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I made a thing. It started out with me just reading Twitter. A friend built a thing and tweeted about it.

Here’s a thing I made during an in-class demo today. https://t.co/e4EEfyp5vg

— Dan Phiffer (@dphiffer) March 29, 2016

The thing was a super-simple search box which returned content on Flickr that was public domain or Creative Commons licensed. Very cool. However, when I use stuff on my talks, tools or otherwise, I like to make sure it’s free content. Creative Commons is great, I just was looking for something a little different. I noticed the code was on Github and thought “Hmmm, I might be able to do this…”

I’ve used Github a bit for smaller things, making little typo fixes to other people’s stuff. If you don’t know about it, it’s basically a free online front end to software called Git. At this site, people can share a single code base and do “version control” with it. This is a super short and handwavey explanation but basically if someone says “I made a thing, the code is on Github” you can go get that code and either suggest modifications to the original owner OR get a copy for yourself and turn it into something else.

In the past we’ve always said that Open Source was great because if you didn’t like something you could change it. However it’s only been recently that the tools to do this sort of thing have become graspable by the average non-coder. I am not a coder. I can write HTML and CSS and maybe peek inside some code and see what it’s doing, maybe, but I can’t build a thing from scratch. Not complaining, just setting the scene.

So, I “forked” this code (i.e. got my own copy) and opened it up to see if I could see where it was doing its thing and if I could change it to make it do something slightly different. Turns out that Flickr’s API (Advanced Programming Interface) basically sends a lot of variables back and forth using pretty simple number codes and it was mostly a case of figuring out the numbers and changing them. In this image, green is current code, red is older code.

The fact that the code was well-commented really helped. So then I changed the name, moved it over to space that I was hosting (and applied for my own API code) and I mess around with it every few days. And here’s the cool thing. You can also have this code, either Dan’s which searches free and CC images, or mine which only searches for free images. And you don’t have to mess with it if you don’t want. But if maybe you want to use the thing but make a few of your own modifications, it’s easier than ever to do it with something like Github. Please feel free to share.

If you’re always looking for more ways to get public domain and free images, you may like this older post I wrote.

Reference question of the day was about finding public domain images. Everyone’s got their go-tos. If I am looking for illustrations or old photos specifically I’ll often use other people’s searches on top of the Internet Archive’s content. Here’s a little how to.

1. Check the Internet Archive Book Images feed on Flickr. What I often do is search (which finds the words that surround the images) and then click straight through to the book (which is always linked in the metadata) and then fish around. For example…

• Search for cricket
  https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=126377022%40N07&view_all=1&text=cricket

The trick, I’ve found, is to try to get as close to 1927 as possible because you’re likely to have the best illustrations and still be out of copyright. Older books don’t have good illustrations because the technology was not there yet. Enjoy!

Sometimes people who license their digital content aren’t really thinking it through. They may have something else on their minds or copyright nuance may not be their thing. I think it behooves us copyright advocates and activists to (at least) politely try to push the envelope towards more open content licensing. Here’s the example I enjoyed from today.

This is interesting especially because Flickr uses Creative Commons licensing, but does not use CC-0 which is an intentional choice. Photos from cultural heritage organizations which are in the Flickr Commons have an additional “no known copyright restriction” option that is only available to specific accounts, not any Flickr user. There are many ways this specific issue can be resolved but just the fact that it’s generally a hurdle that has to be overcome indicates that there is still a good role for copyright reform advocates to play. More supporting links: Original article & SpaceX photos on Flickr.

White campaign tab with “WIN” in bold, red letters accompanied by a small red fish.

I had read with interest the articles that came out recently about the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library getting a Wikipedian in Residence. For more info, see this a short article about the library’s exhibits coordinator Bettina Cousineau talking about the library’s participation in the GLAM-Wiki Initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums with Wikipedia), and a little more about the Wikipedian in Residence program.

I think this program is nifty and I was excited this time because the WiR is a Master’s student at the University of Michigan’s iSchool. I dropped him a line and asked if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. Here is a small Q&A (done over email) with Michael Barera about his new internship.

JW: The Ann Arbor Journal says you’ve been a Wikipedian since 2001. Is that a typo or have you been an editor there for over ten years? In any case, what first brought you to Wikipedia or the Wikimedia school of websites? What is your favorite thing about working on Wikipedia?

MB: 2001 isn’t exactly the true year that I started on Wikipedia: I found the site first in 2005, and made my first edit in 2006. 2001 is the year of the oldest photograph that I have uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, so in a way my contributions go back to 2001, although I didn’t edit Wikipedia or Commons until 2006. I was actually introduced to Wikipedia by my high school Western Civilization teacher in 2005, which is interesting because most people don’t have such an academic entry into the site: perhaps he was part of the reason why I’ve always taken it seriously.

For the first year or so, before I made my first edit, I used Wikipedia essentially as an extension of my social studies textbook: I’ve always loved how much more inclusive it is than the mainstream social studies curriculum in this country. My favorite thing about working on Wikipedia is sharing everything I’ve created or contributed with everyone in the world. We all chip in a little, and because of the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses, everyone gets to share and enjoy in the totality, all without ads or paywalls or subscriptions. I love the fact that it really is “the free encyclopedia”, both in the “gratis” and “libre” senses of the word.

JW: You went to UMich for your undergrad work and now you’re pursuing your Masters at the School of Information. Is this internship a natural outgrowth of what you planned to do at the iSchool or is it more of a side hobby that turned into a big deal? What are your interest areas at the iSchool?

MB: The beautiful thing is that it is both part of my career plan at SI and an outgrowth of a multi-year hobby. That’s why it is so perfect for me, because it allows me to use both my U of M bachelor’s degree (which has a concentration in History) and my knowledge and experience with Wikipedia, all in one package. In terms of my areas of interest at SI, I am specializing in Archives and Records Management (and maybe dual-specializing in Preservation of Information as well), but I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve taken so far, from human interaction in information retrieval to Python programming to dead media. SI really is a perfect fit for me!

