Some connections between (digital) books and music

Just dumping some thoughts and links and connections about books and music in the digital world that I’ve noticed recently.

With the recent UK launch of the Kindle the news outlets were writing and talking a lot about digital books including the usual worries about piracy, DRM and price points (at the moment they seem to be priced similarly to physical books despite no printing or distribution costs). Which is the same set of things that the music industry went through years ago and which has now just about settled down, generally in favour of the consumer.

And I suspect the publishing industry will need to address some of the other problems we’re seeing in digital music - things like unique identifiers, search, content resolution and distribution. Which leads me to some things that all seem to link together somehow.

XSPF is a standard format for describing music playlists but Michael tweeted about the possibility of using it for lists of books - ‘xspf spec “An XSPF playlist describes a sequence of objects to be rendered. Objects might be audio, video, text, playlists or any other media type” erm, book lists?’

Playdar is a music content resolver which has been getting a lot of coverage recently - give it a song name and it will search for it on your hard disk, across all your computers, on your intranet and across music services on the internet. The latest README on Playdar says…

"Depending on the plugins loaded, Playdar could be used to resolve anything.
Here's a fictional example query for an academic essay:
{
   "qid"    : "XXX789",
   "author" : "Jonathan swift",
   "year"   : 1729,
   "title"  : "a modest propsal"
}
... and if you have a resolver plugin that could search for essays and academic
papers, it might respond like this:
{
   "sid"    : "YYY123",
   "qid"    : "XXX789",
   "result" : {
       "author" : "Jonathan Swift",
       "year"   : 1729,
       "title"  : "A Modest Proposal",
       "score"  : 1.00,
       "category"   : "humour",
       "url"    : "http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html"
   }
}
In this example, the resolver matched the query to an essay posted on the web
instead of the local filesystem."

Could we have content resolution for books, essays and academic papers?

And finally, maybe bringing some of these together, there’s the recently announced Internet Archive’s BookServer which is, as I understand it, a federated search architecture for discovering, buying or borrowing digital books. There’s a little more explanation of it in this presentation but not a huge amount of detail yet.

Rural computing and nature's delights

Russell Davies has written a somewhat contrary piece on the urban computing movement and addresses what could be called "rural computing". For that he gets my support and some thoughts.

"I suspect one of the reasons the countryside gets overlooked in all these conversations is that the aesthetics are so disappointing. Certainly the natural stuff's good; landscapes, hedges, skies etc. But as soon as something gets designed it looks like either Poundbury or Hobbiton..."

True, but I think nature's aesthetics are more than just good - the design and engineering of nature is marvellous - and designers, engineers and architects are already using biomimicry and copying the best bits.

And the thing that always gets me is that the countryside is full of delights and beauty; the heron guarding his rapidly evaporating pond in the late summer, rivers glinting in the evening sun, autumn leaves on the ground, unexpected birdsong and glimpses of deer in the morning mist. I think I want a kind of slower, maybe seasonal, noticings for the countryside...

The Plenitude and innovation

I’ve just quickly re-read The Plenitude by Rich Gold while researching something. It’s a lovely little book about the “…dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff ‘the Plenitude’”. But for now here are some dog-eared passages I picked out about creativity and innovation.

On creativity…
p.5 “In this context, creativity is not just making things (factories do that), it’s creating new things, things that have never existed before.” and also p.54 “…I don’t mean that stuff has to be physical. It could be an idea, or a concept, or a string of words.”

On problem solving, engineering and design (try to ignore the “hats”)…
p.25 “The hat of engineering is close related to the hat of design. Both work from need and desire. Both are concerned primarily with the user and the world - the “real world”, as they like to say. Unfortunately, in most companies design is pitted against engineering, a battle that tends to reduce the effectiveness of both. I think this is caused by a misunderstanding by both engineers and management, who see the hat of design as the hat of art. They think that designers work from inner vision and not problem solving.”

Chapter 3, on the seven patterns of innovation…

1. “Necessity is the mother of invention. Find a problem and solve it.”


