Walt at Random

Long-suffering readers will be aware that one of few things still left on my old blog, now retitled Walt, Even Randomer, is the series of brief reviews of old movies, done each time I go through a disc from one of the Mill Creek Entertainment packs (typically 50 movies on 12 discs).

Mill Creek Entertainment does a remarkable job of mining the public domain and other areas where they can license movies or TV for very small sums–including TV movies–to create large sets of VHS-quality movies, typically four or five to a DVD, sold in genre packs at extremely low prices.

I’d been using the movies to “stay on the treadmill” for the past five+ years–going through more than 300 movies in that time, including some true classics and a few total turkeys. Of late, I’ve been alternating discs from two sets and watching two movies in a typical week, so it takes about a year to go through a 50-pack.

End of background. Start of foreground.

So last week, I finished an unusual 20-pack (early Alfred Hitchcock), alternating with a comedy 50-pack (I’m on disc 9)…and, instead of starting another 50-pack, I started something a little different: the 250-movie Mystery Collection.
Two hundred and fifty movies on 60 DVDs…
And suddenly thought, “If I watch movies at the typical rate, I’ll finish this box in about five years.”
Which then suggested musing a little about five years on–particularly where media are concerned.
If you believe some pundits, physical media will all be gone in five years–we’ll rely on that great digital jukebox in the sky for everything, when and as we need it. I don’t buy that for a minute. For a variety of reasons, I firmly believe that many of us will be buying physical media five years from now, enough to make for healthy industries.
On a medium-by-medium basis? I’m deliberately not a futurist, but here’s my best guess:

• Music: Even though CDs have already reached the 25-year mark (over the history of recorded music, a given medium has typically been dominant for about 25 years), they still represent the majority of music sales (about 2/3), despite widespread assumptions that CDs are already dead. There are two reasons for that: First, every DVD player is also a CD player; second, no replacement physical medium has succeeded (and those that have been attempted were, by and large, CD-equivalents). I’d bet that there will still be a multibillion-dollar (per year) CD industry five years from now, although it will probably be considerably smaller than today’s industry. But I’ll also bet that vinyl will still be with us five years from now, even though I’m not among the “digitization destroys music” brigade. (Not even close: The day we purchased our first CDs was a bit after the day we purchased our last LPs.)
• Films & video: I’m nearly 100% certain that there will still be a large (that is, multibillion$) commercial market for DVDs five years from now–and almost certainly a decade from now. Unlike music, the infrastructure for a truly workable universal video jukebox isn’t in place–and, as with music, there are millions of us who actually prefer a physical object. I’m about 90% certain that Blu-ray Disc will also be a multibillion$ market five years from now. Will Blu-ray become dominant over DVD? Short of a forced conversion, I think it’s unlikely–not because there’s anything wrong with Blu-ray but because most people either don’t notice the difference or don’t care about the difference. (By all accounts, a very large percentage of people who own HDTVs never actually watch high-definition TV. Those people aren’t going to pay $1 more for a Blu-ray version, much less $5 more.) I think Blu-ray will do just fine, but for some people, anything short of market domination is a failure, in which case I think Blu-ray will fail.
• Print magazines: Not going anywhere. Of course some are failing. Some always fail, and recessions aren’t great times to start magazines. It’s a tough time to start Yet Another Business Magazine (sorry, Portfolio); it’s a tough time to start Yet Another Any Sort of Magazine. I’ll still be subscribing to print magazines five years from now and ten years from now, and probably still paying absurdly low prices for some of them.
• Print books: Do I even need to discuss this one? Unless you believe that an 0.2% dip in sales in the midst of the worst recession in decades means Books Are Doomed, there’s really no sensible discussion here. I hope ebooks, done right, take a few $billion of the book market where ebooks do it better–but I don’t happen to believe that ebooks are likely to “do it better” for most long-form narrative fiction and nonfiction in my lifetime, much less the next decade. (I plan to be around three more decades, with luck, and my family history suggests that’s on the short side.)
• Print newspapers: I believe that hundreds of small and medium-sized print newspapers will still be around five and ten years from now; they’ve generally been doing better than the huge metro dailies. I hope that the better metro dailies will still be around–but I’m a little less sanguine. (Will we renew the San Francisco Chronicle next year at more than $400 a year? Hard to say…but I’d sure miss it, even though most content is available at SFGate.)

