End of an era: Book People... Start of a new era: Book Futures

Everyone,

In 1997, John Mark Ockerbloom started the Book People mailing list for
discussing online books. For the last decade it's been a popular and
vibrant list. John's hands-on moderation of the group gave it a unique
character -- it became much like a moderated round table discussion
with a slight academic flavor.

A few weeks ago, John decided to call it quits running Book People,
announcing that the last day will be November 30 (I reposted his
announcement here on November 13.) And indeed it has been closed, with
John posting a very personal and introspective final farewell message.
(With John's permission, I am appending his entire final BP message to
the end of this message -- I've only edited his line breaks to conform
to the line length used in this message.)

John has started a blog to write about topics relating to digital
libraries and publishing, and I urge everyone to consider subscribing
to his blog. It will be worth following. Here's his blog URL:

   http://everybodyslibraries.com/

(Note to John: is there a working RSS feed for your blog?)


Fortunately, Book People will continue on in the new group started by
Kent Larsen, Book Futures:

   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bookfutures

Kent regularly contributes to TeBC, and he is invited to post an
announcement of Book Futures here to TeBC. I urge everyone here to
consider subscribing and contributing to Book Futures. Although there
is some overlap between BF and TeBC, I see BF as quite synergistic to
TeBC and to the new Digital Text Community group I recently started to
discuss the issues of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.


Best of wishes to John Mark Ockerbloom and to his new blog!

Jon Noring



**********************************************************************
(the final message to Book People posted by John Mark Ockerbloom)

So long, and thanks...

We had some new friends over for dinner last night, and towards
dessert, the conversation turned to books, and eventually to all the
books that were now available online.  They were quite interested in
the travel accounts by women that Mary had been putting online, and
remarked "You must have a passion for this."  When they found out that
over 300 books had been republished on her site, on a completely
volunteer basis, they said "that's a *lot* of passion!"

I think that could be said about a lot of the people on the list.
Whether it's the regular posters, or the folks who mostly lurk and
occasionally send us email, this has been a group that's been
passionate about books, what they can do for people, and the
importance of doing the best job we can to make them available to as
many people as possible.

We've built libraries of not just hundreds but tens of thousands of
books with volunteer labor.  (And some of us have quietly been
building at the millions-of-books scale.)  We've discussed the need
for copyright reform (with one of us famously taking his case all the
way to the US Supreme Court).  We've proposed and argued about the
best ways to produce and provide the most useful, high-quality book
collections.  We've done fresh translations of classic works,
organized large teams of proofreaders and encyclopedia writers, and
written and demonstrated new software and formats for preparing,
viewing, and exploring books online.  We've helped out our fellow
listmembers when they've had posted questions about some problem they
were having preparing or using books.  And sometimes we've just talked
about the books we liked, and what made them special for us.

I've enjoyed hearing and participating in these conversations, and am
happy to have met you all virtually (one perk of taking the
subscription requests is you hear from the lurkers as well the
posters), and have been fortunate enough to meet some of you in person
as well.  If you browse through the archives, which will remain online
at

   http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive

you'll see how far things have come since this list started out in
1997, and how much potential there still is to do more.

So I very much appreciate people continuing in the same spirit as we
started out.  I'm particularly thankful to Kent Larsen for starting up
Book Futures, which I see has already begun activity), and to the
various other listmembers who have recently started other lists
related to online books and the sharing of knowledge.  And I hope
those of you who are so inclined will stop by my blog at Everybody's
Libraries, or Mary's Celebration blog.  Again, I've left pointers to
all these places, and to the archives of this list, at

   http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/bplist/

and am happy to take corrections and updates there.

So I wish all the Book People farewell for now, and hope that we and
our books will meet again soon.

John Mark Ockerbloom
Moderator, Book People mailing list





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