5 Responses to “Bringing Out the Fun in Kids Bedding Design”

1. ree isick on April 17th, 2010 10:19 am
   

   hey shawn one tip when you buy spongebob try looking on the back to see if any of your favourite episodes are on it lmfao
2. yue domontane on April 18th, 2010 7:48 pm
   

   overkill just keeps getting better. this cd has been in my player everyday for the past two weeks. puts the big four to shame except for megadeth
3. carl schridis on April 26th, 2010 5:27 pm
   

   ~Google Books will be better than Gutenberg~

   Listen to an audio version of this Debate of the Day here, or download it from our iTunes podcast.

   This Debate of the Day is released to coincide with London Book Fair (19th-21st April).

   Read the introduction for some background to the debate.

   Agree

   * Google will put a public library in every home
   * Google have done this without costing us a cent
   * Google haven’t acted in an underhand fashion
   * There are already checks and balances
   * Increased availability will democratise culture
   * It’s a bonanza for authors
   * Don’t listen to the squeals of the publishers and booksellers; they are dinosaurs

   Disagree

   * It’s a Big Brother library…
   * …which directly impinges on our liberties
   * The cost is hidden in the Balkanisation of culture
   * Books are great technology – they didn’t have to do this
   * The author/editor/publisher relationship has done culture just fine
   * Wider access is a mirage – and we’re in danger of losing an intelligent filtering process
   * A big corporation is the real winner – along with advertisers
   * Just because publishers are behind the times doesn’t mean Google should take over

   * Google will put a public library in every home

   Google’s own stated goal – to make the world’s information searchable – is a magnificent one, and their digitisation of the collections of the world’s great libraries is a major step towards it. It will transform access to culture. Soon, anyone with an internet connection will be able to read from the millions of books Google has scanned, with no need for a reader’s ticket to the libraries at universities like Oxford, Harvard or Stanford. Many more people will be able to examine old or obscure material, so hidden literary gems and useful nuggets of information will be rediscovered. Even better, every page of these millions of books will be searchable using Google’s world-beating technology, which will make research so much more efficient than conventional indexing ever could. Readers will not have to wait while library staff collect ancient books from hidden shelves in archives, and the books themselves will not be damaged by repeated handling. Your laptop will offer you a better service than any of the world’s great physical archives ever could – all the information relevant to your interest, from sources around the globe, available at the click of a mouse. What’s not to like?

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   * Google have done this without costing us a cent

   This amazing resource has been created entirely free of charge for users. Until the search company developed new technology to digitise books, the process often involved destroying the book itself – the pages had to lie flat in order to be photographed and then passed through a character recognition process to transform them into onscreen text. This often involved cutting off the bindings – anathema for any historical library. The only alternative was to lay a glass screen on each page individually, which was hopelessly inefficient. But then Google’s engineers, making good use of their “20 per cent time” – hours they are paid to spend working on any project they like – came up with a new gizmo to do this process at very high speed, without damaging the books. Essentially, it employs infrared camera technology to detect the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages, then uses text recognition software to compensate and adjust for all the curves and odd angles of the infrared images. Even with this new technology, the digitisation process has taken three years. Without it, it would have taken hundreds. Of course Google has not done this for altruistic reasons, but the outcome benefits us all: such is the wonder of the free market.

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   * Google haven’t acted in an underhand fashion

   Many authors have objected to the way in which Google digitised all the books without first asking the authors’ permission, only giving them a chance to opt out afterwards. But this was the only way the project could have been carried out. The big problem that Google faced was how to deal with “orphan” works – books (ten million in total) which are in copyright but out of print. In contrast to the much larger category of copyright books in print (whose authors or rights holders are easy to identify), or to books that are out of copyright (whose authors don’t need to be contacted at all), orphans pose a logistical nightmare because identifying the rights holders in each case is a very time-consuming business. Had Google sought permission before scanning every orphaned book, they would have spent an impossible length of time – not to mention buckets of money – trying to pursue the rights holders for these “orphans”, thus throwing the entire project in jeopardy. The only sensible course was to scan all the books, then make sure authors knew they needed to contact Google for a share of the proceeds. With “orphans”, Google will attempt to find the rights holder, but if they fail, revenues from their work will be collected for ten years. After that, the proceeds will be used to continue the effort to find other copyright owners.

