After typing the book title into the main Google search box, the Knowledge Panel displays results for buying the book with local library e-holdings below that. When the user clicks on their local library, they are taken to the Overdrive results page where they can either place the book on hold or check it out. If the book is not available as an e-book at any local libraries, the message “no results found near you. Please try another location” appears.

Google has not disclosed how it’s pulling the Overdrive information, but a recent Library Journal article said, “It appears that OverDrive has enabled Google’s web crawlers to access basic metadata regarding the content that the company has licensed to its customers, and Google is using geolocation information from IP addresses and mobile devices to refine individual user results, similar to the way Google would refine searches for restaurants or events.”

Overdrive began partnering with libraries in 2003 and now has 36,000 partners around the world. My library (Indianapolis Public Library) is one of the many libraries with the Overdrive platform and we’ve been offering e-books for many years. However, I still surprise patrons every day with the news that they can read e-books for free from the library! If we’re still working on publicizing our e-books to patrons who walk into the library, reaching those who don’t physically use the library is an even greater challenge. This new partnership with Google may just meet those reluctant library users right where they’re at.

Although some testers have argued that the search isn’t perfect (sometimes Google incorrectly shows an e-book isn’t available at the library and, of course, Google doesn’t display holdings from other e-book platforms), I would argue that the small imperfections aren’t much of a detriment to the overall goal of promoting library collections. Power library e-book users will already know to go directly to their library catalogs, and those unaware of the library’s e-book holdings will still see that their local library does indeed have e-books and will hopefully investigate further.

References

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2017/10/technology/ebooks/google-directs-users-library-ebooks-overdrive/

http://blogs.overdrive.com/front-page-library-news/2017/10/26/google-overdrive-connecting-readers-e-books-local-library/

https://company.overdrive.com/company/who-we-are/history/

The post Google Now Directs Users to Library Ebooks first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

But it is the bookstores that truly intrigue me. Many librarians knew that the proclamations of the death of the book were premature. We now have statistics to support that e-book sales are trending down while print book sales are trending up.

Speculation for why Amazon is opening actual stores ranges from the recognition that people like physical books to the stores being fronts for other, more technological services. I would think it is likely that both are playing a role, as well as Amazon’s ability to take advantage of consumers’ desire to instantly possess an item.

What is most interesting is what this means for libraries. If even Amazon has gone physical, then—for the moment—libraries have a solid, tangible place to argue the notion that everything is and forever will be electronic. But skeptics can still point to disappearing independent booksellers and other struggling large chains to support of the bookstore-as-front-for-technology theory.

Still, if Amazon Books is, in large part, a way to attract people to support their devices, streaming media, and cloud technology, libraries can still point to this retail giant as justification for our existence. After all, libraries also now provide a wide array of devices and technology access.

Maybe the true point here is that there is a time and a place for everything. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. There is a place for the e-reader and a place for printed book, a place for online retail and brick-and-mortar stores. Libraries have always been and will remain places that are more than mere repositories for printed materials. What is old becomes new, what is new becomes old, and the world spirals.

The post Amazon Books – Another Turn in the Spiral? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

What about e-books? What if a student needs a study from a professor in the Washington State MBA program but attends Arizona State University? Can the library get it then? Ryan Litsey, an associate librarian who is head of Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery at Texas Tech and recipient of the Library Journal’s Mover and Shaker award for 2016, thought the answer should be yes. With his partner, Kenny Ketner, the library’s software development manager, he developed the first and only library developed method to loan e-books through an interlibrary loan program.

It’s called Occam’s Reader, and it’s being used by twenty-four libraries across the country by over 600,000 users (seventy more universities are projected to join the program by the end of the year). Occam’s Reader has access to collections from multiple publishers and universities, which equals millions of titles.

The name comes from the Occam’s razor principle: simplified, it says the simplest solution is usually the best. Litsey’s and Ketner’s goal was to develop the simplest system possible for libraries to share e-books with each other, and with the pilot program complete and version 2.0 ready to launch, that goal has been achieved.

“When students are doing their research and writing their papers and they come across a citation or want to look at a book that they want to use for a paper that we don’t have,” Litsey said, “they can now make a request for the electronic book through the Occam’s Reader program.”

This is great tool for the university libraries that use it. What about public libraries?

As libraries and publishers come to agreements and hopefully move toward an ownership model for e-books for preservation as well as library cost reduction, an electronic interlibrary loan program makes sense. Occam’s Reader provides a model that can be expanded to include non-academic libraries.

E-book Borrows are on the Rise

Why do we need this program? Because despite belief to the contrary, OverDrive numbers released in April of 2016 show several trends in relation to e-books.

• Checkouts through OverDrive are on track to grow 30–40 percent for 2016 over the record levels achieved for 2015.
• With a 30 percent increase in children’s digital books borrowed (Q1 2016 vs. Q1 2015), younger readers are increasingly embracing public library children’s and YA e-book collections.
• Borrowing of self-published e-books is increasing—with 40 percent more titles being borrowed (Q1 2016 vs. Q1 2015).
• Publishers are offering new access models that increase availability for readers.

As children and teens become more engaged with e-books, from enhanced digital copies that include audio and video links to comics that are now available electronically, digital borrows will continue to soar.

Loans Save Money

Library budgets in many areas are shrinking or staying static, while demands on libraries to provide public Internet, act as community centers, offer makerspaces, and still curate both physical and e-books and promote literacy acquisition of new titles is often challenging. The process must be very selective.

An interlibrary loan program allows that selection process to be even more specific. Libraries within the program could work together, especially in the area of academic and nonfiction publications, to offer a wider variety of titles without each library having to purchase its own copy.

How does this program benefit students and library patrons? Not only does an e-book interlibrary program save libraries money and expand what they can offer, but it benefits patrons in amazing ways.

E-Library Loans Enhance Distance Learning

In 2013, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCS) were thought to be the coming revolution in education. While they have been much maligned, the growth of online education and distance learning has been astounding.

One of the big advantages is the ability to take classes anywhere. Research can be done via the Internet, but what about obtaining specific books and academic sources? Let’s say a student enrolled in the already revolutionary Global Freshman Academy offered online by Arizona State University and needs to look at a white paper on the Drake equation from a professor at Texas Tech (Both universities are current participants in the program). Occam’s Reader offers distance learners access to such resources wherever they happen to be taking the course, from their couch to a corner table at Starbucks.

E-loans will not replace the in-person research that is sometimes necessary, but it will make more research possible from almost anywhere.

E-Library Loans Enable Teleworkers

Business is being transformed in a number of ways. Many people can work from home or nearly anywhere. One of the reasons is that more data is available faster.

More and more companies are hiring teleworkers and freelancers, allowing their employees to work remotely. E-library loans add to the data available remotely, making this kind of work possible for even more people.

Distance learning and telework are on the rise, and there is little question e-books are here to stay. They will continue be a growing and changing part of libraries. Occam’s Reader promises libraries can continue to work together to provide knowledge and education to their communities. Patrons will continue to count on libraries as a place to find that knowledge, and count on library staff to be able to help them find it.

In that simple solution, we are all winners.

The post Occam’s Reader: Interlibrary E-book Loans first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Apple was initially sued by the Department of Justice back in April 2012 for fixing e-book prices. At the time, the publishers were also sued but settled out of court. The case revolved around the “agency” model, which Apple used in its iBookstore offerings. This model required e-book authors and sellers to hand over a 30 percent cut of each sale. It also allowed publishers, rather than the vendors, to set the prices.[2]

Libraries across the country struggle to meet exponential patron demand for e-books by offering digital collections. However, the ability to lend digital material has been limited by the publishers offering the content. Now that the Apple e-books case has shown the “agency” model is anticompetitive, an opportunity is open for libraries to show the negative impacts of library e-book pricing practices on public access. Attention should be brought to the Justice Department to show that publishers are engaging in questionable practices involving the licensing of digital content to libraries.

While the e-book format is relatively new to the library world, the situation between publishers and libraries is not. Rather, antitrust claims against publishers have been a perennial issue. The current situation parallels the 1960s when the US Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee investigated claims by libraries that publishers had conspired with wholesalers to inflate library prices for children’s books. Publishers would be wise to remember that libraries are a major player in the publishing world, expending $1.22 billion on total collection expenditures annually,[3] and find ways that they can include them in the role of content distribution rather than trying to cut them out.

Libraries need a champion to take on their cause at the federal level. The current practices of publishers suggest a viable case could be made using the same antitrust regulations that were cited in the 1960s. Publishers are alleged to be conspiring to control market pricing. The agency model of pricing cited in the US Justice Department case is similar to the net pricing structure of the 1960s. An argument can also be made that the library pricing structures of e-book publishers, with expiring content and inflated prices, are price discrimination against libraries.

