TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Library links’ Category

By David Rothman

The adrenaline-pumper of the week? American Libraries has just run an article titled “The Elusive E-book,” by Stephen Sottong, former associate librarian at California State University, Los Angeles, whose faculty home page appears with the headline, “Retiring on September 26, 2003.”

Dissecting the Sottong piece, an information manager named Stephen Leary writes: “People won’t read entire books on these readers, Sottong assures us, yet that’s exactly what I have done myself. I’ve read dozens of books on my Sony reader, and on my desktop computer as well. Somehow I didn’t make it into Sottong’s academic research. Like other book lovers, I read many at one time. A reader is a great leap forward for many like me who don’t want to carry around a load of print books.” Exactly.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if librarians recognized the full potential of E and started worrying in a major way about e-book standards and the need to back off from an excessive reliance on DRM? Public libraries urgently need to consider new access and business models. Articles like Sottong’s, alas, steal time away from more useful efforts, including those by Isabelle Fetherston to educate the library world about the benefits of e-books for the elderly.

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By David Rothman

In 1966 Margaret McNamara, wife of the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, volunteered as a reading tutor in Washington, D.C. She found the kids loved books as gifts. Figures. One of my biggest objections to DRM is that it interferes with true ownership, which increases people’s interest in books, be they paper or electronic.

Out of Mrs. McNamara’s informal efforts grew a program called Reading is Fundamental, now imperiled by the Bush administration even though Laura Bush once was on RIF’s advisory council and Barbara Bush even sat on the board of directors.

E as a way to make RIF even better

“Since 1966, the program has distributed 325 million new books to more than 30 million mostly low-income children,” USA Today reported earlier this year. “Testimonials have come from entertainers and sports figures, such as Houston Rockets basketball star Juwan Howard, who was given books as a child. More than 140 publishers participate.”

Rather than cutting back RIF, the Bush administration should expand existing p-book efforts and cautiously experiment with an e-book component, aimed at reaching Net-era students who prefer to push buttons rather than flip pages.

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By David Rothman

The TeleBlog essay on access and business models for public libraries is still on the way, although I’ll probably finish it tomorrow rather than today. Plenty to cover! I’ll be exploring angles ranging from financing to a reduction of the library world’s dependence on DRM.

Meanwhile enjoy this New York Times review of a book I’ll mention, An Arsonist Guide to the Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke, shown here. For free, you can also read a excerpt of Chapter One. And, no, I’ll not be put off by Amazon readers giving the Guide just three stars. I make my own judgments and consider the Clarke book a keeper. But how can this happen if I get the Guide from a publid library—without stealing it or making an illegal E copy? That’s part of what my essay will be about. Yes, I still see a major role for bookstores, especially with just so much money available for libraries, and I’ll tell how to reconcile this with the “permanent checkout” vision.

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By David Rothman

In a MobileRead survey asking when people started reading e-books, some 39 percent of the current 279 respondents said they were 40 or older. That’s great news for Isabelle Fetherston, me and others talking up E as the new large print.

MobileRead folks, like ours, are more into tech than is humanity at large. But then, e-book technology today is much more complicated than it will be in the next few years, at least if the industry can address the eBabel issue and the related DRM question. Oh, well. At least e-book tech is further along than in 1986 when one man now in his late 40s was reading off the Psion Organiser, shown here.

Will libraries be ready for the new E era? I still intend to do that essay advocating a mix of permanent checkouts and other business models that libraries could use in place of the current DRM-dominated approach.

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By David Rothman

Barton Hodes, MD,  an eye doctor in Tuscon, Arizona, heartily approves of Older adults and e-books—and how E could be the new large ‘print,’ a TeleBlog post by Isabelle Fetherston of the Senior Friendly Libraries blog. He writes in:

“As an ophthalmologist, I see many patients every day who have limited vision, most with macular degeneration but many more with a wide variety of other untreatable eye diseases. Large print books and periodicals have been available for decades but do not fill the void that easily can and should be filled with user-friendly i-devices. Amazon’s Kindle is a good start, but it has limited ability to enlarge font size. It should be painfully simple to increase that font size to at least double its present capability and help many more vision compromised individuals enjoy the near endless array of available offerings. To many of these people reading is the only recreation left in life. How about adding Sudoku, Scrabble, and other games to the menu? Keep beating the drums. This void must and will be filled, hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Note: By “i-devices,” I assume Dr. Hodes means Apple products. If he meant “e-devices” instead, he can let us know. Meanwhile, thanks, Doctor! Isabelle will be tickled you appreciated her essay.

