Washington D.C. Public Library Case Study

Washington DC’s 37% rate of functional adult illiteracy reflects one of the most underfunded and underutilized library systems in the country. In 2004, former DC Mayor Anthony Williams launched a task force in 2004 to examine the DC Public Library (DCPL). In November 2006 the Mayor’s Task Force Report was released, envisioning that:

“Revitalized libraries will offer fresh collections of current books and media, useful standard publications, multilingual materials, GED and SAT practice books, historic documents and records, pertinent online databases, and digital content.”

Unfortunately, listing digital content last is symbolic of the vision for DC libraries. In the 370 page Technical Report, e-books are mentioned only seven times in reference to the future of DCPL collections. Here some of the few excerpts that lay out technology vision for the DCPL in 2010 and beyond:

“[Page 21]: The library should license digital content and make it available to registered borrowers whether they are in the library or using the collection from their home. E-books, digital audiobooks, videos-on-demand, and other digital content should be available for downloading to a customer’s personal computer, PDA,or MP3 player. …

[Page 60]: A ‘virtual branch’ is fast becoming a necessary facility for successful public libraries serving large populations. … A virtual branch can be a full-service location for searching licensed electronic databases, getting answers through an interactive reference service, downloading digital books and audiovisual content, using learning software, and participating in online programs such as presentations and discussions about books and topics of current interest. Also, items in the library’s physical collections can be reserved and, when available, shipped to the user – with any fees charged to the user’s account or credit card.”

It all sounds pretty high tech until you hit on idea of shipping books around the city. In any case, if you’ve lived in DC for long, the vision of a virtual branch probably sounds like science fiction. In fact, the 2010 vision for the DCPL is based on technology that has been used in public libraries around the country for years.
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Playing Catch Up

Several companies including NetLibrary, Overdrive, and Ebrary already have partnerships with public libraries around the world. All three offer a system for libraries to purchase e-books and popular audio book titles, though the technology is not cheap. NetLibrary has a rather shocking price structure. According to LibraryJournal.com:

“NetLibrary… now with more than 100,000 titles, has maintained its one book–one user access model. The company offers two primary purchase models based on title-by-title selection: libraries can subscribe to an ebook by paying the list price of the book, plus an annual access fee of 15 percent of the list price, or libraries can ‘own’ an ebook by paying the list price plus a one-time access fee of 55 percent of the list price.”

Unfortunately, the lack of a significant discount for subscriptions will encourage libraries to purchase e-books. If the library purchases a title, e-catalogs lose many of the advantages of digitization. For example, if econo-star Steven Levitt is heading to Seattle to talk about Freakonomics and 100 people want to read his e-book at the same time, they’ll have to wait. The King County Library System can only lend out 5 of his e-books at a time. E-books are made of 1s an 0s, not hardwoods and glue, so why not simply pay the publisher every time the virtual book is checked out?

Although the NetLibrary subscription model is extortionary, subscription e-books are the ideal model for libraries. E-books require few human resources: three weeks after you check out an e-book, it is automatically “returns” itself to the library by deleting itself (spooky, eh?). A subscription service ensures that libraries pay publishers only when e-books are checked out, so no dollars are wasted on lonely, unread books sitting on dusty shelves. Best of all, 10 of your best friends can check out a copy of the e-book at the same time, eliminating excuses in your book club.

While a subscription service might seem to favor the publishers of bestsellers, it also provides increased exposure to authors of obscure or out-of print books - the so-called long tail. If libraries pay only when e-books are loaned, then there is no reason to limit the size of their virtual catalog. A proper e-book subscription service that costs a public library no upfront fees also reduces guesswork in collections management, enabling a smooth transition in budgeting for a dedicated e-library.
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Leapfrog: DC Should Pursue the First True Virtual Public Library System

DC Public Libraries suffer from several problems that make them an ideal test case for launching a real virtual library: huge deferred maintenance costs, an aging central library, and a population disillusioned by years of neglect to local libraries.

DCPL is too far behind the technology curve to play catch up. Instead they should leapfrog technologies. Statastic proposes that new DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and DCPL Director Ginnie Cooper consider a bold experiment in virtual collections.

The DCPL should start phasing out the acquisition of new paper books in 2008, with the goal of e-books making up no less than 90% of new acquisitions 2013. By 2017, the DCPL should have digitized 90% of its existing collection and sold the millions of hardback books in its stacks to help generate revenue. This will reduce required square footage - and overhead costs - of neighborhood libraries, eliminate the frustration of missing books, and create more space for the computer terminals that are sorely lacking.

