AssortedStuff

PBS’s Media Shift blog discusses that question, which has been come very complicated in the age of digital books.

Analog books are simple: pay your money and ownership transfers to you.

More importantly, you have the right to resell the copy (love used bookstores!), give it to someone, loan it (the founding principle of libraries), or even rent it (if you can find willing customers).

It’s all part of copyright law and even has a name: the first sale doctrine.

The ruling in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus was subsequently codified in what is now Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act, which states that “the owner of a particular copy or phono record lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phono record.”

You would think the same principal would apply to digital copies of the same materials.

However, are you the owner of that digital copy of Stephen King or are you leasing the right to use it from the publisher?

Section 109(a) doesn’t define the seemingly simple term “owner” in this context and big publishers see in that an opportunity to apply the concept of pay-per-view (or per read in this case) if they can get away with it.

When software, music, and other media people think they own is added to the mix, the result is a giant copyright mess now being hashed out in the legal system.

As much as I like the iPad, Kindle and similar digital readers, this issue of not being able to easily share a book is the primary reason why I’m reluctant to pay for ebooks from Amazon, Apple and others, and canceled my Audible audiobook account several years back.

It’s also why schools and libraries, not to mention anyone who likes being able to pass along a good read (listen?) to friends and family, need to look very carefully at what they’re actually getting for their money when they decide to go digital.

copyright, digital books, fair use, media

Watch this.

Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.

Except that it’s not just television anymore.

The same addictive, demanding nature could easily be ascribed to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Hulu, email, RSS, IM, FourSquare, mobile apps, or any of the exploding numbers of other sources demanding our attention.

Except that we no longer need to go over there to be distracted.

We carry it with us.

The challenge, of course, is finding the valuable little bits in that massive flow of crap.

Thanks to Clairvoy for the link (and for constantly giving me hell :-).

distraction, filtering, funny, media, television

On last week’s edition of Spark, my new favorite podcast, the topic was games and the first segment was a very interesting discussion with Jesse Schell, a game designer who also teaches at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

His thesis is that, while games of one kind or another have always been with us, the ability to store and access huge quantities of data in the 21st century is bringing about the “gamification” of life.

The whole discussion is worth listening to (an extended version is also on the show site) but there were two pieces that stood out for me.

First, is Schell’s view of school as gaming.

People are already talking about how to reorganize [using gaming techniques] school because school is already a kind of a game. You go they have tasks, you do the tasks, you get a score. In games we have a leader board. In school you call it an honor roll. So school is already a kind of a game.

People are talking about how can we design that better. How can we track what you’re doing a little better, give you more instant feedback?

He uses a student doing math problems for homework as an example of where gaming systems might be used to give kids feedback on their work, although I would hope we could come up with better ways to apply these concepts.

That view of education is somewhat disconcerting, but Schell’s thoughts on how advertisers will use gaming techniques are rather scary.

His thesis seems to be that, when marketers begin to understand all this, it will be almost impossible to get away from someone trying to sell you something.

Everything is going to be trying to distract you constantly and it’s going to have much more ability to distract you because these things are going to know where you are, what you’re doing, and where you’re going.

The advertisers are just now starting to wake up to the power of games. I think for the 20th century the dominant means of building one’s brands and capturing a person’s imagination had to do with graphic arts. It had to do with logo design and designing brilliant commercials and beautiful ads in magazines.

I think in the 21st century it’s going to be much more about game design. It’s going to be much more about how can I incentivize you to focus on my product, pay attention to my product, tell your friends about my product, think about my product all the time. Game design is going to make that very easy to do.

The host noted, quite correctly, that it sounded like advertisers were going to have us all in digital versions of a Skinner box, bombarding us with stimuli to reward us for the correct behavior.

Of course, there’s a right way and wrong way to apply the gaming concepts Schell is working on, in education, marketing, or any other area of life.

I suspect we’ll have to suffer through a whole lot of the wrong approach before we get to the right ones.

We should also be including a big dose of media awareness in every student’s curriculum from the first day they enter school.

Image: Giant Chess Board in Lindenhof, Zurich by szeke, used under a Creative Commons license.

advertising, education, gaming, media, spark

When Amazon released the Kindle a couple of years ago, it generated lots of talk about it (or something like it) being the future of educational printed materials.

Since then, some colleges have been testing the use of the Kindle DX, the larger, more book-sized version, to replace analog textbooks for some of their classes.

One of those schools, Princeton, just released some data about their pilot and most of those participating found the results to be somewhat disappointing.

But in spite of the cost savings, some students and professors said they found the technology limiting.

The Kindle, a handheld, electronic device manufactured by amazon.com, allows users to store, read, highlight and annotate books and other documents using its display screen.

