the vaca-tioner,
and books aren’t available for other patrons.
This writer is thinking about balance and the mix of
patrons that make up a library community, as evi-denced
in this closing paragraph ( excerpted):
[ O] ur policies need to be designed in such a way that we
maximize the publicness of our public libraries. That as a
resource, it remains for as many people as possible to use.
Our collections, our services and our missions ought to
be developed and judged by their betterment of the pub-lic
good and the public’s access to resources, rather than
the tech savvy, the teens or the people who are standing
in front of you at the time, and often that means stopping
one person’s swing to keep the other’s nose.
If that final reference is obscure, it’s because I omitted
Oliver Wendell Holmes’ saying, “ The right to swing
my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” A
balanced approach to patron orientation means not
only respecting the needs and rights of all patrons, but
also considering the needs of the future community
and preserving the record of the community.
Jennifer at Life as I know it commented on No-vember
4, 2006, “ Is it all about the customer?”
[ Ho] w far should we go to provide our patrons with ser-vices
they want and/ or need[?] In a perfect world, the
answer should be as far as possible. However, in reality,
there are all sorts of constraints that limit what services
we can provide— time, money, knowledge, resources,
technology, government regulations, etc. Ultimately, we
are trying to provide the best services to our patrons
with the resources that we possess. And I’m really work-ing
hard to figure out how best to do this. Allocation of
resources is not an easy task. We all need to make deci-sions
about what we can do - and conversely what we
cannot… Balance is key to this equation. [ Loads of un-paid
overtime isn’t the answer.] [ A] dding resources that
current staff can’t support isn’t the answer either. It is all
about the customer— but providing the best service to the
customer doesn’t always mean doing everything that the
customer wants. We can only work with what we have.
“ Providing the best service to the customer doesn’t
always mean doing everything that the customer
wants.” It is, indeed, a question of balance— and bal-ance
across all patrons within the library community
sometimes means ignoring certain felt needs.
Reality and Special Needs
Yes, patrons need to be integrated into library plan-ning
and operations, and new technologies and media
provide more ways to do this. No, library services
shouldn’t be about doing “ whatever the patrons ask
for.” Sometimes it’s necessary to set aside what some
patrons might want in order to serve the broader
community— or to keep working at all.
Unfortunately, it’s also easy to assume that
changes will suit patrons. The Jurassic Librarian dis-cussed
this in an October 25, 2006 post, “ Librarians
to patrons: Drop dead.” Noting that libraries are, in-deed,
frequently innovators and early adopters of
technology, Jurassic notes that this can go too far:
[ W] e tend to deploy new technology in libraries without
regard to patron wishes. We simply bull ahead. We
don't ask permission. We assume we know what is best
for our patrons. We don't learn from patrons' daily
struggles with machines and interfaces.
The example given: Replacing card catalogs with
online catalogs. I won’t quote the whole discussion,
but it’s true ( in most libraries) that “ Nobody asked our
patrons about the change.” It’s also true that card cata-logs
were “ constructed on a human scale” and online
catalogs continue to confound and, in essence, reduce
library service for “ those who cannot use information
technology and those who refuse to use it.”
It’s a tricky example. Whatever their flaws, online
catalogs do offer richer access than card catalogs— but
they continue to be weaker in some areas ( Jurassic
quotes a 1999 American Libraries article where I dis-cussed
this issue). Realistically, most libraries couldn’t
afford the labor involved in maintaining a card cata-log—
but I suspect most librarians also believed, and
Cites & Insights January 2007 16
still believe, that they were doing their patrons a favor
by making the change.
Would libraries be better off if they had involved
patrons from the start and followed the advice to stick
with card catalogs? Would that have been the advice
from patrons? Would we be better off now if the first
two generations of online catalogs had never existed? I
have no answers, but I suspect answers involve more
complex equations than just following patron leads.
Finally for this discussion, I’ll quote from a Pub-lib
post by Aaron Smith relating to the requirement
that libraries should involve all patrons as part of the
library community— and that a balanced approach
means paying special attention to special needs:
Is there a more radically egalitarian institution than the
American public library? We have this variety of users
precisely because we accept all comers and serve them
without bias. Most of us make every effort to come as
closely to this ideal as possible.
Good libraries not only accept all comers, they make
special efforts to serve those most in need of service.
Good libraries— particularly good public libraries—
pay special attention to the minorities, to those not
readily served by majoritarian goods. I think that is-sue
deserves more exploration— and I explored a
group of related issues in a 2001 American Libraries
article which is not available on the open web and
many of you probably haven’t read. The article ap-pears
below ( with a different title), in full but in its
submitted rather than published form.
Patrons, Libraries and
the Pareto Principle1
The best public libraries are exceptional institutions—
where “ exceptional” is a literal description, not an enco-mium.
Good public libraries cater to exceptions: to the
ideas, people, and literature too often ignored in a ma-joritarian
society. The best public libraries are “ counter-
Pareto” institutions: they go beyond the Pareto Principle
for the long- term good of the community.
What’s the Pareto Principle? You’ve almost cer-tainly
used the observation even if you don’t recall the
name. Think of it as the 20: 80 ( or 80: 20) rule. Twenty
percent of the contributors in a field account for 80%
of the field. So, for example, 20% of a restaurant’s
1 This section appeared, possibly with editorial changes, as “ Excep-tional
Institutions: Libraries and the Pareto Principle” in American
Libraries 32: 6 ( June/ July 2001), pp. 72- 74. What appears here is
the original draft submitted on November 10, 2000.
menu probably generates 80% of its business; 20% of a
store’s customers produce 80% of its business; 20% of
currently- released movies will do 80% of the box office
business; 20% of advertising produces 80% of results.
On the flip side, 20% of customers will generate 80%
of the complaints— and solving 20% of the problems in
a process may resolve 80% of the failures. The Pareto
Principle holds true in an astonishingly wide variety of
fields, including many aspects of librarianship.