In 1966, librarian Marvin Scilken led the charge against children’s book publishers after learning publishers were charging libraries under a different pricing structure than other consumers. Scilken contacted the Federal Trade Commission and members of the US Senate in an attempt to bring the situation into the public eye. Scilken’s efforts brought the issue before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly in September 1966.

The words of Scilken echo today, “Libraries must be wary of our suppliers. Librarians should also be wary of books sold primarily to libraries for they tend to be overpriced. Every time publishers ‘discover’ libraries they tend to put their hands in the taxpayers’ pockets.”[4] It is time for libraries to influence more strongly federal law and policymaking for digital content and be more selective when spending taxpayer dollars on licensed materials.

References

[1] Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, “Apple gets smacked by $450-million e-book price-fixing fine,” ZDNet, March 7, 2016.

[2] Zack Whittaker, “DoJ sues Apple, publishers in e-book price fixing antitrust suit,” ZDNet, April 11, 2012.

[3] “Marketing to Libraries,” American Library Association, November 2015.

[4] Marvin H. Scilken, “Scilken on publishers,” Library Journal 116, no. 7 (1991): 8.

Further Reading

U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary, Alleged price fixing of library books: Hearings before the Committee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 1966.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act, U.S. Code 15 (1890), § 1 et seq.

Joseph Deitch, “A conversation with Marvin Scilken,” in Getting libraries the credit they deserve: A festschrift in honor of Marvin H. Scilken, ed. Lorien Roy and Antony Cherian (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002) 45–58.

Lawrence Hurley, “Supreme Court rejects Apple e-books price-fixing appeal,” Reuters, March 7, 2016.

Adam Liptak and Vindu Goel, “Supreme Court Declines to Hear Apple’s Appeal in E-Book Pricing Case,” New York Times, March 7, 2016.

Lyle Denniston, “Apple loses case on its e-book selling tactics,” Scotus Blog, March 7, 2016.

Bobbi Newman, “Should Libraries Get Out of the eBook Business?” Librarian by Day [blog], March 7, 2012.

The post Apple E-book Verdict an Opportunity for Libraries first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Data Based Decisions
Data-based decisions are increasingly becoming the norm for website owners, companies, and government agencies. Data gathered from online customers has driven the success of Amazon’s first physical bookstore, which I learned a lot about by paying them a visit. The data these decisions are based on is often known as big data, or sets of data too large to be handled effectively by humans or a computer with normal capabilities. In the library world, these decisions are similar to the data based decisions of other businesses as they involve inventory, product development and participation (like Self-E), human resource and hiring, and image management.

Do we stock more e-books for electronic check out? Do we opt into Overdrive and Self-E? How many digital librarians do we need to have, hire, or train? What is our library to the community? Are we a digital center, with maker labs and other activities, or are we an archive for paper books and nothing more? It is vital when making these decisions that we have all of the facts, not just those presented by certain portions of the publishing industry. Quarter after quarter, AAP reports that e-book sales are declining, while Amazon and other sites report they are on the rise. What’s the real story?

The Sources of the AAP Information
The AAP gets its sales figures from the 1,200 largest publishers, and continues to report declining e-book sales.[1] This sounds like a pretty impressive big data sample, and it is. It’s also much easier to examine that segment of the market rather than looking at a broader picture. The sales numbers come straight from the publishers, right? But those sales figures, limited to just the largest publishers, leave out most small presses and indie authors, and they also counts sales of physical books to bookstores rather than those sold to consumers. What’s the difference?

Well, if a book sits on the shelf too long at Barnes & Noble, for instance, it moves first to the bargain table. Why? Because it costs more to ship it back to the publisher than it does to sell it at a discount, since they only get a partial refund of the cover price. Even if it is returned to the publisher, or a distributor, those books are pulped and recycled rather than shelved in a warehouse for future sales that may never come. It’s just a cheaper option. So the number of physical books is somewhat artificially inflated, as not all of those books make it to the hands of readers. E-books, however, are a different story. Once ordered, they are immediately in the hands of the reader, or at least at their disposal on their device.

What They Left Out
The information they don’t have comes from sites who do not report e-book sales, and the hundreds of indie publishers, from small press to single authors, who also do not report sales numbers to the AAP. And that is a ton of books.

A website called Author Earnings, the brainchild of Hugh Howey and his partner, known simply as Data Guy, has been gathering sales data for well over a year now. In March, in a presentation at Digital Book World (DBW), their data and methods were presented in an eye-opening keynote address. The data offers a much broader picture of the industry.

Basically, there are five major retailers of e-books in the United States: Amazon, the largest; Apple Books; Barnes & Noble (Nook); Kobo US; and the now nearly obsolete Google Play Books. A large majority of the books sold on those sites are not reported to the AAP, as they are published through non-traditional (read: small press or indie author) methods. The share of the market these books have is growing all the time.

Fig. 1: 95% of US ebook sales go through only 5 major online retailers [2]

Pricing: In the pricing war between publishers and libraries, a more complete picture shows the prices of books actually selling, and can certainly give libraries leverage toward fairer pricing, and even toward moving to an ownership model.

Inventory: What genre are people reading and buying; i.e., what genre are they likely to borrow? This is important because the overall picture shows different trends than the partial picture the AAP numbers present.

Personnel: If e-books are indeed on the rise, and becoming the norm, more digital librarians are needed, or at least librarians who are tech-savvy. This seems logical anyway, as more libraries are becoming community gathering places, educational and making centers, and sources for Internet access for those who do not have it at home.

Image Management: My wife’s grandfather loves his local library. He most often visits it on his iPad. He’s reading e-books borrowed through their digital library system. The library fosters the image that is it more than just a physical building, but a place that extends to the Internet.

All of these things make an assumption: e-books are on the rise and here to stay. What about the APA numbers and the way they conflict with those of Amazon and other retailers?

Fig. 2: What does an incomplete picture of the market tell us about consumer spending by genre… [3]

Fig. 4: …versus what a complete image of the market says? [4]

This does not mean paper books are dead. Far from it. In nonfiction and reference, paper books still dominate the market. While e-textbooks are popular to some, the novelty has worn off in favor of note taking and highlighting in the margins, to the point where Barnes & Noble is closing its e-textbook division, Yuzu.[5]

What this Means to Libraries
The library will never be a solely digital space, yet it’s unlikely libraries will ever go back to being a solely physical place either. Both digital and physical collections are important, even though they make collections management much more complicated.

The key is to have a realistic view of the publishing world. Digital media experts often say “everything is a concept” and creative thinking and innovation are just as important to the library industry as knowledge and analysis. This intuitive and imaginative approach is critical in what Daniel Pink calls the “Conceptual Age” in his book, A Whole New Mind.[6]

Programs like Self-E, the Open eBooks app, and free digital libraries set up by different states will all have an impact on how and where the library spends its budget.

The key may be to realize that using simply traditional sources of information is what has become a clearly nontraditional industry may be a mistake, and looking at the whole picture offers benefits not otherwise available.

References:

[1] Association of American Publishers, “AAP StatShot: Publisher Net Revenue from Book Sales Declines 2.0% Through Third Quarter of 2015,” Association of American Publishers Newsroom [website], January 27, 2016.

[2] Data Guy, “Outside the Data Box: a fresh look at ebook sales” (2016 Digital Book World Keynote Presentation), March 11, 2016.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Michael Kozlowski, “Barnes and Noble Closes Digital Textbook Division,” Good E-Reader, March 8, 2016.

[6] Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005).

Resources:

Making Data-Based Decisions

Author Earnings

Digital Book World

Open eBooks

Further Reading:

E-book Trends Flattening, Paper Books Holding Their Own

A Visit to Amazon Books

The post The Myth of the E-book Plateau first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Times have changed. E-books, something many of us never thought were possible, are now commonplace, and many checkouts from the library never even involve a visit to the stacks.

Not everyone has access to them though, especially families who are poor and cannot afford to pay for content, even if they have a smartphone or computer. Checking out e-books from libraries is one option, but at the end of February, the White House released a new app: Open eBooks.

Getting started with the app is easy. Educators can sign up at openebooks.net and receive codes for their students. The students can then use those codes to download the app to a smartphone or tablet, and then they will have access to the e-book collection.

“Clearly, the Open eBooks program can provide another digital gateway for millions of children to develop a love of reading,” says Sari Feldman, President of the American Library Association, “and what smarter investment in our future could we make than getting books in front of kids?”

