It’s a meta-book, about books, and the title promises to make an argument for why they are important in the present age. Judging a book by it’s cover, I’d say we are going to talk about books that are plugged in - based on the white cords, perhaps an Apple Tablet, excepting of course the three USB ports. I grumble, but I can’t resist either.

Robert Darnton is author of many books, professor of history, and director of the Harvard University Library. The Case for Books collects essays and speeches on his area of interest, books, that were published between 1997 and 2009, with one exception which dates from 1982.

Rather than making a sustained narrative argument on “the case for books”, The Case for Books acts more as a case which contains books, or at least essays, and we are all better for it. The theme is that the best way to understand what is happening with books and publishing today is to look at their history. Each chapter is thoughtful and relevant and no one tries to tie them together with any supplementary text.

There is a lot to I could babble about in this book, so I’m just going to highlight the one thing most on my mind right now. This book is overdue.

In the late 90s, Darnton and the American Historical Association conceived of Gutenberg-e, a project designed to both enable newly minted PhDs to publish their theses and reinvent the genre of scholarly monographs at the same time.

As they conceived it, an electronic book didn’t have to have use a narrative approach because you can reorder the pages on the fly. A reader might choose to read an e-book more or less in-depth in different sections - say you are really into a research project’s methodology and the data produced, but you want to draw your own conclusions about the results:

The readers will download [the e-books], search the texts for whatever needs to be studied, print out the relevant sections, bind them in a machine attached to the printer, and take home for reading in the form of a custom-made paperback.

OH

This idea reminds me of some of the arguments I read last year about literacy, education, and the role of libraries. Michael Gorman, in The Enduring Library argues that more and more books are published each year, and Gunther Kress in Literacy in the New Media Age points out that many books being published are not meant to be read as narratives. Textbooks, children’s books, reference books, guidebooks, Books for Dummies, all are “books” but do not represent the kind “sustained reading of complex texts” that Gorman values.

One of Darnton and the AHA’s early challenges was that even if an academic press was willing to put out an e-book, authors and thesis advisers were reluctant to stray too far from the traditional form. Tenure is competitive, so don’t risk it. Dynamic hypertextuality is a great idea, but it makes your scholarly opus into something other than a book.

I am only a lame non-ebook-user, but it is my impression is that of the “real” e-books we read today on our Kindles and iTouches and Sony Readers, the genres most suited to the format, whether for ease of marketing or ease of reading, are narrative ones: fiction, literary non-fiction - and thinking of Nicholas and Anne-Marie’s presentation today, perhaps scholarly communication as well, at least for now.

I’m not terribly impressed with it - the opening chapters make weak and culturally biased arguments about the importance of alphabetic writing, and the brain science after that is a little dry. The good part is part three, where she summarizes a century of research into the biophysical basis for dyslexia.

She loves the Ancient Greeks, and especially Socrates and Plato. Socrates the great orator, and Plato who wrote it down. I was never clear on this - wasn’t Socrates, as Plato wrote him, partly the invention and voice of Plato? Again with the cultural bias: writing is not necessarily the definitive version.

But anyway, Wolf compares Socrates’ concern that literacy will corrupt young thinkers if they learn to read before they learn to think to modern day concerns about young people having access to the internet. She is validating Socrates’ concern vis a vis the Internet, which I disagree with, but also sets off a light bulb moment for me on page 221:

Throughout the [written] story of humankind, from the Garden of Eden to the universal access provided by the Internet, questions of who should know what, when, and how remain unresolved.

Intellectual freedom, filtering pornography, information about birth control, the bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War - all of these things touch on this question, and it struck me that my particular brand of librarianship answers it in the exact same way every time: everyone has the right to know everything, now.

And Socrates? I can’t think of him without thinking of Saukrates.

The most compelling bit of the book is the introduction, most of which is available in Google Books, where he argues that people writing blogs, tweeting and posting their photos and videos online are motivated by stardom.

All this is why I, for one, had no quibble with Time’s choice of “You” as the person of the year [in 2006]. Indeed, I will happily put “You” forward as the defining person of this whole random decade, which our hordes of cultural critics have redefined so often and so variously that it lacks an identity or even a name (the Zeros? THe Oughties?). But make no mistake: I am on to You.