Vilfredo Pareto and J. M. Juran
Who was Pareto? Vilfredo Pareto ( 1848- 1923) was an
economist, sociological theorist, and— supposedly—
avid gardener. Born in Paris, he graduated from the
University of Turin and was a professor of political
economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzer-land.
Pareto observed that 20% of the population of
Italy owned 80% of the land. According to one cita-tion,
he later observed that 20% of the peapods in his
garden yielded 80% of the peas.
Did Vilfredo Pareto formulate a principle stating
that, in most fields, a few of the contributors ( 20%)
account for the bulk of the effect ( 80%)? Probably
not. According to Dr. J. M. Juran, “ Dean of American
consultants on quality control,” the first published use
of the term “ Pareto Principle” was in the paper “ Uni-versals
in Management Planning and Controlling,” The
Management Review, October 1954. Juran generalized
Pareto’s observations to other fields and chose to use
Pareto’s name for that generalization.
Dr. Juran’s belated confession that the Pareto
principle should probably be the Juran principle
comes in a charming article, “ The Non- Pareto Princi-ple:
Mea Culpa” ( http:// www. juran. com/ research/ articles/
SP7518. html). As he notes, it’s far too late to rename
the principle of unequal distribution.
Pareto offered an observation in one field— one
that echoed and quantified similar observations from
previous scholars. Juran generalized the observation
into a principle that seems to hold across most endeav-ors.
That’s all to the good: the Pareto Principle ( whether
rightly named or not) is useful shorthand for the sort of
distribution that seems prevalent in many areas.
Juran went one step further, a step that made
sense for quality control but causes problems else-where.
He characterized the Pareto Principle as sepa-rating
the “ vital few” from the “ trivial many.” When
you’re locating the 20% of problems in a system that
cause 80% of the difficulties in using that system, the
distinction makes sense— particularly because you
Cites & Insights January 2007 17
can proceed in an iterative fashion. That is, once
you’ve corrected the worst 20%, chances are that 20%
of the remaining problems— 16% of the original— are
causing 80% of the remaining difficulties— again, 16%
of the original. Solve those ( 36% of the original prob-lems)
and you’ve approached perfection ( eliminating
96% of the original difficulties).
When the Pareto Principle becomes the basis for
decision- making, “ trivial” can be a tricky word, as it
slides quickly over into “ irrelevant.” You see that at
some banks, stock brokerages, and other service insti-tutions,
where nearly all customer service is aimed at
the 20% of depositors who represent 80% of the de-posits:
the rest of us are trivial. Some stores seem in-tent
on reducing their customer base to the “ vital”
20%; from a purely profit- oriented perspective, that
may be a reasonable attitude.
Even in the private sector, businesses run into
trouble when they try to apply the Pareto Principle
too broadly. Crown bookstores carry the 20% ( or less)
of books that represent 80% of sales— but Borders,
Barnes & Noble, and similar superstores find it much
more profitable to carry much of the “ irrelevant” 80%.
A similar situation may be playing out for video
rentals. Pundits wrote off neighborhood video stores
some years back: video- on- demand, offering the 20%
of movies that people really want to see, would wipe
them out. But the video rental stores survive; even
though most of us do indeed stick to the new releases
( and to a minority of those), we appreciate the
broader selection and will pay a few cents extra to
have it available.
For that matter, some financial institutions have
benefited from the Pareto orientation of their competi-tors.
It’s not unusual for people to move from the ir-relevant
80% to the vital 20% as their conditions
improve. People with reasonable memories make a
point of avoiding those institutions that shunned
them when they were struggling; that’s a rational ten-dency
that favors more egalitarian institutions.
Libraries: Counter- Pareto Institutions?
It may be useful to think of public libraries as
counter- Pareto institutions. Good public libraries con-centrate
on the other 20%: the 20% of needs and uses
not satisfied by the “ vital” 20% of resources, and the
users left out by majoritarian services.
Consider some ways that the Pareto Principle af-fects
libraries, and why libraries need to focus on the
exceptions:
􀂾 Most of us get at least 80% of our information
and entertainment from sources other than
public libraries: TV, newspapers, magazine
subscriptions, and so on. It’s more difficult to
satisfy the other 20% of our information and
entertainment needs; if we’re sensible, we look
to public libraries for those exceptional needs.
􀂾 80% of public library users may be satisfied
with small popular collections, as they’re
looking for best sellers and evergreens. Al-most
any library can satisfy those require-ments;
good libraries work to handle the
special needs of the other 20%. That may
mean that 80% of your collection goes to
serve 20% of user needs— and maybe that’s
the way it should be.
􀂾 80% of the user population of a typical public
library can probably afford to buy all the
books they want or need. Libraries are the
most vital for the 20% who can’t afford to buy
their own materials.
􀂾 User surveys will show the 20% of library
services that meet 80% of needs. Those may
not be the most important services for the
health of your community, particularly if you
degrade the other 80% of services.
I am neither qualified to suggest formulas for incorpo-rating
counter- Pareto thinking nor brave enough to
do so. Most libraries don’t adhere to pure Pareto
thinking in any case: it’s a rare public library that de-votes
80% of its acquisition budget to the 20% of ma-terials
that will yield 80% of the circulation, even
though a case could be made for doing so. On the
other hand, most public libraries also don’t spread
acquisitions funds evenly across the entire spectrum
of publishing; you do— properly— devote more dol-lars
to the materials most likely to be widely used and
to meet your own community’s immediate needs.
Counter- Pareto Thinking: A Hypothetical Budget
Counter- Pareto thinking might suggest some balances.
The numbers and ratios used here are illustrative and
reflect a profound ignorance of current public library
selection and budgeting process: this is entirely hypo-thetical.
Let’s assume a $ 1 million materials budget
( suggesting at least a $ 5 million operating budget),
with 20% set aside for reference, special local collec-tions,
and digital resources, leaving $ 800,000.
If your library knows borrowing patterns and has
use- oriented acquisitions policies, it’s fair to suggest
Cites & Insights January 2007 18
that 40% of the remaining budget should be devoted
to the “ top 20%”— the items that will get 80% of po-tential
circulation. That’s $ 320,000, leaving $ 480,000.
