Newsgroup: it.cultura.libri
Titolo: Digitalizzazione totale di tutti i libri: Amazon rende questo sogno realtà!

Amazon ora consente di sfogliare i libri permettendo una ricerca full-text
(anti-abuso) nell'intero contenuto di questi, non soltanto nell'indice come
fino a pochi mesi fa.
Chi desidera avere questa possibilità anche in Italia faccia richiesta alle
principali librerie online italiane:
'
commen...@internetbookshop.it
'; '
in...@hoepli.it
';
'
cons...@libreriauniversitaria.it
'; '
egea.e...@uni-bocconi.it
'.
Con un accordo tra librerie ed editori riusciremo ad averla anche noi!
<<#Amazon lancia il database del testo#
(
http://punto-informatico.it/p.asp?i=45718
)
(27/10/03 in: News - E-Business)
Include 33 milioni di pagine prese da 120mila libri ed è in continua
espansione, per consentire agli utenti-clienti di cercare libri di cui
nemmeno sanno l'esistenza. Non per titolo né per autore ma per parola
chiave.>>
Lilli

 fino a pochi mesi fa.
Ci ho dato un'occhiata ora, ma ovviamente non c'e' piu' traccia di
questo servizio nella homepage (la notizia di P.I. e' vecchia di un paio
di mesi)... hai qualche link diretto?
-- 
UFV:Alex&Emma/Profondo rosso(VHS)/The Thief and the Cobbler(VHS)
L'orgoglio degli Amberson(VHS)/Franco Bagongo(VHS)/Č gią ieri
Quarto potere(VHS)/Garde a vue/Dai sbirro/Monsieur Hire

 paio di mesi)... hai qualche link diretto?
Qua un bell'articolo passato un po' di tempo fa su wired, ci sono delle 
restrizioni all'uso del servizio, proprio per evitare guai con la legge 
copyright
Ecco il link: 
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60948,00.html
-- 
...ale...
http://lermocolle.splinder.it

 di mesi)... hai qualche link diretto?
Vai qui 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021
 e fai click
sugli esempi a destra.
Poi nella nuova pagina, in alto, metti le keyword che vuoi tu.
Nota che la prima volta ti richiede la registrazione ad Amazon, con i dati
di carta di credito (non ti prelevano soldi).
Io l'ho fatta e mi funziona!

 Ecco il link: 
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60948,00.html
Violo il copyright e posto l'articolo nella sua interezza. Non leggo
"Wired" abitualmente, ma le prospettive mi sembrano davvero
affascinanti... Non riesco nemmeno a immaginare le ore che ci vorranno
-che ci vogliono- per scansionare tutta quella roba e controllare che
l'OCR non abbia fatto casini, anche facendolo in paesi a basso costo
della manodopera... 
Il problema di fondo della digitalizzazione, forse, resta solo
l'eliminazione definitiva della verita' -anche se non impossibile, e'
sicuramente molto piu' difficile falsificare un supporto fisico che una
sua immagine digitalizzata.
Pero' forse per l'idea di una Biblioteca di Alessandria elettronica e
quindi duplicabile all'infinito puo' valere la pena di correre il
rischio...
(grazie del link, grazie anche a lilli)
09:00 AM Oct. 23, 2003 PT
The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all
knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great
library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. Through centuries of aggressive
acquisition, the librarians of Alexandria, Egypt, collected hundreds of
thousands of texts. None survives. During a final wave of destruction,
in AD 641, invaders fed the bound volumes and papyrus scrolls into the
furnaces of the public baths, where they are said to have burned for six
months. "The lesson," says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet
Archive, "is to keep more than one copy." 
 
