Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

CIL2010: eBooks: Landscape & Implications

Brian Hulsey talked about general themes and concerns about implementing and maintaining eBooks in your library. Print is the same, but it’s migrating.  You have to be open and accept this change.  Why is this change important to us?  With budget cuts, we have to be available to our patrons still, virtually.  We need to keep up and stay at the forefront.  If we don’t keep up, our patrons don’t need us, then our budgets get cut more.  You also need to examine your area to see if it will work for you.  Another issue is cost.  If you start to circulate eBooks at your library you need to think about how it fits into your patron base.  Also, consider cost.  The cost for the eItem is much cheaper in the long run.  It can’t be damaged, it doesn’t require check-out, reshelving, or processing.  California is moving totally to electronic text books.  Since everyone’s budget is tight, you need to think about how to maximize the money you do have.  How are eBooks going to impact your community?  How will they impact your staff?  Don’t do something just because it’s sexy, or you’ve seen it on someone’s blog.  You need to consider policies of your eContent.  Will you have stations for downloading? Will you check out eBook readers?  Which ones?  Do users use them in the library only or can they take them home?   You should become BFFs with your eBook vendor to get better information or deals.  There are problems of compatibility — devices, OS, content types, DRM.  The landscape is constantly changing too.  People were utilizing eBrary in the early days, then the Kindle was cool, then the Sony Reader was cool, now it’s the iPad.

Bobbi Newman then talked to us about .  If library users want to access our eBooks, they have to go to a website, download a software platform & maybe some plug-ins, log-in, find the book they want, download the book, and then transfer it to their mobile device — all laden with soul-sucking DRM.  The problem with eBooks is ownership.  If you’ve paid for eContent, the vendor can say that you can’t loan it, sell it, or donate it.  That is a major problem for libraries.  If you don’t continue your subscription with the company, they may take that “owned” content away (or the access to it, which is pretty much the same thing).  Many people are reading on eBook readers like the Nook & Kindle, but also they are using the iPad, and phones as well (e.g. iPhone, Android phone).

Then Bobbi showed a short video from Jason Griffey.  Jason said that he thinks we’re going to stop seeing hardware-specific eBook, and offer more eBooks in an open format.  We’ve already started seeing that with the iPad just a bit.  You can purchase eBooks in ePub format (with Fairplay DRM, that doesn’t work anywhere else) right on the device and read them on the device.  You can also access the Kindle store from the iPad, and read them on the device too.  Jason says that he thinks Barnes & Noble will be producing an iPad app soon.  He’s interested in Copia and Blio.  Copia is a social network for books…kind of like LibraryThing but it’s also a platform for books in addition to being a network about books.  It will be in beta in February.  Blio is a platform solution developed by the American Federation for the Blind and Ray Kurzweil.  It allows for easy tie-in from the audio file to the text.  This would be useful for people learning to read, people with disabilities, and young children.  Blio has worked really hard to tie audio and text together seamlessly.  A prediction from Jason is that the black and white eReaders will likely be commodity devices by the end of 2010.  He doesn’t think we’ll be driven by a particular bookstore or a particular functionality.  Prices are starting to drop considerably, and Jason says they will do so even more before the end of the calendar year.  He thinks this year it will be under $100, and next year under $50.  So…what will libraries do with these low-cost storage text-delivery devices?  That is really, really exciting!  Initially they goal was to tie up content with DRM, a la Apple Store.

#cil2010, computers in libraries