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Advantages to the DC Virtual Library

One of the most obvious advantages to a virtual library is the 24-hour access to books that might otherwise be checked out or unavailable. It could also expand the size of the DCPL available collection from 2.7 million volumes to as many as 32 million - every title in the WorldCat system. More titles mean more attention from residents, which increases reading and circulation.

In a city with 17% of its residents and 30% of its children living in poverty, it might seem that DC is not well-suited for e-books. After all, how would someone living in poverty afford a $300 e-reader? And how would they download a book with access to the Internet? Statastic expects the prices of e-readers featuring e-ink to drop to less than $75 within 5 years (we already have $100 laptops), and less than $40 by 2017.

Under this plan, the DCPL would phase in heavily subsidized or free e-readers for every low income DC resident. Children could also use these e-readers in the public schools where textbooks are in such short supply making it impossible to assign homework from textbooks. And assigning a hot new technology like e-readers to under-privileged citizens might just spark their interest in reading.

With the advent of Google Books, do we need a virtual public library? Many DC residents with their own e-readers and home Internet access will soon have access to millions of Google e-books. But the digital divide is real and if public libraries aren’t centrally involved in digitization of books, the gap will widen. As the high-income, early adopters turn toward e-books, wealthy taxpayers might see less value in funding the DC Public Library System (if this is even possible). This would exacerbate already grave funding shortfalls, leaving an underclass with an ignored and outmoded library system.

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E-book Public Library Budget

Free e-readers, millions of e-books… sounds expensive, doesn’t it? Actually it could save taxpayers millions of dollars. The DCPL proposed budget for 2007 is $43 million, of which $19 million is for reference and library collection services. Facilities make up another $9.4 million. All three of these categories will have enormous savings if transitioned to an e-books catalog:

• 1. Book Sale: Bound books would be liquidated, with proceeds dedicated to digitizing rare books and subscription to an e-books catalog.
• 2. Deferred Maintenance: Neighborhood libraries that have been already been closed or that suffer from huge deferred maintenance costs would be sold and replaced by an increased number of smaller, leaner e-libraries that offer better neighborhood access to computer workstations, distribution of e-reader and training and reading programs. Neighborhoods with little Internet access would be served by DCPL e-book kiosks (more on this below).
• 3. Staff reductions: With fewer books to re-shelve and a 24 hour virtual library online, collections and maintenance staff could be reduced. As D.C. Library Renaissance Project Director Robin Diener recently commented: “We have evidence of incredible abuses — people who work for [the library] and draw a salary and rarely come to work. It’s a no-work culture.”
• 4. Private Partners: The DCPL should pursue technology partners such as Google or Yahoo which will be naturally be drawn to the cutting edge, high-profile project of digitizing the library system of the nation’s capital.
• 5. Private & Public Grants: The DCPL’s innovative virtual library experiment will also attract attention from major donors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as federal grants.

By 2017 when the DC Virtual Library System is in place, there will be some new expenses (2007 dollars):

• 1. New Staff: Tech savvy staff capable of managing a virtual catalog and training patrons on the use of e-books, e-readers, and online catalogs. The new, more expensive staff hired will be offset by staff reductions due to reduced maintenance and collections services (e.g. re-shelving). Reference librarians will still be necessary, though they may take on new roles dispensing valuable advice through online forums. It’s even easy to imagine 24 hour access to an online librarian.
• 2. Subsidized E-readers: Assume that students would be issued e-readers at school. The DCPL would purchase e-readers for any adult with a household income of less than $35,000 per year. Nearly one-third, or about 184,000, DC residents would qualify for free e-readers. If new e-readers are issued every 2 years and the price of e-readers averages $40 in 2017 (it is more likely to be about $15 to $20), it would cost the city about $3.7 million annually to supply free e-readers. Other ways to help defray these costs are to require a deposit or small co-payments from those above the poverty line.
• 3. E-book Subscriptions: Circulation in all DC public libraries is about 1.1 million books. If the DCPL can reach a circulation rate similar to Seattle’s, residents would be checking out 6 million e-books per year, or about 1 book per month for every reading-age citizen. If the DCPL cut a deal with publishers to pay $2 for every book checked out from its libraries, it would cost the DCPL $12 million per year to maintain its e-book collection.
• 4. E-book Kiosks: For residents in neighborhoods with limited home Internet access, DCPL could provide e-book kiosks near public areas like schools or community centers. Pre-distributed e-readers would have RFID technology that identifies the DCPL account. The customer would simply touch the e-reader to kisok to log in. After selecting a title, the user holds the e-reader next to the kiosk for a free wireless download of the e-book. Installation and maintenance could be covered by corporate advertising on the outside of the kiosk.