So, there it is: My personal take on what I think’s likely as regards physical media. I know some hotshot futurists say Everything’s Going Digital Real Soon Now. I also know the history of new and old media–and the wonders of DRM aren’t really helping. (Yes, Amazon probably did what it had to–but it also waved a Big Red Flag about the mutability of that big celestial jukebox. The book you “purchased” yesterday may or may not be the book you’re reading today…)
I could be wrong about any of these. I could be wrong about all of them–but I’d be very surprised. Heck, I’m hoping I’ll find interesting new Mill Creek 50-packs or 100-packs to buy in 2014. (The 250-packs appear to have been short-lived phenomena: you can still buy them from Amazon and elsewhere, but they don’t show up on Mill Creek’s website. That may be sensible…)
So, is this enough of an information science hook? The Future of Physical Media, from one reasonably informed perspective…

I’ve probably mentioned before that ALA can sometimes be inspiring (or inspiriting, if that’s a word), perhaps not as a result of any given program or social event but through the cumulative effects of seeing a few hundred (or few thousand) people I know, and many thousand active librarians, face-to-face. (Inspiring: It can and does inspire me to keep “doing this stuff.” Inspiriting: It can restore my spirits when they’ve been down.)
It can also be revealing, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Chicago was inspiring and inspiriting, to be sure. I wasn’t actually dispirited before ALA Annual, but found it easier to concentrate on decisions related to the new house than to focus on library-related issues outside of work. That’s still a major focus, but I’m back to paying attention elsewhere…
The revealing part is the theme of the first part of this two-part mini-essay.

We: False universalism or simple elitism?

I’ve ranted before this, here and there, about “we”–with or without the implicit “all”–being used for claims that I don’t consider even remotely universal or opinions that I don’t believe there’s any real consensus about.
“We (all) are (or soon will be) connected to the internet all the time.” “We (all) are growing to prefer reading online rather than in print.” “We (all) use iPhones.”
None of those are literal quotes, although the first one’s very close. I could find hundreds of others (thousands?) with a little literature searching, but this isn’t really aimed at any one person, so I won’t.
I’d thought of these phony or overstated we-isms as false universals, a problem in and of themselves. (Want true universals? We breathe air. We eat food. We need safe drinking water. We will die. I think those about cover it–and if you believe Breatharians, if there are any of those left, even the third is questionable. Then again, if you believe Breatharians, what are you doing at ScienceBlogs?)
I was wrong, at least for some people who are fond of We-isms.
I recognized that during a session at ALA–details unimportant–in which one panelist was spouting We-isms with considerable relish, even after another panelist pointed out that one supposed universalism wasn’t even true for a majority of those present at the session. Nonetheless, We do this and We use that and…
The breakthrough recognition: It’s not false universalism. It’s elitism. “We” really means “the people who matter.”
Doesn’t make it any more right. Does make it a lot more understandable. Without that recognition, I’d have to believe that some We-ists are hard of hearing, hard of understanding or a bit daft: Surely they’re aware that their universal assertions are nowhere near being universal?
But once you substitute “the people who matter” for “we,” it’s all clear. Maybe all the people who matter really are connected 24/7. Maybe all the people who matter do use iPhones.
The trouble with all this, for public librarians at least, is that good libraries serve the whole public–and specifically serve those who “don’t matter,” who aren’t part of the elite, the in crowd, the overprivileged.
Anyway, this should be a useful reminder, for me at least, for the future: When I encounter an absurd We-ism, I won’t assume the speaker’s more ignorant than they would appear to be–I’ll assume they’re elitist.