Kahle recently gave a copy of his digital archive of 10 billion Web
pages to a new library in Alexandria. On a visit to the city last year,
he sat down with Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of Egypt's president, and
discussed his gift, which has all the advantages of a modern electronic
resource: It can be instantly updated, easily searched, and endlessly
replicated. Mubarak, with diplomatic politeness, allowed that she was
impressed. Still, she ventured a protest: "But I love books!" 
Therein lies a problem. Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their
physical form inspires passion. But their very physicality makes books
inaccessible to the multi-terabyte databases of modern Alexandrian
projects. Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their
pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it's still shockingly
difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has
revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an
answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe
of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the
Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books. 
An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way
at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an
unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to
quickly add most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog. The entire
collection, which went live Oct. 23, is searchable, and every page is
viewable. 
To build the archive, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has had to unravel a tangle
of technological and copyright problems. His solution promises to remake
the publishing business and give Amazon a powerful new weapon in its
battle against online competitors such as Yahoo, Google, and eBay. But
the most interesting thing about the archive is the way it resolves the
paradox of the book, respecting its physical form while transcending its
limits. 
I recently drove to a home in Silicon Valley and spent a few hours
digitally searching the text of books. My host was Udi Manber, an
Israeli-born computer scientist and author of a popular textbook,
Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach. Ten years ago, while
developing a seminal piece of Unix search software called agrep, Manber
came up with a concept for an information tool he has yet to build. It
was supposed to search the mess of papers on his desk. The idea that you
could perform a digital search of physical objects has long fascinated
him. "Why not have users take pictures of their bookshelf?" Manber asked
when we first met. "We could scan the images, extract the titles, and
then let them search the entire text of the books they own." 
The notion of Amazon scanning all of its books but allowing users to
search only those they own is a clever way around the central barrier to
creating a digital archive: Copyrights are distributed among tens of
thousands of publishers and authors. But when Manber told Bezos his
idea, he found the Amazon founder ready to work on a grander scale.
Bezos wanted his customers to be able to search everything. 
In his small, ranch-style Palo Alto house, Manber and I sit side by side
at a table near the kitchen as he begins typing my queries into his
laptop. The computer is connected to a prototype of the archive, which
at the time of my visit is scheduled to go live in a few weeks. Within
seconds, I am captivated. The experience reminds me of how I felt a
decade ago, when I first began browsing the Web. Back then, the Web was
still small, and most of my time was spent peeking into the homepages of
physicists and engineers. Even so, the power of the new network was
unmistakable. The thrill didn't come from the content of the pages but
from the structure of the Web itself, its obvious scalability and ease
of navigation. 
Amazon's new archive is more densely populated than the early Web was,
but it's still far from complete. With its 120,000 titles, the archive
has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is
plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new
territory suddenly opens up. 
The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For
instance, I've recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York's most
famous pillager of public money. Manber types "Boss Tweed" into his
search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the
more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have
thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole;
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill.
I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections
hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will
become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in
published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our
collective intellectual life. 
From the Hamill reference, I link to a page in the afterward on which he
cites books that influenced his portrait of Tweed. There, on the screen,
is the cream of the research performed by a great metropolitan writer
and editor. Some of the books Hamill recommends are out of print, but
all are available either new or used on Amazon. 
With persistence, serendipity and plenty of time in a library, I may
have found these titles myself. The Amazon archive is dizzying not
because it unearths books that would necessarily have languished in
obscurity, but because it renders their contents instantly visible in
response to a search. It allows quick query revisions, backtracking, and
exploration. It provides a new form of map. 
Getting to this point represents a significant technological feat. Most
of the material in the archive comes from scanned pages of actual books.
This may be surprising, given that most books today are written on PCs,
e-mailed to publishers, typeset on computers, and printed on digital
presses. But many publishers still do not have push-button access to the
digital files of the books they put out. Insofar as the files exist,
they are often scattered around the desktops of editors, designers, and
contract printers. For books more than a few years old, complete digital
files may be lost. John Wiley & Sons contributed 5,000 titles to the
Amazon project -- all of them in physical form. 
Fortunately, mass scanning has grown increasingly feasible, with the
cost dropping to as low as $1 each. Amazon sent some of the books to