The total new expenses of subsidized e-readers plus e-book subscriptions is equal to about $15.6 million. Compare this to the $19 million being spent on collections and references this year alone.

It’s important to remember that not all books, documents and historical will be digitized, so there will be still be a need for a central library, whether it is the renovated Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in downtown DC or the new one proposed by the DC Mayor. Either of the central library proposals are would cost about $275 million according to city estimates. Statastic doesn’t prefer one proposal over another, but it is imperative to rethink the needs of a central library with e-books as the heart of the collection.

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Unknowns and Opportunities

There are two unknowns in creating the world’s first truly digital library: 1) are publishers willing to negotiate lower e-books subscription rates, and 2) will the DCPL create its own e-book collection or outsource it?

One major pre-condition for this proposal to succeed is that subscription e-book prices must be negotiated downward. Publishers and authors must be made to understand that low-priced e-book “rentals” in public libraries will increase readership. Publishers will sell higher volumes of e-books, and they can count on a reliable revenue stream.

It is not cost effective for the DCPL to digitize its collection from scratch. Google has already inserted themselves into the e-book value chain and Google is far and away the leader in the number of titles digitized. In fact, Google may be the only corporate partner for creating a virtual public library. According to Jeffrey Toobin in this week’s New Yorker, because of publishers’ lawsuits against Google, they might be the last company to digitize the world’s books:

Google’s advantage may well be cemented if the company settles its lawsuits with the publishers and authors. … [Lawrence Lessig , Professor at Stanford Law School said], “The publishers will get more than the law entitles them to, because Google needs to get this case behind it. And the settlement will create a huge barrier for any new entrants in this field.”

Google will complete digitization of the 6 million books at the University of Michigan by 2010 - the same target year for the DCPL’s modernization. The DCPL should approach Google immediately to negotiate a partnership for the DC Virtual Library.

Are DC residents feeling lucky?

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Yesterday we left several unanswered questions: who should digitize the world’s books? How do we ensure that authors get paid? What is the future of libraries in the digital age?

U.S. libraries have the potential to lead the digital book revolution. Libraries have a large market, consistent funding sources, and good relationships with private partners. Unfortunately, a lack of funding, a lack of focus, and usual bureaucratic hurdles have given Google the lead. Google certainly isn’t evil, but their market power does reduce the likelihood that public libraries will ever gain the political traction needed to fund this vision.

Before we start assessing the future of e-books and public libraries, let’s set the framework for how authors should get paid and who has the power to provide a digital library for the world.

The E-Book Market

It might be instructive to take a brief look at how Google has inserted itself into the e-book market. There are five major players in delivering e-books to readers:

1. 1. Authors: The vast majority of authors are crucial but in many ways peripheral to the development of e-books. That may change (as it has in journalism) but in the near future, their power is distributed too widely.
2. 2. Publishers: Publishers select authors, preen their works and prepare them for public consumption. Resembling the intransigence of record labels in the music industry, publishers are effectively dragging their feet on e-books by not offering any type of discount that would realistically lure readers away from paper books. Publishers fear that the sharing of e-books and emergence of virtual publishing will cut them out of the value chain.
3. 3. Google: Google has used its deep pockets to rapidly insert itself into the e-books value chain. Google already reaches out directly to authors, so it’s easy to imagine that publishers may lose power and influence.
4. 4. Libraries: Libraries are a widely distributed market and reliable customer, purchasing millions of books every year for their collections. The role of libraries in the digital world is rapidly changing. They may lag behind and slowly adapt to e-books, but taking initiative sooner could them more control over the e-books market than any other player.
5. 5. Bookstores: Bookstores - online and off - have lagged on developing a viable e-book model. E-book sellers are often small web companies with specialized catalogs (see statastic! below). Your corner bookstores should be shaking in their bricks and mortar when it comes to e-books, and finding an e-book at Amazon.com is a confounding experience.