JW: Sort of a silly question but are you literally “in residence” meaning that you get to go work at the library? Or is it more of a virtual residency?

MB: I’m literally “in residence” at the Library four hours per week, but as you know Wikipedia can’t be confined to just one place at a certain time, so there is plenty of spill-over above and beyond these four hours. It is rather interesting to have an internship that literally bleeds into my free time, but I love editing Wikipedia, so I can’t complain!

JW: This project seems like it’s sort of a trial partnership experiment for both Wikipedia and a US cultural institution. What are you hoping will come out of this partnership in addition to the stated goals of making more of the library’s public domain holdings available via Wikipedia?

MB: Well, to be fair, a number of US cultural institutions have already had Wikipedians in Residence: the National Archives and Records Administration, the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, Consumer Reports, and the Smithsonian Institution have all beaten the Ford Presidential Library and Museum to the punch. For me, the biggest goals of my internship (in addition to the obvious desire to improve content on Wikipedia) are to foster and maintain a relationship between the Wikimedia movement and the Ford as well as to encourage content experts, like the people I work with at the Ford, to create Wikipedia accounts and to become Wikipedians themselves. I know it can be daunting at first, but there are lots of long-time users who are happy to give their help and guidance, myself included. We won’t bite the newcomers!

JW. Do you feel a little odd about being in a fishbowl with all of your Wikipedia edits and actions being visible or is this par for the course for you? What do you think is people’s largest misunderstanding about Wikipedia?

MB: Well, all of my Wikipedia edits and actions have always been visible (that’s the nature of the MediaWiki software), and while there is certainly an upsurge in media attention and awareness about the internship or me specifically, I don’t think that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people paging through my edits or watching my talkpage. On Wikipedia, I still feel like a private citizen: I think most of the media attention has been at a very basic level, and I think some of it struggles to grasp the nuances of what I am doing or even the structure of Wikipedia itself, which brings me to your last question. In terms of people’s largest misunderstanding about Wikipedia, I think it is the simple fact that we are an encyclopedia: a tertiary source without original research. We are not a blog or a forum for anyone to post whatever he or she wants to post, but rather a dedicated and thoughtful group of “collectors” trying to assemble the world’s best encyclopedia piece by piece, bit by bit.

I think we sometimes get lumped in with other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, and while there are a few commonalities (like the fact each is made up of user-generated content), Wikipedia really is a lot more like Britannica than it is like a blog, at least in terms of the content itself and the work that goes on behind the scenes.

[these are follow-up questions from a few days after our initial exchange]

MB: I’ve always loved how much more inclusive it is than the mainstream social studies curriculum in this country.

JW: I’m with you there. Are there any particular examples that stand out to you?

MB: During my elementary, middle, and high school careers, I discovered that my history/social studies education was essentially a history of Western Europe and North America. While the curriculum has improved dramatically in terms of coverage of Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans in the last few decades, there is very little Latin American, Eastern European, African, Asian, or Oceanian history taught at the primary or secondary levels in this country (and just about all of it directly impacts the United States, typically in negative ways, such as Vietnam’s one cameo appearance in American history during the Vietnam War). I think the heart of this issue is the old belief that history is “national myth-making” is still alive and well in this country, at least below the post-secondary level.

On the other hand, I absolutely loved how different history is at the college level: as an undergrad at the University of Michigan, it was refreshing to take history courses covering nearly every corner of the world that both attempted to show that country’s perspective and then critique it at the same time. My modern French history (1871-present) and Soviet/Russian history classes were the best examples, and I would highly recommend my professors, Joshua Cole and Ronald Grigor Suny, to anyone: they do it the right way, and I for one wish I had more exposure to that kind of “real history” when I was younger. Long story short, Wikipedia is much more like this post-secondary, “real history” than “national myth-making”, so I always enjoyed how much more objective Wikipedia is (although not perfectly objective, of course).

JW: One of the things that has been challenging for me in Wikipedia outreach is trying to convince people that they don’t need to get someone to do the editing, that they can be bold and dive in. Do you have any particular approach to trying to get people to get comfortable making their own edits?

MB: My advice for getting people to start contributing is simple. The next time our hypothetical potential editor is on Wikipedia, I would encourage him or her to create an account and then just stay logged in while reading articles. Anytime he or she spots a small error, such as a typo or punctuation issue, he or she should just go ahead and change it. Actually, an account isn’t even needed: readers can (on most articles) make such minor corrections without an account, too. Still, this notion of starting small is the real key, in my opinion: just start with the little things and become comfortable with the editing interface (and the notion of editing a wiki itself), and eventually that new editor will feel comfortable making larger and more substantial edits. That’s how it was for me many years ago.

JW: Are there other online reference sources (crowdsourced or not) online that are your “go to” sites when you are trying to do research either for Wikipedia or your other projects?

MB: The resources I use for referencing Wikipedia articles are broad and diverse, and they range widely from topic to topic, as is to be expected. One commonality, though, is that I use a lot of newspaper and journal articles: in most cases, they are reliable secondary sources that are very good at establishing the core facts that lie at the heart of the Wikipedia article. One hint for maintaining NPOV is to try to recognize the different sources and balance them with each other. For example, on the article on the 2001 Michigan vs. Michigan State football game, I made sure to use both the U of M and MSU athletic departments’ press releases and game notes.

And, in an even better example from my work on the article Queens of Noise (The Runaways’ sophomore album from 1977), I tried to effectively balance multiple perspectives on the content, including the recollections of Jackie Fox and direct quotes about specific songs and events from Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and Kim Fowley. Most interestingly, that article includes two separate (and contradictory) accounts of why Jett sang lead vocals instead of Currie on one of the songs, one given by Fox and the other by Currie. The key is to make it clear who is saying what where, and so like the “real history” taught in colleges and universities across the nation (and the world), the article has become an effort to show the different perspectives in conversation with each other instead of just giving one point of view (as is the case with “national myth-making”).

JW: Cheers and thanks for doing this for me.