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By Jeff Scott, Director of the City of Casa Grande Public Library in Arizona

Moderator: Welcome to our latest contributor, Jeff Scott, library director in Casa Grande, Arizona! His bio is at the end. An aside: We’re also eager to run balanced write-ups of library e-offerings from companies besides Overdrive. - D.R.

Double-click for Jeff’s audiobook video in greater detail. May other library systems create their own! - D.R.

Find free audiobooks on the Web. Libraries can use hooks like this to help advertise their downloads of audiobooks, e-books, movies, and music.

Some libraries team up in consortia to have better selection. The Greater Phoenix Digital Library in Phoenix, Arizona, is among the bigger ones and is an example of what Overdrive-style services can provide.

The allure of audio

Audio books are the most popular items for download. Many libraries with less buying power will purchase the Overdrive service with audiobooks only. Audiobooks are popular because they are the easiest and most ubiquitous of formats—easier to use in most cases than e-books, which have far more problems with clashing formats. 

Most people have an MP3 player or something similar to use. The availability of titles is quite amazing. Go over to the Phoenix site and click on Audiobooks, click on Browse all, and you will find more than 10,500 titles available to you. Certain audiobooks are by the most popular authors or may even be pre-releases—as fresh as, yes, September 2008! So just imagine, having the ability to download the latest audio-book from the comfort of your own home whenever you wanted it! This is a great service.

The negatives: Long hold lists for hit titles and less-than-perfect searching

While the OverDrive audio books are a hit, with all those thousands of titles available, people may have to wait too long for the ones they want. Overdrive needs to provide more “Maximum Access” titles—those without a wait list. Let’s hope for a more liberal rights agreement between Overdrive and the publishing industry.

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By David Rothman

Here are my remarks prepared for The World in Your Library conference, held today as part of the LACUNY Institute Series in New York. - David Rothman, TeleRead moderator.

I know. The gizmo I’m holding up is made of plastic rather than the familiar cardboard, paper and glue of a ”real” book. And it weighs three pounds.

These days, however, I am spending at least as much time reading off my One Laptop Per Child XO-1 machine as off conventional books.

But let’s look beyond my experiences and think globally in more than one sense of the word. How will the XO-1 fit in with the open source concept—the idea that software can actually be given away and modified? Later this afternoon I’ll demonstrate FBeader, the open source program that for me is a vast improvement over the reader that the XO comes with. Via the Web, you can see tips galore on using FBReader yourself.

What’s also ahead in this talk

• I’ll also tell how open source, e-books and related technology might contribute to the success of the Bologna Accord—a way to make academic standards more comparable in Europe, and perhaps elsewhere, including, maybe, developing countries. Interest in the Accord is a major reason for this conference. But you can’t raise standards without making the best use of your limited resources, one reason why the economies of open source could be so significant if the Bologna concepts take off globally.
• Finally I’ll mention the role that the TeleRead idea could play in all of this and more. For those who don’t know, TeleRead is the name of a plan for well-stocked national digital library systems in the United States and elsewhere. I proposed it in the early 90s—the possibility of not only getting huge digital libraries online but also integrating them closely with local schools and libraries and promoting the use of appropriate hardware. I’ll tell how TeleRead could live up to the title of this talk and bring nations, socioeconomic classes and generations closer together.

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By David Rothman

Oh how I’d hate it if TeleRead weren’t a global e-book blog. Where would we be without posts from Branko Collin in Amsterdam or others such as Carol Jurd in Adelaide or Ficbot in Toronto—or, now, Richard Herley, the prize-winning novelist whose essays reach us from a village in the Hampshire Downs in the U.K., an area shown in the photo?

But no course requirements, no academic details, bedevil us. What about institutions? How can degrees be more similar in a number of places—not just Europe or the United States but also cash-strapped developing countries? And can open source software and the right library resources, including, yes, well-stocked national digital library systems, help? Not to mention OLPC-style computers and variants that can display e-books well.

The World in Your Library conference

Such topics will come up Friday at an all-day conference called The World in Your Library: International Users and International Librarians: Enriching the Academic Experience, and I’ll be among the speakers along with another name familiar to TeleBlog regulars, Wayan Vota of OLPC News. If you’ll be attending and want to say hello, just shoot me an e-mail. Wayan and I will be part of a 3-4:30 p.m. program and demo XOs afterwards, although we’ll be there all day. Beyond the librarians, I’m also looking forward to meeting Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation. The event is part of the LACUNY Institute series from the Library Association of the City University of New York.

Where the TeleBlog is weak: We need more contributors from developing countries, such as David Ajao, who wrote about e-books on mobile phones in Africa. E-mail me if you’re working to popularize e-books there and want to write about successes—or challenges.