Copyright Issues

Now that we know the players, let’s look at one sticky issue that may be delaying the widespread adoption of e-books. Copyright is fundamentally a commercial problem, not a legal one. Intellectual property protection enables authors and musicians to derive profit from their works. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is absolutely critical to protecting the rights of authors. While many of us are familiar with the shortcomings of DRM in music, it is much better suited to e-books - with some adjustments:

• -Customers who purchase e-books must be given a discount. Of the $20 you pay for a new hardback book, up to half is allocated to shipping, printing, publishing, and marketing costs. When you eliminate those costs by selling it in electronic format, you can charge less (say $12) while increasing publisher and author profits.
• -Customers who purchase e-books should have the right to re-sell those books. Although Apple is having no trouble selling DRM music that cannot be re-sold, music downloads are fundamentally different: music is designed for repetition. Just try reading an e-book as many times as your little sister listens to the latest Justin Timberlake CD.
• -E-books must be sold in sections. Just like being able to buy an MP3 single rather than the full album, e-books must give customers the option to part of a book - especially in non-fiction. For a few cents, customers should be able to buy a single recipe (rather than the cookbook), or city museum guide (rather than the entire country guide).
• -E-books must be rent-able (a.k.a. subscription model or DRM time bombs). This is especially critical for the success of electronic public libraries.

If low-priced e-books are protected by reliable DRM and rent-able for public libraries, copyright protection should cease to be an issue. Why? Because people will have almost no incentive to share e-books and e-libraries would create a reliable profit center for publishers and authors.

The Wal-Mart Library?

Now that we have the commercial fundamentals of our new e-book world established, let’s take a look at how this would impact the players.

Wal-Mart flipped the supplier-buyer relationship upside-down. Because of Wal-Mart’s size and market share, suppliers are hesitant to be dropped from Wal-Mart shelves. This gives Wal-Mart increased power to negotiate supplier prices down (often to a fault). Suppliers make less profit per item, but they bet on making it up on volume.

When Google enters the e-book market, it will do so as the market leader (see statastic! below). This may have been Google’s strategy all along: the network effect. For example, where would you go to auction an item? If you want the most eyes on your item, you will auction it at Ebay where there are the most items for sale. Google’s huge database of digitized books will provide a similar draw for readers, giving Google buyer power over suppliers - in this case publishers. With the promise of massive volumes of e-books being sold on Google Books, Google should be able to negotiate lower e-book prices with publishers.

If libraries across the country were to unite and pool their resources, they could also create a single digital library. The federal government could also negotiate lower e-book prices for its public libraries, just as Congress is considering using the market power of 300 million citizens to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for its Medicare beneficiaries.

There are several advantages to a publicly-funded initiative to digitize the world’s books. Google Books search is proprietary. In other words, if you use Yahoo as your search engine, no Google Book results will show up. In contrast, a U.S. Digital Library would be searchable by anyone. Tomorrow we will explore how a such a nationalized virtual library might be implemented in the Washington DC Public Library system.
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In the near future, most of our media will be found on a hard drive. 35mm film is rapidly going extinct, CDs are giving way to MP3s. Filmmakers like David Lynch have announced that they will never use anything but digital video cameras. Meanwhile, Netflix has introduced movie downloads. And whether the execs are ready or not, television is being revolutionized by YouTube among others. But our most ancient media of all hasn’t budged: books. Sure we read and write on computers for school and for work, but at the end of the day when you curl up with a good book, it’s unlikely to be on your laptop. Why hasn’t the e-book taken off? And what happens when it does?

Books are long overdue (ahem) for the digital revolution. For the rest of the week, statastic! will consider the future of e-ink, e-paper, and e-books. What are the implications for our public libraries? Stay tuned for a case study on the e-library of the not-so-distant future. But first things first: You can’t have an e-book without e-ink.

In the 1970s, the legendary Xerox PARC first developed something they called electronic ink, or e-ink. E-ink is comprised of millions of microcapsules the diameter of a human hair. Each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a minimal electrical charge is applied, the microcapsules flip and remain flipped until the next electrical impulse tells them otherwise.

E-ink is perhaps best explained by what it is not. It is not an LCD or a plasma display that you may be accustomed to seeing on a laptop computer. Unlike laptop displays, e-ink is not backlit, meaning that if you want to read in bed, you’d better have a light on. The fact that e-ink doesn’t rely on backlighting results in several advantages:

• -Easier to read: E-ink has nearly the same resolution and reflectivity as printed text. Reading using reflected light is much easier on the eyes than backlit screens, and much easier to read in sunlight. Unlike plasma or LCD flat screens, you can view e-ink from several angles just like regular paper.
• -Flexible e-paper: Because e-ink doesn’t require backlighting, it also doesn’t require a rigid glass screen. The simplicity of e-ink means that it can be paired with flexible materials creating an e-paper that can be bent, or even rolled up.
• -No need to recharge: Once the electrical current tells the microcapsules whether to turn black or white, they remain in that state indefinitely with no power input. A page using e-ink (also called e-paper) can remain open indefinitely without drawing down of a battery source. You can read thirty books before you need to plug in an e-reader using e-ink.

