TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for April, 2004

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Call it compassion, call it a protect-your-employees system, whatever you call it, this could be one reason why British libraries are spending so little on books–just nine percent or whatever. Imagine yourself in a library faced with budget cut after budget cut. Do you cut back on collection-building or fire your employees? Perhaps it’s time for an efficient TeleRead approach where less money would go for concrete and steel and more would be available for books and people.

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Come to think of it, we already have a nasty Internet tax or at least a quasi one. Can anyone spell S-o-n-n-y B-o-n-o?

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is a disguised tax on government and the public. Over the decades it will shift billions from schools, libraries and consumers in general to members of the copyright elite. Among the lucky beneficiaries will be none other than the descendants of the well-to-do lady to the left, Congress member Mary Bono. Well past the previous copyright terms, the family of Sonny’s widow will collect from the RIAA, Warner Music Group and the Bono Collection Trust.

One way or another–for example, through somewhat higher taxes–Americans will have to cough up for old content that should be free. Republicans, Dems, no matter what the party, it’ll be helpful for legislators to pass a ban on the Bono Internet Tax–or at least to consider the Lessig approach.

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“State and local access fees could add 20 percent to 25 percent to the average Internet consumer’s bill–a tax hike of about $150 per year.” – Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The TeleRead take: I’d side with Armey on this one. E-books and learning in general will benefit from “always on” connections of the kind that broadband and Wi-Fi will encourage. Imagine a mix of Wi-Fi and e-books with interbook links and no downloading-speed issues for multimedia e-books.

Simply put, the last thing society needs is for governments to make it more expensive to connect in an up-to-date way. For that and a variety of other reasons, the tax ban should remain. Hmm. You think that the Open eBook Forum would actually care about this? Many groups are at work against Net taxes, but every little bit should help, especially when it involves books and education. Click here to support a moratorium on Net taxes.

As for ways to pay for rural connections, I can think of a zillion and one other possibilities if techno-evolution alone won’t do the trick by lowering costs.

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Without comment, Roy Lewis in Garland, Texas, was nice enough to pass on a means to compare the library systems of Dallas and the suburb of Plano for 2002, the latest year available this way.

Dallas spent $21.35 per capita in total operating expenses and $2.99 for library materials (14 percent of opp expenses), while Plano spend $38.64 per capita in total operating expenses and $4.57 on materials (12 percent). And remember. The materials expenses presumably include everything from Shakespeare to VCR cassettes, not just books. In both cases, the percentages may well be in line with the 9 percent that British libraries reportedly are spending on books.

Which of the two Texas library districts mentioned would you like your child to grow up in? Time for a well-stocked national digital library system to help narrow the gaps and increase the actual percentage of material spent on content, especially books? In case you’re tuning in late, see Library palaces vs. a child-friendly neighborhood approach.

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This parody video in .mov format is just too funny to pass up. In Copyfight, Ernest Miller examines the copyright implications and hopefully doesn’t spoil the fun for the rest of us.

Note: Fair’s fair. If any GOP types come up with equivalent parodies and can provide URLs, send ‘em on.

By David Rothman

Stinky homeless men staring at porn on library computers. Unzipped flies. Threats against female patrons. A slew of thefts. 117 police calls in 12 months. That’s life at Dallas’s downtown library palace, if you go by an article in the Dallas Observer. If the story is accurate, library bureaucrats have tolerated this mess far more than they should. At the same time the ‘crats have tried to impress the library world with a Declaration of Independence exhibit, a Shakespearean one and ambitions to create “a highly respected research library” amid the chaos.

Don’t children and the public at large suffer, though, when bureaucrats and politicians fixate on downtown library palaces at the expense of neighborhood branches within walking distance of many students? And might an additional emphasis on e-books and other electronic items be part of the solution, especially for the homeless? Before making up your mind, read Billy Barron’s observations below from the Dallas area. Most are not about electronic libraries directly. But they are rather relevant since e-books must be considered in the context of the here and now, the paper world. Billy compares several Texas library systems and essentially concludes that except in small towns, libraries are most effective with a strong emphasis on the branch approach. I’ll have more to say at the end of this TeleBlog item. But first, abridged, here are Billy’s thoughts on library systems in Dallas, Garland, Richardson and Plano.