…

You blog and photograph and record precisely so you can be read and heard and seen by others. You monitor and you scheme and you promote, just like the hit-addled corporate culture has been teaching you for years. Because when your words or actions or art are available not only to your friends but to potentially thousands or seen millions of strangers, it changes what you say, how you act, how you see yourself. You become aware of yourself as character on a stage, as a public figure with a meaning. You develop, that is, the media mind. You know exactly what you are doing.

(p. 12-13)

Part of his point is that people seek to be stars within their own subcultures, and it is easy for me to find examples of the same phenomena in different groups: a small group of people is at the center of the food blogging community in the same way a small group of people were at the center of the library blogging community. But both of my examples are of subcultures with a heavy publishing component: librarians for scholarly and professional communication, and foodies for cookbooks. I think the ‘cool kids’ dynamic would exist for us without the internet.

But the internet is what make’s Wasik’s book work, and what it is about. He talks about internet memes, and indie rock, and politics, all of which I consider to be subjects engaged with almost exclusively by internet users. On the one hand, it is refreshing to read about what happens on the internet as sort of closed system, as opposed to the usual theme of how much it is changing our lives. At the same time, meh, there is so much more to the world.

This actually turns out to be Wasik’s limp conclusion: that we need to “unplug” in order to keep “viral culture” from taking over our lives. I think he means I should swear off the whole genre of books-that-explain-the-internet for a while. I’m going to try.

Zittrain describes something as generative if it “fosters innovation and disruption”. Something non-generative is “sterile”, and in the context of the internet, a “tethered” device has software and services bound to the hardware. A personal computer is generative because you can reprogram it. An iPhone is not, as Zittrain points out often on his book-related blog.

Generativity on the internet is add odds with our culture and economy because of it’s disruptiveness: spam, viruses, copyright infringement, the distribution of child pornography and the proliferation of cheap cameras and microphones that infringe on our privacy all seem like super-villains in the story of the Internet. More often than not, institutional response to these is to restrict the internet’s generativity by restricting who can do what with which device. Zittrain argues that limiting generativity limits innovation.

It is curious that Zittrain doesn’t add that restricting generativity is just as damaging to information as it is to innovation. Luke Rosenberger is a systems and reference librarian I know from the days when my library contracted a company he worked for. He recently wrote that his university’s lockdown of peer-to-peer internet traffic also managed to block websites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. Extending the rationale of an executive order from Texas governor Rick Perry, the university said the sites were blocked because of the “potential risk” of sharing files.

Zittrain is Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, visiting professor at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and co-editor of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. He is certainly aware of the limitations on speech and intellectual freedom that a “sterile” internet imposes.

The implicit argument throughout the book is that generativity is basically good and that social action will do more to combat disruptive technologies and behaviors than regulation will. Reminiscent of Lawrence Lessig’s statement in Code (version 2.0) that the internet has no inherent qualities, Zittrain says that the Internet is what it is because we made it that way. Along with everything else on the internet, disruptions like spam and viruses are not technical in nature but born of human action. He suggests we find solutions that are “light on law”.

Zittrain’s principal model for social action to support innovation without succumbing to disruption in a generative space is Wikipedia. A very simple editing process and an inclusive community has birthed a collective ethos among Wikipedians, and that is usually enough to stop vandalism, slander, copyright infringement and political grandstanding.

…Wikipedia has come to stand for the idea that involvement of people in the information they read - whether to fix a typographical error or to join a debate over its veracity or completeness - is an important end itself…

Libraries should take note that we don’t land completely on the side of the Justice League when it comes to internet generativity. I can think of at least two de-generative capers perpetrated by libraries: our brief embrace of DRM-laden downloadable audiobooks and the lack of media in multiple formats (MP3-CD, for example). Both of these limit the generativity of library materials, and ergo, of libraries as well.

Zittrain notes only that locked-down public computers are not the generative devices that open PCs with unfettered internet connections are. Even when we provide patrons with complete access to the internet, we give them little opportunity to change it.

My first job that required an MLS included changing PC BIOS settings so that computers couldn’t be booted from the disk drive. Of course, nowadays you can just run a Linux emulator from your USB flash drive, so I imagine student workers are in charge of the F1 key today.

Surely, libraries are not out to sterilize generativity. Ultimately it is cheaper to restrict public computing than to support it unconditionally, and the common strategy of wiping a hard drive in between uses allows us to preserve our role as guardians of our patrons’ privacy.

