Bits Blog: Books, Just Like You Wanted

Test Run: BookVibe Picks Up the Buzz on Books

A persistent problem faced by users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter is the flood of information they create. If you are connected to more than a handful of people on one of those platforms, you will be deluged with far more status updates, photos, likes, advertisements and videos than any human being could ever digest.

That provides an opening for tools, like BookVibe, that scan your feeds to pull out specific, useful information.

BookVibe, created by a tiny start-up called Parakweet, basically analyzes the tweets of accounts that you follow on Twitter and compiles a list of book recommendations based on which titles those people are talking about.

BookVibe compiles a list of book recommendations based on which titles the people you follow on Twitter are talking about.

The company uses artificial intelligence techniques to try to distinguish between someone expressing true affection for a book as opposed to merely mentioning it. When you pull up the recommendation, the service gives you the full tweets so that you can see the book reference in its original context. And on Wednesday, Parakweet unveiled a new feature that lets you look at the Twitter discussion surrounding half a million specific titles.

I currently follow 245 accounts on Twitter, many of them smart people in technology and journalism. Although I am a voracious consumer of news and magazines, I don’t have time to read a whole lot of books, so I am always looking to make intelligent choices about the ones I do pick up.

So I checked BookVibe, which is free, to see what it recommended for me. It pulled up an eclectic list, from the 1972 children’s classic “Watership Down” by Richard Adams (which my colleague Diego Sorbara called “a wonderful book”) to the 2012 novel “Forgotten Country” by Catherine Chung (which the author and food blogger Cheryl Tan said was “a beautiful debut novel”).

Intrigued by “Watership Down,” which I never read as a kid because it was about rabbits, I clicked through to learn more. I got a basic description of the book plus data that indicated it was being mentioned about 20 times a month on Twitter. There were many tweets from fans, including the Chadron State College professor Elisabeth Ellington, who proclaimed it “My #1 Top crying book.” A British Twitter user named John painted a more mixed picture: “I was obsessed with Watership Down as a child (even wrote fanfic) but it has more blood & death than most horror films.” And a student named Camille was clearly distressed at being forced to read it for school: “That book looks like it is NOT the business.”

Hmmm, perhaps I made the right decision back in junior high.

Would “Forgotten Country” be more promising? Although its BookVibe page said it was only getting a few mentions a month on Twitter, they were overwhelmingly positive. The Syracuse University student Kyra Nay wrote, “Beautifully clear prose. Complex meditation on family, sisterhood, immigrating & secrets.” And the book blogger Jaime Boler not only liked it but pointed out it was now available in paperback.

Much more my type of book. Since BookVibe provides easy links to Amazon.com to buy books, I added it to my list of saved items for my next order.

The service is still in beta, and it shows signs of being a work in progress. Extracting real meaning from the shorthand found in 140-word tweets can be a challenge for humans, let alone computers. Some books popped up on the recommended list because their author had mentioned them. Some reviews were missed because the Twitter user offered a link to an external review without summarizing it in the tweet.

But over all, I found BookVibe to a valuable single-purpose tool and an indication of what’s possible as social media search technology becomes more sophisticated.

One of BookVibe’s most intriguing features is what I call voyeur mode. Because most Twitter posts are public, BookVibe lets you see the books recommended for any Twitter user, offering a window into their possible tastes through the people they have decided to follow on Twitter.

BookVibe lets you see the books recommended for any Twitter user, including Bill Gates.

So you can, for example, peek at the recommendations for the television book-club hostess Oprah Winfrey (“Gone Girl” is on the list, as is “The Kite Runner”), or for the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (“Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything” popped up, as did “The Autobiography of Malcom X”).

Ramesh Haridas, the co-founder and chief executive of Paraktweet, said in an interview that his team set out three years ago to figure out what kind of posts in the social stream had staying power and would be worth cataloging in some way.

“We decided that the most useful ones were updates about activities,” he said. “The quality of these updates was very, very good, especially movies and books.”

In addition to the free consumer-oriented BookVibe, which will soon come out in a Facebook version, the company sells a more in-depth set of tools to book publishers, authors and retailers to help them understand how books are selling and where and what people are saying about them.

