I won’t replicate the article here (here’s Google Translate for an entertaining English translation) but one thing I will share:

Is there a reason not to buy it?

In my opinion, I don’t think it’s a perfect solution, today. But you need to think of the iPad (and the iPhone OS in general) as an organism that is continually developing and improving and therefore is becoming more interesting every day.

WhenI bought my iPad, it didn’t take long for me to get up to speed with it. If you’ve ever used an iPhone or iPod Touch you’ll be instantly familiar with its interface and special functions.

I wanted to add some quick thoughts and feedback after having an iPad in Italy for more than a month. Note that the iPad has been released in Italy only on May 28th.

• I’m still not comfortable using it on public transportation.

As a woman using public transportation every day in a city where safety is not a guarantee (a woman was raped a few hundred yards from my house), I’m hesitant to pull out the iPad on the metro unless I’m pretty much alone. Sometimes when I’m reading out in public I disguise it behind one of those free newspapers. I suspect this will ease after the iPad comes out in Italy (May 28th), and I can get a case that will make it less conspicuous.

• It’s the most interactive gadget I’ve owned, including my computer.

When I say interactive, I mean it morphs into what I need depending on where I am and especially who I’m with. It manages to involve the other person in a way no other gadget I’ve owned has done, which in part is due to the screen size, but also to the variety of features and applications available. I have yet to find a person whom I can’t excite by showing some fun things or how I’m productive using it.

• The speakers

I was expecting to have to use the device exclusively with headphones like I do with my iPod, but the speakers are pretty powerful. I watched a movie at home on it – we don’t have a television. I also listened to music in the office. It’s not a stereo system, but sharing music and giving a quick listen with friends becomes much more enjoyable.

• The screen

Yes, it gets filled with fingerprints easily, but I carry a microfiber cloth with me (to protect the screen in my purse) and in a few swipes, it’s clean once again. Summer is just now getting into full swing, so I’m curious to see how it will be at the beach. I often read with my iPod Touch at the beach by shading it. I don’t expect it to work in full sun, which is a negative, just like I don’t expect to read a paper book in the dark (whereas I can read on the iPad in the dark).

Some side effects

• I stopped pulling out my Moleskine for quick notes.

A lot of times I wrote in my Moleskine for ideas and designs, and then transferred a more organized or final version into a presentation or email. I find that I’m using the iPad more and more an enhanced note-taking device.

• I’m reading fewer books.

Since the introduction of the iPad, things have gotten worse for the ebook market. Prices have gone up, availability has been reduced across the popular ebook sites and many apps available on the iphone are still not available on the iPad which means those books I bought can’t be read on the iPad. Most iPhone apps can be enlarged for use on the iPad but text is one of the things that suffers the most. The only two apps ready for the iPad in this moment are iBooks and the Kindle app. Stanza, a popular app used to read ebooks and is owned by amazon is still only available for the iPhone. Update: Stanza was released for the iPad on June 3.

• I play more games in dead times.

I’ve never considered myself a gamer but with the iPad I am definitely gaming more – I play a quick game of air hockey with a colleague or 10-pin bowling by myself when I just want to let off steam. This point is a direct consequence of the above point. In the past when I might have opened up the latest book I was reading, now I might play a quick game.

• I make more playlists on the go.

One of the things I didn’t like was the On-the-Go function that small screen, and searching for a particular artist or song took forever. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Now the iPod function is almost exactly like the iTunes experience – I can do a quick search in my library to find an artist, keyword or song title, and make an instant playlist. I can edit playlists very easily with just a few taps.

• The iPod Touch screen seems really, really small.

After using the iPad for a few weeks, I sometimes go back to my iPod Touch to read some books with apps that aren’t available for the iPad yet, and it feels very small, something I never noticed before.

Here’s some of the articles I’ve written in January – I hope you enjoy them. Let me know!

• The Stats of Life – What is it about statistics that makes a geek jump for joy? I talk about some great sites to start collecting, organizing and analyzing your life’s statistics

• The New Age of Patronage – Centuries ago, patronage referred to the act of kings or important figures like the Pope sponsoring artists or musicians for the creation of their art. Now, we all can be patrons, with small money but without inauguration. A great site that puts patrons close to the arts is Kickstarter.com.

• Google Wave - Google Wave has introduced a ripple in the way we collaborate. Six months ago, when it was previewed, it seemed like a very intimidating service with the promise “to communicate and collaborate in real time.” I talk about the differences between Wave, email and wikis, and some suggestions to get you started using Wave.
  

• The Internet in Times of Tragedy – The Internet has changed us profoundly, from how we seek information to how we react in times of tragedy. Especially in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, we have more options and ways to react. Here are some of them.

• Apple, our modern-day oracle? – When Apple makes a move, it sends shock waves in every direction. Why do we feel the need to speculate on what Apple’s doing? How Apple’s moves affect our hope and imagination about the future.

• Ebook Format War: There Will Be Blood - There is a war going on. A war for a format. And until there is a universal format for ebooks, the consumer will be the first to lose. But many companies will lose, too. An update on the war for a universal ebook format.

• Solving the Babel Problem – Translation services are trying to make the citizens of the world just a little bit closer – If we can’t have a universal language, Google Translate wants to make communicating as seamless as possible.

• Tackling Indecision: Automate Destiny – Sometimes the most difficult thing about making a decision is not the result, but the process of making it. These decision and recommendation websites like Hunch.com, Yahoo! Answers, Let Simon Decide and Vark.com want to take the place of your best friend in the decision-making process.