…and me

The other part of this not-as-brief-as-I’d intended (but, you know, longer essays are The New Black for blogs, right?) has to do with me. Not “me” as short for “the out crowd” or “me” as short for “people like me,” but me–one person.
To wit: If you’re a FriendFeed user who pays particular attention to who is or isn’t subscribing to you, and if you find that I’ve dropped off your subscription list…
It isn’t you. It’s me.
That’s happened once this week. It may happen again. In the particular case, it was somebody I find interesting some of the time–but somebody who Likes, and comments on, a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that I don’t have time for, but that’s just interesting enough that I spend time checking it out. (I’m not sure why, but skipping over stuff seems to take more time in FriendFeed than it does in Bloglines–or, again, maybe that’s just me.)
Yes, I use Hides, lots of them, but in this case that wasn’t quite enough. There’s another case that’s right on the cusp; I may quietly unsubscribe.
Let me be clear: You’re not doing anything wrong. I don’t believe you should even think about changing the way you use FriendFeed. Because, you know,
It’s not you. It’s me.
That’s not a breakup line. It’s the truth. You could expand that to “I’m too ignorant to set up FriendFeed in such a way that it’s compatible with your use of it–and that’s my problem, not yours.”
Another way to put it: I’m not much for either creating lifestreams or following them. Maybe I shouldn’t be using FriendFeed at all, but I find that it’s useful as a semi-professional conversational medium. When too much lifestream material makes it cumbersome to follow the conversations, I make changes…purely because of the way I use FriendFeed, which may not be how it should be used. (If I’m Breaking The Rules, so be it.)
I don’t know: Maybe FF doesn’t notify people when someone unsubscribes, in which case this isn’t an issue at all. On my part, I’d rather not know, to be honest…and I only scan my subscriber list maybe every three months to see who I should be subscribing to. Which, then, may lead to my resubscribing to someone who I later unsubscribe from…

Here’s the situation:

We have AT&T DSL in our new house, as we did in our old one. We use a 2Wire modem/router combo, the one AT&T recommends. My computer’s connected to the router by Ethernet. My wife’s notebook uses wifi.

And ever since we moved in here, her download speeds have been poor–significant delays in page opens, long delays in downloading photos. We ran speed tests yesterday, and download speed was around 200Kbps, sometimes lower. (When I removed my ethernet connection, I was getting 160K–as compared to the 1.5-1.7Mbps I normally get. And that was a foot away from the router.)

So: Any ideas?

Other factors:

1. The house has a security system with some wireless transmitters…

2. There are other nearby wifi networks…

3. When I was running my treadmill–which has now gone back to Sears–it would knock out DSL after about a minute, due to interference. But the treadmill’s gone and DSL itself is just fine.

I’m wondering whether it would make sense to use the DSL/router combo as just a modem and plug in a separate router (with external antennas–2Wire hides its antenna or antenna inside the case)…

Ideas?

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Update, July 8:

After some experimentation–e.g., enabling wifi on my own notebook (normally connected via Ethernet) resulted in download speeds of 50K-250K, still upload speed of 400-430K; eliminating a whole bunch of possible interference sources made no difference–and trying out 2Wire’s initial suggestions (AT&T was, shall we say, a whole lot less helpful than they’ve been in the past):

We decided to try the separate-router route, even though there’s no way to actually disable the wifi portion of the 2Wire Gateway. Picked up a D-Link N unit with 14-day return policy. Set it up, using the variation on its setup wizard encountered when it sees another router. Logged in on my notebook (which has “n” support); got 900K-1500K download speed. Set up my wife’s notebook (which doesn’t); after one false start, got 800K-1400K download speed (still 400-430K upload, to be sure). Reset the power level on the 2Wire to 1 (lowest possible setting) to minimize interference–but the D-Link’s autoscan already set it to a channel considerably away from the 2Wire’s channel (it apparently looks for the channel with the least traffic: When my wife checked, she found *six different wifi networks* with at least one bar of signal, three of them public and unsecured…)

So, for now, we’re in better shape. I’ll probably replace the 2Wire gateway with a straight ADSL modem, once I’m confident that I understand how the modem would set up with AT&T DSL. (If AT&T still offered email as a contact option, this would probably be simple…)

[Later that day: ADSL modem on order.]

