Peter Brantley
Peter Brantley is the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, a not-for-profit international association of libraries and allied institutions. His background includes significant experience with research libraries and digital library development programs. He has served as the Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, New York University, UC Berkeley, and UCSF. He was the first IT Manager for Rapt, a private SF firm providing pricing optimization for online advertising delivery, and eons ago worked as a systems analyst in the mass-market division of Random House. Peter is a member of the Board of Directors for the International Digital Publishing Forum. He was first introduced to computing via the CDC Plato system.

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Peter blogs at:
http://radar.oreilly.com

Expectation of Fair Pricing, Not Free

February 23 2009

At Dear Author, a post stating that not all content should be expected to be free; rather it must be provided, free or not, in a realistic understanding of consumer... read more

New York Times Settles Linking Suit

January 27 2009

In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated... read more

Palm's webOS Represents Major Shift for Syncing and Data

January 12 2009

In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their... read more

New Tech Mixes Book Experience with Sensors

December 16 2008

A new form of hybrid book is coming on the market -- and the inventor consults with Apple. From the Guardian UK: Lyndsay Williams -- who has already developed... read more

History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts

December 10 2008

A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration... read more

800 Newspapers Coming to Iliad E-Reader

December 06 2008

iRex Technologies scores scores of newspapers for its new iLiad e-reader. From E-Reads: Digitally delivered news is gaining momentum and as we turn the corner to 2009 it's gotten... read more

Random House Expands Ebook Offerings, Embraces EPUB

November 25 2008

Random House is pursing digital with a vengeance, recognizing a growth market. From the Huffington Post: The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and... read more

EFF Attorney: Google Book Search Settlement Weakens Innovation

November 20 2008

In an editorial in The Recorder, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says Google's settlement with publishers and authors signals an implicit abandonment of Google's legal team... read more

Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM

November 20 2008

In the first part of a point-counterpoint exchange, Peter Brantley outlines reasons why DRM is bad for book publishers. read more

Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation

November 19 2008

Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare: It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes... read more

Ebook to iPod to Hard Copy Purchase

November 18 2008

Hugh McGuire is loving Stanza, the free ereader app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. From the Book Over Blog: 40,000 ebook dowloads-a-day. I've got 35 of them sitting on my... read more

APIs, New "Transactions" and the Google Book Search Registry

November 13 2008

At PersonaNonData, Michael Cairns discusses the Google Book Search registry, and muses whether it might support certain types of transactions through an API: How the registry may be formed is... read more

Android Barcode App Connects to Google Book Search

November 12 2008

Google has released a nifty Android app that permits the scanning of a book's barcode, enabling the linkage with the corresponding work in Google Book Search. From E-Reads: "Google has... read more

Election Interest Signals Print's High-End Future

November 10 2008

Following the sell-out of post-election newspapers, Ed Nawotka looks at the collectable future of print. From Beyond Hall 8: One immediate consequence of Obama's victory was the boost in... read more

The Barack SlideShow

November 09 2008

President-elect Obama has been very vocal about supporting an open government policy, and so far the signs are quite promising.  See for example this page linked off Obama's transition website,... read more

Vanishing Paper in Higher Education

November 03 2008

Christopher Conway has a thoughtful essay at Inside Higher Ed on the seemingly inevitable trend towards digital text consumption: It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers'... read more

EFF's Concerns About the Google Book Search Settlement

November 03 2008

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes that the Google Book Search settlement accomplishes a degree of access that litigation might have taken years to develop, but it also observes... read more

Connecting the Dots Between Google Book Search and Android

October 31 2008

Ed Nawotka of Beyond Hall 8 discusses the possibility that the Google Book Search settlement permits them to envision product delivery through Android-capable devices: Perhaps most important of all... read more

New York Times Movie Reviews Released as API

October 30 2008

The New York Times has released an application programming interface (API) to its movie reviews, which is a rather significant feature. From the Times' Open blog: Finally -- and this... read more

Apple is Now a Phone Company

October 22 2008

Apple reported stunning results for the last quarter, and it has clearly become a dominant phone company in a very short space of time. John Gruber from Daring Fireball... read more

BBC Shifts Conversation Style: Go Where They're Already Talking

October 13 2008

I think this deserves to be pondered. BBC News is moving away from merely hosting comments to inciting discussion in a variety of formats and locations. From Reportr.net: For... read more

Do Publisher Brands Still Have Relevance?

October 03 2008

Kate Eltham espies HarperStudio, asking whether they should have a separate Web portal/site, or just operate with a blog. She wonders: can a publisher drive a brand these days?... read more

10 Things Ebook Merchants Should Offer

September 29 2008

Jane at Dear Author has a wonderful list of 10 things ebook merchants should be providing as a matter of course. Here's just one example, but read the whole... read more

Going to Free Online

February 24 2008

At Portfolio, Felix Salmon in his Market Movers blog writes in his post Why All Consumer Magazines Should be Free Online on why it is worthwhile for magazines to put their content online for free, and why free doesn’t mean... read more

Digital Reading, Subpoenas, and Privacy

November 29 2007

In the c|Net blog, The Iconoclast, Declan McCullagh recounts that Amazon successfully resisted an effort by federal prosecutors in Madison, WI to obtain 24,000 customer records. As c|Net notes, libraries and bookstores have recourse to special protections against the forced... read more

Kindle Economics

November 26 2007

I'm pleased to bring the commentary of a couple of the publishing industry's most experienced and respected voices to conjecture on the economic ramifications of Amazon's Kindle. First, Jason Epstein has kindly agreed to share a back-of-the-envelope analysis of the... read more

Kindle Fundamentals

November 25 2007

Many of the conversations over the release of the Kindle have focused on its features, or perceived lack thereof; there has been some discussion of what reading might become, or how authorship might change. I was impressed with the rather... read more