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By Rochelle Hartman

For newcomers: Rochelle is a librarian in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and writes the lively Tinfoil and Raccoon blog. Related: The Kindle vs. a rotated laptop for e-booking, in librarian Steve Lawson’s blog. - D.R.

Michael Stephens wonders if my fondness for Kindle (despite its uselessness for libraries) could be characterized as “technolust.” I chewed on this for awhile and came to the conclusion that I need to come out of the closet as kind of a technodud. I think I may be a bit ahead of the curve, measured against all of LibraryLand, and a bit more ahead compared to library users but am definitely on the uphill side of the curve compared to my fellow bloggers.

Basically, my interest in the Kindle, and my occasional forays into e-book reviewing have had very little to do with technology and everything to do with my steamy relationship with the written word. I’m still very hopeful for an excellent e-reading experience in my lifetime. I love to read and I love to write. I came to blogging not because it was a new tech app, but because it gave me an easy way to start writing again. I don’t love gadgets. I don’t exactly hate gadgets. The most charitable thing I can say is that I am gadget-neutral and tech tepid. I present you with the evidence:

• I have a ridiculous cell phone. It’s a Pocket PC that has baby versions of Windows and Office. Mr. Raccoon, goddess bless him, is frequently giving me new software apps in an ongoing attempt to make my phone more than a deluxe Solitaire machine. Basically, I use the phone to visit Twitter, Gmail and weather.gov, to take kinda crappy pictures when I don’t have a real camera, and to play Scrabble, Bubble Breaker or Solitaire when I’m stuck some place and forgot to bring a book. I don’t sync it to anything. When I do remember to carry it, the ringer is always off in public.

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By David Rothman

Ficbot—check out her cogent reply to critics of Read an E-Book Week—has run across a gem within John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Page site. It’s a link-rich list of works of winners of the Nobel, Pulitzer and Newbery prizes. In many cases the writings are free, especially for people outside the Bono-hobbled United States. Here’s the entry for Sinclair Lewis (photo):

1930: Sinclair Lewis (USA, 1885-1951) : English language books online

• Our Mr. Wrenn (1914)
• Main Street (1920)
• Babbitt (1922)
• Arrowsmith (1925: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)
• Dodsworth (1929: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)
• Cass Timberlane (1945: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)
• Kingsblood Royal (1947: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)

Notice? This isn’t just a list of books, but also, unwittingly, a policy statement—documenting the damage that copyright term extension has done to the study and enjoyment of literature in the United States. The Sonny Bono Act Copyright Term Extension Act has enriched heirs, not spurred the creation of new masterpieces. Let’s hope that Larry Lessig indeed runs for Congress and can make Bono an issue not just in his race but also the presidential one.

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By David Rothman

“There’s no doubt that Yahoo! shareholders would delight in such a mega transaction. But what about the open source developers who built Zimbra? What about all the Zimbra customers who bought into the open source e-mail specifically because it was an alternative to Outlook and other proprietary offerings? Will Microsoft crush Zimbra into non-existence? Feed the Zimbra features into Outlook?” - Paula Rooney (shown with her blog collaborator, Dana Blankenhorn).

The TeleRead take: Oh, and how about the Open Content Alliance, which is working toward “a digital archive of global content for universal access”? Both Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN are listed as supporters, but with the former swallowed up, would Microsoft be as inclined to help such efforts?

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By Rochelle Hartman

Moderator’s note: Rochelle is, er, right on the money. Even with cheaper gizmos in use, such as the $200 OLPC XO, a library’s role should be to encourage use of book-friendly hardware—not provide everyone with it! - David Rothman.

(Screeching brakes)  Whoa. Wait a minute. Stepping back from my Kindle krush and putting aside the question of whether or not it’s legal for libraries to loan them, I considered the Kindle issue through the eyes of a public library manager who has to make decisions about how to get the most out of a budget. Duh! It’s a no brainer.

There is no way I could justify deploying Kindles, given the present model. The machine itself is 400 bucks and can hold up to 200 titles. Let’s say that the average price of a Kindle title is 10 bucks. That all adds up to almost $2500 tied up in a resource that can only be used by one person at a time. 

Kindle vs. other purchases 

For that much money, I could buy more than 100 titles for check-out, a few reference sets, a year’s access to a database, a bunch of CDs, audio books, or DVDs,  a couple of display units, some comfy furniture, conference registration plus travel and lodging for a couple staff members, a contract with a coffee vendor, honorarium for program speakers…. 

How does it make any sort of sense for a library to loan out a $2500 resource to be used by one person at a time for 2-4 weeks? That’s the equivalent of allowing only one person at a time access to Ancestry online for two weeks.  Or to check out the entire World Book set. Those ideas sound outrageous. Because they are.  It would demonstrate impeachment-level poor stewardship.

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