Confessions of a Book Killer

Gather round, and I'll tell you a story.



In 2001 I worked for a large Midwestern research university on a grant from the National Science Foundation. I was tasked with digitizing a collection of books on non-Euclidian geometry.

Hang on. I'll wait here.

You were going to go to this page anyway, right? 

Do you have any questions?

Via Reddit.

Didn't think so.

Some of the books were old, dating back to the seventeenth century. Most were published in the nineteenth century, when non-Euclidian geometry was first recognized as a field worthy of study in Europe.

Back in those heady days, digitization was also called "digital conversion" or "digital preservation," though how these texts were preserved made those phrases sound rather Orwellian. I separated content from container, meaning, I took the books apart. I removed the pages from the covers and spine, and then I took the pages over to a book guillotine, which is exactly what you think it is.

Something like this, via Reddit's r/oddlysatisfying. 

When the blade of a book guillotine presses down the middle pages of a book sometimes bulge out, and text too close to the spine can be lost, so I often had to break up the books into more manageable batches of pages, which I learned the hard way. Text literally cut off by the guillotine had to be obtained via interlibrary loan.

After cutting, I shrinkwrapped the pages, and shipped them to Nogales, Arizona. Then they were trucked across the border to a land that labor and environmental standards forgot, the "other" Nogales in Sonora, Mexico.

Weeks later, I'd get the pages back, along with a CD-ROM full of .tiff (Tagged Image File Format) files. One page per tiff, as you might imagine. Sometimes there was enough room between the text of the cut pages and the spine to rebind the books, but not always. And not usually. And once some of the mathematics faculty found out, they were concerned.

I would perform quality control on these tiff files, making sure they were legible and level, which sometimes included holding a protractor up to a computer monitor. Really. From there, I sent the tiffs to colleagues who ran optical character recognition (OCR) on them, making them text-searchable, or, in today's parlance, discoverable. It took multiple passes through OCR to turn these files into text-searchable files, and the process was fraught with errors. Umlauts, for example, turned any letter below them into two "i"s. Other accent marks turned "e"s into "6"s. It wasn't always pretty. And once some of the mathematics faculty found out, they were even more concerned.

However, no one was as concerned as Nicholson Baker, who was so concerned he wrote a book about the seemingly haphazard ways in which libraries digitized material without regard for the source. Baker's book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, was published as I was chopping up these texts. In Double Fold, Baker cited my boss' boss multiple times, often, according to my boss' boss, out of context. Have a look.


Baker's book sparked a firestorm in the library and information science fields, culminating in an appearance at the American Libraries Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco that June. It was the first ALA Annual I attended.

Anyway, if you come across some nineteenth century non-Euclidian material in a database, that was probably me. You're welcome.

Where are they now?

• My then-boss' boss is now head of the preservation department at the University of Maryland. 

• It later came out that Baker was storing archival materials in a high-humidity environment, a you-store-it warehouse site next to a river in New Hampshire. According to one library listserv, he also used Post-It Notes as bookmarks. He also wrote a book on pacifism and World War II, Human Smoke, that was widely criticized. The Association of Research Libraries website maintains a page on preservation that is, in large part, because of Baker. 

• I felt bad about cutting up some of the books, so I put several third edition texts by Isaac Newton and a first edition Gottfreid Wilhelm von Leibnitz aside. 

• Technological advances: the spread of sophisticated book mounts and cameras, and declining costs associated with them, have limited the above practices.

Elsewhere on this site:

Your Special Collections Won't Save You

The Things They Carried: Preserving User-Generated Content in Course Management Systems

Digital Preservation on the Cheap: Book Mount Edition

Computers in Libraries Day 3: Ebooks and Content Management

While my first day at Computers in Libraries had the discrete theme of discovery, and I returned to the library to get some work done on day two, day three was spent bouncing around between tracks.