The White House has been slow to adapt, but is rapidly catching up in the digital realm. Some developments include the first Chief Data Scientist in US history leading the white house into the world of big data, as well as the Department of Education launching an initiative called #GoOpen and encouraging educators and their districts to use openly licensed educational resources (OERs).

Open eBooks is different from those programs in that it deals primarily with copyrighted material. It does, however, follow a similar pattern from the White House: gather data and make sure it is publically available, use OERs to enhance education, and make e-books free to those who cannot afford them.

The app involves partnerships with ten major publishers, who provide the texts, with the Digital Public Library of America, First Book, The New York Public Library, digital books distributor Baker & Taylor and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

What do you think? How will Open eBooks affect libraries and classrooms? Tell me your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Open eBooks: A Digital Gateway first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

When I was growing up in Toledo, Ohio, there was a local bookstore in the Westgate Shopping Plaza named Thackeray’s. It was a decently sized store with helpful staff and a great sense of community. With the advent of superstores like Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million, coupled with the birth of Amazon, Thackeray’s could no longer compete and eventually closed its doors forever in early 2005, after being open for twenty-two years. Where Thackeray’s once stood is now a Costco; the move felt like the business equivalent of “paving paradise to put up a parking lot.” While Thackeray’s, and many stores like it, mainly sold new books, the corporate giant of Amazon also eviscerated most of the local used bookstores.

However, the electronic “evolution” seems to be changing as of late, insofar as recent articles are suggesting a slowing of e-book sales and upswing of independent bookstores – new and used alike. The question then becomes, “What do we attribute this paper book revival to?” Many believe that it is the personal touch of an independent, local bookstore that people are responding to. As much as there is an “online community,” many just simply prefer an in-person version. Having a destination for the day, meeting up with friends to drink coffee and peruse the bookshelves together, having an actual person to discuss a book recommendation with instead of relying on an Amazon algorithm – these are some of the varied reasons why people are coming full circle and returning to the local bookstore. Many people also feel a sense of obligation to support their local business owners. Small Business Saturday is an American shopping holiday held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was initiated in 2010 and encourages shoppers to support their small and local businesses.

As stated earlier, I believe there is plenty of room for both print and e-books. In college, I would often use Amazon or the library to get my textbooks because, well, textbooks are very expensive. However, if I want to pick up some leisure reading material, I will make a trip to Half Price Books to pick up something for myself, or a a Hardy Boys book for my eight-year-old nephew.

Share with us which you prefer – print, electronic, or a mix of both?

Further reading:

Amy X. Wang, Quartz, 12/19/15 http://qz.com/578025/against-all-odds-print-books-are-on-the-rise-again-in-the-us/

Leonard, Andrew. “The independent bookstore lives! Why Amazon’s conquest will never be complete.” Salon (April 4, 2014). Web. http://www.salon.com/2014/04/04/the_independent_bookstore_lives_why_amazons_conquest_will_never_be_complete/

Rosenwald, Michael S. “In the age of Amazon, used bookstores are making an unlikely comeback.” The Washington Post (December 26, 2015). Web. http://wapo.st/22tqbiP. https://www.smallbusinesssaturdayuk.com/about-us

The post Paper Books Making a Comeback first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Times They Are (Still) a-Changing’

Libraries of previous eras all had their dilemmas when it came to collection building. Comic books, music and movies, and potentially dangerous books have all been controversies de jour for your local library. More recently, whether or not to provide Internet access was an issue, and we still struggle with the best ways to carry e-books.

As long as libraries have the space and funding, they tend to include whatever this year’s controversial material is. Many are making that choice with self-published books. Though there are several practical issues such as funding (discussed recently by Public Library Online’s own Troy Lambert), this article is concerned with inclusion criteria for those libraries that choose to bring self-published materials into their space.

Writing Strong Policy

Including self-published works comes with many decisions, such as whether to include printed books, e-books, or both. The library will have to maintain a stringent inclusion policy that fits into their larger policies for selection of new material. This will make it easier to defend against people who say self-published books don’t belong, and also help deter authors of self-published materials the library doesn’t want.

Recognition of the Material

One easy way to add credibility to self-published books is to only accept those that are already recognized; for example, accepting e-books that are part of a publisher or e-book platform. If a patron can get the item on their Kindle, the library has less reason to say “no.” Contrariwise, if the library has an arrangement set up so that all books they adopt into their collection will also become available on an e-reading platform, it raises the stakes on inclusion decisions, forcing the library to be pickier.

Other criteria for determining the legitimacy of a self-published book can be even more simple. Is the author prominent in the local community? How many other books have they published? Is there a built-in readership for this book? These factors can all play into the selection process.

Vetting the Quality

A library may need to take extra steps to assess the quality of self-published books. Often genre books, such as romances or mysteries, are included solely on the basis of publisher recommendation or author. Without these pre-arranged tools, libraries may need to create a formal submission and acceptance policy that goes above and beyond their normal criteria, as well as task an employee or committee with making recommendations.

Is There a Reason We Shouldn’t Have Them?

Self-publishing has become a big industry. Certainly, it’s a way to provide a community access to the works of local authors, but there’s also a growing list of self-published authors who have attained success and popularity. Let’s not forget that Fifty Shades of Grey was originally self-published, and though it has had its own controversies in libraries, the vast majority of public libraries carry it and it circulates extremely well. Whether or not libraries choose to have a wide selection of self-published material and how far they wish to take their collections (consider Taken by the T-Rex and the other very NSFW Christie Sims writings , which have attained enough popularity to be available through BarnesAndNoble.com, be reviewed on Goodreads and are technically in the same genre as Fifty Shades) is something each library system will have to answer for itself. Soon, the question may not be whether your library should carry self-published material, but simply if, like Fifty Shades of Grey, it has the shelf space and can order them from Baker & Taylor.

If the goal of a library is to provide people access to information and books, and if self-published books fits all the criteria for inclusion, then the library should strongly consider carrying them. However, as much as we should have open policies relating to the items we accept, we also must be willing to do the work of curating our self-published collections. Space is limited, and every book we put on a shelf is a choice we’re making about how to use the space we have. If self-published books are coming to our libraries (and, really, why not?) we should be careful and considered in the way we choose them.

Sources:

Lambert, Troy. “Building a Bypass: Libraries, Amazon, and Indie Authors.” Public Libraries Online. December 08, 2015. Web. Accessed January 07, 2015.

Landgraf, Greg. “Solving the Self-Published Puzzle” American Libraries. October 30, 2015. Web. Accessed January 07, 2015.

Schwartz, Meredith. “Florida County Pulls Fifty Shades of Grey From Shelves.” May 11, 2012.,Web. Accessed January 07, 2015

The post Policies for Library Inclusion of Self-Published Works first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Open eBooks Initiatives is set to “make over $250 million in popular e-books from major publishers available, for free, to children from low-income families.” This will be accomplished through an app designed by New York Public Library, Digital Public Library of America, and First Book and funded by IMLS. The ConnecteED Library Challenge steps in by collaborating with 30 communities to ensure that every student has a library card and will be able to access these e-books.[1]

Not connected with this initiative, but a very timely piece, is Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Op-Ed “The Power of Hope is Real.” Nicholas Kristof is a journalist who brings awareness to social injustice, global poverty, and economic struggles on a global and national landscape. He and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, authored Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide and, more recently, A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity. His latest addition to his regular column discusses hope and begs the question: “Could hopelessness and stress create a ‘poverty trap’ — abroad or here in the U.S. — in which people surrender to a kind of whirlpool of despair?”[2] Bringing in randomized studies and statistics, Kristof explains that one’s motivation and outlook on life can dramatically brighten when given a ray of sunshine (hope).

As librarians, we can all agree that a major perk of the job is helping people by introducing them to resources, websites, and books that can change their day, week, month, or even their life. Personally, as the Business Liaison Librarian, one of my favorite moments is when I teach a job seekers course to participants who feel overwhelmed and disgruntled with the job search process. However, after class they are now equipped with new search strategies, effective databases, and optimism. I know that you have similar stories too.

It’s in this spirit that the White House proposal with IMLS, Open eBooks Initiatives, and ConnectED Library Challenge is truly valuable. The inspiration, enthusiasm, and hope for the future that these students (and their parents) experience when they are introduced to a new world of literacy, education, and opportunity are what really matter.

Sources:

[1] “President Obama Announces Open EBooks and ConnectED Library Challenge.” Press Releases. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 May 2015.

[2] Kristof, Nicholas. “The Power of Hope Is Real.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 20 May 2015. Web. 21 May 2015.