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   * There are already checks and balances

   The simple act of digitising the books – massive undertaking though it be – is not in itself controversial: it is perfectly legitimate under “fair use” understandings, which mean that libraries are entitled to back up their collections by getting Google to make copies for them. The key consideration is what other uses Google may make of the information, and here again there is no cause for concern since competition and copyright laws are already in place to check Google if they overreach themselves and abuse authors’ rights or monopolise the market. At this very moment, challenges to the rubric of the current Google settlement are going through the American and French courts and may result in modifications to the deal. But even more potent than the reassurance provided by the law is the reassurance provided by improvements in technology. As we learn over and over again, such breakthroughs make worries about monopolies irrelevant over time – many people were concerned about Microsoft’s domination of computing until its power began to wane over the past decade.

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   * Increased availability will democratise culture

   The status quo favours a small number of big-selling blockbusters to the detriment of specialist books – all those niche products that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson refers to as the “long tail” in his 2006 book of the same name. Even though these books may be of great interest to their small target market, the cost of producing and distributing a new title has hitherto been so high that publishers, bookshops and local libraries had no incentive to produce and stock small sellers. If they were published at all, they swiftly went out of print. But the economics of e-trading has started to change all that. Online stores like Amazon have already opened up some of this market – and now Google’s digitisation of books could absolutely revolutionise it. For a start, unlike most other ebooks projects, it covers the past as well as the present, so obscure and long-overlooked publications will now be able to reach their intended audiences – think of all those orphans suddenly finding a home. The company’s expertise in search technology and in techniques for identifying readers’ interests (currently used to place adverts) will also make it far easier for readers to find niche books which will appeal to them. And for those who still like the feel of paper, Print-on-demand technology is becoming more advanced and cheaper all the time, so people will still be able to own and read books made from wood, even if it isn’t worth a publisher’s while to produce a whole print run. Through this process, control of culture will move away from bookshops and publishers, democratising the choice of what is read and what continues to be read over time. This will allow new movements to percolate up into the mainstream rather than vice versa in the current top-down model – something that already happens in, say, pop music, but rarely in literature where publishers prefer to produce more of what has succeeded in the past than take a punt on an untested style. This will make the literary scene far more vivid and exciting for everyone.

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   * It’s a bonanza for authors

   Removing the middlemen from the book trade will improve life for past and future authors as well as readers, creating routes to being read – and paid – which are not governed by luck and publishers’ investment. Under the current system, authors of books which have already gone out of print will pocket at least $60 if Google scan their book and they choose not to opt out of the system. After that, they will get about two thirds of the revenues from any sales of their works on Google Books and from advertising sold alongside it, while Google receives about a third. For the authors, this is effectively money for nothing, considering that they had no chance of gaining any more revenues from their out-of-print work. As for those who hold the rights to the millions of orphan works, they will suddenly start to earn money from works which they might have assumed had no useful life left in them. For future authors, the Google project creates the opportunity to sell their books directly to the public, avoiding the need for bookshops and publishing companies. Many of the manuscripts currently yellowing on publishers’ slush piles would be enjoyed by a small audience. Some might even have broad appeal if only readers could get their hands on them – after all, tales abound of publishers rejecting works which go on to be huge hits, and dozens more must slip through the net. Bookshops and publishers currently cream most of the proceeds of book sales, leaving very little for writers – often only around 5% of the cover price. Many authors could do much better by placing their books with Google.

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   * Don’t listen to the squeals of the publishers and booksellers; they are dinosaurs

   We shouldn’t be surprised if publishers, booksellers and the authors who have done best from the current system fight innovation from Google and their like. They have been very successful at selling dead trees, so of course they are going to stamp on attempts to shake things up. This is the incumbent’s curse – big, established organisations fail to embrace innovation and adapt to change, preferring to make incremental changes to their business model, whereas newer entrepreneurs are able to revolutionise the system. New technology and new approaches are always disruptive, but Luddite attempts to resist progress are misguided. And in this case, the ecology of online books appears to be developing nicely. Google depends on rights holders not opting out en masse or launching legal actions against it, so will be prepared to accommodate many of their demands. Just as the publisher Macmillan forced Amazon to pay it and its authors far more for ebooks than it had intended to, so other publishers and authors will be able to extract decent terms from Google for their work to be distributed.

