Google Does E-Books

Google finally launched its e-reader app and online bookstore today, after several months of delays and not a little buzz.  Whereas other e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, limit where you can buy your books, Google’s idea is that you can store your books in the cloud and then read them on any device with an internet connection, including some e-readers.  In fact, books that are read through the specific apps, rather than stored online through your Google account, can be accessed offline as well.

This is, I think, a big step forward in the evolution of e-readers.  Granted, there are Kindle versions for different devices, including computers and phones (and iPods), but you still have to purchase your books (and even download public domain ones) through Amazon.

Here’s Google’s introductory video.

Another great feature of the new release is the ability to purchase books through independent sellers.  You can purchase books directly from Google, or you can choose a local shop.  This is unlike Amazon’s approach, which is to fight for control at every stage along the way.  Google’s approach is “reading unbound,” as the store’s motto says.

Things are still getting going (I even tried to get the app before it was available this morning), and so the current selection, even though comprising millions of volumes, is not exhaustive.  For instance, I searched for Philip Roth’s Everyman, one of my favorite books, and I couldn’t find it.  There were only a handful of Roth books available right now.  But that will surely change very quickly, especially as independent booksellers set up their online stores.

So how will this affect libraries?  I’m sure there will soon be reactions from all over about this development, with a wide range of opinions, but my hope is that this will help libraries in their attempts to provide digital books for people to check out and read.  There are some e-readers, like Sony’s, that have been compatible with libraries from the get go, but if Google makes it much easier to access e-books across a variety of media, then hopefully this will reduce some of the obstacles facing libraries now, at least as soon as the lending and copyright issues are all worked out.  If nothing else, companies like Amazon, which have been less than helpful with regard to libraries, will surely be forced to extend privileges and control on the user’s end.

book review: Delete

a very thoughtful book about the role that remembering and forgetting have (supposedly) played throughout human history, and why we are for the first time at a point where remembering, not forgetting, has become the default.  the author finds this problematic for two main reasons.

the first has to do with power.  despite what is said, information is not power — it’s the ability to control and restrict access to information that is power.  Mayer-Schonberger worries about the extent to which we may, whether we know it or not, lose control over pertinent information about ourselves, including more troublesome features like our personal information, as well as our tastes and opinions that outside agents use to great extensive — and unending — dossiers about us.  we are not in a great position to control who has that information and what they do with it.

the second has to do with time.  Mayer-Schonberger sees forgetting — as frustrating as it may be — as a blessing in disguise in that it lets us freely reconstruct our memories — which are far from perfect — as we progress through our lives, choosing to focus on (and thus retain) certain memories and not others.  what happens when we have perfect (not now, but someday soon) recall, through digital technology, of all of our past decisions and events?  will we, like the few individuals who do have perfect memories, be frozen in indecision, constantly replaying the past and inept at acting in the present?

the author then takes a look at a number of possible solutions, from digital rights management to information abstinence and other suggestions, but decides that these are not “silver bullets” for confronting the problem that we face today.  however, he does not reject these, and in fact he hopes to see many of them in place.  his concerns are pragmatic and focused on where we are now, and he does not denigrate other suggestions (many from his peers) in self-promotion.

his ultimate solution is to use meta-data to place expiration dates on information that we store or share with ourselves, in addition to supporting programs in our technology (e.g., storage devices) and online tools (e.g., browsers) that automatically erase information about our searches after a time period — a period we may have some control over.  we could thus choose what types of queries we want google or amazon to remember indefinitely, and which ones to forget after some time.

overall, Mayer-Schonberer’s suggestions are very interesting ones, especially since they are rooted in the technology as we have it today, although there would need to be some pressure on companies to implement some of these changes to help people make the transition (he takes humans as they are, with imperfect knowledge and motivations, and that’s another strength of the book).  it’s  not entirely certain how all of these suggestions would play out — and how inconvenient it would all be.

in the case of putting a shelf-date on personal photos shared online — which is one of the cases he uses to illustrate the extent to which information online can come back to haunt us — it seems difficult to know how you would decide what expiration date to put on something like that.  plus, if you consciously put a date on a photo that could get you into some trouble — maybe you should think twice about sharing that photo.  indeed, in the case he uses — someone being denied a teaching certificate because of a questionable photo on myspace — a photo like that could be found at any point before the expiration date and the individual could still face unforeseen consequences — after all, that’s the point of the story: it was a seemingly harmless photo that the individual never thought could be used against her.

