The other day, Springwise.com had a post titled “Audiobooks for phones” about a product and company in Sweden.

Bokilur is Swedish for book on phone. And the company offers exactly that: audiobooks for cellphones. …

Books are usually split into 5 parts, each of which costs SEK 30 (USD 4.10/EUR 3.25), and is between 50 and 150 minutes long. Payment is processed through the user’s normal phone bill. Available titles include popular fiction, literature, children’s books, business titles and language courses. …

For consumers, downloading on the go is far more convenient than downloading to a non-phone mp3 player, does away with the need to carry multiple devices, and allows for spontaneous downloads. …

Bokilur definitely benefits from 3G bandwidth being cheap in Sweden, which has made for far wider adoption of mobile services than in countries where mobile downloads are prohibitively expensive.

I don’t know if the cell phone situation in the US is fertile ground for this type of service. We aren’t (yet?) as attached to our mobile devices as Europe and Japan, but certain segments of the popular are certainly getting there. Telco download offerings so far have been pretty poor, DRM-laden, and expensive.

I wonder if Sweden’s libraries feel the need to compete with Bokilur. I suppose that might depend on just how popular the service is.

Some have tried smoking rooms, had boy’s club rooms and games, and many have tried simply to make the rooms homelike and cheery, and all of their experience is valuable to us.- “The Library as Social Centre“, the opening address of the Minnesota Library Association, October 12, 1905, by Miss Gratia Alta Countryman

Read the whole thing because it is awesome, but here’s another pull-out:

The whole building at all times should be managed in the broadest spirit of hospitality; the atmosphere should be as gracious, kindly and sympathetic as one’s own home. Then do away with all unnecessary restrictions, take down all the bars, and try to put face to face our friends the books and our friends the people.

Gratia Alta Countryman was city librarian until 1935.

While I’m on the topic of phones…

Today I came across some very potentially important news . Sprint is partnering with movie ticketing giant/annoying ad purveyor Fandango to sell and issue movie tickets via cell phones. The issuing mechanism is pretty novel. Once tickets are purchased, a message including a scannable barcode is sent back to the phone. The specific of this aren’t what’s most important however. Just the fact that it is happening is important. Asia has been buying things out of vending machines with their cell phones for years, and we might be *slowly* catching up. But remember, we’re 7 years behind. Here’s a bit more on Asian eCash.

While I think it’ll be neat to pay for a cab or Mountain Dew with my phone, what I’m most concerned about is how libraries will or will not embrace the delivery of content and services via cell phone. Now I know…we’re having a hard enough time letting people pay their fines or apply for a card online, but we should probably be thinking about both today’s problems and tomorrow’s.

About two years ago I wrote a post titled the power of texting in which I mention incorporating texting into holds notifications. Recently, Michael Casey linked to Teleflip, a universal email to text service, and highlighted how it could indeed be used to send a hold notification.

Phones aren’t getting any less featured, right? Right now, it’s more difficult to find a phone without a camera than it is to find a cameraphone. Wow. These little devices will increasingly be an always-on link to the Web and will give us a convenient digital interface to the physical world. But instead of just talking to a physical human being, we could be unlocking our cars, doing our laundry, and feeding our dogs. Perhaps we’ll even be using them as our library cards and paying library fines with them.

Hot on the heels of my post about libraries trusting patrons, and writing a sentence about drinks (gasp!) in our buildings, I walk into a local library and see this sign. Does this make anyone else as sad as it does me? Why does this library want to treat their patrons like children? Clearly there are much nicer ways of getting this point across. My favorite part of this sign is the miniscule “thank you” at the end of the message, put there as if forced, or even patronizing. The font they used is so small, you’ll likely have to click through to flickr to see a larger sized image. Look at the weight they’ve given to the “NO” in comparison to the “thank you”. This is what user hostility looks like.

A Japanese primate researcher announced the other day that mobile phones are turning Japanese youth into apes. Or at least that’s the sensational way to put it.

“Parents let their kids go out because they think they’re only a phone call away. And even if the kid doesn’t come home, parents don’t call them because they believe the child’s mobile phone offers them an unbreakable link…”

What does this have to do with apes? These liberated kids are evidently losing a sense of home, and aren’t distinguishing between private and public space. Chimps in the wild also tend to walk around in groups, eat wherever they get hungry, and rest wherever and whenever. I don’t think this phenomena is strictly Japanese. I often see tribes of kids walking around the town in which I live. They hang out at the local cafe, ice cream shop, and sometimes, just sometimes, the library. One thing that so fascinating about their behavior when they’re in the library is that they often tell us what they want out of a library. They come in packs, and they come for a space in which to collaborate. Group work is huge. Use of our resources is secondary. If kids act this way in this area, they very well may act this way in your area. We all have the task of thinking how we can get these people into the library more often.