But even then, Zittrain might argue, we are guardians only of “Privacy 1.0″. In chapter 9’s case study, “Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0″, Zittrain touches on the notion that generational differences in attitudes towards privacy, but really focuses on the idea that cheap, ubiquitous and mashup-able cameras muddle what is public and what is private. Texas experimented with crowdsourcing border control, facial recognition technology promises to tell surveillance cameras who they are pointed at, and anyone with a cameraphone can post an image or film of another’s bad behavior.

Our hero offers us some hope and a number of strategies, but ultimately warns us that the younger, seemingly privacy-unconscious generation may have gotten it right. Zittrain says that “privacy is about establishing a locus which we can call our own without undue intervention or interruption - a place where we can vest our identities”. Faced with only the reality of a hyper-generative space in which to do this, “MySpace pages, blogs, and similar online outposts can be repositories for our identities for which personal control, not secrecy, is the touchstone.”

I wish I could be a little more critical in this review. I found some nits to pick (am I the only one who thinks eBay’s reputation system is a sham?), but even if it’s a little dry and gloomy, the book is accessible and well-argued, and I learned a whole bunch. Zittrain even goes so far as to take his own advice. The entire text is available online through a creative-commons-licensed interactive web version of the book.

The first thing I did when I decided to raise chickens was put a hold on every book in the library with chicken or poultry in the subject heading. By far, the most informative and entertaining one I read is John Festus Adams’ Backyard poultry raising: the chicken-growing, egg-laying, feather-plucking, incubating, caponizing, finger-licking handbook, published in 1977.

Judging a book by its cover, in this case an astounding 70s design complete with an iconic chicken-as-farmer, I knew I was going to like it. I did. The book provided me everything I needed to know about raising chickens with no direct instruction at all, or none that I remember anyway. What makes this book such a rare treat are the author’s anecdotes about raising various birds - chickens, turkeys, ducks, an owl, an eagle - and the pervasive idea that anything can happen, it usually does, and it’s a blast.

Right at the start of the book, Adams warns us not to take chickens too seriously.

The reasons any particular person keeps, or wants to keep, chickens will be found to include one or more of these three options: for eggs, for meat, or for the hell of it.

When I went around talking to my neighbors of my fowl intentions, they each asked, “for eggs or for meat?”, seemingly oblivious of the third option. I plan to get both, and sure, there’s something to the back-to-the-yard movement’s desire to know where your food comes from, but Adams’ attitude provides the most enduring reason to raise chickens or do anything else: to enjoy it.

Adams was then a professor of English at Washington State University and the consummate homesteader. Besides his book on chickens, he wrote about gardening, beekeeping, and homebrewing, translated Anglo-Saxon poetry and published a novel. He’s both renaissance man and country boy, and all of his books that I’ve been able to get my hands share his easy style and irreverence for taking anything too seriously.

His book on homebrewing includes hangover cures, and discussing gardening, he’s the only writer I’ve known to include sex as one of the reasons home-grown foods are better than store-bought.

Even the lowly potato, freshly dug, suddenly has a flavor, a distinct, unique and subtle earthiness, suggestive of native mushrooms or the mysterious wild. My wife says there is something erotic in their earthiness. I always grow lots.

- The Epicurean Gardener (1988)

Adams’ point of view is grounding, and if it weren’t for that, he might have been some kind of 70s and 80s Michael Pollan, the gardening writer turned food writer now drying out as a food activist urging readers to start a garden to save the environment. Thank Dog.

It’s no wonder that Adams is able to inspire his readers to similar irreverence . My library’s 30 year-old copy is riddled with stickers and dog-ears, and scribbled in pencil at the beginning of a chapter is a simple instruction, “If you love chickens, call Ruby 503-233-9740″.

When I read this, I smiled. Ear to ear. I imagined a library service that brought together readers by hiding messages in books. I dreamed I was going down the rabbit hole of a chicken-centric alternative reality game. I looked up the number in Reference USA and found no one named Ruby. I waffled. I waited. I grew to love my chickens, and finally called the number.

“That’s terrible”, I told Pomerantz, “I hated that book”.

A few months ago, I had a brief conversation with Anne-Marie about Weinberger and his ongoing debate with Andrew Keen over just how much the internet is sending our culture to hell in a handheld. At the time, I felt like both Weinberger and Keen were full of it, but realized I should at least read their books before coming down too hard on them. One down.

