 I'm actually remembering. I used to teach a bartending course in college 24 years ago. And it was just like this, Kate, just like this. It was the Harvard bartending course, believe it or not. So in many ways, what I'm going to try to talk about is the least doing and the most talking of any of the people who've spoken so far. So I apologize in advance for the excessive abstraction and philosophizing that you're going to get from me. But hopefully, some of what I'm going to say can offer some larger narrative or structural context for what you've heard so far. And the second hour was focused on the question of libraries as a service. And one of the things that's become very clear across media over the last number of years is that there is a shift from an industrial revolution model of media as object, media as something that you own toward this rental model, media as something that you access with some degree of universality, with some degree of legality, with greater or lesser economic participation. But before I go into discussing what that looks like, I'd like to look a little at the previous model. And we'll focus on books. So what are some of the attributes of the book as product? And what are perhaps some of the limitations of book as product? Now, those of you who have ever designed or used design software or had to work with designers will be familiar with Laura Mipsum. It's placeholder text, dummy text. When you want to see what something would look like in a different typeface or a different color, up comes this garbage Latin. It's Virgil, or bastardized Virgil. Now, let's do a little thought experiment. What would it be like? What would be the, how would it play out to publish that as a book? You wouldn't have to pay the author. Not that everybody is always paying the author anyway, but you cannot pay the author and feel fine about it. It is perfectly ethical to not pay the author of Laura Mipsum. So you're going to get this text for free. But you're then going to have to pay a designer to lay it out. You're going to have to pay a cover designer to create a cover for it. You are going to have to pay a proof reader, because even though you don't need to edit the text, when it gets flowed into fixed format, there's going to be bad hyphenation. There's going to be widows and orphans, the little line that, you know, the paragraph beginning at the bottom of a page or ending at the top of the next page. The book has to be put in a catalog. Jacket copy has to describe this magnificent novel, Laura Mipsum, and what a page turner it is, and what a fascinating life its author had, what a cool backstory she had. Blurbs have to be solicited from other writers talking about what a fine Laura Mipsum is, which requires printing it out or mailing it to authors that still sometimes like to get physical manuscripts sent to them, and then sales reps for the publisher have to go to bookstores and spend 25 seconds addressing the title on this particular page about how many copies of Laura Mipsum the bookstore should be ordering three copies or four, two, or five, and then it obviously has to be printed, and it has to be shipped, and has to go to the store where it will sit on shelves until the consumer figures out this is a bunch of bullshit, and then it gets put in boxes, shipped back to the publisher, and just like a lot of other books that weren't Laura Mipsum, but in fact represented the blood, sweat, and tears of many authors and pulped, which means that a publisher would have to use the standard pricing models in American paperback publishing. A publisher would have to sell this for at least $10.95, which means that a book that is not Laura Mipsum that was actually written by a human being, somebody as talented and charismatic as Kate, gets a markup on its printing, distribution, and distributed overhead of maybe a dollar or two. Now look at the pharmaceutical industry, and look at the cost of producing a pill versus what a pill is sold for. The cost of producing a shirt in China versus what the shirt is sold for, or a Nike sneaker, or even a CD of music back in the days when people bought such things. And you begin to see that the book publishing industry had a catastrophically dreadful inability to charge people more than what it costs to create the physical object and put it in a store. Books were actually super shitty ways to monetize stories. So shitty, in fact, that if you compare the cost of producing something new to the cost of a public domain text, Jane Austen or Mark Twain to pick a couple of English language examples, we basically have agreed to give it away. So much as the industry has currently been stressing out enormously about what to charge for e-books, the reality is that as an industry if you look at it from a standpoint of what component of the selling price of a book is made up by the intellectual property, you begin to see that the status quo ante has been disastrous. The book as a product is in many respects a terrible product. Now why? I would argue that a lot of this has to do not with how much things cost in terms of money but how much things cost in terms of time because a book unlike any other cultural artifact takes up a lot of time. It takes 15 hours and it's 15 hours of the inside of your head. You can't iron or watch television or knit or perform various household duties. You can't second screen while reading a book. It's one person's voice whispering in your ear for 15 hours. So it is an enormous commitment that you're asking somebody to give up 15 hours of the inside of their head. We