The post Downloading Hope: Providing E-Books to Low-Income Students first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The founder of Smashwords (Mark Coker) graduated from Los Gatos High School, making it the logical choice to begin a new chapter of libraries and e-publishing joining forces. Through a variety of connections, Henry Bankhead, the current acting director of Los Gatos Library, got in touch with high school English teacher, Tonya McQuade. They worked together to create an opportunity for students to not only write their own material but also be a part of the process of getting it published.  Thanks to a grant from the Pacific Library Partnership, two mobile labs were used to create these books. Each lab included 10 iPads, 1 MacBook air, a charging station, and Microsoft Office for all of the devices. The lab components were used mostly for creating art work but also for some of the actual writing.

“Last year’s students were the first to try this, and they really enjoyed being able to see their own work published,” says McQuade. Even more, the students enjoyed being able to be part of the process of seeing the whole book come together, from learning about self-publishing from Coker and Bankhead; to choosing a title and cover design; selecting poems to include and organizing them into sections; adding artwork; marketing the book, promoting the book through social media and news campaigns; and then finally, having our book launch party at the Los Gatos Library. There, several students read their poems for an audience of parents and students, as well as explained the process used to create the book. What’s more, on the day of the launch party, our book went to number one on Amazon’s Poetry Book List! The students were also eager to help out their freshmen class by contributing the funds raised to help support upcoming class activities.”

And the positive reactions didn’t stop with the teacher. A number of students during that first year learned not only writing and editing skills, but learned how the library can be an excellent resource. Aididh Finlayson said, “I’ve always loved the library, and this made me feel like the library was really trying to support our educational endeavors.” Another student added, “I do feel more connected to the library now.”  The success of the program is best summed up by Nitin Srivivasan, a sophomore who was in Ms. McQuade’s ninth grade English class last year. “Because of this project, I have developed a greater appreciation for literature in general, and I have grown more connected the Los Gatos Public Library.”

The tangible results of this collaborative work included the poetry anthology Windows to the Teenage Soul (available on Overdrive), as well as two short story collections, Stories to Remember and Collection of Inspirational Teenage Stories, both available on Smashwords. Due to the success of this project, Bankhead and crew will be working with the next class of ninth grade English students this year.

The post Teaching Teens Self-Publishing @ the Library first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Spun on the surface as harmless ,the promotional announcement is delicately peppered with subtly positive adjectival poetics like “empower,” “crafted,” “unique,” “opportunity.” What first reads like a pat-on-the-back concession made by Amazon (“you won little guys – we can’t compete with your local touch”) sub-textually can’t help but suggest a more sinister scheme to assert its foot into the door of previously impenetrable outposts. Not least of which is to reach a niche (but loyal) audience who has typically avoided the proprietary megalith in favor of supporting local stores (the “little guy”). The proposal’s eventual goal seems to be to angle that partnership to incrementally steal the customer base and potentially sound the death knell for the store.

Stripped of this subtext, the arrangement sounds simple, and even innocuous, enough. “Amazon’s program offers U.S. retailers two options. As “Booksellers,” an option available to retailers in twenty-four states, they receive Kindles from Amazon at a six-per-cent discount off the suggested retail price and earn a commission of ten per cent on e-book sales in the two years following the sale of a Kindle. As “General Retailers,” available to stores in any state, they profit only from the sale of the device, but obtain it from Amazon at a discount of nine per cent.”

But the thousand sins of Fortunado must not be forgotten. Remember Amazon offering a 5% discount to shoppers who served as price-shopping moles by visiting brick-and-mortar competitors, sending the price to Amazon, then bought it from them instead? Or their cloak-and-dagger supposed attempt at online/offline symbiosis with Borders? Or even the Amazonification of OverDrive—and how it allowed them to get a piece of the library-money pie they might otherwise miss out? Or better yet, maybe OverDrive builds themselves up, Amazon buys them, and inherits their nationwide client base. Stanger hyperboles have come true, and with Amazon there’s a laundry list to be sure. The point is not to confuse simpatico opportunity with aggressively angled risk vs. reward cut-throat business tactics.

Amazon is simply reevaluating the landscape and the food-chain ecosystem minus some of its more recently demised large chain and big box competitors. The bee in their bonnet has always been the independent book stores—those privately owned coffee and curiosity shops that comingle neighborhood niche and artisanal fare with books and electronics. Here, by removing their biggest threat, Amazon realizes they’ve done the little guys a favor. And now that the bigger fish have been fried, they’ve cross haired the indy’s.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon doesn’t view them as a sling-shot wielding David, or even portend they fear an Indy store invoked “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” rise-of-the-little-guy scenario.But the effort behind Amazon Source does indicate a humbling admittance (and jealousy) of sorts. Firstly, independents—and community focused organizations in general—offer something that Amazon cannot; a truly personalized and individualized voice, product, and service—reflecting that, in cinematic melodrama parlance, the “rebel alliance” resistance is working. Secondly, the unique, made-from-scratch services translate to Amazon as a financial threat. For a company centered on growth and influence, this serves as a glaring constituency that has proved difficult to obtain. So, in a way, Amazon Source IS a concession or an olive branch, but they stand far more to gain (in terms of ear-bending influence, marketing opportunities, and eventual customer segment severance and acquisition) than indy’s could ever hope.

But if I’ve learned anything from a seeming lifetime of Lifetime movies and definite lifespan of rom-com jiltings, it’s that your best friend was there all the time. (Meet cute take one: enter the Library as Mr. Darcy to independent bookstores’ Bridget Jones—Wait! No he’s dead. Meet cute take two: enter the Library as any role played by Colin Firth, previously played by Bill Pullman. . . ) In this case, a further extrapolation of this subtext spins Amazon’s admission of what they aren’t and why they care so much about sticking their nose into library or local business’ affairs into the real empowerment effected by Amazon Source—the inverse revelation of what we are and WHY it’s so valuable and important. And it should serve, if libraries haven’t already, as an opportunity for libraries and local indy stores to partner and stop looking at each other as competition. Our patrons and customers see us as coexisting and so should we. Book borrowers also tend to be book buyers and vice versa. Accepting this nourishes a true symbiotic relationship where ideas/instances to collaborate—such as providing book sales at a library author event—are mutually beneficial opportunities to strengthen and support community institutions and businesses at the same time.

(Photo by MorBCN on Flickr, Creative Commons license).

The post Frenemies: An Amazon Story of Courtship first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Trends in Publishing

Two key trends have emerged that will drive the future not only of publishing, but of public librarianship. They are:

1. The rise of e-books. By the end of 2010, Amazon reported that it had sold 115 e-books for each 100 paperbacks, and 3 e-books for each hardback.¹ On October 19, 2011, author Erik Larson told me at a local book talk that his most recent book, In the Garden of Beasts, had sold 500,000 copies––and that fully half of them had been e-book sales. While probably fewer than 20 percent of Americans own an e-book reader (Pew reported a 12 percent number in May 2011, and that number had doubled since November 20102), they read a lot, and every holiday boosts their number. Beyond the steady growth of this market, there is also a compelling economic force: Even best-selling authors typically make only about 10 percent on each sale of a print book. But with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a host of new e-only publishers such as Smashwords and BookBrewer, authors are getting 70 to 90 percent of the sale. (And there is some anecdotal evidence that commercial authors are now getting a higher royalty on sales from e-books than from paper.) E-publishing is attractive not only to established authors (who already have an audience), but new authors with dreams of making a fortune, beholden to no one. Finally, there are also authors who are adopting the Creative Commons license, for whom e-publishing is simply a low cost way to get their message into the world.
2. The rise of self-publishing. In 2004, there were 29,000 self-published titles in the United States. By 2009, that had grown to 766,000––roughly two-and-a-half times the output of commercial publishing. By the end of 2010, there were more than 2.7 million titles.3 Such phenomenal growth presents profound challenges to librarians: How can we stay on top of such a flood of new content? How can we determine what’s good? How can we manage the acquisition and cataloging of even the best? It is the job of the public library to gather, organize, and present to the public the intellectual content of our culture. Yet few public libraries collect any self-published works at all––typically, only the most persistent of local authors, and then, probably on topics of local history. The truth is we really don’t know what’s out there. Wouldn’t now be a good time to start finding out?

The Problems of Outsourcing

Certainly, librarians have heralded the coming of the e-book for a long time. But it wasn’t until the arrival of the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad that the demand really took off. When patrons showed up after last Christmas asking for e-books, there was really only one public library solution: OverDrive.