This article is interesting for what it says, but it is also interesting because it doesn’t even say what these kids are doing with their phones. We know that texting, IM, and ringtones, let alone voice communication, have had a huge impact on people’s behavior, but phones are going to get even more interesting .

Take for instance Sprint/Nextel’s new walkie-talkie picture sending service. It combines the ultra-annoying bleeping and blooping instant talk found on some phones, and picture sharing on phones. It allows users to send cameraphone pics instantly, look at them simultaneously, and discuss them all the while. This real-time interaction and collaboration seems really web-like to me, which is great to see in a portable device. This, however, has the advantage that it can be used anywhere.

Nokia has developed a peer-to-peer network for mobile phones, and they are looking to develop support for the sharing of mp3 files. This is another activity leaving the desktop and coming to the little computers we carry around.

Speaking of mp3s, Japan’s largest cell phone provider, DoCoMo, is buying Tower Records. I wonder how long it will be until we see direct to cell phone downloading from the iTunes Music Store.

A bit closer to home we see Google Local for Mobile which is “downloadable application that lets you view maps and satellite imagery, find local businesses, and get driving directions on your phone.” In English, this means, Google Local for Mobile is “the first step in getting location-based advertising on your phone.” Pondering primate reminds us that they’ve been keeping track of all the text messages sent to GOOGL and are compiling a database to see what people search for on their phones. “Google knows what services were used most and where they were requested.”

Technology like this makes the development of ubiqutous computing easy to imagine.

There isn’t a full report, but PEW Internet /American Life has a ‘PIP Comment’ out titled The Rise of Cell Phone Text Messaging. It is short and worth a read, but here are some numbers I found to be interesting:

Percentage of cell phone owners that are texters
Gen Y (18-27) – 63
Gen X (28-39) – 31
Young Boomers (40-49) – 18
Older Boomers (50-58) – 13
Over 60 types – 7

Percentage of age group that use cell phones
Gen X – 76
Young Boomers – 68
Gen Y – 68
Older Boomers – 62
Over 60 types – 60

According to the ‘Comment,’ ”[t]he findings come from a nationwide phone survey of 1,460 cell phone users…” Make of that what you will.

These figures above look very high, but perhaps not as much when you really consider what they’re looking at. One thing that they didn’t include is the percentage of the total population (not just cell phone users) that are texters. With some mathematical wizardry I deduced the following:

Percentage of age group that are texters
Gen Y – 43
Gen X – 24
Young Boomers – 12
Older Boomers – 8
Over 60 types – 4

These figures are lower, yes, but they’re not small enough that we should be ignoring them, especially with what we know about how phone trends move East to West. Bigger numbers are coming. Remember of course that statistics are statistics, but I think this is good for looking at general trends. We need to be reaching out to the Gen Yers (18-27), not only because we have a mandate to serve them (and they don’t deserve to be ignored) but also because they are going to be the people voting on our referenda in the not so distant future. What have you done recently to make them feel warm and fuzzy about the library?

Something struck me as my friends and I were killing time during the (god-awful aneurysm inducing) commercials before a film last night. We were paying absolutely no mind to each other (nor the commercials). I realized that we were all using our phones when one friend exclaimed to another, “My tetris is better than your tetris.” Looking up from my screen, I saw that we weren’t the only people on our phones.

I think that this anecdote affirms what Jenny wrote the other day:

A bet: if you’re under age 35, you probably will do just what the survey says and take your phone, use it during parties, and communicate while multitasking F2F (face to face). If you’re over age 35, you probably view this behavior as rude and you don’t want to be interrupted by phone messages (text or voice) during F2F parties.

A generalization that will naturally have exceptions, but I think we’re getting to the point where the U.S. is starting to catch up to the numbers in this article….

Meanwhile, there are reports of kids ignoring more than commercials.

This is a film that invokes awe, but totally fails to induce it. At the screening I attended, most of the young audience spent the second half text-messaging friends.[via textually.org]

Libraries have a significant opportunity to increase their cultural relevancy by responding to this information trend. How should we respond? A start would be having mobile friendly websites and reference availability via text messaging.

If you thought Reference by Instant Messaging was progressive, what do you think about Reference by SMS?

For those of you not familiar, Short Messaging Service (SMS) is the feature available on the majority of cell phones that people use to send not voice messages but text messages to other cell phones (or some IM services too). SMS is catching on in the United States. I phrase it this way because it is absolutely huge in other parts of the world. It is so big in Europe and Asia that they are making airline reservations via SMS over there. European broadcasters have made SMS voting a source of income and American Idol “received over 2.5 million SMS votes for their show. Jenny recently linked to a good article about SMS catching on if you’d like to read more.