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   * It’s a Big Brother library…

   This is not a library in the sense that we have always understood it. We may be able to read the books, but the copies will in no sense belong to us or to public institutions. They will remain the property of Google, so the company can change them as they like. This is not a paranoid fantasy – it is already a reality. Kindle users discovered this last year, when Amazon removed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from their readers remotely. Google will be able to do exactly the same thing. This is terrible news for the integrity of the historic record, as Harvard professor of internet law Jonathan Zittrain explained in a lecture earlier this year. If individuals and libraries come to rely on Google’s digitised version of books, less effort will be put into storing physical copies. (This is already happening with newspapers, which are winding down their physical cuttings libraries as online libraries improve.) It means, for example, that it only takes one person to object to the contents of a book – because it allegedly infringes their copyright, say, or because it defames them – to get that item excised from the record. All it takes is a call to Google. This opens the door to a very Orwellian refashioning of history, which the current system, in which many institutions have copies of information, guards against.

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   * …which directly impinges on our liberties

   The Google version of libraries also threatens individual readers. Google not only keeps a record of every page you look at, they also record how long you’ve looked at it for, and which search terms you used to arrive at it. It’s part of their business model, allowing them to tailor their advertising. But this information can be highly sensitive. As author and blogger Cory Doctorow points out, “Our reading histories are private. Librarians and booksellers have spent centuries arguing for the privacy rights of their patrons and customers. For anyone to be able to come along and extract your reading history is a very grave thing.” When America’s 2005 Patriot Act gave the government the right to access individuals’ library records along with other information in order to identify terrorists and potential terrorists, the American Library Association fought back strongly, and formed a resolution to protect patrons’ privacy. Librarians are public servants. Google is a for-profit business. We shouldn’t trust it to protect our privacy and our history.

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   * The cost is hidden in the Balkanisation of culture

   Google’s attitude to copyright has terrifying implications for our culture. The Google Book Agreement will create a copyright register, and envisages a world in which this register acts as a barrier to the use of any sentence, plot detail or character of copyrighted books – much of which is currently considered “fair use”, and is an integral part of the way literary works are created. Permission will have to be sought to use quotes, just as authors currently have to pay to use even a single line of a pop song. The worst thing about this is not the money – it’s the fact that permission could be withheld. An author who suspected that his or her work was going to be criticised could simply refuse to co-operate. As Harvard Law School Professor Larry Lessig argues, we mustn’t let our literary culture be closed down by copyright in the same way as films and music currently are. Documentary film-makers, for instance, face months of struggle to clear the rights to show tiny snippets of film, and any rights holder could veto the project. Plagiarism is clearly unacceptable, but building on and responding to the works of others is integral to the work of fiction and non-fiction authors alike. Google has, at the most charitable interpretation, stretched copyright rules to create its archive – but its own attitude to copyright will hobble the future of literature.

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   * Books are great technology – they didn’t have to do this

   Books and libraries weren’t broken and didn’t need fixing. The printed page is versatile, beautiful and has longevity. Twenty-one copies of the Gutenberg Bible, printed in the 1450s, still survive and are easily readable. By contrast, many documents stored on floppy disks even ten years ago are unrecoverable – because we lack the technology to read them, or because the files have degraded. We should also be concerned if Google Books threatens our libraries. From the British Library down to the tiniest mobile library, these are great institutions, the churches of a secular culture which respects literature and learning. They shape and curate our access to literary culture, drawing our attention towards the most valuable books while saving us from wasting our time on worthless literature. They also create the environment in which we read books, which affects our attitudes to them. We should not necessarily welcome Google’s promise to make access to books easier; there is cultural value in striving after knowledge and seeking out the information we need. When every book is just a click away, we get out of the habit of paying attention to the argument of a single one. Journalist Nicholas Carr described his own experience of losing concentration after spending time researching online in an essay for The Atlantic titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?: “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy…That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.” Carr points to research which shows that users of online archives tend to skim texts, reading one or two pages before hopping to another site. We may run our eyes over the information offered through Google Books, but the medium makes it less likely that we will read it deeply and engage with it, as we are encouraged to do by the cumbersome nature of switching from one book to another in a library.

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   * The author/editor/publisher relationship has done culture just fine

   Our greatest literature has been nurtured by the relationship between authors, editors and publishers. We should mistrust the suggestion that Google’s book scanning project will in future remove intermediaries between authors and readers, allowing writers to sell their books directly. The work done in-house to shape and polish pieces of writing is rarely acknowledged but is essential. Raymond Carver’s pared-down style, for instance, was owed in large part to his editor, Gordon Lish, who cut some of Carver’s short stories down to half their original length. If Google’s attitude towards copyright and cultural production prevents editors and publishers from making money, writers will not be able to sustain themselves; nor will the institutions that nurture them. Google seems to be totally unaware of the realities of the book business. Ken Auletta, who has written a book about Google, describes a conversation with one of the search company’s founders, Sergey Brin. “People don’t buy books” said Brin, who encouraged Auletta to put his book online for free. This might create a buzz and get people more excited about it in the long run, Brin argued. But without an advance from a publisher, who would pay the writer’s travel expenses? Auletta asked. Who would pay lawyers to vet it? Who would hire people to market the book, so that all those potential online readers could discover it? “I guess that’s true,” replied Brin. Then he changed the subject. Tampering with a system when you don’t know how it works – and don’t even seem to care – as Google is doing, is foolish.