MB: My pleasure! Thanks for the interview, and take care!

There has been a lot of great writing about copyright and access to our cultural and intellectual history in the weeks since Aaron Swartz’s death. I have been retreading some of my old favorite haunts to see if there was stuff I didn’t know about the status of access to online information especially in the public domain (pre-1923 in the US) era.

I talk like a broken record about how I think the best thing that libraries can do, academic libraries in particular, is to make sure that their public domain content is as freely accessible as possible. This is an affirmative decision that Cornell University made in 2009 and I think it was the right decision at the right time and that more libraries should do this. Some backstory on this.

• Cornell Press release announcing this decision
• Librarian and Policy Advisor Peter Hirtle’s article for Research Library Issues about this decision, Removing All Restrictions: Cornell’s New Policy on Use of Public Domain Reproductions, and the thinking that went into it.
• Cornell’s 70,000 items accessible via the Internet Archive
• Cornell’s guidelines for use of these materials

So, if I wanted to share an image from a book that Cornell has made available, I have to check the guidelines link above and then I can link to the image, you can go see it and then you can link to the image and do whatever you want with it, including sell it. This is public domain. The time and money that went into making a digital copy of this image have been borne by the Internet Archive and Cornell University. The rights page on the item itself (which I can download in a variety of formats) is clear and easy to understand.

Compare and contrast JSTOR. Now let me be clear, I am aware that JSTOR is a (non-profit) business and Cornell is a university and I am not saying that JSTOR should just make all of their public domain things free for everyone (though that would be nice), I am just outlining the differences as I see them in accessing content there. I had heard that there were a lot of journals on JSTOR that were freely available even to unaffiliated people like myself. I decided to go looking for them. I found two different programs, the Register and Read program (where registered users can access a certain number of JSTOR documents for free) and the Early Journal Content program. There’s no front door, that I saw, to the EJC program you have to search JSTOR first and then limit your search to “only content I can access” Not super-intuitive, but okay. And I’m not trying to be a pill, but doing a search on the about.jstor.org site for “public domain” gets you zero results though the same is true when searching for “early journal content” and also for “librarian.” Actually, I get the same results when I search their site for JSTOR. Something is broken, I have written them an email.

So I go to JSTOR and do a similar search, looking for only “content I can access” and pick up the first thing that’s pre-1923 which is an article about Aboriginal fire making from American Anthropologist in 1890. I click through and agree to the Terms of Service which is almost 9000 words long. Only the last 260 words really apply to EJC. Basically I’ve agreed to use it non-commercially (librarian.net accepts no advertising, I an in the clear) and not scrape their content with bots or other devices. I’ve also seemingly acquiesced to credit them and to use the stable URL, though that doesn’t let me deep-link to the page with the image on it, so I’ve crossed my fingers and deep-linked anyhow. I’m still not sure what I would do, contact JSTOR I guess, if I wanted to use this document in a for-profit project. Being curious, I poked around to see if I could find this public domain document elsewhere and sure enough, I could.

• Wiley, the original publisher has the article available with no JSTOR preconditions.
• Google Books has it both available and not-available depending how you look for it. Readable online, downloadable if you really fish around for it. Google has nearly identical language to JSTOR: use this non-commercially, don’t scrape content or use bots, leave Google’s watermark intact. Hathi Trust has a discovery layer for this material as well and they provide this concise explanation of how “public domain, Google digitized” is different from the public domain. Seventeen different types of rights, whoo-wee!
• Worldcat shows me how to get this from a participating library
• The Internet Archive has a copy, though it was a little tough to find, and it’s an OCRed version of the Google Books document that’s been ported to their interface, though this one says NO_KNOWN_COPYRIGHT (all caps not mine).

At that point, I quit looking. I found a copy that was free to use. This, however, meant that I had to be good at searching, quite persistent and not willing to take “Maybe” as an answer to “Can I use this content?” I know that when I was writing my book my publishers would not have taken maybe for an answer, they were not even that thrilled to take Wikimedia Commons’ public domain assertions.

As librarians, I feel we have to be prepared to find content that is freely usable for our patrons, not just content that is mostly freely usable or content where people are unlikely to come after you. As much as I’m personally okay being a test case for some sort of “Yeah I didn’t read all 9000 words on the JSTOR terms and conditions, please feel free to take me to jail” case, realistically that will not happen. Realistically the real threat of jail is scary and terrible and expensive. Realistically people bend and decide it’s not so bad because they think it’s the best they can do. I think we can probably do better than that.

Public domain photograph by: US Navy, National Science Foundation. Link.

I’m back at home after meeting with a lot of terrific librarians in four different states. March is the busy month and after last month my plan is “not getting in a plane more than once a month for work.” I’ll be speaking with my good friend Michael Stephens at the Indiana Library Federation District Six conference next week. I’ll do a wrap-up of the talks I’ve been giving sometime later but news for me is mostly having more free time to actually attend things and not just speak at them. Getting to go to programs at the Tennessee Library Association conference and the National Library of Medicine’s New England Region one-day conference about social justice has really helped me connect with what other people are doing in some of the same areas I’m interested in. It’s sort of important to not just be a lone voice in the wilderness about some of this stuff, so in addition to the SXSW stuff (and talking to a great bunch of library school students in Columbia Missouri) getting to attend library events as an audience member has been a highlight of the past few weeks.

However I’ve been backed up on “stuff I read that I think other people might like to read.” Try as I may Twitter is still for hot potato stuff [i.e. Google's April Fools Joke specifically, I felt, for librarians] and not for things that I think merit more thoughtful or wordy presentation. So, as I enter the first Thursday in over a month where I get to hang out at home all day, I’m catching up, not on reading because there is tons of time for reading while traveling, but on passing some links around. So, here are some things you might like to read, from the past few months, newest first.