Kindling Openness and Impact

November 19 2007

With the launch of the Kindle, I have little desire here to add to criticisms (e.g., the lack of support for the IDPF's epub standard, or PDF for that matter), or the whims of "service" designers who decided to charge... read more

Take the Money Out to Get It Back In

November 18 2007

Last month, I wrote here about the death of the music file sharing system Oink, in a post called "Libraries or Pirate Places", which made note of Jace Clayton's observation that the high quality, finely described and deeply curated collection... read more

Going Legal on CC-0

November 14 2007

CC-0 is a brand new Creative Commons license, whose official launch is expected in December, that signals the absence of any copyright or related rights associated with a work. The creation of CC-0 is heralded by the release into the... read more

Kindling eBooks

November 14 2007

With the Amazon Kindle ebook reader announcement increasingly looking like it is imminent, and with a review at Ars Tecnica of the latest generation Sony ebook reader ready to stoke a smoldering fire, it is an interesting time to speculate... read more

NASA Plays Games

November 09 2007

At the DLF Fall Forum, we unfortunately missed a presentation from NASA's Daniel Laughlin, who wound up stuck in traffic on I95 for way too many hours (not the worst travel incident of the Forum, but in the top 5).... read more

Mapping Philly

November 08 2007

One of the most engaging sessions at the Digital Library Federation Fall Forum meeting in Philadelphia this week was a panel discussing a georeference-supportive project from the City of Philadelphia itself. We were thrilled to have representatives from Philadelphia's Department... read more

Checking Copyright

November 07 2007

At the DLF Fall Forum today in Philadelphia, Mimi Calter [pdf] presented a paper on an examination of the Copyright Registration database, which Carl Malamud and I have been active in "liberating." Stanford has been working on creating a full-text... read more

RESTing the Library

November 06 2007

At the Digital Library Federation's Fall Forum in Philadelphia, NCSU Library's Tito Sierra, Markus Wust, and Emily Lynema presented their "CatalogWS" which is a web service that runs against a derivative of their library catalog, provided by Endeca, to provide... read more

Books Working with the Web

November 05 2007

Almost a year ago, Tim O'Reilly wrote, "Search engines should be switchboards, not repositories" in his blog post, "Book Search should work like Web Search." The premise was that search engines should not duplicate the digital book repositories of publishers... read more

Publishing Digital Fair Use

November 03 2007

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. I was in the offices of a major... read more

Libraries or Pirate Places

October 31 2007

DJ, musician, and cultural critic Jace Clayton recently wrote about the demise of a file and album sharing site called Oink ("Defending the Pig -- Oink croaks"); Interpol came knocking, and Oink is now off air. Oink got into trouble... read more

Books on the Border

October 24 2007

The New York Times today had a story on the pressures on the German book market created by the ... wait for it ... Swiss. In "German Border Threat: Cheap Books," Michael Kimmelman discusses the challenge to an old German... read more

Digital ILL and the Open Library

October 22 2007

Today the New York Times has a story ("Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web") reviewing the various positions that libraries hold on the digitization of their collections. The story, in part, was occasioned by a recent convening of... read more

Catalog Tree

October 22 2007

Via Greg Smith at serial consign, an interview with the Arnheim [N.B.: corrected from errant Amsterdam] graphic information design firm catalogtree. Catalogtree creates compelling graphics and navigations through complex data spaces. In some ways, it made me think of a... read more

Machinima Mash

October 21 2007

Via our friends at if:book, notice that the first machinima contest in Europe just took place at De Montfort University in Leicester 12-14 October 2007. If:book highlights the winning video in the Experimental category, Cirque du Machinima: Cuckoo Clock, by... read more

Take the A Train

October 19 2007

Worthwhile speculations sometimes arise with an element of serendipity. For example, on a mailing list that I am on, there was a thread on how to describe complex content packages to facilitate interlinking. John Mark Ockerbloom of the University of... read more

Copyright via RSS

October 19 2007

About a month ago, Carl Malamud and I worked together to obtain the Copyright Office's database of registrations and make it available for public download and updating. The Copyright Office (CO) data have been distributed in bulk through the Library... read more

The New Stacks

October 18 2007

As the Director of the Digital Library Federation, I worry a lot about the future of university research libraries (notably distinct from public libraries, or even small college libraries -- they might as well be considered different markets). University libraries... read more

Finding the House

October 16 2007

Wireless Watch from Japan, Inc. has a story, "The Navigation Bubble," about the mobile maps market in Japan. Not surprisingly, given the difficulty of specifying Tokyo addresses (which are usually not numbered linearly with the flow of the street, may... read more

Documents In-Stream

October 14 2007

In ODF enters the Semantic Web, Rob Weir writes in his blog, An Antic Disposition, of the challenges of encoding the wide range of possible metadata describing a document in a semantically meaningful fashion within the constraints of a schema.... read more

Open Grants

October 14 2007

Poynter notes that Monday October 15 is the deadline for two notable grant series: the Knight News Challenge grants and the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition. (Yea, sorry, I know this is kinda late notice for those who... read more

iClones and Newspapers

October 08 2007

Found via GalleyCat, Look Out, Here Comes Tomorrow: iPhone Kills Newsprint? Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, speculates in his blog (complete with drawings), about the longevity, or lack thereof, of newspapers. Quoting GalleyCat: "I predict that the end of... read more

Sensing Wars

October 08 2007

There has been rampant speculation about the motivations and trajectory of events surrounding a recent and very mysterious Israeli air attack on Syria. AviationWeek is now reporting the intriguing use of highly advanced foreign sensing appropriations that subvert the actual... read more

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