The good news is that OverDrive gave us a solution when we needed one. It was very much like the model we had followed with periodical databases: We outsourced the content aggregation, indexing, and presentation to a vendor. That made it familiar. But that outsourcing has brought along some troubles, too. I see four of them:

1. Loss of ownership. My library’s current OverDrive contract specifies that if we leave OverDrive, we also leave all of the content we have licensed.
2. Increased costs. While I have not done a title-by-title comparison across the board, I have concluded two things. First, most OverDrive licenses exceed what a consumer would pay for the same title if available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Second, while sometimes e-book prices are lower than the comparable print version, suddenly we have lost a mainstay of library budgets: the discount. My library’s collection budget currently exceeds $3.5 million annually. For that, we negotiate buying discounts up to 45 percent. OverDrive also charges an annual platform fee. Moreover, as with the state of Kansas, OverDrive has shown itself willing to unilaterally demand price increases of up to 700 percent over a four year period.⁴ Then, of course, there’s the HarperCollins notion of charging an additional license fee for materials circulating more than twenty-six times. At this moment in history, e-books, despite the fact that they are cheaper to produce, are relatively far more expensive to “buy.”
3. Confusing user interface. Again like the multiplicity of database vendors, the OverDrive model of e-book provision splinters the user experience. We might have MARC records for OverDrive titles, but the instant patrons selects one, suddenly they are yanked out of our catalog and dropped into a system that looks, feels, and operates very differently. This fragmentation of the user experience makes library use unpredictable, cumbersome, and difficult.
4. No used e-books. This is a twist on the “loss of ownership” issue. The secondary market of print––whether withdrawn from or donated to a library––is huge. Libraries recycle books into communities in many ways: nonprofit organizations, thrift stores, churches, charter schools, overseas charity efforts, overseas troops, and not least, poorer families and students, who pick up books at pennies on the dollar. There are no used e-books. That means fewer books in homes, fewer people getting into the habit of buying books, fewer people discovering authors.

Disruptive Technology

Sometimes print is profoundly disruptive. The first time was the invention of moveable type. The surge of print––mostly of Bibles––directly resulted in a profound challenge to the most powerful institution of the time, the Catholic Church. When people could read the Bible for themselves, they formed their own opinions, sometimes different from those of the parish priest. The rise of literacy is directly related to the secular fall of the church.

A second example is the age of the broadside. At the end of the Colonial period there was an explosion of political writings. People––like Benjamin Franklin––went to the local newspaper printer to print up often anonymous screeds of 8, 16, 32, or 64 pages. That’s where Thomas Paine got his start, and many others. The broadside––the blogs of the day––launched a revolution.

The third example may well be the self-published e-book. It’s fair to wonder which institutional power or powers will fall this time.

There are now at least seven links in the public library chain of distribution from author to reader: author, agent, publisher (which includes acquisition, editing, copyediting, book design, cover design, printing, and marketing), reviewer, distributor, library, and reader. I don’t see how we can do without the first and last of those. But for everyone in between, we had better be able to show that we can add value at a reasonable cost, or the reader will simply step around us. If reviewers can’t keep up with 2.7 million new titles, we’ll need new strategies (see “crowdsourcing collection development” below). If distributors require us to buy materials in proprietary formats (Amazon’s mobi and Baker and Taylor’s Blio), then we will contact publishers directly. If publishers won’t sell to us at all, then we’ll talk to agents. If agents won’t talk to us, we’ll talk to authors––many of whom grew up in libraries and want their works in our institutions. And let’s not forget that most of those 2.7 million titles are from authors who are unattached. To them, the library might become the publisher and the bookseller. But I’ll say more about that below.

My point here is that public libraries don’t have to sit back passively as publishers and distributors unilaterally redefine the terms of our relationship. These commercial entities now comprise less than 12 percent of the market of new content. While not all of that nontraditional content is “good,” some of it may be wonderful. In a time of disruption, do we put our time and money into maintaining the old, or do we leverage our skills and talents into something new, but more vibrant and alive?

Managing Our Own Content

What drives a lot of publishers right now is fear. They saw what happened to the music industry. One file gets out on a peer-to-peer network, and sales disappear. Putting that book file on a secure third-party server (OverDrive, 3M, or other) and licensing its access looked like a way to lock it down. Indeed, licensing looked more profitable than selling. Surely they could make more money charging per view or per year than allowing many readers for one purchase.

Publishers are also extremely wary of Amazon, which has decimated many bookstores, the traditional consumer outlet for publishers. Amazon is driving down the margin of profit, particularly for used books.

It’s also the case that many publishers don’t really understand the value of the library market. Some think we steal sales from them. The truth? We account for about 10 percent of publisher sales⁵ and 40 percent of children’s.⁶ Public libraries account for about $1.8 billion of sales a year. Other studies show that libraries directly promote the publisher’s bottom line.⁷ “Our data show that over 50 percent of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library,” said Library Journal executive editor Rebecca Miller.⁸

When librarians thought of an e-book on their catalogs, they saw the possibility of instant gratification. An electronic file doesn’t have the limitations of physical items. They imagined being able to satisfy every single demand for a new book simultaneously. We could replace the market of scarcity with a market of abundance.

But that won’t work. Publishers can’t stay in business if they sell one copy to institutions that used to buy hundreds. And authors can’t make a living––without whom we have no content at all.

I was myself content to think that some new licensing model might be in order until I spoke with a friend and colleague, Joseph Sanchez, then the director of the Red Rocks Community College, and now associated with the University of Colorado Denver. “If we maintain the existing model ––one user at a time––then what does a publisher have to be afraid of?”⁹ It’s true that the file doesn’t “wear out.” But most library materials aren’t discarded because of condition; they’re discarded because they are no longer in demand. Our patrons mostly want what’s new.

The more I thought about that, the more brilliant I found it. This is a case where the existing model––libraries buying at discount, managing the content ourselves, “checking it out” to one patron at a time, buying multiple copies to meet demonstrated demand––translates very well into the e-publishing world.
So I asked Monique Sendze, my associate director of information technology, to investigate a method of circulating digital rights management (DRM)-protected content. Her article, “The E-Book Experiment,” details the infrastructure she has now built (see page 34).

In brief, that e-content management system includes the following components and features:

• A Vufind (open source) discovery front end. Vufind integrates searching, displaying, recommending, ranking, reviewing, and delivering the content to a private cloud. There is one user experience, for print or digital content.
• An HTML5-based online e-reader for all e-book content (and another “browser” for audio content). This software remembers where you are in a book, allowing you to read it across multiple browser-enabled devices. All you need to do is log into your account.
• Free content (Project Gutenberg, public domain, Creative Commons) sits on a MYSQL server. It can be downloaded freely. But it too is in the catalog.
• DRM-protected content lives on an Adobe Content Server (ACS). This industry standard solution is used and understood by many publishers. It’s what OverDrive and 3M use. It controls the download of e-pub files to supported devices. To my knowledge, only the Internet Archive and the Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries (DCL) have adopted ACS for use in a library setting. That should change.
• Visual display on the library catalog, a large screen LCD powerwall, and a mobile application. One of the biggest questions in the twenty-first century will be how do people find the book they’re looking for? Libraries are a big answer to that. As much as 80 percent of our adult circulation is driven by displays. Less than 20 percent is driven by catalog searches. It’s reasonable to think that a similar pattern might be true of e-books. This is our solution to the sociability and serendipity of browsing––touchscreen displays based either on community use (popularity, ranking, newness) or private use (your own reading history on a mobile app).
• A link to purchase. In an effort to demonstrate our value to publishers and authors, we’re experimenting with inserting either generic links (to Tattered Cover, our amazing local independent bookstore or Amazon) or specific links (to an author or distributor website) for titles. That way, if the patron sees that an item is on hold and doesn’t want to wait, or wants to buy something he or she enjoyed, they just click through. We started tracking this recently. Between October 20 and October 31, 2011, there were 653 click-throughs, about evenly split between the independent bookstore and Amazon.
• Building this infrastructure took about a year, and we’re still tweaking it. But it works. It allows us to take what was successful under an old paradigm (the value of discount-based ownership, integration of content, and fair payment to publisher and author) and incorporate modern elements (industry standard copyright protection, full-text indexing of digital content, secure cloud-based access,) that give it immediate new life.

I have to ask, as Sanchez asked me, “Why would a publisher object to that? It’s what we’ve been doing for over 100 years!”

Partnerships

Now all we need are people willing and able to sell to us. So far, it hasn’t been difficult to find them. First, we approached the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. Their members produce many fine books––many of which hadn’t wound up in our libraries. This reveals the myopic focus of many libraries on just the Big Six publishers. Independents were eager to break into a new market, and intrigued by the experiment of preparing their best––EVVY award winners, in this case––for e-publication.

