More on Ebooks and Libraries

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here's another article about how libraries and publishers are failing to meet reader needs, particularly in regards to ebooks.

Basically, if you aren't meeting people's needs, they will find somebody else who will.  If your economic model isn't meeting people's needs, they'll replace it with one that will.  If your system isn't managing the main flow of activity, it's a failure, and the real system is wherever that main activity is.  What we're seeing now in the shakeup of the publishing/literature industry -- and to some extent, media in general -- is the process of consumers declaring that the current options don't meet their needs and they're exploring other options, kthxbai.

You aren't going to make money by trying to trap people where they don't want to be and aren't getting their needs met.  You need to find a way to meet their needs and make a reasonable profit in the process; you need to go where the interest and activity are.  You also need to treat people decently, and expect them to behave decently.  If you mistreat them, they will not hesitate to mistreat you in return and you will have no moral high ground to complain about it.

I'm keeping my eye out for a subscription-based e-library where you can read whatever you want that's in the stacks without the stupid restrictions that the libraries, publishers, and software are currently promoting.

Comments

Re: Well...

[jenett]

That's the thing, though.

Public library use - people in the physical space *and* circulation numbers (print items) is up substantially in a lot of communities from the conversations and stats I've seen. (a lot of them fairly informal, mind you.) That suggests a whole lot of relevance - but it's circling around points that are hard to put into tidy lists. (Community gathering space, computer access, a variety of community centered programs, but also classic how-to reference materials.)

Interest in ebooks is up, as well, but a lot of it is coming from a relatively small (but quite vocal) minority. Many of whom are reasonably happy with the current options in ebooks (or, in particular, want easier ways to read Latest Current Big Titles, not all sorts of other - potentially even more awesome - books.)

So if we're just going on demand, exploring alternate ebook options is not the top priority for most libraries. Or even the tenth. Or maybe the twentieth.

To put this in context: in the past nearly-six months at this job, I've had, I think, two questions about ebooks (though also a request to update our docs, which is actually my project for the rest of this week, because there's places we could do better. Though as the licensing and technical details are making *my* head spin, I fully understand why it's a mess)

I've had a whole lot more about how to use Word, or Excel (mostly for class purposes) or the usual run of glitches in public use computers. And for every one of those, I do two or three computer account requests for community patrons.

(And then there's the rest of what I do: the past few weeks, it's been the twice-yearly upgrades to public computers, tracking down a networking problem enough our IT folks could fix it, staffing the reference desk, necessary meetings, and so on. And the current Big Project, which is getting off the ground, and is a big part of why they funded my position, so it sort of has to get priority.)

My impression is that it's like that at a lot of libraries: ebooks come up, but they're not the big thing on the top of the list, either. Maslow's heirarchy of needs: you need access, and time and space before you get to additional options like sorting through more complex ebook options.

Like I said: I think it's coming eventually. But I don't think we're going to see big shifts for a bit longer, because one of the things that needs to shift is access for those big bestsellers that are the bread and butter of a lot of library collections. We'll see a lot of individually passionate patrons, many of whom are willing to invest the time on their own to figure out how to make things work, and individual librarians.

There's also a complicated thing about collection development budgets that's hard to explain quickly - but briefly, in most libraries, including public ones, a substantial amount (somewhere between 30%-60%) is going for database access, which continues to get more expensive, and sometimes unpredictably so. That leaves a much smaller piece of the pie than many people are aware of for any other segment of the library's collection. A couple of thousand dollars for ebooks doesn't go terribly far to build a rounded collection, even under the most generous of licensing terms.

I also think that's going to shift, somewhere, somehow. But it's going to take another few years for that to play out, because of the length of contracts and related negotiations.