Turning the Pages

iBooks and KF8 - Learning about Apple and Amazon

2012-01-26T11:09:00.001Z

The last ten days have seen the release of the new iBook Author program from Apple and a new version of KindleGen from Amazon, each producing eBooks to their own proprietory standard, iBooks and KF8.

How they've gone about this though, reveals much about the companies and their approaches to this market.

Apple launched iBooks almost two years ago now with some ballyhoo, but have never really made a dent in Amazon's market share. The Nook might have done, and Kobo has nibbled a piece here or there, but Apple? Not so much.

So they flipped the strategy with iBA. Keep the lockin (iBooks only available and readable through Apple devices/channels), but provide better tools for publishers/authors and target a different market - textbooks. Instead of trying to convince the consumer, they're deciding to convince the supplier. It's the "killer app" strategy.

And you have to say, the samples they've put out are stunning. The EO Wilson "Life on Earth" really does redefine textbooks. By all accounts iBA is also a great tool. The backlash has been about the Apple walled garden and restrictions about the sale of works produced by the tool. I don't really understand much of this reaction - Apple is a business, not a university or library. If the Library of Congress produced a proprietory tool, then I'd get the outrage.

So, if you want to play Apple's game, there is now a compelling workflow from production to distribution, with QA thrown in along the way. Slick, if you can live with the terms.

Amazon launched KF8 then in to a market it dominates, working from a position of strength. But the KF8 launch has been confusing. The specs were announced in October, and missed elements like audio and video, present in mobi files as well as Apple's iBooks. The Fire launched in the US in mid-November, with some books being demo'd that had been made to the KF8 standard, so some publishers had access to the tools. Then last week, the tools were announced, but the guidelines were incomplete (since updated), but the Fire is still US-only and the Apps haven't been updated. So, although we now have the tools, there's nothing for us to target and test on outside of the US. And even there, do you just want the Fire as your entire potential market?

So it feels like a mess. Simultaneously late and rushed.

What these two launches tell me is that Amazon is not a technology company. Sure, it uses technology better than almost anyone, and it even re-sells spare capacity in a way that has changed the technology landscape (EC2, S3), but a real technology company understands developers.

And make no mistake, if you're in the business of ebook production, you're now a developer.

Amazon has the market right now, but, as Steve Ballmer memorably once said "It's about developers, developers, developers!". He may, at that point, have thrown a chair.

10 Great Things About iBooks

2012-01-18T14:40:00.002Z

In the last post I outlined 10 things Apple need to fix in iBooks. Who knows, maybe tomorrow at DBW, they'll tick off some of my list.

But in the meantime, here are 10 things I love about iBooks.

1. Technical

The way I see it, Apple read the epub3 specs ahead of time and cherry-picked some cool bits they liked for the iBooks specification. It's epub with a twist. So, for 6 months now we've been selling books made up of CSS, HTML, Javascript (even JQuery). We can animate and transform and bring our books to life. KF8 doesn't even come close. Check out the Yellow Submarine iBook if you haven't seen it.

2. Quality

Being able to drop in 2 million pixel images means we can get fantastic image quality in our books. Add in the slick page turns, the freedom to view landscape, portrait, big or small, and whatever we make as an iBook looks great.

3. Fixed width

We make digital facsimiles of rare books, so this is a deal-breaker for us.

Apple were the first to do this. Without this we don't have a business.

4. Audio and video

iBooks handle video really slickly. Tap to play anywhere in your page. Bring it up, full width, rotate the screen to landscape and you've got a 720p video playing. Tap to stop and the video resizes back down into it's slot on the page and you pick up where you left off. Elegant.

5. Apple people

The people I deal with at Apple want us to succeed. They're helpful (within their constraints) and smart. They know how the deck is stacked and are trying to make things better. I don't get a re-hash of unhelpful documentation I just read online.

6. Unified platform

It's hard to over-stress the ease of developing for a unified platform. Compared to the apocalypse that developing an Android app must be (x different OS versions, y different screen resolutions, z different processors) or even Kindle (Fire, iPad App, iPhone App, Windows App, Android App etc etc) we can test and release in hours. Sure Apple's walled garden approach has some downsides, but this is the reason iBooks (and apps) look consistently great.

7. Growing fast

When you publish a print book, you're releasing into the wild a product with a fairly finite market. Our universe is much smaller - just those with iOS devices. But it's growing at a breakneck pace. Maybe 32m iPhones last quarter, 11m iPads. Our potential market is doubling every year or so.

8. Great devices

People love using iPhones and iPads. They come at the top of consumer satisfaction surveys. Having our books run on great devices means we have happy customers. Imagine if we had to support all those buggy $99 e-readers that are made of tinfoil and glue. That bad hardware experience rubs off on us.

9. Some UX aspects

Despite my criticism of the iBooks UX in the last post, some of the iBooks UX works well. The navigator is great, multiple table of contents views is great, and the integration with dictionaries and notes is cool. We're really not there yet, but the foundation is solid.

10. Ongoing improvements to IBooks

This seems to come in fits and starts. The first 6 months from release didn't see much action, then we seemed to rocket from 1.0 to 1.4 with all sorts of improvements. Then a hiatus and recently some more changes. It seems like Apple have some resource to throw at this, and there is a commitment to improve the platform.

So tomorrow will be interesting.

It really feels like the future of publishing belongs to those who can make the numbers work for content-creators. That means self-publishers, lean indie publishers and legacy publishers who can reinvent the business model and articulate their value.

I wrote my first multimedia app using Hypercard in about 1991. Right now our tools aren't even that mature yet. All of us could do with better tools and a bigger market. Here's hoping...

10 Things Apple Need to Fix with iBooks

2012-01-16T13:23:00.001Z

Ahead of this week's iBooks announcements (likely around textbooks) and 2 years from the initial iBooks launch, I did a little thinking about iBooks in general and the successes and failures of the platform and the store.

First up, I have to say I'm surprised at the iBookstore's lack of success. It's impossible to get hard numbers on market share, but, reading around, and from my experience of publishing to iBooks and Kindle, I'd guess Apple has somewhere around 10% of the market. Probably less in specialised areas, maybe more in top 100 fiction titles.

Last summer I came across this graph from Asymco:

Damning, no? Their report contains some other, equally scary charts on download rates. It may not be 100% accurate, but other data, 18 months in, pointed to 180m book downloads (10m/month), which pales next to the App Stores 1bn a month.

Making the App Store 100 times bigger than the iBookstore.

So, if I was Tim Cook, giving my end of year appraisal, how would I score iBooks. Maybe a 5/10. Shows promise, hasn't delivered yet. Should have done better.

What can Apple do to fix this? Here are 10 ideas, some consumer-related, some for developers and publishers.

1. Mindshare

Despite the number of iBooks app downloads, the public do not think of either the iPad or iTunes as a book purchase/consumption channel. They're habituated into going to Amazon. Apple is probably the best tech marketing company in the world. Get on and produce some great ads that articulate what a great platform you have. Kindle is in danger of doing what Google and Hoover before them managed - becoming a verb.

2. Titles

When Random House declined to pitch in with iBooks early on, Apple just didn't have the catalogue of Amazon. That still feels like the case. Embrace more publishers, make it easy for them to come on board.

3. Learn to love self-publishers.

It's hard to self-pub on iBooks. What with ISBNs, EIN numbers, Apple IDs, tax sign-ups and what have you, self-publishers are mostly thinking "why would I jump through all these hoops just for a few more sales". What Apple is missing here is also the publicity that self-pub success stories generate for your platform. How many column-inches has Amanda Hocking generated for Kindle in the last 6 months? Make it easier for the next Hocking or Konrath.

4. Intelligence

The iBookstore doesn't currently have a high IQ. Apple must know a load about you, what with all your iTunes/iBooks purchases, but in terms of pushing appropriate content your way, all they can offer is "people who bought this...". Make it smarter.

5. Don't hide it.

iBooks still isn't a default iOS app, you have to download it. Why is that? When you load up the iTunes Store, the front page runs like this (from the top down): music; music; music/miscellaneous; music; music; films; tv programmes; miscellaneous; music. The charts on the right-hand side: singles; albums; films; tv programmes. Books just have a text drop-down menu at the top of the screen. If you want to sell more books, give them some prominence.

6. Development Tools

iTunes Producer and iTunes Connect handle iBook creation (from epubs) upload and management. There's a lot of overlap in the tools, and one's web-based and one an app, and they're both clunky. Want to run a promotion on all 32 territories for a week? Try having to change 3-4 fields for each book in each territory. I just did it for 3 books, and I actually gave up. It was so painful, and Connect was so slow, I just ran the promotion in our key territories (sorry Slovakia). The only way to create epubs from within the Apple ecosystem is also Pages, which wasn't designed for an epub3 world. Give us some great tools - if you can build iLife, this should be easy.

7. Documentation and Approval

Approval can take from 2 days to 4 weeks. You have no way of knowing which it will be when you upload. I understand the need for QA, but an indication of expected approval time would help us plan launches. And when building a book, it sometimes feels like you're playing a game to which you don't know all the rules. The documentation just isn't comprehensive enough. Sort the documentation and when a book uploads give us a status "Approval expected in 5-7 days".

8. Viewing Books in iTunes

How about allowing users to view books on their Mac (or even PC). Unless you have an iOS device (realistically an iPad), iBooks don't exist.

9. Other platforms

Or, even more radically, what about an iBooks app for Android/Windows. Buy an iBook, read it anywhere? Yeah, I know. Not going to happen #walledgarden.

10. iBooks UX

iBooks still looks like an intern designed it. The IKEA-style bookcase and the limited functionality (nothing social, nothing from iTunes) could do with a refresh.

When all's said and done, I love the experience of using an iBook, and I want iBooks to succeed. You can do things on iBooks right now that Kindle haven't even addressed in their forthcomg KF8 format. I show people the books we make and they're blown away.

So in my next post, I'm going to run through some of the things that Apple nailed with iBooks.

Charles Dickens and Me

2011-12-05T11:13:00.001Z

I was first forced to read Dickens at school. The book was Oliver Twist, and the length and density of the work put me off. I suppose I was about 12.

Many years later I picked up an old edition of Bleak House and read it almost at one sitting. The humour! The plot! The characterisation! The satire! Something for everyone - you can't not like Dickens.

