[Web4lib] iPod Libraries; Was: Bitten by the Portable Apps bug!

[Karen Coyle]

Eric, I love the "megaGrisham" measurement :-)

I want to look beyond the technology to what it is that we want to do 
with the various intellectual resources that we have access to. I 
occasionally read a book more than once, but I almost always listen to a 
piece of music multiple times. Some texts, poems, inspirational works, 
seem designed for repeat business. I re-watch movies more often than I 
re-read books, but it's a small percentage of the movies I've seen. So 
far (and not enough time has passed for this to be a trend) I've not 
listened to a podcast more than once.

It's not just a question of medium, but some combination of medium and 
message, that leads me to repeat use. So the idea of having a whole 
library in my pocket doesn't sound interesting -- carrying around a 
bunch of stuff that I may access once only, or will have a very fleeting 
interest in. What I see happening with portable devices is that people 
are carrying with them "their culture," that is, the significant 
cultural expressions that they want to interact with on an ongoing 
basis. This could be, in itself, an interesting act of expression and 
creativity. It would be even more interesting if we could get seriously 
good visuals, so we could carry around our favorite paintings or 
sculpture. Of course, the market limitations and commercial interests 
skew this culture by making only certain resources available, but I'm 
hoping that we'll realize some of the potential of micro-markets for 
literature, art and music.

kc
p.s. Currently I'm carrying around Allen Ginsburg reading his own early 
poetry. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...."

Eric Hellman wrote:
> It is worth a quick look at today's technology.
>
> I have on my table here a copy of John Grisham's "the Brethren".
>
> Each page has about 1500 symbols; there are 440 pages, for a total of 
> 660,000 symbols. Shannon's estimate for the entropy of the English 
> language is 1.3 bits per symbol, so the full text of the Brethren will 
> take up 107 kBytes of lossless storage.
>
> So a top of the line 60GB iPod could store the full text of 559,440 
> similar books, i.e  0.56 megaGrishams. If we allow some extra storage 
> for cover art, we can round up and say that 100 GB= 1 megaGrisham.
>
> So, sure, carrying around an entire library is not much of a stretch, 
> it's just that carrying around an entire library in your iPod is not 
> going to deliver nearly as much value as "Weapon of Choice" or "Smells 
> Like Teen Spirit".

-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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