but again, the strength of the author’s position — and of the book overall — is that he is not out to establish THE plan for confronting these concerns; rather, he works within the existing frameworks to offer a novel solution that could help fill in some of the gaps and — in keeping with the concerns of the book — return to individuals some of that control over information and help shift the balance back to a society in which forgetting — and not remembering — is once again the default (even if just barely).

book review: Infotopia

this book, as its subtitle indicates, is about the production of knowledge by many minds.  but the book is less about the fact that many minds produce knowledge than about the ways in which information that is dispersed among many minds can be accessed and the conditions under which those varying methods work best.  under discussion are surveys/polls, deliberation, markets, wikis, open source software, and blogs.

so, for instance, he starts off the book talking about the surprising ways in which large groups of people can outperform individuals when answers are averaged out.  often the average answer — when guessing the weight of some object, when trying to correlate body weight with gender — is not only better than the best individual answer, but also better than what a supposed expert can offer.  to be sure, aggregating information like this only works under specific conditions, say, when it is reasonable to presume that people might have a general idea about something.  it would be useless to rely on the statistical responses of people for information not privy to most people, say, the year of some lesser known historical event or the name of someone’s pet (unless that someone is famous, maybe).

the reason that this works, Sunstein explains, is due to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which states that the probability of arriving at a correct answer increases as the size of the group increases provided that there is greater than a 50% chance that people will arrive at a correct answer.  the more people you have, the closer you approach to 100%.  this is the reason why “ask the audience” usually works well in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — because there’s a decent chance that some people know the answer, or at least can correctly rule out false answers.  in these types of situations, it is beneficial to rely on the responses of a large group of people (as large as possible, in fact) to increase the chances of arriving at the correct answer.

the flip side of this math, however, is that if people have less than a 50% chance of knowing the correct answer — again, when asking about information not widely disseminated — the probability of arriving at the correct responses approaches 0% as the group increases.  so clearly this isn’t always (or even often) the best way of arriving at the truth.

the second method under review is deliberation.  Sunsstein is open about giving deliberation a bad rap here not because it is entirely inefficient, but because it is so often assumed to be the ideal way of accessing dispersed information and thus the truth.  deliberation lies at the heart of many practices in this country, from trials by jury to our deliberative democracy.  the problem with deliberation, in short, is that it doesn’t work very well.  Sunstein offers a number of reasons for this, owing to some of the natural shortcomings of the human mind (some familiar terrain after reading Kluge) and to particular behavioral phenomena in group settings, such as the general “groupthink” idea, along with informational cascades (when people factor into their responses the likelihood that other people, who may hold a different opinion, would be wrong and so answer or vote not purely on the basis of information but on what everyone else appears to know as well) and the many pressures on individuals to preserve group harmony (or their own status) by not offering information they may have that goes against the conventional group wisdom.  in experiments, people also tend to accord more authority to people in higher positions (including class, gender, and race — even if those social statuses are irrelevant to the immediate context) and to ignore others, regardless of the value of the information.

in one particularly illuminating example, the author discusses an experiment in which individuals of a group are asked to vote for candidates in an imaginary election.  the experiment is set up in such a way that Candidate A is clearly the most fit choice for the position.  when group members are all given about 2/3 of the relevant information for the candidates, the deliberation usually results in the correct choice of Candidate A (a statistical improvement over the initial poll of individuals — so here, deliberation helped).  however, when the members are all given 2/3 of the information about the other candidates, and the information about Candidate A is dispersed among individual members (even if the total information is more than in the previous scenario), the groups fail to access the relevant information contained by some of its members.  as a result, they end up choosing one of the demonstrably inferior candidates.  moreover, the percentage of votes for Candidate A fell after deliberation.  why?  because the information favoring the wrong candidate is that which is held by all the members — a phenomenon aptly called “the common knowledge effect.”