Most of what there is to hate about Everything is Miscellaneous is that Weinberger simplifies library organization principles in order to prove the point that card catalogs aren’t a good way to organize digital information.

Library card catalogs are an example of what Weinberger calls the “second order of order” - using sortable, paper objects to summarize metadata about a more complex three-dimensional object or text. The first order, he says, is the physical objects themselves (that can each have only one place in the world at a time). The second order was better, he says, but the problem with it is that it can never contain all the information about the object in such a small amount of space.

In the third order, the digital order, every possible bit of information about an object, and every combination of bits, is a possible point for which to access or sort that object on a moment’s notice.

I don’t disagrees that the third order reigns, but it’s hard not to take issue with Weinberger’s image of the library as a stodgy outmoded institution. Libraries were among the first institutions to embrace digital tools, first for transporting catalog records, and later for storing and accessing them. Yet, Weinberger insists on presenting libraries’ tools and methods for organizing information as if they haven’t changed since 1932.

To Weinberger, Amazon.com is the exemplar of organization in the digital age. He tells us that instead of organizing books by putting each one in a specific place on the shelf, as libraries do, Amazon.com files each book in multiple hyperlinked categories. Wonderful, I agree, and libraries have hyperlinked subject headings in online catalogs since the late 1990s, so stop hating on us, dude.

I think what irks me most is that this book could have been so much better if the author had acknowledged that libraries catalog as well as classify, and that in those ancient days, each book in a library had multiple entries in the card catalog: one for each subject heading, one for the title, and one for the author or “main entry”, the last often being multiple cards listing as much information about the object as possible.

Card catalogs were constrained by space and labor, but the principles are the same as Weinberger’s “third order”: file references to a single object in multiple places.

Of course, with that kind of background, Weinberger’s argument is much weaker: if “second-order” orders rely on paper to put access points in multiple places just the same way “third order” orders do with bits, digital objects lose their mysterious omnipresence. Suddenly, it’s not the digital objects themselves that make the “third order” so powerful, only the speed at which computers can process and sort them.

Weinberger also could have taken his argument a step further and pointed out that for digital objects, cataloging and classification are essentially the same thing. What you call it can be where you put it and where you put it can be what you call it. This was the point I kept waiting for Weinberger to make, but he never does.

Weinberger shows some love for libraries by honoring library weblog godhead S.R. Ranganathan and his faceted classification system. In building up to a discussion of why tags are better than the Dewey Decimal Classification system, Weinberger describes a tree that can rearrange it’s leaves at your whim: Ranganathan had a separate slot in his call number for “place”, “time”, “personality”, “matter” and “energy”.

Faceted cataloging is pretty good, Weinberger thinks, and advanced for its time, but not as good as throwing all your metadata into one bucket and calling everything a tag. He doesn’t prove it, but what he describes as a better way sounds to me suspiciously like making a lot of cards, calling each one an entry, and filing them alphabetically in drawers.

Everything is Miscellaneous definitely has its strong points. Weinberger shows that by applying lots and lots of tags to a digital collection, the collection’s structure hierarchy and organization can be inferred. e.g. if a lot of things tagged ‘cherry’ are also tagged ‘pie’, then cherry and pie must have something to do with each other. He argues that an organizational structure built from the bottom up can be just as good as one dictated from the top down.

And there he stops. There are all kinds of interesting things to think about in regards to tagging, flat vocabularies and folksonomies as they relate to library cataloging and classification and other forms of organization, and Weinberger shows interest in none of them. It’s just a refrain, the digital objects are here, the digital order is here, Hallelujah, please make a donation, the collection box is coming around.

To make the point, consider The Library of Congress’ flickr photostream, a wealth of pleasure and intrigue. Many images, such as Going to town on Saturday afternoon, Greene Co., Ga. (LOC), have about 70 tags, in this case including such specious descriptors as ‘old’, ‘octopus’, ‘blue’, ‘dignity’ and ‘afternoon’.

Are these valuable access points? Would a library bother adding them? How valuable is a collection when some objects have 75 tags and some have only two? When is a signal to noise ratio acceptable and when is it just noise? You’ll have to look elsewhere to find the answers.

Everything is Miscellaneous makes some good points, Weinberger’s pithy examples are fun, and as a whole, the book is provocative, so I don’t actually mind that tomorrow’s librarians are reading this book. Hell, if it provoked me, I hope it provokes some library school students too.