We learned a lot from this early partnership. Among our lessons were:

• A lot of publishers are still trying to figure out how to produce a clean and consistent EPUB file. A lot of them had to be sold on EPUB as a format: many knew how to do PDF files (which flow poorly on e-reader devices), or the Amazon mobi format. But EPUB, we told them, was the wave of the future––an open standard.
• A lot of new companies are springing up to help publishers produce such files.
• We needed to set up two kinds of upload options: single and batch.
• We need to think through cataloging workflow.
• Amazon influences even small publisher pricing, driving it down. The Amazon price is the lowest price; if a publisher sells their title at a discount to libraries, Amazon will lower their own price to match.
• We needed to generate a strong PR buzz for every new publisher that signed up with us. At this point, no one model has settled down or been generally adopted. If we want our model––library-owned and managed content––to win, then we have to promote it.
• We needed to think through the terms. Was it necessary to do a complex contract with each publisher, or could we simply hold to some general principles (one person uses it at a time, we give you a link through, etc.)?

Since then, we’ve formed agreements with reference publisher Gale/Cengage. They get it. Without any kind of contract, they simply provided MARC records and files for the titles we’d already purchased. And here we made another discovery: Ownership and integration of files meant that we now had federated searching. We’ve been doing some experiments with full-text indexing and realized that it gave us the ability not only to solve some cataloging workflow problems, but to far more tightly knit together a variety of resources.

We were particularly excited to sign children’s publisher Lerner––and to add interactive children’s books to our growing collection.

We have recently signed an agreement with the Independent Publishers Group, a coalition of some seven hundred publishers. We are in discussions with many others, including some cautious but interested talks with HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. One particularly interesting discussion was with the faculty of a local University of Phoenix campus. They’d like to contribute some Creative Commons textbooks for their students.

These days, every trip to a conference involves a visit to exhibitors asking a simple question: Will you sell us your e-books? I believe, as time goes by, more of them will. And those that do will get a larger percentage of our budget.

Library as Publisher

We realized that, after installing and configuring our new system, we are now in the position of owning not just a distribution platform. We could ourselves be publishers. To that end, we’ve been talking to some local historians and film producers to investigate what other content we might gather and disseminate.

Our library has more than two million physical visitors each year, and another two million virtual visitors. All of them are looking for books, movies, and music.
There are many ways we could start a conversation with them, for example, inviting them:

• to help us crowdsource collection development (a possible experiment where we’ll take anything, but we only keep what our community uses and ranks well);
• to help others write better (by working as copyeditors or indexers, for instance);
• to contribute cover art;
• to conduct and contribute interviews of local people;
• to attend, or deliver a workshop on writing quality works; or
• to serve as citizen journalists, attending meetings, posting reports, and/or ranking the writing of others.

First the West, Then the Rest

For the time being, DCL will run a mixed-digital environment. That is, what our patrons want, and can only be leased, we will lease. But we will give preference to 3M over OverDrive, because 3M explicitly states that we own the titles. And we will give preference to publishers who sell to us directly over 3M because we can achieve a higher degree of integration if we possess the file. We will also begin to explore the exciting world of quality content creation.
The library belongs at the center of this revolution, not at its periphery.

DCL can’t be the only institution willing to invest some time, effort, and finances into setting up their own content management infrastructure. We need partners and colleagues to catch the eye of the marketplace.

Our first official team-up will be between DCL and the Marmot Library Network (a consortium serving much of the Western Slope of Colorado).

But this is an ideal cooperative effort for multistate regional networks, state libraries, in-state systems, or other smaller regional cooperatives.

The key features are:

• purchasing discounts to demonstrate the value of the publicly funded buying cooperative that is the public library;
• ownership of the file, both for preservation and to ensure the highest possible degree of integration and seamless user interface, the better to connect creators with consumers;
• industry standard DRM for those who need it;
• open source tools; and
• a bold and confident engagement in the emerging revolution of content creation.

Interested? Start at vufind.org and www.adobe.com/products/contentserver. Don’t forget to check out our website.

In this time of disruption, the relationships between powers will change. Many institutions will be challenged. I think public libraries just might be the last ones standing.

REFERENCES

1. Julianne Pepitone, “Amazon Sales Pop as Kindle Books Overtake Paperbacks,” CNN Money, Jan. 27, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
2. Kristen Purcell, “E-reader Ownership Doubles in Six Months,” Pew Research Center Publications, June 27, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
3. “Traditional Book Output Up 5%; Nontraditional Soars,” Publishers Weekly, May 18, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
4. Michael Kelley, “Kansas State Librarian Goes Eyeball to Eyeball with OverDrive in Contract Talks,” Library Journal, April 6, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
5. American Library Association, “Marketing to Libraries, ALA Library Fact Sheet 5,” accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
6. Barbara Fister, “Publishers & Librarians: Two Cultures, One Goal,” Library Journal, May 1, 2009, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
7. Andrew Albanese, “Survey Says Library Users Are Your Best Customers,” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 28, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
8. Ibid.
9. Joseph Sanchez, personal interview with the author.

The post The Last One Standing first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

This growth in popularity and demand for e-books presents many challenges to public libraries. At this point, the way most people access e-books completely bypasses the library. The options that libraries have today for e-books (in terms of content, interface, interoperability, and so on) are very limited, and that greatly impacts the primary role of the library––to connect people and information.

E-Books: Problems, Challenges, and Opportunities

E-books seem to present challenges that go against the core mission of libraries. The move from print to digital, along with the shifting business model from content ownership to content licensing, are some of the largest challenges facing libraries today. Electronic books are not always owned when purchased by libraries. Instead, materials are only leased for a certain period of time, and in some cases are not available to libraries at all. The current environment allows publishers and aggregators to control our content, in ways they can’t with our print collections.

In addition, getting an e-book from a library can be a confusing process; so much so that library staffers wind up creating elaborate tutorials on how to borrow an e-book. Simple downloading processes with retail outlets like Amazon provide readers with access to vast collections of e-books and pose serious competition for libraries.

What Do Libraries Own and What Does That Mean?

When Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries (DCL) buys physical books, we own those books. They don’t disappear unless we choose to remove them from the collection or a patron loses them, in which case we usually recoup our costs in patron fees and fines. We can loan those books through other library systems and we can put them on hold, incurring no costs for that book beyond the initial purchase. With e-books, we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars
to license books from a vendor––but we do not own anything. If we were to cancel our subscription, those books would be gone. We also do not have archival rights to the books we have paid for, even if a vendor goes out of business. The vendor also has the power to add or delete books from our collection depending on their current deals with publishers. What are libraries to do when a book is taken out of its print form and only exists as an e-book?

The Squeeze on ILL

Interlibrary loan (ILL) is another area that is affected by the growing demand for e-books. ILL is an important part of what we do in libraries. As we turn our efforts to respond to patron demand and begin buying more e-books, and with only a small number of e-book vendors (mostly academic) allowing for any sort of ILL, the more our book collections go digital, the less we will be able to loan to other libraries or borrow from other libraries.

Too Many Platforms, Too Little Interoperability = Limited Discovery

Libraries want to provide e-books through a single, easy-to-use, easy-to-search platform. Unfortunately, that may never happen. Vendors continue to create their own distinct platforms: OverDrive, Baker & Taylor, Simon & Schuster, 3M, ProQuest, EBSCO, etc. Libraries are expected to present all of these platforms to patrons in a way that makes sense, which is near impossible.

Library catalogs have been the primary resource patrons use to browse and locate materials. The library catalog is perhaps the best single place to make our e-book collections discoverable, but many catalogs lack the sophisticated search functionality of the individual vendor platforms themselves. The solution then lies in the integration of these platforms for discovery and delivery.

Browsing is still an important part of the discovery experience, but serendipitous browsing is not replicated well online because libraries offer a mix of vendor e-book collections and traditional print books. Add to the mix the nightmare of ensuring that your library’s e-books work on the plethora of mobile devices and e-readers patrons will tote into the library.

When it comes to technology and e-books, it is very difficult for a library to make decisions or plan ahead, due to the number of e-reader devices (Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc.), and the number of e-book formats (EPUB, PDF, Flash, etc.). A single standard for e-books would ease maintenance and administrative burdens. Libraries should be cognizant of the issues (business, technical, and legal) so that we make the best possible decisions and lobby for better interfaces. There is no legitimate reason why any book in the library should be encumbered by digital rights management (DRM).

Libraries have historically been too complacent to negotiate directly with publishers, to create consortia to lend e-books, to fight DRM, to create our own lending/license conditions, to promote an e-reader model, to produce any technology such as a basic desktop e-reader, or even to demand open formats. If all libraries had supported one format and bought a particular e-reader ten years ago, imagine the power we would have. DCL made the decision not to wait any longer––as no one is really sure what the future for e-books holds.