Notice what’s missing from that list? There’s no way for students and faculty to edit or add to the content on their devices so that other members of the community can see it.

In other words, there’s nothing new about these textbooks other than the format by which the information is delivered. Same old material, still controlled by the publisher, with no options for students to interact with it.

Of course, based on the comments of some of the teachers involved, interactivity really wasn’t an issue anyway.

Wilson School professor Stan Katz, who taught WWS 325 this fall, said he also found the device ill-suited for his course.

“I found it disappointing for use in class because I emphasize close work with the text, and that ideally requires students to mark up the text quite a bit,” Katz said. “Though it doesn’t prevent highlighting, the annotation function is difficult to use, and the keyboard is very small,” he added.

But Wilson School professor Daniel Kurtzer, who taught WWS 555A, said he found the Kindle conducive to the format of his class because it consisted of “very traditional reading.”

And likely, very traditional teaching.

However, to me the how digital books are being used at Princeton wasn’t the worst part of this story.

Students in WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, who were given Kindles, printed an average of 762 pages, compared to the roughly 1,373 pages printed in past years, a 55 percent difference in paper use.

Kindle owners in WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East printed an average of 962 pages, while those without the e-readers printed an average of 1,826 pages, a 53 percent difference.

Why is anyone with an electronic book printing pages from their digital materials at all?

Maybe a few sheets, but 962 pages is likely very close to the size of the original analog college textbook those students used to pay a small fortune for (and are probably still paying for the Kindle version).

So anyway, the bottom line in all this is that teachers and students at Princeton are using a portable, connected digital device in almost exactly the same way they used the also-portable, unconnected analog versions it replaced.

Why bother?

college, kindle, media, textbooks

Evidentially, there’s a big fight going on at the New York Times over how much to charge for the new digital edition being prepared to launch when the iPad goes on sale next month.

The people currently in charge of the paper version want to charge $20 – $30 a month.

Why so much? Because they’re said to be afraid people will cancel the print paper if they can get the same thing on their iPad. Nevermind that iPad distribution comes with none of the paper or delivery costs associated with print, or that there’s already a free electronic edition available to subscribers who cancel.

On the other side are the folks running the Times’ online edition who are pushing a price of $10 a month, still much higher than the current web site (free), which owners plan to pull behind a pay wall in 2011 regardless of the iPad.

Realistically, anyone at the Times who believes they can persuade a meaningful number of subscribers (that is, enough to save the business) to give them $30 a month for a digital version of their paper is crazy.

I’m not sure they’ll be able to find enough readers, especially outside the New York metro area, willing to pay $10.

The bottom line is that the owners of the Times (and other distributors of data) are selling a package of not-particularly-unique information to which they attach their particular brand.

And they need to seriously consider if that package is one that consumers will pay to have delivered, digitally or otherwise, on a regular schedule.

So, what would you pay for regular access to a brand-name digital information package (aka newspapers and magazines)?

I suspect the owners of those packages have a much higher opinion of their brands than do most of the people formerly known as customers.

brand name, ipad, media, new york times, newspapers

If you own a product, do you then have the right to give or sell it to someone else? Millions of yard sales every year would seem to say “yes”.

And when it comes to intellectual property-based items (books, for example), the Supreme Court has even given the concept a name: the first sale doctrine.

However, at least one software publisher believes that piece of legality does not apply to their products. That they have the power to restrict an owner’s right to resell them.

Autodesk has appealed, arguing that so long as its license agreements recite the right magic words, it can strip purchasers of any ownership in the CD-ROMs on which software is delivered. If that’s right, then not only don’t you own the software you buy, but any copyright owner can simply recite the magic words and effectively outlaw libraries, used bookstores, and DVD rentals, among other things.

Ah, the magic of the end-user license agreement (EULA) which we’ve all had the pleasure of reading* during a long pause in the software install process. Right? :-)

Anyway, the EFF, which just celebrated their 20th anniversary, is involved in this and many other battles over consumer rights when it comes to digital property.

Unfortunately, most media companies these days, including software publishers, want to move away from the concept of “ownership” when you pay money for their products, whether it’s a physical package or digital download.

An idea that is only reinforced by files locked up with DRM, such as the books you buy for reading on a Kindle (something I hope is missing from Apple’s iPad book reader).

BTW, if you can afford it, contribute a few dollars to the EFF to help them continue defending our rights to own and control the media we pay for, no matter the format.

* I’ve read a few EULAs over the years, mostly so I can help people understand their fair use rights (the one that used to come with the Microsoft Office clip art collection was rather interesting). While I can’t tell you exactly what the EULAs say for any of the commercial software on my current MacBook, I’m pretty sure most read similar to Autodesk’s.

copyright, eff, eula, media, rights

From PHD Comics, an excellent explanation of why the K12 math curriculum should include annual healthy doses of basic statistics.