About a year ago, we moved offices to Cleveland Street in central London, an old road marking the ancient boundary between Camden and Westminster. Doing some research I found that Dickens lived at number 22 when he was just 2, and he enters this address again when registering at the British Museum on the 8th February 1830, when he was 18. Number 22 is now, in a truly Dickensian twist, a button shop.

Just up the road, between us and number 22 is the Cleveland Street Workhouse, which would have been fully occupied in Dickens time. It must have influenced his description of the workhouse in Oliver Twist.

When I was last in Boston I stayed at the Parker House, where Dickens lived for two years, and where the first ever reading of "A Christmas Carol" took place on 3rd December 1867, almost exactly 144 years ago.

I think I've turned into an inadvertent Dickens stalker.

So we're delighted to be publishing an incredible facsimile of an illuminated 1916 edition of "A Christmas Carol" through our digital imprint, eBookTreasures. It's available through iTunes, and if you haven't read it in a while, I commend this version to you.

eBookTreasures III

2011-11-22T15:31:00.001Z

Here's the last post about eBookTreasures. This one deals with the commercial side.

When we decided to go for this, it was to answer 2 questions:
- how can we help our clients generate revenue?
- how can we provide access to collections on mobile platforms?

Our client base is possessed of some of the greatest treasures in the world, but not with great amounts of money or the appetite for risk. So the commercial model we developed was one that many app developers in this space have used: revenue share. Put simply, we take care of all development and management, we share marketing responsibilities, and the revenues, after the vendor cut, are split. The exact way revenues are split depends on the kind of titles the institution has, and the number of titles they commit to. The better the titles and the more they want to do, the better deal they get.

This effectively gives the library no downside (other than the management opportunity cost), which makes it an easy decision. Which then compels us to keep the quality bar high. We've had to turn away a number of potential clients as we couldn't see us selling enough of their titles to make it worthwhile. To be honest, we're still not sure what the breakeven number is. We know how much work goes into creating an iBook, but we're just about to launch for Kindle, and looking at building out an app. All these costs have to be amortised over the catalogue we have at that point.

We know we'll never sell tens of thousands of any given title - the market for digital facsimiles just isn't that large, but we hope to build a catalogue of several hundred titles each selling respectably over a long period of time. And then there are the crazy spikes we sometimes see. When the last Alice in Wonderland movie came out, we saw 40,000 downloads a month for an online version we did. Nothing to do with us.

Pricing has been interesting. Kindle wisdom would tell you around £2.99 is a sweet spot. But we're not on Kindle, just iBooks for now, and the pricing seems different - not so many self-pubbed authors for one. Then the only alternative to buying some of our digital facsimiles is a print facsimile, and they can cost thousands. Add in the provenance of our titles, and we decided on a somewhat premium pricing model, but still cheaper than Big Six ebooks of their latest hardbacks. So, £9.99 for a complete large facsimile, less for smaller ones. To hedge our bets somewhat, we did highlights editions of books like the Luttrell Psalter and Leonardo's Codex Arundel. To our surprise though, the complete versions have been outselling the highlights versions 2:1. We're slowly learning more about our audience.

We're three months in, so it's early days, but we're really encouraged. Books are dropping into the system week by week, and we're taking a long view of this. We might just be building the greatest library in the world, and making some money for our clients at the same time.

The Briefcase in the Hall

2011-10-17T22:03:00.000+01:00

It's standing next to the pew, by my front door. It's a black leather briefcase my wife bought me in 1993 or 1994 when I started Armadillo Systems. "There" she said, "now you're a businessman".

I haven't used it for years, so it's going to the charity shop. In its day I used to carry vast folders of paper around. Printouts of letters, contracts, checklists and sketches. It's day has passed.

It was in 2005 when I was spending a lot of time with Microsoft in Seattle that I realised paper had died. In meetings, 10 or 15 people lined up either side of a long table would open their laptops almost in unison, tappeting away throughout the meeting, every comment and thought filed away ready for copying and pasting, ready to later justify or judge. Times had changed.

Then the other week I was in another meeting. This time in a coffee shop. All three of us pulled out iPads and silently stabbed at our on-screen keyboards. Times had changed again. No formal meeting rooms and no formal filing system. Coffee and the cloud rather than formality and folders.

Over the last weekend, Apple sold 4m new iPhones with their latest voice recognition system, Siri. Make no mistake, this is the beginning of another big shift, this time not from paper to keyboards, but from keyboards to voice.

This won't define the future of how we relate to computers, but it will surely point the way.

Unripe Apples

2011-10-10T11:56:00.002+01:00

It was the summer of 1985. I was working for a financial institution as part of my degree in an office made of grey. The walls were grey, the suits were grey and the floor was grey. Ties were pink or yellow though.

We had two computers in the department - an IBM XT and an IBM AT. One was better than the other, but it was hard to tell which, as they both had green screens and ran DOS. They were hooked up to an enormous dot-matrix printer that would go "screeeek, screeek" as it spewed out reams of stripey paper.

Down the road was a computer shop that had just started to sell things called Macs, which didn't look at all like the PCs. I persuaded them to lend me one for a couple of weeks. I think it was a 512k running System 1.1. Over that two weeks the entire company must have crowded round my desk.

"Look at that nice screen"

"Wow, it has pictures on screen"

"What's that box on a wire on your desk? What you move that box and that little pointer moves at the same time?"

"Do that thing with the font again".

It just changed everything. Computers moved from the domain of the data-processing guys to everyone. We could suddenly envisage them being useful in all sorts of ways, not just as gigantic calculators.

You know the path we've trodden since then and it doesn't need revisiting here, but I wouldn't be doing what I do now if it wasn't for Steve Jobs.

For which I'm grateful.

eBookTreasures II

2011-10-03T17:25:00.005+01:00

OK, here's the second post about eBookTreasures. In the first we covered the background, today it's technology and UI.

Prior to 1.1 iBooks had done a similar job to most epub readers, but then the iBooks team saw the writing on the wall and adopted many of the epub3 standards - HTML5, CSS, Javascript as well as fixed-width books.

Fixed-width was the starting point. You can embed images, pretty large ones if you want, in regular epubs, but they don't fill the screen. You don't feel like you're reading a book. The device acts as a frame, and then the app acts as a frame within that. There's no suspension of disbelief there. Fixed-width changed all that. Books can butt up against the iPad bezel and suddenly you're leafing through a manuscript, not reading an ebook. And with the iPad's 2m pixel ceiling for image size, you have plenty of headroom to drop in nice high-resolution images. That got us started.

We then wanted a very stripped down UI, that let the book just be the book, but we wanted some subtlety too. Discrete arrow buttons bring up custom functionality. We animated these using jQuery classes, and then wrote some Javascript to do things like flip Leonardo da Vinci's pages the right way round, play MP3 audio files and do some image swapping.

The latter is important, as it swaps the page bitmap for a blank page bitmap (custom-coloured for the book it's placed in) with system text embedded in it. This allows for the text to be searched, taking advantage not only of iBooks rather nice search function, but also it's highlighting and dictionary functionality.

For these generic pages, as well as the introductory pages, we used CSS to allow for easy customisation. Our objective here is to build a template or engine that will give us the chance to build new books very quickly and easily.

This is a key differentiator in what we are doing. We didn't want to build a big "bet the farm" type app model where huge development costs go in to building each book. This is more like a large number of smaller bets, meaning it's easier to get partners on board, easier to scale and easier to fine tune.

The HTML5 capabilities of epub3 are allowing us to easily embed video, which will be a feature of a forthcoming title, and getting to grips with all these capabilities puts us in a good place for working on more complex ebook projects in the future should we want to.

For all of this we had to test against lower-end devices like iPod Touch and iPhone 3G, which operate with much less RAM and an older GPU. We were really concerned about performance on these devices. In the end, Apple advice was to go for quality, so we did (using the high-res files for example) and the low end devices cope OK. An iPad2 gives a snappier experience than an iPad1 for example, but the latter is plenty usable.

Overall I guess we built up to 400 test epubs of various sorts over a 3-4 month period. Different bitmaps, different code, breaking changes as Apple released new iBooks builds, UI tweaks, you name it. Ironically though, the technology set we are using is the lowest we've used in many years. This hasn't been a project with huge technology hurdles, just UX and marketing ones.

One of the things we have our eye on is the Kindle approach to facsimiles. So far we've seen Kindle Print Replica appear out of the ooze, but this primitive life form is nothing but a PDF in a DRM wrapper. Plenty of scope for evolution there.

Next time I'll look at the business model and the barriers to adoption.

eBookTreasures I

2011-09-05T17:20:00.002+01:00

This will be the first of a couple of posts on a new venture we've just launched called eBookTreasures.

Basically it's like Turning the Pages for iPad, but you get to download and own the book. If you're having a hard time visualising this, take a look at a video.

I want the posts to cover the background, the technical approach and the commercial model. I think it's worth doing this as so many things fall out of this project: open vs closed standards, Apple vs Kindle, free vs paid, social media vs traditional marketing.

This post is on the background.

Around summer 2010, the iPad had just launched, and whilst we had been looking at what TTP on mobile devices might be for quite a while, this launch acted as a catalyst to take another look.

Our options were:
- build an iOS app
- build an Android app
- create an iBook
- create a mobi file for Kindle

Building an iOS app condemned us not only to a lifetime of support, but also the need for an Android app at some point. And then maybe a WinPhone 7 app. No chance - we were never going to get Angry Birds style volume so the development costs couldn't be justified. Plus the Android app store was a black hole made of nasty.

We actually made a few mobi files to see what they looked like on a Kindle and the answer was predictably ugly. They looked OK on Kindle apps though, and we really wanted to use Amazon as a channel, but the deal-breaker was Kindle's charging model - 10p per Mb on top of the 30%. One of our books came out at over 200 Mb, so we'd have to give Amazon £20 per download, with resultant ridiculous pricing. Another one crossed off the list for now.

So we looked at iBooks. The iPad was great, but in summer/autumn 2010 iBooks was like Kindle - no support for graphical books.

So we waited, and then came a rush of updates to iBooks. Essentially they added a slew of features from the forthcoming epub 3 standard before it was ratified. Woo-hoo! Fixed-width pages, support for Javascript, CSS, HTML5. Now we could build the books we wanted. True digital facsimiles of the greatest books in the world with interpretation and enhanced features like narration.

This felt good to us. The iBook platform uses the open epub standard, so the books should have a life outside of Apple when epub3 is supported by other vendors, we can offer a great user experience, and a slick delivery mechanism.