Take another chunk out: 40% devoted to the next
20%-- the materials that will fill 80% of remaining
user needs. That’s $ 192,000— and you’ve now met
96% of likely user needs. ( This assumes that the
Pareto Principle does work iteratively for circulation
patterns. That may not be true, but it’s a reasonable
starting point.)
Following these allocations— two levels of “ giving
‘ em what they want”— you have $ 288,000 available to
meet special needs and to expand the horizons of your
users. Should some portion of that money go to alter-native
literature, small press books, and the resources
that will make your most frequent users extremely un-comfortable?
Possibly so; it’s reasonable to suggest that
any good public library should have something in it to
offend ( or at least upset) almost anybody.
Even if you take a strongly majoritarian perspec-tive
and allocate half of your funds to the best- selling
20%, and do that twice, there should still be deliberate
funding for exceptional cases. At the end of the first
two cuts, $ 200,000 should be available. $ 200,000 will
buy a lot of specialized resources, alternative literature,
and small press books— and it will help to build a di-verse,
lasting collection that will grow with your public
as their needs and tastes change.
I’m not suggesting any radical changes in budget-ing.
My naïve guess, based on browsing within a
range of public libraries around the country, is that
public libraries do engage in counter- Pareto thinking
( perhaps unconsciously). While the difficult areas of
publishing may receive less attention than they de-serve,
most good libraries do go well beyond what
would be needed to serve everyday needs and popular
demand. Instead of buying bestsellers at saturation
levels, libraries buy and lease enough copies to be
responsive while allocating some funds to important
items that may circulate once a decade— but that will
mean far more than any bestseller to the rare users
who read those items.
Conclusion
The counter- Pareto perspective may clarify some mis-leading
claims about the future of libraries. “ Give ‘ em
what they want” has always been a Pareto assertion:
focus on the predictable materials that will please
80% of users. “ Give ‘ em what they need,” the counter-
Pareto assertion, is much more difficult to carry out.
Good libraries do both.
The Whole Library Community
If a library finds that it can’t serve 100% of the needs
of 100% of its potential patrons, where should it do a
less than ideal job? Consider a worst case: based on
unusually effective patron interaction, it’s clear that
20% of the patrons will be unsatisfied no matter how
resources are distributed and services are defined—
but the library can determine which 20%. To make a
silly hypothetical even sillier, let’s assume that one set
of choices will result in “ inferior” service as defined by
the 20% most technologically adept patrons in the
service community— and that the other plausible set
of choices will delight them, but will result in inferior
service to the 20% least technologically adept patrons.
Which direction would you choose?
Faced with this implausible dichotomy, I know
which course I would argue for, and I think my
choice is obvious from the section above. The 20%
least technologically adept patrons are almost cer-tainly
the 20% most in need of library services—
they’re likely to be those left behind in various ways.
In the real world of most libraries, you should
never face such a stark choice. But if someone tells
you it’s OK to ignore 20% as long as you please 80%,
think long and hard about which 20% you’ll ignore. A
balanced public library maintains its soul and its
character as the most egalitarian, most accessible pub-lic
agency: one place offering free services where no-body
should ever be ashamed to show up.
Interesting & Peculiar Products
Burwen Bobcat
Here’s a case where I don’t know what to make of a
product— and might not even after there have been
some reviews, given the market it’s aiming for. Burwen
Bobcat is software, a plugin for Windows Media
Player. According to an early writeup in the October
2006 Abso! ute Sound, it’s “ a proprietary, patent-pending,
computation- intensive process… that does
three things: It applies a new form of rapid, high-frequency
reverberation... Bobcat restores the leading
edges of transients to their original steepness. Bobcat
can… apply extremely precise equalization adjustment
optimized for various types of material. Overall, the
idea is to create audio waveforms that more closely
Cites & Insights January 2007 19
resemble those that originate from high- quality analog
recorders ( but without the associated noise).”
The claims are where things get dicey. Mark Lev-inson
( a high- end audio person) claims Bobcat turns
128K MP3 files into “ sound quality on a par with, if
not better than, that of SACDs”— and that it will turn
files ripped from CDs ( without compression) into “ the
finest digital audio sound he has yet heard— sound he
likens to that of analog master tape.”
Does it work? To date, I haven’t read any reviews
( but I’m behind on reading). It’s not cheap: Figure a
minimum of $ 1,500, bundled with hardware. It’s de-signed
to appeal to high- end audiophiles. I question
whether you can restore the quality lost in 128K
MP3s, but then I don’t much believe in magic.
Will reviews tell the story? That’s hard to say.
High- end audio magazines have run a few too many
reviews praising the huge, unmistakable, “ anyone
with ears can hear them” effects of such miracle cures
as freezing your CDs, marking the edges of CDs with
green ink, putting coins in certain points on top of
speakers, having special clocks somewhere in the lis-tening
room [ I am not making this up], setting stones
or blocks of wood ( but only the right stones or wood)
on components, demagnetizing vinyl recordings�� the
list goes on and on. I’m not quite ready to say that
some high- end reviewers manage to hear whatever
they think they should hear…
Meanwhile, expect a followup when there are
loads of reviews. Maybe. I can think of better things
to do with $ 1,500, and in any case my ears aren’t
golden enough, although I can certainly hear the loss
in 128K MP3 and, even more easily, sense the listen-ing
fatigue of low- bitrate audio.
Flash Hard Drives
Sure, it’s an oxymoron, but the name suggests what
these are: Big flash drives intended to replace hard
disks. An October 2006 PC World piece discusses
Samsung’s new 32GB SSD ( solid state drive), which is
already in a Japanese Samsung notebook ( not yet
available in the U. S.). As the article notes, “ 32GB may
not satisfy multimedia addicts, but it’s plenty for aver-age
business users”— at least until Vista comes along!