I attended Jennifer Waller's presentation on Google Glass. I'm a noted skeptic, for reasons that are hard to articulate. I find wearable technology with a built in camera creepy (and I'm not alone in that; a search for "google glass is creepy" in that search engine is chalk full of the same sentiment), yet at the same time I understand that in the past peoples' reactions to then-new-now-ubiquitous technology mirror my reaction to Google Glass. Wearable tech may be a bridge too far for me (us?) at present, or, as Polly-Alida Farrington put it

#cildc perhaps real fear of ggl glass is the instant dissemination & persistence of data, not so much the photography itself.
— pollyalida (@pollyalida) April 9, 2014

I appreciate that the Glass is an ice breaker, a conversation starter, something that gets a community excited about a library, and even a tool to start discussions of privacy, but I'm not sure if these benefits outweigh the risks. Does using the Glass to teach privacy subvert Google or further empower it? There are some tough conversations to be had concerning giving a community what it wants when technology like this comes into play, and I appreciate that Waller not only raised these questions, but engaged them. I suspect I'll have more to say about Google Glass later.*

Miami's excellent Shelvar application also made an appearance. It has the potential to liberate our student workers from shelf-reading.


I jumped over to Track C for a discussion of students' use of ebooks. This presentation had an impressive amount of quantitative data that corroborates the qualitative data I've seen: students do not like ebooks. They'll use them if they have to, and some will use them if they deem it convenient. Purchasing both an electronic copy and a physical copy of the book is, based on the data presented, a waste of money.

Survey results from Delaware County Community College (PA), however, countered the first half of the presentation. Even though DCCC's students often use mobile technologies, they prefer either print or a choice between print and electronic. Im sum, different communities have different wants and needs, and it's important that we library staff ask and listen.


At the 1:30 session for Track C I (re)learned that what we ask ourselves and faculty to do in order to embed or link content to within a Course Management or Learning Manage System (CMS or LMS) is nothing short of sadistic, wrought with friction.

I grabbed two cookies on the way out and went back to work.

Elsewhere on this site:
Computers in Libraries Day 1: Discovery
The BeerBrarian's Guide to Computers in Libraries

* Full disclosure, Waller and I are friends and she bought me lunch. I owe her at least a beer.

Library and Craft Beer Bullies

I have the strange fortune of being in two industries, one as an employee, the other as a blogger, that perceive themselves as being bullied. The former is librarianship, the latter is craft beer. There's no shortage of ink, digital and actual, spilled over this in librarianship. We're the victims of budget cuts, subject to the whims of vendors. We're not in control. When we exercise what agency we have, we might think we're driving, but the correct analogy is probably closer to downhill skiing. We're heading down a path, dodging trees, trying not to fall, but we think we're going to end up in the valley regardless of what happens on the journey. "Yes, there is a teleology here."

Or so the story goes. I find a tension in the discourse around this subject: that libraries and librarians are agents, are superheroes, and yet at the same time find themselves objects, acted on, then perhaps reacting. I prefer to think of it as complexity. Agents at one moment can be structures the next, and the opposite is true as well.

Craft beer defines itself, in large part, by what it's not. It's not bland, light, made with adjuncts, not made in fifteen locations. It's not macro beer, made by Bud, Miller, Coors. And yet what it's not is a myth. Craft beer can be all those things, though perhaps in two rather than fifteen locations, and even owned by the large companies mentioned above. Like libraries, craft beer has a chip on its shoulder, feels oppressed, and, perhaps like libraries, with good reason. To wit, a document that purports to show the incentives offered by one distributor of beer, Reyes Premium, to remove Devils Backbone, a Virginia craft beer, off of local draft lines. 

If this document is genuine and accurate, this could be considered evidence of a distributor paying its employees to remove a craft brewer from a draft line in favor of Blue Moon. It’s my opinion that Blue Moon sucks, as does Shock Top, which is also mentioned in the photograph. These beers masquerade as craft, but are made by MillerCoors and InBev, respectively. The best thing I can say about them is that they might get you to move up to Allagash White. These beers are to craft beer what “useful idiots” are to Lenin.* 

That being said, selling beer is the job of any distributor and its employees. Distributors are paid to put products in bars, restaurants, and on the shelves. These bonuses (if genuine) are incentives for a sales force; this is a common practice in other industries and businesses. People who love craft beer have a tendency to romanticize this industry while forgetting that it is also very much a business. People strive to make good beer for a living, but without turning a profit on that beer, we’re left with hobbyists, not an industry. 