When I wrote this post, I left out a whole second “trigger” because of time and energy.
That trigger–once again, wondering whether my humanities background (rhetoric major, math minor) leaves me simply unable to cope with the true Scientific Mind–regarded the format used for publication.
Or, to put it another way, the widespread and vehemently-expressed view that PDF sucks (to use a polite version).
What I saw, in several conversations, was a seeming demand from text-miners that everything must be in HTML (or, better, XML) so it was easy to mine, with a complete disdain for layout and typography as irrelevant. (I can only imagine Donald Knuth’s response to the concept that typography and layout don’t matter…)

Why some of us humanists use PDF

Because we care about typography. Because we care about the presentation of what we’ve written. Because PDF–and, of portable formats, only PDF–can assure us that the typefaces and layouts we’ve chosen will be rendered properly for the reader.
And because it’s easy–pretty much automatic on the Mac, and not difficult on the PC (there’s a free Office download to define a PDF printer; I use Acrobat because it produces much smaller PDF files and because it can combine many PDFs into a single file, but for 95% of users, the free download’s good enough).

Getting from there to HTML

So you want HTML? Make it easy. Actually, for Word2007, it isn’t bad: Save as Web page (filtered), and you get not-too-ugly HTML. (Since .docx is actually an XML package, it probably should be better than it is.) But you have to tune an HTML-version stylesheet if you really want to do both well–one that only uses “easy” typefaces, for example. It won’t be elegant HTML, but it will work.
But, even here, what’s in it for me? Can you demonstrate that I’ll get more money, more fame, or even significantly more readers by taking those small steps?
“It makes it easier for me to plunder your text for my own purposes” is not, I hate to say, a terribly convincing reason. It might be for you, but it isn’t for me.
Still…after years of doing only PDF for my own peculiar ejournal, I started doing Word’s filtered HTML for most essays, because it did seem to serve some subset of readers–and it didn’t add substantially to the production task. But whenever I read one of the HTML versions, I wince a little: It’s just not as good as the PDF.

Going beyond HTML

But, you know, I think you want more than HTML. I think you want semantics–XML or better.
Provision of good-quality HTML from a regular writing-and-layout stream is at least plausible, with no real extra effort on the part of the writers and editors.
Provision of semantics, though–that’s a huge additional effort, and I don’t believe it’s one that’s readily automatable for non-trivial instances.
Which magnifies the question: What’s in it for me?
I’m honestly interested in the answers. “Some neato research down the line that will earn someone else grants and tenure” may not be a wonderful answer. Just sayin’

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Update, June 25, 2009:
Based on one comment (not here–ah, the multifarious conversational channels!) I should stress that, when I say “What’s in it for me?” I’m not suggesting that there are no reasons to use HTML. Of course there are. (Hmm. I’m writing this in HTML, because it suits blogging–and, unlike WordPress’ editor, this editor is pretty much raw HTML, other than automatic paragraph breaks.)
I’m suggesting that there are also legitimate reasons to use PDF.
Really, “what’s in it for me?” (a phrase I rarely use) has more to do with demands for HTML–not for readability, but for text-mining–and pressures to do more than HTML. And the constant “PDF sucks!” refrain.
As noted above, I do provide HTML versions of (most) Cites & Insights essays (except for a small number that just don’t work well that way and one “print bonus” feature that appears sometimes)–because some people asked me nicely to do so as an alternative for those who really want to read online, and because it had been a while since people were demanding that my free publication should be revamped to suit their own preferences.
(Yes, I do mean demanding, in at least one case with fairly strong language. My standard response, after the unmailed two-word/seven-letter one, was that there are lots of other things to read on the web…)

I picked up a little buzz about Google software engineers planning to rework the guts of some major open-source software to make it run faster. Since it wasn’t software I use, I didn’t read enough to remember what software, but it brought up memories…

Walking to school in the snow, 3 miles, uphill, both ways

No, this isn’t going to be one of those posts. I only wish we’d had the kind of raw processing power in my early years (decades?) as a systems analyst/programmer that we take for granted now. Most people today spend more time on what needs to be done, and that’s as it should be.

