The university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas. …

“We’re already starting to see a move on the part of university libraries… to outsource virtually all the services [they have] developed and maintained over the years,” Greenstein said. Now, with universities everywhere still ailing from last year’s economic meltdown, administrators are more likely than ever to explore the dramatic restructuring of library operations.

Within the decade, he said, groups of universities will have shared print and digital repositories where they store books they no longer care to manage.

The above is from a conference that Inside Higher Ed reported on. The whole article is here.

So ask some in publishing, They even wonder if the new tech shouldn’t nuke the old business models. Why not jut have private rental plans? Or just let children and families use online bookstores?

Because, dear publishers, free library books are among your best marketing tools. Hook ‘em while they’re young.

Bookless libraries ahead?

In fact, publishers should worry less about competition from libraries and more about a less-than-happy trend that CNN discusses in a piece headlined The Future of libraries, with or without books.

Excerpt: “Books are being pushed aside for digital learning centers and gaming areas. ‘Loud rooms’ that promote public discourse and group projects are taking over the bookish quiet. Hipster staffers who blog, chat on Twitter and care little about the Dewey Decimal System are edging out old-school librarians.”

So now what happens if the libraries can’t even offer e-books under reasonable terms?

Optimal scenario: TeleRead

The optimal scenario, as I see it, would be a mix of for-profit activities and a well-stocked national digital library system carefully integrated with local schools and libraries—and with a definite agenda: the encouragement of reading and other forms of learning.

Meanwhile here’s something else to chew on: “In the United States, libraries are largely funded by local governments, many of which have been hit hard by the recession.

“That means some libraries may not get to take part in technological advances. It also could mean some of the nation’s 16,000 public libraries could be shut down or privatized. Schultz, of the Berkeley Law School, said it would be easy for public officials to point to the growing amount of free information online as further reason to cut public funding for libraries.”

Related: Cushing Academy getting rid of all its books, by Paul Biba.

Image: CC-licensed photo from the San Jose public library.

For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page.

I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I can only find a few references to it on TeleRead. E-books—and some modern issues relating to e-books—actually play a pretty prominent part in the book’s plot, in a number of ways.

Vinge’s Other Work

Those who only know Vinge from his recent work prior to Rainbows End might be surprised at his return to the relatively-near future, more commonly the province of Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, and Neal Stephenson. After all, his books A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky take place thousands of years in the future, when Earth is barely even a memory and humans have spread out across the galaxy.

But long before he wrote those, Vinge wrote another near-future book, The Peace War—and before that, his 1981 novella True Names helped to define the entire cyberpunk genre. With Rainbows End, Vinge returned to the near-future, adjusting and updating his predictions to fit the present-day.

(It is refreshing, by the way, to read a near-future extrapolation story for once that is not written in the present tense, or bombastic in the way that the authors like Doctorow can be. Vinge is old-school in his writing approach, which means I can appreciate his technological extrapolations all the more.)

The Plot

The story of Rainbows End is a third-person narrative woven together from the perspectives of several characters. The overall plot concerns an intelligence agency’s infiltration of a research lab that someone is using to perfect a workable mind-control technology—but unbeknownst to most of the intelligence agency, the mind-control mastermind happens to be the very man in charge of the search.

The infiltration plays out against a backdrop of fascinating new technology, culture clashes between fandoms, and protests against destruction of old media in favor of new. There are a number of memorable characters who get caught up in all these events.

The closest thing to a sole protagonist the book has is Robert Gu, an Alzheimer’s victim who is returned to lucidity by one experimental medical process, and returned to a youthful body by another. He lives with his son and daughter-in-law, Bob and Alice, and his grand-daughter Miri (another character of importance). Robert starts out as a fairly unsympathetic character—he used to be a real bastard, abusive of his wife and others around him—and it seems as though he is set to resume where he left off…until something changes him.

Since he was last lucid in our era, and has spent fifteen years or so in a mental fugue before being revived like Lazarus, he serves as a viewpoint character for modern readers. We learn about the startling technological advances in this new world just as he does, and we can sympathize with his future shock as he gradually grows accustomed to his new life.

Another important character is the mysterious Rabbit, a shadowy fixer (and trickster)from the Internet world who specializes in getting things done by getting people with complimentary talents together. His identity—indeed, even his very nature—is unclear, as are his motivations. However, he is a vital part of the plot to infiltrate the lab—whether the intelligence agency thinks it’s a good idea or not.

There are actually several different narratives within the story that interweave and cross over with one another in the most unusual ways. Characters watch others in secret, and exchange private messages to hold conversations behind each other’s backs. In the end, it all comes together in ways that are unexpected even by the participants.

Vinge’s Cyberspace

Rainbows End is an expansion and reworking of ideas found in Vinge’s 2001 short story, “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (found in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge). “Fast Times” features characters who would later appear in Rainbows End, though some of them have different names (or even entirely different species), and the plots are almost entirely unrelated. The technology is the same, however, as far as it goes.

However, Rainbows End also owes a lot to True Names. Both feature consensus fantasy realities constructed within computer networks. Both of these fantasy worlds have geographical correspondences to real-world locations—though True Names’s world is one that can only be observed from within while Rainbows End’s can be seen by anyone wearing special glasses.

Interactive Fiction: If You Build It, Will They Come?

And both True Names and Rainbows End also feature interactive “books”. The protagonist in True Names writes what another character refers to as “games” but he calls “novels”—apparently advanced multimedia versions of the text adventure games that were just reaching the height of their popularity at the time True Names was written.

Vinge has long held that the e-book medium of the future would be “interactive” in some respect. In 1993, when Vinge wrote an introduction for an “annotated” edition of his book A Fire Upon the Deep, he believed that hypertext (at the time, the newest new computer thing) was going to be the future of fiction:

I believe hypertext fiction will ultimately be an entirely new art form, as different from novels as motion pictures are from oil paintings. […] Guessing: There may not be hypertext sequels so much as the instantiation of new windows on the “reality” of the story. Group participation both during initial construction and in expanding the ongoing reality may be one of the most striking features of the art form. […] Hypertext fiction may evolve into immense art works that combine the essence of professional production teams with independent artists with the interests and efforts of the ultimate viewers.

