EnWords News Roundup (11-24-2008)

A collection of news about words in their various forms.

• Free Recipes as Cookbook Sales Mechanism Will Schwalbe, former EIC at Hyperion, has started a food site called Cookstr that gives away recipes from top-name and lesser-known but solid cookbook authors as a way to get people to buy copies. (NYT)


• Random House to Digitize Books Random House will make thousands of additional titles available in e-book form.(AP)


• Writing the Unwritable in the U.K. Britain has much stricter (or looser, depending on your viewpoint) libel laws than in the US, as well as other impediments to freely publishing information. But journalists have developed all sorts of ways to report on that which could get them in legal hot water. (NYT)


• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Stops Buying - For Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has told its editors that it has “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts” in trade and reference. They can't say when the ban will end. Although claiming that the move is about "doing things smarter" than "the end of literature," note that not buying now means not having a selection of new titles in 12 to 18 months. Either the house has a massive backlog, or things are worse than management wants to admit. (Publishers Weekly)


• Obama and New Book Directions A Guardian blogger suggests that Obama's election will open the book industry to many new types of titles as well as creating a market for some backlist entries. (Guardian)


• US Branch of Manga Publisher to Close The U.S. branch of Broccoli International, a Japan-based manga, anime, game, and merchandise publisher, will close. Although probably few readers of this blog are interested in manga and anime, it's something to note. Graphic novels have become mainstream business and the same approach to story telling has been moving into the non-fiction world. This might be a very early indicator of changing tastes of younger generations. (PW)


• EU Book Digitization Project The European Union has launched Europeana, a plan to scan and make available online "millions of books, artworks, manuscripts, maps, objects and films from the most important libraries, museums and archives, and provide them free to download from one website." It will also include video and audio of interest. Having paid attention to the suit against Google, the EU is focusing on works in the public domain. The site is currently down because there was such overwhelming interest that the traffic crashed the servers. (Guardian)

NYT to Open API?

NYT is the New York Times and API, if you don't know the acronym, stands for application programming interface, or a series of tools that programmers can use to hook their own software into an already-existing pacakage. What makes this combination of six letters total is that it could spell a revolution in online media delivery. According to a story on ReadWriteWeb, if this rumor is true, it would make the entire online version of the paper a tool just waiting to be included in so-called mashups, or the Web applications that hook into existing services to provide something more than either party could deliver on its own:

In addition to the API, New York Times CTO Marc Frons told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site. Following that, the paper plans to offer developer keys to the API allowing programmers to more easily mash up the paper's structured content -- reviews, event listings, recipes, etc. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. "How far we don't know."

The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months.

For example, you might go to a site, click on two points on a map, and get every story that includes the names of both locations, or clicking on a city might bring up all restaurants that have had their recipes printed by the Times. In a way, this takes a stroll from the traditional job of newspapers. Papers did not focus on simply delivering facts, but arranging them in the context of telling a story. When the data is all open, do the stories become less important?

Fifteen Seconds of Fame and Fleeting Audiences

I caught myself doing something that makes me nuts when it's done to me - the fifteen second reading indulgence. I had followed a link to a column that former litigator Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon.com. The topic, mentioned in an email news list, that caught my attention was a critique of a reporter's coverage of John McCain, but I accidentally stumbled onto an earlier post about the unintended consequential results of hate speech laws. The topic caught my attention - I think that there are probably enough laws to cover pretty much anything that one person might do to another, and that legislating intent and thought is both dangerous and more than a little useless.

I finished reading, nodded to myself, and then was ready to head off elsewhere and suddenly knew that even though I just read two pieces back-to-back from the same author that seemed solid, I had no intention of checking back in the future for further posts. There is something more than a little peculiar about how many of us approach the world as readers, these days. We see something of value, but it is as though these items appear out of nowhere, have no connection to any one person, and certainly could not be evidence that more of the same might be found there. It's as though much of humanity had become thoughtless intellectual cattle, roaming about, grazing here and there, but never drawing any conclusions as to the best places to munch based on experience.

I'm sure people do bookmark spots, I do at times, but perhaps there is just too much out there and trying to keep up with it all has become more burden than freedom. Or maybe there is just so much out there that some of us are sitting tightly in a pool of serendipity, figuring that the interesting things will show up eventually. But I'm wondering how much of value I miss because I don't follow up - even for the few sites where I have a paid subscription.

No Web 2.0

You may have heard the term Web 2.0, which is supposed to be the next incarnation of applications that do ... oh ... something or other with ... uh ... communities and ... mm ... interactive whatchamacallits. I think. Confused? Join the club. Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder, had an interesting post on his blog about how Web 2.0 originated as the name of a technical conference, and that people had been moving toward an understanding of what exactly the Web is. So there isn't really a Web 2.0, just a web. Unfortunately, those looking to make money don't always leave well enough alone:

Web 2.0 has been picked up as a term by the entrepreneurial community and its corollaries in venture capital, the press, analysts, large media and Internet companies, and Wall Street to describe a theoretical new category of startup companies.

Reminds me of when everything was an ERP system ... uh ... supply chain optimization system ... ohhh ... [dancing around here as though in dire need of a toilet] ... marketplace ... errr ... CRM ...

Sometimes you have to forget coming up with new terminology and just do something.

New Yorker: Print or Web, Still a Slam

This week's New Yorker has a Shouts & Murmurs piece by Larry Doyle, a former writer for The Simpsons, called Share Our Joy. Read the print version and you see a number of words and phrases underlined. At the end of the piece is a suggestion to go to www.newyorker.com to further follow the story. Go to the site and you see the story along with links - those underlined sections.

This seems like an entirely silly way to bring print and the web together. The true extent of the satire of a young and pretentious couple, obviously with too much available money for any good to come of it, doesn't become apparent until you start following some of the links. Next, the reader basically has to reread the piece to put the links into context, and many readers of the print version aren't going to take the trouble.

Separately, some of the humor felt stereotyped. For example, there's mention of a pilot who takes people from an airport to an island on their way to a wedding ceremony who has to be checked to be sure he's sober. Can you imagine that sort of image being used in relation to Ireland? Canada? Germany? Of course not. Obviously in such "civilized" places one wouldn't need to check if the pilot was drunk. And a remark about "the whole child-slavery thing" as a reason to leave the kids at home? There actually is a link to www.antislavery.org and the reports on Latin America, but then the US has certainly had a number of cases recently hitting the courts of illegal immigrants being kept as slave labor. A reference to a slightly alcoholic drink called chicha has a link to an explanation of how this was made from a site called AncientWorlds. Heaven forbid that the author use a link to a more modern view, just as the methods of producing food and drink changed in Europe over the period of, oh, a thousand years or more.

Humor requires an appreciation of its intellectual milieu. If you have to depend on people doing background reading to see why what you write is funny, it's the hypertext equivalent of explaining a joke. The laugh won't be coming, and left is a colonial attitude of watching the amusing savages. Compound that with the assumption that what is properly designed for the web should work in print, and I think the piece is an interesting experiment that thoroughly failed.