Cali the Librarian

And in our world, computers have replaced human interaction.  Virtual people have replaced people.

And this is absolutely where Stoll predicted correctly.  He concluded in his Newsweek article, “What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact.”  He could never have imagined that in the 10 years following those words that we have successfully replaced physical contact with emotional contact and that emotional contact would be derived from tweets and pokes and updates and texts.

Graduate school can make you feel “less than,” but every step of grad school (and venturing beyond it) requires the knowledge of your unique advantages. When suffering from imposter syndrome or some other discouragement, take a lesson from Business and count your assets.  Otherwise known as counting your blessings, listing your assets can help you feel better, come to a better knowledge of yourself, and—best of all—it only takes a few minutes (no accounting required!).

Good advice for those of us who are still relatively new to our profession, as well.

The thing is, it really does baffle me. Granted, I know how important it is both to the publisher and the author to be paid for their work. I’m an author and I’m not stupid. But screwing the libraries? Libraries?

Did any of us ever, ever become a reader without the influence of a library? If nothing else, we were regularly herded into the library at school. If we were lucky, our parents took us to the local library. But there was always a library involved. Always.

An effective online presence really comes down to not putting one’s ego first.  That could be the collective ego of the library as an institution,  the ego of the director, the ego of the board of trustees, or the ego of that territorial librarian who controls the library’s online content with an iron fist.  As soon as any person or entity’s ego overrides the need of the online patron, the library, as a whole, loses.

While there was a big outcry against SOPA that included protest from many well-known Internet giants like Wikipedia and Reddit, the backlash against CISPA hasn’t had quite as many champions. Some sites that came out against SOPA, like Facebook, are actually pro-CISPA for very self-interested but logical reasons. Along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), whose opposition to the bill is frankly no surprise, the American Library Association (ALA) has also come out against CISPA, and in doing so have suddenly become my heroes. Here’s why.

Real Simple consulted the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), food scientists, food manufacturers, and a host of other experts—including fishmongers, cheese sellers, coffee roasters, bakers, and bartenders—to establish these storage guidelines. The first consideration was safety. But because you want your food to be delicious, too, for some products, Real Simple chose the conservative storage time for optimum freshness.

I just wish I’d thought to consult something like this before I tried freezing some sour cream (that didn’t turn out well, but I still cooked with it).

Even though the decision could possibly signal a lessening of fear among some publishers, DRM will remain an integral part of the library lending workflow for the foreseeable future. Whatever rethinking is going on among publishers, and that in itself could be a positive, it still remains that what a publisher decides to do with DRM on the retail side does not necessarily correlate to anything they will do with DRM on the library side.

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A number of publishers, such as Osprey Publishing (parent of Angry Robot), F+W Media, and O’Reilly Media, make books available without DRM, but this does not translate to the library channel, which relies on DRM as the mechanism to control one of its quintessential functions – the loan—as well as to impose the one-book, one-user lending model.

It’s a good point that the way library ebook lending currently works actually requires DRM, despite the problems with DRM in the public marketplace. I would argue that DRM used in that context makes some sense in that it allows us to lend ebooks. But how long are we going to cling to the old metaphors that require us to treat ebooks as if they are physical books (i.e. one book, one user)? Is there a better way we could be doing this? The only comparison I can think of offhand is to PDFs of journal articles… should libraries and publishers be figuring out a way that libraries can allow patrons to download ebooks like they do PDFs? (What would the pricing for that look like?)

Unfortunately, this focus is distracting us from the realization that we don’t need to treat access to commercial content as our primary mission. Yes, we’ve put a lot of effort into it in the past, and we’ve done it well. But it’s time to take a step back. Previously, we had the force of law on our side; now, though, the problem of access to digital content is being solved without us. More important, our insistence on competing with (or even just complementing) Amazon and Apple—not to mention all of the free content available online—is an insistence that we define ourselves by something we are not good at anymore.

Does this mean it’s time to shut our doors and go home? No way. Here’s where user experience (UX) comes into play. Remember, UX is concerned with designing products and services that are easy to use, desirable to use, and genuinely useful.

UX design can help us optimize the services currently in our libraries, but we can do even more. We can use it to design completely new services and innovate. I’m not talking about a shallow buzzword sort of innovation as when a library employs the technology or social media flavor of the month. What I’m talking about is a systematic approach to learning about our communities so that we can find other ways to offer essential support.

More importantly, though, beyond the shiny gadgets and apps, readers are fans of authors and genres (and, sometimes, even publishers), and while selection varies amongst the major e-tailers (especially Apple), there’s an interesting comparison to video games that I’ve been mulling over for a while now. It’s an imperfect but workable analogy, where the big hits are almost always cross-platform (including PC and, increasingly, mobile), while the exclusives tend to align with each platform’s respective strengths and core audiences (especially mobile).

