Twice a year the Shuttleworth Fellowship meets in a Gathering – could be anywhere in the world (subject to a minimum travel costs algorithm). This is my first and we are in Budapest – one of Europe’s loveliest cities. (I’ve been here before, luckily, as our programme has been very full and we only got out once formally for a river cruise.

It’s Chatham House Rule so no details but see our web page for the 13 fellows. This is one of the most coherent, inspiring, groups I have ever been in. So much is common ground – we agree on doing Open, the questions are why? what and how? and we’ve explored those. I’ve found so much in common – we are in the area of liberating knowledge and inspiring innovation , mixed with democracy and justice. I’m finding out about how to build communities, annotation, education while being able to help with computer vision, information extraction, metadata, etc.

We each ran a 75 minute slot on “eating our own dogfood”. NOT a lecture. We had to bring the practice of our project and ask the others – everyone – to grok it and hack it. Often this was in small groups and so for mine we had 5 groups of 5. Here’s my rough summary with comments:

• Why are we doing ContentMining? economics, openness/democracy, innovations, disruption.  Hargreaves

Very useful discussion (as would be expected)

• What is The Content Mine? http://contentmine.org

• Manual markup (highlighters) of two articles

Worked very well. Lots of questions about “should we mark this?”. 

• Demo (PMR) of semantic content  (chemistry)

• Crawling exercise (manual)

Good involvement. “Why doesn’t publisher X have an RSS feed?”, etc.

• Scraping exercise (manual and software)

Again worked very well

• Extraction (software and manual design)

Mainly concentrated on manual markup but showed chemical tagger, etc.

• Where are we going?

I deliberately put far too much in – so people could test the software worked, etc. But the main idea was to see how non-biologists managed. I chose a paper on evolutionary biology of Lions in Africa and everyone got the point. In fact it reinforced how needlessly exclusive scientific language is. The first part of the introduction could be rewritten without loss to read something like

“African Lions are dying out because of hunting and environment change. DNA analyses show that lions in different parts of Africa have evolved in different ways. By studying the DNA and historical specimens we can understand the evolution and perhaps use this for conservation.”

There wasn’t enough time for everyone to run the software – deliberately – but we got very useful feedback.  I shall be tweaking it over the weekend to make sure it’s working for our Vienna workshop.

In the preface to The Handbook of Journal Publishing, the authors state one goal and make one prediction for the book: that it will serve as a useful resource for those who “have come to journals publishing after a spell with books, or are completely new to publishing,” and that it may be best used as a reference book, rather than read from cover to cover (xi). Still a bit of a newbie to the journal publishing industry myself—having worked on academic journals for more than three years, but only from within the confines of an Open Access, library-based publisher—I tackled this book with these aims in mind.

“Above all,” argues Michael Bhaskar, “creating the New Publisher and meeting the digital challenge is not a business problem but a conceptual one” (ch. 6). As this claim and as the book’s subtitle suggest, The Content Machine ambitiously sets out to offer a kind of prolegomenon to a “theory of publishing” and to offer some hints about what to expect from the publisher of the future. As someone very much in the middle of university press practice, I’m initially excited by and skeptical about the ambition here. After all, publishing is a fairly old, complicated activity, which is notoriously idiosyncratic and context-bound, with a history of immunity to tidy explanations. A theory of publishing seems ever prone to over-simplicity (and alignment with a certain set of circumstances) or over-complication (and generalization to the point of little practical use). In other words, I was set up to be hard on this book. The Content Machine surprises me, however, in its sophisticated approach to what most interested readers would agree is an exceptionally daunting task. The book is detail-rich but capacious in its selection of examples and its synthesis of what the author argues are the essential elements tying together publishing circumstances that many might consider discrete or incompatible.

With The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, technology journalist Brad Stone set out to write the “seminal” book about Amazon. Although Bezos did not consent to being interviewed for the book, he approved interviews with other Amazon executives, as well as friends and family, making The Everything Store the first book about Amazon to have the authorization of its subject. The result, based on 300 interviews, as well as Stone’s fifteen years of reporting for Newsweek, the New York Times, and Businessweek, is a deftly crafted biography of both Amazon, the company, and Jeff Bezos, the man. Much of Amazon’s (and Bezos’s) story has been told before, either in the business press or in a few books about Bezos and Amazon’s early years: Robert Spector’s Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (2000); James Marcus’s Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut (2004); or in Mark Liebovich’s The New Materialists (2000). But no significant book about Amazon has been published in ten years, which makes Stone’s book all the more welcome. He not only takes the story forward but he enriches what is known with new details and testimony, weaving together an immense amount of material into a readable, compelling account of a complex, dynamic company and its driven founder.