Author: griffey

Jason Griffey was most recently the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he worked to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise was useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of Library IT and a tenured professor at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently a chapter in Library 2035 - Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries by Rowman & Littlefield. His latest full-length work Standards - Essential Knowledge, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, was published by MIT Press in March 2025.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Categories
Personal presentation

I could go to Australia

I could do these dishes I could try
To do these dishes
I could decide to do these dishes
Time to decide

or i could go to Australia
And carry a bowie knife
and wear my hair like Hepburn parted on the side
and learn card tricks and physics and buy
everyone drinks and take boxing and try
eating things only with chopsticks and finally
be like a person I think you might like

I could do these dishes
I could try to do these dishes.
I could decide to do these dishes
I should decide to do these dishes
Time to DECIDE….

Fuck it
I’m gonna go to Australia

— Australia, by Amanda Fucking Palmer

I am completely thrilled to be able to announce that in February of 2012, I’ll be doing one of the keynotes for the Victorian Association for Library Automation (now more formally called VALA – Libraries, Technology and the Future Inc.) 2012 Conference. While “Victorian Association for Library Automation” sounds a bit like a group of steampunk library cosplayers, it is actually an incredibly forward-thinking organization that helps foster and understand the use of technology in libraries and other information professions.

So come February 6-9, 2012, I’ll be in Melbourne, Australia for the VALA 2012 conference. It will be my first time visiting that particular continent, and I can’t wait to meet with all the great Australian, New Zealand, and other librarians that will be attending.

Categories
Books Media Personal Technology

Next writing project

I decided that the only thing worse than a writing project is a writing project without a deadline…so here’s me self-imposing a deadline via public announcement. For the last month, I’ve been working on revising my Library Technology Report from April of 2010, Gadgets & Gizmos: Personal Electronics and the Library.

In April of this year, publication rights for the text reverted to me. Rather than just re-releasing it as is, I wanted to update it with more information about each of the Gizmos discussed in the original text. In addition, I’m adding a chapter related to to the iPad and tablet computing…believe it or not, when I delivered the text to TechSource for publication, the iPad hadn’t been released. So it’s pretty clear that any text about personal electronics has to take the new tablet space into account.

Here’s the interesting bit…whatever this becomes, it’s not going to be published by a “traditional” publisher. I’m still working on the specific details, but you can bet that it will be available as widely as I can possibly make it. As long as I can get the look/feel right for every eBook store, I will be making sure that it’s on the Amazon eBook store, the Apple iBook store, the B&N store, etc. I’m also going to be searching for a print on demand option for libraries that wish to have a print copy. I will also be making it available for free, under a Creative Commons license, through my website…although I’m also going to try to find an interesting way to make that happen.

To be fair to TechSource, I’m already under contract for a Gadgets & Gizmos 2.0, to be delivered and printed in 2012…so this is going to be Gadgets & Gizmos 1.5, in a sense. So in 2012, there will be an updated version from ALA, but in Summer 2011, there will be an update from me, directly. I get to test the waters of electronic self-publishing and hopefully learn a lot along the way. Stay tuned for more information, coming soon.

Categories
Books Media

Kindle and ePub

Head over to Library Renewal to see what I think about the recent news that Amazon may be turning on ePub support on the Kindle. It should tell you something that the original title of the post was “ePub don’t mean shit”.

Categories
Books Media Personal

ePub don’t mean shit

So the twitterverse exploded a bit ago with the report that Amazon had talked to publishers about submitting ePubs instead of the traditional mobi/AZW format to the Amazon eBook store. This quickly became “OMFG AMAZON IS GOING TO ALLOW EPUBS ON THE KINDLE”. Let’s back up here just a second, and take a closer look at what the report actually says:

It seems many publishers have been told by the company that in the near-future, they should be submitting their books to Amazon in EPUB format and not exclusively MOBI. They also went on to let us know that Amazon was indeed planning something BIG and that soon the Kindle ereader will have the full capability to read ePub books.