the major concern here is that deliberation groups often fail to access the relevant information held by some of its members because of the tendency to favor (and focus on) information shared by all rather than on individual perspectives, even when there was no evident (or stronger than usual) “status” issues or instances of social pressure on conforming to group opinion (indeed, there was no group opinion until the hypothetical information was given out).  in other experiments, the success of deliberation groups was also dependent on whether the group members were “primed” to think that arriving at the correct answer was important, as opposed to priming them for getting along.  this is cold comfort when thinking of juries and governmental deliberation.

this is not to say, however, that deliberation never works — obviously it worked in the first part of the experiment.  indeed, deliberation groups can perform as well as their best member, and sometimes they can even outperform their best member when pieces of relevant information are dispersed and the information, together, helps the group arrive at the correct answer.  but deliberation is best limited to instances when an answer is readily available (like problem solving) or “eureka” problems — when the correct answer can be identified by all as soon as it is made apparent.  on more ambiguous matter — say on social or moral issues, or anything involving ideology of whatever sort — deliberation groups are fairly terrible, often resulting in the amplification of previous biases (a well-documented event, familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a chat room or on a message board — or even among a group of like-minded friends, really).

Sunstein then moves on to markets — prediction markets, more specifically.  on the general level, the author discusses why online review sites (of movies, restaurants, products, etc.) have worked so well on the principle of a market and the establishing of a “price” of a particular commodity.  but what is most interesting is his discussion of more recent developments of prediction markets in which people place value (and trade stock) on the likelihood of a certain outcome — say, the winners of Oscars or the results of a political election.  surprisingly, these “markets” have often (but not always) outperformed even the best experts in their predictions.  the reasons why these markets work is that they provide an incentive for people with good information to put their money where their mouth is, resulting in predictions made by people who, in theory at least, have relevant information.  if you are concerned, as the author is, with how we most efficiently go about accessing widely dispersed information in society, then markets are often an excellent way of bypassing some of the social pressures and dynamics of deliberation groups.  these don’t always have to be (indeed, they often aren’t) open to the public and so can limit the predictions and trading to the relevant individuals.  so far, these types of markets have proved excellent within individual companies (e.g., Google and HP) at predicting what products will be the most successful or when a new product or program will be ready for distribution.  this new approach undermines conventional wisdom of a board of big wigs — who couldn’t possibly have access to all of the relevant information possessed by all the employees — making the decision from the top down.

to keep the rest of this brief(er), Sunstein then moves on to the various Web 2.0 developments in social media and information aggregation — including wikis, open source software, and blogs — and discusses their relative merits, as well as causes for concern.  as it turns out, unmediated forums for the sharing and refining of information have proved more effective than many feared.  that is not to say there are not problems with, say, wikis — indeed, Wikipedia is far better on some topics than others, and even then usually as a general guide, not the end-all authority — or blogs — here we can find some pretty terrible groupthink behavior, along with more than generous helpings of bullshit — but overall, they are very effective in ensuring that dispersed information sees the figurative light of day.  in fact, Sunstein discusses a few instances where information shared online by bloggers helped to correct statements made by political candidates (leading to apologies) or to debunk a phony document (leading Dan Rather to apologize and retire).

the book ends with a few discussions about the situations in which the various methods work best and a few suggestions about how groups and organizations can best make use of them.

overall, this is a very interesting book and fascinating information.  unfortunately, for even such a short book (225 pages), it was more repetitive than necessary and could have benefited from more individual case studies.  also, while I am tempted to say that this book is to groups what Gary Marcus’ Kluge is for the individual mind, this book is not nearly as entertaining and engaging as Marcus’, which is unfortunate because it certainly had the potential to be as captivating and perhaps even more relevant.

und was mache Ich jetzt?

oh lordy, have you seen and used Google translate?  you can upload or paste entire documents into its text field, or you can paste the link to an entire web site and get a fairly decent translation in seconds!