Image by thetrial / CC BY-ND 2.0

Hopefully I don’t need to spend a lot of time convincing you that backup is essential to anyone that has digital data. And who doesn’t these days? Some of the benefits for backing up are avoiding data loss and gaining data independence from your physical computer and therefore, being more prepared for an eventual failure or crash.

• What to Backup
• Different types of Backup
• Backup vs. Archiving
• Scheduling and My Backup Setup
  
• Backup Software, Online Backup Services and Google Docs
• Resources

What to Backup

In short, anything you have on your computer you can’t bear to lose.

I backup what I consider to be the most important documents to me: my photos, my writing, organizational and university documents, and archives of important orders or noteworthy digital receipts. Anything I can’t replicate easily, or whose historical value means something to me. I also backup my ebooks, music and films I’ve purchased as some sites don’t provide you with a bookshelf or a way to re-download the media after purchase.

I often download files, programs and installation files to a specific folder (like C:/downloads) so that I can find the exact program later and re-install if necessary. Backup your installation files if you’ve downloaded them from the Internet, especially if they aren’t easy-to-remember program/website names.

If you’re using an email client that downloads mail directly to your computer, you’ll definitely want to have a backup of those email, too.

Different types of Backup

Backup is generally divided into two methodologies: file-based and image-based backup.

Image-based backup or disk imaging is like taking a snapshot of your computer’s current state and configuration. It will make an exact copy of your operating system, programs and drivers in that moment, useful for restoring at a later date. The entire backup is saved as a single file that is not navigable / explorable because it’s a complete package – you won’t be able to just restore a particular file or driver. If you’ve ever seen an installation CD for your favorite software, the data on the CD is usually in an .iso format which means it’s a disk image.

Image-based backup can be helpful to capture a particular state of your hard drive, installations, or system settings and is more popular for servers that are in a production environment, or a commercial setting. Most end users will not need to make an image backup. If you have a disk that is partitioned (i.e., on C:\ you have all your programs and operating system, and on D:\ you have just your data) you may decide to image the entire data drive instead of selecting particular folders.

File-based backup is based on selecting files, folders or even file types for backup. This is the most common usage of backup and allows you to have clear control on what exactly is being backed up. To allow for some flexibility, I select high-level folders (like C:\mydocs) where I save all my personal data. Centrally saving your data and downloads so you can easily locate them later is a good practice to get into – try to override any default settings in programs to save in their particular folders.

Doing a backup by file type (like all images: .jpg, .gif, etc.) can be useful to someone who just wants to back up photos or a particular type of document they have on their hard drive. Backup by file type can be limiting, though, especially if you’re not sure what kind of data you’re going to be producing in the future or if you don’t regularly check your backup settings to see if something needs to be changed to be more inclusive.

Backup vs. Archiving

Archiving is different from backup. Backup means that a file is copied to a secondary location where it will reside until it’s needed to replace or restore the version on the primary device. With archiving, the primary copy of the data is on a secondary device (like an external hard drive), and the original copy is deleted from the primary device (i.e., your laptop hard drive). Archiving a file means future versions of this file will not be synchronized to the secondary device and/or if the file is deleted from the primary device, the archived version on the secondary device is not affected.

Be careful that you don’t mix up the terms backup and archiving when looking at backup software and online services. Most software and solutions available today are based on synchronizing or backing up your computer’s actual state and files and are not archive solutions. If a file is deleted from the primary device, then a version of the file is available from the last time you backed it up on the secondary device. But if a file is deleted/changed/lost, and then a synchronization is executed before recovery is attempted from the secondary device, that file will be deleted/changed/updated on the backup repository and therefore non-recoverable.

Scheduling and My Current Backup Setup

With scheduling, you can really harness the true power of doing a backup – being able to schedule your backup automatically. Depending on your data generation/modification habits, I would suggest scheduling a backup once or a few times a week to keep your backups fresh and relevant.

My Backup Setup

For fun, I’m going to share the backup and archiving solution that I use at home. Perhaps you might feel I’m a little cautious with a lot of my failover, but it definitely goes back to the benefit of backup – feeling independent from my computer. My laptop is 4 years old, but I don’t worry anymore about the day that it might break down. My laptop drive is so small that most of my new content can’t fit on it anymore.

• A. Primary device – laptop 60GB
• B. Backup drive 1 – 250GB
• C. Backup drive 2 – 750GB
• D. Online backup services – MozyHome

On A, I keep some personal documents and photos, which I then back up to B. On B, I now also have some photos and original content which only exist on B (and not on A). These documents and photos from A & B are backed up onto D, my online backup service. Then the entire contents of B (backed-up files from A, and primary content on B) is backed up to C. On C there is some primary/original content that is not backed up, and for now I’m ok with that.

Backup Software and Online Backup Services

There are many options for online and offline backup, many of which are listed in the articles at the end of this post. If you already have an external hard drive you back up to, you still might need software to help the scheduling or synchronization process. I use Synkron which is an open source software that synchronizes folders which works pretty well. If you don’t have an external hard drive, what are you waiting for? They are getting cheaper every day – pick up a Western Digital or Seagate drive.

If you’re running Windows, you may not have to buy anything. Microsoft XP comes with its own backup software = Windows XP Backup – installed automatically on XP Pro and available to XP Home users, too. I’ve never used it so I can’t vouch for its effectiveness, but it appears you can select what to backup and even schedule it. Read more about how to set up Windows XP Backup.

As far as online backup options, there are so many. I have been using Mozy (Pro) for my online backup more than a year, and while it’s a little slow, I’ve been generally happy. If you feel like giving me a little love, you can sign up for Mozy using my referral link – but that’s up to you. Here’s also a clean link to Mozy with no referral.

