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  • Academic Libraries, Publishers, and Digital Books

    By Joshua Kim October 19, 2009 8:14 pm EDT

    The future will judge academic librarians by how well they were able to build coalitions across institutions and negotiate with publishers to bring digital books into a co-equal status with physical books.

     

    This is a hard problem to solve, but leaders will be judged on how well they solve the hard ones.

     

    The NYTimes recently ran an article "Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending" that highlights many of the difficulties and opportunities that library leadership will encounter.

     

    The Times reports that while digital books (e-books and audio books) still make up a small portion of library collections that the demand for this format is growing rapidly. For instance, NetLibrary (a division of the non-profit OCLC) has seen the circulation of audio and e-books grow 21 percent in the past year.

     

    Currently, academic libraries do not have a good model to offer students and faculty the full universe audio and e-books on multiple platforms. Ideally, academic libraries would be able to loan audio and e-books in the same way they do paper copies. If the digital book is not available in the collection then an inter-library loan like service would be provided.

     

    Digital books would be priced to libraries at the same rate they are on consumer sites - which translates into about $10 a book. If an academic library could basically act like an individual on the Amazon properties (Kindle and Audible sites), and then loan the purchased book out to patrons like a physical book - then the world of digital library books will greatly open up.

     

    Unfortunately, I fear that publishers and companies like Amazon (and whoever else emerges in this space) will make the same mistake as the record companies and choose to lock down their digital book content. This would be a terrible mistake, as the publishing and book-seller industry has an opportunity to turn the next generation into a generation of readers.

     

    Publishers, book sellers, and the makers of reading devices should be doing everything they possibly can to make their digital books available to academic library users. College students will only develop the habit of reading if they can read on the devices that they want to use. If books are not available in digital format, as e-books and audio books, then they look at other things on their screens and listen to other things on their iPods.

     

    College library digital book readers will become tomorrows digital book buyers. It is in the self-interest of all of us to figure out how to bring digital books to parity with physical books in our college libraries. Who will step-up to provide the leadership to make this happen?

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Comments on Academic Libraries, Publishers, and Digital Books

  • e books not analogous to print books
  • Posted by Mark Dahl , Associate Director-Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College on October 20, 2009 at 2:00am EDT

  • I think you correctly identify e books as a major leadership challenge for academic libraries at this time. Publishers and book vendors should recognize libraries as a potential revenue stream and marketing tool for e books.

    I tend to dislike e book purchasing models that are too analogous to print purchasing models. Why should we have to select books title by title when in the electronic environment there is a very low marginal cost for adding each book to our library? It seems like it makes more sense to license e books in large aggregations or use purchase on demand instead of buying them title by title. The whole idea of "lending" them and interlibrary loaning them seems silly in the electronic environment, too.

    In the digital environment, we should be able to provide our patrons with access to a wider range of content, if not a greater volume of content, than in the print environment. I think that is what people will expect given the breath of content available in the web information ecosystem.

    Unfortunately, many library book vendors are trying to sell e books at the same price or more than print books, and licensed so that a single library can use them. And as you point out, much of the e book content is not available to academic libraries at all.

    Hopefully, libraries will be able to negotiate some mutually beneficial deals book publishers and aggregators.

  • Decouple the ebook from the interface
  • Posted by Olga Verbeek , Information Systems Librarian at salve regina University on October 20, 2009 at 9:30am EDT

  • One of the stumbling blocks in the use of e-books is that too often the access to the the content is tied to the interface provided by the vendor. I think the use of ebooks would greatly increase if the interface was sold/presented separately from the content.

  • eBooks - "a world of hurt"
  • Posted by Dr. Pepper , Academic-in-training at US Northeast on October 20, 2009 at 10:00am EDT

  • To quote steve jobs, eBooks are "a world of hurt" as far as I am concerned.

    There are three issues that I see relevant to ebooks:

    1. Cost - The cost of eBooks isn't lower than the print version, so all things equal, why would you buy an ebook when a paper version isn't riddled with the same problems (see point #2)

    2. DRM - DRM is going to be the death of the ebook. It makes no sense to buy an ebook if you don't know if the file format, or DRM is going to be compatible in 5-10 years. We still have books in our library from the 1800s, will the ebooks we buy today still be functional in 210 years from now?

    3. Devices - I can take a paper book to the beach, no big deal. I do have a problem bringing a kindle or a laptop to the beach. This also assumes that I have the disposable income to buy a device like this.

    Personally I think the future is not necessarily in ebooks, but rather the convergence of printed books and ebooks. You would still buy paper books, but you would have access to a vast library of digitized materials that you can search in to find relevant content. Once you've found your content, you are free to either read online (painful), go to the stacks to get it, print-on-demand, or order via ILL if you don't have it.

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