Currently several companies are pursuing e-ink and e-paper. Plastic Logic, the developer of the “E Ink,” announced on January 3rd, 2007 that it had completed a $100 million round of equity financing. Their research currently is focused on flexible displays that will enable an electronic reader to hold hundreds of e-books and weigh less than a thin newspaper. For video on the flexible display prototypes, click here.

Several companies have already licensed E Ink for their own devices. Sony’s $300 e-reader holds 80 books, weighs about as much as a paperback and can turn 7,500 pages before it needs a charge. Star eBook just released its 6.2 ounce e-reader in Japan, claiming that it’s the lightest reader on the market. And late in 2006, Hitachi released a 4,000 color e-reader, an innovation that could rapidly earn some converts.

If the $300 to $500 price tag seems unrealistic, consider this: In 1996 DVD players hit the American market for about $600 (in 1996 dollars, no less). The least expensive DVD player at Walmart.com is now $30, less than 5% of the price a decade ago. If e-readers have similar adoption rates, you might be able to pick up an e-reader for less than the price of a hard cover within a few years.

Tomorrow: the e-book market

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The Russian Futurists - imagine the Magnetic Fields playing with a full electronic symphony underwater. Try to pick out the honking geese on the track “Our Pen’s Out of Ink.” A relative inconvenience in this age of e-ink.

Sources: Statastic research, Wikipedia, e-paper.org,

In online music news, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) is suing the Russian website allofmp3.com for the comical sum of $1.65 trillion, more than double Russia’s nominal GDP of $763 billion. To be sure, allofmp3 is skating on thin legal ice by using loopholes in lax Russian copyright laws to sell MP3s discounted as much as 90% from iTunes pricing. But if it weren’t so legally ambiguous, who would complain about song downloads for as little as a dime?

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune of happening upon a Tower records in the process of liquidating its CDs for half price. The place was mobbed. It seems that while people no longer can stomach paying $19 for a CD, the $9.50 price point was much more tolerable. This is not as much a lesson in bricks and mortar versus online music, the lesson is that people buy more music when the music is less expensive.

iTunes has noticed that the $10 price point is significant to customers. But it’s still too high. After all, they’ve compressed a higher quality digital format, cut out shipping costs and eliminated printing of CD booklets. It’s possible to buy CDs online for a similar price, the only trouble is that you’ll have to wait for several days to receive it.

A couple of years ago during an NPR round table about digital rights management (DRM), someone suggested a groundbreaking approach. Why not put every song ever recorded online and let users download them for a nickel each? When allofmp3 started that’s basically what they did. At that price, there’s no reason not to be impulsive. Five cent downloads would reduce incentives for file sharing and encourage listeners to experiment with new music.

A nickel per song doesn’t sound like much revenue for artists, but artists would drastically increase sales volume. If artists picked up 60% of the revenues, or 3 cents per song, then selling an albums with a total of 15 songs would only earn them $.45. If 10 million people downloaded the album they would earn $4.5 million on album sales alone. And what if the artists benefited from the mashups and amateur remixes that now proliferate on the web? Artists could offer up song pieces for sale and then split revenues with bedroom DJs.

As hard drive prices decline, the cost of storing music approaches zero. And if the price of acquiring the music approaches zero, then people have no reason not to buy it. Imagine the innovative companies that might spring up: online DJs who choose playlists from your own MP3 collection. Or, while listening to online radio you could simply push the repeat button for a song you like. The service would charge you a nickel, download the song instantly to your hard drive. Better yet, store your music library of thousands of songs online and stream it wherever you go.

This will never appeal to the RIAA lawyers who make their living by imagineering $1.65 trillion lawsuits. But it would benefit the artists and the public. And artists that no longer make their living attempting to sell overpriced albums can always sell overpriced tickets to sold out concerts (there’s evidence that this is already happening), incentivizing bands to play live more often.

Statastico would love a copy of TV on the Radio’s critically acclaimed “Return to Cookie Mountain.” The single Wolf Like Me is fantastic, as is their live show and nearly everything they’ve produced thus far. So how does someone like me get music? At about $.27 per track emusic.com is the best value out there.  If emusic doesn’t carry the album (and they don’t), then I buy the CD and endure the long wait. There are many other options, so I decided to evaluate them compared to my dream website anysongonearthforanickel.com.

