Infomatters

You can view the video of Canadian officials interviewing a 16 year old and draw your own conclusions. It’s fairly dull viewing and the quality is very mixed. It was supposedly captured by a camera hidden in an air duct. His lawyers have released it now but in this age of data overload, one wonders how more of this type of tape has never found it’s way out.

Imagine you take a book out of a library, a local history piece that outlines how a group of students stood up to a bunch of racists, and when seen reading this book, you are reported to your employer for racial harassment. Couldn’t happen? Try this and this for size. The book is Notre Dame vs the Klan. How the Fighting Irish defeated the Ku Klux Klan, cracking read no doubt for this Jesuit-educated Irish lad and clearly an anti-Klan text to anyone who spends more than a millisecond reading the cover, but really, this is happening on a university campus? Is there more to this than meets the eye? Charges made, charges dropped, now unspecific allegations are hinted. You could not make this stuff up!

Oddly, I was reading Vol 1 of Ian Kershaw’s excellent bio of Hitler while on vacation and come to think of it, some people did give me the evil eye (more than usual), as if to imply that somehow I might be an admirer or worse. I foresee a wonderful new age where you are what you appear to read. So, go click on that link and see what happens — someone is bound to enter your space at just the moment old Adolf’s ugly mug pops up and you will be known for spending your time surfing and worse, you’re a Nazi! Be warned.

Clearly there is no perfect survey, as seen in some recent entries, but the design of and use of voter surveys now has a faculty member at Syracuse in the hot seat. Jeff Stonecash of the Maxwell School has conducted a variety of political polls for decades, using students as project staff, offering polls to all-comers, apparently, at cut-price rates. Following complaints from Democrats that the his recent poll was ‘partisan’, he has now been asked (told?) to stop. Clearly there are issues of appropriateness that might need to be addressed but one might also think that practical experience in conducting a poll that will be viewed publicly by a large audience could be an excellent learning opportunity for the students. Curiously, Stonecash is a registered democrat himself, and says he would have done a poll for the democratic candidate too if asked. In a wonderful example of understatement he is quoted as saying “I think it’s a very legitimate issue to ask whether a professor can do polling for candidates using university resources.” Indeed it is, just as legitimate as asking if conducting polls should be limited to profit-driven companies alone rather than allowing academics intent on exploring the process with students to participate. One wonders is the issue about paying for such a service or someone just not liking the results? The role of the university in society is about to be examined, one hopes, and not found wanting.

According to the latest Random House-commissioned survey of more than 8000 adults:

43% of respondents say that they buy most of their books online. Amazon is becoming the bookshop of choice for such people — not only does it outscore Barnes & Noble online site by 10:1, but independent bookstores are the most common choice of only 9%. Of course, the respondents were all online when they provided that response. Coincidence?

60% of adults spend less than $20 per month on books, and 50% of people buy fewer than 10 books a year. This sounds low but if you multiply it up by the millions of adult book buyers, this is a tidy amount. If you are somewhat cynical, you might wonder why nobody ever says ‘I don’t buy or read books’ — surely there are such people out there and you’d think a survey of 8000 random folk should probably find a few. But then, apparently everyone has a library card too and believes in God. No desirability to these responses surely.

The really interesting data is not so much the claimed spending and type of books purchased (hardcover history books bought at the airport seem remarkably popular with these respondents) but while 23% of respondents claim they spent more time reading this year than last, 65% reported increasing their time spent online (completing surveys, perhaps?) The subject of the book and its author account for over 70% of people being drawn to and subsequently purchasing a book; price and bestseller status were deemed irrelevant by most readers. More than half read only one book at a time but a large proportion (40%) report having 2-4 books on the go at once. Now that’s multi-tasking.

The survey contains a section which asks about ‘bad reading habits’ and people seem to view folding over pages or writing on the text to be serious sins. I can’t understand why if the books are your property but this could just be the survey design (again!). Of course, I admit to using corner folding systematically to reflect the quadrant of the open book I am drawing attention to (works a charm in retrieval, at least for me).

Bad news for the e-readers, it would seem – but you might think the following question was just a little leading: “Do you like to curl up with a printed book or would you be comfortable reading books in other format e.g, online, ebook etc.” — now really, is this a straight question? 82% said they like printed books (does this mean 18% have something against them?). I like to curl up with a printed book for sure, and I am also comfortable reading books in other formats. Can’t I have both?

It’s not easy to make sense of the data this survey yields, there are various combinations of results broken down by political affiliation, investment style, and general belief in the American Dream (I kid you not) but if you are the kind of respondent who provides completely off the wall answers to strangers who push surveys at you, you might recognize yourself in here somewhere. The survey was conducted online so there’s a further complication. 80% of such people say they make up answers that create a positive impression of themselves as intelligent, wealthy, well-mannered citizens. [I am making this last bit up]

A series of short articles on the concept of genre in digital environments has been published in the June issue of the ASIST Bulletin. This is the outgrowth of a successful panel session at the 2007 conference.

NPR carried another segment this morning about the oath required of faculty in the Cal State system. They covered it earlier in the month so that story seems to have some legs. Most telling, Wendy Gonaver spoke up immediately when she did not feel comfortable with the oath. Compare this to certain political hacks who seem to swallow their objections until they get whiff of a book deal. Most frightening — can you really believe in this day and age a faculty member will be removed from a classroom by police for failing to take a loyalty oath? Where’s the AAUP on all this? Where’s the AAUP at all?

I am sitting in Austin TX listening to a web feed of a BBC show talking to people in London about a football match in Moscow that we in the US just watched on ESPN. As background, the mighty Red Devils of Manchester United won the European Champions League tonight in penalty shoot-out. That was the result I wanted (though I hate penalties as a basis for separating teams at the end of a game, nay a season). It’s somewhat unnerving to listen to a radio interviewer in London telling the audience she has to move from where she is due to drunk thugs claiming to be Chelsea supporters who are threatening anyone nearby who is not wearing blue. Hooligans aside, it’s a global village, and the wonders of uniting us in real time across the planet to share the moment is something a middle-aged radio fan such as myself loves to experience, words are sometimes more vivid than images. The phone-in to London is coming in from all over Britain and from Moscow, with emails from around the world, uniting a worldwide audience of football fans. Community is connection.

The process has been slow but e-book numbers show continued healthy growth according to the latest publishing data. Against a backdrop of typical 2.5% annual growth in book sales over the last decade (more than $25 billion of revenue in 2007 according to AAP), the e-book proportion is miniscule (less than $100 million) but growing much faster. This January alone, e-book sales showed record numbers again suggesting a further spurt in 2008 is likely. It’s not easy to get accurate data on these issues but the International Digital Publishing Forum provides wholesale estimates and intriguing data nuggets: did you realize Japanese readers were buying over 300% more books to read on their phones than the previous year or that sales for e-books doubled in Korea in 2007? And you can’t just dismiss this by saying that selling 3 books instead of 1 is a 300% growth — the $ amounts for Korea alone top $140m. Not sure how much of this is due to nifty new readers or the increasing pressure to condense your entire life into your cell phone but all these data provide an interesting counterpoint to the negative assessments of people’s reading habits. I don’t dispute the NEA (well, perhaps a little) but my view is that we are all spending more time reading now than ever before, if by reading you include more than curling up with a book.