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Where Everything Is Miscellaneous? Sadly Not.

“Imagine a bookstore with no organization scheme. Thousands of books are simply tossed into huge piles on table tops. Such a bookstore does, in fact, exist: Gould’s Book Arcade in NewTown, Australia.” ~ Information Architecture For The World Wide Web 3rd ed.

I came across the above blurb in my reading today. It was accompanied by the following photo from gordy.com. I thought wow, what a great find! A place where David Weinberger’s principles live. A quick tour of the Gould Book Arcade’s site indicates Seth Gordon, the photographer, caught Gould’s on a bad day back in 2000. Their books seem orderly, shelved and even indexed on abebooks. Shame.

Bookstore to customer: I want you for your body

An article by Robert Scoble last month has been on our collective mind again since we attended BookNet Canada’s annual technology forum. What we’ve been wondering (with no small measure of professional interest) is what’s to be done with bookstores as digital reading grows.

For my part, I don’t go to record stores anymore. What’s the point? They sell content I want at a price I don’t want to pay and in a format that’s no longer convenient to me. Buying music now means iTunes. How then will bookstores keep from entirely losing the foot traffic of people who’ve come to prefer consuming their primary product digitally?

We Datachondrians are certainly a long way off from an answer (and so far nobody’s asked) but it does seem right off that nothing will be solved by doing anything with print books. There’s no themed table, endcap, discount promotion, or membership bonus that’s going to make people go to a store that sells a product they don’t want. That stuff is for the people who showed up.

The hardest battle in retail is just getting the bodies through the door. Once they’re in, you can let your merchandising and salesforce take over — if either is worth anything at all, you’ll make some sales (and with luck, turn a profit). But when whole segments of your customers decide they not only prefer to buy what you offer elsewhere, but in fact can’t buy what they really want in your store, how do you entice them past the lease-line?

More coffee shop space?

Free wi-fi?

Or does the key to attracting traffic lie in making people want to be around the people you’ve already got?

Then how do you make the wireless and fancy-free want to hang around the same place as a bunch of page-flipping luddites*?

To be continued…

*We happen to love page-flipping luddites.

Democracy meets party time: Apple releases iTunes 8.1

We Datachondrians have been worrying about what’s going to happen at parties now that digital media is rendering shelving obsolete and with it the joy of browsing and passing casual judgment on every party’s hosts. So far we’ve had only a bright idea or two about what might replace shelves full of CDs or books in this very strange but important social space.

We’re still coming up short of anything exactly equivalent to being interrupted while deploying the next tactic in the strategic seduction of the girl in your building who you’ve run into in the laundry room enough times to have made possible an invitation to this very happening shindig of yours by your guffawing brother-in-law waving your copy of REO Speedwagon’s greatest hits.

Today Apple released iTunes 8.1 and with it a feature they’re calling iTunes DJ. On the surface it looks like all they’ve done is rename the Party Shuffle smart playlist but they’ve also added functionality that allows the playlist to be manipulated by anyone with the remote app for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Not only can your guests browse your entire music collection as judgmentally as ever, but they can also vote for the next song to be played — and if they really can’t stand the present state of tunage they can interrupt the song currently playing.

I’ve held off from the iPhone for a while now, but with the way Apple keeps adding fun new ways to use the device I can see it might soon be time to give in.

The music kids listen to these days is crap

Not the music itself, mind you (though I could moan about the loudness war some other time) — just the format that’s become widely preferred among teenagers and young adults. Standford researcher Jonathan Berger has been testing his students’ format preference for the past 6 years, having them listen to a recording in a number of formats, from low resolution MP3s to “ones of much higher quality”, (SACD?) and found some disappointing results. As Dale Dougherty of The O’Reilly Radar puts it:

each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

Dougherty goes on to argue, persuasively I think, that people gravitate to the medium that they grow up with, playback artifacts and all. People who grew up with LPs, for example, like the background analogue noise and naturally limited frequency range of vinyl.

If you were 13 years old in 2004, when the iPod mini came out, you grew up with MP3s and probably prefer their sizzly upper register (and not paying for music, but I digress). Me, I’ll always go for a very clean open sound because I grew up on CDs — though I have an innate fear of being sold old recordings that haven’t been remastered properly.

But consider this: the ubiquity of the iPod and digital music means boomers and their kids, will have approximately the same degree of hearing degradation at the same time.

Music-listeners brought up on MP3s like recordings with lots of extreme high frequencies are in for a big let-down relatively early on. As a person ages, their ability to perceive exactly those frequencies diminishes significantly. And this process is accelerated by listening to music loudly, which has become a lot more common since carrying around your entire music collection became not only possible, but more convenient than it was for me to carry around just a couple of CDs (and the batteries to ensure I’d be able to listen to them all) just 15 years ago. People now spend hours at a time with music blasting into their ear canals in all kinds of noisy settings that require them to use high volume settings to hear their device.

