I was informed earlier that my RSS feed had a character-encoding problem. It appears to have been an artifact of server upgrades by my host, and (I am told, again) is now fixed.
If the RSS is still acting weird, let me know. Sorry for the snafu.
So what’s Rothman on about?
Well, one thing is a follow-the-money hit on OEBF management in general and Steve Potash in particular. I don’t particularly like either the OEBF as currently constituted or Steve (and I’ve made no particular secret of it, either), but Rothman’s hit is absurd and his proposed solution drastically incomplete, and it doesn’t take any particular knowledge of the OEBF or of Steve to see why.
Yes, the OEBF is run on fees from its members. Duh. That’s never been a secret. Yes, they’re a trade group, made up of and answerable to their industry-drawn members rather than the general public. That’s been so all along, too. Yes, their management is drawn from their members’ management. Where the hell else are they supposed to get it, hm?
See, here’s the thing. That’s how just about all standards bodies work. It’s not specific to the OEBF; the W3C works the same damn way. The IETF doesn’t, admittedly, but the IETF also has a real problem with being ineffectual because of shifting membership and no direction. I have asked, over and over and over again, that people read Liora Alschuler’s brilliant article about this. GO READ IT NOW, PLEASE; here’s a quote most apropos to Rothman’s criticisms:
There is a purism about standards writing that seems to say, if you are accepting money, somehow your motives are tainted, your work is suspect. Yet very few people do this work without financial support. “Paid” and “volunteer” merely designate whether the funding is through an employer (who sees a business interest in the outcome) or through a public agency (which sees a public benefit in the outcome.)
Yes, it’s a problem—standards bodies are only answerable to the public good insofar as their individual members are idealists (and we’re damned lucky that a fair few smart techies seem to have an idealist streak) and can get away from their sponsors’ wishes long enough to be idealists. I don’t have a pat answer to that, but it certainly informs my wish that librarians would get more involved with standards development.
Rothman doesn’t have an answer either, from anything I’ve seen. It’s all very well to call for a new organization, but how will it be funded? How will it be led? Who will its technical experts be? How will they be supported in their work? (And I don’t mean “who pays them?” though that is a fine question; I mean “who does their time-consuming logistical and editorial gruntwork?” The W3C pays people to get gruntwork done. PubStruct lucked into me, and couldn’t replace me when I left.) What stops the new org from being just another OEBF? Who gets industry buy-in to whatever the new org produces? Whence comes the new org’s credibility?
It’s just not as simple as calling Steve Potash the bad guy. For what it’s worth, my impression is that Steve believes what he says. He genuinely believes that DRM is both necessary and inevitable. He believes that without the mass-market, ebooks will wither and die. And he really wants ebooks. He really does. Yes, he aligns both OverDrive and the OEBF around his beliefs. How could he reasonably do otherwise? I think he’s wrong in a lot of ways, mind you—but he’s honestly wrong, not venally wrong.
Nor is Steve on the take from the OEBF. Candidly, I suspect his presidency has cost him and OverDrive far more than it’s ever made up in business gained. And there is no—I mean, NO—chance of Steve doing anything dishonest with OEBF funds. (Dumb, yes; I see the openanebook.org page now points back to the OEBF, after the silly PR stunt they tried. But dishonest, no.) For one thing, there’s oversight. For another, Steve is a lawyer by trade and bloody well knows better. For a third—and you’ll have to trust me on this one—that’s very, very not Steve.
Sure, the contacts he makes via OEBF work are important to him and his business. That’s a key reason businesses join standards bodies. And it’s a key reason for individual people, for that matter—I still have plenty of people in my card-file I met through OEBF, and they’re still important to me professionally. If that’s an inherent conflict of interest, then I’m as guilty as Steve.
And if it’s not, then Steve isn’t guilty either.
I’d really appreciate it if Mr. Rothman would quit smearing Steve Potash. I’d appreciate a public apology, too, and a private one would be eminently appropriate in addition. I think attacking Steve was a cheap and ultimately pointless attention-grabbing ploy. There are indeed real issues, technical and social, and my next post(s?) will try to address them and suggest a way forward, but whatever his mistakes and possibly mistaken beliefs, Steve Potash absolutely doesn’t deserve to have his integrity called into question, not without vastly better evidence than Mr. Rothman has presented. Or, indeed, vastly better evidence than I think actually exists.