Another popular solution for online backup is Dropbox. We use it often at work to share files and folders among members of a virtual working group. Similar to Mozy, you get 2GB free and they have other, more robust options for pay.

Worth mentioning, and one you might not have thought of is Google Docs, an online document service that will actually import files into their online versions. If you’ve got text, presentation or Word files that you’d like to be accessible online, this is a great way to have a copy of them online, but it’s not a good solution for continuous backup. Note that Google Docs does NOT have a guarantee for users so it’s possible that some day your documents could be lost or they could turn off the service.

What concerns or issues do you have when it comes to backup? What’s your setup like?

Resources

• 10 Data Backup, Storage and Sharing Solutions from Smashing Magazine
• CNET’s list of backup software
• List of backup software on Wikipedia
• List of online backup services on Wikipedia
• Best online backup services by PCMag
• Synching your files with SugarSync by NYTimes

(img by zebble)
Note: There are affiliate links in this post which are clearly labeled.

Tara Hunt, @missrogue on Twitter, is a notable Canadian entrepreneur, founder of unconventional marketing company “Citizen Agency” and frequent keynote speaker talks to me about her new book.

SARA ROSSO: You’re the author of “The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business.” What is “Whuffie”?

TARA HUNT: Whuffie is a fun word coined by Cory Doctorow in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that means social currency. In Cory’s book, he describes a future where there is no money, only Whuffie. One makes whuffie by being nice, networked and/or notable. You can ‘ping’ someone else’s whuffie, getting back a score. A high score means that you can probably trust that person and you may want to get to know him/her. When I read Cory’s book, I thought to myself, “Actually, this doesn’t sound any different from how we relate to one another in online communities.” We are constantly pinging one another’s whuffie.

SARA ROSSO: There are 5 key principles of the Whuffie Factor -

1. stop talking, start listening – focus on individuals and understand the needs of a community
2. become part of the community you serve
3. create amazing customer experiences
4. embrace the chaos – communities are made up of people, and people are not predictable
5. find your higher purpose – what can you give to the community, and still be profitable?

Which principle are you finding companies are having the hardest time with? What advice are you giving them to overcome this?

TARA HUNT: The principle most difficult for companies to gr0k is Embrace the Chaos. Giving up control of the message and opening oneself up to the vast opportunities presented in building relationships with one’s customer community is a risky thing to do. Of course, everything is a risk, even when tightly planned, so I help coach companies through taking baby steps towards embracing that chaos, pointing out the rewards along the way.

SARA ROSSO: Why do you think that companies should focus on “delighting and enchanting those people already part of your community” first? If there is no official existing community, how do companies start identifying who is part of the “community”?

TARA HUNT: If you delight your current customers, they will go out and tell their friends and contacts about their great experience. This word of mouth is still and always will be the most effective type of marketing. When people give their peers recommendations, it’s much more powerful than a pitch from a company. As far as identifying who is part of the customer community? The advice I give is to step back and figure out what problem are you solving/need are you filling? And then ask yourself, “who has those needs?” Those are the types of questions that will help you identify your customer community.

SARA ROSSO: In Italy BarCamps are very popular – you’ve been very involved in BarCamps from the start in California. What do you think has changed, for better or for worse, in the way BarCamps are organized and executed in these past 4 years? Any advice to share?

TARA HUNT: BarCamp is amazing because, I believe, it is morphing with the needs of the social geek community (who are the ones primarily driving the adoption of BarCamp). I think it is changing around the world. People are getting really creative with the idea of BarCamp, applying it to non-tech questions and industries and seeing really great results. This is bringing BarCamp to a wider audience, so I believe strongly it is for the better. Advice? Only that I think that BarCamp is an awesome model for getting the creative juices flowing. Apply it liberally!

SARA ROSSO: Are there any new and upcoming tools or sites you’re using that might interest the Girl Geeks in Italy?

TARA HUNT: I use an abundance of travel tools nowadays. I really love Tripit.com and Dopplr.com (want them to synch together, though). I’m really looking forward to seeing how Open Social unfolds as well to help me solve my social network management issues. Other than that, I’m loving various Twitter applications like Tweetie for my iPhone and Tweetdeck for my desktop. I think there is going to be more ideas and applications to emerge out of Twitter. It’s all in the beauty of their open API.

Thank you, Tara! Her book, “The Whuffie Factor” is now available on Amazon.com

Here’s a presentation of hers on Whuffie. There are 261 slides but they FLY!

This it the English version of an article that I published on

At night, before going to sleep, do you turn off your computer? Do you leave it on to exchange your poetry and photos through peer-to-peer file sharing? At lunch do you activate your screen saver? Or do you leave your computer on during the day when doing a backup?

Why not give something more and collaborate with the rest of the world?

What is Distributed Computing?

Distributed computing is when many computers work together to resolve difficult problems or calculations, becoming a sort of virtual supercomputer. These projects are organized and managed all over the world by scientists, mathematicians and professors, but even you can contribute directly to their success!

There are hundreds of active distributed computing projects and the majority of them are non-profit projects that need volunteers to accomplish the project. A volunteer “donates” bandwidth, processor (CPU/GPU) time, memory (RAM) and space on their hard disk for a project.

For example, a project requires a calculation of 405 million sums. Without a supercomputer it would be impossible to complete it, or it might take years. Instead, if your computer does 20-100 sums, and mine another 100, together with other 100 computers, an army of volunteer computers manages to do it faster and with a lower cost or free for who manages the project.

