The Obliteration Room, by Yayoi Kusama

Read more about this at This is Colossal.

One of the tweeters I came across thanks to them is seedouglasrun who’s organising a virtual #TwitterRoadRace. It’s a nice example of using Twitter to build a quick community around a one-off event, where participants sign-up online for a 5k race that they run anywhere on Saturday 21 January 2012. It’s similar to some of the virtual/real runs and events that Nike organise but without the taint of corporate backing. Details available at Doug Cassaro’s blog, I run because….

Something I’m keen to see from future race organisers is for them to collect Twitter handles as part of race registration and then live tweet runners’ preliminary results on race day. Would create a great online buzz for the event and give runners something to smile about while they wait for their official time.

Ghosts in the form of gifts provides some lovely examples of using printing to recreate lost objects using images and information.

It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up is a short review of an article by the same name, and touches on the potential tension between people creating objects and the owners of the intellectual property behind the objects.

Someone may have mentioned it at NDF recently. We’re heading towards a world where copying things won’t just be copying a bit of music or some digital tv shows, but you’ll be able to make a 3d model of sculpture, objet d’art, or any kind of object.

And the tools for making them will only get better. Take this Te Papa record of a taha huahua (calabash). There are enough  images of it for someone, anywhere, to recreate it. What IP owners and guardians of cultural taonga will make of it remains to be seen, but right now it’s inevitability is fairly compelling.

For more on re-use, appropriation, creativity, and intellectual property, try this New York Times article, Apropos Appropriation.

It’s an attractive idea, barefoot; it’s natural, surely, that’s how we used to run and it’s how kids still move for a lot of their early years. And the highly structured shoes we currently run in are a recent invention, less than half a century old. (Witness any number of twentieth century runners run in little more than plimsoles, including New Zealand’s own Arthur Lydiard).

But it ain’t all simple. Most adults in the western world have been in shoes for most of their lives. We’re lazy, we sit at desks, we watch too much tv. There’s not much that’s genuinely ‘natural’ about our lives anymore, whatever natural is. What I like perhaps most about barefoot is the idea that running is light, bouncy and graceful, and not at all macho. Makes running a pretty good antidote to most male sport in New Zealand.

Good stuff to think about, especially concepts of being natural compared to our bodies’ ‘natural’ tendency to adaption. For me, I’ll be buying some neutral lightweight shoes soon to replace my current motion-control shoes.

I work on web projects at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.* We run some wonderful websites, sites like Te Ara, NZHistory, Vietnam War, 28th Maori Battalion, and others. They’re popular, especially the first two. Te Ara gets about a quarter of a million visits a month, NZHistory a bit under 200k. That’s not bad for government websites, in fact, it’s pretty bloody good.

There are a couple of really obvious things going on on our sites, and neither are unique. I won’t ask you to guess. The first…

There’s a lot of it. It’s one of the main things our area of the Ministry does. We research, write and edit text, whether for books or the web. Text is something we’ve been doing since our origins in the historical branch of Department of Internal Affairs in the 1930s.

I’’ll come back to the second thing that’s happening soon, but first take a look at this:

It’s the Creative Commons licence from Te Ara. A similar one appears on NZHistory. It’s a complicated statement that attempts to say “you’re welcome to use the text – non-commercially – and some of the images”. Which leads me nicely along to the second thing happening on the site.

Our sites use a ton of images, like the one above from Auckland City Libraries – Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero (Reference: NZ Map 2664), video and audio files, interactives and diagrams. Images are the biggest group. We own some of them, maybe 10%, maybe as little as 5%. The vast majority of them, and this goes for video and audio too, come from organizations like National Library, the Turnbull, Archives NZ, museums, galleries and other organizations up and down the country.

To get a sense of how many images we use from big collecting institutions, try a Google image search of Te Ara for Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland War Memorial Museum, or the Alexander Turnbull Library.