have a massive sampling problem because people don't want to give up 15 hours of the inside of their head. So the reason we are only able to charge such a tiny markup on what is a very expensive manufactured product is because people don't yet know if they want to waste 15 hours of the inside of their head. What it also suggests, however, is that if you get in a position where you like that 15 hours spent with somebody else whispering in your ear, if you're enjoying that almost erotic intimacy then you are obtaining enormous value, vastly more valuable dollar hour for hour in terms of its cost than almost any other mass produced cultural artifact. And I would argue that a lot of that has to do with what Bohr has, the second person to reference Bohr has which of course not only is he a writer but he is a librarian, is apropos. And what Bohr has was getting at both in this quote and in the quote that I think Kate, the way I read some of Bohr has a sort of fantasy of paradise as a library is that the book is a blueprint. The text is not something that is foreclosed but it is an opening. And in that sense, the book is very much not a product. The book is a service. And in that sense, what we begin to perhaps see is that the advent of trying to understand the book as a service versus the book as a product is not necessarily something that begins with a fantasy around Spotify for eBooks. The book as a service, the book as a process, the book as an interconnected web of activity, the book as a sort of erotic experience predates Spotify, predates the internet. And so in that particular sense, there is a tremendous opportunity for those of us who have practiced publishing and books and librarianship and editorial activity and creative writing in the present day that we can look to our past as well as look to the future. So what are some of the key attributes of the book as a service at a commercial level? Primarily what we're seeing is that the book is now possibly going to be sold as access rather than ownership and what are some of the attributes of access? The way I would sort of frame it is that access is the process of reading as a service. And that's, to some degree, the most obvious one. A library, a sort of an unlimited library of texts. And there are several examples of companies out there right now who are operating on a commercial basis who are adopting this particular model. There is a Spanish company called 24 Symbols that has a sort of, their business model is sort of a classic freemium business model where one chunk of their library is available for free to anybody who signs up. They just get dumped with a bunch of advertising and the selection that is in the free library is relatively limited. Then they have a premium version where their entire library is available. Sebastian mentioned, how should I pronounce it? Scuba? Scooby. Ah, like it's in Scooby-Doo. So Scooby is a German instance of that. That operates in a more limited version where I believe you get two books a month for nine euro. Then there is two other companies I'm going to mention. Their business models are currently a mystery because they haven't launched but I sort of feel when one comes to a conference like this you should find about stuff that hasn't launched yet so you can stick it in your Google news alerts and find out what the hell their business model is when the time comes. These are both American companies, one is called Oyster, all we know right now is that it's going to be focused on smartphones and the other one is another American one called LibreFi and what we know there and that's sort of instructive I think for what I want to talk about quickly now is LibreFi and their model seems to be focused on the reading group. The 10, 12 people getting together to read the same book and discuss it once a month or every six weeks or every two months. But where I think the opportunity for libraries may be involves going beyond what these commercial services are doing because in many ways what these commercial services are doing is just attempting to create all you can eat subscription model. But I think beyond going beyond ownership to beyond access is the critical thing and I think that involves not reading as a service but serving the reader. Now how do we serve the reader beyond giving them access to all the books ever written? Assuming one can economically pull that off. And what I would suggest is the reader's problem right now is not that they are restricted in what they can read. As Sebastian has pointed out, you can get all the books right now for free just like you can get all the music right now for free if you wanna go to the trouble. Just like one can go to a library and get the print book for free if one wants it. Access in and of itself is kind of no longer the issue. The problem readers have is that they want a, a, a, I was structuring that as a statement I'm gonna speculate but we are all engaged in a sort of an ongoing set of speculations around this. But I'm speculating that what we are looking for is ways to integrate reading into our day-to-day lives in a richer organic contiguous way. Not as a lump that falls into our life once or twice a month or once or twice a year, but where there is a sort of an integrated flow. One area in which this is happening and this is where I, where, where, what I, what I, what I characterize as understanding the reader is in trying to provide ways to take data in the way that Sebastian was describing, but offer it to the reader. I mean certainly publishers want that data and certainly