TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘library’ Category

By David Rothman

Q. What do the RIAA techies have in common with so many Washington bureaucrats?

A. Job preservation is Job Number One. The head of RIAA’s tech unit “made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM.” 

Q. So what else are the RIAA and the rest of Washington doing to shaft the consumer?

A. Aggravating Cyber Prohibition, of course—or at least trying to, via a new bill.

DRM Alternatives—in an e-book/library context: Library books you can KEEP forever—and other ideas to help public libraries survive the digital era. No, libraries and e-bookstores can’t get rid of DRM overnight. But they can significantly reduce e-books’ reliance on this sales and lit toxin.

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By David Rothman

Chief of Random House to step down—are pirate booksites to blame? reads a Bookyards headline. Actually, as I see it, it was a mix of factors, not just just slow growth but also CEO Peter Olson’s declining health. I doubt that Internet bootlegging counted in the grand scheme of things.

That said, Random House does need to consider new business models—for example, use of innovation to grow library sales. Even Random can’t do this alone. Librarians and publishers should spend less time fighting over copyright-related matters and more time lobbying for new funding mechanisms. Remember, library e-books are the best of both worlds—free to patrons (reducing the piracy risk) but a revenue stream for creators. No, I’m not saying library sales are a panacea; here’s to retail growth, too! But I think library revenue could be much bigger than now, thanks to the possibilities of e-books.

Olson’s rumored successor: Gail Rebuck of Random House UK (photo).

The Bookseller on her ‘tude toward E: Rebuck warns that publishers should take e-books seriously but be vigilant on copyright matters to protect themselves and writers. “However, she said that ultimately it did not matter if, in 2050, a writer is read in a traditional paperback or a hand-held device. ‘As a publisher, I am happy to supply either to customers, and the essence of what I am selling will be the same, whatever the technology transmitting it. I think there is an irreducible quality to reading that means the book will never die.’” Let’s just hope she’ll be open to backing off from traditional DRM as well as to ePUB—both would make it easier for legitimate customers to enjoy e-books.

Related: PW item and Google news round-up on Olson’s expected departure from Random.

(Thanks, Tamas.)

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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

“We are a public school district with a corporate Amazon account. In good faith we purchased a Kindle. When it came time to download books, we discovered Amazon would only allow customers to order by credit card. Public school libraries, academic libraries and public libraries do not have corporate credit cards. So, bottom line, Amazon won’t let us buy Kindle books on our corporate account via a purchase order. Our Kindle is useless to us and our students have no access to this great technology. So much for innovation and Amazon’s lack of leadership in emerging technologies! And now we have a $400 loss at our taxpayers’ expense.” - A school librarian in New York.

The TeleRead take: Read the comments (appearing below her post), which overwhelmingly defend Amazon. I’d agree with them for the most part. That said, Amazon would do well not to allow purchase orders without warning customers of the complications—including the Kindle’s licensing terms, suggesting that this is really machine for individual use. See a LibraryJournal article and Rochelle Hartman’s thoughts on these matters. Psst! If the librarian and her school really want to keep the Kindle, they could download free nonDRM classics or buy nonDRMed books in Mobipocket format or DRMed ones from sources such as Fictionwise. Carefully read the format-related information in store FAQs. Confusingly, the Kindle can read nonDRMed Mobi for public domain sites and many stores but not the “protected” type unless the store has arranged for this.

Meanwhile, if nothing else, we know that the Kindle is in use at a New Jersey library—presumably one with a credit card—despite the legal questions. No, this isn’t the most school-and-library-friendly machine, but as long as you know the risks and workarounds, it’s far, far from useless. Of course, the Kindle will be more useful if Amazon gets behind the ePub standard, which could increase the number of books available for it.

Two public domain sites with Mobi/Kindle books: Feedbooks and Manybooks.net.

Image: Kindle with Sony Reader—CC-licensed from Jblyberg.

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By David Rothman

E-books sales could get a big boost if the industry ditched Digital Rights Management, a literary and sales toxin.

Wickedly, DRM  links future access to a book to the whims and survival of the DRM provider.

But what to replace DRM with?

The best scenario for e-book-lovers, as I see it, would be nothing. But many publishers won’t go for that, and what about the tricky issue of library books made available via permanent checkout quotas?