There was a lot of talk at NDF about the need for narrative around organizations’ collections, ways to connect the dots for users, as well as finding new ways to present collections, making interaction more about giving rather than expecting the user to ask for something. And that’s pretty much what we do – our text is the context for all the collection content that we re-use. Our content is context for that content.

Back to that creative commons license and what it’s effectively saying. As a user of our websites you can use our text for non-commercial purposes like research, study, mixing and mashing, etc. If you want to use it commercially, get in touch and we can talk. Of the images, where we own them you can use those as well. Our view is simple: New Zealand taxpayers funded the creation of this content and continue to fund the websites. It was created with the public good in mind, and sharing it widely contributes to that public good.

So what about the bulk of the images and other media files on the sites, can you use them too? No. They’re not ours and we can’t share them. You can use their captions – they’re ours – but sorry, not the pictures themselves.

So here’s my pitch to the holders of our cultural collections: how can we work together to share our text and your images? How can we build on the narrative that Te Ara and NZHistory provide about your collections? How do we collaborate to make shared content and narratives available for re-use? And what could we do with that shared pool of content ourselves?

These seem like obvious questions to answer. Like our content, your collections are paid for and maintained by the taxpayers of New Zealand, and it’s on you to share and make this content available. Surely it would help your organization if you could easily find and re-use descriptions about your collection items? Or how about shared application like the beautiful Biblion iPad app from New York Public Library?

Like someone said at the conference, it’s just programming. This stuff should be easy. We’ve found the images, written about them, created a narrative, all we need now is permission and willingness.

* Full disclosure: as well as working at the Ministry, I’m also joining the NDF Board for 2012 and 2013. The views expressed here are mine and not necessarily those of the Ministry or the NDF Board.

Ran a half recently around the Wellington bays in 1:39:30. A slight improvement on the last half, and not bad given the lack of focused training. Should be able to go under 3:30 for the full marathon if I can stick to the training and avoid injury. Using Matt Fitzgerald’s beginners programme on top of regular commute runs into work. (It’s about 7k one way and I’m trying to do it five or six times a week.)

It’s got me thinking about something I’d like to see in web design to help long-form reading: a graphic ticker tape-like bar on the side of the screen that shows the proportion of the page that’s the story and the proportion that’s comments, plus a marker to show where I’m up to. That can’t be too hard can it?

Vaguely related reading: if:book’s a defense of pagination.

On Digital rights management (DRM)

DRM makes me queasy. Whichever way you cut it it’s a hard one to know really which way to go. Ultimately I feel drawn to the DRM-free side of the argument, merely for the sake of making life easy on consumers. They are after all the last people that publishers want to get off-side with. If I were a publisher I’d give DRM-free a shot and see how it went; it just seems like a suck-it-and-see kind of thing. At the very least follow some of John Noring’s suggestions to keep the DRM as light and the file as flexible for the reader as possible.

It’s a vexed question, and the hardest bit to handle is the question of who pays the author when no one buys the book? I don’t think anyone quite has an answer to that, but nor do they have any substantial facts and figures about the effect DRM-lite or DRM-free might have on sales.

But the alternative question is what’s the real threat? Sure, one person might buy a book and mention it to a friend who’ll ask to borrow it, a situation that’s no different to a print book. The fear is that ebooks are that much easier to distribute therefore the peron who buys the book won’t just lend it to a friend who who asks to borrow but will for some reason send it to all their friends just in case they all want to borrow it as well. I don’t think that’s likely.

Where the argument falls down is that the friend who borrowed the book doesn’t have to give it back under a DRM-free model. I’m not sure that’s a huge problem; if they didn’t like the book, nothing lost and nothing gained. If they did, they’ll probably be buying others by the same author without waiting to borrow copies first. Like NAP’s Jensen says, DRM gets in the way of discoverability, whether by search engines or people. Conversely, unlocking content makes it findable and turns it into its own marketing device.