This has, of course, never really come to pass. (And, as pnh noted in his interview, probably never will.) I always think of it as an example of the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy—projecting the popularity of something based on the ability to do it rather than the demand for it.

We can do hypertext fiction today very easily—but apart from a few Internet writing sites like Ficly or Writing.com, nobody seems to bother. Wikis would seem to fit best of all with Vinge’s vision for expanding upon someone else’s story, but there have not been many uses of them exactly like the ones he imagined. The closest things would be the forest of wikis that have sprung up to cover select interests or fandoms, such as the Avatar: The Last Airbender wiki, but these are usually reference rather than creative works.

On the other hand, there has been at least some serious study of the idea, as I found when searching TeleRead for another link. But it does not seem to have led to any commercial success outside of a few isolated experiments.

Belief Circles

With Rainbows End, Vinge’s conception of the interactive book of the future has evolved again, into a fully multimedia, virtual reality experience—though in most other respects it has a lot in common with his hypertext prediction quoted above. In Rainbows End, fans of published works create “belief circles”, which seem to be a mash-up of fanfic, Internet shared-universe writing circles, live-action roleplaying, and virtual multi-user environments such as Second Life.

In the virtual world that overlays the real world (and is viewed through displays embedded in contact lenses and controlled via sensors in clothing), fans of a given fictional or historical setting (members of that setting’s “belief circle”) create their own avatars and overlays for themselves and everything around them based on that setting. A skyscraper might be painted as a medieval tower, and cars might become horse-drawn carriages or low-flying magic carpets. Multiple different belief circles’ worldviews can overlap the same area; onlookers can switch between them like changing channels on a TV set.

For settings that are still under copyright, micropayments are charged to belief-circle members and credited toward the owner for each use of something relating to that world. (Though apparently there has been some copyright reform in Vinge’s cyber-fantasy world: at one point movies are said to have five-year copyright terms. I guess we can at least dream.)

One of the central conflicts of the book involves a clash between two belief circles over which one will dominate the University of California San Diego Library building—the “Dangerous Knowledge” setting in which librarians are knight-guardians of knowledge, and the Pokémon-ish “Scooch-a-mouti” children’s-fantasy-monsters setting. At one point the clash escalates into an out-and-out battle, with millions of viewers world-wide tuning in to see the outcome.

An Object Lesson in Obsolete Objects

The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.

So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before.

Vinge wrote Rainbows End just as Google was beginning its own massive scanning project (which does get a mention in passing in the book), but well before the settlement with the Authors Guild (and the attendant controversy) was on the horizon. Thus, some of the predictions are already slightly obsolete. (It is amusing how little controversy there is over the idea of China digitizing the entire contents of the British Museum and Library, compared to how much uproar there is in Europe right now over Google.)

Still, it’s easy to see how this global scanning project inspired Vinge’s future version—scanning books a page at a time is a time-intensive process, even if you saw the spine off and put the stack of paper in a sheet-feeding scanner. With better computers it would be much faster to scan them in windblown fragments, and digitize all the world’s knowledge in a matter of weeks.

This does, of course, depend on printed books getting so deprecated that nobody minds if scores upon scores of them—some possibly valuable antiques—go through the shredder in the name of digital reincarnation. It is difficult to see that happening now—but on the other hand, if technology marches on as quickly as Rainbows End predicts, before long entire generations may come to think of printed books as akin to papyrus scrolls and stone tablets. (Even for an e-book fan like myself, that’s a scary thought.)

Faulty Crystal Balls

Still, I’m doubtful it will happen. Predicting the future is always an inaccurate game—if we go by True Names, we should already have direct-brain-stimulation cyberspace and mandatory computing licenses by now. Rainbows End is set as far in our future now as True Names was then—and if it seems like books written now are “more accurate” predictors, that is only because hindsight is 20/20. Things that didn’t come to pass in a book written thirty years ago are easy to spot—but those same things in a book written now will have to wait another thirty years.

There are already a few “predictions” (for the 2005-2010 years) that did not come true—and one irony. At one point in Rainbows End, a character refers to a (fictitious) Terry Pratchett book written after Robert Gu succumbed to Alzheimer’s Disease. Of course, we now know that Terry Pratchett himself has been diagnosed with latent Alzheimer’s.

But as far as prognostication goes, Vinge also isn’t above poking a little fun at himself. As the battle between belief circles rages at the library, one character reflects:

There had been a few debacles in the late Teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or the Zones of Thought?

The Tines and Zones of Thought are, of course, major elements from A Fire Upon the Deep.

Conclusion

Rainbows End is an interesting book for the future it predicts. It presents a fully-realized world, very well fleshed out and with more interesting predictions and characters than I have been able to cover in this review. I highly recommend it.

Ironically for a book where e-books are important, Rainbows End does not seem to be commercially available as an e-book—not on eReader, Fictionwise, or even for Amazon’s Kindle. The HTML version at the Internet Archive appears to be the only way to read it electronically.

Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch, whom we have mentioned within only the last couple of days as a possible investor in Plastic Logic e-readers, made the remarks at an industry trade show in Washington. “People reading news for free on the web, that’s got to change,” Murdoch said.

However, as the Wired article points out, there is no sign yet that Murdoch’s talk is anything more than hot air. He has certainly not asked Google or Yahoo to remove any of his publications from their news aggregation services, let alone moved to sue them. And if such a suit were filed, it is anyone’s guess how it would come out.

Google Books

Those objecting to the Google settlement have a somewhat stronger case. They contend that Google has gamed the legal system, making a huge rights-grab by way of court settlement, unsupported by any act of legislature.