Statastico compiled an entirely biased and unscientific assessment of the methods most people might use to acquire music. There are two scores, the price score and the usability score. Price score was taken as the inverse of the price as a percentage of $11.50. In other words, if it’s free it scored 100 and if it is close to $11.50 it scored near 0. The usability score is based out of 100 and is the average of the scores from the following 6 categories:

1. 1. Legality: Sharing songs with friends, file sharing and allofmp3.com scored 1 and 10 in this category; all others scored 100.
2. 2. Ease of Use: File sharing is time consuming and risky, while amazon.com and iTunes are straightforward. Emusic was marked down to 75 because they require a subscription.
3. 3. Music Selection: How many albums can you find? Predictably, our theoretical “any song on earth for a nickel” came out on top.
4. 4. Flexibility: Can users share the music easily with other, are there digital rights management, can you re-download MP3s that you may have lost (as on emusic)? CDs scored slightly higher because they allow users to select their own music compression, allowing flexibility for more advanced compression formats in the future.
5. 5. Audio Quality: CD format was given 100, AAC was rated higher than MP3s because of better quality at lower bitrates, and file sharing was marked down to 50 out of 100 because of inconsistent downloads.
6. 6. Instant Gratification: How long it takes to get the music? Physical transfers involving UPS scored low, online transfers (except file sharing) scored higher.

As you can see, the fictional website anysongonearthforanickel.com wins. Of the next four best options only allofmp3 would (allegedly) pay royalties to TV on the Radio (emusic doesn’t carry the latest album).

The RIAA should remember that customers - especially young customers - are extremely price sensitive and tech savvy. The RIAA will never shut down peer-to-peer networks, (in fact allpeers just developed an add-on for Firefox). The RIAA must embrace innovation rather than outmoded business models. By shifting the paradigm to low-cost song downloads, artists may once again get paid for their hard work.

For full source data click here.

Statastico tries to provide a diverse look at world around us. I’ve written about butter cows, decapitation, planets the size of countries, even measured wieners. The result of this eclecticism is that some odd, disturbing (and anonymous) google searches have led people to my web site over the past month.

Some folks have pretty normal requests. Most web searches that end up on statastic.com are searching for one of three things: 1) nursing wage information, 2) video games, or 3) critiques of the Bottom of the Pyramid. These folks I can help.

Then there are the others…

Someone in Vancouver wants to know “how many breaths a human takes in a week?” All statastic can tell you is how much hot air from a politician it takes to fill up a balloon, but the good people of Vancouver are asking the right questions.

A Los Angelean wants to know the “definition of Joshua”. No idea, but have a look at joshuakucera.net, maybe he can tell you when he’s not worrying about The Rise of the Neo-Con Artists.

A Canuck wants to know about “cannibalism in Islam”. I’ll go ahead and field this one. Cannibalism is indeed a fundamental precept of the Muslim religion. And you are right to be worried: Most Muslims prefer the tender, maple-syrupy taste of Canadians. Now you understand why Bush is so concerned about Islamic Cannibal Extremism.

But maybe it’s the Romanians we should be focused on. Apparently someone in the San Francisco Bay Area is wondering about cannibalism in Romania. Hopefully, they were looking for this old Romanian folktale: The Cannibal Innkeeper.

Someone in Norcorss, Georgia (I’ll a assume an optimistic young man) did a google search on “super models AND alcohol”. Finally someone thinking straight. After reading my entry on how to drink the most alcohol per calorie, he now knows that supermodels prefer Keystone Light.

“Swiss cow subsidies” were on the mind of someone in Zurich, Switzerland. You know, I’ll bet Swiss cows are nearly perfect. They stand on two legs at the top of the hour when it’s time to be milked, and put the toilet seat down after using the cow-let. Well worth the EU subsidies, I’m sure.

Over in Utrecht, Netherlands, someone was wondering about Agassi and death. He’s alive and well, it was the death of American (men’s) tennis that had Statastico worried before Roddick’s encouraging run at the U.S. Open.

Finally, someone in Tucson, Arizona was thinking about “breast terror”. Dear god. Why anyone looking up breast terror on the Internet would click on a site called statastic! is beyond me, but a recent search shows that statastic.com still comes up third on the google search for the terms.

Perhaps the Arizonian was looking for a justification for getting breast implants during our Global War on Terror:

Shrapnel from rocket lodged in implants, sparing Israeli woman

August 15, 2006: JERUSALEM - An Israeli woman’s breast implants saved her life when she was wounded in a Hezbollah rocket attack during Israel’s war with the Lebanese group, a hospital spokesman said Tuesday.