This is just a little harmless nostalgia, none of it longing for those days.
(If you want my take as of three years ago as to how I think I’d deal with being young again, here’s your post.)

Early on, cycles really didn’t count

As I’ve noted elsewhere, my first systems analysis and programming involved an IBM 188 Collator. (Hmm. 20% of all Google results for the search [IBM '188 collator'] are my handiwork. That may be depressing.] In some ways, the 188 was a marvelous machine, particularly in 1961 when it was introduced: IBM’s first punch card equipment using solid-state circuitry and core.

That’s right, core memory–visible devices, just a wee bit larger than today’s RAM bits. I honestly don’t remember how much core the 188 had–maybe 64 bytes, but that’s vague memory. I do remember how you programmed it: with a double-wide board full of holes, into some of which you put jumpers to make circuit connections. Hard-wired programming…
For the circulation system, it wasn’t a question of using too many computing cycles. You got 650 cycles per minute–that is, one cycle for each card feed. Your program did whatever logical comparisons between two cards (one from each reader) as it could, given the limited core and your ingenuity, then either fed both cards into a common bin or one or both cards into other bins.
Sounds primitive. Was primitive. Worked.
(More technologically interesting, in some ways, was IBM’s last card sorter–by far the fastest, and using vacuum feed rather than pushers to move the cards and an optical sensor rather than brush contact, so that a card would last for thousands of sorts without wearing out. Without the speed and gentleness of the IBM 84 [2000 cards per minute, which is fast for a mechanical device processing little pieces of stiff paper], the circ system would never have kept up with Doe Library’s volume of business.)

A bit later, every cycle counted

Comparing computing power of, say, the IBM 360/65 that I did early programming on (indirectly, sending decks of cards over from Berkeley to UCSF) and the Intel Core 2 Duo notebook I’m writing this on is a chump’s game. Looking at some sources, I see “1.25 million calculations a second” for the ’65, which had one megabyte of RAM (rather a lot in those days). How does that compare with two CPUs, each with 1.6 billion processing cycles per second, and 4 gigabytes of RAM? You got me; I’m not sure there is a real answer to that question.

The thing is, doing library processing on a machine with that kind of power required a lot of optimization. The ideal language for the work I wanted to do was clearly PL/I, for its combination of logic and string processing–but the head of the systems office properly wouldn’t let me use PL/I because the early compilers just didn’t produce tight code. Instead, I used assembler (BAL)…
When PL/I (Optimizer) came along (and we’d moved up to a somewhat faster S/360), I could start using the high-level language–but not without paying attention. I remember a classic example: Cases where I needed to do translates to normalize characters for sorting purposes. The classy way to do that would be to include two strings of characters in the TRANSLATE statement, the source and the object. But, after trying that and seeing the results, I moved to using two 256-character strings (not variables), containing the source and object sets.
Why? Because it made a difference of at least 10:1 in the overall running time of the program–changing it from something we couldn’t use to something we could. And once you understood some assembler and learned to read PL/I’s pseudo-assembler output, you could see why:
If you were translating using variables, then the compiler would generate code that built two 256-character strings each time the translate was performed, then do the translate–a big, unwieldy loop of code.
If you were translating using fixed strings, then the compiler generated one assembler statement. One. I think the difference for the translation steps was at least two orders of magnitude, maybe even worse.
That’s just one example. There were many others. In the ’70s and early ’80s, I’d probably spend as much time optimizing code as writing it in the first place, maybe more–and after the first two programs, my first code was already fairly optimal.

Don’t take me back…

With more abstract tools and less need to worry about cycles, I could have (potentially, at least) accomplished a lot more. So could we all. I think it’s great that a modern PC (Mac, Unix or Vista) can devote perhaps 90% of its cycles to system overhead–and still have plenty left for actual computation.

