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Library futures

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The future of the library. What is a public library for? First, how we got here: Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own. This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing. Only after that did we invent the librarian. The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. And your kids? Which was all great, until now. Want to watch a movie? This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data).

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost. How Obama's data-crunching prowess may get him re-elected. President Obama posts a tweet during an online town hall meeting in July from the White House in Washington. In the mechanics of identifying voters, President Obama's team is ahead of GOP rivalsObama's re-election campaign is the only one doing cutting-edge work with data President's operation uses a powerful social-networking tool called NationalFieldExpert: GOP presidential campaigns don't fully understand power of data crunching Editor's note: Micah Sifry is co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website that examines how technology is changing politics, and the author of "WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency.

" This commentary is the first in a series of "Campaign Tech" articles that will run through 2012 and explore technology's role in the presidential election. (CNN) -- In July, KDNuggets.com, an online newsite focused on data mining and analytics software, ran an unusual listing in its jobs section. The question almost answers itself. Facebook apps and other tools. Hassle Maps: The Genesis Of Demand.

"I had a big late fee for Apollo 13. It was six weeks late, and I owed the video store $40. I had misplaced the cassette. I didn't want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, 'I'm going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee? '" Reed Hastings' frustrations led to the creation of Netflix, one of the fast-growing businesses of the 21st century. The executives behind some of today's most successful products and services--think Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg--all share an ability to experience the world through the eyes and emotions of customers.

Mapping your customers' hassles should be a top priority. Creating a hassle map A hassle map can be a purely mental construct, or a literal map; it can be a top-down or bottom-up exercise. Connecting the dots for customers Armed with thousands of data points from customer observations, quantify the hot spots--the biggest drivers of consumer behavior. [Image: Flickr user jeanbaptisteparis] Media digitisation: Book transubstantiation. ONCE Babbage buys a book he finds it hard to let go. As middle age approaches, however, and shelf space grows sparse, he has begun to shed titles, retaining only those he actually expects to consult in the future (plus a handful he holds on to for purely sentimental reasons). Now, a firm is offering to slake his voracious appetite for new tomes without forcing him to relinquish old ones—or, at least, their contents. 1DollarScan is the American outpost of the Japanese firm Bookscan, founded to solve the problem of scant space in Japan's poky urban dwellings and to prevent damage caused by bookshelf-toppling earthquakes.

(Bookscan has no relation to Nielsen BookScan, an American retail-sales-tracking service). Ship your volumes to 1DollarScan, and the company will slice off the spine, and charge $1 for every 100 pages scanned. (The firm also scans routine documents and photos.) Chopped-up books are recycled; they are not retained and the firm will not return the pieces. On the death of book publishers and other middlemen. Hot on the heels of Amazon signing publishing deals with authors, and thus doing an end-run around their publisher partners, another major e-reader company says it plans to do the same: Kobo is launching its own publishing arm and looking to sign deals with authors directly. All of this is more proof (as if we needed any) that the Internet is potentially lethal to middlemen.

Does this mean that traditional publishers will soon be extinct? No. But it does mean that they are going to have to work harder to try to do what Amazon is already doing — namely, making it easier and more profitable for authors to reach their readers. For months now, Amazon has been busy ramping up its publishing unit, which it beefed up earlier this year with the hiring of publishing-industry veteran Larry Kirshbaum. All that matters is connecting writer with reader [T]he only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Amazon could find itself disintermediated as well.