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A couple of days ago we reported on the iPhone SMS bug that would allow your iPhone to be taken over by a hacker. Today Apple has released a patch for the bug. Update your phone as soon as you can. It never hurts to be safe.

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"Enthusiasm, patience and sunblock" is what Robert Flynn Johnson credits with keeping him going in the never-ending search for anonymous photographs. On June 24, the author of The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs talked with host Scott Shafer on KQED Radio about the aesthetics and ethics of said "accidental art".

Listen Now:

Often sifting through hundreds of images at flea markets and estate sales before coming across a striking image, Johnson belies a passion that transcends his position as Curator Emeritus for the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Over the years, he's collected a number of "friends in low places," to help him with his search.

Because these photos were taken by anonymous photographers of (mostly) anonymous subjects, they don't carry any inherent value. Rather, their attraction lies in their furnishing of "raw material for one's imagination," which allows the viewer to create a story befitting her personal whims.

Beyond a dispassionate viewer's initial attraction to an anonymous photo, there crouches a deeper ethical dilemma. Photographs are precious, meant to mark important moments: birth, death, marriage. And so Johnson reminds us that to find these mementos stuffed into boxes at a vintage shop indicates a rupture that lead to their abandon.

Johnson brings up an interesting dilemma.

While he is clearly dedicated to the art of photography and recognizes the power of accidental masterpieces by unidentified shutter-clickers, there remains the question of respect for the people who lost these photos.

In guise of mute response, the author includes a photo of his own mother, taken back in 1917 by a nameless photographer, in his book. In this manner, he puts his own family up for public viewing along with many unknowns.

Like slowing down to scrutinize a car crash, The Face in the Lens furnishes powerful imagery for the curious voyeur.

An exhibition of 50 photos from Robert Flynn Johnson's private collection is currently on display at Modernism, through late August, located at 685 Market Street.

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The Millions’ has a collaborative atlas of book stores and literary places. This Atlas is open to anyone and everyone to edit. Aside from the atlas the mashup also includes book blogger locations. The creator says: add the general location … of where you live. In the next year, I will be notifying you about authors who are coming to your area!

It’s fun to poke around the map and see what bookstores are where. The most unusual one is in the Antartic:

CSEC Library, Antarctic
Last Updated by Max on May 15

The Crary Science & Engineering Center (CSEC), McMurdo Station, Ross Island, Antarctica (77.8475S, 166.6576W ,45m, or about 2200 miles due south of New Zealand) houses a library with views of glaciers and the Transantarctic Mountains

Thanks to BookofJoe for the link.

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David Michaels is the author of Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health which explains how many of the scientists who spun science for tobacco have become practitioners in the lucrative world of product defense. Whatever the story- global warming, toxic chemicals, sugar and obesity, secondhand smoke- these scientists generate studies designed to make dangerous exposures appear harmless.

On Tuesday, President Obama nominated Michaels to the post of Assistant Secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Department of Labor.  The release says, “David Michaels, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Department of Labor
David Michaels, PhD, MPH, is an epidemiologist and is currently Research Professor at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. He has conducted numerous studies of the health effects of occupational exposure to toxic chemicals, including asbestos, metals and solvents, and has written extensively on science and regulatory policy.  From 1998 to 2001, Dr. Michaels served as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health, responsible for protecting the health and safety of workers, neighboring communities and the environment surrounding the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities.  In that position, he was the chief architect of the historic initiative to compensate nuclear weapons workers who developed occupational illnesses as a result of exposure to radiation, beryllium and other hazards.  In 2006, Dr. Michaels received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award for his work on behalf of nuclear weapons workers and for his advocacy for scientific integrity. He is also the recipient of the 2009 John P. McGovern Science and Society Award given by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.”

From all of us at OUP, congrats!  Learn more here.

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This is not a good time to raise capital. That’s why that fact that LibreDigital was able to secure $15M in a second round financing is impressive. LibreDigital is an ebook distributor, and the venture sharks wouldn’t give them money if they didn’t smell more money in the water. And that money is coming from ebooks.

VentureBeat quotes on of the partners who financed LibreDigital as saying: “Demand for books & newspapers in digital formats is out-pacing supply.”

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Un autre lecteur 5 pouces disponible exclusivement aux Etats-Unis et au Canada, le EZReader de la société Astak (basé sur le Hanlin V5). eBouquin lui a consacré un billet récemment. Accord passé avec Adobe pour la DRM (viaMobileread). Il devrait également être distribué sur un site spécifique pour l'international dans les semaines à venir à un prix agressif de 140€ (frais de port en plus)!

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Google Books engineering director Dan Clancy was interviewed recently and he talked about Google’s vision of the future. He said that that the settlement was looking at the past, but in the future Google had other ideas. Here’s an excerpt from the interview as published by the BayNewser:

… But right now the physical bookstores are a critical part of our book ecosystem. And in fact a huge amount of books are bought because people go into a physical bookstore and say, hey I want this, I want that. And I think it’s a mistake if we think of our future digital world as digital means online and physical means offline. Because if that happens and 10 percent of the world goes digital, that’s going to be really hard for all the bookstores to sustain their business model.

So part of our model is to figure out we’re going to syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in bricks and mortar stores as well.

And then finally, our model is you should be able to read on any device…. Our model is some people will read [our books] on a laptop, some will read them on the phone, some people will read on their netbook, and some people will read on their e-reader. And we’ll work with any reader provider that wants to make it so they can get their books from the Google cloud….

So the principles of our future world is trying to build this world where there’s lots of retail players, read on any device, but it’s still stored in the cloud. And as we talk with publishers and booksellers, I think this is the right model, because we’re trying to make what would be an open model that encourages competition. …

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

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Maria Bonn is the Director of the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. She is responsible for the production of electronic books and journals and for broadly developing the role of the Library in scholarly communication. In an interview by Mary Minnow of the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use website she discussed how the University determines whether a book is under copyright:

On determining copyright status: right now we are being fairly conservative in our copyright judgments. Keep in mind that these volumes are only for sale in the United States, so we are guided by U.S. copyright law. We run an automated analysis on the MARC records to identify all volumes published prior to 1923 and most U.S. government publications. After this analysis, he bibliographic information is sorted by publication date and undergoes a quick manual review to check for obvious errors or bibliographic oddities (such as a record for a book that asserted it had been published in 1099). These volumes are removed from the POD (Print On Demand) stream. There is a wealth of material that is relatively easy for us to identify as public domain, and these are the books that we are currently working on getting out into the world. There are many other books that are probably also public domain but we’ll need to do a more nuanced analysis in order to make that determination.

If we extend our arrangements with POD printers and distributors to allow for sale of books in other countries (we already have that option for the U.K and Germany, but have not acted on it), we will need to construct a similar process of analysis taking into account the copyright laws of the countries in which we are selling the books.

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