Under the terms of the settlement, only Google would be able to profit from the out-of-print “orphan works” it has scanned in—it could not license them out to others the way it could out-of-print books or books with permission granted by their authors. Anyone else who wanted to do something similar with out-of-print books would need to work its own deals with libraries, scan and proofread the books themselves, get sued, and work out a settlement of their own. Meanwhile, Google has a seven-million-book head start.

Critics have raised the spectacle of Google as a potential monopoly power over orphan works, with the ability to charge whatever price they liked. However, Google representatives claim they would be keeping prices reasonable in an effort to reach as many customers as possible.

Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School. It is not clear that any group will oppose the settlement outright.

As we pointed out recently, the New York Law School group is partly funded by Microsoft.

Taiwan has teamed up with Ingram Digital to digitize the nation’s libraries. From the press release:

The Taiwan Library Consortium, in conjunction with the government of Taiwan, has selected Ingram Digital, an Ingram content company focused on solutions for digital content management, hosting and distribution, to provide e-books and audio books to a majority of the nation’s libraries.

The Taiwan Library Consortium will provide 88, or about 75 percent, of the country’s libraries with access to e-books through this agreement. E-book titles will be accessible to member libraries via Ingram Digital’s e-content aggregation platform, MyiLibrary®. Under the terms of the three-year agreement, Ingram Digital will supply 250,000 users with access to 5,000 digital titles covering a wide spectrum of subject matter. …

Titles that will be available through this agreement were methodically chosen after a one-year survey evaluating usage patterns of print titles. Content will be available in both Chinese and English, continuing a longstanding tradition of providing citizens with access to education through the highest quality reference materials available. …

The agreement marks the third international government-funded deal for Ingram Digital. Ingram Digital is also currently engaged in partnerships with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network and the Joint Information Systems Committee in the United Kingdom.

Grossman touches on and ties together a number of related topics. He discusses the way that vanity publishing has largely lost its stigma over the last few years, going from the last refuge of the talentless to just another way to get books noticed. He talks about the outdated advance and consignment systems that have constrained traditional publishing since the Great Depression, and how e-books might represent a way to bypass some of those constraints. And he mentions fan fiction, which is written and read for free in huge quantities.

Essentially, Grossman predicts that the future will be just like today only more so, as aspiring writers rely less on the "Old Publishing" system of manuscripts and literary agents and more on the less traditional means of Internet and vanity publishing. He also predicts changes in the content of books based on the influences and form factors of the new media:

Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software.

The article is interesting, even if the predictions are not especially novel (pun not intended).

And now the shocker of the day! A study cited in Parade Magazine says a family of four can save up to $2,500 a year by borrowing just 10 items a month from the public library. That’s 120 items a year, averaging $20.83 each.

Significantly, public libraries are godsends to students and job-hunters. But Philadelphia and San Diego may shut down some branches, and library budgets are tight in many other cities.

So what would Novelists, Inc. think of that. Cheery news? Probably not, but it’s still something for the group to ponder as it continues its war against used bookstores. Will libraries be its next targets?

Background: Used books blamed in NYT for slump, as well as Chris Meadows’ Should second-hand book stores pay royalties? 

In a related vein…

Also see America’s Most Literate Cities (top three: Minneapolis, shown in photo, Seattle and Washington, D.C.). The study found that both libraries and bookstores were more numerous in high-literacy areas, even those with heavy Internet use. Might literary be leading to more literacy?

The best way to grow the publishing industry’s profits isn’t to gouge readers, but to rather to team up with libraries and schools to market books and literacy in general—not just to the public but to policymakers.

Speaking of literacy: Check out Different Kind of Library Thief in Yesterday’s Paper.

And a reminder: I fervently agree with Novelists, Inc., that writers are underpaid. But there are better ways to correct this. Consumers are cash-strapped and have many entertainment options. When it comes to books, “free” just might be the best model, with provisions, of course, for libraries compensating content-providers fairly.

Plus, an “I told you so”: I love libraries of all kinds and sizes, paper and electronic, big and small. But given the miserliness and short-sightedness of many politicians and voters, even in high-literacy areas, should certain libraries really have spent so much money on flashy headquarters buildings when the real action was and in neighborhood branches? For years I’ve warned against the library palace syndrome. Greater use of e-books, naturally, would be another way to get more per buck out of library spending.

Detail: Yes, I wish Parade had cited the family-related study by name, so I could find out more about its methodology and so on. Just how does “family of four” enter the picture? The ten-item-a-month stat would seem to apply in many cases; is family size that relevant? And what about other variables such as ages of the children?

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) today announced its agreement with the Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC), an initiative of the Georgia Board of Regents and the University of Georgia, to develop and launch the AccessText Network, a comprehensive, national online system that will make it easier and quicker for students with print-related disabilities, such as blindness, to obtain the textbooks they need for their college courses.

“Many college students with disabilities are struggling to use required or recommended print textbooks that are essential to their course success. The new AccessText Network will improve the way electronic versions of print textbooks are delivered to campus-based disability student service (DSS) offices from publishers and streamline the permission process for scanning copies of print textbooks when publisher files are unavailable. By improving the efficiencies of our present process, AccessText will facilitate quicker access to content for more students,” said Patricia Schroeder, AAP’s president and chief executive officer.

Europeana – the European digital library, museum and archive – is a 2-year project that began in July 2007. It will produce a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers. The prototype will be launched in November 2008 by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

The digital content will be selected from that which is already digitised and available in Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. The prototype aims to have representative content from all four of these cultural heritage domains, and also to have a broad range of content from across Europe.

The interface will be multilingual. Initially, this may mean that it is available in French, English and German, but the intention is to develop the number of languages available following the launch.

There is an excellent article about the background leading up to the site in this article in The Guardian, from which the following is taken:

"It is unique," said Jill Cousins, Europeana’s executive director. "A search engine cannot do what we can. For example, a search [on Europeana] for Mozart brings together letters he wrote to his father, musical scores, and film and sound recordings of his music."

She said she was grateful to Google for setting a precedent. "Part of the reason our site exists is because Google Book Search kicked off a debate about the presence of European cultural heritage on the web. That allowed us to mobilise."