The first distributed computing project is GIMPS, Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, begun in 1996, for the search for new prime numbers. Through this project they have discovered 12 new prime numbers in the last 13 years, the most recent in September 2008: 2 ^37.156.667-1, a number 13 million digits long!

How it Works and How to Get Started

Distributed computing is executed through a program installed locally on your computer. This application communicates with the project servers to download data, resources and upload results. Often a middleware is used to manage more projects (and their applications) together or manage the project across multiple volunteer resources.

You’ve heard of software, the applications that you install on your computer. The hardware are peripherals that have physical space inside your computer. But what is middleware? A middleware is a layer of application that manages to manage more than one application, share resources and driver libraries between them, or manage the priority of the processes of several applications. It can be also used to manage applications and resources across several computers.

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a platform of middleware that permits a volunteer to easily participate in distributed computing because the interaction with the projects is completely managed by it. BOINC is the most well-known and used** software with more than 1,5 million users (and 500.000 active users) on all of their projects. It was developed by Berkeley University in 2002 and it’s open source as well as LGPL.

When your computer is idle for a period that you decide (like 10 minutes), a screensaver is activated which communicates with the software installed locally so that it can proceed with the distributed computing. An alternative configuration is to give the calculations low priority so as not to impact the performance of other processes while you are working normally.

How to get started with BOINC:

1. Choose a project: (there’s a list of all the distributed computing projects on Wikipedia)
2. Download and install BOINC
3. Insert an email address and password (the address will not be published, it serves for some communication from the team, but a way to identify you for credits and interact with the team)
4. At this point your computer is assigned tasks or calculations to complete by the task manager of the project.
5. Your computer will download data files and apps (if necessary) from the project server.
6. When the tasks are completed, it will upload the results onto the remote project server.
7. Your computer will automatically request new tasks based on your preferences.

**You can also participate in a project that does not use the BOINC platform as some are available ad stand-alone distributed computing projects, such as GridMP which is used by the World Community Grid di IBM (and has 200,000 users).

For every set of tasks completed, there is the possibility to earn credits (the appropriate number is determined by the difficulty and/or resources needs to complete them) which are added to your volunteer profile. You can also ask for more tasks and proceed.

Some interesting Distributed Computing projects

There are hundreds of active distributed computing projects all over the world – just look at the list of all the distributed computing projects on Wikipedia to see the possibilities. Many projects are overseen by universities and volunteer groups, and, seeing as BOINC is open source, a project can be started and launched by anyone!

Here are some interesting and popular projects:

• SETI@ Home – Perhaps the most well-known BOINC project, SETI@Home is the search for intelligent life outside Earth through radio telescopes.
• Combat cancer or AIDS: Compute against Cancer – Help Conquer Cancer or fight AIDS FightAIDS@Home
• Folding @ Home da Stanford University: studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Folding @ Home
• Einstein @ Home: Uses a computer’s idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors Einstein @ Home
• or if you prefer a more entertaining approach - Project Sudoku or Chess960@Home
• or more artistic: RenderFarm@Home to render 3D graphics, The Internet Movie Project to create animated films for the public domain.

Mini-FAQ on Distributed Computing

• Is it safe? Could I be at risk for spam or viruses?

As all software downloadable through the internet, there could be some risks. For each project you will be asked to download files and executables for that particular project. Take a look at the site and the information available before deciding to participate in a project. Many projects, however, already have thousands (if not millions) of users and a strong and reliable reputation.

The relationship between the volunteer and the project is based on trust of the project and that it:

• will provide applications that don’t damage their computer or invade their privacy
• is truthful about what work is being done by its applications, and how the resulting intellectual property will be used.
• follow proper security practices, so that hackers cannot use the project as a vehicle for malicious activities

• Is there a minimum commitment to participate?

Your commitment is as you decide. You can connect one day and another no. Your participation is divided into sets of tasks, so you can complete your current tasks and then stop, or immediately continue with new tasks.

• Does it cost to participate?

Obviously there can be costs in terms of electricity consumed due to the fact that you leave your PC on to participate in distributed computing when it might be otherwise turned off. But maybe not. How many times have you left the PC “just for a moment” and then you come back a half hour later? This time (and electricity) “lost” would be much welcomed.

And bettering the world will have a cost anyway, and you want to help, right?

Other Resources

• Distributed computing on Wikipedia and a list of distributed computing projects
• Grid Republic : an online interface which helps in the getting started and signup process
• International Science Grid this Week – a weekly newsletter
• Volunteer @ Home – information for volunteers
• Grid Cafè – a place to learn about grid computing, brought to you by CERN.

What are you waiting for? Your computers are ready to participate!

Photo by jmv

• Part 1: Copyfight and Creative Commons
• Part 2: Ebooks, DRM and Universal Formats
• Part 3: The Future of Art in the Information Age

Here is the entire transcript of the interview in a text file – it took me hours to transcribe, it…so play nice.

Here’s the mp3 which is about 22 minutes long, which you can also download by saving here. But please note, it’s not the best quality recording.

If you liked what Cory had to say, you might enjoy reading some of his recent articles:

• Authors have lost the plot in Kindle battle, The Guardian
• The High Priests of IT — And the Heretics, Harvard Business Blog
• You shouldn’t have to sell your soul just to download some music, The Guardian
• Writing in the Age of Distraction – Locus Magazine
• drmfree tag for items on Amazon, BoingBoing.net

Or, check out his books which are made available FREE through a Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States

• Novels, non-fiction books, and his stories
• I recommend “Content“  – a collection of “essays, speeches, and white-papers on subjects ranging from copyright to science fiction writing to DRM, Wikipedia to Facebook and Metadata.”