The strategic technical decision was to let someone else build the app. So Apple do the heavy lifting in building, testing and updating iBooks, and we develop a model to cost-effectively populate the app with our content.

This allows us to focus on our customers, not the technology.

The approach is also the one we plan to use for all other platforms - to use the Kindle platform and apps to reach into Android/Windows/WinPhone 7 and Kindle devices, rather than build our own platform.

The only thing we knew we were missing was the volume that the Amazon channel could offer, but we figured we could make up for that given the impressive nature of out launch partners (the British Library, Natural History Museum etc).

We soft-launched in August and have spent the last few weeks ironing out some wrinkles in the metadata, so now would be a great time to tell us what you think.

A Change of Pace and the Pace of Change

2011-07-06T16:12:00.004+01:00

We're working on an Apple project at the moment, and I was thinking back to January 2007 when we launched Turning the Pages 2.0 to coincide with the launch of Windows Vista, and what has happened to Microsoft since then, and what has happened to Apple.

Since then Microsoft has got back into shape with Win7, which is where it ought to have been all along, and finally launched sort-of viable phone software that hasn't got much traction yet. Kinect has been big but hardly changed the world. The cloud strategy is still unconvincing, at least to me.

Apple meanwhile has in the meantime launched the iPhone (60m+ sold), iPod Touch (100m+ sold) and the iPad (35m+ sold), redefined mobile computing and along the way sold about 13 billion apps and the same number of songs. In mobile computing and gameplay everyone else is left for dust. The pace of change is truly staggering.

And then there is the cultural sector. Sure, you've put on some exhibitions, and maybe done some digitisation, but does your institution look very different from 2007? Probably not. For some it does though. The National Library of Norway has reinvented itself as a digital library with two thirds of all staff engaged in digital projects.

In January 2007 Microsoft was worth around $293bn and Apple $78bn.

In April this year Microsoft was worth around $213bn and Apple $321bn.

How far has your institution come in those 4 years?

* update* Apple announced 15 billion app downloads by 6th July. That's 5 Billion downloads in 6 months. Heading towards 1 billion/month. I think I need a sit down...

The Glories of Cambridge

2011-05-12T16:27:00.000+01:00

"And on your right is Trinity College, where they discovered splitting the atom and creme brulée".

I'm in Cambridge, at the Wren Library, and the disconcerting patter of the guide in the punt drifts over the immaculate lawns.

The self-aware beauty of Cambridge never fails to impress, and the more you dig, the more there is to be impressed by. A Russian doll of varied cultural glories. From the Cam and the backs to the elegance of Wren's library. Then inside to the astonishing carvings by Grinling Gibbons, who worked boxwood like putty, and on to the shelves to see the Trinity Apocalypse in all it's prurient, appalling glory. An age when the consequences of sin had to be spelt out, lest the fabric of society be completely jeopardised.

Occasionally, when I tell people what I do, they are overcome with sad envy, sweating, as they do, for uncaring American corporations. Occasionally I feel lucky and today was one of those days.

The Power of Reproduction

2011-05-10T11:59:00.003+01:00

When the Royal Couple got married, the bit my son was most interested in was (predictably) the flypast. Wanting to know what a Lancaster bomber looked like, I dug out my old Big Book of Aircraft and found a picture. But interleaved next to the picture of a Lancaster was a piece of tracing paper that I had used 30 years ago to trace a wobbly outline of the plane that I never got to transfer to a nice clean sheet. Maybe teatime or homework interrupted me, and the tracing paper lay sealed up in this book since the late 1970's.

What efforts we used to go to to reproduce pictures and maps.

Secure the tracing paper to the picture with paper clips. Pick a soft pencil (HB or B) and carefully trace the outline. Remove the tracing paper and affix over a clean sheet of paper. Pick a harder pencil (H) and retrace the outline you just made, pressing hard enough to leave an impression on the paper underneath. Don't press too hard or you rip the tracing paper and you have to start again (a problem if you're tracing a map of the world). Having removed the tracing paper pick any pencil or pen and follow the indents along the page, twisting and turning, until you have a representation of a bomber (or the coast of Norway) appear on your page with surprising fidelity.

Fast forward to today. Type "Lancaster bomber" into Google, narrowing the search to Images. 99,400 results. Hmmm. Colour or black and white, cockpit or whole aircraft, flying or stationary…Right click, copy, paste and the image (copyright permitting) is ours to do with what we want. Information wants to be free and now this collection of bytes has been let loose to appear whenever and wherever we like.

As we fill our repositories with digital images, we're allowing for a myriad of unexpected, unpredictable and unknowable future uses, with entirely unforseeable results. A chaos theory of image dissemination.

And a long way from tracing paper.

Harper Collins vs the Real World

2011-03-21T14:23:00.003Z

We're working on a really exciting e-book project at the moment, so I've been spending time digging around the e-book world seeing what's going on.

The other week Harper Collins decided that e-books sold to libraries could only be borrowed 26 times. Then they would expire. Give up the digital ghost. Cease to be bits.

It sounded bizarre - 26 times? Why not 25. Or 100. It turns out 26 is the amount of times a paperback would be lent before it became too shoddy and had to be replaced.

What?

I'm getting that deja vu feeling all over again. HC is trying to map an old economy model on to a new economy business. And guess what will happen - exactly what happened to the music industry. When Napster and others came along the market spoke loud and clear to the music labels and stores: "We love this music, but we believe, with the new models of distribution, lack of packaging and retailer markup, we really shouldn't be paying £14 for an album any more. You're choosing to ignore what the market is telling you, so we will take matters in to our own hands. Goodbye Tower Records, hello BitTorrent". The first to go were the stores (Tower, HMV, Our Price, Virgin) labels had to reinvent themselves as 360 degree merchandising machines.

The first company (Apple) to come back with a sensible counter argument ("OK, we'll reduce the price just a bit, but we'll make it super-easy to get what you want legally") won the day. They've now sold 12 billion songs, and over 10 billion apps (an unforeseen bonus with the ITunes model).

The second company to come back with a sensible argument, Spotify ("All you can eat - $10 a month), just passed 1m paying customers.

When you try to shore up an old economy model in a new economy, you're just delaying the inevitable. In a mirror of the record industry, bookstores are now closing with Borders filing for chapter 11 the other week.

Harper Collins can try this on for a while, but the market has spoken. And I'm not sure they're listening.

Facebook and Geeks

2011-03-08T12:26:00.003Z

Ars Technica is one of the grand-daddies of tech blogs. It's been around for years, and about a year or so ago refocused to become even more technical, putting some daylight between it and sites like The Register.

So it's safe to say that readers of the site know their stuff technically speaking and are up to speed with the latest sites, apps and trends. Ars have a poll on their site today to gauge the use of Facebook. I voted and checked out the results - and was stunned.

As at today, 36% of readers never use Facebook and 18% have an account but never use it. More than half of all readers are just not engaged with the dominant social networking platform. Why?

A measured response. This audience won't believe the hype. They'll take a look, weigh it up and decide if it's for them. They're smart and they normally make good decisions.

Time poor. Geeks work hard and then either play hard or disengage with technology. They don't generally have endless idle hours to fill before going home time, and have better things to do with their evenings (such as they are).

Trivia-intolerant. Much of what I see on Facebook could fairly be described as pointless drivel. The Ars audience has a low boredom threshold.

A preference for privacy. Technically-savvy users understand (and may even be paranoid about) the use of their data and profile. They don't want private information shared, and prefer to control dialogue rather than have it exposed to scrutiny.

Low sociability. Lets face it - geeks aren't the most sociable of creatures.

So why is this important - who cares if geeks don't use Facebook so much?

Because they're the advance guard. Exposed to technology more than most, they will actually be representative of the rest of the population in a decade.

Busy, clued-up, a bit cynical.

Not Fading Away

2011-03-07T15:25:00.004Z

To Grasmere last week, to the Innovative Interpretation of Manuscripts conference, organised by the indefatigable Jeff Cowton from the Wordsworth Trust.

As we edged along Ambleside in glorious sunshine, I mentioned to my taxi driver where I was going. She never learnt Wordsworth at school, she said, and had never been to Dove Cottage. He was just a name, and his work was irrelevant.

I spoke with Dr Luca Crispi from University College Dublin (formerly from the National Library of Ireland), showing some work we did with Joyce and Yeats manuscripts. Eighty people jammed in to the Jerwood Centre with others sitting in the lobby outside, and a further fourteen on the waiting list. It was a great event, the numbers proving that there's a real demand for information on this subject. Too often librarians can just do what they've always done. The charismatic Nat Edwards spoke about the Burns Birthplace Museum, and I was struck by the attention he'd paid to environment, and the erudite David McKitterick from Trinity College Cambridge illuminated us on the revolutions in writing.

I blogged not long ago about the centrality of special collections, and the importance of the user experience and interpretation. The conference gave me a new understanding of the need for leadership, knowledge sharing and collaboration in these areas.

Unless we can get user experience and interpretation right, it won't just be the taxi driver who doesn't know who Wordsworth is. Visitor numbers are declining at the homes of many smaller collections. I think we know how to fix this, but we will need to learn from those who already have.

Luttrell Psalter - the Movie - For Free!

2011-02-08T10:26:00.003Z

Following on from a post I made a little while ago, the lovely people at WAG Screen have now put the film they made of the Luttrell Psalter online for free!

I'm a fan of this kind of thinking. You can hang on to rights in the hope of some tiny future gain, or you can give stuff away, enrich the community, enhance your reputation and call it marketing if you need to convince your boss.

If you're a fan of medieval manuscripts or just enjoyed The Beauty of Books on BBC4 the other night, you should take a look.

Lessons from Latte

2011-02-07T16:41:00.005Z

Lots of noise recently about the future of libraries. I liked the marches to protest against library closures, and the BBC carried quite a lengthy piece on it's website rather fatuously entitled "Libraries vs the Internet". The very fact that the BBC chose to give the article this title tells us that libraries aren't doing a good enough job of both utilising the internet and telling the world about the great work they're doing regarding digitisation, online catalogues, aggregation and online exhibitions.

One of the problems was highlighted to me again last week in a meeting with a big library. They'd scanned a large number of 19th century books and converted them into eBooks. But, as the OCR'd text was much the same as that to be found in Project Gutenberg, or even Google Books, they had no real option but to give them away for free.

This is the commoditisation of knowledge. Why should I go to this library rather than another?