Initially, these drives are designed for portable
devices. They’re too expensive for desktop PCs, given
that the memory alone costs about $ 16 per gigabyte,
with integration adding to that. PC World tested the
Samsung SSD against two contemporary 5400RPM
notebook drives from Seagate ( one with perpendicular
recording, one longitudinal). Since most notebook
drives are 5400RPM or slower ( as opposed to desktop
drives, mostly 7200RPM, some faster), that’s a sensi-ble
comparison— and for most tests, the SSD was
faster. Much faster for finding a file and running Nero
Express; just a bit faster for booting up ( 35 seconds
rather than 42) and copying files and folders.
The SSD is a lot more expensive but does have
some selling points: It’s silent, light, shock resistant—
and it draws very little power.
Hot Notebooks
Both figuratively ( Intel’s Core 2 Duo dual- CPU chip
produces fast results) and literally: The base of one
“ laptop” reached 114 degrees in PC Magazine test-ing—
and they found temperatures as high as 120° F in
one case. Right now, these notebooks are mostly for
gamers; one good choice appears to be Dell’s XPS
M1710, which costs $ 3,789 ( ouch!) but gets very
good test results. It’s loaded, with 2GB RAM, 512MB
graphics RAM, a 100GB 7,200RPM disk ( relatively
unusual for a notebook), a DVD burner, and a 17"
widescreen display— but it also weighs just under
nine pounds and has mediocre battery life ( 2 hours
23 minutes).
At the opposite end of the price scale, the same
November 7, 2007 PC Magazine that gives an Editors’
Choice to the Dell XPS M1710 includes a “ real- world
testing” look at laptops you can buy for less than
$ 600. It’s an interesting story with an odd lot of ma-chines,
including a “ GQ” ( Fry’s Electronics house
brand) that cost $ 349 and is mostly a joke to enable a
cheapo ad price— the sales reps didn’t want to sell
him the unit. Not surprising: the CPU is pathetically
slow ( it’s a VIA, intended for embedded devices and
consumer electronics), the hard disk runs at 4,200
RPM, it took four to six times as long to run bench-marks
as a typical laptop— and the battery lasted
about 90 minutes. There was one winner: Gateway’s
$ 579 MX6214, with a 1.67GHz Celeron CPU, 512MB
RAM ( the others had 256MB, barely enough to run
Windows XP with “ shared” graphics memory), a 15.4"
display, a DVD burner, an 80GB 5,400RPM hard disk,
close to three hours battery life, and performance not
too much slower than a $ 1,000 notebook.
Editors’ Choices and Best Buys
With the demise of PC PROGRESS, this subsection will
feature products that are interesting primarily because
either PC Magazine or PC World regards them as the
Cites & Insights January 2007 20
best choices among similar products at the time of
review— the products receive either Editors’ Choice
( PC Magazine) or Best Buy ( PC World) awards. I won’t
include every such product, but will include those I
think worth noting.
For really big computer displays, PC World ( No-vember
2006) favors the $ 719 Dell UltraSharp
2407WFP, with impressive scores across the board, a
wide range of adjustments and connections, support
for HDCP, and a relatively low price. Or you could
spend $ 2,749 for an Apple 24" display— but that one
happens to have a powerful Mac built in, with a Core
2 Duo T7600, webcam, 500GB hard disk, and other
goodies; the November 21, 2006 PC Magazine gives it
an Editors’ Choice. One oddity: Photshop runs almost
twice as fast on the iMac 24" under Windows as it
does under OS X!
Digital cameras can be divided into several over-lapping
segments. PC World uses “ advanced” for cam-eras
that fall between point- and- shoot and digital
SLRs. Best Buy in a November 2006 roundup is the
$ 285 Fujifilm FinePix S5200; it’s only 5 megapixels,
but it has a 10: 1 opltical zoom and great battery life—
and yes, it has “ superior” image quality. PC Magazine
awards simultaneous Editors’ Choices to two digital
SLRs, the $ 799 Canon Eos Digital Rebel XTi and
$ 1000 Nikon D80— both body only, add $ 100 to
$ 300 for a lens. Both offer 10MP performance and
quality images; both are for serious photographers.
I’m a little surprised that HP’s LightScribe tech-nology
( which allows you to burn a monochrome la-bel
directly onto specially formulated recordable CDs
and DVDs, using the laser itself to create the label) has
proliferated as much as it has. A November 2006 PC
World roundup of DVD drives finds LightScribe on
two of the five internal and three of the five external
burners, including the two Best Buys: the $ 85 LG
Electronics GSA- H10L internal drive and the $ 75
Samsung SE- S164L external burner. I’m astonished
that you can buy a 16x name- brand dual- layer multi-format
DVD burner for $ 75, much less one with
LightScribe; it even comes with Nero Express. Oh,
and both drives are truly multiformat, handling every
DVD and CD format including DVD- RAM.
Perspective
The Death of the Disc?
I’m reminded of the early 1990s ( and periodically
since), when the death of print was being predicted
regularly and with complete authority— or, more nar-rowly,
the death of print books. That death has been
postponed indefinitely
Some of us who objected to the notion did so not
only on the basis that books work so well for most
lengthy stories, but because new media and technolo-gies
rarely replace older ones rapidly or entirely unless
the old form is seriously flawed, and maybe not even
then. Radio didn’t replace reading. TV didn’t replace
the movies or radio. And so on.
But “ death of…” predictions keep coming. Some
observers seem convinced that any significant upstart
means the doom of existing methods. So it is, lately,
with discs— CD and DVD alike. A few data points and
comments on what’s likely to be a long story, since
physical media aren’t disappearing any time soon and
pundits will always be with us.
Hi- Def DVD
Sean Cooper tells us “ why HD- DVD and Blu- ray are
dead on arrival” in “ The death of the disc,” Slate, No-vember
16, 2006. His thesis is not that the format war
dooms hi- def discs ( which might be true). “ No, the
new formats are doomed because shiny little discs will
soon be history.”