• For Archivists, ‘Occupy’ Movement Presents New Challenges – becoming part of history includes keeping track of history. Howard Besser and others have been working to make sure that activism is archived. See his group’s website at Activist Archivists.
• Are Privatized Public Libraries So Bad? – an interesting look at the good and bad parts of privatized libraries. Not particularly compelling to me, but worth understanding the viewpoints of people who argue that this is where the world of libraries is going.
• Three cheers for the digital divide? Ann Treacy responds to a controversial Thomas Friedman post which said that we should spend less time trying to close the digital divide and more time getting super-fast bandwidth to “the top 5 percent, in university towns, who will invent the future” Treacy’s response is very thorough and very worth reading.
• 0 Comments on A good old fashioned linkdump as of 4/5/2012 12:53:00 PM
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An ongoing debate in the copyright wars is whether an institution that is making reproductions of public domain materials available should be allowed to dictate terms (usually involving payment) for use of those items. We all know that libraries need money. It’s also true that having digital copies of rare materials available helps preserve the original items. So, if I want to download a public domain book from Google Books — say John Cotton Dana’s book A Library Primer — I get usage guidelines from Google attached to the pdf I’ve downloaded.

Usage guidelines
Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

We also ask that you:
+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.
+ Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.
+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can’t offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book’s appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.

These are all “suggestions” as near as I can tell. As with the Chicken Coupon fiasco of a few days ago, the implied threat that comes along with this item puts a bit of a damper on the joy that is the public domain. Bleh. We’ve seen other big corporations and libraries doing this as well.

However, this post is mostly to say “Yay” about Cornell’s decision to remove all restrictions on the use of its public domain reproductions. Here’s their press release about it and here is the web page with the new policy. What’s their reasoning? Well among other thigns it’s hard to support a misson of open access and at the same time go out of your way to make materials more difficult to get ahold of and interact with. You can see some of Cornell’s 70,000 public domain items at the Internet Archive.

Public domain determination becomes clearer cut, more books entering the public domain thanks to … Google? Jacob Kramer-Duffield explains how Google and Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders put their book-scanning and OCR-ing smarts into trying to solve the thorny orphan works problem to determine which out of print books have had their copyrights renewed and which haven’t. Neat. [via joho]

Every once and a while we like to present something other than books to help stoke your imagination. Our video presentation of philosopher Dan Dennett is a great example.

Today we want to introduce you to The World Wide Telescope. It’s a revolutionary technology being given to everyone this spring. Both these videos come from a truly incredible website called Ted.com You should make it a regular stop. (The video is a little dark at the begining, let it continue as it improves quite a bit- also the intro is quite loud)

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A Cautionary(?) Tale: Or, There are no Morals in Book Selling

We all get jumpy at times - especially if you have an open shop and you start to see your monthly rent running like a cab meter in your head every time you close your eyes and it’s been a week of customers few and far between, mostly browsing or idly thumbing through the bargain rack. Funny too, because it looks like there are humans outside, wandering about, some look like they might have a few coins in their pockets jingling about, but the cash register collects dust. The same certainly happens online - we have those weeks where the orders just stop and you’re forced into that familiar bookseller position of concocting stories about why this is happening.
Bad Weather
School vacations
Economy looks sketchy/Stock market is down
ABE has disappeared my books
Amazon disappeared my books
My books are terrible
I knew this day would come, everyone just stopped reading at once.
Once we got a book about dead people - how only the dead can see the dead, etc. and became convinced that we and our customers were dead and that explained all the people walking blithely past the shop - they just couldn’t see us. Sometimes the simple explanations are best.
Anyway, I was having one of these months last year - not a week, a whole month of dreaming of drowning in unsalable books, wondering if I should start selling something sensible like Pokemon cards or malt liquor - and it was compounded by the beginning of the housing slump which meant we weren’t getting calls to clean out houses and our stock was starting to feel thin and a little stale. So, I noticed an interesting auction on Ebay - someone was getting out of the book business and selling 20 some odd thousand books cheap, real cheap. I knew they’d mostly be terrible old bookstore stock, but for the price if they were only horrible, it was going to be a win. A win involving back breaking labor, but a win nonetheless.
So we exchanged a few emails with questions about the books - found out they were from a few shops that went under, that the current owner was getting out of the book business to concentrate on Civil War textiles (note to file: There was probably an alarm that should have gone off in here somewhere, but I present my foolishness unadorned for your benefit) sounded like they’d been cherry picked somewhere along the line, but still a nice bunch of dreck, as they go. We decided to go for it - this despite (or because of) the fact that I’d just had my first child and was saddled by fatherhood, lack of sleep, and the pressure to get this business going, pronto.
Every time something is going to go terribly wrong, there are foreshadowing missteps that not only make you cringe when you look back, but also provide ample time to anticipate your undoing. This time we get a call for delivery only it’s the wrong day and they have them on a truck without a lift. We’ll need to pay $200 and they’ll put them on the right truck - and deliver them next week - no problem, what’s another $200, right? This is why they call if hemorrhaging money not spewing money. So the books arrive on 20 some odd pallets at the storage location we’re using, and we start to go through them. It takes about six seconds to realize we’ve been had - then about ten minutes of working up a scenario where it isn’t as bad as we think and salvageable, don’t worry, only to backslide into the realization that:
1) It’s at least as bad as it seemed as first
2) We are now the proud owner of 20,000 useless books
3) It’s apparently (who makes these laws) illegal to set fire to books at storage facilities or to throw them onto the conveniently located railroad tracks.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened is they didn’t send a mixed bunch of mostly terrible books like we’d hoped, but sent boxes upon boxes of remainders. Bad ones. The sort that looked like they were born as remainders - the book equivalent of straight to video. Around 15,000 of the 20 some odd thousand books were 14 titles - the rest were as advertised - dreck with some high points. So what to do? File a Paypal claim - email the seller (maybe it was a mistake), etc. But it wasn’t a mistake - and Paypal, bless their furry little hearts, doesn’t refund shipping costs. This is funny, of course, because 2/3 of the cost of the books was shipping. What’s not funny is that with no loading dock, and no forklift, shipping the books back is going to cost more than the whole thing cost in the first place. You can rent a forklift but between the cost and the all too vivid image of myself operating it and the ensuing damage to the storage facility, nearby cars, loved ones, pets, it seemed like a bad idea.
I contemplate loading them into a U-Haul and delivering them myself to the seller - perhaps covering them in feces and setting them on fire so that when they went to step on them to put them out…I contemplate other things that my mother wouldn’t approve of. I move on…no, I really don’t, I’m stuck there in bileville for quite some time, imagining divine retributions, natural disasters…bad thoughts.
But this isn’t good for me - not to mention that it’s pointless. I got screwed, the wheels keep turning, so we move to the mitigation of disaster phase.
1) Try to put some boxes on Ebay in bulk - one book is in some mild demand and we can move a few boxes for $10-20 a piece. This is not a good use of time.
2) Find someone to take the rest off our hands - as I’m sure most of you know, this is much more difficult than you’d think. Americans love free stuff - unless it’s books or PBS.
3) At least clear out the storage facility so that the nightmare where I’m stuck behind a pile of remainders and someone forgets I’m there and locks me in overnight, ends.
4) Try to find a moral in this.