Image by hiddedevries

Thanks to one of the many Meet the Media Guru events organized in Milan, Cory Doctorow was in Milan and I was lucky to get an interview one-on-one with him. Here’s part 3 of my interview with Cory Doctorow, where he talks about the future of art in the Information Age.

SARA: Can we go back to copyright a little bit…you talk about “the elimination of copyright is something that diversifies cultural participation” and “decentralizes who gets to make art.” I wanted to talk to you about what you think the future of an artist is, because maybe a couple of years ago, you were a programmer OR a writer OR a photographer and I think that if we’re not going to be able to “get rich” because that’s something that the copyright should be protecting who can buy, and how many copies they can buy, a further evolution of this might be: you might make less from that book, you might write more books because the technology is helping you do things faster, but you might need to diversify your own talent.

How do you see the future of an artist being impacted by the information age?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, I think that, and I want to start at the beginning of the question: I think that copyright diversifies decision-making about who gets to make art. Before copyright, we had patronage, so a pope or a duke said that you could paint a ceiling, you could paint a ceiling. We got some great ceilings that way, but it was not a great way for apportioning capital to make art. The creation of an exclusive industrial right that you could then waive investment on to restrict copying allowed people to make any art that they wanted to, provided it was profitable.

So that was the second stage, and that vastly diversified decision making about who got to decide who made art, and that was good. We are entering the realm now in which relaxing that right, not eliminating it but relaxing it, dramatically reduces the amount of capital you need to produce, because for example you can remix and do lots of other things. And when you dramatically reduce the amount of capital you need, you further diversify, because now it’s not just that art which is profitable, but it’s that art which is profitable at smaller investment levels, or that art which doesn’t require profit in order to exist, right? It can be made for free.

So this is really a good policy, I can’t wait to have more diversity from a more relaxed or more liberal copyright regime. But I don’t think that copyright ever made a majority of artists rich.

So, the majority of artists were not earning anything like a living before copyright, before the Internet rather. They won’t be earning a living during the Internet, they won’t be earning a living after the Internet because creating art is a non-economic, fundamentally non-economic principle. People make art even when no one wants to buy it because they want to express themselves.

Now the Internet has made it possible for a generation of artists to earn a living, there are a lot of artists who are earning on the Internet and that’s great news for them. Visual artists who can connect more readily with potential buyers for their work. My friend Rick in Michigan, he lives outside of Detroit and he’s a well-known painter of science fiction book covers and it’s your basic commissioned painter work. It’s your basic day-job for painters. But he loves photography and he sits in his backyard and he takes the most exquisite macro focus photography of bugs and high-speed photography of birds. And the Internet has made it possible for him to connect with an audience, a gigantic audience of people who want to buy art prints of these photos.

So here you have someone who was making a modest living painting book covers for New York publishing, is now making a real living as an artist taking photos that really tickle his artistic fancy from his backyard in Michigan. So this is the kind of thing the Internet enables. But even when it does enable an artist to make a living, the two reasons we make art is to get paid, but also to be heard. The Internet has made it possible for more people to be heard by more people than ever before.

So, every artist is going to find their own way to earn a living or not, and the majority of artists won’t find a way to earn a living, that’s just the way it works, whether or not there’s an Internet. But if there’s an Internet, more artists will be able to find an audience and that’s a piece of the puzzle. It’s not the only piece but it’s a very important piece of the puzzle.

SARA: Can you give us a little preview of what you’re going to be speaking about tonight? (Meet the Media Guru, Milan)

CORY DOCTOROW: I think you just heard it. I’ll be talking more about exactly this.

SARA: Yes, because I saw that you’re talking about writing in the “Age of Distraction”…

CORY DOCTOROW: I won’t be talking about that so much but that’s certainly something that cuts right into my daily experience, because I work on a novel all the time, I’m writing a thousand words every day on it, I wrote a thousand words this morning and getting those thousand words done when you travel a lot and have a little baby and all the rest of it, is tricky.

SARA: I’m not sure if you’re aware that in Italy they are proposing a law for a registry of bloggers, because in Italy we still have a registry of journalists – to be a part of this you have to be certified and carry a license. What do you think the implications of having a registry of bloggers could be, that we’re held accountable legally just like a journalist could be in Italy?

CORY DOCTOROW: I don’t think it would work very well, because defining who a blogger is would be very hard. It would silence or make ridiculous the phenomenon, for example of a 12 year old who wants to open a blog to talk about their Pokemon cards with their friends. Do those people need licenses? And how do you establish where the cutoff is?

This sounds to me like it’s something that a Parliament could spend 10 years debating, and by the time they come up with a working definition, it would have been completely invalid and technology would have moved on.

If there’s a legitimate problem that the Parliament’s trying to solve, this won’t solve it. I guess that’s the shortest answer I can give you: this won’t solve it.

SARA: That’s all the questions I have today, thank you for your time.

CORY DOCTOROW: It was lovely to meet you.

Thank you so much, Cory! I’ll be posting a round-up with the downloadable file and audio tomorrow.

Image by regolare

Thanks to one of the many Meet the Media Guru events organized in Milan, Cory Doctorow was in Milan and I was lucky to get an interview one-on-one with him. Here’s part 2 of my interview with Cory Doctorow, where he talks about ebooks, DRM and universal formats.