DCL believes that no contract should be signed without the right to own a copy of the e-book file, to lend that e-book to our users for as long as we decide, and to receive the e-book in an EPUB format. The library profession must do its best to push publishers to come up with better platforms and purchasing/licensing options. We should fight to regain control of the content and establish our own rules––rules that will benefit the library patron the most.

The DCL Experiment

DCL, located just south of Denver, serves a population of close to 300,000. As the third largest library district in the state, it features seven libraries and is considered one of the busiest libraries in the United States, with more than eight million items checked out annually. However, for the first time in over two decades, DCL is actually seeing a decline in circulation growth in almost all categories––with the exception of digital downloads (see figures 1 and 2).
DCL has been very innovative in its current experiments with e-books. We are leveraging the e-book opportunity to improve service and reach more users than ever before. Our immediate goals to improve the library e-book user experience include:

• to enhance the discovery of e-books with VuFind library catalog software;
• to simplify the delivery and circulation of e-books with Adobe Content Server (ACS); and
• to challenge a business model based on content license, with one based on content purchase.

Library staff have developed software to optimize the e-book user experience; implemented Adobe Content Server to store and deliver e-books that require DRM; and begun working with publishers to develop an e-book purchase model that will fairly compensate writers and publishers, while meeting the expectations of library users.

The Software

The software components of our system include (see figure 3):

• ACS, which primarily handles DRM;
• VuFind––an open source discovery layer that interfaces with our integrated library system (ILS) to allow patrons to easily find titles they are most interested in. The base VuFind code has been heavily modified to handle e-content management. Many application programming interfaces have also been added to VuFind to enable additional products to be created on top of the VuFind platform such as our powerwall displays;
• an Android and IOS e-reader/mobile app; and
• an engine that provides Amazon-like recommendations.

The e-content delivery platform:

• handles the management of e-content with both unlimited usage and e- restricted usage;
• allows e-content to be viewed online from a DCL-developed, cloud-based HTML5 reading system in the browser application;
• allows e-content to be downloaded for offline usage;
• allows new e-content to be purchased;
• allows e-content to be searched so patrons can easily find titles that are of interest to them;
• includes various reports to help collection development staff purchase titles that are of interest to their patrons and weed titles that are no longer used; and
• handles the management of holds and checkouts for e-content to eliminate the need to manage the items within the library’s ILS.

The beauty of our system lies in the fact that the number of steps from search and discovery to checkout has been greatly streamlined to no more than three clicks.

Future developments include:

• a content acquisition and aggregation system for selection and purchasing;
• replicating the system to other libraries. We are currently set up to pilot with the MARMOT Library Consortia in the western slopes of Colorado;
• a publishing platform that will set up the library as publisher for any self-published authors––crowd-sourcing; and
• incorporating other content types other than EPUB and PDF (video, audio, and so on).

The Display

Circulation of print materials at DCL is high because we purchase, manage, and physically display our collections in a smart, appealing, and engaging way, through the use of our powerwalls (see figure 4). Powerwalls are located almost immediately as you enter the library, giving the patron a true retail experience featuring popular material. From research, we know we have only thirty seconds to catch a customer’s attention and keep him or her engaged. People come to the library to browse––to use their eyes and bodies to explore. Our powerwalls are successful because they meet consumers’ needs and interests the minute they enter the library. We know powerwalls work, because at least 60 percent of our circulation is driven by these displays. We decided to apply this same model to e-books in order to create a successful virtual browsing experience.

DCL now offers virtual solutions that allow patrons to explore digital material. Our new touch screen displays (two to three 52-inch digital touchscreen displays), are located adjacent to our physical powerwalls, and feature e-book content for easy browsing and downloading. We also have an online e-book storefront within our online catalog, as well as a mobile app, that allows us to display the same dynamic content.

Browsing is a key feature of the digital discovery experience. Our virtual powerwall displays staff-selected e-content using the same principles that drive our physical displays––what people look for, what’s hot, or what’s seasonal. What we are after is to manage this content as intelligently and professionally as we do our other collections.

The Publishers

Lastly and most importantly, we’ve established agreements with publishers to allow DCL to purchase and manage the digital rights for e-books.

To date, we’ve secured agreements with Lerner Digital, the Colorado Independent Publishers Association, Marshall Cavendish, ABDO Publishing Group, Independent Publishers Group, Dzanc, Book Brewer, and Gale, a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools, and businesses
and part of Cengage Learning. Our agreement with Gale includes titles available through Gale Virtual Reference Library, including numerous business titles, travel series titles, and children’s nonfiction titles.

By directly pursuing these agreements with publishers, we emphasize our role as protectors of intellectual freedom and major players in the book-buying industry. After all, public libraries account for a healthy chunk of all book sales, and can properly guard against copying.

Patrons enjoy being able to experience products in new and creative ways that are highly entertaining and exclusive. We recognize that the greatest commercial value for e-books is not the book itself, but the conversations around and through the book. Libraries can position themselves as the vehicles that enable these conversations, and use this to gain leverage with publishers.

The Rollout

Our experiment gets put to the test this winter. We have created our own software, and combined elements––our catalog, ACS, the Vufind “discovery” tool, and a new recommendation engine. All of which have never been combined before.Now we are ready for one more ingredient––our patrons.

Many more reports and articles will follow as we continue to drive traffic, create awareness of our electronic collections, and enhance our customers’  experience with digital content. DCL is proud to bring such a distinct look and feel to our library that is both captivating and entertaining, while still providing a tight and seamless integration into our library system.

REFERENCES

1. Matt Townsend, “Barnes & Noble Sinks Most Since June After Halting Dividend,” Bloomberg.com, Feb. 22, 2011, accessed Sept. 21, 2011.
2. Kristen Purcell, “E-Reader Ownership Doubles in Six Months,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, June 27, 2011, accessed Sept. 21, 2011.

The post The E-Book Experiment first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

E-Book Growth

E-book growth is not offsetting traditional book use and the popularity of multiple formats continues to grow. At TPL in 2011, use of our e-book and e-audiobook collections was up 103 percent over 2010, and by the end of 2011 we surpassed the 500,000 circulation mark for e-book downloads. Still, even with this exponential growth in e-circulation, this represents only 1.5 percent of TPL’s overall circulation (which is seeing growth for its third straight year).

So there is still great demand for print materials, while at the same time demand continues to increase for other formats, both established and emerging. And that is one of the biggest challenges facing libraries everywhere––increased demand overall, continued demand for traditional books while at the same time there is an explosion of online resources, increased availability of alternate format materials such as audiobooks and graphic novels, and emerging formats such as downloadable e-content. And then of course in Toronto’s case, there continues to be great demand for a multitude of languages, with requests for new languages all the time. At TPL, we actively collect in forty languages, and are regularly adjusting our mix to accommodate new ones.

We also see that, for more and more titles, there are multiple formats available. With last year’s release of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, for instance, we ordered the standard book, the talking book for the print-disabled, the large-print book, the audiobook, and the e-audiobook. And this year, with The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, we have it as a standard book, a large-print book, an audiobook, and an e-book. For some titles, it’s becoming more common to release the formats simultaneously with the book. For example, when The Lost Symbol was released, we bought eight hundred copies of the print version and then we bought copies in large-print, e-book, e-audiobook, audiobook, and talking book formats. And all are popular!

The popularity of both traditional and emerging formats makes sense. For Torontonians, already a city of readers, e-books are sparking new and renewed interest in the written word. An e-book is still a book––it is just offered in a different, very convenient “container,” and digital or downloadable content simply provides another option for people, helping to extend the availability of published materials. An easy read obtained through an impulse download from your couch on a rainy Saturday night, or the classic pre-loaded for free on your e-reader that you’ve been meaning to read or reread, very much appeals to the serious and casual reader alike.

So, in the mid-term, we expect to see more of what we are experiencing now; that is, significant growth in the availability and use of e-books, and continued use and demand for the traditional book. In the longer term, e-books will become a mainstream format. We see that process unfolding now.

Demand vs. Budget

So how do we meet growing public demand (a good thing) for new and different formats, with tighter and tighter material acquisition budgets? While the growing popularity of e-books is definitely good for business, it’s certainly having its impact on our budgets, especially in the current climate of fiscal constraint that so many public libraries are struggling with. To manage this demand, TPL is taking several approaches.

Although circulation is up at TPL in pretty much all areas of print materials, one notable exception is in mass market paperbacks––the same trend that has been reported by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study group.¹ At TPL, we are also seeing some decline in the use of compact discs, albeit to a lesser extent (1.2 million borrows per year). So these declines have certainly helped us to offset our e-book purchasing by reducing our spending in these areas. Still, more needs to be done.