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DALLAS: Population 1.2M, spread out, centralized palace library with neighborhood branches

Dallas built its library palace in the downtown area. Downtown Dallas is a dirty place where nobody feels safe at night. Parking is terrible during the day. On top of that, homeless people from what I have read invade the library during the day because they have nowhere else to go to get out of the heat. Martha Brown, a principal of a charter school in Dallas, is scared of going alone to the central library to check out the materials there. According to the Dallas Observer:

Brown says she is familiar with the homeless at the library from many years of working downtown and is wary of the building because of them. She says she will not go to the downtown library alone and wouldn’t bring children there either. She’d take children to a neighborhood library instead, she says.

“That was one of the things that steered me away,” Brown says. “I didn’t feel like dealing with that.”

People in Dallas hope that better facilities for the homeless will help. But the homeless are not the only problem. The central library has drained away resources that could go to neighborhood branches that families could visit without all the fuss of going downtown. In Dallas the branch libraries are small, poorly stocked, and mostly useless. You’re much better off going to Barnes and Noble if you are trying to research a paper for school. Do I expect this to change? No, the powers that be want to revitalize downtown Dallas, whereas everybody else just never wants to go there.

Very, very interesting food for though especially with regard to TeleRead. A good online library system would enable even little neighborhood branches to offer a wide variety of books, which could be read either there or at home.

GARLAND: Population 200,000, spread out, centralized non-palace library with neighborhood branches

Garland is smaller than Dallas, the downtown is relatively safe, parking is easy and there are no homeless in the centralized library. The Garland branches, to one of which I used to bike as a teenaged resident, are even smaller than the ones in Dallas. Still, this system is a step up from Dallas’s.

RICHARDSON: Population less than 100,000, relatively compact, centralized library at the geographic center of town with no branches

Richardson, whose school district I was in, has a single semi-nice library–not a palace. Probably a wise choice since anyone in town can get to it within 10-15 minutes.

PLANO: Population 250,000, spread out, peer library system

I like Plano’s approach. There are five branches, and no main branch, and each one has around the same number of books as the other, and, I think, has the same hours. Each branch does usually has a special area of strength such as business research, but that is a reasonable thing. The Plano system has also done an excellent job of making it easy online to get a book transferred from one branch to another–the next day if an item is in stock.

“On top of this, Plano’s system is completely integrated with that of Allen, the small town next door, so patrons from both cities can use both library systems. They share the computer system with the community college district so you can see the catalog over there as well. You need a different library card to use it, but any citizen of the county can get one.

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That’s the end of Billy’s informal note to me. So what are the lessons here?

1. No, we shouldn’t immediately sell off large central libraries. I can see their usefulness for museum-style displays, for example, and for collections of city history. Too, central libraries could be good for meetings of large civic groups.

What’s more, e-books aren’t going to replace p-books overnight. But in planning for buildings that will be in use for decades, it’s sheer folly for library administrators to act as if the status quo will last forever–not when e-book technology keeps improving. Libraries should embrace it, not fear it, and think less about palaces and more about neighborhood branches, which, through the new technology, could offer a wider selection the palaces do.

2. Behavior rules–whether affecting the homeless or anyone else–should be helpful and well enforced. Needless to say, this is much harder to do in a library palace than in a branch library. In Dallas, at least, the library palace apparently has become the equivalent of a large urban high school, a library version of the Blackboard Jungle.

3. E-books and other electronic holdings could be especially valuable to the homeless, since these items could be offered at homeless shelters for 24/7 access. That would be better for both the homeless and library users as a whole. Why mix children and the most menacing of the homeless? Just what kind of political correctness has allowed library administrators to allow for this outrageous situation? I’m against library filtering and the stupid laws that Washington has inflicted on local libraries. But is it really the constitutional right of the homeless to plop down next to a child and gawk at explicit porn? Let them do so in the homeless shelter. And guess who at times should be on the scene at the shelters to offer help in person to augment the electronic variety? Librarians! Meanwhile, yes, I realize that the problems at Dallas are not the librarians’ entire doing. But they should be more aggressive in resisting the urge of some to let libraries serve as homeless shelters. More money for the real McCoy, please. And make certain, too, that the shelters are located where they will do some good. That might be problematic in Dallas.

4. Even with the advent of e-books and a well-stocked national digital library system, appropriate allocation of local resources among branches would go a long way. A branch in a low-income neighborhood deserves reference librarians familiar with the needs of the local jobless. Similarly a reference librarian in a neighborhood full of retired people should be familiar with such issues as financial planning. Libraries could help adapt electronic resources to serve the needs of neighborhood users. Can’t libraries learn from the chaos of centralized urban school systems? The neighborhood-oriented approach is best–for children and the rest of us. Don’t abolish headquarters libraries, even in the future; but, as the Dallas experience shows, there is need for more balance.