1-3 were doable - 4? I’m not sure. While generally an optimist, I must admit that a positive side of this one was becoming hard to identify. Most of the lessons that I could have learned from this - don’t buy bulk lots on Ebay, don’t take on 20,000 books without looking at them - I either had learned already or had proven resistant to. I knew these and had decided after much thought that this was the exception. Ha. Is that a moral? Too early to tell. What complicates matters - and what caused me to revisit my blunder, was that we’ve been going through the last 20 or so boxes of cast offs and ne’er do wells (we whipped through the first 150 or so, but it was as if, despite ourselves, we didn’t want it to end and the last of the boxes festered downstairs, became powerful as we avoided them) and pulled out a scarce signed copy of a Hollywood memoir. Sold it three days later for $800.

If I stop thinking about it now, this will have to pass for a happy ending.

—
Pazzo Books
4268 Washington St.
Roslindale, MA 02131
pazzobooks.com
617-323-2919

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A Little Bit on Little Golden Books

In 1942 Simon and Schuster published the first dozen titles in Little Golden Books (LGB) series. They were priced at about 25 cents, marketed to department stores, and as an alternative to the more expensive children’s books, which at the time cost 2 to 3 dollars, were immediately popular.

There are collectors that passionately collect LGB, and I’ve discovered to my disappointment that the Little Golden Book collectors, like series book collectors, are not really interested in collecting outside of their area of interest. However there are some authors and even more illustrators that were published by Little Golden Books that went on to gain more mainstream popularity. There are non LGB collectors that are looking for the LGB publications by their favorite author or illustrator.

So no matter whether it is an out of print bookstore or a booth at an antique mall, I always take the time to go through the stacks of LGB to look for the following authors and illustrators:

• Margaret Wise Brown of Good Night Moon fame published 6 or so LGB
• Garth Williams the illustrator of Charlotte’s Web, illustrated many LGB
• Elizabeth Orton Jones, who won the 1945 Caldecott has at least one LGB
• Alice and Martin Provensen (illus and later authors) Caldecott and Newbury Award Winners!
• Charlotte Zolotow (author)
• Feodor Rojankovsky (illus)
• Leonard Wiesgard (illus)
• Trina Schart (Hyman) (illus)
• Clement Hurd (illus)

This checklist is by no means complete and is most definitely not definitive; there are collected authors and illustrators that I know I’ve missed. Also not included are the illustrators, most notably Eloise Wilkin, who did primarily LGB illustrations. This is just a quick list generally made up of illustrators or authors that I have non LGB collectors looking for.

by Dana Richardson of Windy Hill Books| more of Dana’s articles can be seen here

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Now, internet commerce is my life blood, so I pay attention to elements of
it on a daily basis - how many orders are coming in, from where, for what,
for how much - basically boring but vital stuff. What I try to take a
more careful look at, from time to time is what forces are driving
commerce on the internet forward, and what, if anything, can I do about
it. Looking around this time I was left with a Where’s My Jetpack, where’s my damned bubble car feeling. While I’d had the
feeling, viscerally if not intellectually, that the internet was zipping
along and more in danger of leaving me behind than getting stuck in the
mud, this appears to be exactly what has happened to internet commerce,
especially that first great application, books.

Amazon in 1998 - look familiar?

Lets look back:

1995 I was connecting to my University’s server with a blazing 2400 baud
modem and zipping along fudging bibliographical entries for my grad school
papers on the text browser Lynx and Telnet. Often when connecting to
websites with creaky databases, I yearn for the days of telnet. Anyway,
one day we all moved to Netscape née Mosaic and,
lo and behold, there were pictures. Following along were Amazon and Ebay
and internet commerce - not just ordering products off of internet
bulletin boards - was born. At the time, and especially during the great Internet Stock
Market Bubble, it seemed like the internet would grow exponentially
unleashing brilliant technological advances every 8-10 seconds until the
universe collapsed in upon itself. If you’d listened to the media, you’d
have heard that this was actually happening, but if you look back at the
early days of Ebay and Amazon, it’s really hard to tell much of a
difference between then and now - the growing popularity of comparatively
backwards sites like craigslist and the
classifieds on Facebook are a testament to how far we haven’t come.

At least ABE was cuter in 1996.