Is this possible? Sure…all it would take is a quick software patch and every Kindle in the land could read ePub files. The questions we should be asking, though, are: What does it mean for patrons and for libraries? Why would Amazon do this?

The second question is easier to answer: If true, Amazon is almost certainly positioning themselves for the release of their Android Tablet. There may be good reasons to move to ePub as a result of that, including support for much more complicated media types. The article linked above says:

MOBI/AZW is known to have similarities with the ePub data structure and has most of the code embedded into its format

which is not quite true…both are markup languages, but ePub is a much more modern filetype, and is a combination of open standards (XHMTL for content, XML for structured metadata and such). If Amazon does have a tablet up their sleeve, moving to ePub could be necessary for those plans.

The first question is harder, but the answer is, almost certainly that ePub don’t mean shit to libraries or to patrons. Why? Our good friend DRM. It is extraordinarily unlikely that Amazon will replace their own DRM with that used by the library industry (and by others in the eBook world), Adobe Digital Editions. If you aren’t familiar with the various DRM used in the industry, I’ll refer you to my previous post on eBooks, Filetype, and DRM.

So what this means is that while the Kindle might get ePub abilities, it almost certainly won’t get Adobe DRM capabilities. There is no chance that Amazon is going to give people the ability to purchase books from Barnes & Noble and load them onto their Kindle…which is what it would mean if they did turn on Adobe DRM compatibility. So you still won’t be able to load non-Amazon DRM’d ePubs.

Given an ePub-ification update to the Kindle, you should be able to load and read ePubs without DRM. This is almost completely meaningless, because if you had a collection of non-DRM ePubs you wanted on your Kindle, you could just use Calibre to convert and load them.

So for libraries & patrons, the ability for the Kindle to use ePub is a non-issue. It doesn’t give us any ability that we don’t already have. The only advantage here is to Amazon, and only if they are positioning themselves for a new device that needs ePub. Let’s not get too excited about this.

Categories
Library Issues presentation

5 days, 3 states

In the next 5 days, I’m speaking for two different state conferences that someone out there in bloglandia might be interested in.

First, I’m heading out to Minneapolis, MN for Academic & Research Library Day. I’ll be presenting a keynote tomorrow morning entitled The Everywhere Patron, where I’ll be talking about the expectations of patrons vis a vis personal electronics and services. I’m really excited about the talk…if you’re going to be at ARLD please say hello!

After that, I head over to Stamford, CT for the Connecticut Library Association conference. There, I’ll be doing a presentation on eBooks, both in terms of content, containers, and the challenges for libraries during the transition to digital texts.

If you are at either presentation, come introduce yourself and say hi!

Categories
Books Digital Culture Library Renewal Media

Smart discussion on Kindle/Overdrive announcement

There’s been a ton of discussion around the web about the Kindle/Overdrive library deal over the last week, but this thread over at Librarything is full of some real gems. If you haven’t read it, go there and take a look.

Amazon to Launch Library Lending for Kindle Books

Categories
Books Gadgets Library Issues Library Renewal Media

Kindle Library Lending

The online library world is abuzz today with the announcement of Kindle Library Lending, which promises to finally bring the ability for libraries to check ebooks out to patron’s Kindle (or Kindle software-driven devices). The announcement itself is full of promise and light on details, including such gems as:

Customers will be able to check out a Kindle book from their local library and start reading on any Kindle device or free Kindle app for Android, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone. If a Kindle book is checked out again or that book is purchased from Amazon, all of a customer’s annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.

Translation: Amazon will be maintaining notes and details of the book you read on their servers, and providing a way to purchase said book as a part of the library experience.

Amazon is working with OverDrive, the leading provider of digital content solutions for over 11,000 public and educational libraries in the United States, to bring a seamless library borrowing experience to Kindle customers. “We are excited to be working with Amazon to offer Kindle Library Lending to the millions of customers who read on Kindle and Kindle apps,” said Steve Potash, CEO, OverDrive. “We hear librarians and patrons rave about Kindle, so we are thrilled that we can be part of bringing library books to the unparalleled experience of reading on Kindle.”