On the other hand, bonuses, incentives, and commissions that involve cash introduce the potential and possibility of kickbacks. One can easily envision a situation in which an employee of a distributor splits his or her bonuses with people who work in bars, restaurants, and stores that sell alcohol, or even that the bonuses come from brewing companies themselves. MillerCoors and InBev have deeper pockets than any craft brewer. DCBeer is not suggesting that this is the case here, nor do we have evidence that such practices are occurring in this or any instance. We merely have a photo posted to Twitter. However, there have been discussions of this behavior in the past, and no doubt there will continue to be more in the future.

There's more information, and speculation, here.

Both in libraries and beer, much of any alleged bullying happens behind the scenes, away from the public. The paying public doesn't see the how and why of that draft line moving from one beer to another, or the how and why of an ebook or journal that's no longer available. It our job in both those fields to acknowledge, publicize, and fight that bullying without coming across as whiny or shrill. The solutions are also similar: education, outreach, marketing. We're targets; let's adapt.

* The initial DCBeer.com post attributes this quote to Marx. I have corrected it here. Photo credit to twitter user @wort2yourmom.

#hcod and Academic Libraries

The main source of outrage over HarperCollins decision to limit e-book checkouts came from public libraries and their staff, which makes sense since the market for circulating e-books comes more from their neck of the woods than mine. However, it's not difficult to envision a scenario in which academic libraries, even ones that don't loan e-books, are affected. That's one reason why I was surprised to see this post from the Annoyed Librarian, which challenges the big tent that is the American Library Association. I'm not going to get into the commonalities that all librarians share, mostly because Andy Woodworth does a good job with that, but also because I can see both sides of this debate. I think that the Annoyed Librarian's piece makes some good points about what separates academic, public, school, and special librarians, among others from archivists, and I saw these divisions from the start of my MLIS program, which were reified in the courses offered. So the following is done in the spirit of "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next."

The library where I work, the library that I now run, I guess, doesn't really do the book thing. We've got books, but they're books from the 70s, when the core of the school was arts and sciences. In the last fifteen years, four of which involve me, the school has expanded, moving from a college to a university with several professional schools. For a variety of reasons, all of them depressing, the library did not keep up. As a result, we've got a great collection of Victorian literature... and nobody to teach about it. We've got books in French and German... languages no longer offered. You get the idea. We're getting better, more current, but we've got a ways to go. We're starting a distance-learning, online-only program in the fall, and we push patrons towards electronic and digital resources because we think that's where the world's headed... but this make us more vulnerable. We provide access to information, to knowledge, that we don't own. E-books are different from books that way; we don't lease any physical copies of books, although students can do that through the campus bookstore.

What if the next move of other, more academic, publishers is to limit access to e-books in a way similar to HarperCollins? What if an e-book could be accessed or viewed, analogous to circulating, as I see it, 26 times? What would happen to our distance learning program then? What about e-books placed on reserve to be accessed via course management software? A class of 20 students wouldn't last half a semester under that regime, and thus the library's budget wouldn't, either. So you see, Annoyed Librarian, we're all in this together, we're not so dissimilar. Let's hang together instead of separately on this issue.

Who's a Bully? A reply to Martin Taylor and more on #hcod

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the HarperCollins affair has lead to a wider discussion about e-books in libraries, access versus ownership, and the role that DRM plays in our lives. After all, HarperCollins decision wasn’t made in a vacuum; they have interests to protect and those interests aren’t relevant to just HarperCollins, but to all publishers, especially the Big Six, and to authors as well, who deserve to be compensated for their work.

Librarians, for their part, have advocated resistance (I assume that there’s also a silent majority or plurality out there that’s going to carry on as they did before HarperCollins decision), ranging from a boycott of DRM, a boycott of all of HarperCollins, a boycott of just HarperCollins e-books, to lobbying. But we haven’t heard much from HarperCollins or their supporters… until now.

Martin Taylor is the managing director of Addenda Publishing in New Zealand and has long had an interest in digital publishing. He founded the Digital Publishing Forum and claims both authors and publishers as shareholders and works with the New Zealand copyright regime.

No surprise, then, that Mr. Taylor writes

In spite of the heat HarperCollins can expect to receive from its library customers, I hope they stand their ground. Librarians need to shift their thinking as digitisation transforms the reading landscape. They are doing authors, publishers and ultimately themselves and their patrons no favours by this stance.

