Pieces of the Pies: Customized Books, or Slice 'Em and Dice'Em

[Gerry Mckiernan]

              _Pieces of the Pies: Customized Books_

  On July 18, the New York Times published a most interesting article on soon-to-be-available customized books

[ "Books by the Chapter or Verse Arrive on the Internet this Fall / by Lisa Guernsey" (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/18book.html) 

NOTE: A free account must be established to access this item]. 

Here are some excerpts from the article

 "This fall, ...[The Frommer's  guide to France] and a few hundred others will take a new form on the Internet. They will be sold in component parts -- chapters, maps and even paragraphs -- that can be mixed and matched. Readers will be invited to create customized books by picking
pieces of content à la carte from an array of  already-published guides"

"Under this model, books have not only turned into streams of electronic bits that are downloaded to hand-held devices or printed on demand. They have also turned into databases -- pools of digital information that people can extract and
combine on their own terms. "

"Travel books, textbooks, cookbooks and how-to guides will be some of the first books chopped into interchangeable parts, according to officials at publishing and software companies experimenting with the concept."

"If a book is going to be chopped into digital pieces for mixing and matching, those pieces need to be technologically compatible with parts of other books. And to make those pieces searchable across databases, companies will have to establish a standard means to identify the piecemeal content, just as the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, enables books to be catalogued, tracked and bought quickly. "

"Most of the progress so far has come from the realm of education and research. College professors, after all, have been mixing chunks of editorial content for decades by assigning "course packs" that are typically compilations of photocopied pages from magazines, anthologies and nonfiction books.  Now, with advances in copyright-protection software and the recent drive to create electronic books, many publishers have embraced the idea of selling individual chapters from multiple academic books. "

   With these pending scenarios in mind, I am very interested in initiating a list discussion of the implications and ramifications of such developments for libraries and librarians and our clientele.
[I am particularly interested in the impacts on selection, acquisition and cataloging.]

  As Always, Any and All comments, critiques, questions, contributions, commentary, etc. etc. etc. are Most Welcome!

/Gerry McKiernan
Theoretical Librarian
Iowa State University 
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 

       "Life is What Happens While You're Making Other Plans"