Take Your Due-Date Slips Back, Ebooks

Sarah, the Librarian in Black, had a post a bit ago on how she's "breaking up with" ebooks, which she argues have been like a bad boyfriend/girlfriend for libraries: promising more than is delivered, ignoring our needs, acting all charming to win us over and then turning into a jerk, etc.

She makes the argument that 'we in libraries are actually doing a disservice by offering what’s "barely good enough." We give people the false impression that they can get their eBooks through their libraries.'

This is an interesting point. If all we can offer is a bad ebook service, maybe we're better off not even saying "we have ebooks!" at all--it's not as if that money couldn't be spent elsewhere.

And it's true that libraries can't offer every format for everything. We can lend movies, but (in most cases) not in the 35 mm reels you'd need to project them in your private large-screen theater.

Maybe we could likewise just say, we lend books, but not in the electronic format you'd need to read them on your tablet.

There's a difference, obviously, in that most people have no desire to borrow 35 mm film canisters, while many people probably would like to borrow ebooks, but hey--if the publishers won't grant licenses libraries can work with, what can we do?

As I've noted before, the library where I work has stayed mainly out of the ebook fray by purchasing items you read online at the publisher's website, rather than ones that are downloaded to some other server or device, but it sounds as if that model is a lot more available for academic texts than popular works, so is not a viable option for public libraries trying to make sure everyone who wants it gets the latest bestseller in a timely fashion.

We could call it the "only offer ebooks no one wants to read" approach?

But that's not fair to our perfectly nice electronic titles: it's not that no one wants to read them (well, it probably is for some of them), just that they have a very specific and fairly small audience compared to popular novels and such.

In any case, I could certainly see how breaking up with ebooks could be an unfortunate, not-especially-crowd-pleasing option that would nevertheless be the best move for a library.

Heck With 'Em

Intriguing post on Librarian by Day wondering whether libraries should be investing so much energy in ebooks given the various flaws in the system.

I like one of the opening paragraphs, which responds to the "but patrons want it!" argument with the quite true point that patrons want all kinds of things that libraries can't always give them.

Ebooks are definitely an issue that not's going to go away, but it does seem worth considering not dealing with them at all (at the moment), among the other options for managing them. You've got to think about all the angles.

Repurposing = Awesome!

The Krafty Librarian has presented a very crafty idea, using old unbound journal holders and brightly colored paper labeling to make booklike shapes that sit on the shelf with the print books in a certain subject, highlighting the existence of ebooks on the same subject.

I like it! Partly because we have stacks and stacks of unbound journal holders where I work, too, and I always like to reuse things, so the idea of getting some use out of them now that we have hardly any unbound journals left is appealing.

Also, we are always trying to promote our ebooks.

However, Krafty uses QR codes, with a "scan this code to see ebooks on this topic" message, and I'm not sure about that part. I don't sense a whole lot of excitement around QR codes in our user population. Not that I exactly have my finger on the pulse of what's cool with that population or anything, but the one time someone used a QR code (to promote a workshop), I never saw anyone actually scanning it.

In fact, the main topic of Krafty's post is actually how one generates interest in QR codes, rather than how awesome it is to recycle journal holders.

Given our extremely limited but unpromising experience, I don't really have any advice on how to generate interest in QR codes, hence my focus on the crafts part of the piece. I'm wondering if it might not just be useful to put those up as a reminder that the ebooks are there, because it's true that not everyone thinks to look.

Maybe we could steal the booklike shapes idea, and just put a note on the label to "see our ebooks page for online titles on this subject," with a short URL. (We'd have to actually make short URLs for our ebooks based on subject for this to work, but...I'm supposed to be learning to code, I could figure it out. Or steal it from someone.)

And maybe a QR code too, I'm not opposed to QR codes, I'm just not particularly excited about them, but maybe simply putting them out there would encourage their use. Anyway, they look kind of cool and decorative, so what's the harm?

On the other hand, we're pretty desperate for shelf space right now, so taking up room with this sort of placeholder might not fly.

Borrowing Ebooks

We don't really have popular books at my library, so we've been spared all the worry about whether and how to lend ebooks or ebook readers., It's certainly a subject worth keeping an eye on, though, so I appreciated this post on librarian.net giving a borrower's perspective on the new Amazon Kindle 'lending library.'

I especially like the description "a wolf in book's clothing," although it's more poetic than accurate since the piece unfortunately doesn't have a wolf leaping out of a Kindle to attack the reader's sheep (because that would be an exciting story!--although I'd feel bad about the sheep).

