Reading Redefined ?

Captive on a five hour flight, shackled in an ever-shrinking airplane seat, I had a chance to catch up on journals and find a few gems hidden within the pile of paper.  One of the best articles I've read recently was Annette Lamb's  Reading Redefined for a Transmedia Universe.    Thanks to ISTE for offering this via the web! 

This article does a great job of explaining where the print world is headed to accommodate our transliterate alien culture.  If you are looking for a good read to fill-in-the-blanks on eReading as well as peek at the future evolution eBooks, take the time to study every paragraph in this article on alien print formats you may encounter. 

I found it especially interesting when she concludes the article with the caveats in a quagmire world of muddling fact, fiction and misinformation.  This is clearly exemplified in the last section with the heading New Opportunities, New Challenges.  Lamb says, "Traditional fiction is a representation that is invented or imaginary and not factual....  But what happens when you're in a fictional augmented or alternative reality world, but working with non-fiction materials? Or, when you're in the real world working with fictional materials?  Or, when authors develop websites that are intended to be misleading or deceptive? ... Spaceheadz by  Jon Sciszka is advertised as a work of fiction...however the book also contains pages with factual information about topics such as sound waves and electromagnetic fields.  To make it ever more complicated, links within the story take the reader to websites with fake content such as the Mrs. Halley's Comets, and Anti-alien Agency...."  

So, in addition to new transliterate formats, we need to pay attention to mixed credibility resources.

For those who haven't heard about transliteracy and the reading revolution-- take the time to think about it.  Reading is no longer two dimensional, chronological, black and white, top-down, left-right.  Reading is now multi-dimensional and multi-mediums.
(See previous blog postings on transliteracy:

Librarydoor: All's a Buzz Over Transliteracy...

Librarydoor: What is transliteracy and are you addressing it?
Librarydoor: More on Transliteracy )

The real message is that librarians need to insure we are preparing our 21st Century students well to discern the credible truth.  We no longer should just teach fact, fiction & opinion-- but rather teach fact, fiction, opinion and misinformation.  My space helmet off to Annette!  

Penguin's Polar Suppression

What did Penguin Publishing Group expect when they announced that they would not be selling to digital distributors? What a polarizing decision.  It's no wonder they backed down a bit.   Do they believe that by denying the digital format that people will marching down to their library to check out the print version?  Digital readers will just choose a different book that is available as digital users are generally married to their device.

Our digital library holds Penguin titles and they include hot best sellers, Pulitzer Prize titles, ChickLit, and more. They are successfully loaned to owners of Nooks, iPads, generic readers, and generic MP3 players, placed on hold, and sometimes sit idle. Most of our titles were purchased 2010, long before the Kindle format accommodations with Overdrive. Overdrive is caught in the middle of this because they are the biggest player--as a purveyor of digital content trying to equip libraries with a great solution for the masses.

We can look at history get a hint of how this will play out. It was only a dozen years ago that we had the same issue with music files, DVD's and the birth of digital piracy. Billions of files were transferred and the software pirates often sold their software to corporations who then developed legitimate products. Teens such as Norwegian Jon (dubbed DVD Jon) became wealthy. He makes a great claim when asked about "piracy":

"As far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with me," he says. "I support fair use, which means that when you actually legally acquire content, you should have the right to use that content on any of your devices, using any application." [Grossman, L. (2010). The Men Who Stole the World. Time, 176(23), 54. ]

As Steven Abrams put it at the NYS SLMS conference this past summer, "reconciliation has to be reached. Publishers have to be able to turn a profit, and users have to be able to use products they purchase. If publishers are circumvented, then where will the money come from to support development and publication?" He warns that if the publishers don’t make money, they will start to embed advertising within the book, and who wants that? Hyperlinks to a setting could lead to a travel advertisement for example.

We are not holding polar opposite views. The producers and the consumers need to both be comfortable with the solution. The music industry has worked this out to everyone’s benefit. It’s hard to believe that the print industry will boycott this need, as they will lose their market share. Someone else will rise to the occasion and will publish books. Where there are crooks, there will be a way to circumvent any law or DRM system that is implemented. Perhaps the current DRM model has flaws, but I still have faith in Americans and believe that most people are not into “stealing” access from the public library. They know they can just wait in line and read the book eventually.