The biggest difference (other than some more pictures and Amazon’s look
inside the book feature which we’ll revisit) is seller uptake. One of the
amazing things that the internet has unearthed is that sellers are
infinitely quicker to embrace new technologies than buyers. What this has
meant is that books you could sell on the old ABE or Ebay for $50 because,
pre-internet, they had been locally scarce, now can’t be sold for $6 and a
bag of chips. Capitalism encourages the breaching of new markets, but
consumers are much more stuck in their ways than the more desperate and
enterprising sellers - this leads to some, let’s say interesting, supply
and demand disparities. Obviously, it also means that ridiculously
obscure books that were on interest to no one locally can now be sold for
$250 in a flash to the four people 1000 miles away who are jonesing for
it, but this tends to happen below the surface, for now we’ll focus on the
surface.
Twelve years ago I used to cruise Onsale
the early internet auction site (which, who knew, still exists in some
form) and buy piles of great stuff that they were liquidating. I used to
have boxes of steak delivered from Omaha steaks for pennies on the dollar,
exotic meats - I bought an $8,000 couch for $400 and still have it in my
living room. Buying weird stuff on the internet was fantastic in the
early days - sellers had jumped into this new distribution system with
both feet and the comparatively few buyers out there were reaping the
benefits. It’s easy to think this has radically changed, but the same
dynamic is still largely at play, it’s just been turned on its head a bit.
Strange and rare items are now offered at a premium, and common items are
worthless, but in both cases the cause is largely the huge number of
sellers relative to buyers.

Innovation has been limited (have a look at any of the book sites via the
Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine which archives sections of the internet)- the internet is
still basically an electronic version of a print catalog, with little to
recommend it, particularly bookselling wise (clothing has actually come a
long way - but clothing is a much harder sell online, so they’ve had to
work harder and this has turned them into leaders), as an alternative. In
some ways it’s amazing that so many people are willing to shop for books
online, given how basically lame it is. What innovation there is has
largely been of either the bells and whistles variety, or part of a Seller
Cold War, driven by the aggregator sites, usually Ebay. Compare shopping
at Amazon to shopping at Nike.com or designing your own jeans at Lands End - it’s not very exciting. There are
a few items of interest though, that may point the way to the future of
bookselling.

1 - Look inside the book. This has finally moved bookselling into the
realm that music has occupied for some time - being able to sample the
product before buying. What will be interesting is whether this, and the
Kindle and related readers, starts to sink sales as perception as to what
a book is begins to change. Music, once freed from the confines of the CD
and record, rapidly evolved into a “shareable” rather than buyable,
medium.

2 - Amazon reviews. What was once a good start on user generated content,
now seems decidedly Web 1.0. With the advent of Wikipedia, tag clouds, and social
networking, static customer reviews are of limited helpfulness is
navigating the vast world of new and used books.

3 - Ebay has done a great job encouraging the use of pictures online - a
must for forward thinking booksellers. However, they’ve also encouraged
sellers in a mutual assured destruction arms race with bold listings,
gallery listings, featured, featured plus, featured super extra bold plus,
etc. Most of these features could be done without - and if sellers all
got together and decided not to use them, it would be the same as everyone
using them. Just like in the prisoner’s dilemma though, win wins are hard
to orchestrate.

4 -Between the Covers is an independent site that has done a great job of maximizing Web 1.0
features. A likable site, 3-D rotating books, and book related games lend
a stickiness and character to their book selling. It may not be the
future, but if it’s the past, it’s the best of it.

What some of this suggests is a path for the future of online selling.
Robust flash based shopping sites like Nike’s are both more fun to shop
on, and more intuitive to navigate. They are also, at least in theory, no
more difficult to run as a front end than current sites. If coupled with
additional content, the conceptual framework for which has already been
laid by Amazon, they could begin to utilize the strengths of the internet
and lead us beyond the electronic versions of paper catalogs that we
remain stuck with.

For example: Amazon reviews are great as far as they go - they allow
customers, and some paid reviewers, to enhance individual book listings
with deep content. Why not move into the current internet and allow users
to generate all sorts of content. It’s already been shown by sites like
Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, and others, that the cheapest and most
effective way to both generate content and create loyal users, is to allow
them great latitude in adding information to sites. Why not let them tag
items, comment on titles - even comment on pricing. On a site like ABE
where sellers hit the site much more than buyers (and have more invested
in it) you would rapidly generate useful content that, coupled with tag
clouds and the like, would allow navigation of the site in new and
potentially profitable ways. Crowd sourcing (as they call it) can be
extremely unpredictable, and the actual results can scarcely be guessed
at, but it’s shocking that no one has given it more of a shot.

ABE’s purchase of a stake in LibraryThing suggests that they
see this future, but nothing has been done to link the sites since their
May 2006 investment. They need to at least run a beta test linking the
sites and see what happens - the only way I see to inspire a new
generation of collectors is to embrace the social networking of the
internet and let people pursue their interests. As general searches on
both Google and in book selling databases become less reliable, and
browsing more pointless as stock grows, an alternate avenue for finding
what you’re looking for is vital.

Amazon’s look inside the book - and the long history of music samples
online - also suggest ways to enhance the selling of books. Why not link
to a books google books page, OCLC listing, or, even better, the Open Library (an improved, open content
version of Google Books in the early stages of development but showing
great promise). Sadly, this is easier on Amazon than ABE because of the
cataloging system Amazon licensed from the British Library, but it should
be possible. You could even have much of the user content on Open
Library, potentially helping both ABE and Open library.

I’ll have some ideas for hastening the future of online book selling in
Part II, but just imagine how all those late adopters and potential
customers out there would hop on the internet and buy stuff if it didn’t
continue to seem like an extremely complicated version of a print catalog
or a lame version of The Home Shopping Network. If infomercials and
television shopping channels continue to survive, it’s only because the
internet isn’t doing what it ought to be.

Posted by Tom Nealon of Pazzo Books

– Pazzo Books 4268 Washington St. Roslindale, MA 02131 pazzobooks.com 617-323-2919

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A Book Nerd’s Dream: Stories Toward Opening My Bookstore

This is the beginning of a story that (I hope) will have in it the part about me opening my own bookstore. I hope the story doesn’t end there – as you booksellers know, it’s the ongoing narrative that’s the stuff dreams are made of, not the single moment of opening the doors. I’m a bookseller too, and have been for quite a while, but I haven’t yet made it to that climactic moment of owning my own store. In hopes that it will prove interesting both for booksellers and for those with entrepreneurial ambitions, I’d like to offer my story, unspooling behind me as it unfolds ahead of me, for the Bookshop Blog.