retailers want that data and as Kate was saying certainly writers want that data. But what we've been in seeing increasingly is that people read in order to understand themselves. And what are the ways in which we can create services that allow readers in their reading experience to understand themselves better. And there's a wonderful Swedish startup now based in Berlin, they're here at this particular conference, Reed Mill, who have been working hard at that, not through a subscription model, but just trying to allow readers to understand themselves. Readers to be able to take granular bits of something that they're reading, highlights and make them more shareable, allow readers to understand some of their own reading rhythms. It's something that obviously is going to require a lot of time and a lot of patience and a lot of readers and a lot of aggregation to get to where it is going to be useful to us. But it becomes an opportunity to take reading and add it to what gets called the self-quantification world. The people like myself who wear little bracelets that tell you how many steps you've walked today and how well you slept last night. The ability to take reading and make it something that we do more of because we know we want to do it but we don't do enough of it, just like exercise. We know over the long run we should be healthier and eat in a particular way, but we don't want to do it today. Today we want to drink, tomorrow we'll go to the gym. And then tomorrow comes and we drink and go, so, and we try to find little tricks to motivate ourselves to do what we know is right. Reading is one of those activities like working out that can very much benefit from the opportunity to allow readers to look at their own metrics of reading. And also conveniently allows the move to capture a lot of data around reading and give it to the reader, him or herself, as opposed to giving it to commercial enterprises. A second area in which I think we can kind of go beyond access is in looking at structured context. And by which I mean, so the number that I throw up behind it is an ISBN. And the world of book as product is centered around the ISBN, it is a skew, it is a number that represents a thing. It could be anything, it's a number that in other areas of retail could correspond to a computer or a box of corn flakes. We use the exact same structure, whether it is corn flakes or books. The difference with the ISBN is that there is another way that you could represent that ISBN. That ISBN is the ISBN for a graphic novel by Alan Moore. And that particular graphic novel deals with Guy Fawkes. And what is behind me is in a somewhat happier times in Egypt, a bunch of people wearing Guy Fawkes masks. So part of the context of that Alan Moore graphic novel is the Guy Fawkes mask. There is the book, there is the character in a book. There is the role that the character plays in the book and there is a mask that the character wears. That mask is also a skew, it is, our last year was the most best selling mask on Amazon. So books contain within them universes. The company that I'm working with, Small Demons, is working to basically create a massive structured data set of all the people, places and things within books. But as you sort of saw from the previous quote from Borges, there is also vast universe of much more subtle cultural reference within books. Another area of structured context, Javier pointed out to earlier, there is a Canadian company called Bibliocommons that, and you will have seen from Javier's slide, so I'll skip showing you their website, but is an opportunity for libraries to basically be able to take all the review opportunities, list making opportunities, folksonomic and a properly structured tagging for the universe of books. And then, of course, there is the vast universe of linked open data, not just Small Demons or not just Bibliocommons, but the entire universe of all those, all the museum archives, Wikipedia, the vast catalog of information that is out there that no commercial enterprise is ever going to take the trouble to make talk to one another, but that the universe of librarians can work toward allowing to talk to one another. What this suggests in a certain sense is something that I think literally every single one of us has touched on directly or indirectly tonight, which is that when you have all this data in a structured way, when you treat the reader as engaged in an act of creation when reading, their marks physical or digital are meaningful, their list making is meaningful, their habits are meaningful, you begin to see that readers are authors. And as we know from Kate's account earlier, authors are readers. And we begin to see that the idea of the writer and the reader as two different people is the idea in many ways that needs replacing. They are behaviors that one person can exhibit at any given moment and that one person is, in a sense, the ecosystem that Jonas spoke about at the very beginning, those two little happy icons can actually merge into one figure so that you go not just beyond ownership to access, but also beyond access itself, revealing the reader to herself and revealing the entire culture to the readers. So that's it for me. We are gonna be talking amongst, we are available to chat with you guys the second this is over. And you probably saw all our email addresses, but I certainly know speaking for myself, if we don't have time to chat tonight, that's my email address, email me anytime because just like the folks from eBooks for the people, we're here for the people. Thank you.