Lessons learned? I think if I were doing the presentation over again tomorrow, I’d emphasize the practice of making data openly accessible should be considered as outside the normal scholarly communications system. It isn’t just for pirates and thieves. The goal is to make data sharing a standard practice. The means to that end is to ensure data sets are cited in the literature and by extension to have data sharing become an accepted part of the normal academic reward and incentives structure. You create data, you share it, someone else uses it for their research, they cite your data set in their paper, that citation is counted with the same weight as a citation to a paper.

Recently, I began chatting with a publishing industry executive about this. This person — who I’ll call Exec — was interested in learning how to break DRM on e-books. About a month later, Exec is a convert and was ready to talk about the experience, albeit anonymously. I don’t think Exec is the only person in the publishing industry breaking DRM on e-books they buy…and those who aren’t doing so already might want to give it a try, if only to see what readers go through. Here is Exec’s story.

Putting some collections in remote storage has helped the library in another, unexpected way, says Ms. Gibbons. Items can’t be transferred to the storage facility until they’re properly cataloged—some for the first time. That has led the university to put more resources into cataloging than it would have otherwise. “It was a completely unintended consequence, but we can see it,” she says.

When they hear about library reorganizations, print lovers tend to bemoan the loss of serendipitous browsing in open stacks. Patrons can’t wander through remote high-density shelving. But a new kind of digital browsing may be taking shape. It’s counterintuitive, but certain collections become more visible and accessible when they are moved to remote storage.

Libraries are obsolete because they act as institutions of remediation. Libraries were either created to fill some deficit in existing institutions, or over the years have adopted the role of remedying some deficit in the community. While this deficit model of libraries made sense at one point, today many of these deficiencies either no longer exist, or libraries now divert precious resources we should use to solve the underlying problem and/or institutions.

What scared me (and still does) is that the predominant message libraries use to justify their budgets (and continued existence) is as a sort of societal band-aid ministering only to what ails our communities. As with any argument about libraries in the abstract, the argument lacks nuance and parts are easy to refute, but I ask you to look to the core of the argument. This deficit model thinking has big implications for library advocacy, and even the evolution of the institution.

Many people – me included – have pointed out the disaster of customer service at every level – business and government – many times. It probably serves no purpose, other than the fact that venting makes you feel better. What is needed is a solution, and I think I have found one.

Everyone should hire librarians.

Every time you hear about budget cuts and cutbacks on hours, it seems like our libraries, and librarians, are the ones suffering. But these places, and these people, must be the most helpful, the most informed, and the most knowledgeable resources on the planet. If they hired librarians to be clerks at the DMV, everyone would get their license plates on time and walk out of the office looking forward to renewal time. If librarians ran health care, people might still get sick, but not tired.

As forecasted, OverDrive has begun analyzing the masses of data collected across its network of public and school libraries. The first report – made available to ALA, UK libraries, and publishers participating with OverDrive – includes information about eBook and digital audiobook title circulation, book demand and holds, as well as web traffic and general demographics.

For instance, in March 2012, nearly 60 percent of readers browsed – defined as exploring the catalog without a targeted search term – public library ebook collections to discover new content. Browsers viewed more than 636 million title cover images. Serendipity and discovery continue in the e-world!

It’s a long but well researched piece by Walt Crawford illustrating how the illusion of public libraries closing does not match with reality. Yes, budgets are down, branches are being closed, services and hours and staff are being cut, but the number of libraries actually being closed is extremely small. Some of the rhetoric (and I’m quite sure I’m guilty of it myself) around library closings works to invoke people’s emotional response and play on the public’s fear and apprehensions. That isn’t a card that can be constantly played without being called out on it.

Raises some interesting points about the proliferation of digital information (files, photos, you name it) and its effect on access to that information (and totally separate from the issue of older files not being compatible with newer software).

Yes, all my files are on a computer or online, somewhere.  But without permission, a password, most of them remain hidden.  I try to store some of my stuff under “effinglibrarian” accounts, but I have lots of accounts under various usernames.  If I were to bump my head and develop amnesia or die, would anyone ever learn who I was?  I don’t have scrapbooks with photos of my trips to … see? I can’t even rememeber without finding the folders with the files.

Without account names and passwords, there is nothing to find.  I will disappear. 

If I feel disappointment as a writer and indignation as a reader, I manage to get all the way to rage as a bookseller.

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So while it’s true that the Pulitzer committee has, since its inception in 1917, declined to award the prize on 10 previous occasions, I can’t imagine there was ever a year we were so in need of the excitement it creates in readers.

The winners are written up in papers and talked about on the radio, and sometimes, at least on PBS stations, they make it onto television. This in turn gives the buzz that is so often lacking in our industry — Did you hear about that book?

Has DRM prevented piracy? That seems unlikely, since it is relatively easy to get around those locks and copy a book if you really want to. What is pretty clear, however, is that those rights-management locks have cemented Amazon’s control over the publishers’ content. In other words, it has given the online retailer a stick with which to beat them, as Stross described it recently. And it has also made it more difficult for some independent e-book sellers, because publishers won’t let them sell their books without DRM.

