[Ed. Note: This was received by ACQNET 8-30-00]
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 13:48:52 -0400
From: Gerry Mckiernan (Iowa State U.) <GMCKIERN_at_gwgate.lib.iastate.edu>
Subject: Pieces of the Pies: Customized Books, or Slice 'Em and Dice'Em
_Pieces of the Pies: Customized Books_
On July 18, the New York Times published a most interesting article on
soon-to-be-available customized books
"Books by the Chapter or Verse Arrive on the Internet this Fall / by
Lisa Guernsey"
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/18book.html)
NOTE: A free account must be established to access this item.
Here are some excerpts from the article
"This fall, ...[The Frommer's guide to France] and a few hundred others will
take a new form on the Internet. They will be sold in component parts --
chapters, maps and even paragraphs -- that can be mixed and matched. Readers
will be invited to create customized books by picking pieces of content à la
carte from an array of already-published guides."
"Under this model, books have not only turned into streams of electronic bits
that are downloaded to hand-held devices or printed on demand. They have
also turned into databases -- pools of digital information that people can
extract and combine on their own terms."
"Travel books, textbooks, cookbooks and how-to guides will be some of the
first books chopped into interchangeable parts, according to officials at
publishing and software companies experimenting with the concept."
"If a book is going to be chopped into digital pieces for mixing and matching,
those pieces need to be technologically compatible with parts of other books.
And to make those pieces searchable across databases, companies will have to
establish a standard means to identify the piecemeal content, just as the
International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, enables books to be catalogued,
tracked and bought quickly."
"Most of the progress so far has come from the realm of education and research.
College professors, after all, have been mixing chunks of editorial content for
decades by assigning "course packs" that are typically compilations of
photocopied pages from magazines, anthologies and nonfiction books.
Now, with advances in copyright-protection software and the recent drive
to create electronic books, many publishers have embraced the idea of selling
individual chapters from multiple academic books."
With these pending scenarios in mind, I am very interested in initiating a
list discussion of the implications and ramifications of such developments for
libraries and librarians and our clientele.
[I am particularly interested in the impacts on selection, acquisition and
cataloging.]
As Always, Any and All comments, critiques, questions, contributions,
commentary, etc. etc. etc. are Most Welcome!
/Gerry McKiernan
Theoretical Librarian
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011
gerrymck_at_iastate.edu
Received on Mon Sep 04 2000 - 14:55:19 EDT