I’ve had a Google translator box on my homepage for a while now, which I use when translating (it’s sometimes better than other, more official dictionary sites, especially when it comes to more modern terms and slang).  but I had never actually tried to use it for anything more — in fact, I didn’t even know about this until someone linked to an article I thought should have been in German but was in an only slightly awkward English.

check out these screen shots:

so now what do I do with myself?  I have to reevaluate how much time I want to spend learning modern languages.  I at least want a decent working vocabulary in whatever language I learn, and I want to understand the principles of the grammar, so that even when using a tool like this, I can make corrections where I see errors and I can know what’s going on.  plus the learning is part of what’s fun for me!

but as I’ve posted before, it’s just not possible for me to keep up on all the languages I have learned on a regular, weekly (even monthly) basis, and it will only get worse.  now with programs like these — which will only get better — it looks like there’s a new argument in favor of learning more languages generally rather than specializing in any one.  it’s not always important to me to read everything in the original — that will never be entirely possible and I have other things to read and do …

but I do love the languages I learn and want to spend time with them.  so this is one reason I’ve been reading more poetry lately, in English and in other languages.  I have a book of Paul Celan‘s German poetry coming soon, and I hope to get some classical Greek and Latin lyrical poets in the near future.  I think this will be a more “economical” choice for me when it comes to enjoying and keeping up with the languages I learn.  who knows, maybe one day I’ll get back into Hebrew and check out some biblical poetry!

article review: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”

in this thoughtful essay in the Atlantic, Nicholas Carr muses over the extent to which we may become (or already are) dumber as a result of the way we access information, and the accessibility of that information overall.

among his chief concerns are:

first, our ability to digest complex ideas or lengthy writing: the most comprehensive studies of internet search habits and the accessing of information online so far indicate that we skim and jump from topic to topic, rarely returning to our starting point.  in a particularly effective metaphor, he writes, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.  Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

second, the impact of this kind of learning and thinking on our brains: as reading is not “natural” in the sense that speaking is, there is good reason to suspect that processing a lot more smaller pieces of information as opposed to digesting lengthy books or letting complex ideas simmer may produce a genuine difference.  plus there is the concern about how this type of accessing information affects how we interact in the world and with one another.

third, the concern that we will allow technology to do all the thinking for us, eventually leading to the point where we’d be drained of “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance.”  reflecting on a comment made by one of Google’s founders, he writes,

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.  It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.  In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.  Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.  The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

there are a few responses and thoughts on the Edge web site, here.  I particularly like Larry Sanger’s brief dissent and apt phrase, “epistemic indigestion.”

W. Daniel Hillis writes that the problem is not Google but the flood of information (“a metaphor so trite,” he writes, “that we have ceased to question it”).  in this flood, Google is in fact a life preserver.  these days, so much more is expected of us in terms of current events, pop culture, etc. he sums up,

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings.  This is still true, but our surroundings have grown.  We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends.  Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter.  Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth.  We skim, we summarize, we skip to the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point.  We are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat.

I have to say that I think this relates more to those persons who make an effort to be informed and who, as learners, are struggling with the “flood” of information — and not necessarily the average person who can’t locate, say, Mexico on a map.  I mean, I’m still learning my states…

clearly, one of the most significant benefits of this change in how we access information is who gets to access it: everyone (well, not quite, but that’s where it’s headed).  with historical records, works, persons, and ideas within such close reach, it democratizes knowledge to a great extent and provides an unprecedented (and even previously unimaginable) possibility for information.  there is so much culturally and politically at stake when it comes to our history and that of others, so access to this information — albeit with the patience to actually digest it — is crucial.

the problem, of course, is whether or not we are able to digest any of that information, rather than simply scan or sample it.  this is the topic of the article. are we losing our patience and our ability to mull over lengthy writings and complex arguments?  are we all in danger of moving “from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style”?  for me, this brings up the question of education and the goals of universities. do we teach and learn lists and big ideas, or do we learn how to access information and — and this is the kicker — think critically about that information.  we need to learn how to wade through the effluvium and find the core ideas, how to mull over ideas and take them apart, and how to relate previously disparate fields of knowledge in order to think and act reasonably in the world.

I should say, though, that my ability to read over longer periods of time and to reflect in ideas is, I feel (and hope), actually getting better.  I read more now and am increasingly interested in mulling things over and reflecting critically.  but then again, I also want to have a foot — maybe a toe? — in a much larger spread of ideas and fields of knowledge so as to at least have an idea about the “terrain” and how to go about navigating through it should I have the need.  and I want to at least be slightly informed when something is under discussion so I can appreciate it and reflect it on not-altogether-unfruitfully.