Doctors found shrapnel embedded in the silicone implants, just inches from the 24-year-old’s heart.

It’s a weird world wide web.

People are passionate about their online groceries. And they are very passionate about milk, specifically Tuscan Whole Milk sold at amazon.com. Reading these 700+ reviews of a gallon by teens and tweens from around the world did make Statastico feel a bit old. (And uninformed.)

But it does raise an issue: how much of the time we spend blogging, reviewing products and updating Wikipedia while at work? How does this affect worker productivity? Wikipedia arguably increases efficiency. Buying the product you want on the first try because of user feedback helps consumers and producers alike.

If I had more time, I’d try to correlate the average number of product reviews on Amazon to the unemployment rate. Alas, Statastico is going to the U.S. Open to watch Agassi beat Baghdatis tonight. Any volunteers Statasticos out there, or have you all gorged yourselves on a gallon of milk during the past hour?

Google Trends is statastic! Not many web sites get the statastic adjective, but it’s no surprise that the Google Labs have pulled it off.

Google Trends is an anonymous snapshot of worldwide Google searches broken down by the geographic origination of the search. My favorite part is that terms are normalized, which basically means that Google takes the search term that you’re interested in as a percentage of all search terms from the geographic area you’ve selected. Google explains here.

The word or words that appears at the top of each section were the search terms that people around the world entered into Google. In all cases except the last one, these are the top results from around the world. The last comparison between Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio was limited to U.S. Google searches.

Now to see what the world has on its mind!
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When Republicans Google themselves?

Top 10 cities around the world searching for the word “corruption.”

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Hope the Romanians are voting in the midterms

Top 4 regions around the world searching for the words “democrat” and “republican.”

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Planning a vacation?

Top 10 countries around the world searching for the words “witchcraft,” compared to their search for “cannibalism,” and “spontaneous combustion.”

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We care a lot. But not as much as you.

Top 10 cities around the world searching for the word “Darfur.”
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When men are in charge

Top 10 countries that searched for the word “sex” compared to the frequency with which they searched for the term “love.”

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Now that’s not funny

Top 10 countries searching for the word “joke.” I don’t get it.

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Time for the Butter Cow!

Top 10 cities around the world that searched for “state fair.”

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“Well they’re both really important issues… the boobs, I mean.”

Top 10 cities around the world that searched for the term “breast implant” versus how often they googled the name of the Iraqi prison “Abu Ghraib.”

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“Jihad” must mean something else in Indonesian. Besides, there are hardly any Muslims there.
Top 10 languages that searched for the word “jihad” versus the frequency with which they searched for the word “terrorism” and “al Qaeda.”

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What exactly are the Indonesians planning for?

Top 10 countries that searched for the term “UFO” versus how likely they were to look up “Elvis.”

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Washington DC just isn’t very hip.

Top 10 U.S. cities that googled “TV on the Radio” compared to how often those same 10 cities searched for “Arcade Fire.”

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In May, 2006 the MIT Media Lab unveiled its first working prototype of the $100 laptop. The non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was spun out of the Media Lab to manage the design. The result is small, brightly-colored and rugged laptop that may cost as much as $140. Designed to the specifications of the world’s poorest children, they are the great hope for narrowing the global digital divide.

Before they ship the final product in 2007, OLPC will pilot prototypes in the six countries listed in the chart below. The plan is for the governments of developing nations to purchase millions of these laptops and distribute them to children through their schools.

While I applaud the goal of providing an ultra-affordable laptop to the bottom of the pyramid market, I do worry about the re-sale of these high-value items. OLPC has eventual plans to create a secondary market for the sale of $100 laptops in developed world. From the OLPC FAQs:

Will OLPC spin-off a commercial subsidiary?

The idea is that a commercial subsidiary could manufacture and sell a variation of the OLPC in the developed world. These units would be marked up so that there would be a significant profit which can be plowed into providing more units in countries who cannot afford the full cost of one million machines.

The discussions around this have talked about a retail price of 3× the cost price of the units.

$100 in Nigeria is the equal to nearly two months income. To give Americans a sense of how much $100 is to the average Nigerian, imagine sending your 8 year old to school with a $6,000 laptop. Now imagine living in a country with an epidemic of corruption, in a shanty with no electricity or running water. If laptops were selling for $300 in developed nations, it would provide a strong, and unfortunate, incentive for Nigerian parents to sell their children’s laptops.