Parakweet is also developing a similar recommendation service for movies, which it calls TrendFinder. (There is already an early version.)

The technology is promising enough that Parakweet was recently able to raise $2 million from angel investors, and Mr. Haridas said that several global media companies and retailers, which he declined to name, were testing the company’s services.

By focusing on just a few topics, he said, Parakweet is able to offer more sophisticated results than those provided by the general-purpose search tools available on Twitter and Facebook. “It’s very hard to be an all-purpose social media tool and provide actionable analytics,” he said.

The Times’s technology writers offer their first impressions on new Web services, apps and other products.

Books of The Times: ‘Big Data,’ by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

Does what? Uses “big data” analysis of the swelling flood of data that is being generated and stored about virtually every aspect of our lives to identify patterns of behavior and make correlations and predictive assessments.

Amazon uses customer data to give us recommendations based on our previous purchases. Google uses our search data and other information it collects to sell ads and to fuel a host of other services and products.

The National Security Agency, a news article in The Guardian revealed last week, is collecting the phone records of millions of American customers of Verizon — “indiscriminately and in bulk” and “regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing” — under a secret court order. Under another surveillance program called Prism, The Guardian and The Washington Post reported, the agency has been collecting data from e-mails, audio and video chats, photos, documents and logins, from leading Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple, to track foreign targets.

Why spread such a huge net in search of a handful of terrorist suspects? Why vacuum up data so indiscriminately? “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack,” Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to Leon E. Panetta, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and defense secretary, said on Friday.

In “Big Data,” their illuminating and very timely book, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and Kenneth Cukier, the data editor for The Economist, argue that the nature of surveillance has changed.

“In the spirit of Google or Facebook,” they write, “the new thinking is that people are the sum of their social relationships, online interactions and connections with content. In order to fully investigate an individual, analysts need to look at the widest possible penumbra of data that surrounds the person — not just whom they know, but whom those people know too, and so on.”

Mr. Cukier and Mr. Mayer-Schönberger argue that big data analytics are revolutionizing the way we see and process the world — they even compare its consequences to those of the Gutenberg printing press. And in this volume they give readers a fascinating — and sometimes alarming — survey of big data’s growing effect on just about everything: business, government, science and medicine, privacy and even on the way we think. Notions of causality, they say, will increasingly give way to correlation as we try to make sense of patterns.

Data is growing incredibly fast — by one account, it is more than doubling every two years — and the authors of this book argue that as storage costs plummet and algorithms improve, data-crunching techniques, once available only to spy agencies, research labs and gigantic companies, are becoming increasingly democratized.

Big data has given birth to an array of new companies and has helped existing companies boost customer service and find new synergies. Before a hurricane, Walmart learned, sales of Pop-Tarts increased, along with sales of flashlights, and so stores began stocking boxes of Pop-Tarts next to the hurricane supplies “to make life easier for customers” while boosting sales. UPS, the authors report, has fitted its trucks with sensors and GPS so that it can monitor employees, optimize route itineraries and know when to perform preventive vehicle maintenance.

Baseball teams like Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s (immortalized in Michael Lewis’s best-seller “Moneyball”) have embraced new number-crunching approaches to scouting players with remarkable success. The 2012 Obama campaign used sophisticated data analysis to build a formidable political machine for identifying supporters and getting out the vote. And New York City has used data analytics to find new efficiencies in everything from disaster response, to identifying stores selling bootleg cigarettes, to steering overburdened housing inspectors directly to buildings most in need of their attention. In the years to come, Mr. Mayer-Schönberger and Mr. Cukier contend, big data will increasingly become “part of the solution to pressing global problems like addressing climate change, eradicating disease and fostering good governance and economic development.”

There is, of course, a dark side to big data, and the authors provide an astute analysis of the dangers they foresee. Privacy has become much more difficult to protect, especially with old strategies — “individual notice and consent, opting out and anonymization” — losing effectiveness or becoming completely beside the point.

“The ability to capture personal data is often built deep into the tools we use every day, from Web sites to smartphone apps,” the authors write. And given the myriad ways data can be reused, repurposed and sold to other companies, it’s often impossible for users to give informed consent to “innovative secondary uses” that haven’t even been imagined when the data was first collected.