Why? First, because you’ll rent or buy high- def
movies on the internet, and Cooper seems to think
the Xbox 360 will be a big part of this. Never mind
how long it would take to transmit a 30GB file over
typical broadband; Cooper doesn’t pay much atten-tion
to that issue. Never mind, either, that the Xbox
360 only has a 20GB hard disk.
Second, there’s cable on demand— and it does
seem likely that on- demand high- def will be part of
the picture.
Third, “ pricey hardware”: “ After spending $ 3,000
or more on an HDTV and multichannel audio gear,
nobody’s in the mood to burn another pile of cash.”
Two things are wrong with that theory: You can get an
HDTV for a lot less than $ 3,000 ( and most people
apparently don’t buy serious multichannel audio
equipment) and high- def disc drive prices will cer-tainly
come down. The truly bizarre part of this sec-tion
is Cooper’s suggestion that including Blu- ray in
Cites & Insights January 2007 21
Sony’s PlayStation 3 ( the cheapest way to buy a Blu-ray
drive right now) “ could sink Sony’s new console—
and maybe even the new company when Blu- ray stalls
out.” Sony sure had trouble selling that first half mil-lion
units— and does anyone really believe that Play-
Station devotees are primarily buying the game
console to play hi- def movies?
Finally, there’s the “ inevitable” bit: “ The rise of the
hard drive.” This paragraph confuses so many differ-ent
issues it’s laughable. He talks about the costs of
“ embedding a piece of plastic with data” ( that is,
pressing a disc), packaging it, shipping it to retailers,
and stocking it on shelves, as compared to the cheap-ness
of downloading. But the costs of producing,
packaging, and shipping almost certainly come to
$ 1.50 a pop or less ( probably a lot less). Cooper tries
to support his case thusly: “ On iTunes an album costs
about 10 bucks— as much as $ 8 less than some CD
retailers charge, partially because of the reduced cost
of getting music to buyers online.” Right. “ Some” re-tailers
may charge $ 18 for CDs, but others charge $ 10
to $ 12, sometimes less. Cooper even thinks buying
bunches of movies delivered on a hard disk is a wave of
the future, apparently based on the bizarre New Yorker
hard disk ( which costs several times as much as the 9
DVDs): “ In a few years, you’ll buy every episode of
The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards
rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your mi-crowave
oven.” The West Wing complete set is big be-cause
the publisher wanted it that way and provides
extra materials. Even without hi- def you can ship 45
DVDs in a box less than 6x5x5" ( four 50- movie
packs, with a sleeve for each DVD). With two- layer
high- def discs, that complete set would fit on no more
than nine DVDs, which don’t require much of a pack-age
and weigh less than a pound.
From Dying DVDs to Dead CDs
The real basis for Cooper’s prediction:
[ C] onsumers want it to change. Music buyers used their
modems to force the major labels into the fear zone and
Tower Records into bankruptcy. The same will happen
to the movie studios and DVD retailers unless they curb
their disc addiction.
Maybe so, but not based on the evidence cited. Music
buyers ( as opposed to freeloaders) still get considera-bly
less than 10% of their music via downloads.
There’s some evidence that legal download rates are
no longer accelerating very rapidly. A December 6,
2006 Wall Street Journal story shows digital song sales
peaking in the first quarter of 2006 and level, but a
little lower, in the second and third quarters. At
roughly 140 million songs per quarter, the revenue
adds up to somewhere around $ 600 million— roughly
6% of CD sales. A Forrester survey ( since partially
disclaimed) suggests iTunes business is dropping.
Claims that downloading caused Tower’s bank-ruptcy
ignore economic reality. Tower went under
because it was charging $ 18 for CDs and full list for
DVDs when other retailers were charging a whole lot
less. When Tower started its going- out- of- business
sale, I wasn’t the only one to notice that, even at 30%
off, Tower’s prices were too high.
High- def optical discs might not make it, but “ the
death of the disc” is, I believe, the least likely reason
for their failure.
Paul Farbi writes “ For Tower Records, end of
disc” in the December 11, 2006 Washington Post—
again claiming that Tower’s failure means the end of
physical discs themselves. Farbi says, “ Anything that
can be squeezed down to ones and zeros and moved
around at the speed of electrons doesn’t have to be
stacked in plastic cases, shoved into bins and splayed
over aisles under fluorescent lights anymore. All of it’s
going online.” [ Emphasis added.]
Farbi mourns this supposed inevitability. He’ll
miss Tower.
There will never be the same sense of wonder on iTunes,
the same joy of discovery and intoxicating power of mu-sical
abundance that hit you every time you walked into
even the dinkiest Tower or any comparable record store.
There it lay before you— unheard! unseen! un-foundled!—
potential treasures beckoning from row
upon row of wooden bins.
There are two separate issues here: Whether brick-and-
mortar record stores are disappearing and
whether discs themselves are on the way out. After all,
Amazon, Tower. com ( which is not bankrupt, as far as I
know) and other online sites sell a lot of CDs and can
indeed offer “ wider and speedier access to more tunes
than any Tower could ever stock”— even if they ship
those tunes to you on plastic discs in jewel boxes. But
it’s not even that simple. Let’s continue with Farbi’s
lament— which really isn’t for the death of CDs as
much as it is for the death of Tower.
I hear the music geeks whining: Tower wasn’t the cheap-est
place around, and it often employed contemptuous or
conveniently nonexistent salespeople. It also pushed the
same Top 40 pap as the marts ( Wal- and K), the big boxes
( Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, etc.) and the surviving chain
mall stores. Yeah, yeah and yeah. And so what?
Cites & Insights January 2007 22
Farbi grew up near two Southern California Tower
stores including the “ holy pilgrimage site” on the Sun-set
strip. Even as he describes the kind of store that
finally drove me away from Tower entirely, he evinces
a nostalgia that’s nice to hear but has little to do with
what’s happening. Along the way, he gets confused.