I think my hostility comes from the often observed cyclical two step that starts with the well worn rebuttal line “libraries are more than books” which is then followed by advertising and/or advocacy that directly connects the library to books. It’s absolutely maddening to watch books be simultaneously embraced and pushed away in a schizophrenic display of identity. This probably says more about me than the advertising campaign, but it’s still my gut reaction.

In all the discussions about why book publishers demand that eBooks should be $15 and not $10, they say it is because they cannot afford to sell books at $10. That is, they cannot cover their legacy cost models on that number. Right. Which is why you must rebuild your cost structure for a digital goods industry with far lower prices. You start by paying your top execs much less than millions of dollars a year. Then you move your offices out of fancy midtown office buildings. Why should eBooks cost $15? Amazon is far more of an expert on optimal book pricing. They have far more data than publishers, since they experiment with pricing hundreds of thousands of times a day across millions of titles. Amazon can tell you the exact price for a title that will produce the most number of copies sold. Amazon is pretty sure that number is closer to $10 than to $15. Yes, they want to sell more Kindles. And they believe that lower eBook prices mean more eBooks sold which means more demand for Kindle. The negative coverage of Amazon is centered on them selling eBooks below cost in order to reach the $10 price point. But that is a function of publishers setting the cost higher than $10. If the profit-maximizing price for an eBook is $10, then publishers must adapt to set a wholesale price lower than that, even if it means your legacy cost structure doesn’t allow it. And that’s the rub. [By the way, as publishers continue to resist this market force, new “publisher” models are appearing and will replace the traditional functions of publishers with more digital-friendly models.]

Some good thoughts on what to do (and what not to do) when tweeting for a library.

A few of my opinions vary, but my library also isn’t a public library, so by necessity some of my practices are different. :)

Amazon is well on its way towards dominating the ebook market, but its platform has several weaknesses that not only threaten Amazon but also threaten the ebook industry should Amazon dominate.

The line of argument is as follows:

1. Amazon’s Kindle platform has inherent flaws that lead to serious imbalances.
2. Those imbalances threaten Amazon first and foremost and grow with the platform.
3. If Amazon grows to dominate a mature ebook market, those imbalances will be big enough to both damage Amazon and threaten the ebook market.
4. Amazon could end up dominating an ebook market that more resembles the modern day comic book direct market than a mass medium: a shrinking niche industry that caters to a limited number of expert readers.

Following up on comments last week in which the RIAA finally admitted that innovation is the best tool for tackling piracy, Brin said that the piracy problem would continue as long as people found it easier than using legitimate offerings.

“I haven’t tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like; it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work,” Brin explained, adding that the restrictive mechanisms employed by authorized sites only represent artificial walls and “disincentives for people to buy.”

First, a growing number of people are using mobile as the only way they access the web. A pair of studies late last year from Pew and from On Device Research showed that over 25 per cent of people in the US who browse the web on smartphones almost never use any other platform. That’s north of 11 per cent of adults in the US, or about 25million people, who only see the web on small screens. There’s a digital-divide issue here. People who can afford only one screen or internet connection are choosing the phone. If you want to reach them at all, you have to reach them on mobile. We can’t settle for serving such a huge audience a stripped-down experience or force them to swim through a desktop layout in a small screen.

A colleague and I are interested in finding out more about how students use library books before we follow the herd into investing a lot of money in e-book collections. The project is just in the beginning stages, but I did have a chance to look over some survey responses today. Numbers will have to be crunched before they mean anything, but at first glance I was struck by a couple of impressions.

• Some of the things people mentioned as benefits of printed books are actually not attributes of library books. Being able to underline and write in margins appears to be an important benefit of printed books, but I’m afraid we actually frown on writing in library books. (I was pleased to see that one student, at least, wrote about copying sections of books before writing all over them.)  
• Likewise, some of the things people asserted are benefits of e-books may not actually be true of library e-books. Buying a Kindle book is easy, and there is little question in my mind that it is easier to use articles found in a database than in print – because publishers let you save copies, print entire articles, and don’t require that you download specialized software before you can start to read. Not so with library e-books. They are not automatically easier than print. If we do start adding e-books, it’s likely that they will not only come with strings attached, but with completely different tangles of strings depending on the vendor and the license. […]

This post is full of SO MUCH WIN. Seriously, go read it.

maureenjohnsonbooks:

[…] I also read lots of paper books, so it’s not like I am TIPPING THE BALANCE FOR THE MACHINES. I’m like SWITZERLAND, without the Alps and all the delicious fondue. Read what you want, how you want. If you are paper books only, that’s it, period, I say, jam on, paper-lover! If you prefer ebooks, I say, electric boogaloo to you too. DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU. […]