2. “It’s a thing of genius. I had a vision and just had to do it.”


3. “The Big Kahuna. Scientific deduction of stuff from 1st principles.”


4. “The future exists. We just have to intersect it at the perfect moment.”


5. “Colonization. Find the unowned; package it; sell it back.”


6. “Stuff desires to be better stuff. Humans are how stuff makes more stuff.”


7. “Change the definition. Language and metaphor create/are the world.”

Which includes this on corporate R&D…
p.38 “A company can build too much of an ivory tower. While visions don’t flow directly from problems, they often grow, like a pearl, from an irritating grain of sand.”

On naming and defining things…
p.48 “The seventh pattern, Change the Definition, is the one that designers often invoke when they work on corporate identity construction […] These changes allow their respective companies to innovate in new areas, to develop and create in new ways, to behave differently. In a very real sense it changes the frame of imaginable invention.” and p.49 “The definition of a product (the product genre) determines to a large degree what it can and cannot be. It sets up the frame of expectations, not just for the customer but for the producer as well.”

On how we need to innovate…
p.55 “And since we can’t make what others are making - by law and by the law of the marketplace - it is only through creativity and innovation that we survive.”

And I’ll finish off with a couple of passages that are not so much on these themes, but that I found liked.

On brands and nature…
p.63 “There are differences between the bio-Plenitude and the stuff-Plenitude. As far as I know there is nothing quite like brands in nature.”

And on the fractal nature of stuff…
p.67 “I once asked Hal Varian, the economist, how much stuff is there in one room? “Well, what’s the definition of a piece of stuff?,” he asked. “How about: something that was individually designed, shipped, marketed, and sold,” I replied. “OK,” he said, “then there is no answer, for stuff is fractal.”“

On a final note, there’s a companion autobiographical PDF which is well worth reading alongside the book.

The good craftsman and innovation

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett

I'm just finishing this book on craft and craftsmen by Richard Sennett. It was an interesting read, possibly with a few too many confusing metaphors, but lots of fascinating anecdotes and useful thoughts. So I'm going to blog a dog eared page. Around p.262 the author writes about the 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein and his obsession with perfecting the architecture of his sister's house. At one point he had just about finished it all when he decided the ceiling of the drawing room needed to be raised by an inch. Anyway Sennett uses this as a jumping off point to write about how to manage obsession.



Paraphrased...

• The good craftsman understands the importance of the sketch - that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.


• The good craftsman places positive value on contingency and contraint.


• The good craftsman needs to avoid pursuing a problem relentlessly to the point that it becomes perfectly self-contained.


• The good craftsman avoids perfectionism that can degrade into a self-conscious demonstration - at this point the maker is bent on showing more what he or she can do than what the object does.


• The good craftsman learns when it is time to stop. Further work is likely to degrade.

I liked that. And those five points certainly apply to our prototyping and innovation work on the web at the BBC, indeed I've got some more notes that I need to write up about this sometime. But is what I do a craft? I don't know. And anyway what is it that I do exactly with the internet and technology? Produce, manage, build, innovate, design, code, craft?

Instapaper and reading on the iPhone

I've been finding Instapaper really useful lately for reading longer articles from the web.

Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.
We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.
Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

A one-click bookmarklet adds it to your list and there's an iPhone application for reading the articles. It works for me, giving good clean text for in-depth reading on my iPhone during my daily train commute. It's more like reading a book than a feedreader and I think that mode of reading is valuable. Anyway, some of my recent favourites...

Paul Morley on how a year studying at the Royal Academy of Music changed him
Leviathan or, The Whale | PD Smith
Pitchfork: Poptimist: Poptimist #23 on the charts
3quarksdaily on "DESIRE PATHS: READING, MEMORY AND INSCRIPTION"
The Best Bits » American Scientist - A new technology called compressive sensing slims down data at the source

If you use Instapaper you can subscribe to my starred articles using my username, tristanf.