And it’s simple enough for even those back-to-basics types who believe we can’t possibly teach math concepts until we’ve drilled any possible interest in mathematics right out of the kids.

Actually, any adult claiming to be a “journalist” should be required to display proof they’ve taken a basic stat course.

fun stuff, media, news, statistics

Have you heard… print media is dead?

Or at least sales of the dead tree editions of newspapers and magazine are in an downward spiral, headed to their eventual demise.

The owners of those publications are now struggling to find some way to not only survive but also make money in amounts, they hope, equal to or greater than the huge pots they earned only a few years ago.

Like before RSS, and CraigsList, and YouTube, and blogs, and all the other sites that offer right now the same information as their analog versions will deliver tomorrow morning, later this week, or next month.

And before a new generation was taught (by many of those same publications) that information presented on the web was supposed to be free.

Recently, two large publishers, Conde Nast and Time Warner have been showing off their plans for recreating their publications for the tablet devices that all the smart analysts say are coming any day now*.

Another group (including Conde Nast) has announced their intention to create a “Hulu for magazines” that would produce a “fully featured kind of immersive e-reading application”.

While that press release was very vague about what “Hulu for magazines” might look like, Time Warner’s demo version of Sports Illustrated is interesting, mixing the traditional magazine layout with video, audio and interactive elements.

I suspect that approach might work for a publication like Sports Illustrated, but I wonder if it will for more general publications like our local newspaper, the Washington Post.

Although we subscribe to the Post, more often than not I find myself scanning through my aggregator over breakfast instead of reading the paper.

That program does a better job (but certainly not perfect) of organizing the articles in which I’m interested than the traditional fixed-in-concrete format used by most general news publications.

A tablet version would need to do a better job of anticipating what I might want or need to see and pull it together, from all over the web, regardless of the source, and not just from those stories deemed worthy by the Post’s editors.

That same intelligent software would also be exactly what we would need in a digital learning device.

But please don’t call that a “textbook”, a term that implies the same old content and format as the paper-based versions we use now.

Which is the last thing we should want in any educational version of this mythical multimedia tablet.

* In my memory, Apple’s tablet has been coming every six months for at least the last five years :-)

media, newspapers, tablet, textbooks

When it comes to having absolute control over the content they sell, big media companies don’t give up easily.

Or more accurately control over the content they want you pay for every time you watch it.

You may remember that at the end of last year, the FCC declined to give a small group of Hollywood studios the ability to turn off the video inputs that over 20 million high definition televisions rely on. Almost a year later, the MPAA is back, threatening not make content available, responding to year-old arguments while trying to pretend 2009 never happened, and making a lot of noise without saying anything new.

Fortunately, groups like Public Knowledge and the EFF are working hard to block the efforts of the MPAA and others who want laws mandating switches in your TV, DVD player, computer, DVR or future devices that would allow them to determine what you can and cannot do with the media you’ve already paid for.

Which reminds me, I still haven’t put Handbrake on my new machine. Get it while it still works. :-)

The graphic comes from Wikipedia and is here because reading about this issue always seems to trigger the opening narration from the 60′s TV series The Outer Limits (“There is nothing wrong with your television set…”) in my warped little mind.

eff, media, mpaa, public knowledge

An article in the most recent issue of Scholastic Administrator asks that question.

The short answer is no. At least not that particular device.

Certainly highly portable, connected devices are making their way into the classroom, somewhat slowly since most are smuggled in by way of student pockets and backpack.

And, hopefully, they will be one of the catalysts that will force schools to alter their teacher-as-giver-of-knowledge approach to education.

However, the big problem with the Kindle being that device is the way it’s built around a “business model” rather than an educational one, namely the one-way model of the current publishing industry: we print, you buy.

For the most part, placing content on the device is controlled by the publishers, complete with DRM to “protect” their files. Users cannot excerpt or edit the material, and forget about loaning, giving, or selling a file to someone else.

I know it’s become much simpler to put text and pdf files on the Kindle but that’s not enough for a unit that’s supposed to change education.

The devices that will truly change education will be those that make it easy to access information from anywhere at any time, combined with a wealth of open source materials that can be used and modified by anyone, student or teacher.

Devices that make it seamless to work with more than text – audio, video, interactive graphics, access to learning communities – anything that can be used to understand, clarify, revise and build on the knowledge available.

Maybe the Kindle is a step in the right direction (I’m not convinced it is) but the writer of this article is far more optimistic about Amazon’s digital reader than he should be.

education, kindle, media, portable computing, publishing