5. Library palaces should not be built with general downtown economic needs prevailing over library and educational needs. Might localities be better off selling or renting some downtown library assets and turning the revenue over to the branches? And what happens when e-books finally do displace the p-variety? Here’s one idea that could benefit both down libraries and branches. Why not grant free workspace and even residential space in the oversized buildings to gifted young writers, artists and musicians–and older ones, too–who would serve as human magnets to help draw people to central libraries. At the same time, as part of the deal, they would be required to visit the neighborhood branches and help mentor the kids there. Perhaps the best candidates could be screened through volunteer work to see if they were suitable. Such programs could start small and maybe even stay that way to avoid boondoogles.

Details: The Dallas library’s budget page shows no fiscal year later than 1999-2000. What’s going on? What’s more, the branch hours could be better. If I ran the Dallas Public Library, I’d worry less about fancy exhibits and more about keeping the neighborhood branches open for kids to do their homework. Needless to say, electronic libraries can be always open–a boon to children in an Internet era when even some schools are beginning to understand the need for e-books.

Update, 10:55 a.m., April 29: Billy has pointed me to the missing library budget info within the overall Dallas city budgets for FY03 and FY04.

“From looking at these,” Billy comments, “you will notice budget and head-count cuts. At one level, the city slashed budgets across the board so this is probably typically for a city department. The city budget is a big mess due to bad political decisions, but you’d have to read the past 10 years of the Dallas Observer to begin to understand that.

“This line is interesting, though: ‘241,952 citizens will benefit from library programs.’ Only about 1 in 5 or 6 citizens? I don’t know if that says something about the library system or the citizens themselves–probably both.

“‘Meanwhile, yes, I realize that the problems at Dallas are not the librarians’ entire doing.’ Absolutely, they are mostly City Hall’s fault. That’s a long, long, long discussion that is a tangent that I won’t go into.”

Significantly, of Dallas’s 1.2 million population, just 241,952 use the library. Plano, as Billy notes, “has about 170,000 patrons out of a population of 240,144. Part of this is that Plano’s population is mostly upper middle class with a Top 10 school district whereas Dallas is demographically diverse.

“Also, it is interesting that Dallas’ goal is to maintain turnover of 2.0 per item. Plano is sitting up in the 3.7 range.

“Each branch in Plano has a budget from $1.1 to $1.5 million so it is even distributed. Note: I didn’t include that Muncipal Reference Library–it is more of an internal reference library for city staff which though available to citizens is rarely used as such.”

Now–to return to the big picture. Isn’t it possible that stronger branch libraries and eventually e-books could help Dallas’s library usage rate be at least somewhat closer to Plano’s? No miracles promised. But if you force the poor to make the trek to the central library after a hard day as a cook or janitor, usage obviously will be lower than if generous supplies of books matching their interests were closer to them–ideally within their own homes. That’s what TeleRead is all about! What’s more, far from replacing neighborhood libraries, TeleRead would make use of them as support centers–in both the tech and library senses. Branches help hold neighborhoods together. How sad that Dallas is so oblivious to the need to support them fully and would rather go the edifice complex route.

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Billy Barron, an e-library pioneer, saw the U.K.-related items below and came up with some heart-felt analysis of The Library Palace Syndrome in Texas. I’ll run his comments later today or tomorrow, complete with one of the questions he raises in passing. Can the homeless and kids mix safely in Library Palaces? Yes, there’s a common thread in all this. Library systems should be playing up e-books and neighborhood branches, rather than catering to the edifice complexes of politicians and bureaucrats.

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TeleRead has long called for the use of e-book technology to increase the number and variety of library books in the States and elsewhere.

Statistics on the Hampsire library system in the U.K. make powerful case for a TeleRead-style approach, which would offer both public domain and contemporary books and blend them in well with local schools and libraries.

The bloody details

Via the recent Libri study, here’s a list of authors, titles, and chances of finding them in Hampsire libraries. All three public domain book mentioned below, incidentally, are available for free in the major e-book formats via the PD side of the Blackmask bookstore in the States–a one-man operation whose completeness should embarrass library bureaucracies everywhere.

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 83%
Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man, 5%
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 54%
Terry Pratchett, Mort 39%
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye 42%
Jack Kerouac, On the Road 54%
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party, 32%
J.R.R.Tolkien, The Two Towers, 84%
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, 53%
Joseph Heller, Catch 22, 36%

Quite relevantly, a BBC radio report includes an account of a library visit where the staffers outnumbered the actual library users. Could numbers like those above be part of the reason? Is too much money going for staffers and not enough for books? Actually I’d like to see generous spending in both areas–instead of on downtown library palaces. E-books could help free money for both content and staffers to help people absorb it, especially the poor and non-English speakers, who, like other library users, often rely on libraries for authoritative information in areas ranging from job training to health.

