Ever since Stephen Abram mentioned the 100 best opening lines from novels list from the American Book Review I wanted to put them into some sort of image. Mostly because I enjoy looking at vast canvases of Helvetica.

Today was the day. It looks only okay shrunken down here, but laser printed at its full tabloid size of 11″x17″ [15.21 MB - wow] it looks pretty nice. If you want to print it but aren’t crazy about the background color, I’ve uploaded a Photoshop file for you: firstlines.psd [7.27MB].

If you print of it, I’d love to see a photo of it hanging up.

Way back in the day at the TFML some YS librarians recorded stories, I put them online and since the site is (soon to be was, I understand), blog based, the stories were being podcast. Yay. As neat as it was to have a podcast, the interface for listening to stories online was not ideal. As you’ve likely experienced before, clicking on an mp3 takes you to a grey page with a simple controller. Not very pretty, and not good for usability.

I want to provide a better interface for listening to stories the second time I implement a “listen to stories online” program. Considering how easy it is to add artwork to audio by exporting AAC files from Garageband, I thought I’d start there.

This is fine and dandy but makes iTunes the only way to see the artwork while listening to the audio. Why? I can’t find any online tools that will let me embed .m4a files in a website. Do you know of one?

Compressor is one of the most versatile file encoding tools and I guessed that if anything could convert an .m4a file into something useful (like a QuickTime file to embed!) that would be it. It did, but with only slightly satisfactory results. Something like this will appear on the NPPL’s Click-A-Story page (yes, that’s the same name, but give me a break, the libraries are across the country). If this embedded video doesn’t appear in your RSS aggregator, you’ll have to click through:

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The offending video was here. To see it, though for some reason it might crash your browser, here it is on a seperate page.
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iTunes artwork is 300×300 pixels, but Compressor keeps turning the files into 160×160 pixels for some reason. I’ve not yet been able to find the right setting that spits out proper images. Scrolling is unsatisfactory too. I thought I’d put this out regardless as a quick proof of concept, and to see if anyone has suggestions.

Recently, Joshua M. Neff posted about his library’s Johnson County Library Online Storytime. You know, the title of their project is pretty straightforward and I like it. Another part of the project that I like and that I’m planning on replicating is having CDs of the stories for distribution. That’s a good way to get content to do more work.

I’ll be sure to let you know when the project is live and what the response is like!

O’Reilly thinks the device is somewhat irrelevant and finds the wireless book purchasing/download aspect more interesting. This makes sense coming from a publisher, and probably librarians too. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: anywhere on demand delivery is a potentially strong threat to public libraries.

Speaking of libraries, they’re mentioned once in the article and not in the typical doom-and-gloom-the-sky-is-falling-on-them way. In fact, it kind of makes it seem like we’re a step ahead of Bezos and the Kindle.

Bezos explains that it’s only fair to charge less for e-books because you can’t give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell them. (Libraries, though, have developed lending procedures for previous versions of e-books—like the tape in “Mission: Impossible,” they evaporate after the loan period—and Bezos says that he’s open to the idea of eventually doing that with the Kindle.)

Of course, this statement isn’t accurate. Libraries haven’t “developed lending procedures,” have we? No. Vendors and publishers have. In a pretty crumby way. The article makes our ebooks seem pretty cool though with a comparison to Mission: Impossible. Librarians reading the article will find the Mission: Impossible comparison apt but for entirely different reasons.

Mystery novelist James Patterson (did you know he came up with the slogan “Toys ‘R Us Kid?”) thinks ebooks will supplant paper books soon and reasons:

“The baby boomers have a love affair with paper,” he says. “But the next-gen people, in their 20s and below, do everything on a screen.”

Kids these days, I tell ya!

Other good bits from the article include thinking of ebooks as potentially social documents. Authors could update content easily. Users could comment, or even hold book discussions within a book. I like the idea of having different layers of a book that can be turned on and off at will.

So, the Kindle. Funny/sad footnote in the history of gadgets, or world changing device? I dunno, but I’m interested to see!