This appears to mean that Overdrive will be the library-facing partner in this enterprise, and I’m guessing that the checkout experience and user interface will be Overdrive driven. This is (IMNSHO) a disappointment, as I’d much rather deal with Amazon directly (even though I’m sure they would not rather deal with libraries…thus, Overdrive).

Bobbi Newman, as always, has a thoughtful post up about this, and asks a couple of questions for which I’m going to guess the answers. She asks:

Will libraries be forced to add a third ebook format (which will only spread their already thin money thinner?)

If yes

  • Will I be allowed to borrow library ebooks in epub and pdf format on my Kindle?
  • Will owners of other devices (such as the Nook or Sony) be allowed to read Kindle books on their device? (the press release reads as “no”)

I would find it VERY hard to believe that Amazon is going to convert all of their proprietary files into a new format just for libraries…so yes, I believe strongly that there will be yet another format. I also find it hard to believe that Amazon will suddenly decide to embrace Adobe DRM…which means that there is little chance that library books via Overdrive or another vendor that are in the epub or pdf format will start working on the Kindle.

As to the last question…I believe very strongly that if Barnes & Noble and Sony decided to allow Amazon DRM/filetypes on the nook or Sony reader, Amazon would be thrilled to provide them with books. But that’s probably not going to happen either. For a reminder of all the intricacies of the filetype/DRM issues here, see my post on eBook Filetypes and DRM.

I have requests out currently for answers from Overdrive and Amazon on the following questions…if either of them get back to me, I’ll make sure to post it here.

Will the Kindle Library Lending functionality require the use of the Overdrive Media Center Console?

Will the functionality require a “buy this book” link in the Overdrive catalog?

Will the KLL functionality require the library patron to be physically in the library, or authenticated via IP address, or will they be able to access this remotely? Or some combination of the two?

The press release mentions that Whispersync will be enabled to remember page numbers, which implies that patrons will be able to load Kindle books that they check out onto multiple devices…what will the mechanism for this be? If I check out a book, and then load it onto my Kindle, my Kindle DX, my iPod Touch, and my iPad, will that count as 4 checkouts, or one?

Currently, the Overdrive ebook model works with Adobe Digital Editions and ePub…I am assuming that the Kindle books will remain in the standard .azw format, and use Amazon DRM. Can you confirm this assumption? If so, can you describe the process by which patrons will check out a book using this service?

What will the limitations on the KLL catalog be? How does it compare to the overall Kindle ebook catalog?

Will publishers be able to opt-out of allowing Library lending in the same way that they can currently opt-out of other features of the Kindle?

What is Amazon doing to ensure the privacy/confidentiality of library patrons?

UPDATE

Overdrive finally posted to their blog about the issue, and I just received a callback from Overdrive marketing. While they weren’t able to comment a large number of things, I did get confirmations on a few details. On the Overdrive blog post, they say:

A user will be able to browse for titles on any desktop or mobile operating system, check out a title with a library card, and then select Kindle as the delivery destination.

The exact quote that I got from the Overdrive marketing department was that the books would be “deliverable to Kindle” and that did include any Kindle and Kindle app.

The blog post also says:

Your existing collection of downloadable eBooks will be available to Kindle customers. As you add new eBooks to your collection, those titles will also be available in Kindle format for lending to Kindle and Kindle reading apps. Your library will not need to purchase any additional units to have Kindle compatibility. This will work for your existing copies and units.

When asked about the potential catalog non-overlap (what happens when a book available via Overdrive isn’t available on Amazon), the answer from Overdrive was that they hadn’t looked fully at the catalog overlap yet. But it sounds like the Kindle compatibility is simply going to be there for your existing books as an additional option…well done!