SARA: I know that you said that ‘ebooks are poor substitutes for print, which makes them great enticement for print (copies) – if you like the e version, go buy the book’ but what about someone like me, for example, I don’t go buy print books anymore, I only buy ebooks. What can someone like me do? Do you see a world where print no longer exists, where’s the new revenue model?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, I don’t really see a world where print can no longer exist. I mean, there is a minority of people who do this (buy all electronic) but I don’t see it growing very quickly. The Kindle sold no one knows how many units, but at $350 a pop, and I don’t see them getting cheaper either because there’s just not a lot of mass appeal. Book reading is not a mass activity. No one’s going to expect them to sell as many Kindles as they sold Nintendo DS, for example.

I’m not that really worried about it. But if it emerges, we’ll have to think of something different. There’s this risk of waiting for the future, waiting for this crisis to occur before you act, doing nothing because you think this crisis might occur later, and then everything passes you by.

If print dies, we’re going to need a business model no matter what. And it’s not going to be based on preventing people from copying your work if they want to, because it’s not technically possible to really be able to do that. So I’m not exactly worried about it. It’s like ‘What are we going to do when the meteor hits?’ There’s a non-zero chance that the meteor’s going to hit and it would be pretty disastrous if it did.

SARA: I don’t really think it’s a crisis actually, I think it’s an opportunity because, for example, me living in another country I have access to so many more types of genres that I wouldn’t have access to if they weren’t electronic. So I think your point is make it electronic, make it available to someone who’s in Australia, or someone in Iceland…

CORY DOCTOROW: But expatriates are different, and expatriates are a very small market. The total expatriate book market commercially is very small, but getting you free electronic copies of my books probably sells more copies even if you read it electronically because you go out and tell 15 friends about it who aren’t necessarily expatriates because we have these digital networks now. So they can walk down to their local bookshop in New York or Stanford or wherever and pick up a copy. I mean again I think it’s a net positive for now. You know the world in which like print completely bleeds over to the Kindle, I don’t know…we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

SARA: Well you saw that this week has had some big improvements / changes on the ebook industry: The Kindle 2 was released and also they then released an app for the iPhone, and then yesterday Fictionwise was bought by Barnes & Noble. But we’re still in this format war. The difference between the mp3 war is that there was an mp3, a universal format.

What can individuals do or what can you do as an author to push toward some sort of universal format that can make it more appealing?

CORY DOCTOROW: Actually I think that the important thing isn’t a universal format, but the important thing is open formats, because books are open, right? I mean, you walk into a big, well-supplied bookstore and pick out from the smallest, most cheaply made book to the largest, most expensively made you will find an enormous diversity of printed material. Digitally representing that material faithfully is going to require more than one format. So, you open a web page in your browser, you probably open 25 different file formats and you don’t care if they are bitmaps, or pngs, bmps, jpgs, gifs or j32s or whatever because they are all open, right? And provided they are open, it’s not challenging for people to make devices or display technology to implement. These things if they are standardized, there’s been a records code that the standards body produced and you literally just paste it into your code base and away you go, you’ve got support.

And if you go to China, you actually see what this is going to look like because in China nobody cares if the formats are proprietary and if it’s technically against the law for them to include it. So people have video playback devices in China and it plays everything. If you buy an ebook reader in China, it plays everything. If you buy an mp3 player in China, it plays everything. And in fact most video players play all the ebooks and all the audio because, why not? It’s an extra 16 lines of code in a device that has gigabytes of memory.

So, how do we get to open standards is probably a better question and I think we need to focus on bringing these companies to account. So, I don’t think it’s good news that Kindle books are available on the iPhone, I think that’s pathological news. Why should we need a business arrangement so that you can play books that you bought and paid for on another device?

SARA: And it’s extremely US-centric.

CORY DOCTOROW: Right, I mean saying we can now read Kindle books on the iPhone should be as weird as saying that we can read Bantam books in easy chairs. Bantam shouldn’t have any say on what kind of chair you’re sitting on when you’re reading the book. Amazon shouldn’t have any say over which device you’re using when you’re reading the book. You’re buying the book, it should be yours.

SARA: Yes, it’s hard for those of us that want to [buy books]….there’s a lot of temptation because I have three different formats that I want to read and at any time and I think that it’s a big problem with the formatting.

CORY DOCTOROW: Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

SARA: Right and if you’re an avid reader it’s hard to resist that.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of the interview tomorrow…

Photo by meetthemediaguru

PS: I made a gaffe almost immediately (which I’ve left in this transcript) but I blame it on my excitement and enthusiasm talking to Cory.

SARA: So I’m here with Cory Doctorow, and he’s a science fiction author as well as a co-editor of Boing Boing.net and a big proponent of copyfight which is what we’re going to talk about in a moment. One of the things he’s probably most known for is releasing all of his books under public domain-
CORY DOCTOROW: -Creative Commons
SARA: -under Creative Commons Attribution and-
CORY DOCTOROW: no…Creative Commons, non-Commercial, Share-Alike
SARA: …sorry
CORY DOCTOROW: It’s ok. There’s a big difference.
SARA: No, I know…(me blushing furiously and thinking of my recently published A Guide to Creative Commons and Copyright) He makes his books available for download online and people can rework them, adapt them as long as they don’t re-sell them or make them available to others for pay. (Editor’s note: And, due to the share-alike license, all derivative works must be released under the same license.)

So can you tell us, what does copyfight mean?

CORY DOCTOROW: To me, it really means re-balancing copyright. It used to be that copyright was something that the average person never used to have think about..because copyright only kicked in when you made a copy, and making a copy involves having some kind of big industrial piece of machinery…you know, you need a printing press to make a copy.