The fact is that rightsholders do have serious concerns and librarians have not managed to address them… In the face of rightsholders’ concerns, librarians must listen not bully, and they should be willing to experiment with new models that will ensure libraries and other channels can co-exist in the emerging, all-pervasive digital world. No-one has all the answers yet but we won’t solve this issue by denying the existence of the problem and closing off avenues for fresh thinking.

There are some good points made in his article, and I think that librarians need to hear alternative perspectives, away from the #hcod echo chamber, but to this reader two words jump out, “rightsholders” and “bully.” Let’s take these in turn.

Taylor is, I think, absolutely correct about the difference between print and electronic books, and what this difference means for the relationship between libraries and publishers, “the potential ease with which borrowers can get a free ebook is a quantum shift, not merely an incremental change” (italics in original). He also points out that it is print copies of books that sell when libraries circulate e-books, and publishers would like library patrons to buy e-books as well as print. Fair enough. But the distribution model for e-books and e-book publishers compared to print is also a quantum shift, one that is not addressed here. I may as well start with the inflammatory statement and proceed from there, so here goes: who needs publishers anymore?

We’ve seen traditional distribution channels circumvented in music publishing and distribution for some time now. Radiohead, a popular and critical success, has managed to make millions by selling mp3/wav file downloads directly to consumers, and then partnering with publishers to sell traditional materials. Hundreds of other bands don’t get rich using this model, but they make a living, and maybe even a career out of it, which in the end is their goal. I like to think that most authors don’t dream of millions of dollars, but of millions of people discussing their works and their ideas therein. Maybe that’s overly romantic of me, and so be it, but then again, I know a lot of writers, and I don’t think any of them would trade places with a cash-obsessed hack (no need to name names, insert your tastes here). Authors can sell e-books via Amazon’s Kindle store, something less than a publisher, something more than the Radiohead model. It’s already happening. And it's not entirely a good thing. Look at Borders.

Taylor's use of “rightsholders” is telling. Publishers create nothing; they share the rights with authors because of their ability to distribute and promote, and increasingly, authors can self-publish (many have self-promoted for eons). Taken in this context #hcod seems like the last gasp of a dying industry, doesn’t it? Publishers last comparative advantage is separating the signals from the noise since there are so many potential self-published and -distributed creators. Being published by a firm is a stamp of approval to the rest of the world. But outside of that (admittedly powerful) normative and intersubjective milieu, HarperCollins and other publishers will be left behind.

Now, this is the extreme, not very nuanced position. But tell me I’m wrong. Use the comments below, or use an excerpt on your blog and let’s have a conversation on the middle ground.

As for bullying, we didn’t land on #hcod, Mr. Taylor. #hcod landed on us. Librarians are not the bullies here. Bullies pick on the weak, using positions of strength to force their terms on others. HarperCollins capricious and arbitrary decision to limit check outs of e-books to 26 times was unilaterally imposed on libraries, without consultation or negotiation. Who’s the bully here?

In the end, however, I think the author and I agree on how this is going to end for many public library systems, at least in the short-term: some of the costs of e-books are going to be passed along to patrons. Librarians don’t like charging for services, but given the budget cuts, it’s going to happen. Right now most e-reader owners are affluent and can afford these costs. As e-readers' costs approach $0, though (and that’s going to happen soon), more people at all income levels will have them, at which point lending e-books for a fee may be a only temporary fix.

Maybe by the time we revisit this conversation, there won't be a Big Six, and that's what HarperCollins decision is all about.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

The following post is from Sarah Houghton-Jan, who blogs over at Librarian in Black. I whole-heartedly endorse the following.

Meanwhile, there's spirited debate concerning a boycott of HarperCollins. Because librarians and libraries are about customer service, it’s not something I can completely sanction, but I understand. HarperCollins’ decision is what started this, but at least they make e-books available for a loan, or 26. Simon & Schuster, on the other hand, does not. If a boycott is what gets libraries to the table when decisions like these are made, then ultimately I’m for it. But to me the real enemy is DRM, and what’s below in the bill of rights is much more about DRM than it is about individual publishers.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.