It’s been a big day for ebook news. (more…)

His fascinating and important Domino Project concluded, Seth Godin is still pondering writing and reading and all things in between. Godin’s latest post, Selling vs. Reading, includes the usual ramblings, some meaningless, a few trenchant, and one entirely ingenuous. (more…)

Last evening I wrote to a colleague who runs a regional association of trade book publishers. I thought I would share the letter:

Hi xxx,

I thought of you when I read this just now in today’s Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160421561955208.html

I think it’s a very good article just because it presents the unvarnished truth about ebooks in American libraries today. The author, Katherine Boehret, is wide-eyed and open-minded and just checking what’s out there. Several things trouble her:

• the small selection.
• little availability of bestselling titles (for borrowing).
• difficult to find what is actually available from her library.
• unnecessarily complicated registration requirements.
• tight limits on how many books you can borrow and how long you can borrow them for.

I’ve found an additional challenge not discussed in the article. Patrons need to go through a wide variety of disparate digital portals to get at ebooks. In my local library the current number of portals for Ebooks & Downloadable Audiobooks is 14! Right now the library catalog doesn’t help much in navigating around these (although they’re trying to build a new online catalog), and if I found separate registration networks for each, then aaargh (eventually there will be one point of access, but…).

This is the big worry that I mentioned at our lunch a couple of weeks ago. Libraries are being marginalized by the shift to ebooks because their existing infrastructure doesn’t enable ebook lending. They’re receiving only tepid support from publishers, none from authors, and none from Amazon. The email I showed you that I’d received from the Massachusetts librarian demonstrated his efforts to prove that publishers and authors benefit from having their books available in libraries. That’s important for publishers and authors to realize. Amazon would I think be thrilled if public libraries failed in lending ebooks, not because they’re worried about theft (OverDrive, ebrary et al, protect their ebooks with more robust DRM than Amazon does). Amazon wants to sell ebooks in volume at low retail prices to the broad public, not just single copies that public libraries can lend multiple times.

I believe that publishers and Amazon are content to take advantage of this ebook confusion to undermine the public library system.

When you read Mike Shatzkin’s recent post about the rapidly increasing sales of ebooks (and the commensurate decline of paper book sales) you can see a fierce storm cloud forming.

Meanwhile 8 of the 20 top paid Kindle books in the U.S. are .99, $1.99 or $2.99.

If you look to the right of those inexpensive Kindle ebooks you’ll see another column demonstrating how many free ebooks are available. Who needs to engage in the fruitless frustration of trying to borrow ebooks from a public library when there is such a variety of free titles available, and many more for $2.99 or less?

A Google search on Amazon AND “public libraries” delivered links to several books about libraries for sale on Amazon. It also delivered the pages the next images are clipped from.

Added February 27: If you don’t think publishers will be happy to see ebooks kill public libraries read: HarperCollins Puts 26 Loan Cap on Ebook Circulations

In the first significant revision to lending terms for ebook circulation, HarperCollins has announced that new titles licensed from library ebook vendors will be able to circulate only 26 times before the license expires.

Good commentary here:

http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2011/02/harpercollins-and-suspension-of-ebook.html

Update, April 20, 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot about libraries.

To think about the library of the future you must start with an appreciation of libraries today. That appreciation must be derived from being an active customer of libraries — you don’t qualify if you don’t regularly borrow books and other physical (analog) materials. You also don’t qualify if you fail to take advantage of the great online services from your local public library and every other library you have access to (1).

Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Copyright 2010 by Thad McIlroy

So this is not an insider’s look at the library of the future and not necessarily the view a librarian might have. I’ll be considering librarians’ perspectives: I respect them a great deal. But just as active readers are often more interesting than publishers when considering the future of publishing, so too are active library users uniquely qualified to consider what they want from their libraries next year or a decade from now.

I’m not interested here in armchair theorists who last used a library when they were 12 years old. Libraries are living, breathing, changing organisms in the future of publishing ecosphere. We must live among the living.