scanning centers in low-wage countries like India and the Philippines;
others were run in the United States using specialty machines to ensure
accurate color and to handle oversize volumes. Some books can be chopped
out of their bindings and fed into scanners, others have to be babied by
a human, who turns pages one by one. Remarkably, Amazon was already
doing so much data processing in its regular business that the huge task
of reading the images of the books and converting them into a plain-text
database was handled by idle computers at one of the company's backup
centers. 
The copyrights to these titles are spread among countless owners. How
was it possible to create a publicly accessible database from material
whose ownership is so tangled? Amazon's solution is audacious: The
company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all. "This
is not an ebook project!" Manber says. And in a sense he is right. The
archive is intentionally crippled. A search brings back not text, but
pictures -- pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to
your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and
forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning
to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book. If you
want to read an extensive excerpt, you must turn to the physical volume
-- which, of course, you can conveniently purchase from Amazon. Users
will be asked to give their credit card number before looking at pages
in the archive, and they won't be able to view more than a few thousand
pages per month, or more than 20 percent of any single book. 
Manber has built a powerful, even mind-boggling tool, then added
powerful constraints. "The point is to help users find a book," says
Manber, "not to make a new source of information." 
Bezos is vehement on this point. He has sold publishers on the idea that
digitizing hundreds of thousands of copyright books won't undermine the
conventional bookselling business. "It is critical that this be
understood as a way to get publishers and authors in contact with
customers," he says in an interview at Amazon's Seattle headquarters.
"We're perfectly aligned with these folks. Our goal is to sell more
books!" 
Bezos has some good evidence to back up his argument. Amazon has
consistently added features that have proven to increase book sales.
Through its customer reviews, used-book business, and personalized
recommendations, the company constantly puts its customers in contact
with new titles. Amazon is a machine that stimulates the acquisitive
urge of readers. It appeals to their specialized interests. 
It makes people buy books. But Amazon's scheme would never work if users
really wanted their books in digital form. The magic of the archive lies
in the assumption that physical books are irreplaceable. The electronic
text is simply an enhancement of the physical object. 
The Amazon project -- dubbed Search Inside the Book -- represents a bold
step toward the dream of a universal library. Bezos refuses any such
allusion. But outlines of the Alexandrian fantasy can clearly be made
out in Amazon's innocent book-purchasing tool. The company's success at
launching a massive archive of digital books will undoubtedly fuel
enthusiasm for overturning the current publishing and copyright regime.
I first talked with Brewster Kahle a dozen years ago over a plate of
execrable spaghetti in the kitchen of a flat in San Francisco's Mission
District. The apartment served as the headquarters of WAIS, one of the
first Internet search engines, and Kahle was sharing a dinner with me
and several of his employees. He was in his twenties then -- thin, with
a mass of unruly curly hair, a rapid manner of speech, and an unguarded
expression. Kahle was already one of the great enthusiasts of universal
information access. A few months earlier, he had left his job at
Thinking Machines, the legendary builder of massively parallel
supercomputers, and devoted himself full-time to refining and selling
WAIS. 
To Kahle, it was obvious that vast amounts of useful material could be
shared with the general public via computers, but the Web did not yet
exist, and most of the major databases were not linked. You couldn't do
a comprehensive search. WAIS was meant as a remedy, and it proved a
modest success. However, its most significant contribution to Kahle's
evangelical mission was a byproduct of the stock market bubble: In the
spring of 1995, AOL bought WAIS for $15 million in stock. AOL stock
soared, and Kahle became rich. 
With his money, Kahle started the Internet Archive, while also creating
another company that offered a clever Web search tool called Alexa. In
1999, as the bubble continued to expand, Alexa was sold to Amazon for
$250 million in stock, and Kahle became richer. He's now committed to
public service. The computers of the Internet Archive are in a Mission
district warehouse. The headquarters are in a ramshackle house in the
Presidio, a decommissioned Army base near the Golden Gate Bridge. The
office is one of those classic engineer-idealist domains, where
programmers go up the fire stairs because the inside stairs are broken,
and age-old pizza molders in the refrigerator. 
When I call Kahle to ask if I can come talk to him about the state of
digital libraries, he says, "Sure, I'm free right now." I find him
substantially the same. "What's the average lifespan of a Web page?"
Kahle asks me when we meet, and then answers himself: "One hundred
days!" He has a slightly accusatory tone, as if I share in the general
neglect that led to the erasure of history – or would, if the machines
owned by the Internet Archive weren't so busily preserving it. 
The goal of the archive is to save digital information and make it
accessible to all. But what, exactly, is digital information? As the
entertainment industry has learned to its great chagrin, digital
information might take the form of music, or movies, or even books. To
Kahle, this is a good thing. The products of human knowledge ought not
to be squirreled away where they can't ever be found. 
Kahle hates the idea that when people think of information, they think
only of what's accessible via Google. "Seventy-one percent of college
students use the Internet as their research tool of first resort," he
says, citing figures from a 2001 PEW Internet Study. "Personally, I
think this number is low. For most students today, if something is not
on the Net, it doesn't exist." 