I've just moved office, and next door is a nice non-chain coffee shop run by a Turkish guy who this morning tried to convince me to go to his Turkish barber (I tried that once, and they set fire to my ears). His coffee is about as good as anyone else's, but he does a few things well. He know who I am, he offers a nice environment, and he gives me a discount. User experience and personalisation.

Maybe I need to persuade my new friend to start selling Turkish coffee though - that's something Starbucks would never do.

And libraries are just the same really. They may offer much ubiquitous content, but their unique offer is their special collections - stuff no-one else has. Baklava are optional.

Making Meaning

2011-02-01T11:43:00.002Z

I noticed a piece by Alain de Botton the other day on the failings of museums. His opening statement is "Museums should help us to live better lives". Alain de Botton is very keen on us living better lives. He's written books on philosophy, travel, architecture and status in order to try and help us. I've read them, and I enjoy his well structured, precise prose and thoughtful arguments.

But should that be the purpose of cultural institutions?

Well I believe it's possible for these institutions to help us live better lives in all sorts of respects. From the simple but profound appreciation of beauty (take a trip to the V&A) to the unravelling of the past that illuminates our present (past performance normally being an indicator of future behaviour), these places can enrich us in ways that our work and home lives cannot.

But so often I see museum and gallery visitors straining to find meaning in their experiences. Hunched over tiny labels, taking a close look at the brushwork of a painting, then stepping back to take in the whole canvas. Or sleep-walking through the endless galleries of the British Museum, dazed by the riches.

And here's the problem. We can show off artefacts (well those that aren't in storage), and we can can give some interpretation, but we don't seem to be able to give meaning to these objects. They are just not relevant to the visitor. The quasi-religious presentation of the objects declares their importance, but the visitor's response doesn't correlate to this declared value.

So Alain de Botton frames it like this "curators should co-opt works of art to the direct task of helping us to live".

Surely it's possible for us to contextualise objects for visitors, make meaning and therefore value? As with some of the humanities, museum professionals seem to take for granted that everyone will understand the value of what they do, and they are poor at articulating this value. But politicians and the public clearly need persuading.

David Cameron is championing a number of initiatives such as Big Society and the new measure of national well-being.

Surely now is a great time for the cultural sector to cry out "We can help with this!" But we need to add meaning, not just information.

Future History

2011-01-27T14:45:00.003Z

For Christmas this year I got a great book called Lost London, published by English Heritage. It documents in photographs London in the years 1870 to 1940. The London that the combined might of planners, developers and the Luftwaffe swept away.

I have also spent quite a lot of time, for one reason or another in Streetview, looking around various locations. I even invented a game at home for my kids. I dump them somewhere in Streetview and they have to work out where they are (the best was the Isle of Mull - "Balamory!", the easiest "Grandma's house!")

So what technology has brought us is perfect recall. The tantalising and fragmentary glimpses we see of London 100 years ago or more give us an elliptical glance at the way life was, but the record is incomplete. Streetview allows us to stroll around towns cities and the countryside at will, observing every detail of architecture, town planning, fashion, advertising, automotive design, agriculture and even economic activity.

Which presents posterity with an amazing opportunity. If Google's slightly creepy Streetview vans take a snapshot of our country every 5 years, the legacy for future historians will be immense.

And it doesn't stop there. Mix in the petabytes of social media data generated around people and places that has all ben time-stamped, and future historians will have a field day. Imagine the young Charles Darwin was on Facebook while at Cambridge, or tweeting away his early cogitations. What insight we would have into his world and the way he came to think the way he did, and who might have influenced him. Stepping back into Streeview, Cambridge 1829, we'd be able to walk the streets as he saw them.

Which means, I guess, be careful what you write, wherever you write it. You never know how you might get entangled in future history.

Lowering The Price of Failure

2010-11-15T17:55:00.003Z

Back in the 60s my mum was a secretary. She spoke a few languages and worked in some cool places, and she used a typewriter. When my sister was born, she gave up work and spent the 70s doing a fair imitation of the Good Life mixed with Abigails Party (think black forest gateau served with home-made wine…).

When we'd all decamped to college she wanted to go back to work, and picked up her typing again. Initially bamboozled by word processing, she was amazed with spellchecking and backspace. Make a typo - no problem: just lean on that left arrow button and hit "Del". No more tippex or white ribbons fed into clackety typewriters.

When Henri Cartier Bresson took photographs in the 30s, he would compose a shot, check the exposure, choose the moment, and press the shutter. Then he'd walk away - the shot done, the moment captured. I read on a blog yesterday about a guy who has an ambition to get 10,000 photos on his Flickr account by Christmas. And he's not even a photographer.

So the thing that has changed is that the price of failure has just dropped.

We're starting out on building a pretty ambitious bit of software. I've been agonising over features and what to include, but the great news is that we don't have one shot. For example, Flickr and Wordpress put out multiple versions of their sites every day. Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress) blogs about this here. If a new feature, or some "optimised" code doesn't work, they just revert back. The price of failure is low.

The price of building software and not iterating it can be very high.

Back to the Future

2010-10-19T15:20:00.002+01:00

At our local park fair the other week I picked up Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Written in 1995, I sort of never got round to reading it.

It deals with the "careers" of a bunch of Microsoft developers who go to Silicon Valley to make it big in a multimedia startup. Back in those days I had just started Armadillo, a multimedia startup in London, so the memories it brought back were acute. If any of these terms means anything to you, you need to find a copy:

- multimedia

- 3DO

- CDi

- BBS

- 9.6k dialup

- Broderbund

- Voyager

- Powerbook

- NeXT

- SGI Reality Engine

Throw in some Apple-envy and some evocative prose about the Microsoft Redmond campus and I spent a happy and nostalgic couple of hours with this book. At the same time I was clearing out our office and found some awards from 1994 for Best Interactive Multimedia (from the long-gone XYZ magazine), and a BIMA, as well as the Photoshop 1.0 installation disc (one 720K floppy). Then I started boring the guys in the office with old multimedia tales until they surreptitiously plugged their ipods back in...

What was fascinating though was the frustration in the book - trying to build complex experiences within the limitations of the technology (CDROM, slow as treacle dialup) and the money required to build anything. Fifteen years on, both these barriers have gone.

As well as capturing the zeitgeist, the book also presages the arrival of social media and blogging and many of the casual predictions have turned out to be eerily prescient. But then I saw the list of advisors, and with the likes of Kevin Kelley and John Battelle on board he had some good futurologists.

So then I started thinking about 15 years from now. There's a sort of feeling that we're "there"; that we have ubiquitous fast broadband, great developer platforms and loads of free content; that all we will now do is tweak what we have.

So will 2025 be as different to today as Coupland's story is?

The Practice of Work

2010-09-20T15:26:00.002+01:00

37 signals are one of my favourite companies. We've used Basecamp for a while, and I like their products, but it's the way they run the company that has always resonated with me.

So this interview with their lead dev was fascinating and contains some business practices that I've adopted (either knowingly or unwittingly) over the years.

Here are some:

- work from home on Friday. I take my kids to school, have a coffee with my wife and then dive in to my emails. 37 Signals go further. In the summer the office closes on Fridays.

- small is beautiful. A friend of mine started a web agency and, for some reason, he thought employing 60 people would be good. So he did. Then it went badly wrong, and 60 people lost their jobs. More people also means more personnel issues, bigger overheads and more management tiers.

- niche thyself (borrowed from Guy Kawasaki). If you're going to be small, find a niche and become the best. As a generalist you have very little ground to defend in any competitive situation.

- enjoy your work. I blogged on this before, but if you don't feel what you do matters, you won't do it well.

- employ smart people. When 37 Signals didn't like the available tools for building websites, they wrote their own. That's now Ruby on Rails. We had no code to convert conventional 3D models to XAML, so we wrote some convertors and built Turning the Pages.

- get code out the door. Then iterate.

- trust your employees. The 18 employees at 37 Signals are spread over 3 countries. The management (such as it is) trusts the people - they're in it together.

If you work for someone else, you might be sighing wistfully and bemoaning the culture you've inherited. If you control the culture however, then you can change it.

Anything's possible when yo' in the Library!

2010-08-26T12:05:00.004+01:00

There was a day when not much was possible in the library. Falling asleep was very possible, and, I recall a certain amount of surreptitious eying of female students back at college. Off-curricular study was my specialty though. I remember wading through shelves of books on architecture, fashion, parapsychology and history. My degree was business admin, so none of those contributed much to my grades...

One of the challenges librarians face is assessing the validity of the library as a physical space - not just a collection of data. Hey, why come to the library, when you can kick back in your dorm with your ipod on, your friends dropping by and a can of beer right there?

I've blogged before on the concept that we are different people in different spaces, and we're surely different in a library from our lounge.

So I loved this video on why you should get to the library.

In October we're launching a complete reinvention of the library space with the BL. We're doing the software, but it's the re-imagination of the physical space that will really blow people away. More when it goes live, but there's some stuff here.

Thanks to umjanedoan for the photo licensed under creative commons.

The Perils of Certainty

2010-06-30T14:20:00.005+01:00

We all like to feel secure, so people who act and speak with certainty about the future are compelling. Doctors who say with conviction that we will live longer if we eat more beetroot. That bananas can stave off Alzheimers (if we eat 20 a day). That spinach is a cancer-beating superfood. Or was it lettuce...

The UK property market was the same. Prices in 2009 would continue to fall said the experts. Except they went up.

I was researching some stuff about trends for the iPad and came up with an article called "The Apple iPhone Doomed to Failure" written just as the iPhone was launching. My favourite quote is the pithy signoff "Apple iPhone. Enjoy the limelight because it won't last long." Being wrong is OK, but the hubris here is on an impressive scale.

So what are we to make of the bullish statements around Flash, HTML5, iPads and slates in general, mobile form factors, app stores, WiMax and so on. Everyone seems so sure.

In the heritage sector we have to take a long view, and we have to do so knowing that every penny has been hard fought for and has to account for itself. So that increasingly means portability, open standards and interoperability. Want to reskin the app - no problem. Expose your data to some other museum with a bigger website - yup. Share the code or build on someone else's work - absolutely. Agility is a word I use a lot nowadays.

Don't be taken in by certainty.

Luttrell Psalter - the Movie

2010-06-28T11:47:00.004+01:00

So the kind people at WAG Screen sent me through a copy of their film of the Luttrell Psalter in response to me blogging about it a few weeks ago.