When book spending lags

In the U.K., more content could help reverse the horrors of the chart below, showing past, present and projected trends in library-book borrowing. Even allowing for hyperbole in the projections, the numbers are bad news for library boosters everywhere. Usage stats are far higher in the States, but if nothing else, the U.K. numbers serve as a warning against smugness as more and more families gain access to high-speed Internet connections and spend more and more time on Web sites and on movies on demand–and less on books.

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A library activist group called Libri warns that public libraries in the U.K. may be dead in 20 years. In A minute’s silence, please, for the late public library, the Independent spells out the details from Libri’s report and elsewhere.

“There were 377 million loans recorded from British libraries in 2003,” says writer Ian Herbert, “down from a reported 480 million in 1999.” U.K. libraries are spending just nine percent of their budgets on books, many of which are now outdated.

It’s a lesson for all librarians, especially here in the States where short-sighted cities are squandering money on contruction or maintenance of library palaces downtown at the expense of hours and collections in neighborhood branches.

Even well-off cities such as Seattle, site of the new palace shown here, can’t do everything when times are tough. Priorities, please. As it happens, just a fraction of U.S. library spending goes for books and other text. Let’s learn from the mess across the pond, which is apparently is even worse than ours.

Net vs. books

Given the U.K. book crisis, is it any wonder that schoolchildren at many libraries now beeline for the computers–to visit Web sites full of questionable information–rather than reading books as their predecessors did?

“In the past,” the Independent quotes one librarian, “we’d have a rush of book inquiries when children came out of school with their homework at four o’clock. “Now it’s only the Internet. It’s been the biggest change in my 30 years here.”

A far cry from the past

Compare that statement with the reflections of a British writer quoted as saying: “I used to go to the library so much it made my mother cry. I practically lived at the local library I visited…I withdrew 10 books a week and went once during the week and twice on Saturdays.”

Yes, that’s a writer speaking. But clearly more books and newer books would help–and not just the young:

Stewart Fawcett, 65, has long since exhausted the library’s supplies of travel books on Crete, something of specialist genre for him. His Heald Green borrowing record on the subject includes the 1890 tome Travels in Crete , which he obtained on order, but the most modern guide he can find today is dated 1993. “The Crete books are way outdated,” he grumbled, settling for a James Herbert paperback instead. “I can’t find anything of interest.”

The article cites a recommendation that more money go for books, presumably the paper variety. Yes! But along the way, why not also consider a well-stocked national digital library system in the TeleRead vein to reach Net-oriented children, stretch resources and vastly improve the number and freshness of books?

Related: “UK libraries out of use by 2020″ and Is this the library of the future? from the BBC, which offers an audio in RealPlayer format. In the latter story, it’s clear that books are being played down. What’s the point? Are libraries to be little more than free video stores? I’m all in favor of multimedia, but a little balance could go a long way.

(Report found via LISNews.)

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“In Forney, Texas, a fast-growing suburb of Dallas, 10- and 11-year-old schoolkids are set to cross a technology divide to an area many adults won’t venture into–electronic books.” – Reuters, via Forbes.

The TeleRead take: Considering the many prejudices that adults have against e-books, it should be easier for the fifth and sixth graders to adjust. Details:

Starting in August, more than 100 students in the fifth and sixth grades of the Forney Independent School District will receive notebook computers that contain as many textbooks as the school can muster the rights for, as well as thousands of classic works of art and literature.

Instead of opening books, the children will log onto school-supplied laptops to access their math and science textbooks or read American literary classics such as Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” about the Civil War.

“Our generation didn’t learn to read on a computer screen, so most parents have an issue with that,” said Mike Smith, Superintendent of the Forney school district. But today’s fifth and sixth graders don’t see it the same way.

“They just operate differently than we do. They’re digital kids,” Smith said.

Exactly! When will more schools get it?

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We e-booker can use all the good news that’s out there. The Next Chapter in Electronic Books is a somewhat upbeat Forbes article mentioned earlier in this TeleBlog. But a little redundancy won’t hurt since at least two readers missed the original item–tucked away at the end of a Librie-related post–and wrote in to suggest a link. Thanks anyway; I might well have overlooked the Forbes item.

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A hate site is no longer the first on the list when you type the word “Jew” into Google. Nothing deliberate happened at Google’s end, however; see CNET for the full story. (Via Mike Cane.)