And yet most books are not on the Net. This means that students, among
others, are blind to the most important artifacts of human knowledge.
For many students, the Internet actually contracts the universe of
knowledge, because it makes the most casual and ephemeral sources the
most accessible, while ignoring the published books. "It's shameful,"
Kahle continues, "because we have the tools to make all books available
to everybody. You need three things. Technically, you need storage and
connectivity. Storage is easy. For under $10 million, you can store all
published works of humankind back to the Sumerian tablets. The last time
they tried this was in Alexandria, and they had an innovative storage
mechanism, too. They had papyrus, and papyrus was astonishing compared
to clay tablets. But we can do better than the Alexandrians, because we
also have connectivity. I have traveled in Uganda and in rural Kenya and
seldom been more than one day's walk from an Internet café. It is
technologically possible for most kids in the world to have access to
all the books in the world." 
The third item on Kahle's list has nothing to do with technological
know-how; it's simply political will. Here, he finds the situation
mixed. "We live in an open society in which the concept of widespread
knowledge is embraced as a goal of governance," he says. "Just look at
our libraries. Public libraries spend $7.6 billion a year; academic
libraries spend another $5 billion." That's the good news. The budgets
are hard evidence of a public commitment to the Alexandrian ideal. But
on the other hand, almost none of this money goes to digitizing books. 
The Internet Archive turned Kahle into an expert in managing huge
databases of publicly accessible information. Now – in partnership with
Carnegie Mellon University, the National Science Foundation, and the
governments of India and China – his goal is to create a digital archive
of 1 million books. Books from the US are packed into containers and
shipped to India to be scanned and proofread, then the digital files go
to the Internet Archive and the books are returned to the owners. Kahle
and his partners are hoping to have about 100,000 online by the end of
the year, making this project almost as big, at least numerically, as
Amazon's effort. "We chose a million books because it's a big number,"
admits Kahle. "It's something you can strive for." 
But in reality, the Million Book Project lags far behind Amazon's
effort. For one thing, libraries have been slow to lend parts of their
collections. And even then, the project concentrates on digitizing those
that are out of copyright. Libraries and nonprofits don't have much
leverage with publishers, and since the goal is fully readable online
text, there is no system to protect the interests of copyright holders.
As a result, many of the titles being digitized by the Million Book
Project are government documents, old texts, and books from India and
China, where copyright laws are less stringent. 
Kahle is happy to sidestep the problem of digitizing commercially
successful books. He has no wish to antagonize the publishing industry.
What he hates is that the Million Book Project cannot legally digitize
countless books that aren't generating money for anybody. US libraries
hold about 30 million unique volumes. No one knows how many of those
books continue to be protected by copyright or are available from
commercial publishers. Still, Kahle says, "they can't be digitized
because the copyrights can't be cleared, and the copyrights can't be
cleared because it's too much work to identify the copyright holders.
Some people call them abandonware. I call them orphans." 
"Amazon is taking a cut at the commercially available titles," continues
Kahle. "We are going for the public domain titles. But who is taking
care of the orphans? Nobody." 
This is no longer true. Kahle's plea on behalf of orphaned books,
stripped of its sentiment and restated in the rational voice of finance,
exactly expresses the logic of Amazon's Alexandrian venture. Latent
within the new archive is a business model for selling books that, with
a little legal help, ought to vanquish orphanhood forever. 
The publishing industry has made great strides since the Roman era.
Movable type was invented in 11th-century China, then reinvented in 1450
in Germany. In 1886, Ottmar Mergenthaler created an automatic
typesetting machine. In 1983, we got desktop publishing. But publishers
continue to edit books using four colors of pencil, and the idea of
freely accessible digital files conjures nightmares of a peer-to-peer
disaster among media corporations. Things are even going backward –
Barnes & Noble recently announced it would stop selling ebooks. 
In this context of change, confusion, and fear, Jeff Bezos is forced to
behave like a politician. Talk of a universal library elicits no
enthusiasm from him. When I mention it, he counsels caution and
patience. "You have to start somewhere," he says. "You climb to the top
of the first tiny hill, and from there you see the next hill. It's
difficult to see what's beyond before you have climbed the first hill."
When I met Bezos the first time, in 1996, there was no masking the
radical nature of his ideas. At the time, he was trying hard to prove
that you could create a major retail company on the Web. Skeptics
abounded, and he answered them with vivid descriptions of the future.
All of Amazon's important innovations – starting from the concept of a
Web bookstore – have suggested a profound change in the bookselling
business, a change that makes it possible to earn a profit by selling a
much wider variety of books than any previous retailer, including many
titles from the so-called long tail of the popularity curve. "If I have
100,000 books that sell one copy every other year," says Steve Kessel,
an Amazon VP, "then in 10 years I've sold more of these, together, than
I have of the latest Harry Potter." 
In fact, Amazon doesn't have to wade far into the shallows to begin
remaking the book business. Books are abandoned by publishers long
before their sales are reduced to one copy every other year. Under the
current publishing system, a title becomes inefficient at thousands of
sales per year. An electronic archive through which readers can find
books is an essential counterpart to Bezos' original vision of an
infinitely big bookstore, just as Internet search engines are essential
to the fragmented, increasingly diverse cultures of the Web. 