One of Tower’s strengths was diversity— the bigger
stores stocked a lot of music, including CDs that will
never show up at Wal- Mart. Here’s Farbi’s take on
that, albeit in the guise of deploring online choices:
The future portends more abundance and choice than
Russ Solomon [ Tower’s founder] could ever have
stacked in his biggest store. But something’s being lost in
this vast and unending digital banquet. Tower’s down-ward
arc tracks the fragmentation of musical tastes into
10,000 little pieces. We’re well past the point where
broad musical consensus is possible.
That means there might never be another Beatles or U2…
More shocking, Tower’s fall suggests the end of “ standards.”
But those arguments suggest that Tower was bad for
music, since it stocked those 10,000 little pieces— that
we’d be better off with payola- based radio and Wal-
Mart’s top hundred so we’d all hear the same music.
Just like we were better off when we all watched the
same TV shows on three networks, presumably.
Price, not format
Farbi talks about Tower clinging “ to bricks and mortar
and $ 17.99 CDs.” He’s half right. Lots of bricks and
mortar stores sell lots of CDs— indie record stores and
the “ mall chains” but also extensive selections at Tar-get,
Best Buy, and other chains that shall go unnamed.
What they don’t do very well with is $ 17.99 CDs, not
unless they’ve established special loyalties and provide
great service to make up for grotesquely overcharging.
The record industry treated CDs with a level of
greed it didn’t show when LPs were dominant—
maybe because there are fewer major record compa-nies
than there used to be. CDs started out expensive
because they were new, better in some ways and ex-pensive
to produce— although they soon became
cheaper than LPs to produce and package. ( For both
LPs and CDs, the package costs more than the disc.)
But LPs declined steadily in price as the years went on;
CD suggested retail prices didn’t— and even went up.
You had to know CDs couldn’t cost much of any-thing
to produce, given all the freebies. It didn’t take
much research to learn that artists weren’t getting
huge chunks of the take. There was simply no legiti-mate
reason for CD prices not to decline— right now,
$ 6 to $ 9 should be about right. ( Classical fans know
that Naxos has produced a few thousand high- quality
original recordings, profitably, at $ 8 or less.) But the
labels wanted $ 18— or more, if they could get it.
I stopped buying at Tower partly because the
prices were too high, partly because the music was so
loud and offensive I couldn’t stand to be in the store. I
still buy CDs now and then— for example, a fair
number of Sony’s two- disc “ Essentials” artist compila-tions—
but I buy them at Target ($ 12 to $ 14 for an
“ Essentials” package that equals four or five original
CDs), secondhand at SecondSpin, via Amazon, or
elsewhere. I won’t pay more than $ 12 for a single CD,
and I believe $ 10 is a fair price.
Tower priced itself out of the market and made
itself unattractive to us less- young folk who have the
money to buy CDs and prefer a physical package with
top- notch sound, but don’t like being subjected to
painfully loud music while we’re shopping.
Tower disappearing doesn’t mean CDs, or physi-cal
media in general, are done for. There’s room for
downloading and CDs, just as there’s room for ebooks
( where they work better) and print books.
The Celestial Jukebox
That seems to be some people’s dream of a media fu-ture.
No DVDs ( HD, Blu- ray, or regular), no CDs, no
nothing— just whatever you want when you want it,
for a slight fee. Hollywood’s only too happy to offer
different forms of movies— for the right price and un-der
the right controls. But does it work well? The Sep-tember
2006 Sound & Vision includes “ S& V’s guide to
movie downloads,” an overview and set of test drives
of three legal movie download services— Movielink,
CinemaNow and Guba.
The writer, Michael Antonoff, touts the “ advan-tages”:
“ With a download, there’s no need to drive to
the store or walk to your mailbox. There’s no case to
open, no packaging to throw away. Just point your
browser…” I’m not sure how “ no need to walk to
your mailbox” is a big selling point unless the only
mail you get is from Netflix ( and the walk to our
mailbox is zero steps, since it’s right by the front
door)— but perhaps true couch potatoes consider
opening the mailbox too much trouble. Of course,
some folks might consider it mildly burdensome to
have to use a PC connected to the big- screen HDTV,
but you’ll get over that, right?
How did the three do? Movielink charges $ 20 for
a current movie— the same price as a DVD, but with-out
DVD extras. For that, you get stereo sound and an
Cites & Insights January 2007 23
image that “ reminded me of a VHS cassette.” You can
burn it to a DVD, but only as a Windows Media Video
file that plays on up to three computers. So you lose
DVD extras, you’re back to videocassette sound and
picture quality, and you’ve saved… nothing.
Movielink’s owned by a bunch of studios. How
about CinemaNow, owned by one studio ( Lionsgate),
Microsoft, Cisco, and Blockbuster? It’s a whole four
cents cheaper: $ 19.95 instead of $ 19.99. Some mov-ies
download fast ( 13 minutes for Fun with Dick and
Jane, but then you own Fun with Dick and Jane) and
some don’t ( four hours for Harry Potter and the Goblet
of Fire). Once again, you don’t get DVD extras ( al-though
a handful of movies come in true DVD form).
While the writer doesn’t specifically comment on
CinemaNow picture quality, his summation says,
“[ N] othing I saw came close to matching a good
DVD.��� Guba? Back up to $ 19.99— and, as with
CinemaNow, there were technical issues. Unlike the
other two, Guba won’t let you burn even a protected
WMV file to DVD— but you can transfer your DVD-priced
less- than- DVD quality no- special- features
movie to an Archos AV700 portable player.
The writer concludes that these full- priced mov-ies
“ could be a nice fit for the midget- screen- and-earbuds
crowd” when DRM issues are straightened
out. After all, on a midget screen with earbuds, me-diocre
picture quality and loss of surround sound and
extra features won’t matter— even if you did pay the
full price of a current- feature DVD.
Why not? People seem willing to pay $ 2 or $ 3 for
a ringtone when a full song goes for $ 0.99.