The Social DRM compromise

So, as a compromise, I’ve been talking up the concept of Social DRM—putting customer-specific information in books to discourage the posting of them on P2P networks.

The idea, named by Adobe’s Bill McCoy and based on the experiences of The Pragmatic Programmers, has already intrigued some smart publishers. People “might be a little less eager” to share a book with “5,000 of their closest friends” if “it had their name, address and ‘for a good time call….’ plastered all over it,” joked Deena Fisher of Drollerie Press in Cleveland. 

What to include beyond “For a good time call…”?

Humor aside, how far can publishers go in inserting information that would make people less likely to spread copyrighted books around without fair compensation to writers and publishers?

And what about the related issue of perhaps using some kind of digital water marking or something roughly equivalent to make unauthorized copies traceable?

Chris Webb, an open-minded Wiley editor, who dislikes DRM-style lockdowns but wants to carefully weigh alternatives, has broached the privacy question in a thoughtful post headlined Social DRM: How much is too much information? 

So has Garson O’Toole, a much-valued TeleBlog contributor, in our comment area.

Privacy-respectful possibilities: The nuts and bolts 

In response to the above and other concerns, here is one plans to consider for Social DRM and related marking:

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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

Here’s a look at the University of Michigan’s rare-book scanning operation—used for books that the library there deems too fragile for the Google scanners.

The Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle (photo) and a Michigan librarian disagree on the issue of how open the scanned books will be to the Net at large. Brewster still fears Google might in effect lock up the public domain—see his earlier comments on this issue. Speaking of openness, AP reports:

“Google, the Internet’s leader in search and advertising, says the process it developed and is using for scanning the majority of the books in Book Search is proprietary. Employees will not discuss it except to say it is much faster than what [the library] is doing and it’s not destructive.

“‘It took us quite a while to develop it so we do keep that confidential,’ said a library manager for Book Search, Ben Bunnell, who declined even to say where Google does the scanning.”

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By David Rothman

I’m baffled why Amazon readers are giving just three out of five stars to An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. Not everyone will love the Guide’s quirks, but I do. A bumbler named Sam Pulsifer accidentally burns down the Emily Dickinson house, killing two and bringing out the inner arsonist in other losers.

National Public Radio called the Guide “captivating”—read an excerpt, to to get a quick feel for Brock Clarke’s blend of charm and mirth—and I agree despite major issues with characterizations.

Many memorable novels abound with flaws, and yet you still might regard them as keepers. I’ve just finished a paper copy from the Alexandria, VA, library and need to get it back before I draw a fine, but oh how I’d love to be able to read the Guide whenever I wanted.

What, however, if I could legally keep an e-book edition of Guide and other library items I liked, up to a certain number per month or year? And suppose that the quotas favored books over other media, one way to promote literacy? That’s the “permanent checkout” concept, a way to wean libraries off an overdependence on the Rube Goldbergish approach of Digital Rights Management that besets patrons today, especially those with limited technical skills.

I could not sell a permanent checkout of the Guide or other book or video or audio. But perhaps I could share it with my family, and I could at least point friends to the same item for them to access from their libraries—under these terms or others.

A mix of access and financial models, please

Permanent checkouts are just one of a mix of business models and related technologies that I’ll discuss here as a way to help public libraries survive the digital age. Books are my main interest, although the models in one form or another could apply to other content.

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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 Branko Collin

Copyright is not fit for this digital age, and needs to be changed; so said two representatives of the Dutch national library in a letter to daily NRC yesterday. In their epistle (Dutch) Martin Bossenbroek and Hans Jansen, managers Collections & Service and E-strategy respectively of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library), the Dutch national library, explain how difficult it can be to run large-scale digitization programs when for a large number of books it simply is not clear whether they have returned to the public domain or not:

Copyright is a good thing, but the code that enshrines this right is too much of a good thing in its current form. In the digital age, it misses its targets. For hundreds of thousands of 20th century rights holders, it offers no protection, recognition and reward, but only the prospect of oblivion. An adaption of copyright law to the demands of the 21st century is needed urgently, otherwise the building of a digital library of any serious proportion will remain an illusion.

[Because of the difficulty of locating the heirs of long-dead authors, you cannot safely re-publish works that came out a 100 years ago.]