This vision implies that readers will someday be able to purchase books
that are printed at the time they are ordered. On a small scale, that
phase of the revolution has already been quietly accomplished. As part
of the Million Book Project, Kahle has created an Internet Bookmobile
that produces decent-quality paperbacks of out-of-copyright books for
about $1 each. The bookmobile consists of a Ford Windstar minivan with a
satellite dish, a computer, a printer, and a binder. Meanwhile, last
spring, Amazon announced a partnership with Ingram Industries' Lightning
Source subsidiary, a print-on-demand company that offers more than
100,000 titles – with a list that grows by hundreds each week. Lightning
Source is the high end, Kahle's Internet Bookmobile is the low end; both
operate on the premise that tiny runs of books can be affordably made
and sold. 
With these tools, the concept of out of print is becoming obsolete. A
copyright-friendly archive that allows all books to be easily found plus
a books-on-demand printing network gives publishers an economic motive
for reactivating entire back catalogs. As for books whose copyright
holders cannot be found – Kahle's orphans – this is where the copyright
law needs to change. A sensible solution advanced by copyright scholar
(and Wired columnist) Lawrence Lessig and written into a bill before
Congress requires that copyright be renewed every 50 years for a token
sum. Anybody who can't be bothered to pay a dollar or two to hold on to
a copyright loses the work to the public domain. 
And who will digitize the books once they've been claimed by their
copyright holders or lapsed into the public domain? Project Gutenberg,
the first book-digitizing initiative, has put about 10,000 titles online
and is rapidly accelerating its effort. The Million Book Project,
launched by Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Raj Reddy, is eager for
more volumes. Lessig, in partnership with Stanford University librarian
Michael Keller, will soon announce a free program to digitize any
out-of-print book whose copyright holder wants to make it available to
the public. And of course, Manber invites copyright holders to offer
nonexclusive searching and browsing rights to Amazon, which will
digitize the titles and offer access to audiences forever. "Give the
books to me," Manber says. "I am glad to do it." 
The original vision of a digital archive of all knowledge renounced
paper volumes; physical books were seen as antiquated, like papyrus or
clay tablets. But if electronic archives prove to raise the value of
physical books, a new dream may replace the old one. After talking with
Manber, I raise this question with Kevin Kelly, a Wired founding editor
who spent part of his summer trying to establish a private cooperative
library of digital books. The digital titles in Kelly's library would
match the physical books on his shelf. "The idea of ebooks was to do
away with paper," he says. "But really, you want to add dimensionality
to a physical object rather than take it away. You want an enhanced
physical world." 
In this enhanced physical world, the logic of the book business is
transformed. Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly
browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest
best-sellers, just as cable siphons audience from the major networks,
and just as the Web pulls viewers from TV. 
This shifts power away from the people who own finite sets of
copyrighted material and toward the people who offer access to
information about where this material can be found. Information about
books, not ownership of copyrights, becomes a new center of power.
Manber is correct when he says that Amazon's Search Inside the Book is
not an ebook project. It is merely a catalog. But a decade of Internet
history proves that the catalog is exactly what you want to own. 
Of course, Amazon is not merely part of the book business. The Internet
as a whole is going through a similar transition. Revenue for Internet
companies increasingly comes from users seeking to buy something – from
transactions made in the physical world. Even Google, which doesn't sell
anything directly, earns most of its cash from advertisers whose
messages pop up when users search for info about specific products, such
as computers or cars – or books. With retail at the center of the
Internet industry, Google is a key competitor because customers begin
their online shopping trips at search engines that offer neat algorithms
for comparing prices across multiple vendors. Everybody – Yahoo!, eBay,
AOL, Microsoft, and, of course, Amazon – wants to be the site of first
resort. 
All the leading retail sites have better knowledge of their customers
than Google. But Google is the leading Internet information tool,
period. Google is a window onto the entire Web. On the other hand, the
contents of books may be the only publicly accessible data set with the
potential to match Google's Web index both for size and utility. Search
Inside the Book makes Amazon the sole guide to tens and ultimately
hundreds of millions of pages of information. And while Google's
business is vulnerable to any competitor that builds a better search
engine, Amazon's book archive is the product of negotiated contracts
with hundreds of publishers. Amazon has cornered the market on
information that was once hidden away in books. The burden of the
physical – the fact that the database Amazon uses is linked into a
complex system involving real things – gives it a stunning, if perhaps
temporary, advantage. 
This fall, Amazon announced that it was forming A9.com, a new company
devoted exclusively to search technologies. Manber, who leads it, came
up with the name by running a simple compression algorithm on the word
algorithms. Algorithms begins with A and is followed by nine other
letters. When Manber explains the name to me, he notes mischievously
that another word can be identically compressed: Alexandria. 
Amazon's Alexandrian scheme hinges on the insight that physical books
can be turned into electronic databases and then – in the retail process
– turned back into physical books. This is one of the boldest maneuvers
yet in an intense commercial competition, but for all its cunning, this
is a civilized, even civilizing war, one that builds libraries rather
than burns them. 
-- 
UFV:Alex&Emma/Profondo rosso(VHS)/The Thief and the Cobbler(VHS)
L'orgoglio degli Amberson(VHS)/Franco Bagongo(VHS)/È già ieri