Leapfrogging technologies is a worthy goal, but OLPC has to make sure that the social institutions in their target markets can support the landing. They must concentrate as hard on issues such as corruption and cyclical poverty as they do on the design of motherboard and screen brightness. We’ve seen before with the example of SCANWATER that good technology will fail without first addressing underlying problems.
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Sources: Statastic research, Wikipedia, IMF

Notes: PPP was not used because the calculation expresses $100 in an approximated nominal US income per capita. The statastic was calculated by dividing the nominal GDP per capita in these 7 countries by $100. That percentage was then multiplied by the nominal GDP per capita of the United States.

Sure English has the most entries in Wikipedia - 1.3 million at last count - but we also have half a billion native speakers around the world. In fact, it takes 250 Internet users to produce a single English entry on Wikipedia.

So which country is the most prolific? A mere 2 million Slovenians have cranked out 32,000 entries, and they only needed an average of 30 Internet users to write each entry.

And 8.8 million Swedes have produced a whopping 177,000 entries. So if anyone ever asks you how many Swedes it takes to screw in a Wikipedia entry on lightbulbs, the answer is 50. The punchline is that it takes 389 English speakers and more than 11,000 Chinese speakers to do the same. This is hardly surprising given that Sweden is one of the most industrious and entrepreneurial countries in the world, home of Ikea, Volvo and the Swedish Chef.

But look out for the Lusophones. The 210 million Brazilians and Portuguese have produced 169,000 Wikipedia entries so far, and while they’re not the most efficient, that’s still an impressive 28% increase in entries since April, 2006.

Here are the top 25 languages used to write Wikipedia entries. The first statastic is a snapshot of which native speakers produce the most entries per capita. The second measure shows how productive the language groups are given their access to the Internet.

Sources: Statastic research, Wikipedia, World Bank, United Nations Millennium Devlopment Goals Indicators

Notes: Chinese speakers count Mandarin and Cantonese.

Internet usage: Wikipedia entries as of August 9, 2006. Internet usage data is from 2004. In cases where a language spans several countries, a weighted average was used to determine estimated Internet usage data for a language group.

How do we know when a media technology is maturing? Look at how well it reflects society. Communications technologies often start with a limited set of users, and often a limited appeal. And there are often contradictory forces at work in media innovation, for example when Monk scribes gave way to Gutenberg’s printing press. Religious elite lost some cache, but the rewards were expanded literacy and increased creativity in literature.

Photography is an early example of a media that could both document life and afford artists a new medium to reflect life. But today there is a major difference: ubiquity. In 1997, it was estimated that there were more than 150 billion photographs existed in the U.S., and that was well before digital cameras. Today almost everyone has access to a still and video camera. Yesterday’s photojournalism is today’s snapshots. And the advent of photo sharing is also blurring the lines between amateur and commercial photography.

Music has been around about as long as Homo sapiens, and perhaps since the Homo neanderthalensis. But the transformative nature of music, its ability to fuel the social activism of the 1960s, for example, could only occur with innovations recording (starting with the phonograph) and distribution (beginning with radio). With the advent of Internet music sharing, there is a new wave of do-it-yourself creativity in music, whether through self-published albums, mashups, or local iPod DJ nights.

Documentary and experimental film is as old as the medium itself. But documentaries of the early 20th century were from the viewpoint of a few documentarians. One side of innovation in film distribution has increased the public’s access to our homes, cars, even stadium seating. The other side is more the surge in production. Just look at the Viewer Created Content on Current TV to understand how everyone from high school students to priests and drug dealers are sharing their point of view. And motion pictures are increasingly activist: The box office now has hits with political editorials, documentaries about global warming or docudramas about genocide.

So what about video games? Where do they fit in? It depends who you ask. Those under 40, probably grew up playing them and understand the appeal. The baby boomers have likely avoided video games, save for the ones that best imitate the card games they grew up with. First person shooter games have often been blamed for increased violence. The Economist magazine would beg to differ (see chart at right). Perhaps violent video games don’t reflect crime patterns perfectly, but they do reflect what’s CBS weeknight programming pretty well.

But do video games reflect more than violence in society? More on that shortly.

Sources & Notes:

DVDs include all DVD video software shipments in North America. Data provided by Digital Entertainment Group
Book sales data: Seattle Times
Movie Tickets: Motion Picture Association of America
CDs sales include only CD albums. No CD singles, LPs or downloaded music was included. Data provided by Record Industry Association of America
Games include computer and videogames. Data provided by the Entertainment Software Association