I suppose I was expecting the standard documentary-style piece, with voiceover, pieces to camera, intercut with a couple of re-creations of medieval life. That's certainly a film they could have made, but instead they've made a deceptively simple 20 minute film recreating scenes from the Luttrell Psalter in an effort to transport us back 600 years. No plot, no narration, not many words at all.

As a result, if you just view the film, it's a very impressionistic experience. Oxen, breath steaming in the cold Lincolnshire air, haul a crude but familiar-looking plough across a field. A young boy vaults up a tree to steal some cherries, narrowly escaping a wrathful farmer. Chickens scratch around a farmyard. A wronged wife belabours her penitent husband with a stick. We're left to have our own opinions on how like these people we are and how unlike. How hard life must have been and how rewarding.

The film took 2 years to make, on a budget that wouldn't normally cover the costumes, and the makers traveled to the North West to film red squirrels, to Wales to find a medieval village, and to London to find a scriptorium. This truly was a labour of love, and it shows on the screen.

For those unfamiliar with the book, the interview with the ever-watchable Michelle Brown is required viewing, and helps relate the book to the film.

So as a piece of film-making, experimental archaeology, pedagogy and indeed art, the film is an unlikely success. I hope the team put a copy online soon and it gets the wider audience it deserves.

The New Busy

2010-05-17T16:52:00.003+01:00

On my way to work this morning I saw the new Hotmail ad campaign: "Because the new busy is not the old busy". Indeed. Microsoft is getting busy making a play for cloud email. Look out gMail.

It got me thinking though. I'm old enough to have started work before email, internet and mobiles. I remember getting a fax machine for the first time. I'd ring someone up in the US and say "I'm faxing it right now!" and they'd say "It's coming through!!" It felt like a miracle. Most of what we did was face to face or on the phone and by post. I remember lots of cab and bike bills.

Now electronic communication has, of course, supplanted all that. Our phone at Armadillo rings probably twice a day. One of those is normally a wrong number. I get maybe a letter a day.

What's happened is latency has been removed from the system.

"I phoned but you were out", "The cheque's in the post" and "He's out at a meeting - I'll get him to call you when he's back" are all phrases we don't hear any more.

If I don't get a response from a mail or voicemail in a matter of hours, I'm surprised. Often it's minutes. There are many effects of this I think, but here are two.

The first is that we're being hunted down all the time. "Ping" goes our mail client ("I'm after you"). "Ping" (So am I!"). Ping. Ping. Feeling important is OK (not too important though), but feeling pursued is not OK.

Fred Wilson, a well-known New York VC wrote about his working vacations:

"I block out 90 minutes in the morning when my family is asleep for emails and phone calls"

"I keep my blackberry with me but try to keep it off unless we have some down time like waiting for a tour to begin"

"I also find time to do stuff, like post on the eliptical trainer"

The second is that latency brought time to reflect. A response was considered, measured and then dispensed. There has been a lot written about the dangers of hastily-written emails, but some people I deal with are ploughing through so much communication, that there's just not a lot of thinking going on at all.

So, whilst I wouldn't want to go back to the old busy, we must surely shape our new busy, lest it shape us.

John Bulmer

2010-05-11T15:05:00.008+01:00

I don't know how I've managed to miss him up till now, but just recently, I've come across the work of photographer John Bulmer.

I was asked to look at a project for the National Coal Mining Museum for England, and they had a temporary exhibition of his work. It sits in the same tradition as Martin Parr or Nick Waplington, but the life of the industrial north he captures is unique, at least to me. He was one of the first to shoot documentary style imagery in colour, but, to us, it's a strange, muted world of colour. Very beautiful.

I have to say the social documentary side of his work extrapolates one of my abiding interests; the shift to an urban society and the loss of rural traditions. Bulmer, working mainly in the 1960s and 1970s by the look of it, captures the last years of the industrial north and the communities that had built up in these great smoking cities.

Looking at some of the work now, I feel as remote from that world as I do from that of Froissart or John Stow. How could a world like this disappear so completely in a generation?

Work like this does exist to document the Middle Ages - my favourite is the ever-popular Luttrell Psalter, with its scenes of daily life so joyously depicted in the margins. Talking of the Luttrell Psalter, I just found out there is a "Luttrell Psalter - The Movie".

If you've seen it let me know. If it's on YouTube, even better.

Digitisation So Far

2010-05-11T12:41:00.006+01:00

I came across some beautiful 10 x 8 transparencies of an early illuminated Gospels the other day. Truly, they were things of beauty in their own right. Shining, luminous, with a level of detail we'd be hard pressed to capture today, even with the latest digital cameras.

It struck me we've come a long way...

"In the beginning.... we scanned the lovely transparencies on heinously expensive scanners and archived to tape. JPEGs were put online and on CDROM. And, lo, it was dull and slow. And yet it was a start.

A little later we discovered digital cameras, even unto the 4th megapixel, and it was very good. So the JPEGs multiplied and became larger, begetting also JPEG2000s.

On the third day metadata was created. And it formed many tribes, and only the anointed really got to grips with it. Often we looked for it, and it was not to be found.

And it came to pass that man invented machines for scanning, and books could be turned into scans, text and metadata almost before tea-time. And librarians were courted by those from Mountain View. And there was much surprise and consternation amongst the peoples. For surely there is no such thing as a free lunch?

After many years in the wilderness, software was invented by those with few friends. And wherever you were, you might search a catalogue and find treasures therein.

And then the elders met together and decided that it would be a mighty thing to be able to search across many collections and discover treasures wherever they may be found. And federated search came to pass.

Yet in the later days there was still discontent. "Surely this is not enough" the people cried. "We yearn to collaborate, blog and annotate even unto the last digit. We ache to get social and pine for access on the Great iPad of Jobs. When will this come to pass?"

And the elders looked grave and downcast and replied 'This will only come to pass when the day of Provision comes, when dollars shall fall from the sky like spring rain. Until that day, be thankful the days of transparencies are past.'"

Conditioned Reactions to Spaces

2010-05-05T11:46:00.005+01:00

Fancy title eh? But then I'm not sure how else to describe this.

I was at the John Rylands Library in Manchester last week, talking with Carol Burrows and Caroline Checkley-Scott who are part of the new Centre of Digital Excellence there. Nice people both and a good source of lunch recommendations.

I was taking a tour of the amazing Victorian Gothic building and commenting on how people were talking in hushed tones. The building felt just like a church and people were acting that way. I mentioned to Carol that children must be spooked by the place. She laughed and said it was quite the opposite - they loved it and tore around the place. "They just think it's Hogwarts!" she said.

Not having been to church much, this was what the building reminded them of. Unlike their parents.

We're about to launch some software for the Imperial War Museum in a new space called Explore History. Not gallery and not reading room, it's a third space in the museum (I've blogged about this before). Now if this ends up looking like a departure lounge I kind of know how people are going to behave. If it ends up looking like a Starbucks, I'd guess people will behave in a different way.

We'll find out on 21st May. If you're in London, drop by and take a look.

Less is More

2010-05-04T15:26:00.002+01:00

There's a dicey-looking restaurant down the road from me. The sort that offers 3 course dinners for £9.99. It bills itself as a Mexican/Irish/Italian place. Really.

For some reason known only to it's owners, it was called Robin Hood. This is Hammersmith, not Sherwood Forest we're talking about here, but, hey ho, maybe the owners had a thing about early Errol Flynn movies.

The other day I walked past, and they'd changed the name to Robin Hood Zorro. Everything else looked the same, but I guess they figured that if naming your restaurant after one mythical medieval freedom fighter was good, naming it after two was even better! I can't wait until they change the name to Robin Hood Zorro Don Quixote.

It's the same in the world of software. We're building out some apps, and there's a clamour for "more". More features, a change of name, funkier design. I've resisted this and drilled down to the need to just do what we are doing better.

So instead of adding Zorro to the restaurant name, maybe they should just focus on Mexican food. Or Irish. Or even Italian. Wait, what about Polish? Or Lithuanian...

Sleep In Heavenly Peace

2009-12-17T16:16:00.003Z

I was reading just now about how tired we all are. A few years ago Ariana Huffington (she of the Huffington Post) apparently passed out through exhaustion, fell over, broke her cheekbone and had to have five stitches.

That's a serious case of your body telling you to slow down. Which she did.

Which I hope to do also over the next few Christmas weeks. I may even turn email off on my iPhone (hmmm, let me think about that one...).

I suggest we all do. I wouldn't want to run into you in the New Year and have to ask "What happened to your face?"

ps the story is part of Seth Godin's new free online book What Matters Now.

Moving Images, Moving

2009-11-11T16:11:00.012Z

I was at the launch of Wellcome Film the other night, the hard work of Angela Saward, Curator of the Moving Images and Sound Collection at the Wellcome Library. They're putting hundreds of hours of, frankly, amazing video online for free here.

The day before I was at another museum looking at streaming multiple HD streams over their network and pondering the viability of delivering HD to a ship.

At the weekend I was talking to a friend at the BBC who mentioned that researchers use an iPlayer-like platform to view the mountains of digitally archived BBC output. Waaaay more than we ever get to see on iPlayer.

My how we've grown up. I probably watch more web-based TV than broadcast nowadays. My especial favourite is iPlayer on the new iPhone with a built in speaker. Wandering the house watching back episodes of Top Gear...

A few years ago I had dinner with a friend who worked at Gartner and we were discussing the likelihood of IPTV taking off. This was probably just prior to YouTube going mainstream. He confidently asserted that the internet would "break" if something like that happened. I guessed two things would happen: network capacity and bandwidth would grow and compression algorithms would improve. A bigger pipe and a smaller file. I'm not sure I was entirely right, but the internet hasn't "broken" just yet.

So what's the next frontier?

Undoubtedly video on mobile - streaming video both to and from your phone. 15 million people viewed mobile video content in the second quarter in the US - only 7% of all mobile users, but up 70% on the previous year (Nielsen Mobile Video Report 2009).

Ustream allows anyone to broadcast their mobile video.

A lot of what we're doing at Armadillo is starting to take into account this demographic. They're young and influential, but this is moving mainstream as users want to consume all their media and continue all their conversations wherever they are.

A big game-changer could be the long-rumoured Apple Tablet - a ten inch screen iPod Touch/iPhone. Put me down for one.

And get ready to fix them internet pipes. Just in case...