 affascinanti [CUT]
*plonk*

 sua immagine digitalizzata.
Questa puň essere l'impressione, ma se ci pensi, cosa, o chi, ti assicura 
che ognuna delle migliaia di copie di un libro che vengono stampate sia 
uguale alle altre?
Bibliografia essenziale di riferimento: "Finzioni" - Borges :-)
-- 
...ale...
http://lermocolle.splinder.it

 Bibliografia essenziale di riferimento: "Finzioni" - Borges :-)
Se mi citi "Finzioni", alzo le mani. :-)


 l'eliminazione definitiva della verita'
Secondo me il problema non sta tanto qui, quanto nel fatto che
l'effettiva realizzazione del sogno alessandrino resta lontana
nonostante tutto.
L'innovazione introdotta da Amazon Ã¨ straordinaria, ma relativamente
ad un solo aspetto del servizio bibliotecario, come spiegato
nell'articolo: l'identificazione dei testi; non l'accesso gratuito
agli stessi. Si tratta in sostanza di un nuovo tipo di catalogo, forse
il piÃ¹ potente mai concepito, ma pur sempre un catalogo. Il Million
Book Project di Brewster Kahle invece 'lags far behind'.
Da notare anche che il nuovo catalogo resta limitato per ora a un
numero relativamente ristretto di titoli, e c'Ã¨ da chiedersi quando
sarÃ  in grado di espandersi in modo veramente significativo per il
mercato dei consumatori. Pensare a tutte quelle pubblicazioni che
offrono informazioni piÃ¹ o meno esaustive su un determinato soggetto
in poche pagine: guide, manuali, libri illustrati, ricettari, ecc. E'
logico immaginare che non saranno inclusi nel nuovo servizio a meno di
sostanziali cambiamenti. Per non parlare dei periodici.
Comunque un'innovazione di grande portata, nonostante i limiti che
verrano superati poco a poco. A quanto pare disponibile per ora solo
su Amazon.com. Speriamo venga presto introdotta anche negli altri siti
Amazon - il che ci farÃ  rimpiangere ulteriormente l'assenza di un
Amazon.it.
Joe