Well, this is one of the awkwarder positions I’ve found myself in. And I suspect it’s one that won’t lend itself to the usual length of a single CavLec blog entry. So be it, I suppose… I can always write more than one.
This post had better carry all the disclaimers and all the history. Off I go, then.
David Rothman has called twice recently for an end to the Open eBook Forum. I’ve got my own opinions on that, and me being me, you’re all going to be subjected to them. But first…
I started working with the OEBF on the OEB Publication Structure in May 2000, when the OEBF formally incorporated. I was at the time working for Impressions Book and Journal Services, which became an OEBF member and paid for my time and travel expenses as I did OEBF work. I was in short order chosen scribe to the Publication Structure working group, and in that capacity I edited the 1.0.1 release of the Publication Structure.
I left Impressions in May 2001 intending to make a go of TAG, but Steve Potash of OverDrive hired me instead. I worked for OverDrive until March 2002. Steve came within a millimeter of firing me once, but in the end I walked under my own power. TAG had to wait, though, owing to a non-compete agreement signed with OverDrive which I honored to the letter.
I could not, however, make time to continue with the OEBF after leaving OverDrive—and certainly I didn’t have travel money. Truth be told, too, I wasn’t happy with where I saw the organization going, or with what looked like (and in hindsight was) a general disengagement on PubStruct. We just weren’t accomplishing anything. I resigned as PubStruct scribe.
Take all this into consideration while you read. Myself, I have not yet read any reactions to Rothman’s articles (though they got a Slashdot mention yesterday), nor have I spoken with anyone associated (now or since) with the OEBF, OverDrive, or Impressions about them. (Jon Noring alerted me to the articles’ existence, but only with a bare notification—he said nothing other than that, nor did I.)
Whatever I say, it’s just me saying it. I don’t speak for any person or organization but myself and TAG, and any agendas I have I’m doing my best not to hide. I may, in fact, get in trouble for opening my mouth on this—but so be it; openness is more important.
So that’s where I’m writing from.
Lovely check in today’s snailmail from WonderClient. Yay WonderClient!
That had been starting to worry me. Almost 30 days past due. What’s worse is that I do TAG’s tax accounting on a cash basis (because it’s the only sane way, I’m telling you), and without that check TAG would have had a loss for the year. Not a big one, but nonetheless—the IRS is fond of auditing small businesses that show losses.
TAG is nicely in the black for 2003 now, yes indeed.
Well, my last data-entry coworker has moved on; she landed another job (which must be a considerable relief). Now it’s just me, my boss, and the other grad assistant. The Fellowship is broken.
Probably a good time to say aloud—again—what a terrific job this has been. I’ve been here just about as long as CavLec has existed, and believe me, if CavLec were contemporaneous with either of the two jobs previous to this, its (whining-about-)work category would be many, many, many times as large as it is.
In a year or so I’ll be on the job hunt again (in-school job hunts aside). The best legacy this particular job will leave me is a high standard for other jobs and coworkers to meet—I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to avoid before I came here, but now I know what I want to look for, too.
And that’s good.
Playing with Bloglines today. I have never been an aggregator person before, but I think my mind is changing.
See, the problem with ping-check services (such as Blogrolling) is that not every site pings, and some of the ping-recording sites have gotten to be so unreliable that sites that do ping faithfully don’t necessarily get their pings picked up.
So my blogroll perforce divides itself into pingers and non-pingers, and I’ve found myself dropping non-pingers from the list because I just haven’t got time to check them regularly. Even if it’s not their fault that they’re non-pingers!
But with RSS aggregation, no site with a feed has to depend on a ping-recording site or blogrolling.com to get to my attention. Distributed notification, essentially. That is not at all uncool. And the way Bloglines is set up, I don’t have to forego the pleasure of going to blog sites and looking at nice blog designs, another objection of mine to aggregators.