Books of The Times: ‘Who Owns the Future?’ by Jaron Lanier

While working on “intriguing unannounced projects” for Microsoft Research — “a gigantic lighter-than-air railgun to launch spacecraft” and a speculative strategy for “repositioning earthquakes” — Mr. Lanier found time to follow up on his first book, “You Are Not a Gadget” (2010). That was a feisty, brilliant, predictive work, and the new volume is just as exciting. Mr. Lanier bucks a wave of more conventional diatribes on Big Data to deliver Olympian, contrarian fighting words about the Internet’s exploitative powers. A self-proclaimed “humanist softie,” he is a witheringly caustic critic of big Web entities and their business models.

He’s talking to you, Facebook. (“What’s Facebook going to do when it grows up?”) And to you, Google. (“The Google guys would have gotten rich from the search code without having to create the private spying agency.”) And to all the other tempting Siren Servers (as he calls them) that depend on accumulating and evaluating consumer data without acknowledging a monetary debt to the people mined for all this “free” information. One need not be a political ideologue, he says, to believe that people have quantifiable value and deserve to be recompensed for it.

It’s true that Mr. Lanier was once driving in Silicon Valley, listening to what he thought was some Internet start-up “trumpeting the latest scheme to take over the world,” when he realized he was hearing Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” (“If you select the right passages, Marx can read as being incredibly current.”)

He is no “lefty” (to use his word); he sees high-tech thievery as an apolitical problem. And he is too much of a maverick to align with anyone’s thinking, even his own. Whether it is a boast or a mea culpa, Mr. Lanier acknowledges: “I was an early participant in the process and helped to formulate many of the ideas I am criticizing in this book.” And “to my friends in the ‘open’ Internet movement, I have to ask: What did you think would happen?”

“Who Owns the Future?” reiterates some ideas in Mr. Lanier’s first book: that Web businesses exploit a peasant class, that users of social media may not realize how entrapped they are, that a thriving middle class is essential to keeping the Internet sustainable. When “ordinary people ‘share,’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes,” even that elite will eventually be undermined. Mr. Lanier compares his suggestions for reconfiguring this process to Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” but the last thing he worries about is writerly grandiosity. “Understand that in the context of the community in which I function,” he says of Silicon Valley, “my presentation is practically self-deprecating.”

Mr. Lanier’s sharp, accessible style and opinions make “Who Owns the Future?” terrifically inviting. What is he calling for? Just “The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity.” He much prefers sweeping formulations to qualified ones, although, as he points out, “being an absolutist is a certain way to become a failed technologist.” This book may not provide many answers (“It is too early for me to solve every problem brought up by the approach I’m advocating here”), but it does articulate a desperate need for them.

“Who Owns the Future?” overlaps with “The New Digital Age,” Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s much more polished work of Web analysis. Their book focuses more on global issues, but disagrees with specific points.

“The New Digital Age” looks forward to self-driving trucks that can ease the strain on Teamsters; Mr. Lanier rambunctiously writes of “Napstering the Teamsters” out of work, and of how such technology could go terribly wrong. The books also disagree on whether surgeons’ work will be enhanced or diminished by robotics.

And where Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen see promise in technology’s effect on the Arab Spring, Mr. Lanier is sick of the back-patting about social networking. Revolutions can happen without it, too, he says.

Mr. Lanier may not have any personal animus against Mr. Schmidt. But he describes listening to him and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos discuss the future of books just as he, Mr. Lanier, was struggling to write his first one. This prompts an attack on how Siren Servers could undermine and impoverish the world of reading, just as they did music. (Mr. Lanier is also a musician. He specializes in the arcane and innovative, as might be expected.) More generally, and very quotably, he warns against being seduced by “dazzlingly designed forms of cognitive waste.”

Finally, “Who Owns the Future?” takes some of it biggest swipes at those who do presume to own the future: fans of the Singularity (the hypothetical imminent merger of biology and technology), Silicon Valley pioneers seeking “methusalization” (i.e., immortality), techie utopians of every stripe. Yes, Mr. Lanier happens to be one of them. But he is still capable of remembering when, in his boyhood, prognosticators foresaw Moon colonies and flying cars. Now they think about genomics and data. Mindful of that way-cool past, he says, “I miss the future.”