MASSIVE SPECULATION AHEAD:It sounds to me like Overdrive will be providing the ability to checkout a book and click “deliver to Kindle”, much in the same way that Amazon currently does when you purchase a book. If I’d been thinking for half a second, I’d have realized that’s the ONLY way they can do it and support Kindle Apps. None of the Kindle apps that I’m aware of allows for any sort of side-loading of content…all the content that is in them can ONLY come from Amazon directly. CORRECTION: Kindle App for iOS does allow side-loading via emailed or web-linked files of the appropriate filetype (mobi, azw)…but no tethered side-loading. You can obviously plug your Kindle directly into your computer and throw a random PDF on it, but you can’t do that with Kindle Apps. They have to deliver these to you via Whispernet…there’s no other choice.

Back to the blog post!

The Kindle eBook titles borrowed from a library will carry the same rules and policies as all our other eBooks.

One answer that I’d really like from Overdrive is relating to this piece. On the phone call, I asked if a publisher limited the number of times that a book could be downloaded (which some do), whether this would effect the number of devices that I could have said book delivered to. The official statement was that they didn’t have that information right now, but that whatever the solution it would “support publisher’s existing models”.

Last bit of news for now: I tried to get Overdrive to give me anything on a timeframe, and they weren’t even willing to promise/commit to a quarter of the year…all they would say was “in 2011”. So we could have some time to wait for this.

Categories
Personal

The Agiat Forum

While only a few hours old, I’m betting that the newly-created Agiat Forum blog is going to be one worth keeping an eye on in libraryland.

Categories
Personal

Librarianship, and Farming vs Mining

The opening sentence for Will Shipley’s post “Success, and Farming vs Mining” couldn’t be any better:

Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What are you going to do, mine or farm?

The point of Shipley’s post is to use the metaphor of Farming (slow, steady, cared-for growth managed over time) against Mining (fast, sudden economic change without concern for long term outcomes) to explain businesses. There’s are software/web startups that fall into both camps, and interesting discussions to be had about which is “best”, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

What I want to do is torture the metaphor a bit more for yet another purpose. I like the model as a way to understand web startups, but I love it for understanding change management in libraries, and I really love it as a metaphor for understanding myself.

Libraries seem to me to clearly be Farms. Carefully managed, curated, fertilized and watered over years…and this extends, somewhat, to the general management methodology in libraries, and it absolutely extends to our larger organizations like the ALA.

What I’ve realized in thinking about this for a bit is that I’m not a farmer. I’m a miner. You can look at what I’ve done in my short career as a librarian inside of LITA and ALA with BIGWIG, LITABlog, my presentations, my writing…just about everything I’ve done, frankly, was a form of mining. My strength, if I have one, is having an insight, prototyping it, briefly explaining why it’s a better methodology than prior methods, and then moving to the next thing. That’s mining. I’ve never been interested in the long-term management of things, doing process evaluation, etc. I just see it, do it, show it to people. If it’s good enough, I hope that people will recognize it and someone else will use it, apply processes to it, etc. But not me.

This extends to a lot of things in my professional life…and over the last 6 months or so I’ve had lots and lots of conversations with people about this very topic, but not in these terms. I’m lucky to have some Farmers (I’m looking at you, @shifted and @kgs) that helped give me insights into that style, and have worked with me to temper my “let’s just cut the top off this mountain and see what’s in there” reflexes.

If you didn’t read the entire Shipley article, two of the last paragraphs in his post really speak to me:

The people who really change the world are farmers. Steve Jobs works constantly on his products, every waking minute of every day. He lives and sleeps and breathes them. He’s obsessive and crazy and kind of scary — but he’s trying to build something. He didn’t just say, “Here’s my idea: smart phone! BAM! Go make it happen. Ima jump in the sauna.” That simply doesn’t work. God is in the details. In the implementation.