The third space

2009-09-11T10:41:00.003+01:00

In his book "The Architecture of Happiness", Alain de Botton goes to some lengths to outline how we are different people in different spaces. He cites the example of a miserable experience in a crowded McDonalds in Victoria "The restaurant's true talent lay in the generation of anxiety".

Leaving the bedlam noise, he found himself outside Westminster Cathedral, and entered to avoid the rain. "Concepts that would have sounded demented 40 metres away, in the company of a party of Finnish teenagers and vats of frying oil, had succeeded - through a work of architecture - in acquiring supreme significance and majesty".

I'm working at the moment on developing interactives for a "third space" for a museum. Not a public gallery, and not a reading room, we are trying to develop a space where people can be themselves and still explore the collections digitally.

I hope this will mean conversation and coffee, parents and children, sofas and cellphones. So many spaces we engineer in cultural spaces are, by need or tradition, constraining. We become an unfamiliar person. The hushed whisper in a gallery, the frustrating peering at undersized labels.

In this third space good things can happen. I was in Cambridge again yesterday at the library. Mostly I go to the tea room, as it was pointed out to me a while ago "Oh, that's where all the real work gets done."

One day...

2009-09-07T12:17:00.002+01:00

If you're archiving material in a digital repository or just making a backup of an archive, there's one thing you don't want to do if you're thinking long term. Use proprietory standards. Use formats like JPEG2000 for delivery and as proxy files for sure, and use pdf files for ease of portability, but don't rely on them for posterity. Because Adobe will go out of business. Maybe not soon, maybe not for 50 years, but it will disappear. That's what happens to commercial companies.

So that's why I'm delighted that we're finally seeing some mainstream pushback against the Google Books settlement. It's been all over the BBC website like a rash the last week or so.

I'm not going into the mechanics here, but my view is simple. Businesses have one driver - profit, and they change and disappear, and we cannot allow our cultural heritage, the drivers of scholarship, learning, research and innovation to be in the hands of any commercial entity.

For more on this see what the Open Books Alliance have to say.

In the Zone

2009-08-28T11:56:00.003+01:00

One thing that has been occupying some of my thinking recently has been the way trains of thought break down.

You know, when you've got an idea or theory and you're desperate to commit it to paper before it evaporates. I was in Cambridge the other day talking with some Darwin scholars about the manuscripts of "On the Origin of Species". I asked them whether there was any evidence of Darwin's fluidity of thought. Sometimes you write in a staccato way, struggling to formulate or express ideas, and sometimes it just flows - the ideas are clear in your mind and stream onto the page as if your pen is just a conduit.

Their eyes lit up "Yes, yes!" they said. Apparantly on occasion Darwin was writing so fast that, when he turned a page, almost the entire recto was still wet with ink, and they can see the impression of that wet ink on the facing verso. Sometimes this happened for page after page, Charles Darwin writing faster than the ink could dry.

Almost 150 years after the publication of the "Origin", we're still finding out much about how it was written.

That's why I love working with libraries.

Finally the Penny Drops

2009-07-21T11:41:00.006+01:00

I couldn't make it myself, but Nicholas Serota and Neil McGregor (head honchos at the Tate and British Museum respectively) spoke at the LSE last week about the Museum of the 21st Century.

Amazingly enough, their conclusion seemed to be that it lay on the internet. "Well hello..." you might say.

But they also seem to have identified the fact that museums need to act as broadcasters and publishers, which starts to address a fundamental problem: access isn't enough.

Years ago there was a massive drive towards digitisation, with libraries leading the way. We all know about Google Print.

Looking at the petabytes of scans made the institutions happy that they now had a valuable asset. Like having money in the bank. That you're not allowed to touch.

Most have yet to realise how to surface that content in an engaging way, or provide shared experiences around it. Nick Poole from the Collections Trust commented on the talk "We really do need a new product to excite these people - which might still focus on interacting with Collections in a browser, but in much more imaginative and mediated ways." (You would be right at this point to think this is where Armadillo comes in).

But then we also need museums to take up the challenge of interpretation, and herein lies their role as broadcasters and publishers. A layer of mediation, interpretation and facilitation between the object and the public preserves the role of the museum curator. How many European teenagers do you see wandering the galleries of our museums, with looks of blank incomprehension on their faces. "I know this is important stuff" you can hear them say to themselves (maybe in German...) "but I don't know why".

We can do something about this.

Unravelling strings

2009-06-01T14:58:00.003+01:00

I just got back from a beach holiday where my son's kite string got tangled up. So instead of a relaxing afternoon peering into rockpools, I spent hours unravelling knotted string, trying to get a simple straight line from his hand to the kite. Before that I was in Atlanta, where much the same was going on at the Open Repositories conference. Database guys and other assorted geeks trying to unravel a nightmare of databases and repositories to make a simple connection between the user and the data he needs.

But the good news seems to be that they're winning. Some of the work done facilitating cross-repository search makes it look (whisper it...) easy.

This is in no small part due to the emergent standards that I've talked about before, OAI-ORE and SWORD, which make real data migration possible.

Also interesting was the merger of DSpace and Fedora into one organisation; DuraSpace. The message was that they can benefit from working together as well as not chasing the same funding opportunities.

Instead of competing with each other they now have another company to worry about - Microsoft. The engaging Tony Hey was on hand to launch Zentity, a repository built on the Microsoft stack. The pitch was that the institutions already owned and had paid for Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server etc, so Zentity was leveraging that investment. For free.

The Scholarly Communications team have been making big efforts in the last couple of years to convince people that there is a "new Microsoft", which I've found to be true. There is also an "old Microsoft" however and this dissonance will make life hard for the team.

Whatever the case the entry of Microsoft into this space means the pace is about to pick up.

Continuous Partial Attention

2009-04-07T12:27:00.002+01:00

I like that phrase. Everyone I run it past gets it straight away. "Oh yeah, it's when you're watching TV and sending a text at the same time!" Yup. Or on your mobile when you're with a group of people, or using an interactive or website while you're chatting with a friend.

It's bubbled up to the surface again this week due to a couple of things. I was listening to an interview with the MD of Odeon cinemas. Strangely one of his biggest problems isn't bittorrents or DVDs - it's mobile phones. He stated that under 16s just don't get the fact that they shouldn't have full-volume conversations on their mobiles in a cinema, and typically 2 or 3 are going on at any one time during a film with this audience. Under 16's are cool with this. Older people are not.

Then I was at a do at Microsoft. They called it an un-conference, which has come to mean many things. This one meant that they live streamed a keynote address from the Mix09 conference in Vegas on a big screen, but at the same time you could play with demos, chat to friendly softies or get a beer. It was fun, but the level of information going in was compromised for me.

The really interesting thing is that I think I'm a dying breed. Clearly younger audiences have acclimated to absorbing information in this way to some extent. But the challenge facing user interface and user experience professionals will be how we manage to feed this growing audience in a way that both suits their "grazing" approach and provides quality information.

Small and Perfectly Formed

2009-03-04T17:06:00.006Z

Smaller is the new bigger. Not only for banks, but also for computers. Two stats jumped out at me this week.

One from Net Applications. It shows that, in the last quarter, 68% of all mobile internet traffic was generated by one device. The iPhone. In second place was Windows Mobile. With 7%. Nokia and Blackberry even further behind.

This tells us a few things. First, the iPhone is very popular (which we sort of knew). Second, people are using it for mobile internet access. Thirdly, I believe all that has happened is that that device has opened the floodgates. There had been a huge pent up demand for mobile web use, but people just weren't surfing from their handhelds because the experience was so bad (hold your hand up Windows Mobile 5, and you 6...). Come up with a device that made it a pleasure....WHOOSH, the floodgates open. What that means is that when other device manufacturers catch up, they will exploit that demand.

Just to reinforce the fact that mobiles are the new computers, according to the same source, iPhones accounted for 0.48% of all internet traffic in the last quarter. Linux was only 0.86%.

Next stat. As we might expect, desktop, and even laptop sales are expected to tank this year. Gartner are predicting an 11.9% overall decline, with desktops plumetting by 31%. Yet the sales of those small form factor netbooks are on a crazy upwards curve. Acer sold 500,000 Aspire One netbooks in 2008. It's forecasting sales of 12,000,000 in 2009. For one model. Many of these devices are internet-connected with 3G cards, giving us the same scenario as with the iPhone - instant access anywhere.

One thing is clear - we will have to come up with offerings that pay attention to users location, allow for smaller screens and respond to very short usage sessions. We're cooking something up here at Armadillo Towers, so stay tuned.

Things That Matter

2009-02-23T11:48:00.002Z

When I was young my dad wanted me to be a lawyer. I went to see one of the big five law firms in the city and had a long and dull conversation with someone in a grey suit. I couldn't see the point. What did being a lawyer do to contribute to society, or even my own well being? Sure I'd be well paid, but it clearly wasn't for me.

Guy Kawasaki (former Apple evangelist turned VC) says every business needs a mantra - something to measure your actions by. When people ask me about Armadillo I say that we like to do the things that matter - work that, if we looked at it from the outside, we'd say "I'm glad someone did that - it was worth doing".

So a few weeks ago I was pleased to see Tim O'Reilly blog about "Work on Stuff that Matters".

There are a lot of people who just took a job for the money. The money and the job are now gone, and I guess that there are a lot of under-employed bankers wondering what to do next. Hopefully it might be something that matters.

Most people in the cultural sector aren't in it for the money - they're in it because they like it and what they do stimulates them, and it might just matter. Now's a good time to give yourself a little credit and count those blessings if that's you.

Co-operate ORE else...

2009-02-16T17:30:00.002Z

Excuse the nerdy pun, but interoperability has been in my thoughts a lot recently.

A big project, unifying the collections of 9 different establishments just failed to get funding after a year of work. We asked the funders why and it came down to the politics. It was just felt to be too hard to get everyone to play nicely together. Sure, when we looked into it, individual data repositories were wildly different and metadata standards had been lovingly honed in isolation over the last 30 years. Melding them into a coherent whole was going to be, umm, challenging, but we knew that all along.

As standards like OAI-ORE emerge, and start to demonstrate how we can move not only data, but objects around the web, we should be entering a period where virtual loans, digital repatriation and unified collections are commonplace.

But we're not there yet.

Because all this is ultimately about people. If we let politics stymie endeavours such as these, scholarship suffers.