If vendors made this happen I wonder if they’d use subject headings to drive the recommendation engine. I don’t like this idea. It would be much more interesting to capture and use data about patterns in how the collection circulates. This would be a more user centered approach. Ideally there would also be a URL and code next to the recommendation so patrons could rate the pairing of items, providing human feedback into the process. It would improve with use, but I’m sure it would give some hilariously interesting recommendations too.

Does anything like this exist? John, Casey, Glenn, Dave? Could you build this for me soon please? KTHXBYE.

What about promoting upcoming library events on our receipts? Surely some library is doing this?

I read about this right before I read Jessamyn’s post (with comments worth reading) about Overdrive, audiobooks, and the iPod. I love her attitude about making the most of a crappy DRM situation and using the inevitable patron iPod denial as a teachable moment about free audiobooks online.

Similarly, I doubt libraries will be circing titles to patron iPhones anytime soon. Instead we can tell them about Project Gutenberg and iPhone formatted PDFs from manybooks.net.

One of the author’s central ideas is that books are migrating online and ceasing to be books. Take for example wikipedia. He also writes,

Many fantasy fans, for example, have already put aside books and logged on to “virtual worlds” such as “World of Warcraft”, in which muscular heroes and heroines get together to slay dragons and such like. Science fiction may go the same way, and is arguably already being created by “residents” of online worlds such as Second Life.

What makes this claim somewhat more interesting in that it is tempered with the statement that

Most stories, however, will never find a better medium than the paper-bound novel. That is because readers immersed in a storyline want above all not to be interrupted, and all online media teem with distractions (even a hyperlink is an interruption).

I don’t think all fantasy readers have set down print books though I’m sure some have. However, many people are certainly getting the same (or greater) satisfaction from games in addition to reading books. With sales of the Wii, Xbox 360, PS3 approaching 8 million units (and let’s not forget the 8.5 million World of Warcraft players), it is safe to say that more people are either replacing or supplementing their reading with gaming.

The article isn’t just about gaming. There’s an interesting bit about recapturing the oral nature of poetry though podcasting, and getting haiku text messages. Both of these things, by the way, are services that any library could offer at no real cost…

Spending hours reading the papers may be an ideal pastime on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

But what if your newspaper updated itself during the day? What if the pictures moved and the interviews could be listened to?

In Belgium, this is coming true – at least for a three-month trial period. The Antwerp-based daily De Tijd will soon become the world’s first newspaper to publish a digital version on so-called ‘electronic paper’.

Those lucky Belgians will now get to eat great waffles and have eInk newspapers! Here’s the full article: Belgian newspaper to become first ‘paperless’ daily. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there’s going to be a revolution and newspapers are going to stop their presses soon. I’m just saying that this is a step in the evolutionary process.

One of my favorite essays about paper is The Social Life of Paper by (a way pre-Blink) Malcolm Gladwell. If you missed it in 2002, give it a read. There is even a great bit about Melvil Dewey in the article.

Video Games Are Good For You by “Juniorette”

Video games are widely known as an excellent source of entertainment, and are, according to some, better than watching TV because of their interactivity. What a lot of people don’t know is that they can be good for those who play them, and are easy to obtain and keep, since most games and systems can be kept together in one area. They come at low cost, usually under thirty dollars.

There are several genres of video games. RPGs, or role-playing games, often include the task of completing quests. The characters in the game are your party, or your team, and there are frequently three to eight in a game, though only some of them may be able to fight at a time, and players have to balance their teams to use all their skills effectively. MMORPGs (Massively-multiplayer online RPG) are online RPGs where people all over the world create custom characters and interact with other people in the game world, joining together to form their own parties and complete quests. In racing games, up to four players, depending on what game, race against each other on different tracks. There are the classic games that are like NASCAR, and there are others that use characters from classic video games of other genres, like in Mario Kart Double Dash. Fighting games are exactly that. There are some that even have their own small plot lines, where the goal is to defeat the strongest character and win the prize. In strategy games, the player controls a wide range of characters that they act as tactician for and direct around a map to defeat an enemy or accomplish a mission. In sports games, the player controls a favorite basketball or football team that they lead to the championship, or a single character, such as in golf or skating games. There are genres to entertain nearly everyone who wants to play a game.

