Steven Johnson on E-Books

[richards1000@comcast.net]

Listmembers may be interest in Steven Johnson's engaging article 
in the April 20 Wall Street Journal, "How the E-Book Will Change 
the Way We Read and Write," 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html . 
Johnson predicts that the Amazon e-reader and Google's vast 
digital library, combined with machine-readable markup and a 
standard citation system that provides pinpoint citations to the 
paragraph or even sentence level, will lead to social tagging of 
subparts of millions of e-books.  Google's search system and 
Amazon's ranking algorithms would then foster discovery and 
ranking of those subparts.  Moreover, the handheld appears to 
enable easy impulse buying of digital texts.  According to 
Johnson, all of these factors should cause a huge increase in the 
sale of subparts of electronic books.

While it's clear that scholarly journal publishers are already 
effectively selling online on demand at the article level, I'm 
not sure whether scholarly monograph publishers or vendors are 
yet prepared for online sales on demand at the chapter, 
subchapter, or paragraph level.  I'd be interested to hear from 
scholarly monograph publishers and vendors whether Johnson's 
scenario seems likely, and, if so, how far along scholarly 
monograph publishers and vendors are at implementing the semantic 
markup, citation standards, and e-commerce components to 
facilitate such a system of on-demand digital subpart sales.

Johnson's article seems to underscore the value for knowledge 
dissemination and e-commerce of an open, machine-readable e-book 
citation format that can function as a unique identifier for each 
book subpart.

Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D.*, M.S.L.I.S., M.A.
Law Librarian & Legal Information Consultant
Philadelphia, PA
richards1000@comcast.net
* Member New York bar, retired status.