Summary: the borrower wasn't too psyched about the whole thing.

I think for now we'll probably just keep on staying out of that whole discussion where I work.

Ebooks and Me

In my continued effort to keep a keen eye on the matter of the ebook and its infiltration of bookly culture, I have made a small foray into the electronic book world, when I read a couple of Jane Austen* novels on vacation.

I will say that it is absolutely easier to carry an iPod Touch on planes and trains and around airports than a couple of physical books (even paperbacks). You can slip it in and out of a bag, where it takes up very little room, or even carry it in your pocket.

There was a faintly disorienting feeling of never knowing how far into the book I was (you make different kinds of half-conscious deductions about plot points and story when you know there's half the book left, than you do if you've only got 30 pages to go). I think this is based both on the small amount of text that fits on an iPod 'page'--I might have flipped to the next page 200 times, but who knows what that means?--and on not having physical pages in my hand to judge by.

I know that the screen will tell you how much of the book you've read if you check, but this was never something that rose to the level of a thing I needed to check on, just a sort of nagging uncertainty that sometimes came to the back of my mind, and that is not usually part of my experience of reading a book.

Other than that, it really wasn't a different thing to read on a tiny screen than to read on a small page. You can enjoy the prose and get absorbed in the story the same way.

So I'll definitely be all about carrying a bunch of public domain titles around with me on trips where I don't feel like taking up space in my carry-on bags with physical books. Ebooks are a wonderful thing for travel.

As long as your battery holds up, and also as long as you don't mind putting away the book during the first and last several minutes of the flight, when they tell you to turn off electronic devices. You don't worry about that with paper. And remember, if you're traveling to Europe, you'll need an adapter so you can plug your device in and recharge it there, which is also something you don't worry about with paper.

These are small details, and easily overcome. I think I will not be making any kind of wholehearted plunge into this format, however. I like to check out books at the library, because there are all kinds of titles I don't really feel I have to own. (Also, one downside of ebooks from my selfish perspective?--if people who used to lend me their books start buying everything on Kindle or the like, where am I then, I ask you?)

I love the library, good people. And since paper books work so perfectly well for day-to-day running around where you don't worry about taking up space in your bag, why switch to something that needs a regular battery charge?

I've got nothin' against it, but I don't find it generally necessary at this time. Such is my considered opinion.


*I'd never read Jane Austen before, and as an English major I was naturally filled with shame.

Sit Down For This One

I heartily endorse the useful advice of J on A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette:

Librarians should militantly enforce the “pushing in” of recently vacated public chairs in their libraries. As you make your rounds through the library, forcefully bump the chairs against the tables as a passive aggressive warning of your quiet rage for any future potential violators.

I don't really do this in my library, but I may need to start. Anything that warns of my quiet rage for future potential violators is a good thing. The people need to know!


I also endorse the curiosity of Paul Levy at Not Running a Hospital, who wonders "Will books someday be works in progress?" He's referring to the fact that, with ebook purchases, one could theoretically buy a book, and then have it automatically updated on your reader to reflect changes made by the author. He compares this to a software update, something that you get to make sure the content is up to date, and it's easy to see how this could be useful for informational material that loses value over time.

A constantly updating encyclopedia, or a guide to New York City, could be very handy, especially if it involved no or minimal charges. Rather than buy a whole new book, just pay a couple of dollars to have the updates integrated.

On the other hand, theoretically, you could also have your book updated to reflect changes made by editors in response to threats of lawsuits, or something. Let's imagine a truly awe-inspiring scandal that prompts a recall of certain information that you purchased, by that could be removed from your book after the fact.

Nobody likes the idea of paying for something and then getting it taken away.

I guess the crucial thing here would be that you should be able to decide if you want to accept the updates or not. Much like software, they could send you a little message saying "an update is available for your book The Awe-Inspiring Scandal Encyclopedia: New York City Edition. Would you like to accept these changes?"

And then you could review the proposed updates and say yes or no. Maybe even accept some while refusing others ("I liked this part better when it was that dude and the ostrich"). It could become not so much a software update as a collaborative editing process.

Of course, then you would have bunches of people running around with their own slightly different versions of what would in some sense be the same book, since it would have a single uniform title, but would in another sense be a bunch of personalized editions, since the actual text might vary widely.


The Awe-Inspiring Scandal Encyclopedia: New York City, Adeline Hoopstine Edition. Citing these as sources gets really interesting.

Once again we stare into the terrifyingly mutable face of the electronic book. We shiver in trepidation, but we cannot turn away.