Another way that we are looking to manage our e-book costs is through the exploration of different pricing models with publishers. For example, through patron-driven acquisitions, which have been available in the academic community for some time.

With the release of new e-readers and e-reading devices such as the iPad, staff members are increasingly being asked to provide tech support and tech purchase recommendations, in addition to their reference and reader’s advisory roles. Some vendors provide training opportunities for staff, but this one time or occasional training doesn’t accommodate the frequent release of new devices, and the increasing rate by which the public is adopting them.

At TPL, we are addressing these pressures, in part, through innovative internal training programs such as Tech Days and iKits. On Tech Days, we bring together internal technology and online expertise from throughout our organization––staff from the IT and eServices departments, from Collections Management, and other staff throughout the organization who have an affinity for new technology and are happy to share their knowledge. We gather all the newest gadgetry we can––some purchased for the purpose of training, some already in use in the branches, and some personal devices from staff. And then we invite staff for the day to try the equipment and applications, ask questions, and get demonstrations from our “experts.” The days are fun and interactive, and full of learning.

We have also purchased a limited number of iKits––small collections of portable devices including e-readers, tablets, and netbooks––and distribute them to library staff in our branches for them to try out, learn, to support customers, and to use as part of their day-to-day work.

Limited E-Content

Lots of people want to borrow e-books, but do we have the e-books they want to borrow? We know that e-books are the future, or at least a major part of it, but right now the reality is that content is limited, and that will limit growth. In Canada, libraries simply can’t buy the same range of titles that we can buy in print.

Despite the growing adoption of the e-book format with publishers, it’s not news that e-books are making them nervous as they struggle to find sustainable business models, in particular with libraries. There are still major publishing houses that are not making their titles available for lending and in Canada we have only recently started to see an increase in the availability of more Canadian titles.

Navigating the Landscape

Libraries understand better than most how important it is to have a vibrant, healthy successful publishing industry––for publishers, vendors, and authors. So we as libraries need to work with publishers and vendors to navigate the changing and evolving landscape. Through organizations such as the Canadian Urban Libraries Council (CULC), public libraries are advocating for better access to e-books and, as a result, we are gradually seeing more Canadian content for our customers. And as mentioned earlier, we continue to explore pricing and lending models that will work for the success of all.

Another avenue we are exploring is making the library’s website––and more specifically our catalog––a gateway to publishers to generate e-book sales. These kinds of promotional and affiliate sales opportunities can clearly benefit both parties, building confidence and partnerships between us, while also providing a much needed revenue source for the library to help reduce ongoing budget pressures.

For local authors and small publishers, libraries also have the potential to be strong partners for generating e-book sales, for providing access to other kinds of online and digital content, and for collaborating in the creation of new digital content based on the library’s unique collections.

One such example that demonstrates the potential for these kinds of partnerships is TPL’s collaboration with an innovative initiative called the Toronto Project. This online digital resource was set up by local authors, content producers, historians, and city builders “to help build meaningful connections between the City of Toronto and its population––past, present and future––through the use of history. Toronto has a rich history, and it is hoped that torontoproject.com will assist in illuminating the accomplishments of its people, and the strength and continuity of its diverse communities.”²

One of several partners in the project, TPL’s main contribution will be its extensive local history collections, special collections, and expertise, which will be used to help tell Toronto’s history in a way that makes it accessible, interactive, and brings it to life, using digital channels and applications to deliver the content. Some examples of this include: narrative documentaries (defined as “kinetic exhibits” that make use of text, kinetic text, photographs, video imaging, interactive protocols, and sound); independently written and published e-books on local history that would be lent and sold through the library’s
online channels; and an interactive encyclopedia of Toronto history, a collective narrative that “harvests history” from Toronto’s diverse communities and neighborhoods.

A Marked Difference in E-Book Usage

Despite significant challenges for public libraries’ access to e-content, we are seeing some expanded offerings from publishers and in 2011 TPL saw an  increase in availabiity of content over 2010. Combine this with the proliferation of e-readers and other e-book reading devices that are now cheaper and easier to use, and we’re seeing a marked difference in e-book usage in just one year. It started at the end of 2010, when Torontonians plugged in their new Christmas presents and took their devices for a spin at their library. As a result, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s 2010, TPL saw an incredible jump in e-book downloads. The trend wasn’t just in Toronto either. OverDrive reported that traffic and e-book checkout records were “smashed” during the 2010 Christmas holiday, with an increase of 93 percent over the month prior.³ We saw similar activity at TPL during the 2011 holiday season. On a single day (December 28), views of our downloads webpage spiked to more than 6,000, and since then we’ve had more than 2,500 page views each day—a 25 percent increase over the pre-holiday period.

Not surprisingly, around the same time that e-reader sales were taking off, we were seeing a real increase in Canadian e-book content––from small  publishers to some large publishing houses––and not just in terms of new titles of bestsellers and genre fiction that are very popular with the format.  Increasingly, we’ve seen the availability of more nonfiction and children’s materials (for example, Thomas the Tank), and even some books that are being issued exclusively in the e-book format (for example, Jack Layton’s essay collection, Hope is Better than Fear, published by Random House Canada). And, as a sure sign that e-books are becoming mainstream, the New York Times started publishing e-book bestseller fiction and nonfiction lists in early 2011.

Longevity of Access

One of the longer-term issues for libraries as we invest more heavily in e-books and other e-resources is longevity of access. Currently, most public libraries are dependent on the OverDrive platform to purchase and distribute their e-titles. And the e-titles we purchase are often in multiple proprietary formats. Still other platforms and services offer a subscription-based model, where purchasing of titles isn’t even an option. This was fine when we were purchasing titles in both print and online. But we’ve already seen with many subscription-based e-resources that the print versions are being phased out and “e” is the only option.

So what happens if a vendor or publisher chooses to pull a library “purchased” e-title from their lending inventory, or fifty years from now OverDrive is no longer around, or the proprietary formats have changed or disappeared? How do we guarantee continuous access for our customers? What if we want to change platforms and move from OverDrive to something new or different? How can we take our significant digital investment with us?

These are important questions that libraries, in partnership with publishers, producers, and distributors of e-content are working through to ensure that new formats like the e-book continue to fuel the growth of publishing, reading, and public access to information, and remain an important part of the innovative library services we deliver.

REFERENCES

1. Julie Bosman, “The Dog-Eared Paperback, Newly Endangered in an E-Book Age,” New York Times, Sept. 2, 2011, accessed Jan. 11, 2012.
2. Toronto Project, accessed Jan. 11, 2012.
3. Dan Stasiewski, “Traffic and E-Book Checkout Records SMASHED Over Christmas Holiday,” OverDrive’s Digital Library Blog, Dec. 30, 2010, accessed Jan. 11, 2012.

The post Balancing Patron Demand for All Formats first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

First, I am not in collection development.  Many will probably argue that I do not understand collection development.  They would be correct.  Second, I promise not to write another blog post about e-books until such time as I am involved or at least more knowledgeable with collection development.  Third, my voice matters, because many of our users and funders do not have a great deal of collection development knowledge, and they would likely have strong opinions on the costs associated with e-books if they were widely publicized outside of the library walls.

The Fabian Strategy

An idea based upon the Roman general who was opposed to direct conflict and instead fought battles of attrition, and allowed the opposition to defeat itself rather than a more conventional road to victory.  The term generally has a negative connotation despite its relative success.  The reason for this is the high value of perception.  Believing an individual or entity is defeatist or insufficiently motivated to engage an opponent directly can prove more fatal than even powerful opposition.

E-Books and Libraries’ Fabian Flaw

The wait and see decision by many librarians has not only placed us in an awkward situation with publishers, but it also damages our credibility with our communities.  How will they translate our actions?  That we are no longer gaining a net benefit, but merely redistributing wealth from one segment of the community to the other?  That we can be swayed to meet the needs of for-profit entities?  We will economically support entities that we are not philosophically aligned with?  We are willing to spend more on less content (some of which we do not even own) while espousing that we are not merely repositories?  We have no other way to exist in the current marketplace?

Possible Courses of Action

Promoting efforts such as Unglue.it and Kobo may be important means of supporting library convictions.  ALA’s open letter to the APA was an important step, but does it go far enough?  Sarah Houghton writes poignantly and metaphorically on her blog about the betrayal of e-books.   We cannot inspire our communities if we allow our core principles to be compromised in an attempt to bring them content.  I do not have the answer to the e-book dilemna, but I believe that if we do not have a frank conversation about this content, both internally and with our communities, the power to make any decision on this matter will be wrested from our hands.  I hope you will use this space to build on this conversation, and please feel free to refute what I have said! I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

The post The E-Book Dilemma first appeared on Public Libraries Online.