Still, sometimes things really do run slower than you’d like–and there are still lots of programmers who understand code efficiency. (I’d bet Google has hundreds of them!) They may be counting cycles at a more abstract level, but they’re still coming a little closer to the machine side of the man:machine boundary to get the job done.

I was going to write a series of posts describing each essay in the current Cites & Insights, and still plan to do so.
But this hit me by surprise–a LISNews item pointing to a makeuseof.com post pointing to Blind Search.

Blind Search?

People who care deeply about open web search engines spend a lot of time figuring out which engine is better for which purposes. For most users, though–at least the minority who appear to be aware that Google’s not the only game in town–the look and feel of a site may be as important as the apparent results.
Blind Search takes that away, at least for three major open web search engines. You type in a search. You get back the first 10 results for each of three search engines, displayed in three parallel columns. You click on one of three “vote for this search engine” buttons, based on the column of results that seem to match your query best.
Then, and only then, Blind Search shows you the engine used for each column.

Maybe both

I try to rotate searches to some extent. My FireFox search box includes several major engines along with some specialized tools (WorldCat.org, IMDB, Citizendium, that other web encyclopedia). But, yeah, I probably use Google more than the others…
So this morning I tried some searches at Blind Search. An ego search (oh, come on, you don’t do ego searches?). A semi-ego search, “Cites & Insights.”
While the results were similar (as you’d expect), the same engine seemed to yield the best spread of first-ten results in both cases.
I just now tried it on ScienceBlogs. The same engine seemed to yield a slightly better set of results than the other two (a small difference).
A silly search (memory of water). Hmm. One engine was just a little better.
By now, you’ve probably guessed the engine that came out “best” in the first few tests–and it certainly isn’t what I’d expect.
Maybe bing is on to something.
(Or maybe not. The more searches I try, the more diffuse the results. Still…)

It appears that this post won’t accept new comments (or accepts, and counts, but doesn’t display them).

That may be a consequence of the work needed to rescue the blog after incredibly heavy traffic (related to that post) shut it down.

So, well, feel free to add your appropriate comments here.

For starters, here are two comments received but apparently not visible:

From El Aura:

Blu-ray probably will not be as successful (ie, reaching the same market share) as the DVD because DVDs are in a sense ‘good enough’ and because of the competition from downloads. That is what is compared against, its predecessor.
The predecessor for the Kindle are some earlier Sony eBook devices.

Any judgement or classification needs a benchmark.

From Steven Kaye:

To be fair, there’s also skepticism that Blu-Ray won’t be replaced by yet another format in short order, while Kindles can read a variety of file formats.

My responses:

To El Aura: I think that’s an awfully high benchmark for “success.” I’d suggest that Blu-ray is a success if it’s profitable and achieves mass-market status. (Most companies these days would be delighted with the first criterion…and there are a lot of niche success stories.) I’d also suggest that the predecessor for the Kindle is the Rocket eBook Reader; the Sony is a contemporary competitor. (And at $280 at Target in today’s flyer, I would suggest that Sony hasn’t given up the competition.)

To Steven: Really? I haven’t heard many suggestions of any new physical video format–and Blu-ray players are fully backward compatible with CD and DVD, with most of them also able to handle MP3 CDs, so they can certainly read a variety of file formats. There may be skepticism–but there are also sales an order of magnitude greater than Kindle (that is, >10x as many).

From Russell Frost:

Inevitable can be a difficult word.  It’s a sword that cuts several ways.

Extend the graph of vinyl sales back just a little beyond the convenient of 1991 and it’s clear where that format is headed.  Go back just one year, to 1990, and total vinyl LP sales were 38 million.  Getting excited about 1.88 million vinyl LP sales is something, relative to a specific time period but it’s an awfully tiny share of the market.  As you said, “small business”.  Add in the fact that those 1.88 million pieces were shared between a dozen or more companies and then ponder that the two million piece sales mark was a respectable hit for a single title from one artist but by no means a blockbuster a mere twenty years ago and you have, perhaps, some better perspective on vinyl sales.  Keep in mind that even during the early boom years of the CD vinyl sales were in the hundreds of millions.  In the three years from 2005 to 2008, digital download sales went from (as charted by the RIAA) zero to over 50 million.