The rules were a little difficult to understand, but it didn’t matter because if you were going to spend a million dollars on a print shop, you could afford to spend a thousand dollars for a lawyer to tell you how to do it right. But now we can make copies a million times a day without even thinking. We copy like we breathe on the internet and every one of those copies is governed by copyright law and the digital response to the copyright law hasn’t been to make it simpler for us to understand, it’s been to make it harder and to make the penalties for getting it wrong even worse.

This has produced a really bad outcome, where 98% of the works in copyright don’t have any visible owner, no one knows who the license comes from, but the majority of internet users are essentially criminals because of how they use the internet. Musicians and other kinds of artists are not getting paid and their fans are starting to feel like they’re greedy, terrible people – for having sued people who love their work and don’t deserve to get paid, I mean it’s a mess for everybody!

So I really think we need a set of common-sense copyright rules that say if you’re going to do something industrial, with copying as a business that you have a set of rules that are respectful of the need to innovate but still fairly compensate people whose work that you take and if you’re not doing something commercial but if you’re doing something that’s merely cultural – the kind of thing that’s really the way we converse with copyrighted works now – that that shouldn’t be subject to that kind of industrial regulation at all. It should just be outside of the realm of industrial regulation.

SARA: And what about an artist who’s interested in releasing their works under Creative Commons? I know that when you did that, you already had a bit of a following, a bit of community. I think in some ways a community serves not only as someone who propagates your work but also defends it as a sort of a watchdog. What about someone who’s just starting out? Would you recommend they release their work under Creative Commons?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, to be honest I’ve never needed a watchdog. It just hasn’t come up. Yeah, I mean there’s like a million people who violate the licenses in tiny ways, but you know, as an artist or a commercial person you need to decide : Are you interested in making sure everyone who uses your work pays you for it or everyone who would pay you for your work gets a chance to use it? You can’t do both. If you spend all your time chasing 13-year olds and turning them upside down so the quarters fall out of their pockets, you’ll never get any painting or music or books done.

So, I’ve never had to worry about the enforcement side. Now as to whether or not it’s worth doing if you don’t have a community or what it can do for you I think you put your finger on something important: Creative Commons doesn’t make people love your work in one spread. It gives the tools to people who love your work in one spread to do something. So, it doesn’t solve the first problem. And that’s a problem that every artist solves in their own way. Some of them solve it by connecting with a commercial entity that helps promote their work, some of us have the innate ability to do it, some of us just chance into it…

Every artist finds their way there. But the important takeaway from that is it never occurs, I think, to allow people explicitly to non-commercially share your work, because first of all most people assume that they’re allowed do it, or if they don’t assume they are allowed to do it, they do it anyway. So you’re not enabling people to do something anyway that they would do if they loved your work. What you’re doing is assuring them that what they’re doing is lawful. And more importantly than enlisting people to act as your enforcer, what you’re doing is creating a social contract with those people by saying to them, “this isn’t a lawless zone with no rules under which you can take my work and share it with your friends. This is a zone where we have a social contract of reasonable, easy-to-understand terms; I would ask you to police yourselves.” Not that you’re asking them to police on your behalf, but to themselves, temper their own behavior on that basis.

The important thing about all law, all agreements is that they have to be in large part self-enforced. If a law requires a policeman to sit in your living room all day long to make sure you don’t violate it, then the law is dead. So the law has to first be seen as reasonable by people who are bound by it. And Creative Commons represents a set of very reasonable, easy to understand set of bi-lateral, easy-to-understand premises.

SARA: Can we talk about your decision to release your book under Creative Commons? Can you tell me about that day you decided to do that?

CORY DOCTOROW: Sure, you know I decided to release it for free online before Creative Commons existed, but by the time I was ready to, Creative Commons had come into existence. My first book was a guide to publishing science fiction. I wrote it with a novelist. I was a short story writer and he was a novelist and we were both widely published. We wrote this book and the month it came out, I won the award for best new writer in the field, so this was presumably good news for the publisher and you’d think they run out and try and sell some more copies off that, but they did nothing. And they did nothing because they expected to sell 10,000 copies of this book and if they sold another 1,000 copies they would make $800. And it would cost them $3,000 to do anything with this news that was meaningful to sell those 1,000 copies. So it made no sense for them to go out and sell those 1,000 copies.

SARA: Or maybe there were 800 already in Nebraska and your audience was somewhere else…

CORY DOCTOROW: Right. I understood why they didn’t want to do it, but it disappointed me. I thought, God this is no way to run a career as a writer, but at the same time there had been this enormous fufarah about ebook piracy, where people who loved books were taking the copy off the shelf, slicing the binding off of it, running each page on the scanner and then running it through optical character recognition (OCR) software and then going through it by hand and correcting all the typos that had been introduced by this process.

There’s only one reason that someone does this: it’s because they love the book and they want to share it with their friends. And there have been all these writers were going crazy about this – once you go electronic you’ll never get it back, you’re doomed, you’ve destroyed us, we hate you, you’re a pirate! And I looked at this and I thought first of all: calling these people who love your books a pirate even if you’re disappointed with what they’ve done is probably not a productive strategy. The best you can hope for is that they’ll hate you and stop promoting your book. That’s the best of all the possible outcomes. The worst is they’ll hate you and decide to promote your books just to spite you! It’s just awful news, right? So I thought ok, we can do better than this.

So looking at these two facts: the fact that my publisher didn’t want to and couldn’t afford to promote me and the fact that there were fans out there who were trying to promote books that they love, and writers were running away from this as fast as they could, I thought there’s a better way to do this.