 Amazon.it.
Si'. Per me, al di la' dell'utilita' del motore di ricerca, l'interesse
stara' soprattutto nella possibilita' di stamparsi on demand.
Nell'articolo si parla anche di una print-o-mobile o qualcosa del genere
realizzata da quelli del Million Book Project (Internet Bookmobile) che
mi sembra impraticabile su larga scala (se non con costi di gestione che
immagino ingestibili) ma anche bellissima. Ecco un lavoro che potrebbe
essere bello fare (salvo poi scoprirsi a stampare on demand l'ennesima
copia di un libro di barzellette o di castronerie).


 che scansionare tutti i libri esistenti restera' comunque un'utopia.
Questo se l'operazione dovesse essere svolta da un'unica entità 
centralizzate (in questo caso Amazon). Ma la forza di Internet sta nel 
suo pluricentrismo (o a-centrismo che dir si voglia), per cui non è così 
improbabile che ogni editore proceda alla digitalizzazione dei suoi 
periodici, magari rendendoli liberamenti consultabili.
Molti quotidiani già sono completamente archiviati on-line, l'accesso 
all'archivio però non è quasi mai gratuito. Diverse riviste scientifiche 
mettono a disposizione i loro articoli n mesi dopo l'uscita - e in 
questo settore ci sono grandi polemiche e subbuglio -, altre (wired 
p.e.) mettono i loro articoli on-line prima dell'uscita in edicola.
[X-Post con it.cultura.cybersocieta]
-- 
...ale...
http://lermocolle.splinder.it

 '
cons...@libreriauniversitaria.it
'; '
egea.e...@uni-bocconi.it
'.
E siamo al marketing numero due.... visti gli editori e librerie
citate.... mi sembrano gli amici di amazon da un punto di vista politico e
religioso....))))) ossia editori e librerie che cercano di favorire una
cultura rispetto ad un'altra.... mi sembrano quelli degli amici di Aspen...
Non capisco gli editori, come quelli citati e non citati, che si mettono
nelle mani di un distributore come amazon. Sono pessimi editori e pessimi
venditori di libri.
Cerchiamo di essere seri. Questa "manfrina" di amazon ha solo fini
commerciali e di marketing.
Essendo amazon una societa' quotata nella borsa valori negli USA, ha
bisogno, ogni tanto, visti i passivi nel bilancio che ha, di fare degli
annunci per fare restare il prezzo delle azioni su certi livelli di prezzo.
Ossia, e' tutta propaganda commerciale e niente didattica.... tanto che il
libro del mio amico Oskar.... mullah religioso che ha scritto un libro
contro gli USA ed Israele.... su amazon non si trova.
E perche' non si trova?. Perche' non e' amico....
Quindi, iniziativa a soli fini commerciali ( per aiutare il prezzo delle
azioni amazon ) e niente didattica ( il libro del mullah Oskar non c'e' ).
Ciao.
Dario
-- 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 azioni amazon ) e niente didattica ( il libro del mullah Oskar non c'e' ).
Allora, per voi abbiamo in offerta speciale "The Communist Manifesto" in
cinque versioni: Hardcover, Audio Cassette, Digital e-Book, Textbook
Binding.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312157118/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_f/104-8610524-0428725
con sconto speciale se compri anche "An Introduction to Islamism" insieme:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/053313837X/qid=1074877292/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_11/104-8610524-0428725?v=glance&s=books
Lilli

come strumento di ricerca dei libri pubblicati.
Sbagliato. Serve per tutti e due, anche se nessuno nega che il secondo
servizio sia in funzione del primo. E magari gli strumenti di
marketing fossero tutti così! Secondo me ti stai accanendo su un
bersaglio sbagliato.
Saluti, Joe