There are, still, sites that don’t have RSS feeds. But the number of sites I read that neither ping nor RSS is vanishingly small, so my total nonproductive-site-surfing time still goes down quite a bit. (Yeah, yeah, quit laughing, you there. By “nonproductive” I mean “not producing new things for me to read,” okay?)
I’m mildly amused at the reactions to Return of the King. Not just because plenty of people are scraping the barrel-bottom for yabbuttery, though that is certainly amusing enough.
It’s that the yabbuttery falls into no pattern whatever. Some people love the battle scenes and shrug at the character stories. And I heard one person express a wish that the war had been handled offstage, Shakespeare-style, to give the characters more time.
And this “several endings” business—am I the only person who recalls a book chapter entitled “Many Partings,” and thinks the slow, careful fades between scenes toward the end of the movie are a not un-clever nod to that chapter title?
Point being, the diversity of opinion in yabbuttery is exactly, right down to the exclamation points in some cases, what happened with the first two movies. And nobody seems to remember that, either. Short memory we’ve got.
Me, I’ve got small-c catholic tastes. I ain’t got no problem watching the Rohirrim kick Easterling butt all over the landscape. And I simply adore movie-end; it’s beautiful. (Though here’s my personal nitpick: good end-credits song, but Annie Lennox, much as I love her stuff, was the wrong choice to sing it. She’s lost her belt voice, and the chorus to “Into the West” needs a stirringly attractive belt voice.)
And I’m still Bernard Hill’s biggest fangirl, in case anyone was wondering.
So a mere day after my accessibility paper gets submitted for a departmental prize, I get an email from a coworker of my prof’s who is putting together some daylong talks on librarianly web stuff for next spring, associated with a couple of LITA Regional Institutes. Would I be interested in doing a talk based on my paper?
Well, heck yeah!
And in a bit of mild serendipity, she suggests the paper be submitted for the same LITA prize I was contemplating yesterday. So now I’ll just plain have to go and do that.
This post contains a mild Return of the King spoiler. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
So we got to the theatre only a few minutes before the show started (I came straight from work), and ended up in the fourth or fifth row back from the screen.
Up in front there was this kid, about the age I was when I first read the trilogy, eight or nine or thereabouts. And he was just loving it, though it was clear a few of the plot twists were going over his head. (Which is okay. When I was his age I was going to The Empire Strikes Back, and I’m dead sure I didn’t get everything. I mean, I was five or six when I saw Star Wars, and two years is an eternity of forgetfulness to a kid that age.)
The black-sailed pirate ships float onto the screen, ready to ruin the White City. The orcs come slavering up demanding to know where the bloody damned pirates have been all this time. The kid in the front row gasps audibly. “Oh, no!” I heard, quite distinctly.
SPOILER IN NEXT PARAGRAPH. Keep reading at your own risk.
And then Aragorn leaps over the gunwales, Anduril at the ready and Legolas and Gimli right behind him—and the kid lets out a cheer, half joy and half relief, and pumps his little fists wildly.
Cute as the dickens. Even I had to admit it. And PJ should be happy; to my mind, that’s got to be exactly the reaction he wanted.
We went to RotK again yesterday, and when we got home I couldn’t make myself wait the extra day for David to open his present. So I gave it to him.
I did what I’ve been meaning to do for at least two years—put together a scrapbook of the calligraphy (and a few notebook scribbles, because they were fascinating-looking) he did for the trilogy. I also went through the stack of newspapers in the office and cut out David articles to stick in the back.
(I didn’t find them all; I know of two I’m missing, and there may be more. We really need to clean out the office. I know they’re in there somewhere! But at least I got rid of the stack of newspapers, you know? Hm, and maybe I should see how many copies of that 2000 Wired issue we have. If the answer is greater than one, perhaps I’ll dismantle one copy so I can scrapbook the article.)
I need to hit the craft store to pick up more clear document-sleeves and some longer screws to hold the album together. Going to try to do that after work today.
But rest assured, Chicagolanders, the scrapbook will come along with us to Lisle Library. There’s some good stuff in there, stuff I’d forgotten he even did.