April 2012

On April 16, the Federal Communications Commission will host a ".Gov Developer Meet-Up" that organizers hope will encourage web developers and agencies needing web apps to interact.

The amount of raw data produced by government agencies and made available to the public has increased markedly since the Obama administration Office of management and Budget's promulgation of the Open Government Directive. While "data" once meant spreadsheets and documents, it now includes large sets of raw numbers and information that can be organized, reorganized, displayed, mixed and mashed up in custom applications. Federal agencies increasingly make data available through application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services, the former numbering more than 25. But there is still no comprehensive forum for potential developers to see the full scope of available resources. The ".Gov Developer Meet-Ups" aim to fill that void.

The most active senders and receivers of texts are nonwhite, earn incomes below $30,000, and do not have a high school education, says a 2011 study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. AT&T, to use but one example, charged $1,310 per megabyte to send text messages in 2008. In 2011, the company effectively doubled that amount. And that's assuming you're even on a monthly plan. Most low-income users are almost certainly on prepaid devices, where fees for text messages are even higher. Yet it costs the carrier virtually nothing to handle text messages. This raises an obvious question. Are text messages a regressive tax on the poor that helps subsidize cell service for the rest of us?

As a technical matter, it’s remarkably easy to borrow an e-book from your local library. But not if you want to take out the best-selling biography of Steven P. Jobs, the hero of the Internet age who helped lure tens of millions of people to personal computers, tablets and other digital devices. The publisher of the Jobs biography, Simon & Schuster, does not sell digital books to libraries. Five of the six major publishers of trade books either refuse to make new e-books available to libraries or have pulled back significantly over the last year on how easily or how often those books can be circulated. And complaints are rampant about lengthy waiting lists for best sellers and other popular e-books from the publishers that are willing to sell to libraries.

Want to borrow “The Help,” the novel by Kathryn Stockett? On New Jersey’s state e-book consortium, 375 people were waiting for a copy recently.

“We hear a lot of frustration,” said Christopher Platt, the director of collections and circulation operations at the New York Public Library. “It’s rational. We don’t expect our readers to understand the complexities of the publishing industry.”

These complexities may only increase with the announcement that the Justice Department had filed a civil antitrust action against major book publishers and Apple, accusing the companies of colluding in 2010 to raise the prices of e-books. In the meantime, though, if you can find the e-book you want in the library, it’s easy to check it out. You can browse a library’s digital holdings from the comfort of your living room at any time. You don’t have to go to the library to borrow a book, and even better, you don’t have to go there to return it. Books vanish from your device when they are due. And you can get access to a library’s e-books from myriad devices, including e-readers, tablets and smartphones.

The Consumer Electronics Association slammed the Justice Department and Obama Administration for the lawsuit filed against Apple and publishers over e-book pricing.

"The decision by the U.S. government to sue Apple and book publishers for alleged antitrust violations over the price of electronic books marks another sad milestone in our government's war on American companies," said CEA President Gary Shapiro. "Apple is an American crown jewel that other nations covet, yet our own government leads an attack on its entry into electronic books." Shapiro paired that lawsuit with the government's denial of the AT&T/T-Mobile deal and the $4 billion breakup fee that cost AT&T to argue that current political leadership is essentially inviting -- he likened the actions to "catnip" -- the European Union and other governments to extract money from "successful American companies." Shapiro switched metaphors and suggested the Obama administration was a reckless driver bent on destruction. "Our nation is heading toward an economic cliff, and the administration is not only putting its full weight on the accelerator, it is removing the airbags of innovation and growth, which are our best chance at safely avoiding economic catastrophe."