Chapter I. The First Bookstore Job

Not to get all Dickensian or Salingerian on you, but I’ll begin at the beginning of my life – because I wouldn’t want to open a bookstore if I wasn’t the person that I am. I grew up bookish, which isn’t unusual. But I was homeschooled until sixth grade, with a mother for a teacher who believed that we’d learn just as much by reading for pleasure as by sitting down for lessons. I edited the high school literary magazine, wrote poetry, worked on the newspaper, did great in English classes, and everyone seemed to think I’d become a writer or a professor – and I guessed I did too. But I needed to find out somewhere completely different, so I left my California hometown on a scholarship to New York University.

And I almost went home after the first year. It’s a dark, dirty city when you’re far from home. Luckily, I made a few good friends, did okay in class, and got some good jobs – not jobs that paid well, but ones that gave me the safe place I needed. My first gig in a warm little family-run bakery probably saved my life, and I later worked as the night manager of a Dean & Deluca – I never thought that would come in handy for my career, but the diversity of nationalities and languages in that coffee shop taught me a great deal about how to talk to employees and coworkers.

I had a great poetry teacher my junior year – a grad student who understood what I was trying to do in writing and could help me find my way to doing it. She took our class out for an end-of-the-year party at a Mexican place (that served pitchers of Margaritas and never carded), and at some point asked casually if I was looking for a job. I was sick of the night shift in Rockefeller Center and said yes, and she revealed that she was leaving her job at a bookstore to finish her master’s. She gave me the proprietor’s number and told me to get in touch.

And then I totally forgot about it. I didn’t make the call until my teacher called to remind me, and it’s weird to think how nearly I missed out on my life. I went in to the bookstore, Three Lives & Company in the West Village, one afternoon. I later heard it described as a jewel of a bookstore – a tiny spot, but lighted well, with wood shelves and counters I later learned were homemade, and every book looking as though it had been specially placed in its spot, waiting to come under your hand.

The proprietor was a pleasantly brusque woman named Jill, and she took me down to her office and told me that if L.B. (my teacher) said I was okay then the job was mine. The place had always gotten its employees by serendipity, she said, and it always seemed to work out. She told me what shifts I’d be working and sent me on my way. I remember I bought myself a bunch of flowers (which I couldn’t afford) to celebrate on the way home, then pinned them on the wall of my dorm until they dried down to lovely husks – apparently I knew even then that that was a good day.

Much of the store’s history and lore I found out later. It was first opened in 1978 – the year I was born. The name came from Gertrude Stein’s novel Three Lives, and from the three women who founded the store together. The store was run by Jill and her partner, Jenny – the third “life” had left for California long ago. Though a Barnes & Noble was just around the corner on 6^th Avenue, the store never seemed to be in trouble. There were too many regulars, too many folks who came out of their way to go to the shop, too many people who came in just to look and came away with a book or three because of a recommendation, or just because they wanted to own a little piece of that place.

Why they kept me on there, I’ll never know. I was green and dreamy, sometimes forgetting to come in altogether, changing my schedule because of classes, and often making mistakes. But I’m grateful. I ran into Jill and Jenny a few months ago – apparently they’d been keeping up with my doings. “So you want to be a bookseller now, huh?” Jill said. “Who would have thought?” I didn’t say so, but it was partly her fault. Working at Three Lives made me fall in love with the bookselling life, and with New York, and started me on the path toward opening my own bookstore.

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo

www.writtennerd.blogspot.com

[editor’s note]

Stay tuned to the bookshop blog for the ongoing story. Jessica will be keeping us all updated with her dreams, goals and any progress made or pitfalls encountered. In order to not miss a story you can subscribe by putting your email address in the box on the top right or by clicking on the orange button if you are already using a feed reader.

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If It’s Not Fun, Why Do It?

Elisabeth Grant-Gibson – Elisabeth Grant-Gibson is co-owner of Windows a bookshop in Monroe, Louisiana, and co-host of the radio show The Book Report. She is a member of the board of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.

Several years ago my partner and I made a long, luxurious trip to New England. It was the summer of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the first real summer of HP parties and mania, but we’d already planned this trip and who knew the US edition would release on July 5? So we left a friendly customer in charge of putting together a Saturday party (and in charge of praying that books would arrive) and headed off to cool weather. On Cape Cod we stopped at a Ben & Jerry’s store for a cone and, as it turned out, some inspiration. One of the items for sale was a little refrigerator magnet with the lovely Ben and Jerry pictured on the front with their motto, “It it’s not fun, why do it?” It was a motto we wanted to embrace.

Kathy Patrick, owner of Beauty and the Book in Jefferson, Texas, is a bookseller who has definitely embraced the same sentiment. When life threw her a few curves, she opened up what appears to be the nation’s only beauty salon and bookstore in one. You can read her full story in her new book, The Pulpwood Queens’ Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life, so I won’t retell it here. It is enough to say that Kathy Patrick knows how to have fun—and sell books at the same time.

After creating her unique store, Patrick started a local book group called The Pulpwood Queens of East Texas. Their motto was “where tiaras are mandatory and reading good books is the rule.” They attend meetings dressed in leopard prints and hot pink, topped with tiaras and big hair. Her first meeting had 6 attendees. Her second had over 100. The Pulpwood Queens read voraciously and do a great deal of work in the field of literacy. Patrick’s desire to improve literacy stemmed from the fact that her county in Texas has a 39% adult literacy rate. Over time, one book club became over 400 clubs all across the US and in 8 foreign countries. Each month, all the clubs read her pick for the month, and Patrick has developed the kind of clout that can get her the author right there in Jefferson. She usually tours that author to several of the book clubs in the general vicinity. She also arranges for phone-in author visits to as many of her book clubs as possible. You can already tell that she’s one smart cookie when it comes to selling serious numbers of books, right? Well, just wait, because there’s more. Much more.

A couple of weeks ago, I made the pilgrimage to Jefferson, Texas, for the annual Girlfriend Weekend that Kathy Patrick and her Pulpwood Queens host. It was my first time. I packed my tiara and hopped in the car for the two and a half hour drive over the Texas border. I had no clue what I was getting into!