Revolution in Resale of Digital Books and Music

The retailer’s button might say “buy now,” but you are in effect only renting an e-book — or an iTunes song — and your rights are severely limited. That has been the bedrock distinction between physical and electronic works since digital goods became widely available a decade ago.

That distinction is now under attack, both in the courts and the marketplace, and it could shake up the already beleaguered book and music industries. Amazon and Apple, the two biggest forces in electronic goods, are once again at the center of the turmoil.

In late January, Amazon received a patent to set up an exchange for all sorts of digital material. The retailer would presumably earn a commission on each transaction, and consumers would surely see lower prices.

But a shudder went through publishers and media companies. Those who produce content might see their work devalued, just as they did when Amazon began selling secondhand books 13 years ago. The price on the Internet for many used books these days is a penny.

On Thursday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published Apple’s application for its own patent for a digital marketplace. Apple’s application outlines a system for allowing users to sell or give e-books, music, movies and software to each other by transferring files rather than reproducing them. Such a system would permit only one user to have a copy at any one time.

Meanwhile, a New York court is poised to rule on whether a start-up that created a way for people to buy and sell iTunes songs is breaking copyright law. A victory for the company would mean that consumers would not need either Apple’s or Amazon’s exchange to resell their digital items. Electronic bazaars would spring up instantly.

“The technology to allow the resale of digital goods is now in place, and it will cause a dramatic upheaval,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps, a technology consulting firm. “In the short term, it’s great for consumers. Over the long term, however, it could seriously reduce creators’ incentive to create.”

Scott Turow, the best-selling novelist and president of the Authors Guild, sees immediate peril in the prospect of a secondhand digital thrift shop. “The resale of e-books would send the price of new books crashing,” he said. “Who would want to be the sucker who buys the book at full price when a week later everyone else can buy it for a penny?”

He acknowledged it would be good for consumers — “until there were no more authors anymore.”

Libraries, though, welcome the possibility of loosened restrictions on digital material.

“The vast majority of e-books are not available in your public library,” said Brandon Butler, director of public policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries. “That’s pathetic.”

He said that 60 percent of what the association’s 125 members buy was electronic, which meant sharp restrictions on use. Libraries cannot buy from Apple’s iTunes, he said. And so, for example, Pixar’s Oscar-winning soundtrack for the movie “Up” is not available in any public collection. An Apple spokesman confirmed this.

“If these things can’t be owned, who is going to make sure they exist going forward?” Mr. Butler asked. “Without substantial changes, we can’t do what libraries have always done, which is lend and preserve.”

For over a century, the ability of consumers, secondhand bookstores and libraries to do whatever they wanted with a physical book has been enshrined in law. The crucial 1908 case involved a publisher that issued a novel with a warning that no one was allowed to sell it for less than $1. When Macy’s offered the book for 89 cents, the publisher sued.

That led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling limiting the copyright owner’s control to the first sale. After that, it was a free market.

Sales of digital material are considered licenses, which give consumers little or no ability to lend the item. The worry is that without such constraints digital goods could be infinitely reproduced while still in the possession of the original owner.

All Or Nothing, The Movie Promo 1

Official promotional video for the movie "All Or Nothing". The movie will be released in 2014. Until then, you can read the entire book right now. This production will be by Stakk Money Films.

"All Or Nothing" On Amazon.Com -http://www.amazon.com/dp/1461172683/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_HR0Kpb18SNJ3

Common Sense: H.P.’s Autonomy Blunder Might Be One for the Record Books

The deal was considered so bad, and such an object lesson for a generation of deal makers and corporate executives, that it seemed likely never to be repeated, rivaled or surpassed.

Until now.

Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition last year of the British software maker Autonomy for $11.1 billion “may be worse than Time Warner,” Toni Sacconaghi, the respected technology analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, told me, a view that was echoed this week by several H.P. analysts, rivals and disgruntled investors.