With the combined buying power of boomers and their kids should we expect recordings to start to be produced to sound good to their damaged ears?

Given that recordings are already being produced with the iPod as the assumed playback device, it’s not unlikely that the limitations of the listener’s ears are the next consideration to take into account.

And so I begin work on an “I’m not frickin’ deaf” EQ setting for my iPod…

Hat tip: Gizmodo

Pranav Mistry Pioneers Fluid Interfaces For Data at MIT

Will this really take ten years?

Entertainment Guides: Or, How the Publishing and Recording Industries Combine to Create the Purest Hell

The new — ninth — edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings is out now. It’s actually been out since October but somehow I missed it, perhaps because Sam’s no longer exists and there is therefore nowhere in the city where I might be required to have done a great deal of research before visiting in another episode in my ongoing quest for rare mid-50s hard bop gems.

Anyway. The Penguin Guide is still going strong. This is a good thing. Let’s just pause to acknowledge that, before I tell you how very, very wrong it is.

The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD is the definitive printed resource for jazz lovers. It is a brilliantly curated collection of reviews and general aesthetic advice put together by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, an extraordinary cultural service they have been performing for more than 15 years now. It is to the jazz fan’s armory what David Thompson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film is to the film buff’s. Only without perhaps quite the same volume of page-turning salacious gossip.

An adventure in the unknowable

The 9th edition will be the fourth copy of this massive book that I will own, with other editions strewn in storage lockers across the globe like obelisks marking my places of former habitation. And, of course, I can’t possibly get rid of those editions, because they contain reviews of recordings which are no longer actively “in print”, but which might still be available — or might be rereleased in the time before the next edition. Or (imagine this) released digitally without any corresponding physical presence whatsoever by an enterprising record label looking to earn money from its back catalog with very little capital investment.

And there’s more — this, from the Wikipedia page about the guide:

Due to the increasing numbers of CDs on the market, space limitations and depth of coverage have increasingly become an issue: in the 7th edition, for instance, the index was dropped to save space, but it was restored in the 8th edition (but a number of entries were dropped or shortened to make room for it).

So it’s always a contingent and partial exercise. It’s a real-world experiment with the unknowable; a test of your stamina contrived by the publishing industry and the recording industry to see whether you are up to the challenge.

Are you worthy? Do you want it enough? Do you deserve the musical pleasures that you think you want? Will they still be there when you realize you want them? Will they have been reissued in thirteen different editions, each of them offering superior remastering and spectacular studio outtakes?

A problem of organization

Ultimately, however, the problem with books of this type is that their organizational assumptions are now fundamentally out of date. You have to navigate by artist, which can be a pain — there’s no way to see the highest-rated albums by genre, search by sidemen, and so on. And obviously there’s no preview link to listen to parts of the album or actually download the album(s) directly should you want to purchase.

This is obviously stupid and must be stopped. Users should be able to tag entries by artists, participants, genre, rating, or anything else they want; they should be able to make use of links to direct download, and make links themselves. You could then search for a combination of tags — for example, 4-star hard-bop albums featuring Hank Mobley. And then you could download like a crazy download monkey.

The same goes, obviously, for any other type of entertainment guide on the market. Videohound — you’re next. Release that fine content from the silo of your website.

Of course, I will buy the Penguin Guide. Even though I would much, much rather spend more money for access to an electronic version that integrated seamlessly into iTunes and any other online music service of which I might make use.

(I will also continue to buy jazz CDs, if only because iTunes can be so dreadful at distinguishing top-quality remasters from their poor initial digital iterations. That isn’t to say that I’m not just going to rip them anyway, to the horror of audio purists everywhere. But it does illustrate just how godawful those early CD masters were. Apparently there are two bass parts at the outset of Bitches Brew — who knew? And the vibraphones on Idle Moments really should shimmer and throb, rather than sounding like bland aural wallpaper as if they were recorded in some appalling bar at the front of a dive motel.)

Entertainment guides should guide you to entertainment. Repeatedly.

I’ve recently rediscovered Charles Shaar Murray’s guide to Blues on CD, a book published in the mid-90s which was invaluable to me when I was first trying to get beyond Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. Part of the frustration back then — aside from the fact that I could afford a fraction of what was recommended — was the difficulty in finding this stuff. In hindsight, actually, it seems astonishing that I could find a compilation of Otis Rush’s mid-50s Cobra sides in a record store in a suburban English town. I’m quite sure that I couldn’t find anything nearly as specialized in any of Toronto’s largest record stores today (particularly post-Sam’s). But I certainly couldn’t find Furry Lewis or Ishman Bracey.

Nowadays, I am able to find much of what I want on iTunes — and most of it in the form of the individual tracks I want to hear, rather than the dull filler that was inevitably recorded as radio bait and pads out most of those CD compilations that I bought when I was 18.

Now, if only Charles Shaar Murray’s guide was actually a constantly updated, organically evolving online resource, rather than a one-off produced according to the whims and routines of the publishing industry?