ebook – Looking Forward

Twenty years ago at the 1995 General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), Chris Batt of the Croydon Libraries in the UK gave a talk on the library of the future. This was his prophetic conclusion:

“What are the implications of all for this [the Internet] for the future of public libraries? … The answer is that while we cannot be certain about the future for our services, we can and should be developing a vision which encompasses and enriches the potential of the Internet. If we do not do that then others will; and they will do it less well.”

So from the relatively early days of the Internet – three years before Google was even founded – libraries have been warned about the challenge to their future.

Although many librarians have been innovative in various ways since then, it is fair to say that during those twenty years many players have been offering services that were once the exclusive function of libraries.

As a headline a month ago in the Washington Post put it: “When Google Is Your Librarian And Starbucks Your WiFi, Do We Still Need Public Libraries?” (The answer was yes, but clearly enough people think otherwise that the editors thought the question was worth asking.)

Libraries have been challenged even as a source of collected books, with the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service and similar services from Oyster and Scribd over the last year. [Skip past the pictures to continue reading.]

For roughly $120 per year, a person could have access to a very large collection of books. It would be interesting to see what libraries could do if they had a similar amount of money to work with. But they don’t.

The most recent year in which national statistics were collected about public libraries is 2012. Earlier this year (2015), the US Government’s Institute of Museums and Library Services issued its final analysis of that data. IMLS noted that public library operating expenditures were $35.47 per person – and, of course, that’s for more than just offering e-books.

Of course, libraries are not alone in facing change. All of us do.

In addition to the Internet revolution we already deal with, there are several technology trends whose impact is only beginning — machine intelligence and analytics, a ubiquitous interface to the Internet and high-quality visual conversations that will finally enable the virtual world to replicate the trust, the serendipity and the nature of normal face-to-face human communications.

These technology trends intertwine with and reinforce trends in the economy and society – the transition in employment to a post-industrial, digital economy where many people will earn their living providing knowledge-based services and intangible products; innovation as the competitive edge in the knowledge economy; the increase in the number of people who are both producers and consumers of content; the resulting requirement for cost-effective lifelong learning for adults.

As with all change, while one part of your world is nibbled away, other opportunities open up. So it is with libraries.

This is the background, the context, for the Aspen Institute’s creation of a working group on libraries (of which I’m a member) and its report “Rising To The Challenge: Re-envisioning Public Libraries.” I’ve written about the report itself before. [Skip past the pictures to continue reading.]

As part of the effort to disseminate the ideas in the report, I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Library Trustees Association last week. I then joined with Maureen Sullivan, former President of the American Library Association and long-time consultant in the field, to run two workshops for the trustees.

The gist of my talk was straightforward. Libraries do not exist in isolation from the rest of the world. They need to be embedded in their communities, which means that they need to understand and respond to how their patrons’ lives are changing. Library leaders need to understand how each trend will have an impact on libraries.

Libraries need to lay the foundation for where they need to be in the future. Not to put too fine a point on it, but continuing just doing a good job with things as they are now is insufficient and unsustainable.

While the Aspen report notes the continuing importance of the library building, it is more for a future role than merely the warehousing of books. Moreover, successful libraries services can no longer be constrained by the walls of the library building. Every space in the community should be considered to be virtually part of the library. The library should be everywhere – physically and virtually.

Librarians need to provide access and intelligent guidance not just to their local collection, but to a national, eventually international, and fluid combination of materials. Indeed, the global digital network makes possible an emerging model of networked libraries that promotes economies of scale and broadens each library’s reach.

As Maureen Sullivan has stated:

“With a nationally networked platform, library and other leaders will also have more capacity to think about the work they can do at the national level that so many libraries have been so effective at doing at the state and local levels.”

Libraries can be the central institution of the knowledge/innovation economy, but to do so they must take the lead in helping their communities deal with the future so that both the libraries and their communities flourish.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/120021391122/libraries-no-future-or-leading-the-future]

My last post was about the fight over intellectual property. A few weeks before that I wrote about what a book is in a digital age and suggested that librarians could become the equivalent of DJs for books.

Pulling those two themes together, this post is about what some libraries are already doing that can shift the balance in book publishing.