One of the people most incensed by Google Book Search was the former French president Jacques Chirac, who started a race with the Anglo-Saxons to digitalise French content led by institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. France accounts for around a half of the content of the Europeana site, followed by Britain and the Netherlands. Other countries will slowly add more content. Currently there are around 2m items available, and the site is expected to reach 10m items by 2010.

However, the site is now down due to its popularity. As stated at the URL in the beginning of this article: We launched the European.eu site on 20 November and huge use – 10 million hits an hour – meant it crashed. We are doing our best to reopen Europeana.eu in a more robust version.

This appears to be a classic case of a compromise that benefits all sides. If it is approved by the courts, Google will pay $125 million in legal fees, settlement of claims by scanned authors, and to establish a “Book Rights Registry” that will keep track of known rightsholders and work on locating unknown ones.

This could lead to more than just snippets of books being available. One of the press releases breaks it down so:

If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:

• MORE ACCESS TO OUT-OF-PRINT BOOKS — Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
• ADDITIONAL WAYS TO PURCHASE COPYRIGHTED BOOKS — Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
• INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS TO MILLIONS OF BOOKS ONLINE — Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
• FREE ACCESS FROM U.S. LIBRARIES — Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• COMPENSATION TO AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS AND CONTROL OVER ACCESS TO THEIR WORKS — Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.

In addition to the limited preview available now, Google Books users will be able to purchase the right to view books on-line in their entirety, or will be able to use designated computers at local libraries to view entire books on-line for free. Institutions will be able to purchase subscriptions that permit entire-book viewing as well.

The Universities of California, Michigan, and Stanford see great promise in the settlement for cultural and academic benefits, providing new ways to conduct advanced research and share public domain works.

Could this settlement potentially launch e-books into a new era? It is probably too early to say. But it will certainly be a sea change in the way books may be viewed on-line.

Prior TeleRead coverage of the Authors Guild litigation may be found here.

One idea that libraries have been experimenting with for a while is lending a collection of e-books under the same kind of restrictions as paper books—no more than one patron using a given “copy” at one time, each copy being “returned” after a set checkout period. (For a while, eReader was owned by a company that offered e-book lending collections to libraries.)

I have learned that both Fictionwise and my local public library now offer e-book lending collections—Fictionwise through its Libwise division, and my library through Overdrive. Today, I decided to take a look at both e-libraries and see what they had to offer.

Similarities and Differences

Both of the libraries offer works in the Secure Mobipocket e-book format. This lets them deliver the books to you with a set expiration date enforced by Digital Rights Management (DRM), so that you cannot read them after they have expired. The library is then free to lend the books out again to you or someone else, knowing that only one person can be reading the same “virtual copy” at a time.

To download library e-books, you must register your Mobipocket application and device serial numbers with the library. Fictionwise’s allows 4, Overdrive’s 3. Of course, you must also create an account with each of them. Fictionwise’s uses your pre-existing Fictionwise account. My library’s Overdrive needed my library card number.

At the moment, Fictionwise’s library is open only to members of its Buywise discount club (though they will also offer guest accounts to library administrators on request). My public library’s Overdrive collection is open only to those who have a local library card (as will be other public libraries’ Overdrive collections).

In addition to Mobipocket e-books, the Overdrive library offers Adobe e-books, Windows Media audiobooks, and others, but I didn’t really look at any of them. The Mobipocket books were what interested me.

Selection

The Overdrive collection from my library did not have a very large selection—only 57 Mobipocket e-book titles altogether. (Edit: As noted in one of the comments below, other libraries’ Overdrive collections may be substantially larger.) In all of that, there were only a handful of titles I wanted: the first two volumes of Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife and a couple of Pratchett Discworlds. The rest were mostly non-fiction or mainstream titles I had never heard of.

Fictionwise has 543 titles in its library at the time of this writing, broken down into a number of categories. Many of them are short stories rather than full novels.

I did not browse through all the categories, but of the ones I checked, science fiction definitely had the most with 150 titles in it. There were 31 fantasy and 26 romance—but only 7 dark fantasy and 1 erotica (by Robert Silverberg, of all people). And with only 6 “mainstream” titles out of 543 books, one wonders just how “mainstream” they can really be.

It seems a little odd to break “dark fantasy” out from “fantasy” when there are so few titles in either category, but these categories echo those of the Fictionwise store itself, so I suppose it is just as well to keep it that way for simplicity’s sake.

The Fictionwise library has quite a few decent titles, including a book or two I’ve enjoyed in print. There’s another Bujold, this time the Vorkosigan novel The Borders of Infinity. There’s M.J. Engh’s The Wheel of the Winds. There’s Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmations. There is a huge number of Robert Silverberg titles, and quite a few Michael Resnicks.

And there’s also Tarnsman of Gor—but then, they can’t all be winners.

In both cases, the libraries have only a limited number of each title to lend out—just like printed books in a “real” library. You can only check out a book if there is a copy that is not being read by anyone else.

The Overdrive collection allows books to be placed “on hold” so that you will be notified and given first shot at the next copy of a book that becomes available. Fictionwise does not appear to offer this feature yet. (Edit: Actually, I have been informed and subsequently discovered that they do, but it was not immediately obvious to me how to do so when I looked at a book that had been checked out.)

It should also be noted that, unlike in my local library’s physical-books catalog, there appears to be no way to tell when a book is “due back” in either Fictionwise or Overdrive. This lack is particularly annoying in the Fictionwise library, where there is no way to place a hold but no way to tell when you should try to check it out before someone else can either.

Checkout and Turn-In

To check out books from the Overdrive library, you just add the books to your cart, then click the check-out link to check them out. You can have up to ten books out at one time, and you get them for a fixed period of two weeks. (Edit: As mentioned in the comment below, number of books allowed and check-out period may vary between different libraries’ Overdrive collections.)