Building for Eternity

2008-11-03T15:24:00.002Z

When I was working on Turning the Pages with the British Library and Microsoft there was, as you might expect, a degree of cultural confusion. Our friends in London found it difficult that Redmond had quarterly targets and ways of hitting them. Our friends in Redmond found it extraordinary that the BL didn't think in such short timeframes.

So I used a story told to me about the architect of the BL, Colin Wilson. It was along the lines of the fact that when he designed the library, the specification of the materials was based on the need for the library to last for 400 years. Those are the horizons that major national collections have to have. The story helped bridge the cultural divide a little.

Now we see that Google has settled it's dispute with the AAP and Authors Guild and proposes a repository of out of print books that it will administer and charge libraries to use on special terminals. Harvard, one of the first to sign up with Google has bailed, stating it's unhappy about the restrictions.

Whatever the pragmatic sense in taking Google's money to digitise your collection, I believe you have to take a very long view when it comes to access.

I wonder if those who sign up to this new deal will have the foresight of Colin Wilson? The Open Content Alliance are already figuring out a response.

For more on (very) long term thinking I always find the thinking of the Long Now Foundation useful: http://www.longnow.org/

Ideology and accepted wisdom

2008-10-30T16:29:00.003Z

Just this last week or so I've been having ridiculous conversations about operating systems and RIA technologies.

I've had a concerted Linux attack, whereby I get a number of identical emails from Linux devotees decrying the lack of support for their chosen OS in a project we did.

I've had people saying how bad Vista is, and when I asked why, all they could do was quote other people. And I've seen some rabid Apple fanbois (love that word) talking up anything Apple they could think of, irrespective of their level of knowledge.

Then it struck me. This isn't informed opinion. It's a firmly-held ideological position based on a shared cultural/religious mindset (not technical). Linux geeks like being in a minority of more technically competetent people. Mac fanbois love it that they think they are cooler and more West Coast than sad Microsofties.

Ideology has a place in many areas - I just don't see it in technology. I am idealogically committed to access to cultural collections. But this blog is written on a Mac that dual-boots into Vista, and if I lean over here.....I can touch an Ubuntu machine.

No big deal. My cultural/religious sense of significance doesn't come from my choice of PC.

The need for magic

2008-10-13T10:34:00.003+01:00

A while ago I was demonstrating Turning the Pages to Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England (he looked a bit chirpier then).

I showed off some of the features and, impressed, he asked "How do you do that?". I didn't want to go into specularity mapping, polygon vertices, web services and the like, so in an unguarded moment I said "Well Governor, it's mainly done using magic". Luckily he and his entourage laughed.

He then came back with "We in central banking generally don't hold with magic".

My company have built some software that creates such a convincing illusion that people are confident the book is real. If the governor could summon the same confidence now, that would be magic...

Not as cold as all that

2008-10-02T15:58:00.002+01:00

A while ago I was visiting a convent populated with only a few elderly Polish nuns. They had established the convent after the war, and their numbers had inevitably dwindled.

It was a freezing morning with a thick ground frost, and, in passing, I mentioned to one of the nuns how cold it was.

She paused before her reply, and looked me in the eye, eventually saying in a quiet, level voice "Not as cold as in the concentration camp".

I think of her nowadays when I watch the news.

It's the experience stupid...

2008-09-22T11:08:00.001+01:00

Which end of the tunnel do you start digging from? Do you start off with digitising your collection, or designing a user experience first?

Two of our clients are taking very different approaches to this problem. In an ideal world of course, you'd do both at the same time and the tunnelers would meet up and shake hands. But most institutions aren't blessed with the budget, staff or energy to do that.

I asked the question from the floor at a conference a while ago, and addressed it to a body who were digitising 3,000 books a day. "What are you working on around user experience, or surfacing all this content?" The answer was "We haven't really got there yet". I see this a lot. The imperative is to scan, users often come a distant second.

Last week G. Wayne Smith, Secretary of the Smithsonian said:

"I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society... I think we need to take a major step. Can we work with outside entities to create a place, for example, where we might demonstrate cutting-edge technologies to use to reach out to school systems all over the country? I think we can do that."

This echoes the BL/JISC report earlier this year on the researcher of the future:

"The library profession desperately needs leadership to develop a new vision for the 21st century and reverse its declining profile and influence. This should start with effecting that shift from a content-orientation to a user-facing perspective."

I love Apple products - I have done since using an Apple Mac 256K in maybe 1985. Are Apple successful because they're cool, or are they cool because they are one of the only computer vendors to successfully integrate great content (eg music/movies) and great software and hardware (iTunes/iPod)? Put these together and you get a great user experience.

So who's going to be the Apple of the library or museum world. Could be the Smithsonian...

Technology as a synapse

2008-09-15T16:33:00.003+01:00

"Thinking" said GK Chesterton, "is making connections".

A while ago I was lucky enough to spend an hour or so with Sir George White, erstwhile master of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, in their small and jewel-like museum in London's Guildhall Library. He patiently talked me through the evolution of time-keeping and it's importance. Two things I recall.

One was the simple premise that those navigators who knew the time knew their location. Knowing where they were allowed them to map, name and own. This premise undergirded the foundation of the British Empire and helps explain the importance of John Harrisons chronometer.

The other was the scarcity of the knowledge of time. Up until the 1940 Ruth Belville took a very old but highly reliable chronometer to Greenwich every morning to set it precisely. She then walked into the West End of London and sold the precise time to watchmakers for a few pennies, allowing them to correctly set the time of the clocks in their shop.

Yesterday I was at Lyme Park in Lancashire and came across a collection of clocks by Thomas Tompion, Master of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in 1703.

Sir George had told me of the importance of Tompion, and using the web I might have been able to connect Tompion or the museum with the collection at Lyme. The promise of the internet is connected knowledge, but we will always rely on people to help us make these connections.

Digitising and providing access to collections is one thing, but interpretation allows us to make connections.

Until the semantic web becomes a reality...

Seeing the light

2008-09-08T12:22:00.003+01:00

Microsoft have been steadily porting a number of their key web properties to Silverlight over the last few months, starting with their dev sites, but the big (expensive?) coup was to get NBC to use Silverlight to broadcast the Olympics using Silverlight 2.0 (in beta no less).

For those who haven't come across Silverlight it's Microsoft's cross-platform entry into the Rich Internet Application space. People have compared it to Flash, but it's a bit more than that. With the ability to include HD video, act as a wrapper for C#, Python or Ruby, plus integrate seamlessly into a Visual Studio environment, it has a few more tricks up its sleeve. Just not the installed base.

So how did its debut go? Pretty well by all accounts. On 11th August, according to Microsoft, they served 250Tb of data on that day alone, and the uptake means that up to 8 million people a day are downloading Silverlight.

Adobe counter this with a smug 10 million downloads a day, plus an alleged installed base of 99% of all PCs online in mature markets, added to which they have a huge developer community with a strong vested interest in the platform.

My take is that Microsoft will start to eat away at Flash's dominance. Adobe's download numbers represent a large number of people downloading updates; Microsofts are nearly all first-time users of the technology. In the real world therefore Adobe is not pulling away from Microsoft.

Microsoft also claim there are 2.5 million .NET developers out there. All of those people will now be able to write Silverlight code right away, and even potentially repurpose existing applications in a relatively pain-free way.

But how to get the plug-in to the people? I can't see them being allowed to bundle it with IE8 for fear of further anti-trust legislation, so it comes back to content. Put up great content and people will put up with a 4Mb install.

When I first came across Silverlight it was called wpf/e (Windows Presentation Foundation everywhere) and pretty much the whole developer team was sitting in a small room in Redmond. The team passed 100 a year ago, and it's safe to assume it's still growing.

Microsoft has a lot at stake here. Bear in mind that this is effectively still a beta for Silverlight 1.0. Flash 1.0 was basically just a vector animation tool.

As an interesting historical footnote, the first people to use Flash online were Microsoft (MSN) in 1996 when it was called Future Splash. On the back of that success Jonathan Gay sold his company to Macromedia who re-christened the software "Flash", before being absorbed by Adobe.

So Microsoft only have themselves to blame...

Mmmmm, synthy...

2008-08-27T10:32:00.002+01:00

After much delay (like MUCH delay) Photosynth has finally launched. For those who haven't seen the TED video or the Live Labs blog, this is a piece of software out of Microsoft Live Labs that allows you and I to create 3D panoramas from a series of still images. Download the app, upload your images and you can view a 3D representation of the environment you photographed. No need to carefully line up the shots - this isn't a regular panorama - the app does it all for you.

I won't go into all the point cloud geometry craziness, but the algorithms it runs to create these worlds are very cool.

I first saw it quite a while ago in Seattle, demonstrated by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who was brought in on the project to add some Seadragon goodness to some tech that at that point was called Photo Tourism - a research project by Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski out of Washington University.

Seadragon has spawned Deep Zoom, which I blogged about a while ago and Photosynth is now in the wild with some very interesting first synths. I especially like the Potting Shed.

A few things jump out at me:
- this is still an early iteration - stand by for slicker versions to come.
- in the early days it took a cluster of PCs weeks to generate a synth - now your PC does it in minutes. This is where a lot of the effort has gone over the last two years - tedious but critical optimisation.
- Live Labs is designed to develop great technology, not necessarily to monetise it or even give it too much direction. After the thrill of recreating your own toilet in 3D has worn off, people should come up with incredible scenarios where this technology does things that are otherwise impossible.
- it isn't QTVR - this really does create a 3D space.
- why doesn't this leverage the traction that Silverlight got over the Olympics?

So for libraries and museums you could see a variety of applications from the virtual desk of a writer, to a virtual gallery. Or how about trawling your archives for photographs of a long-demolished building and recreating it?

Keep an eye on this one. QuickTime 1.0 was 160x120 12fps, 8 bit colour. From there to setting the standards for YouTube and having HD movies on demand was quite a journey. This one might be too.

The Meaning Wrapper

2008-07-02T16:15:00.006+01:00

I was reading about the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section conference of the American Libraries Association this week, held in LA.

Apparently there was quite a spring in everyone's step as rare books are seen to be gaining in importance.

This echoes a presentation I gave at the Museum Computer Network conference in Chicago a few months back. I picked up on a presentation at RBMS by Karen Calhoun from OCLC where she mentions a really important fact about special collections. She labels it "metadata +outreach skills=strategic assets".

In Chicago I billed it slightly differently. In a competitive knowledge economy, when users can go to multiple potential sites for the same content, what sets your institution apart?