But, first a bit of history. When public libraries were first established well over a hundred years ago, one of their primary responsibilities was purchase books on behalf of their community. Then the community members could share all these books, without having to buy separate copies.

Until the mid-20th Century, this worked in favor of publishers since libraries were, in general, their most reliable market for books. Libraries also helped build markets of readers that the publishers would sell to or that many people eventually bought the books they borrowed because they liked them so much. The library was a kind of try-and-buy location.

As the industry grew, selling direct to an ever more educated public in the latter half of the 20th Century, many book publishers started thinking that libraries reduced their sales, rather than enhancing them. But that was a battle the publishers had lost long ago and couldn’t do much about.

Moreover, it is a moot point in this century when e-books have overtaking traditional print book publishing. Even if that growth trend has slowed a bit recently, the battle between publishers and libraries has been renewed around e-books, not printed books.

The traditional publishers – the Big 5 – have taken an especially restrictive approach to e-books, perhaps in the hopes of turning away from the historical role that public libraries have played for printed books. Until less than two years ago, some publishers even refused to sell e-books to libraries. They still restrict the number of times an e-book could be lent or charge extraordinary prices for them.

This pattern continues despite some good arguments that publishers could benefit from a more supportive relationship with libraries, as laid out by the marketing expert, David Vinjamuri.

But any significant change, like e-books, can be a two-edged sword. They may be an opportunity for big publishers to change the rules. But they are also an opportunity for libraries.

Unlike printed books, there is effectively no limitation on how many e-books a library can store. And librarians have noticed that many of their patrons are writing e-books. Much of the spectacular growth in e-books has been among self-published authors. (Amazon even makes this easy with its Createspace service.)

With this background, there has developed a movement among libraries to become the publishing platform for authors or to, at least, partner with self-publishing services.

Although he lost by a little, one of the candidates in the election a few days ago for president of the American Library Association was Jamie LaRue, who has built his reputation in large part as a leader of the library publishing movement.

There are already several interesting examples across the country. The Los Gatos Public Library has joined with the Smashwords self-publishing company. The Provincetown, Massachusetts library – proudly “Ranked #1 in the US by Library Journal” – has created its own self-publishing agency, Provincetown Press.

The much larger Los Angeles Public Library is using the Self-e platform from Library Journal and BiblioBoard. The February 2015 issue of Library Journal quotes John Szabo, LAPL’s director and one of the most innovative national library leaders:

“We are and will continue to be a place for content creation… It’s a huge role for libraries. … I want to see our authors not just all over California but circulating from Pascagoula, MS, to Keokuk, IA.”

Too often, news of new library services does not get widely publicized and is only seen by those already patronizing libraries. So it was helpful that LAPL’s platform for local authors was reported a couple of weeks ago in a publication they might well read – LA Weekly.

With the Internet enabling easier collaboration and co-creation than ever before, as I’ve noted in this blog, we are also seeing examples of self-publishing that go beyond an individual author.

Topeka Community Novel Project describes its ideal: “A community novel is one that is collaboratively conceptualized, written, illustrated, narrated, edited and published by members of your community.”

Publishing by academic libraries and other non-traditional publishers is an increasing factor in research, as well. While it publishes papers that are peer-reviewed as in traditional journals, PLOS (Public Library of Science) is perhaps the best known adherent of “open access” publishing. Open Access means that there are no restrictions on the use of the articles, available online, free to read.

Academic journals and books have been very expensive and not all of that cost can be eliminated by this new approach. For example, the peer review process still has to be managed. However, the cost is much lower. PLOS charges authors a relatively minimal fee.

Rebecca Kennison of Columbia University Libraries and Lisa Norberg of the Barnard College Library have plans to extend the PLOS model, with a more cooperative funding arrangement, to “A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and Archiving for Humanities and Social Sciences”.

Overall, all of the initiatives that I’ve highlighted here are a part of a digital age trend in which we’ll see more librarians going beyond being mere collectors of big publishing companies’ books to being curators and creators of content.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/118945402119/libraries-open-publishing]

Tag: ebook

Libraries: No Future Or Leading The Future?

Libraries & Open Publishing