In the Fictionwise library, you check them out one at a time by clicking on “Borrow now.” At the right, a panel appears with a drop-down box where you can select the length of time you will need them—anywhere from 3 to 16 days. This system adds a good deal of flexibility. If you know it will not take you long to read, you can choose closer to 3. If you know you will be away from reliable net access for some time, you can choose closer to 16.

Once you have set the check-out length, click the “Borrow Now” button and the book is automatically added to your Fictionwise bookshelf. (If the book is already checked out, there will be a “Wait List” button instead, and you will be added to a waiting list. You can tell how many people are in line ahead of you by the number of “person” icons next to the “Checked Out” icon.) You can currently only borrow three books at a time from the Fictionwise library.

Instead of checking Fictionwise library books out, you may also choose to buy them, either for yourself or to add another copy to the library. It is unclear whether you can or will eventually be able to buy and donate copies of Fictionwise books not yet in the library, however.

In both libraries, there is no way to turn in a book early (at least for Mobipocket. You can turn in Overdrive Adobe books early, according to their FAQ) because there is no way for the library to be sure the book has been removed from your hard drive before the DRM’s preset expiration date. In the case of Fictionwise, make sure you are not checking books out for any longer than you need them.

Unlike traditional books, Fictionwise books are “turned in” automatically, by the DRM system. In addition to the standard multi-device lockdown of all Mobipocket books, these books are set to expire in a set period of time—14 days for the Overdrive collection; user-selectable for the Fictionwise. After that time, the files remain on your hard drive, but you will no longer be able to access them. The library is then free to lend them out again.

The Books Themselves

I looked briefly through several titles from both libraries, and there is not a whole lot that really needs saying. These are professionally-formatted, nicely legible e-books in every respect.

My only complaint about the Fictionwise library would be that of the books I downloaded to try it out, only The Hundred and One Dalmations had a table of contents—Wheel of the Winds and The Borders of Infinity did not. But that may be an artifact of the way the books were provided to Fictionwise from their publishers.

Pro: The Convenience

On the face of it, these virtual libraries seem to be a very elegant and cool idea. My rant about HarperCollins’s ersatz “free” giveaway of Neverwhere aside, I have no problem with the idea of a book being yours to read for a limited time and then expiring, as long as it’s clear this is a library-style endeavor without a lot of noise made about how “free” it is. And certainly the ability to “check out” and “turn in” books without ever leaving your apartment is just like having your own private on-demand bookmobile.

Cons: Restricted Platforms

The problems lie in the execution. The first problem is a problem for readers like me: there is currently no DRM-capable Mobipocket reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch, or even Nokia 770, my current mobile reading devices of choice. I will only be able to read the books I check out on my Windows desktop—which is why I doubt I will be making much use of either of these libraries beyond my testing for this review, unless and until Mobipocket comes through with the official iPhone client that their CEO claimed would be out “by the end of the year.”

Useless DRM

The other problem is a potentially big problem for Fictionwise and Overdrive: Mobipocket’s DRM is completely ineffective, and has been for quite a while. The tools to crack it can be found in under five minutes on the Internet. Many e-book-reading consumers already use them to decrypt Secure Mobipocket books they’ve bought so they can read them on unsupported devices. This is illegal in some places, such as the United States, but not everywhere—and even where it is illegal, there is no reason to suppose that people who decrypt for personal use only will ever be caught.

There is no reason why these same cracking tools should not work just as well on library e-books as on purchased e-books—time limit or not, they all use the same DRM system. With the DRM cracked, the books can be read by anything that can read normal Mobipocket books, and will not expire.

Of course, you have to have a certain amount of technical expertise to be able to do that, and the majority of consumers will probably be happy to use the books the way they were intended. But for people of low moral character, these “library” e-books will simply become “free” e-books, and nobody will be the wiser. The real scum of the earth might even go so far as to share them through peer-to-peer.

Conclusion

E-book libraries are an interesting idea, and both the Overdrive and Fictionwise libraries seem to be executed about as well as such a thing can be (though I would give the edge to Fictionwise over my library’s Overdrive for its selection and its user-set check-out periods). Providing time-limited lending copies just as with a “real” library is certainly a laudable goal.

The problem is that the DRM that enables the lending is inconvenient to users who do not have exactly the right devices on the one hand, and ineffective at restricting the use of the books to just those intended by the lenders on the other. These are flaws that are inherent in the very idea of trying to make an electronic book act like a paper book, and I am skeptical that they can ever be solved.

Who says e-reading is the only way to enjoy digitally stored text?

Publishers can now turn digital files into single copies of a professional-quality printed book without requiring a full-fledged production run on a printing press. In the most advanced form, the technology even allows printing at the exact location it is needed.

This is worlds apart from the traditional publishing method of printing centrally and shipping to stores.

Traditional Publishing vs. the Vanity Press

Affordable, consumer-friendly print-on-demand technology has been a sought-after grail of the publishing world for at least ten years.

Traditional publishing has always suffered from a problem called economy of scale. It costs so much to set up a printing operation to create a book that publishers must sell either a huge quantity of inexpensive books or a lesser quantity of expensive books in order to break even.

So publishers have had to pick and choose what books could be published, with significant incentive to publish only the most commercially successful works they possibly could.

Death of the midlist

In recent years, this has lead to the “death of the midlist.” That’s the publishing industry term for books that only sell decently. Some publishers have squeezed out midlist writers in favor of those who consistently produce bestsellers.

Of course, it was always possible to finance your own print run, through so-called “vanity presses.” However, vanity publishing had a bad reputation due to the high per-book cost of small print runs—and due to the large number of shady operators. They would prey upon the author’s gullibility and desire to see his work in print to con him out of a good deal of money to print the book.

In the end the author would be left with the realization that he would have to spend still more money to market it on his own.

So in the old days, vanity publishing was considered feasible only for inferior or so-so writers who had large sums of money burning holes in their pockets. Their vanity led them to want to see the book in print even if it wasn’t good enough for a “real” publisher.

Deciding print run size: Another problem with traditional publishing

Another problem with traditional publishing has been deciding on the right size of print runs. Printing too few books results in lost sales by consumers who lose interest when they are not able to get the book immediately. Printing too many runs up huge warehousing costs, as well as costs associated with destroying excess copies that do not sell.