Also, you might remember from a few weeks back that SMSers can query google with this technology. This is where libraries come in, no? I’ve been waiting some SMS integration in libraries for a while now. Even something as simple as Innovative living up to their name and offering SMS hold/overdue notices would make me happy.

A very nice colleague sent me an announcement from an Australian company, Altarama, that is now offering an SMS product for libraries to use for Reference. Excerpts from their site follow.

Altarama introduces Reference by SMStm at VRD 2004 in Cincinnati Complementing its range of products that enhance the reference function of libraries, Altarama announces Reference by SMS, the first service designed specifically to allow libraries to seamlessly expand their reference delivery methods to include SMS (“simple [sic?] message service”).

More commonly knows as “text messaging,” SMS has seen its popularity explode among students, business people, and nearly everyone else with a cell phone.

Reference by SMS provides a phone number specific to a library that can be advertised for sending text messages to the library, which are automatically converted and delivered to an email address that the library specifies. The librarians monitoring that email address create responses in their normal email using a plug-in tool designed to assist with short replies, and the responses are automatically converted from email to text message, and delivered to the patron’s cell phone. No new operating procedures are required!The page also states that it costs libraries about $75 per month to use their service (after an initial setup fee, I’m sure). This leads me to believe that their pricing scheme could be $x per bundle of messages or something like that.

The only thing that I’m not totally crazy about is the email component to their system. Perhaps they thought an email plugin would be easier or less invasive for librarians but maybe it was just easier/cheaper for them to make. However, I’d rather see a small program that would pop up SMSs as people send them. This would really look the same as IM Reference to the librarians, so there wouldn’t be much more to learn*. The real gain would be for the user, who would have a reference librarian in their pocket. What a good way to make ourselves a bit more ubiquitous.

*Librarians might be forced to learn some SMS fonetic shortcuts because text messages can be a maximum of 160 characters. It is doubtful that this would be a huge limitation though. Software could either split longer messages and send them sequentially if there was the need. I bet people would mostly use SMS Reference for simple short things like phone numbers and directions.

About two months ago I wrote about Yahoo! Alerts beta. Here is a followup to that.

For the past two months I’ve been receiving probably 15 text messages per day from Yahoo! One of these is a weather report for the next day, and the rest are ‘breaking news’ stories. While I still think the concept of this is great and important, I now think the content I’ve chosen is terrible.

Weather alerts
People love talking about the weather. If something ‘crazy’ is going to be happening with the weather, I usually hear about this from coworkers or hear random people discussing it. If this fails, I’m a big fan of looking out the damn window.

Breaking news
My news gathering habits are largely web based. I read newspapers infrequently (except for the local police beat, which I read religiously), and never watch TV ‘news.’ There are a number of periodicals I enjoy reading for news, but I’m not too fervent about keeping up with them. Using the web, I can largely ignore mainstream news and select the sources I like. I think I was too excited about the delivery of AP and Reuters headlines via text messaging to remember that I was going to be getting frequent bundles of crap sent to my phone. Not only were the headlines bad, they were often incomplete. British sources say a car bomb exploded on the Gaza Strip, injuring six people on Monday. Investigations are un and the like. There were a few standout headlines among reports of people killed in Iraq and turmoil in Palestine. That Clinton was having emergency heart surgery was somewhat interesting (although I’m not quite sure why). Also, I was watching a movie (at home) when the AP alerted me that a ‘mushroom cloud’ was spotted over North Korea. That was spooky and prompted me to a) text some friends and b) get to my computer for more info. I was confused as to why this was being reported three days after it happened at that point, and slightly relieved that there likely wasn’t a nuclear war going on.

There is different content available through Yahoo! Alerts beta and I might investigate it. I’m concerned though because I signed up with a throwaway account. I had no forsight. Now I’ve got to so some serious sleuthing to figure out how I’m going to login to delete the lousy alerts. Ouch.

When we’re offering text message alerts to patrons, let’s remember to make it easy for them to unsubscribe.

I’m sure every one of us has found a cell phone user annoying at some point, but the Huntington Beach Public Library must have been pushed over the edge. According to some news stories they have put in place a drastic fine schedule for disobeying their no cell phone use policy. After an initial warning, talkative patrons will recieve a $250 fine. It gets worse with the next offenses triggering $500 and $1000 fines!

While excessive, I can partially understand what they are up to. What I can’t understand is that included in their no cell phone use policy is text messaging. I don’t understand why patrons aren’t allowed to type with their thumbs and read responses if their ringers are turned off. Perhaps they think that if patrons are given an inch, they will take a mile and start forgetting to turn their ringers off.

I wonder if they at least have a zone where cell phones are okay? Like the lobby of the library, perhaps.

I’ve called the library twice to ask them some questions, but the administrative assistant hasn’t been around.