Last week, H.P. stunned investors still reeling from more than a year of management upheavals, corporate blunders and disappointing earnings when it said it was writing down $8.8 billion of its acquisition of Autonomy, in effect admitting that it had overpaid by an astonishing 79 percent.

And it attributed more than $5 billion of the write-off to what it called a “willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers,” adding, “These misrepresentations and lack of disclosure severely impacted H.P. management’s ability to fairly value Autonomy at the time of the deal.”

In an unusually aggressive public relations counterattack, Autonomy’s founder, Michael Lynch, a Cambridge-educated Ph.D., has denied the charges and accused Hewlett-Packard of mismanaging the acquisition. H.P. asked Mr. Lynch to step aside last May after Autonomy’s results fell far short of expectations.

But others say the issue of fraud, while it may offer a face-saving excuse for at least some of H.P.’s huge write-down, shouldn’t obscure the fact that the deal was wildly overpriced from the outset, that at least some people at Hewlett-Packard recognized that, and that H.P.’s chairman, Ray Lane, and the board that approved the deal should be held accountable.

A Hewlett-Packard spokesman said in a statement: “H.P.’s board of directors, like H.P. management and deal team, had no reason to believe that Autonomy’s audited financial statements were inaccurate and that its financial performance was materially overstated. It goes without saying that they are disappointed that much of the information they relied upon appears to have been manipulated or inaccurate.”

It’s true that H.P. directors and management can’t be blamed for a fraud that eluded teams of bankers and accountants, if that’s what it turns out to be. But the huge write-down and the disappointing results at Autonomy, combined with other missteps, have contributed to the widespread perception that H.P., once one of the country’s most admired companies, has lost its way.

Hewlett-Packard announced the acquisition of Autonomy, which focuses on so-called intelligent search and data analysis, on Aug. 18, 2011, along with its decision to abandon its tablet computer and consider getting out of the personal computer business. H.P. didn’t stress the price — $11.1 billion, or an eye-popping multiple of 12.6 times Autonomy’s 2010 revenue — but focused on Autonomy’s potential to transform H.P. from a low-margin producer of printers, PCs and other hardware into a high-margin, cutting-edge software company. “Together with Autonomy we plan to reinvent how both structured and unstructured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected,” Léo Apotheker, H.P.’s chief executive at the time, proclaimed.

Autonomy had already been shopped by investment bankers by the time H.P. took the bait. But others who examined the data couldn’t come anywhere near the price that Autonomy was seeking. An executive at a rival software maker, Oracle, a company with many successful software acquisitions under its belt, told me: “We looked at Autonomy. After doing the math, we couldn’t make it work. We couldn’t figure out where the numbers came from. And taking the numbers at face value, even at $6 billion it was overvalued.” He didn’t want to be named because he was criticizing a competitor.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Making Picture Books on a PC

My Mac friends make these really nice picture books with iPhoto, but I use Windows. What options for easily making comparatively good-looking photo books are out there for me?

Apple iPhoto books, which can be designed and uploaded right from the iPhoto program, simplify the process for Mac users, but that does not mean Windows users are without similar resources. When shopping for a photo-book service, be sure to check out the selection of photo-editing tools, page templates and cover options to make sure the company provides everything you want for your custom photo book. Microsoft has a slightly outdated but general guide to publishing your own photo album in book form here.

Sites where you can upload photos and design your book right in your Web browser are plentiful. Shutterfly, which took over photo services from the now-defunct Kodak Gallery this year, and Snapfish are two established companies that have offered custom photo products for years. Mixbook and MyCanvas are also sites that let you create custom photo books.

Reviews of these sites and others are online. Prices for finished books are also comparable, averaging around $30 for a 20-page book before shipping charges. If you use the Flickr photo-sharing site, you can find links to sites that let you create custom books, cards and calendars with your pictures as well.

Depending on the photo-editing software you use on your computer, you may also be able to use a plug-in or an integrated service to create and upload a photo book. For example, Adobe Photoshop Elements has book-creation services and the Snap MyLife Creations Photo Book Uploader plug-in is available for the Windows Live Photo Gallery on Microsoft’s site.