Warehousing and distribution costs may actually account for considerably more expense than printing costs in the end.

Unhappy returns

Lacking effective crystal ball gazers, publishers are often stuck with lots of unsold books. Due to a clause that has been grandfathered into publishing contracts since time immemorial, publishers usually have to buy back from bookstores all copies that do not sell.

Such bought-back or otherwise unsold books are generally either destroyed or sold at a huge markdown to returned book vendors who turn around and sell them at similarly low prices. These are the books you often see in stacks on tables at Waldenbooks or other bookstores with really low price labels on them.

This was also an obstacle to the growth of book superstores such as Amazon.com. The more titles such a store was to carry, the more warehouse space it would need for books that sold very rarely but still needed to be stocked against the chance that someone eventually would order them.

Enter print-on-demand

However, by the late 1990s, digital printing had advanced enough that professional-quality books could be produced cheaply in smaller numbers, by industrial-strength laser printers. With no type to set, such a printer could produce any one of a whole library’s worth of digitally-stored books on short notice. Or, in other words, print them on demand.

It would still have to be professionally bound and then shipped out like any other book, of course, but compared to the cost of setting up a full-scale print run, the savings were substantial.

The rise of Xlibris, Lulu and Lightning Source

A number of companies were soon set up to take advantage of this industrial-scale print-on-demand technology. Smaller companies such as Xlibris and Lulu deal directly with consumers, while  larger companies like Lightning Source are integrated more directly into the larger publishing industry.

In fact, Lightning Source serves as a considerable part of Amazon.com’s merchandising back end.

Lightning’s print-on-demand capability makes it possible for Amazon to stock more book titles than it can afford to warehouse. When it receives an order for a seldom-requested book, it can simply have Lightning Source print the book out as needed.

Beyond “vanity”

Amazon was not the only one helped by industrial print-on-demand publishing. Thanks to the smaller print-on-demand companies, self-publishing has gone from strictly “vanity” to something that many small publishers or even single individuals can do economically.  For example, Diane Duane will be using Lulu to create printed versions of The Big Meow (see this TeleRead entry) for her subscribers.

Many small presses no longer contract traditional printing for their books but instead send them off to a POD outfit such as Lightning Press.

As Lightning Press offers packages that include automatic listing for sale on Amazon.com, it has become easier than ever to self-publish and promote the book at the same time—perhaps in some cases, too easy. In fact, my own uncle has a self-published print-on-demand book listed at Amazon.com.

Enter Espresso: Beyond the central printing model

But these industrial-scale print-on-demand companies still have one foot in traditional publishing; the books still must be printed by a centrally-located company and then shipped out to the customer.

For a number of years now, companies have been seeking to make something more portable—a consumer-level kiosk that can be placed in libraries and bookstores to produce fast, inexpensive individual copies of books requested by consumers. The process itself is not that difficult. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was able to put everything necessary to create inexpensive printed and bound versions of public-domain books in his Internet Bookmobile van and tour the country with it.

There is also a non-profit organization called Public Domain Reprints that prints and ships copies of public domain ebooks at cost. I have ordered a book from PDR, and will be reviewing it here when it arrives. The problem comes in automating the procedure so it can be done entirely without human intervention.

The On-Demand Espresso Book Machine

But a company called On Demand Books has done it. In 2006, they produced the first model of their Espresso book machine. Dubbed “an ATM for books” by CNN, the Espresso incorporates a computer, two printers, apparatus for bookbinding and trimming, and automation to tie them all together.

A book can go from PDF files on a computer to a finished, professional-quality paperback book in under ten minutes. The machine itself costs $140,000 (though CNN’s article claimed $50,000; perhaps $50,000 is the cost and $140,000 the retail price). It can produce books at a cost of a penny a page.

A sticky problem

But creating the book machine was not as simple as just hooking some equipment together. To create a system that could go from long periods of inactivity to instantly cranking out a book, the On Demand team needed to find a method of gluing the spine to the block (the printed pages) without hot glue. Glue kept hot for too long thickens and loses its effectiveness, and also smells bad.

In the end, they developed a new method of binding that kept the glue at room temperature until needed and then hit it with a burst of ultrasound to heat it up.

The Espresso-Lightning Print agreement

Originally, the Espresso was limited to public-domain titles only, but in April, On Demand entered into a partnership with Lightning Source, the owners of Lightning Print.

The agreement  would give On Demand access to Lightning’s scanning facilities (to create high-quality digital copies of books that they could then reproduce through the Espresso). It would also allow them to use copyrighted material from any of Lightning Source’s publishers who opt to let them.

World Bank site of first completed Espresso machine

The first completed Espresso was deployed in 2006 at the World Bank in Washington DC, amid much fanfare (see also a 33 minute RealVideo recording of the ceremony). It has since been moved to the New Orleans Public Library to replace books destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Seven others now exist in such places as the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt; the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco, California; and several bookstores or libraries in the US, Canada, and Australia.

In October, some of the machines will start appearing in British bookstores as well.

Still in early stages

While the Espresso offers a potentially bright future for paper book lovers in an e-world, it is still in its early stages.

The existing machines are on the order of prototypes. You see a bunch of off-the-shelf printing and binding equipment jumbled together in an unholy mess of assembly-line robotics that would seem more at home on a factory floor than in a library or bookstore.

They are also costly and time-consuming to build: On Demand has to spend about a month per unit putting them together from scratch. However, On Demand hopes to have a second-generation, mass-producible, prettier-looking unit ready by fall 2008, to begin leasing in 2009.

Implications for e-books and treebooks

If the Espresso is able to be mass-produced, it may not be long before it starts showing up in bookstores, libraries, airports, maybe even coffee shops all over the place—and its effects might filter over to affect e-books as well.