OK. So you’re a civilian, not a library soldier. You care about the future of libraries because you care about culture and/or entertainment, education and community. You care because you know that libraries have always been a place to go to try to understand the complex world that you find yourself a part of. You care because you marvel that somewhere, some time, we deemed that the commons would include resources in published form (2).

So you have good reason to be interested in the library of the future.

Next you might look at how they evolved to where they are today. That’s important. We see clearly in the United States today the truth of the simple dictum: “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” (3). Let’s not make this mistake when thinking about the future of libraries.

Then you might look outward at the broad publishing trends covered on my site.

You’ll get a first glimpse of the library of the future.

I’ll conclude this first entry with a quotation from Stephen Ramsay (4):

How do you tell when the person addressing a group of librarians is not a librarian? Easy. He or she will, as surely as day follows night, make a reference to the Library of Alexandria.(5)(6)

To be continued.

Notes:

1. By “every other library you have access to” I’m thinking every other library you can access while NOT paying specifically for that access. (If you specifically pay for access I believe it’s an “information service” not a library, in the way that “library” is most commonly used.)

College and university students have access to libraries that are a part of the institution they pay (or paid) to attend. I don’t have that access (other than limited physical access to local institutional libraries). I, however, am a member of the ACM — Association for Computing Machinery — the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. It has a superb digital library which I frequently access.

2. Intended in the broad sense that I use the word “publishing” on this site.

3. If you go to a library you can learn all about the origins of this quotation. It has a rich history. Or you can just search online. Try it. I bet you’ll wish you had a librarian at your side who could help you avoid wasting too much time on political web sites appropriating the quotation to justify their interpretation of history. You just want to know who first said it. That George Santayana never said it does not tell you who did.

4. Stephen Ramsay is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. “He spends most of his time writing about Digital Humanities and designing and building text technologies for humanist scholars.”

5. If you read the full article that this quotation is taken from you will see both why librarians are marvellous and also why they may not be the first ones we should go to to ask about the future of libraries.

6. I’m not sure why the quotation appeals to me other than it reminds me of a thought I’ve had about people who comment on books and publishing. Whenever I encounter words to the effect of “the most important development since Gutenberg invented the printing press” I know I can change the channel. Although a Google search of “Gutenberg invented the printing press”(in quotation marks) offers 412 citations, the first printing press was invented in China in 593 A.D. Johannes Gutenberg invented the first metal movable-type printing system in Europe, many years later. Perhaps this knowledge should disqualify me from commenting on the future of publishing. However it’s my blog; I’ll comment if I want to.

My friend Wendy brought this fun site to my attention: thank you.

The About the Site description begins:

Awfullibrarybooks.wordpress.com is a collection of the worst library holdings. The items featured here are so old, obsolete, awful or just plain stupid that we are horrified that people might be actually checking these items out and depending on the information.

This blog contains actual library holdings. No specific libraries or librarians are named to protect the guilty. Check your shelves, it could be you.

Let me reproduce one entry to give you an idea of the crazy books they uncover:

A great choice for a parenting collection!

June 2, 2009

When Children Invite Child Abuse:  A search for answers when love is not enough
Gold
1986

A fellow Michigan ALB spy has given us this gem!  I am speechless just on the title alone!  Who on earth is the target market for this book?  Abusers looking for an “out” ?  Question to the public library with this holding:  are child abusers one of your major patron groups that you feel are being underserved by the public library?

The comments are very good, often humorous, and in the case of this particular title, able to explain that in fact the book “is meant to help parents understand difficult children and is not meant in any way to promote child abuse.”

Another comment notes:

This reminds me of my first encounter with unfortunate LC subject headings in my public library job fresh out of grad school. I found a heading CHILD ABUSE-INSTRUCTION MANUALS and was horrified. It was for a book on how to lead workshops to help folks recovering from abuse or something like that but the initial shock was similar to this book title you found.

Fun, and in some odd way, instructional too!

November 11, 2010

I’ve updated the link above to the new URL. Here’s a bonus image:

With a Foreword by The Village People!