My own take on the “ celestial jukebox” includes
the old saying, “ Be careful what you wish for.” It’s typi-cally
the case that downloaded media don’t offer the
same quality as physical media ( although you can buy
some downloadable music in lossless- compression
formats). It’s almost always the case that downloaded
media eliminate most fair use and first sale rights
through digital restrictions ( or “ rights”) management;
emusic. com is just about the only exception I’m aware
of. It’s certain that, if pay- per- use ( the fundamental
“ jukebox” model) becomes dominant, Big Media will
make sure you wind up paying more for those uses
than you did to buy media. If you believe Big Media’s
going to lower overall prices when it totally controls
each usage, you haven’t been paying attention.
Saying prices will come down because download-ing
is cheaper than physical distribution ignores the
recent history of Big Media. CDs cost almost nothing
to produce— but CD prices only came down after an-titrust
litigation, and even then Tower retained artifi-cially
high prices. As for DVDs, the real cost of the
medium ( I’ve heard $ 0.06 for single- layer DVDs) can
be suggested by the number of advertising DVDs and
dollar- store DVDs. If you can make money selling 12
DVDs with 50 movies for $ 15, then the DVD itself is
not a major factor in the price of DVDs. You can count
on the universal jukebox being more expensive for
most people, for lower quality, than physical media.
Fortunately, physical media aren’t going away any
time soon, and that’s a very good thing.
My Back Pages
Citizens or Consumers?
“ Putting the net in neutral” in the September 2006
EContent discusses net neutrality ( in scare quotes in
the article) and comes up with a great quote from an
academic: “ It’s… possible that a network owner could
discriminate in a way that benefits consumers, like
guaranteeing higher- priority transmission for movie
downloads.” The word “ consumer” is critical here:
Something you pay for ( as a consumer) will get prior-ity
over something that, say, you create or read for free
( as a citizen). There’s no plausible social policy that
favors paid movie downloads over blogs or shareware
downloads, but such a policy would certainly favor
consumers over citizens.
The same article includes a remarkably ahistorical
comment from the CEO of Gusto. com: “ I don’t know
how much, if any, government money has been in-vested
in building the infrastructure that exists today.”
DARPA? Never heard of ‘ em. Universities and gov-ernment
labs as the contractors for the original inter-net?
You’re making it up, right?
Breaking Through Barriers
It’s an inspiring two- page spread in the October 2006
Business 2.0: “ Grinding out success next to Starbucks”—
how five companies “ broke through Starbuck’s barriers
to entry and carved out profitable niches.”
I guess to my old- fashioned mind, “ barriers to en-try”
implies pre- existing— Starbuck’s was around first
and put up these barriers to newer upstarts. And
Starbuck’s has been around forever— or since 1971,
when the company was founded. Now, with 11,000
locations, it takes in $ 6.4 billion a year. How could a
latecomer fight that?
Cites & Insights January 2007 24
One way is to be a small fry: None of the five cof-fee
retailers named does more than $ 300 million a
year. The supposed strategies of the five may be an-other
way. But as for breaking through barriers to en-try,
consider three of the five:
􀂾 Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf was founded in 1963.
􀂾 Peet’s was founded in 1966— and, notori-ously,
Starbuck’s founders knew Alfred Peet
and originally purchased their coffee beans
from him.
􀂾 Costa Coffee was founded the same year as
Starbuck’s, but in London; it certainly didn’t
face “ barriers to entry” from those folks out in
Seattle until years later.
But what the heck, it makes a good story. ( Personal in-put:
I know Peet’s predates Starbuck’s because I was buy-ing
beans at Peet’s first Berkeley store as early as 1968.)
Be Careful What You Wish For ( Part 295)
I’m not slamming Business 2.0 this time: Jeffrey Pfef-fer’s
October 2006 “ The human factor” column makes
perfectly good sense—“ Why free agents don’t feel
free.” He starts with an anecdote: Chatting with a free-lance
writer, she mentioned that she’d asked her cli-ents
to start paying by the job rather than by the hour.
“ Billing by the hour, she said, made her less satisfied
with her job— especially when she wasn’t working, at
which times she would worry about the opportunity
cost of not being on the clock.”
Pfeffer notes that, in the late 1990s, lots of pun-dits
thought many of us would decide to become free
agents and love it. Part of that has become true, not
always by choice: About 9.2% of workers are now
independent contractors, up from 7.9% in 2001. “ But
I don’t know many people today who feel liberated as
a result.” One study shows that people who went into
contract work for a more flexible lifestyle “ came to
obsess about Ben Franklin’s notion that time is
money.” They have trouble taking time off— and when
they are on vacation, they spend their time thinking
about missed income opportunities. “ So leisure time
became just as anxiety- ridden as actual work.”
Pfeffer concludes, “ We need to find ways to
shield ourselves from the practices of billing time and
hourly payment” if we want to be happier and not
work- obsessed. It’s hard not to agree.
Beyond HD
What? You bought that 1080p wide- screen TV, you’ve
got your antenna or satellite or cable HD service, you
actually know that you’re watching HD— and you’re
trying to decide between HD DVD and Blu- ray as the
final, ultimate, best picture ever?
Hold on there, bucko! Eric Taub’s story in the
September 2006 Sound & Vision carries the chilling
title above: HD isn’t good enough. NHK, which pio-neered
HDTV ( in the 1970s!), is working on the next
step, Ultra High Definition TV. “ Its resolution will be
so high it’ll make your new big- screen plasma look
about as sharp as the 1950s Sylvania HaloLight in
your grandparents’ attic.” UHDTV will have 16 times
the maximum resolution of HDTV: 4320x7680 pixels,
with 22.2- channel surround sound ( ten speakers at
normal height, nine over your head, three at your
feet). The first demos use 440" screens. If you have
room for a 37- foot screen, you may also be ready to
mount 24 speakers around your home theater!
Of course, the files are a wee bit large. Uncom-pressed,
18 minutes require 3.5 terabytes of disk
space— but then, uncompressed HDTV is also enor-mous
( 1.5 gigabits per second, or roughly eleven
gigabytes per minute).
