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]

And what would you have librarians give up to do that work? (Especially in a rapidly changing environment, where even keeping up with the options takes a handful of hours a month, never mind actually doing anything with them?)

Do we give up story hours? Helping patrons use computers to apply for jobs or file their taxes? (The fact the government is dumping more and more general computer help on public libraries without any funding help is a big issue, especially in more rural areas.)

It's not that I don't agree that ebooks are a thing that needs attention. But it's a lot more complicated than "Make some lists of awesome stuff and it'll be all available." Every new technology means patrons who have lots of questions about it - awesome, but someone needs to be able to help them with devices, or explain why this book is available, but that one isn't. Learning to do those things takes time (and administrative support). Training every librarian on staff to do them takes more.

Back to the rural areas: I'm living these days in a town of 8000 people, that's the largest town for 45 minutes. If you don't live in the center of one of the town, you can't get DSL or cable - just satellite, which is expensive and flaky enough that I'd think twice about it, and I've been on the 'Net for nearly two decades.

The public library has, I think, 2 public access computers, and they've got relatively limited hours, especially for people who work during normal business hours (they're open past 5pm two nights a week, and a few hours on Saturday).

The university I work at allows community patrons (and that's a part of what I do I really *like*.) But at the same time, the bulk of our own focus has to be our students and faculty.

So, we're doing some careful ebook exploration beyond the stuff we get from the state and sytem, but we can't afford to support one of every device to be able to do really excellent testing and explanations of how to download/organise/loan. (And there are the issues of staffing already mentioned: those two people are already plenty busy with the existing materials we maintain.)

It's a question of "What do we give up, to do this new thing." And libraries quite reasonably have a variety of answers to that, and a lot of them are currently in the "The benefits - given that stuff is *so* scattered and chaotic right now - aren't there for us to invest massive staff time or collections budget in it."

A lot of librarians are exploring things privately, on their own time (and on their own, privately owned and funded devices, mind you.) But that takes time to trickle into work practice.

Finally, add to that that a lot of the small press stuff - there's great stuff out there, but there's also some *lousy* stuff out there, and it's hard to tell the difference between the two without either reading it yourself (outside the scope of most librarians in the quantity of titles we buy), or getting actual reliable reviews.

One of my hopes is that we get much more reliable systems for reviewing ebooks (in terms of reviews that talk about the things librarians care about: audience, particular concerns, ways to market the material to "if you liked X, try this", etc. that library publications currently do for print materials.) But we're not there yet either.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

It's up to individual teams to decide what's right for them. Is the ebook problem minor at your library? Ignore it; someone else may solve it. Are your patrons bugging you like heck? Consider that it may take less time to solve the problem than to keep dealing with people nagging you or the internal frustration of not being able to do a halfway decent job of connecting literature with eyeballs. You may be able to skip some other program temporarily, establish an alternative ebook system, then go back to what else you were doing.

Libraries are floundering because people don't want to pay for them. People don't want to pay for them because, okay, you can't run 80% of the economy on 20% of the wealth, but also because they don't feel libraries are very relevant anymore. I want libraries to be relevant to people's needs now, because the rule is adapt or die. Either libraries find ways to meet people's needs or they will cease to exist.

I don't like the way that trend is going, with cutbacks making libraries even less useful, so I'm trying to do what I can from where I am to stop it. At least I can throw ideas out there. Maybe somewhere, somebody will have enough resources to give it a try. If they do, I hope they get in touch with me. I've had authors and small publishers saying they're interested in alternative ebook arrangements that would improve library function.

Maybe the damn pig will fly.

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.