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   * Wider access is a mirage – and we’re in danger of losing an intelligent filtering process

   The work done by editors, publishers and librarians to choose which works reach audiences is indispensable. The idea of a “long tail” of worthwhile but ignored books may sound appealing, but this is likely to be made up of bungled works which no one should waste their time and money on reading. Look at the niches that now populate the internet: this is not a “long tail” sparkling with cultural gems from sophisticated auteurs; it’s mostly stuff on YouTube made up of silly videos of kittens. This is in fact precisely why the system of literary stars has emerged – authors such as Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis are simply in a class of their own. There is no reason to believe that putting books on the web, as films and music already have been, will be a way of nurturing greatness. Rather the opposite – when success depends on securing thousands of hits, as it does on the web, the “long tail” amounts to the lowest common denominator. In short, literature doesn’t need to be democratised. It needs to be protected. We should be following the French, who have fought Google’s book scanning. A Paris court has ordered Google to pay more than €300,000 in fines, plus €10,000 more per day. That’s how you protect literary culture, not by caving in to Google’s bullying and propaganda.

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   * A big corporation is the real winner – along with advertisers

   We are handing our literary history and future over to a technological monopoly. Google have benefited from our libraries’ openness and generosity by scanning their books, but they are not offering to share the information they have gathered – individuals and libraries will be able to have access to it, but not download it or own it – and Google could withdraw access at any point. This is because their ultimate goal is to make money, not to enhance culture. Despite their cuddly slogan “don’t be evil”, they will exploit the work of authors, academics and editors through time to sell advertising and earn a profit. Maybe they will throw a few bucks to the people who produced the work in the first place, but this will be peanuts compared to the money they will rake in themselves. This isn’t fair. Our literary culture and our libraries are a shared good, and should not be placed in the hands of a huge private business.

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   * Just because publishers are behind the times doesn’t mean Google should take over

   New technology allows amazing access to great works that were previously inaccessible to almost everyone, but we are allowing Google’s self-interest to chain it down into a new restrictive model. The search giant has gained a huge advantage by being the first mover in this field – it has been quietly digitising books since 2002. Since it now has an almost complete monopoly on book searches, the huge upfront cost it absorbed will be spread over the billions of hits they will get – whereas anyone who tried to enter the market now would have to pay for all the scanning, then try to earn a market share. This would be like digging another Channel Tunnel in order to compete with the Eurostar – virtually impossible, and a complete waste of time since a perfectly good one already exists. Google should be made to share their catalogue of scanned books freely and widely – just as the public libraries gave them access to their archives in the first place. If we don’t force them to do so, we are missing an opportunity to rethink the entire structure of our culture. We could liberate it rather than simply making it free of charge using Google’s advertising-led business model. New approaches to copyright that are more appropriate for a digital age, such as Creative Commons licences, could provide a way forward. The Access To Knowledge movement (A2K) has organised conferences to discuss how to make our culture more open – by allowing free access to publicly funded research, for instance. And the LOCKSS (“lots of copies keep stuff safe”) programme at Stanford University is looking at ways to help libraries preserve digital information. But by allowing Google to dominate we are shutting down the experiment before it starts. We shouldn’t just buy into the Google approach because it is available and because it’s free. We could do so much better.

   http://www.intelligencesquared.com/controversies/google-books-will-be-better-than-gutenberg?result_374_result_page=2&utm_source=Intelligence+Squared+newsletters&utm_campaign=1435f5af9e-Debate_of_the_Day_16_April_2010_Google_books4_16&utm_medium=email
4. temerda on May 6th, 2010 3:16 am
   

   Domingo foi dia de Homem de Ferro. Johnny Deep e Robert Downey Jr. na mesma semana é tudo de bom!!
5. eginsky on May 23rd, 2010 10:02 pm
   

   HEAVENLY DAYZ: Bea Arthur & Sammy Davis Jr. on the Johnny Carson Show tomorrow night. Kay Kyser (himself) at Kay Kyser Kollege tonite.

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