Girlfriend Weekend included about 40 authors, all of them there to participate in panels and workshops and, of course, to sign their books. Barron’s Bookstore from Longview, Texas, served as the bookstore for the event. The panels were interesting, the attendees curious, the events lively. The authors included a variety of people, from supermodel Paulina Porzkova (A Model Summer) to Cassandra King (Queen of Broken Hearts) to Will Clarke (The Worthy). Kim Sunee was there to talk about her new memoir, Trail of Crumbs, and Michael Lee West (Mermaids in the Basement) served on a panel. I chaired a panel with Darnell Arnoult (Sufficient Grace), Lynn York (The Sweet Life), and Virginia Boyd (One Fell Swoop), who wowed the crowd and their books sold like crazy. But it wasn’t all authors. There were musical performances, a play, and the big Ball of Hair, a dance held the last evening. Debbie Rodriguez, author of The Kabul Beauty School, made Kathy Patrick open up Beauty and the Book so that she and other volunteers could give Big Hair Makeovers to the authors and presenters. There are actually pictures to prove it at www.willclarke.com.

This is a long story to tell in order to get to my point. Kathy Patrick has a lot of fun—and along the way she’s come up with some innovative methods of turning her little shop into a destination bookstore. Girlfriend Weekend isn’t her only special project. She also hosts Books Alive each November, a Christian book festival. What else is on her plate? Her blog, www.pulpwoodqueen.com, is the place to keep up with what’s new. Will I be going back to Girlfriend Weekend next January? Oh yes. And by the way, I’m driving over this week for her monthly book club meeting. You just can’t get too many doses of good book fun, and I’m always up for one more.

And by the way, remember that friendly customer who hosted our first Harry Potter party for us? Well, we’re not stupid. We hired her, of course, and she’s been our Special Events Coordinator for the past seven years. And my visit to Girlfriend Weekend gave me lots of ideas to keep her busy for the next seven.

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What are your odds of being content with the packaging of a book that you’ve ordered online?

My odds of being pleased after opening a package seem to running around fifty percent. Can you imagine that? About half the books I order either show up with bumped corners or worse. Many of them are thrown in a simple bubble wrap envelop with no receipt, no protection from water leakage and zero protection from being tossed about during transport. I worry that many of these sellers are giving online book buying a bad name. I imagine some sellers (I won’t call these folks dealers just yet) are just too lazy to be bothered to work like a professional but there are probably many that would love to better protect books but don’t really know the right methods. I would love to see every seller use this system. I have sent out thousands of books this way and have had zero returns, zero complaints or negative feedback and not one phone call or email to complain about damage. In fact I’ll show you some of my Amazon comments, not to toot my own horn but to show how customers feel about receiving a well packaged book.

5 out of 5: “The book arrived beautifully packed and in pristine condition…. I would highly recommend this seller.”
Date: 1/29/2008 Rated by Buyer: Margaret S.

5 out of 5: “…. Accurate description, well-packaged, no problems. Would recommend to a friend.”
Date: 1/29/2008 Rated by Buyer: Carol S.

5 out of 5: “Book arrived today in good time, excellent packaging and as described. Can’t ask for more…”
Date: 1/18/2008 Rated by Buyer: 1byte2few

5 out of 5: “As described, well packaged, timely delivery, excellent vendor”
Date: 12/28/2007 Rated by Buyer: Paul D.

5 out of 5: “The book is in good condition, arrived promptly and was well packaged - thanks!”
Date: 10/30/2007 Rated by Buyer: Carolyn D.

Did I mention that the method I use will cost you less than using bubble wrap envelopes, in fact about fifty percent less. My average cost for one book is about $0.35. The method is known as B-Flute packaging system for books. From the start I want to mention one situation where you should not be using this method. The reason this works well is that it squeezes the book snug inside the package so that there is no movement inside. Any book that can move inside a package is at risk of being damaged. Some older and/or antiquarian books have softer corners and at times can have the corners bent a bit while using B-Flute. To be frank, if a buyer is giving you $100.00 + for a book you should not be shipping it in a thirty five cent box. Go out of you way and package expensive books the way they deserve, in a fine box with plenty of interior extras to eliminate the chance of movement inside the box. Most sellers however are moving more moderately priced stock; this method will help them to look more professional, help the books arrive safely and keep your customers happy.

Follow me step by step as I pack a book for shipping.

Here is what’s needed for packing your books:

• B-Flute or C-Flute rolls of corrugated cardboard. We use 12 inch and 18 inch rolls – this will cover most sizes of books.
• Heavy duty stapler with 3/8” staples
• A tape gun and ultra-clear packaging tape
• A clamp
• Plastic food wrap
• A cutting board.
• Scissors

These items should all be easily found at a local office supply shop like Staples except for the B-Flute. Finding the B or C Flute (cardboard rolls) should be easy enough as well. Simply look for “Corrugated” at yellowpages.com or “Packing - Packaging Materials” in your local business directory.

Here is how to package your books for shipping:

Place your receipt and Thank You note on your book and wrap in the clear plastic food wrap. I purchase mine at Costco.

Measure how much cardboard you require by wrapping the book so that there are two layers all the way around and cut along the gutter.

Wrap the book snugly and clamp it.

Tape the seem with about an inch of tape folding inside the package.

Staple the ends of the book package

Cut your shipping label (we always use a cutting board to give it a sharp edge) and tape to the front. This is where you’ll be happy that you have ultra clear, high quality packing tape. The label will be very clear and sharp looking. If you buy in bulk the tape should be relatively inexpensive.

There you go.

Due to the strengthening effect of the pinched cardboard the corners of the book package are very strong. We have tested this by tossing the package around a fair bit and have never seen corners get bumped. It is a very safe way to pack your books using inexpensive packaging materials.

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We will be undergoing a major revision to the look and feel of the blog today. Things may seem out of place for a few hours, please bare with us as we re-organize the site. All should be working smoothly by tomorrow.

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