Both institutions and companies are keeping a safe distance from this copyright danger zone, and this will result in unbalanced digital collections. The digital library of the 21st century will have a gaping hole where works of that age should be. Hundreds of thousands of authors will never be found again. For them the chance of an epiphanous find followed by a second, digital life will definitely be gone.

This scenario can hardly be the meaning of a law that should protect an author’s rights. Before anything else, an author has the right to be read. That is why it is high time for an Internet exception for non-commercial use in the Dutch copyright law, one better thought through than the changes of 2004. Since then, heritage institutions are allowed to offer their collections electronically to the general public, but only from within their own building, using an intranet. That’s just not how the Internet works.

The authors continue discussing orphaned works, and how a mixture of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon orphan works law could produce a best of both worlds: mixing extended collective licenses with the opt-out principle. Collective licenses, also known as levies, are funds paid by the public into one big pot, and redistributed to the copyright holders. In a lot of jurisdictions radio is paid for this way. This makes radio possible: if there were no collective licenses, each radio broadcaster would have to negotiate separate contracts with artists for each track they play. At least, so the theory goes. Opt-out means the author or their heirs has to state explicitly not to want to participate. Copyright law is opt-in by default, but stops functioning in areas where the rights holders cannot be traced, or only with immense difficulty. Something authors seem to have brought upon themselves with their support of the Berne Convention, which outlaws any sensible scheme for tracking authors and their works.

See also: The printed book as a preservation device.

Next week the Amsterdam public library will organise a conference on the meaning of copyright for libraries, where Ernst Hirsch Ballin, the Dutch Minister of Justice, will be one of the speakers.

(Entry first published at 24 Oranges.)

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By David Rothman

Behold! A few nice words about the Kindle have come from none other than Walt Crawford, a well-known library automation guru and tech skeptic—even if they show up with major conditions.

I’ll get to Walt’s somewhat pro-Kindle remarks and K-related advice in time. His very qualified praise is blog-worthy since he has just about made a career of skepticism toward futuristic library tech. For now, here’s a little context for you to take in, while the suspense builds about the exact Crawford quote.

My biggest disappointment with Walt-style commentary is that it fixates too much on the limits of the technology of the day rather than realistically looking ahead for the long run. Consider Future Libraries, a 1995 book that Walt coauthored with Michael Gorman. FL mentioned the “enormous technological difficulties in creating affordable, bright LCD displays much larger than 11 inches.” It conceded that this might change, but the general tone here and elsewhere was too often anti-tech. Today we have not just econo-LCDs and the OLPC’s display breakthrough, but also E Ink and other forms of e-paper. Display technology will get much better in the future even if we can’t predict exactly when.

Rx: More hands-on—but even without it, Walt can be right at times

Another issue is that Walt often refuses to check out e-book gadgets and software, even after they are no longer so hard to catch up with for a hands-on. For example, to spill the beans on one of Walt’s all-important qualification of his Kindle praise, he noted he has yet to try a K machine. How about it, Walt? Just why not? Can’t you catch up with a K-owning friend? I won’t buy the argument that you’ll “stipulate that it might be ‘ideal enough’ for me.” What about positives and negatives that you might be the first to discern?

Still, I think Walt Crawford at times can be spot on. For example, I agree with certain of his warning about technohype, including the Kindle-related variety.

Walt’s wise advice for Amazon

In a just-published summary of librarians’ writings about the Kindle, moreover, combined with his own opinions, Walt serves up some excellent recommendations or implied recs for Amazon and brethren. The e-book market might indeed grow into the multi billions, “at least 10 and possibly 100 times the size” of the current one, if publishers and retailers listen to him.

His recommendations and implied ones, appearing in the April 2008 Cites and Insights, certainly overlap closely with my own thinking:

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By David Rothman

So what do you think, gang? People are talking about privatizing the public libraries in Dartmouth and Tewksbury, Massachusetts. The photo shows the Tewksbury library.

Of course, the same issue could arise online if public libraries can’t smoothly make the transition to e-books, already underway. Should Amazon and Google service pre-empt public libraries? It’s a very real possibility, alas, if the present privatization trends continue.

Later this weekend if time allows, I hope to post my thoughts on the need to modernize the business models of public libraries while retaining the integrity that the traditional library model at its best can promote. These will be my personal opinions only, and not necessarily those of other TeleBlog contributors. (Via LISNews.)

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