So keep shoving those chairs in, everyone. At least they're solid.

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Free Ebooks For Everyone!

I received notice on the MEDLIB-L listserv that the National Academies Press is making PDF versions of all their books available for free download.

Is that enough books to care about? Why yes! "This includes a current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports produced by the Press."

Thanks, National Academies Press! This is an excellent resource for science, engineering, and medical topics. If you have any interest in these subjects, or work with library users who do, you should check it out.

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Ebooks in Schools

More on ebooks: Nicholas Carr brings word that Florida just passed "a budget measure that bans printed textbooks from schools starting in the 2015-16 school year."

Interesting approach, Florida.

In fact, it doesn't mandate that existing print textbooks be destroyed in a huge bonfire, just requires "public schools to adopt digital-only textbooks by the 2015-16 school year, and spend at least 50 percent of their textbook budget on digital materials by that time."

The governor has not yet signed this into law, and there are some budget issues since schools are concerned about the cost of not only ebooks, but ebook readers. Even if the textbooks themselves don't cost any more, I imagine having to provide the hardware to make them available to all students could get expensive.

So, interesting approach. I'm sure we will watch attentively to see what happens.

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Off I Go

Good people, I must leave you for another blog. The MLA '11 Official Blog calls me! It will most likely demand the majority of my blogular attention for the next several days.

Check it out for medical librarian meeting goodness--there are already some excellent posts.

In the meantime, if you are interested in e-textbooks, I direct you to Rough Type, which reports on a study showing that "Students find the devices cumbersome to use, ill-suited to their study routines, and generally underwhelming."

There's some interesting discussion of the ways we use books, some of which can be approximated electronically (margin notes, bookmarks), and some of which cannot (that sense you get of just where in a book the passage you're looking for is to be found...about halfway through, in the middle of the page on the right hand side).

Paper books. A technology whose time has not yet passed?

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A Sidelong Glance at the E-Reader

This is why I'm skeptical about ebook readers.

I have a co-worker who reads a lot of books. He used to buy a lot of books to read, and then lend them to me when he was done.

Then he got a Kindle. Now he buys a lot of ebooks, and I cannot borrow them.

You can see the problem.

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Electronic Does Not Equal Paper

For years, and for no reason that I know of, my library chose to catalog electronic books on the same record as the print version, if we had both, but cataloged electronic and paper versions of journals on different records.

Mostly.

There were always exceptions, so I've always occasionally had to separate a pair of conjoined journals, or squash a pair of books together. For consistency, you know.

As I say, I'm not sure what the original reasoning was behind this policy. I'm sure there was some. Possibly it had to do with counting...for questions asking how many individual titles we have, keeping ebooks and paper books together makes sense. You count the bibliographic records, and you're good.

Why this doesn't make sense for journals, I don't know. We always have to de-duplicate those for the 'unique title' questions.

It matters little, though, because policy is policy. And now, policy is changing: it has been at last decided that system-wide, we're going with separate records all the way!

So now at some point, when I have the time, I'm going to have to track down every book title that we hold both electronically and in paper, and split them up.

I guess it was either that or find all the journals, and put them together. I actually not sure which would involve more work. I'll imagine it's the one I'm not doing, to comfort myself.

I tell you all this because I know you care very deeply.

Also, mostly, because it's what I'm thinking about right now.

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When EBooks Go Bad

Sarah, the Librarian In Black, in a post rousingly titled Library eBook Revolution, Begin, covers recent changes in how the way ebooks licensed from Overdrive (which we do not have where I work, but which a lot of public libraries use) will be managed.

She breaks down three major changes, of which the first mentioned is the one that struck me most just because it's closest to my personal workflow.

Essentially, ebooks would be licensed for a limited number of uses, after which they would no longer be available (and presumably would have to be re-purchased).

There are a few things here that might kind of make one bristle.

I'm grouchy enough about annual maintenance fees for large ebook collections--now I'm supposed to be cool with the idea that once Person Number 26 (the reported number of allowed checkouts) is done with this single item, it's going to disappear?

And, because I am Technical Services, this point especially gets me:

How could you even put this content in your catalog? You’d have to track circulation and then remove the title from your catalog once you hit your cap. Can you imagine the workload impact?

Yes, that could be pretty annoying. I mean, nothing lasts forever, but if you're spending time cataloging things you kind of want to be able to assume that they'll stay in the collection until you remove them.

Obviously the vagaries of existence on the shelf means that some things will be lost or stolen rather than intentionally weeded. That's kind of a point in favor of ebooks, since there's not a physical item to be lost.