It does make it sounds as though publishers are being held to ransom – don’t use DRM or the vandals at the gates will pirate your books. Create a relationship that the readers wants you to feed – subscription models for up-to-date titles, pre-releases, special deals etc.

I think there’s something in the idea of micro- or distributed patronage and I’d like to see it take off. It’s a kind of dreamy world though: Radiohead pulled it off (I forget the album — maybe not one of the better ones…), and This American Life makes regular calls for donations to support its podcasts; Kiva‘s a different take on the same idea, and Brooklyn Museum supports a fan network through donations. These are all examples where there’s a community and organisation that drives the patronage. I’m not so sure how that translates to lonely writers and their often mistrusted publishers. (And I say that with no slur intended on publishers, but more to point to a misunderstanding of the value of publishers held by many readers.)

Is that the real challenge for publishers? To build genuine communities that readers want to belong to and will feel is worth continuing to contribute to financially. Maybe at the same time break down some of the misunderstanding about the role of the publisher and the restrictions in which they operate. And further, demonstrate to the readers the collaboration that takes place between author, editor and publisher, and ultimately reader. Letting readers know how valuable their contribution is to maintaining the ecosystem might be one of the biggest sales yet.

In short, forget about DRM and think about your readers, and make them think about you.

Well, I’m not entirely clear what the big threat to local publishers is, nor even to the big ones. And if there is a problem, I think it could be worse for the big publishers who have come to rely on revenues streams by buying and selling territorial rights. Large publishers are already dominant – that’s been the case in New Zealand for years – but maybe the end of territorial rights breaks one of their strangleholds if it mean New Zealand publishers can go straight out to other markets. Learn from the French and Spanish publishers and retain world rights, as Edward Nawotka suggests.

There aren’t currently a lot of New Zealand books selling rights overseas and there’s a probably a useful enough model that could take the place of selling territorial rights. Maybe a shared rights on world sales? I’d be interested to know how much money we’re talking in terms of overeas rights on New Zealand books and whether that might be recouped by a share in the world rights?

New Zealand authors will still primarily sign with New Zealand publishers, and New Zealand publishers will continue to sell New Zealand books to that relatively small percentage of the local population that thinks it’s important to support New Zealand authors, books and publishers. Removing territorial rights won’t fundamentally change the precarious state of these relationships one way or the other as far as I can see.

What the smart New Zealand publisher can do though is start selling ebooks and print-on-demand ready books anywhere they can find a market. Isn’t that a good possibility? And a little bit of success for a publisher is going to attract more authors wanting to piggy-back on it.

Maybe there’s a chance overseas publishers will dump stock on New Zealand, though that happens already, and New Zealand is such a small market – that may counter any increase. Typically too, dumped books are dross and not the sort of thing that many New Zealand publishers produce. (Side-note on non-dross parallel importing: here’s a project for someone with a connect at Unity Books – ask them where their yellow circle logo comes from.)

Martin Taylor defended territorial rights on Teleread last year, but it strikes me that he’s talking about a handful of local companies buying local rights and/or handling distribution deals. I’m not convinced that really encourages a local industry, certainly not one that’s focussed on developing authors and high-quality local content. I also suspect most of these ‘local’ companies are local branches of overseas publishers.

I’m optimistic that the end (and yes, I’m assuming the end will come) of territorial rights won’t mean the end of different prices in different markets. David Grigg, writing from Australia, complained that he couldn’t buy a US ebook. That was based on IP recognition: the website he tried to buy from knew where he was and refused the sale. In the same way a website will be able to recognise users coming from developing countries and price ebooks accordingly.

The inevitability of the end of territorial rights seems to have become fact. Consumers won’t and aren’t putting up with it, and it forms part of a traditional approach to the world that no longer really works. I seriously think that local New Zealand publishers can either avoid much impact as they’re not in the habit of selling overseas rights, or can benefit from retaining world rights and selling to new online markets.

Maybe I’m being naive – very happy to be rebuked!