Anything produced for UHDTV would be cap-tured
digitally— 35mm film doesn’t have 4K resolu-tion,
much less the 7.6K of UHDTV. The best film- to-
HD transfers take place at 4K, converted to the
roughly 2K of HDTV as the final step. That also
makes sense: It’s akin to the rule that to capture
20KHz sound you need to encode at 40KHz.
The good news, if you’re wondering about the
lifespan of your hot new TV: NHK doesn’t expect
UHDTV to hit the market until around 2025.
63 New Products That You Just Gotta Have!
That’s the line on the cover of the October 3, 2006 PC
Magazine, right below “ What’s Hot Now.” I knew that
required comment— for example, totaling up the cost
of those 63 “ just gotta have” products and estimating
how many of them a rational person would feel they
“ just gotta have.”
Here’s the thing about this issue: It’s a phony. I
couldn’t find 63 new products at all— and certainly
nowhere near 63 that anyone “ just gotta have.” The
only way I could reach 56 ( not 63) was to count every
product mentioned, including the lowest- rated prod-ucts
in group reviews, and including every old prod-uct
in their “ The Best Stuff” standing feature.
Leaving those out, I count six Editors’ Choices—
presumably the only products we really “ just gotta
have”— and 40 products that didn’t earn Editors’
Cites & Insights January 2007 25
Choice. Buying all six of the Editors’ Choices would
set you back a little more than $ 3,100. Maybe you
“ gotta have” a hot- looking “ music phone” that doesn’t
have speakerphone functions and has poor battery life
( Chocolate by LG), a 32" LCD HDTV ( Sharp LC-
32D40U), a 160GB external hard disk ( Seagate
ST9160821U2- RK), a document scanner ( Xerox
DocuMate 152), Quicken Basic 2007, and a mono-chrome
laser all- in- one printer ( Brother MFC-
8860DN, which would seem to make the scanner re-dundant,
but never mind).
So far so good. Oddly, of the four “ hot” products
on the cover, only two are among those six Editors’
Choices. The other cover hotties are a “ luscious Lam-borghini
laptop” by Asus that gets a so- so 3.5- dot rat-ing
and costs $ 2,800 and a similarly- rated $ 1,800
Sony VAIO VGN- UX180P Micro PC, a strange device
halfway between a small notebook and a large PDA,
with “ less than desirable performance” and a keyboard
that’s “ difficult to do any real work on.”
I guess you “ just gotta have” both of those as
well. What else? The 40 non- Editors’ Choice products
add up to around $ 33,000 total and include a digital
SLR, yet another iPod speaker system, a GPS naviga-tor,
a webcam, seven more LCD HDTVs, six more
document scanners, a low- rated security suite, more
utility software, “ the other” money software ( MS
Money Essentials), another all- in- one printer, open-source
CRM, and another cell phone.
I just gotta laugh. Or sigh, given the many years
during which PC Magazine had the best personal
computing content and cover lines that honestly re-lated
to the contents of the magazine.
The November 21, 2006 PC Magazine makes me
wonder whether the cover writers simply don’t read
the magazine. It says “ Meet Your New PC!” in inch-high
all caps, followed by “ Why These Breakthrough
New Consoles Could Win the War of the Living
Room.” The cover illustrations are the Sony Play-
Station 3, Microsoft XBox 360, and Nintendo Wii.
The article itself says near the end of the introduction:
“ Does this next gen of consoles actually signal the end
of the PC? We don’t think so; not just yet.” But then,
Sony was notorious for its six- year- old prediction that
the PlayStation 2 would “ wipe out the dinosaurs and
supplant the PC in the home.”
How Much is that Audiophile Amplifier?
I was mildly bemused by three adjacent amplifier re-views
in the October 2006 Stereophile— all positive
reviews, all presumably of gear that’s not out of place
in the high end. Some high- end writers are now ad-mitting
that the extreme price differentials in this
equipment can be as much about pride of possession
and the costs of handcrafted products as about actual
audible benefit, although most writers still proclaim
that every super- expensive item clearly sounds better
than mere very- expensive gear.
The third review covers a solid, high quality inte-grated
amp for people still wedded to stereo: the $ 900
NAD C372, rated 150 watts per channel continuous
power into 8 ohms. It’s also typical in size and
weight— roughly 17x13x5", a little over 26 pounds.
The second and first offer interesting variations.
The second, Sonic Impact 5062 Super T, only
produces 6 watts into 8 ohms ( actually a little less),
but that’s enough for sensitive speakers— and it costs
all of $ 159. That’s the upgraded model; the base
model’s $ 39. The frequency response isn’t perfect at
the high end, but the review’s still positive. It’s a
shrimp: 7.5x7.5x3.25", 2lbs.
Then there’s the first. It produces 280 watts per
channel continuous into 8 ohms and, like the NAD,
has a neutral sound ( as any good amp should). It’s a
trifle bigger: Four boxes, one of them 22x17x9" and
103lb., two power supplies each 17x16x6" and 70lb.,
and a 17x16x6", 57lb. battery pack. If that sounds
like a big heap of equipment, the price matches: the
ASR Emitter II Exclusive costs $ 24,900.
I can think of several reasons why the NAD is le-gitimately
worth six times as much as the Sonic Im-pact.
I’m sure some people will find the ASR worth
26.7 times as much as the NAD. I’m not their in-tended
market anyway— that’s more those who will
buy $ 100,000 turntables ( I’m not making that up).
Here’s a fourthdifferent data point, the Joule Elec-tra
VZN- 80 MK V Emerald OTL Stereo Amplifier,
which costs a mere $ 16,000. It’s interesting not so
much because of the price ( it claims to produce 80
watts per channel into 8 ohms, 50 into 4 ohms, so on
a price- per- watt basis it’s the most expensive unit
here) but because of the review, in The Abso! ute Sound
for December 2006. TAS doesn’t do any measure-ments,
so we can only take the word of the re-viewer—
and that word’s interesting. After touting the
wonderfulness of OTL ( output transformerless) am-plifiers,
she says: “ The sonics of the Joule VZN- 80 did
give me a bit of a struggle…