But it's definitely a point against ebooks if they get intentionally weeded for you, based not on your library's exacting standards ("this cover is ugly"), but on the fact that some arbitrary number of people have looked at it. As I said, I don't use Overdrive or the e-checkout model, but I'm pretty skeptical on behalf of those who do.

Christina Pikas is equally displeased about this on her LIS Rant.

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Information Wants to Be Free of You

Mike Shatzkin on The Idea Logical Company makes an argument that we should perhaps just get over our longing to "own" ebooks and accept that, as digital entities based on software, they can only ever be held close to our hearts for a little while, as long as we hold the license to access the file, before they are gone.

Here's a main point:

First sale rights make complete sense with something physical. They make no sense with something digital. When you lend, give, or re-sell a print book, you don’t have it anymore. When you lend, give, or re-sell a digital file, you still have it and you could lend, give, or re-sell it again and again without limit. Surely, that’s a distinction that justifies a departure from the physical world paradigm.

Perhaps it does, indeed, but don't call me Shirley.

There's a lot more interesting stuff to the post, about how publishers and agents have, each for their own reasons not wishing to rock the book-selling boat, allowed this idea of ebooks as being fundamentally similar to paper books to take hold, even though it may just not be a very good way to approach things.

Having dealt at work with the faint uneasiness that comes from discarding thousands of volumes of print journals because we have online access that takes up less room, even though we now no longer physically own the material, I guess I could see dealing with the same model for my personal reading material.

I already do it with my money, right? I get paid, but it's direct deposit, so I never even see a paper check. I've never possessed the physical representation of all the money I own in the world. It's all in computers.

And if I do it with my life savings, I could do it with my copy of The Lord of the Rings, if I wanted an electronic copy of that.

The internet is really all about paying to access things, rather than to own them. You pay just to get on the internet, and then once on it there's all kinds of stuff I wouldn't even want to own, it would make no sense for me to own it, but I might pay for a license to access it.

I don't want to own a copy of every movie I can think of, or even every movie I'd like to watch, but I'll pay Netflix to use theirs.

And if we imagine that Netflix also offered ebooks, it could make sense to think of purchasing a license to some individual book so that I could access that one anytime I wanted without it counting against my monthly total or whatever, rather than thinking of owning some discrete individual copy of that book.

It's an interesting shift in the 'possession' model, that's for sure.

I saw this on LISNews.

A Terrifying Vision of Things to Come

I was at the movies the other night, reading a regular old paper book, and the person sitting next to me asked "Have you considered a reader?"

He said this in the tone one might use to inquire "are you aware there's a treatment for that troublesome condition you have?"

Say, if I'd been wearing obvious wrist braces, and someone asked "have you considered carpal tunnel surgery?"

It's come to this already, has it?

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We Bear a Heavy Burden

Interesting news on Salon about Google Books, which apparently is riddled with interesting quirks, such as:

Sigmund Freud is listed as a co-author of a book on the Mosaic Web browser and Henry James is credited with writing "Madame Bovary." Even more puzzling are the many subject misclassifications: an edition of "Moby Dick" categorized under "Computers," and "Jane Eyre" as "Antiques and Collectibles" ("Madame Bovary" got that label, too).

Indeed.

Librarians will instantly nod when we learn that this is a metadata problem, where the information in the record representing the item is faulty. Oh, metadata, we meet again. Where did I leave that blog I did in that class?

Hm...it seems to have vanished (serves me right for leaving it unattended on the UA server), although a Bloglines preview has preserved some of my remarks. It just goes to show that the internet is a land of contrasts.

You can't assume that something you put online will just stay out there forever, because many times no one cares about it, servers fail or are cleared, and your not-so-deathless prose vanishes into a digital grave.

At the same time, you can't assume that something you put online won't just stay out there forever, because if anyone does care about it, whether to laud it, deride it, or use it as evidence in a lawsuit, it will be copied, stored in multiple locations (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe!), and become nearly impossible to eradicate.

One must be constantly prepared both for immortal infamy, and for unbroken obscurity.

Anyway, the larger point is, yes, that Google Books needs catalogers. Of course they do. Everyone needs catalogers! When will the world shower us with the adulation, money and chocolate we so richly and obviously deserve?

I got this from Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants, who linked it with the astute observation, "Well, Some Librarians Will Have Jobs in the Future."