The most amazing thing about getting to go to TED was discovering that all the people I admire are farmers. The doctors and DNA-researchers and dancers and chocolate-makers and oceanographers and cosmologists and investors all have one thing in common: they are total nerds. They work on the thing they love literally all the time. You can’t talk to them without talking about their passion.

Someday I hope to be a Farmer. Playing the long-game, and working steadily over time to ensure things get done. But I’ve come to realize that it’s against my nature, and that to do so takes a lot of effort, and a lot of thinking, and frankly a lot of repressing my instincts. So while I am aspirationally into agriculture, what I need and want is to find ways that Mining is useful in my professional life. But like Shipley, the people that I admire are Farmers. And I want to find ways that I can stop strip-mining my ideas, and start planting them a bit more carefully.

Categories
Apple Digital Culture Media Music Technology

Amazon Cloud Drive & Cloud Player

On March 29th, Amazon launched two major new services, both of which seem to speak directly to my post guessing at an Amazon Tablet…as well as being shots across the bow of both Apple and the music industry. The two services are connected, but distinct in capabilities and effects, so let’s look at them separately:

Amazon Cloud Drive

The first is Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon’s answer to other consumer-facing cloud storage similar to Dropbox or Windows SkyDrive. Amazon is giving everyone 5GB of space for free, with the ability to purchase additional storage for $1 per Gigabyte in chunks: 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, or 1000 GB levels are all available. While 5GB free is more than Dropbox’s 2GB, and way less than SkyDrive’s 25Gb, for raw storage in the cloud I still think Dropbox has everything else beat in usability. For Cloud Drive, you have to do all file interactions (uploading/downloading) within your browser, which isn’t as convenient on traditional computers as a locally-mounted drive. There’s no reason that Amazon couldn’t move this direction, however, and release a program that would allow more direct access.

The real killer here isn’t Cloud Drive by itself…it’s the associated Cloud Player and the model that Amazon is using for the connection between the two. Cloud Player is a web-based media player that has access to the files uploaded to your Cloud Drive. That is, if you use your Cloud Drive to hold MP3 or AAC encoded music files, those will be automatically available to Cloud Player, and can be streamed to nearly any browser. Cloud Player has the basic controls that you would expect from a music player, allowing you to view your collections by album, artist, or genre. It also allows you to build or import playlists, shuffle, and repeat songs in the same way that pretty much every music player does.

This means that with Cloud Storage + Cloud Player, I can take my own music, upload it to Amazon, and then listen to it anywhere I have a browser…or on the updated Amazon MP3 for Android app on any Android based phone or tablet. In a brilliant marketing move, Amazon is also letting you automatically cross-load any MP3 that you buy from the Amazon MP3 Store directly to your Cloud Drive…and anything that you buy from them doesn’t count against your storage limits. They are also offering a free upgrade to their 20GB storage level if you just buy any MP3 album from Amazon through the end of 2011. So you can purchase any amount of music from Amazon, and it will all be available for streaming to any computer or directly to your phone if you have an Android handset. For free.

Let’s not forget, this sort of service is exactly what got MP3.com in hot water with the music labels a decade ago (with, admittedly, technical differences). Indeed, Sony has commented to Ars Technica that while they were hopeful they could work with Amazon on a licensing deal that they were “keeping their legal options open.” So it’s almost certain that Amazon will see some form of lawsuit about the service…but my money is on Amazon for this one. They have the pockets that MP3.com didn’t, and have a great case for moving the industry forward if they can pull of a court victory.

This is a huge move by Amazon, and will put the pressure on Apple to respond. There have been rumors about a similar digital-locker server from Apple for years now, and their North Carolina Data Center has been rumored to be a part of Apple gearing up for a cloud-based service since it was announced. Google is also rumored to be getting into this market, with their Google Music service that is reported to be in internal testing now. It’s going to be an interesting year for these services, but Amazon has a compelling vision for Cloud Drive + Cloud Player. I’m excited by it, and really want to get my hands on an Android device so that I can play with the mobile access.