Some parents might think that watching TV is a better way to spend your time than playing Halo 2 (a popular first-person shooter MMORPG). Aaron Schmidt, reference librarian at Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs, IL, had this to say on the subject:

“I think games are much more interesting than TV. TV is a ONE WAY operation going from the TV to the viewer. Games are a TWO WAY operation, back and forth, where the viewer can change the world and story. Games let people be creative and interact with their world whereas TV tells people what to think.” (Schmidt 2005)

TV also typically costs more than a video game. With the game there is only one payment (unless it’s a subscription to an online game), but you need to pay continuously to use your TV. Books are an excellent source of entertainment as well that parents might choose over games or TV. Schmidt had this to say about books vs. video games:

“I think books are great, and I think video games are great. Many people don’t realize it, but there can be just as much reading in video games as in books.”

Schmidt also said that the reason some libraries, including his, is that kids like video games, librarians like kids in the library, and therefore, they have video games.

Many people think that video games are the cause of more violent, aggressive behavior in kids and teens. “I’m convinced that violent video games do contribute to adolescents’ becoming more violent, having more hostile feelings, and [experiencing] more desensitization,” Joanne Cantor, recently retired University of Wisconsin professor said. “I think the kids distinguish pretty clearly between the cartoonish nature of a video game and reality,” John Beck, author of a book about video games, said. “I grew up with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd shooting at each other’s heads all the time.” (Anonymous 1.)

Games can be good tools for learning and developing one’s mind. Some wonder how learning in school can be more like a game by using some of the learning principals found in games, such as interaction (simulations of how the student could apply the problem to real life, perhaps), creativity (customizing what the problem is about), being pleasantly frustrating (the student might want to solve the problem because it interests them more), or performance before competence (showing that the student can do something at all before doing it well) (Gee 2-4).

Video game programming and design are now college majors. EA (Electronic Arts) Games, the no.1 video game maker in America, was hiring people from college who had no experience in game design and the wrong art and computer training. “For 20 years, students came out of school and they had to kind of unlearn what they had learned in computer science…the stuff they had learned in art was inappropriate…we had to do a lot of training internally,” Bing Gordon, the Gordon, the company’s chief creative officer, said. The gaming industry was starving for talent. This changed when video game design, programming, and script writing programs were introduced into colleges (Schiesel).

A good game is an interactive structure that requires players to struggle towards a goal. Without interaction, it’s just a puzzle. In some RPGs (role-playing games), players have to figure out a puzzle with clues they get by interacting with NPCs (non-playable characters), or by physically doing the puzzle on the map or in the form of riddles.

Without a goal, the end result of the player’s actions, there’s no point in playing. In many RPG games, the players have several goals over the course of the game that they have to complete before they can win. Without a struggle, the game’s just boring. It’s not fun to walk right through to the end of a game without having to accomplish goals or fight any monsters. Some ways to create struggle to make a game interesting include puzzles, such as riddles, sliding puzzles, and mazes; obstacles, like bosses (a strong enemy character the player has to fight at the end of a level) and the normal monsters found everywhere; and violence in the form of fighting, or a character being attacked in a cutscene (a sequence in a video game that the player has no control over, and is used to advance the plot and portray dialogue) (Costikyan).

Games are wonderful sources of entertainment that come in all kinds of forms. They provide a unique, interactive, and complex activity, at low cost and zero risk. Their design, script writing, and programming are becoming college majors. Games are even better than TV in some ways.

Bibliography:
Anonymous. Illinois Governor Says Some Video Games Are Too Violent for Teens. Current Events. February 18, 2005. One page.

Costikyan, Greg. The Problem of Video Game Violence is Exaggerated. Games Don’t Kill People—Do They? June 21, 1999. 8 pages.

Deutsch, David. Playing Video Games Benefits Children. Video Games: Harmfully Addictive or a Unique Educational Environment? 23 November 2005. 5 pages.

Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games and Good Learning. Phi Kappa Phi Forum. Summer 2005. 5 pages.