After all, e-book vendors already offer all their wares in digital format. Print publishers that resell their wares through Fictionwise might not want Fictionwise going into direct competition with them. But smaller publishers selling their titles e-only, because they cannot afford even limited industrial POD print runs, might just find this a match made in heaven.

Likewise, if PDF roleplaying game sourcebooks could be economically one-off printed in better-than-Kinko’s quality, it could expand their market as well.

Handy even for the big guys

And even traditional print publishers will not always have the foresight to print enough of their books. Print runs take time, and if a novel turns into an unexpected best-seller, it might be a week or more between the first print run selling out and the second hitting stores.

If the novel could be printed on demand as a stopgap, it might mean selling thousands of copies that would otherwise go unsold as would-be buyers cool down during its unavailability.

It also means that older titles need never go “out of print”—as long as the publisher has a digital copy on hand, a single new paper copy can always be printed out without the cost of setting up a print run or shipping it to the store.

(Of course, this will be a concern to some authors, whose contracts have so-many-years-out-of-print rights revision clauses. But that was an issue caused by e-books as well, and there have been several years since the problem first was noted in which to work that out.)

Consumer-level print-on-demand, as exemplified by the Espresso, is a hybrid of P and E that brings the availability advantages of an e-book to the form factor of a paper book. It it means that people who prefer not to read on a screen need not be left entirely out of the digital revolution. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this situation as it develops.

YouTube Videos

Take a look at these videos of the Espresso in action. The first one is kind of a puff piece, but the second one gets a bit more technical.

Someday could the books all be online? Imagine working on your thesis at the beach. Just how much progress are academic publishers and university libraries making?  Here in the States, at least, many trade publishers are buzzing about the Kindle. Academic publishers, however, along with their library customers, are not quite as excited about Kindle-style e-books yet despite growing interest in digital works.

Leaders beyond the Kindle realm

But in many ways the academic houses been the real leaders in delivering other kinds of online content, whether as standalone product databases or as part of library aggregators. Universities see E as a way to fight the growing costs of academic journals and, yes, books, too. One study of academic, public and special libraries showed that only 25 percent of library spending on e-books was with individual publishers, while close to 70 percent was with aggregators.

Such thoughts come to mind not only from various statistics but also from the time I spent on May 29 at the "Going Large with E-Books" seminar at the annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston. Despite the name, e-books in the usual sense were just part of the agenda.

Two different strategies but a common skepticism of DRM

Life-science publisher CABI recommended starting small and diversifying with multiple platforms where feasible. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers chose a single vendor that could deliver online features like subscription-based access and full-text search, but also provide a print-on-demand service.  Both presenters stressed that DRM was something to be avoided or at least made unobtrusive.

Outside academic publishing, Allen Noren of O’Reilly Media presented a high-level view of the company’s online content offerings, including e-books. Disclaimer: I write for O’Reilly but do not work for it.

Curiously, Noren did not stress that O’Reilly e-books (in PDF format) are DRM-free, but did emphasize their repackagability and flexibility, two traits that come in handy for the Safari service. In a TeleBlog comment, Tim O’Reilly (photo) has described Safari as "our third largest reseller, behind only Amazon and Barnes & Noble."

For some titles, users can choose to buy only relevant chapters, download whole e-books, or read content online—or, naturally, continue to buy print editions.

Island-style books not as urgent for academic publishers

So e-books as portable, discrete entities aren’t quite as urgent for academic publishers as they are for trade publishers, but that could change as device adoption spreads.  The Kindle already comes with the Oxford American Dictionary installed, and Oxford University Press has enjoyed good sales of Kindle books. It will be interesting to see if the rigorous scholarly products which began appearing in digital format with CD-ROMs in the 80’s and 90’s—and are now online behind institutional subscriptions—can migrate to e-book devices.

Very large, search-intensive applications may never be able to live on e-readers, but always-on wireless devices like the Kindle certainly could access them remotely. Marrying touchscreens and e-ink with rich online content databases could be quite attractive to college students who’ve dreamed of working on their theses from the beach.

Moderator’s note: Blame moi, not Liza, for the misidentification of the book room mentioned in the post’s lead (based on the Flickr caption). The photo is of a bookstore, not a library, and I’ve made a correction. – D.R.

Image credits: First photo CC-licensed from RTPeat. Second licensed from Del Far.

The prominent journalist Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian in the U.K., obliged e-bookdom recently with a tech-skeptical column headlined When it comes to kissing and telling, you can’t beat this 15th century gadget: The floor of memoirs has again proved the worth of the book as a receptacle for almost all the human imagination can device.

Spot-on criticism from Sir Simon

“Long after emails have been wiped, tapes have decayed, CDs have rusted and computers have crashed, dusty books will remain as silent witnesses on the shelf,” wrote Sir Simon. “Power lies in their simplicity and indestructibility. They are a habit we will never kick. We love them because we know they are for ever.”

As a realistic fan of both E and P, I in fact agree with him on the above specifics. E-bookdom is egregiously deficient for now in preservation-related areas despite some progress with, say, the ePub standard or the estimable but less than fully comprehensive efforts at the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and elsewhere. The publishing industry, libraries and others can change that. But at present, e-books and e-text in general are far from trustworthy, and sometimes the publishers themselves can be the biggest threat, as shown by the still-unexplained link vandalism against me at Publishers Weekly; Luddites at work? Among the killed items was a plea—in the vein of this one—for truly trustworthy storage of e-books.

Amazon as a possible threat to true ownership of e-books

Within e-bookdom itself, as opposed to PW, a magazine, one of the most notable examples of preservation risks is Amazon.com, the very company that wants millions of people to entrust their personal libraries to it. Amazon, of course, is the megacorporation behind the Kindle tablet.  Because the Kindle is headed for the U.K., I would encourage Sir Simon to share with his readers the following story from Harrie Franks, an Amazon-abused reader:  “I had a system crash two years ago and after restoring 60 e-books in PDF format I was unable to get them authorized again. I contacted both Amazon and Adobe but both were unable to help. In fact, Adobe never replied to my emails. Amazon seems not to sell e-books any more and they are unable to give me a re-download.” Actually Amazon was killing off Adobe books to herd publishers and shoppers into its own Mobipocket format, not to mention the one for the Kindle, which was on the cusp of release. So much for Amazon’s past respect for its e-book customers and for E as a permanent medium.