And that is, rather than expect them to spend 80 hours scanning in the book and 10 hours to promote the copy, why don’t I just give them a perfect copy of the book and maybe they’ll spend all 80 or 90 hours out there promoting it? And it worked really well.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the interview tomorrow where Cory talks about ebooks and DRM!

Photo by Joi Ito

Part 1: What are ebooks? Advantages and Disadvantages of Electronic Books

• What are eBooks?
• Why aren’t eBooks more popular? Tactile Loss and the eBabel problem
• ebooks are Great! Here’s Why

Part 2: How to Read an ebook: Formats, Devices, Dedicated Readers and Applications

• eBook Formats
• How to Read an eBook: Devices and dedicated eBook readers
• Applications to read eBooks on the iPhone / iTouch

Part 3: Where to Buy and Find Free Ebooks, and Learning Resources

• Where to Find and Buy Ebooks
• Where to Find Free Ebooks
• Learning Resources

Where to Find and Buy Ebooks

Intersted in finding popular, rare and current books? You have a lot of choice, and it’s growing every day. For more information on each of these formats, make sure you read How to Read an ebook: Formats, Devices, Dedicated Readers and Applications

• Fictionwise.com – Secure Mobipocket, eReader, PDF formats. Multiformat books, which are usually non-DRM books. A list of supported formats and devices. Note: Fictionwise was bought by Barnes & Noble in March 2009.
  • eReader.com – eReader is actually powered by Fictionwise and is a separate site carrying only eReader /.pdb files.
• Barnes & Noble – they bought Fictionwise (above) but books are also available through bn.com – eReader/.pdb files.
• Books on Board.com – a mixture of EPUB, Mobipocket and eReader formats. Check Books on Board supported formats.
• Diesel ebooks – Adobe, Mobipocket, eReader, Microsoft formats.
• Mobipocket.com – Mobipocket format (owned by Amazon).
• Amazon.com Kindle Store (Kindle format only)
• eBook Store from Sony (Sony format) – Sony is also teaming up with Google to offer a half million of public domain books for the Sony Reader.
• www.ebooks.com – Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, Adobe Digital Editions (secure EPUB) formats – they have a handy Reader comparison table.
• eHarlequin eBooks (U.S.) and Mills & Boon (UK) – only romance, but someone to watch since they are often cutting-edge with free book offerings, embracing technology and experimenting in the “e” category.
• Penguin – eBooks (U.S.) and Penguin eBooks UK – in the UK they are supporting the secure EPUB format, while in the US eBooks are available in Microsoft Reader, Adobe secure PDF and secure eReader.
• WHSmith eBookShop (UK) – books in secure Adobe EPUB, secure Adobe PDF, secure Mobipocket, secure Microsoft Reader.
• Waterstones (UK) – for Sony Readers, utilizes secure Adobe Digital Editons (EPUB).
• Wizz-e.com is a site that focuses on electronic books for children.
• EPubBooks.com – a list of places to find EPUB format books.
• O’Reilly eBooks – the classic technology publisher embraces eBooks and offers DRM-free(!!) bundles of their books in three formats (EPUB, Kindle Mobipocket and PDF) so you’ll have some mobility amongst your devices.

Where to Find Free Ebooks

There are several places to find free books which can be downloaded in various formats and converted if necessary. Many of them will be “the classics” – books that are in public domain, but converted and released in different formats.

• Project Gutenberg mentioned above is a great site with more than 27,000 books available in the public domain. Classics from Austen, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, even the Kama Sutra!
• ManyBooks.net – 23,000+ books, and they’re all free! Multiple formats available for download.
• FeedBooks.com – more free books, compatible with most mobile devices and Kindle / Sony / iPhone, it supports the EPUB format.
• Google Book Search – use “Advanced Book Search” and select “Full view only” for some creative commons / public domain books.
• Free Kindle format books – a great list of free Kindle format books from Kindle 2, Kindle Books Reader 2.0 – Amazon Kindle 2 Review
• Kindle Formatting is offering a few free books during Read an Ebook Week.
• Suvudu – a new science fiction portal Suvudu from Random House which has monthly free books to download. You can sign up for their newsletter to get notified when new titles are available.
• Girlebook.com – “free ebooks by the gals” -  classics and titles by lesser-known female authors, all free.
• F+W Media offers some free ebooks to those that sign up for their newsletter.

Learning Resources

Still want to know more about eBooks? Here are some resources to continue your quest. Send me your questions as well via my Contact Page.

• TeleRead.org – a blog all about eBook news and eBook readers
• Three Open Source E-book Readers Worth a Look from OStatic
• A very useful E-book Reader matrix from MobileRead
• ePub Resources and Guides – O’Reilly Labs
• Dear Author.com – a blog mainly about romance books, but check their ebook technology category for some very informative posts including device comparisons and some hot eBook topics. After all, romance readers are one of the most powerful reading markets – we read a lot, we buy a lot, and we are pushing the eBook market to get their act together. Some posts to jump straight to: Dear Author’s 2nd Annual Buying Guide, Parts 1 and 2 – How to borrow eBooks from your local library using the Sony Reader, and 2008 eInk Readers
• How to Choose an Ebook Reader from Wired.com
• International Digital Publishing Forum – proponents of the EPUB format, statistics and news regarding the eBook market.
• MobileRead – information for reading digital content on your mobile/cellular phone, but lots of crossover with the format wars in general.
• Read an E-Book Week – March 8-14, 2009.
• Read Write Web ebooks category

What doubts or questions do you have regarding electronic books? Leave them in the comments, or send it to me via Ask the Geek.

Image from gi