Last week I attended an excellent briefing about the state of ebooks in libraries that had been organised by my professional body in the UK – CILIP. There were representatives from academic libraries, public libraries, library suppliers and the publishing industry.
What I learnt was this – publishers and academic librarians seem reasonably happy with the developing
role of ebooks in university and further education libraries but publishers and public librarians can’t come to an understanding which is harmful to both parties concerned. The main reasons for this situation lie in the specific ebook formats, the previous business model for selling to different library sectors and how books are used by the consumer in those markets.
Academic libraries and ebooks
The speakers from universities and colleges seemed to view ebooks as PDF versions of hard text that are read by students on desktop pcs and laptops. For them the issues relate to models of acquisition and how students “discover” available titles. Should they buy ebooks outright or buy licences to packages of ebooks supplied by library aggregators? A newer model of “patron driven acquisition” is being provided by library suppliers (like Dawson) allowing students to find ebooks through the library catalogue, view their contents and, if they want to go on and read further, enable the library to purchase that book. This is so seamless that students do not know the library doesn’t already own that particular ebook. Last year the University of Sussex acquired over 700 ebooks this way with an average cost of £64 per title. And this is the nub of the (for now) successful partnership between the publishers and libraries in this sector – the PDF format is easily controlled by publishers and universities are prepared to pay as they are used to paying similar prices for hard copy academic texts.
This is all well and good for the near future but in my head my thoughts are rushing onwards. I say to myself
“meanwhile on the interwebs a new vehicle for content has emerged. It can be versatile, regularly updated by experts, edited in an accountable and transparent way and consumers can add good practice to it. It’s called a wiki – see Wikipedia ”
Public libraries and ebooks
Speakers from this sector explained how the consumer sees the ebook as “something you read on a mobile device”. Library patrons arrive at their local library with numerous kinds of devices that work with mutually exclusive ebook formats. They expect to be able to download and read their ebooks whilst they are on the bus, at the beach or in the park. They want to read current best sellers and can’t understand why it’s not easy to do so. The issues for librarians are ones of format compatibility, the multiplicity of devices and DRM by publishers (digital rights management). Publishers are running scared and choose a variety of methods to protect their interests- from deciding libraries can only “lend” an ebook for a fixed number of times to the ultimate control of not allowing libraries to purchase their ebooks at all. Shockingly only 20% of ebooks on the current bestseller lists are available for libraries to purchase. Library suppliers (like Overdrive) can manage the bewildering range of digital rights imposed by different publishers but if the titles are not being made available for libraries they can’t supply them.
Meanwhile I’m thinking “across the interwebs a new vehicle for exploiting the reading for pleasure experience has emerged. It’s consumed on a mobile device, contains embedded links to websites, has video or audio and it’s called “an app”. See, for example, this app about our environmental future shared in a recent TED talk.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html
What does this mean for ebooks in Kingswood Library?
I went to #ebooks11 to plan for the development of my school library. In the near future I intend to invest in providing ebooks for students to download to their mobile devices. This fits with my schools aim to encourage young people to read for pleasure because we know it has a profound impact on their educational achievement. I also intend to provide a service to manage the PDF ebooks that members of staff acquire across the school for study purposes.
However inside my head I’m saying “Is the era of the library and the publisher nearly over? I think it probably is and, you know what, I find I’m over my grief about it. I acknowledge the amazing job both libraries and the publishing industry have done since the mid 1800′s to help disadvantaged individuals in society develop themselves. But aren’t the new technologies, such as wikis and apps, exciting? When I look at the explosion of educational opportunities for all in African countries because of mobile technology I can’t help but be glad.”
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#edtechcc is “a collaboration of educators investigating and experimenting with digital technologies to enhance education”. As those of you who follow my blog know this is something I passionately believe in. Schools should be enabling students to engage with the new technologies in an educational context just as they already do in the “real world” outside school.