Worse, a credible source has quoted Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as having said at one point that Amazon eventually might abandon books. Perhaps Bezos changed his mind after the Kindle made the cover of Newsweek, but a cogent lesson arises here. We mustn’t entrust book to business people alone.

Beware of Google, too

As a preserver of books, Google, which is partnering with some libraries, comes across as more trustworthy than Amazon (disclosure: I own a speck of Google stock for retirement purposes).

But even Google is no substitute for a truly comprehensive strategy to preserve books, and if nothing else, I agree with the concerns that Sara Lloyd at Pan Macmillan has expressed about the search-engine company, which, like Amazon, will be competing with publishers (as an aside, let me strongly recommend “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21th century” even if I don’t agree with absolutely everything she said there—see Parts I, II, III, IV and V, with one more on the way for the Digitalist blog).

Cooperate with Google, I say, sell your books through it, make them searchable via the engine, but don’t rely on it for everything. Pan Macmillan and others should follow the Lloyd suggestions and plan to sell access to books directly to consumers. Not only that, I would encourage Holtzbrinck, the ultimate owner of Pan Macmillan and countless other imprints, to continue its BookStore efforts to warehouse books. Same for other private companies associated with the publishing industry.

The glories of personal ownership of books

At the same time, I would argue that if Pan Macmillan and others care about the permanence of books, they should make it easy for individuals to own them forever for use on their own machines. The Tower of eBabel, all those clashing book formats, is the enemy of permanence. Operating systems and gizmos over the decades will come and go. Digital Rights Management, as shown by the Adobe-Amazon example and Franks’ nightmare, aggravates the problem.

Just why how can the e-book industry win over Sir Simon, as a future believer in the permanence of E, if access to his titles must be linked to a particular company, whether in publishing or technology? Listen to him, Pan Macmillan. Think of those decaying tapes and less-than-”forever” CDs—and also of the fact that most publishers do not last decade after decade, and that it would be foolish for book readers to depend just on them for preservation of books.

Needed: A Preservation Triangle for E

In place of the present situation, where e-book buyers must so often rely on the kindness of strangers for permanent access to their purchases, I suggest a Preservation Triangle for e-books and other electronic media.

–Leg #1 would be the publishing industry itself, as well as publishers or quasi-publishers such as Google or nonprofits such as the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. As much as I believe in well-stocked national digital library systems, I distrust governments. Here in the States, the Bush Administration has warred against the dedicated people at the Environmental Protection Agency and tried to wipe out its library system. It takes a certain amount of vanity to run for, or seize, high office in any country. The leader of every nation, ipso facto, just by dint of being who he or she is, has a bit of an image-fixated megalomaniac inside. It is folly, folly, folly to entrust governments alone with the preservation of books. I want both BookStore and Google and others to be around to help spread around, say, title exposing the environmental disasters that Bush and friends have given us.

–Leg #2 would be public libraries and others. The U.K., the U.S., every country, should ultimately have a well-stocked national digital library system with provisions for fair compensation for creators. Such systems could store e-books and other digital items via a variety of media and regularly check files for integrity. Alas, initiatives of this kind are costly and should be safe from the temptation of many a publisher to cut corners. Here in the States, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation assures that your bank deposits, up to a certain level, are safe. We need a similar system to guarantee the safety of books—both for personal access to purchases and for future access by scholars and others. Libraries and corporations should work hand in hand toward this goal. Same for schools. If we don’t want books simply to be fodder for snippetizing and Wikipedia articles, then the school systems need to accustom students to full-length texts, particularly narratives, early on. Libraries, too, could be part of this mission. We need to preserve books in the public mind, not just on the shelves; and long term, libraries will count immensely.

The permanence of libraries—well, permanence when politicians and wars allow it—would be one way to help assure the survival of networked books, which depend on links from many sources. But that is not the only argument for widespread use of the library model to distribute e-books, beyond the ability of libraries to reach wide variety of socioeconomic groups.

Sometimes, you see, we need libraries and archives to protect the private sector for itself; witness the accidental loss of countless old radio programs, as well as old recordings and films. On top of that, we go back to Publishers Weekly’s zapping of Web links for recent blog posts, not just by me but also by David Nudo, the former PW publisher, as well as those by Karen Holt, the ex-duty editor and former Web editor who hired me. Who says the private sector can’t play Big Brother? In a Web sense, PW, which would have earned advertising income from the blog archives, tried to make nonpeople out of Nudo, Karen and me. I hate it when anyone, government or corporate, commits such obviously Orwellian acts, whether against blog posts or e-books. My own posts for PW tended as a rule to be on such serious topics as Locking up Dickens, but PW blithely deleted tens of thousands of my words from public view, while lovingly preserving beefcake photos from another blogger. Luckily the TeleBlog had run similar items—on Dickens and the rest, that is. But PW’s link-kill thwarted graduate students and others who had naively followed up on the magazine’s invitation to link to my E-Book Report blog.

–Leg #3 would be individual owners, who should be able to buy nonDRMed e-books in a standard format—ePub, along with HTML ideally—for them and their descendants to be able to keep forever. Genuine private ownership of e-books  and other digital content is one way to thwart government censorship or PW-style Big Brotherism on the private side. Short of invading homes electronically or physically to wipe out the books, there would be nothing despots could do.

Outside the Preservation Triangle: P-books

Finally, as a preservation tool, may I suggest something outside the E Preservation Triangle—yes, paper books in case digital preservation fails. Fight on for old-fashioned books, Sir Simon. My favorite Luddite would have been pleased. Whatever the medium, E or P, books to deserve to be a “forever” medium.

Related: Is the e-book over already? on The Bookseller site—a provocative blog item by Managing Editor Philip Jones.