The post is based on Aaron Swartz’s rant against OCLC and WorldCat.  It is, however, a valid rant.  Libraries have tolerated OCLC’s “less than open” practices because there wasn’t much alternative.  Now that open alternatives such as Open Library and ‡biblios.net are growing, it will be interesting to see what happens.  With the growing popularity of open source in libraries, having open records and open cataloging will be very important.

The Virginia Physics “Flexbook” project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open–source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content.

The concept of open source textbooks is very cool.  Open source and education are a natural match.  I know there are other free textbooks out there, but I really like the level of collaboration Virginia trying to achieve here.  The finished materials will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share–Alike license.

It will be interesting to see if the term “flexbook” catches on.  I like it.

Find out more on the Virginia Secretary of Technology’s website.

Now I dislike DRM just as much as the next person. In fact, I probably dislike it more than most people. I understand that it makes content unnecessarily difficult to access and leaves out people without access to certain software or hardware. But the sad truth is that libraries don’t really have much choice. DRM is put in place by the vendors and if libraries boycotted those companies they wouldn’t have much digital content to offer their users.

We’ve seen the retail sector start to move away from DRM with vendors offering unprotected music and such. We are also starting to see library vendors offer DRM-free content. So we are hopefully seeing the beginnings of a trend away from locked-down content. There’s still a long way to go and it’s not going to happen over night. Baby steps.

So while I appreciate all that the Free Software Foundation does, demanding that libraries drop DRM now is just not feasible. Our users want popular, digital content and libraries need to provide it if they want to stay relevant. Should users complain to libraries about DRM? Sure. Should libraries complain to their vendors about it? Definitely. Boycotting digital content, however, is just not an option.

Random House notes that they’ve been running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those DRM-free editions; rather, they’ve come from DRM’ed editions that were cracked, and from ripped CDs.

It goes on to say that Audible (recently purchased by Amazon) may also drop its DRM. Considering that Amazon is very successfully selling non-DRM music, I think non-DRM audiobooks are likely in the future.

It looks like the anti-DRM music movement may now be moving to include audiobooks. Are ebooks next? What about video? How will this affect libraries and library vendors? I’m not ready to say that DRM is dying, but it’s certainly not in good health right now. 2008 is sure to bring more changes.

Update: Penguin and Simon & Schuster Audio have also announced that they are going to try out DRM-free audio books.

I overheard several people at the workshop talking about the new Harry Potter book. I thought it was very funny this morning when I read an article on CNN reporting that the entire book has already been leaked onto the Web. Someone simply photographed the text and uploaded the images. As I mentioned in my presentation, no matter what DRM is in use it’s almost impossible to plug the analog hole. Oh yeah, Harry dies. Just kidding! (maybe)

Slides from my talk are now available.

A better form of captcha relies on logic rather than images; something that asks random, simple questions like “enter the sum of 2 + 3.” There is, however, a new take on image-based captcha systems. reCAPTCHA combines CAPTCHA and OCR to help digitize books (one word at a time) while protecting web forms from spam bots. Better yet, the system is being made freely available.

I’m not yet convinced it will work, but it’s an interesting idea. There’s a reCAPTCHA module available for our content management system. So I may have to try it out.

I’m not a coffee drinker, but this interests me because library patrons can benefit from the same type of service. Here in Ohio, OPLIN has launched a mobile interface to find the nearest public library. Just go to www.oplin.org/mobile on your phone and plug in a zip code. It even lists the closest branch of a library. It would be great if a service like this could take advantage of the GPS in some phones so that a zip code isn’t needed.  And how about a Google Map mashup to plot the closest libraries and give driving directions to them?

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=eRjVeRbhtRU]

I haven’t purchased technical books in dead tree form for a while. Electronic and online versions are much more handy. But these discounts may just prompt me to add a few more items to my book shelf.