Vinyl is cool and there is a case to be made for the album format as it relates to some music.  The idea however that vinyl is resurgent in any real sense of the word is silly.  At least at this point and I would tend to think, forever.  LPs died for a reason and that reason is usually ignored by the more romantic amongst us who are either fans of the medium or simply misinformed.  It doesn’t surprise me that maybe 50,000 or 60,000 people still buy vinyl but again, that’s very small potatoes in the context of the US market.

And make no mistake the public walked away from the vinyl LP format because the vast majority of people felt they were served better by different technology.  And in most senses, I would tend to agree with them.

So when discussing perceptions versus reality I would gently suggest that perhaps the vinyl LP example did not demonstrate what you intended.

My response: I’m one of those who abandoned vinyl and never looked back. My comment in the original post may have been misleading, but what I was saying is that vinyl did not die, even though its role in the marketplace changed from being a major force to a niche market. (I was about to say “the dominant playback medium,” but fact is audiocassettes outsold vinyl before CDs came along!)

You’re absolutely right that LPs are no longer a major market, and probably never will be. But they’re not dead. They’ve become an interesting little niche market. There are lots of interesting little niche markets around…if you believe some who throw around the word “inevitable,” everything’s becoming a niche market anyway.

Time to update Three new things walked into a bar…, as promised.

Marketplace impact

1. There are Blu-ray players in some 10.5 million homes. Publishers expect to sell about 100 million Blu-ray discs this year. For popular new releases, Blu-ray now represents roughly 10% of sales–and, overall, it’s up to roughly 8%. That already makes it a billion-dollar business (take your choice: either players or discs). Since disc prices are dropping and store-brand player prices are already below $200, those numbers seem likely to continue increasing rapidly.
2. There are apparently between 700 thousand and a million people using FriendFeed, although that number–like most online numbers, particularly for social media sites that can be used without actually joining–are heavily suspect. Let’s say 700,000 for now. Revenue from those users, to be sure, is zero.
3. Nobody knows how many Kindles have been sold, but most estimates range around half a million. Amazon is no more likely to release revenue numbers for Kindle-specific ebooks than they are to release actual Kindle figures–but the best estimate I’ve seen for total ebook sales (including everything) is around $16 million for Q1 2009, let’s say $50 million for 2008 total–which is, to be sure, an enormous improvement over previous years.

So by my calculations, Blu-ray is used by about ten times as many people as Friendfeed, which is used by maybe twice as many people as Kindle. Blu-ray is at or nearing mass-market status. Neither one is anywhere near that level.

“Success” and game-changer

Here is the perception issue, and I’d say most gurus and people measuring heat would rank the three in exactly the reverse order–that is, Kindle’s hottest and most successful, Friendfeed’s a distant second, and Blu-ray is a boring failure. Readers here paint a slightly more complex picture.

It’s interesting that GeekChic assumes FriendFeed has the most users (and Steve L. gets the numbers roughly right without checking them). I find Mike’s response most typical of digital gurus, including snide universalisms: “(Who would knowingly purchase a CD today?)” Well, 68% of music sales in the U.S. in 2008 were still physical, as were 80% worldwide (and 90% in Europe)–so apparently two out of three buyers still “knowingly purchase” CDs. I’ll counter Mike’s prediction: I think Blu-ray will do just fine for quite a few years–at the very least until it’s feasible for most Americans to download Blu-ray quality video. Even then, there are still tens of millions of us who actually like to own some of our entertainment… I’d also question Mike’s assurance that we’re headed for “basic changes in how we purchase and read books”–but I think that, here again, Mike falls into the “digital conquers all” category, which certainly puts him in good company. I happen to disagree.