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Paper, Please

Given the big push towards e-books where I work, I was interested to read some stories linked in a post at Stephen's Lighthouse suggesting that students (at least undergraduates--the posts don't specifically address medical, dental or public health students) don't actually like them very much.

It seems that they're too hard to take notes in (I can see that--I never wrote in my textbooks, but I know a lot of people like to annotate and find it helpful for learning), bookmark, and just generally refer to as one likes to refer to textbooks in the course of a class.

But they're so very space-save-y! And time-save-y since you don't have to physically come in and find them or check them out! Come on, students, you know you love them.

Love them! Love them as much as we do!

Actually, we ourselves feel a range of complex emotions regarding e-books. But this isn't about us.

It's about you, students, and whether or not you're actually going to use these things, so that we'll know whether or not we should keep on buying them for you.

So, in fact, it is about us, and our ever-tightening budgets.

Speaking from my workplace, we're hoping to get some better usage statistics in future, as the collection skews more electronic, to help us decide whether or not it's really the way to go. From talking to students, I get the impression that they sort of like the idea of having lots of textbooks available online, but I'm not sure they actually use them all that often.

One major hold-up, obviously, is that we need to get the right books online. Our students seem to tend (as most students, I expect) to read what they need to read for class, or what they're looking at for a specific project, and if something's not assigned, odds are it's not going to get a whole lot of use.

And if the text that's assigned in a class isn't available online, or is available only for individual rather than institutional use, then that's one class whose members are not going to enjoy the convenience of e-books, however much we enthuse about them.

We're sort of assuming that eventually everything will be available as an e-book, but that's some years down the line. If it develops that students genuinely dislike e-books, it may be even more years down the line than anticipated. (Although at some point if schools start saying "look, this is the only format we have, so like it or lump it, you fresh-faced dinosaurs," what are students really going to do? Not that I'm advocating this, given the range of complex emotions I myself feel with regard to e-books.)

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Time for Unification?

So the library where I work has close to 2,300 electronic textbooks (and another couple of thousand we just got in a couple of packages and are super excited about getting to process).

They're all highlighted on a special e-books page of our website, where they're searchable by title, author, year, or by which of our 120-ish subject pages we've stuck them on.

They're also accessible through the library catalog, of course. And we know that multiple points of access makes an item's existence extra awesome, so I want them in the catalog, but I've begun to think that at some point it no longer makes as much sense to separate out electronic books on their own page.

It makes sense if there aren't that many of them, and you want to say, "hey, look, this is a special thing we have: e-books! Check 'em out! Or rather, you don't have to check 'em out, because they don't circulate! Hahahahaha! Librarian jokes are the best!"

OK, maybe we really only wanted to say the first part, since everyone already thinks we're huge geeks. But anyway, if e-books (and e-journals) are sort of a special feature, then yes, you want to point to them specially.

And a few hundred electronic titles, categorized by subject, makes sense. You can even browse through a list like that to see if anything looks good--it's a way to differentiate a certain type of resource so someone could take a quick look and see if there was anything on their topic available online.

Lately, though, e-books are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the collection, and I'm not sure this model still works. We have around 25,000 titles on paper, so e-books are already more than 10% of the collection, once we finish adding the mountain of new titles. An even larger percentage of newer titles will be electronic, since some of our print volumes are very old (some kept intentionally for historical interest, and some just still on the shelves because we haven't had time to do a good weed in a while).

And 5,000 titles, even broken down by subject or alphabetically, are not really that easy to browse on a web screen, so it becomes less likely that someone will be immediately able to see what they're looking for by consulting the e-books page. Ease of access, as well as advertising, was presumably the initial purpose of the separate e-books page, and I'm not sure how well it fulfills the former purpose anymore.

I'm thinking that at some point we might want to simply eliminate the "e-books" page, which is already becoming unwieldy, and let e-books, like all our books, just be accessed through the catalog. (This is even more true of journals, where we have almost no current print subscriptions and an enormous, bloated list of titles on the e-journals page, but I'll think about journals another time.)

The problem, I guess, is that people might not find them there, but that's no more a problem for e-books than for any books, as far as I can tell.

Again, it comes down to a question of whether these are a special resource we offer, that needs special advertising, or just a resource we offer, that gets the same attention as any other. And the way things are going with our collection development, I don't really think e-books are a big special deal anymore. Everyone has them, people know about them, they're just one of the ways we try to make stuff people might want to use available for them.

I'm only partly having these thoughts because it would save Tech Services a lot of time if we didn't have to put all these titles on the web page as well as in the catalog.

I swear, it's also a sincere question about how we can best serve our core audience!

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