My answers are:
- the special collections you hold
- the wrapper of meaning (metadata, interpretation, outreach, education) you put around those assets
- the user experience (including the online UI, the physical site and the facilities).

If you are just putting online material that will also be held elsewhere, people will go to Google. As Karen also highlights, 89% of all information searches start with search engines, not library websites (OCLC report, echoed by BL/JISC Google Generation report January 2008).

But if you can provide unique material, with a compelling user experience and toolset, bringing to bear some of the scholarship that your institution has, then you have a case.

If you can't you'll end end up a warehouseman. Bizarrely both Karen and I used this shot to emphasise this point.

Her slides are here.

Microsoft leaves the field

2008-06-06T12:44:00.000+01:00

So Microsoft has decided to stop digitising books on behalf of partner libraries.

What does that mean for institutions who were hoping for a white knight to come along and fund their move to digital?

Well, you could argue from Redmond's point of view this is a good move - the kneejerk reaction to trace the footsteps of Google, wherever they might lead has been seen to be a futile exercise in this case. Being a fast follower is all very well, but where you're going has to make strategic sense.

Also, as a software company, what was Microsoft up to squatting in libraries with dozens of Kirtas scanners?

So it's back to plan A for libraries (unless you want to get into bed with Google). The advantages of this are that it forces institutions to think really rigorously about committing resource into becoming a digital entity and all that entails.

When you have to fund something yourself and sweat over getting the resources to do it, you normally make pretty sure you're doing exactly the right thing. If someone hands you a gift sometimes treat it more lightly.

Looking at the contracts with people like Microsoft and Google, treating it lightly would be unwise.

In a competitive knowledge economy with multiple potential sources for information, why will people come to your site rather than elsewhere?

Why you should care about .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta

2008-05-14T10:39:00.000+01:00

It's not an exciting name I know. The sort only a mother could love. But .NET 3.5 SP1 promises to shake up quite a lot in online delivery of rich assets.

.NET 3.5 is a Windows component that installs, amongst other things, the WIndows Presentation Foundation, which Turning the Pages relies on for it's 3D version. It turns your PC into one capable of stunningly realistic 3D rendering right in the browser (Firefox and IE) without plugins.

Three things leap out at me:
- improved speed of startup and execution, so your apps, either as xbaps in a browser or executables will run quicker and things like animations will be smoother. Plus a load screen for xbaps (hooray...)
- cooler 3d effects like improved shaders and the ability to have interactive 2d elements on a 3d surface. More realism, more options.
- a lightweight and intelligent client-side installer that can be bundled with an app. This will be about the size of an Adobe Acrobat install, so now for clients with XP (ie no .NET 3+) we can just run the installer when they go to the app for the first time and they're done in a few minutes

The very wonderful and altogether English Tim Sneath over at Microsoft has a great post on it all here.

So why is all this so important?

Most clients I am speaking to have now figured out 2d digitisation, even if they haven't got too far with it. 3d digitisation is the next frontier. Photogrammetry or laser scanning of objects has been happening in a sporadic way in cultural organisations for a while, but without a compelling way of surfacing this content, why would you press on spending time and money in this area?

If you could scan and then publish with a simple production pathway, knowing that 95% of people could view the content at great quality you might think seriously about that collection of fossils or sarcophagi or sculpture.

Some people we know who are pushing forward great work in this area are 3DVisa, based at Kings College London. There's also an interesting-looking conference in the autumn which could be very timely.

2009 might just be the year of 3d in the browser.

The Public Library

2008-05-07T15:40:00.000+01:00

Spring is sprung in London and here's the view from my desk. It's my local public library and very civic it looks too.

I wonder what goes on there as the nature of the use of libraries is changing so fast?

The other week I was in the Wellcome Library having a coffee with a client. The client wasn't the Wellcome, we just wanted to meet in a sympathetic space. Whilst I was talking to quite an eminent scholar, perhaps the leading Leonardo da Vinci academic in the country came and sat at the next table with his cup of tea.

All around people were not using this space as a traditional library.

Last week the British Library made the Times:
"The historian Tristram Hunt said that it was a scandal that it was impossible to get a seat after 11am when students were there. Many people travelling from outside London complain that they cannot get to the buidling any earlier. “Students come in to revise rather than to use the books,” he said. “It’s a ‘groovy place’ to meet for a frappuccino. It’s noisy and it’s undermining both the British Library’s function, as books take longer to get, and the scholarly atmosphere.”

Whilst the BL may be suprised, and indeed pleased, to be called groovy it highlights the changing role they, and all major libraries have.

As content has to move to digital, physical spaces can be used for other things and become expressions of what our commercial friends would call "the brand".

For those who love old school libraries though, I recommend a look here.

Back in Town

2008-05-06T10:55:00.000+01:00

I'm back from Minneapolis and the Digital Libraries Federation conference.

Two things struck me. One is the phenomenal amount of work being done by some very smart people around digitisation, metadata and interoperability standards. These people are seriously laying down the groundwork for us all to have the libraries we want in the next ten years. I hope their home institutions realise how lucky they are to have them on board when they could easily take the Mountain View dollar.

The second was how little work is being done around innovative UI design (which I suppose is why I was invited along...). To my way of thinking, how you surface all this content is critical to a users experience and that experience will directly influence traffic and funding. Speaking to some delegates it seems this is something many people just haven't got around to yet.

Oh yes, there was a third thing - if someone suggests Minneapolis as a holiday destination, think very hard before accepting. I mean, snow in May...?

DLF - Digital Libraries (are) Fundamental

2008-04-09T17:10:00.000+01:00

I'm speaking at the Digital Libraries Federation spring forum in a couple of weeks in Minneapolis (28th-30th April if you're interested).

The last industry event I was at had a real "bunker" mentality. Budgets seemed under pressure, people felt unappreciated and there was a dearth of great work. Same old same old I suppose, but in the presentation I gave, I tried to offer some hope.

In the library and museum communities we are currently sitting at a happy collision of a burning desire to have universal access to all human knowledge and the appearance of an array of tools that make that dream realisable. The people who will realise that dream were sitting in the room. How much more of an exciting challenge do you want in your career?

As we slowly make inroads into the vast mountain of paper than needs converting to binary information, libraries are moving centre stage.

I hope DLF Minneapolis is full of people excited by the challenge and not those wishing life was like it used to be - analogue.

Seadragon surfaces at last

2008-04-02T16:41:00.000+01:00

In January 2006 Blaise Aguera y Arcas sold his company, Seadragon, to Microsoft. He'd built some pretty cool technology - it was imaging technology for the web that came with four promises:
- Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
- Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
- Transitions are smooth as butter.
- Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

Think about that. Pretty scary.

We met up that year in his swanky new Microsoft office up the Smith tower in Seattle, and what he was doing blew me away. Luckily he was kind enough to express admiration for what we were doing as well.

Anyway, Blaise and his team got sidelined to work on the Photosynth technology (post to come on that too...) and there was radio silence for a looong time.

Until last week, when Microsoft released Deep Zoom Composer, a technology that's related to, but not identical to Seadragon. Take a look at a demo: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Does it deliver on the promises? Kind of. It's all inside a Silverlight 2 wrapper, so when the original Seadragon had 3D effects, this one doesn't. Also, I was REALLY hoping it would be using hdphoto, the new format currently undergoing ISO approval, and it doesn't - it's plain old jpegs. This is a big deal as hdphoto (or JPEG XR as it will be known) offers high dynamic range and compression twice as good as jpegs.

I know the softies wanted to keep the Silverlight 2 download as small as possible, but surely they could have snuck this one in?

Take a look at the demo and mentally swap Hardrock cafe memorabilia for 100 paintings from the Louvre, or 1000 stamps, or the entire works of Shakespeare.

Interesting...

For richer for poorer

2008-03-28T14:49:00.000Z

One of the buzz terms flying around at the moment is RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Put briefly, this is the sort of application that would previously have had to be installed locally on a users machine, but can now be run in a browser. I suppose Turning the Pages is a RIA (as opposed to a ria, which I seem to remember is a drowned river valley...).

In one sense this is nothing new. Shockwave and Flash developers would claim they've been building these sorts of things for years. So what's changed?

Well one is the potential hybrid approach whereby data can be stored locally or on a web server, another is the amount of bandwidth and storage that is now cheaply available to deliver these sorts of apps, and another is the tools that are emerging.

When Adobe launches it's AIR platform, Microsoft launches Silverlight, and even Director/Shockwave gets a first new release for 4 years, all in the space of a month, you know something is up.

A compelling platform to deliver all sorts of collection assets, image, audio, video, 3D with a friction-free and engaging user interface opens up exciting possibilities for libraries and museums. Especially when you can hook it into your existing digital asset management system.

One thing comes back to haunt me though, and that is the number of appalling websites that appeared when developers got hold of Flash for the first time.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Time, place and work

2008-03-25T11:43:00.000Z

I just came out of a meeting to figure out how to explain the affect of spatiality on literature. I guess that's an academic way of saying that place and time affect composition. We studied a diary of a writer and looked at data whereby a walk he undertook had been mapped using GIS data against Google Earth. You could see how far he had walked and over what terrain. In fact on one day he'd covered 26 km over some of the hilliest parts of England. I queried that if you could also find out meteorological data, you could work out his calorie burn for the day. How he would have felt at the end of that day could therefore be guessed and fed in to the research about what he wrote at the end of it in his room.

A year or so ago, we were working on James Joyce's diaries. Each page was dated and we knew his age and habits. Constructing a three-dimensional model of his diaries, in the software we lit the manuscript using known data about his latitude and longitude (Paris) and the date (17th February 1907). We had to guess on the time of day (we guessed a late start to the working day - 11am), and lit the book with data we had about the position of the sun at that time, on that day at that place.

So the question is, how does where you are affect what you do?

Let's start at the beginning...

2008-03-18T17:36:00.000Z

My company develops software to help museums and libraries provide access and interpretation for their collections. Turning the Pages is one of the things we've developed.

I get to work with an unreasonable number of fascinating people, whether that's down in the stacks at the Royal Society or in the corridors of Microsoft in Redmond.

This blog is to be a way of highlighting some of the great things I come across and maybe even spark some discussion about how we might best use emerging technologies to help people understand their past, and also, thereby, their present.

So expect to see some technical stuff, some collections stuff, some comment on events and people and a little idle speculation.

Just don't expect me to post every day. I do have a day job to be getting on with...