One footnote on the inevitable triumph of new technologies: Vinyl LP sales were the highest in 2008 that they’ve been since 1991. Admittedly, that’s just under two million albums, but it’s an interesting figure nonetheless–and two million albums represents a respectable small business.

Libraries going out of their way…

Every library is different. I’d bet there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of U.S. public libraries already circulating Blu-ray discs (I could be wrong). I’d guess a fair number of libraries will have patron requests for Blu-ray discs this year. I doubt that there are many libraries actually circulating Blu-ray players; that’s not usually the job of a public library.

Which makes it all the odder that a few public libraries are buying Kindles and circulating them–but who am I to argue with well-informed local decisions?

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I have turned off comments on this post because, for most of us at least, it’s impossible to see any of the new comments. Please add your comments here instead.

Here’s a simple check on your perceptions. Which of the following do you consider to be successful–either currently or as some form of inevitable game-changer in the near future?

• Blu-ray Disc
• FriendFeed
• Kindle

Now, let’s put it another way: Which of these has greater actual marketplace impact–that is, which is actually used by the most people?

Based on what I’ve seen from The Punditry, the answers to the first question seem to be dramatically different from those for the second. I wonder why that is?

For now, your comments and responses are invited (here or, ahem, on FriendFeed). In a few days, I’ll come back with answers to the second question. Not sure whether I’ll offer an opinion on the first…

An even better question!

Which of these do you believe public libraries should be going out of their way to introduce to patrons–e.g., for the two hardware items, buying devices? Why?

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“Answers to the second question” and some other comments appear here.

An odd topic for me? Well, yes, given that I don’t work in a library and have never spent much time on the public-workstation theme.

But ALA Publishing sent me a copy of the April 2009 Library Technology Reports (v. 45:3), “Open Source Public Workstations in Libraries,” by John Houser–who, until recently, was Senior Technology Consultant at PALINET and handled the technology side of what’s now the Library Leadership Network.

Here’s the abstract:

In a time where an economic downturn and concerns about climate change are influencing decisions, many libraries are looking for ways to save money and to reduce their impact on the environment. This report provides detailed information about the operating systems, software, and approaches used by three libraries and one academic institution that have implemented open source public workstations. It explains how open source operating systems and applications, when installed on appropriate hardware, can decrease power utilization while providing a reliable and satisfying customer experience. It will help library decision makers who want to find out about alternatives to Microsoft Windows–based PCs running Microsoft Office, not only as a means of  cutting costs or reducing a carbon footprint, but also as a means of providing a better experience for library customers.

I suspect it’s worth buying if you’re in a library that has public workstations (if your library doesn’t subscribe to LTR, you can buy the issue for $43). Houser suggests reasons for considering open source solutions for public workstations, describes current open source products that may be suited for such workstations and offers several case studies, considering two of them in detail.

In some ways, I’m a skeptical audience for this report. I question the assumption that older/underpowered computers (inappropriate for XP or Vista but fine for Linux) necessarily use less power than contemporary computers–and Houser’s clearly uneasy with that particular argument.

For that matter, while I think the concept of open source software is great–the Library Leadership Network runs on open source software (MediaWiki), my blog runs on open source software (WordPress), and my primary browser is open source software (Firefox)–I’m also a happy Vista user who has no interest in trading Office2007 for OpenOffice.

But the reasons I prefer Office2007 and Vista at home probably don’t apply to public workstations. For such workstations, a set of open-source tools should be entirely workable and indeed more than is needed–and there’s no getting around the cost savings. Let’s be honest here: If and when I buy a netbook as a travel computer, there’s a very strong chance I’ll buy a Linux system.

Houser writes clearly and knows his stuff. If there’s a major problem with this report, it’s a problem shared by other recent LTR issues: It’s on the short side, with a total of 34 text pages. On the other hand, that also makes it a quick read and easy reference. All in all, a good introduction to one interesting approach (or, really, three related interesting approaches) to providing public library workstation support.