First iTunes, now iPages? Is this end of libraries as we know them?

From the Associated Press Friday, November 4, 2005
Amazon.com to sell individual book pages
NEW YORK -- With its new Amazon Pages service, Amazon.com Inc. plans to let customers to buy portions of a book - even just one page - for online viewing. A second program, Amazon Upgrade, will offer full online access when a traditional text is purchased.
Both services are expected to begin next year.
"We see this as a win-win-win situation: good for readers, good for publishers and good for authors," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told The Associated Press on Thursday.
For Amazon Pages, Bezos said, the cost for most books would be a few cents per page, although readers would likely be charged more for specialized reference works. Under Amazon Upgrade, anybody purchasing a paper book could also look at the entire text online, at any time, for a "small" additional charge, Bezos said. For instance, a $20 book might cost an extra $1.99.

For this librarian-at-heart, this is a mindbender. And it doesn’t just rock my world, but has raised “the level of concern” among other librarians as well. This e-mail came a day or so ago:

Do you know how libraries are going to fit into this kind of plan? Will we be able to purchase the electronic version along with the print version?  Will we be able to allow our patrons access to the online version whenever they check out the real book?  Will they be able to download just a page of it?  The implications for libraries are enormous.  Do you know what gurus might be out there making sure that libraries have a place at this table, so that book information does not eventually become the exclusive domain of the wealthy?

I even got a call from School Library Journal today asking for my thoughts about this announcement. (Desperate people, there at SLJ.)

I really wish my crystal ball wasn’t at the cleaners. I am not sure how to take this.

One of the primary reasons for libraries has always been that a collection of materials shared is more economical than everybody buying their own resources. See “Common Sense Economy.”

Does being able to buy one page or chapter at a time for pennies, change the entire economic model for obtaining “print” information?

First a few of probabilities.

• Anything in the public domain or out of copyright is or soon will be available electronically. Project Gutenberg  has been running since the days when Gopher was the search engine du jour and now has 16,000 books available.
• Google Print is trying to make available every other book that it can by scanning whole libraries. (It’s running into some objections, probably futile, from publishers and authors who want to be paid for their efforts.)
• iTunes is providing an economic model that basically suggests that it is as profitable to sell a million songs for a buck as selling 50,000 albums for 20 bucks.
• The iTunes sales model may actually close the digital divide. If I am poor, I may not be able to buy a $20 album, but I can buy a $.99 iTune. I may not be able to buy a $25 book, but I might be able to afford a $2.50 chapter from a book.
• Kids and lots of adults are finding accessing information electronically more appealing than finding it in print. No, we don’t have a practical e-book reader available now, but ultra-portable laptops and handhelds are getting there. The latest iPods show video (and will, of course, play audio books). Will the next ones have a screen that makes digital reading easy on the eyes?

So what are the implications for libraries? I wish I knew. I can’t answer any of the questions above about Amazon’s licensing agreements with libraries. Does Amazon itself know? Who are the library mucky-mucks looking out for libraries? I doubt ALA's been asked to the table.

As I and others  have suggested, libraries may well need to become something other than storehouses of “free” (taxpayer purchased) information. When the majority of patrons can find or economically purchase (prices will fall for books as increased volume in purchasing lowers prices without hurting the publisher’s bottom line), what’s the use of libraries? Well,..

• Physical libraries can still be terrific places to “be.” (Coffee shops, community centers, places to work in groups.)
• Physical libraries can still be terrific place to learn how to find, understand and use information if the librarians are really teachers.
• Physical libraries can still be places to excite people about learning through events and activities.
• And, of course, the one no librarian wants to hear, libraries can still be places where children can be “contained” so parents or classroom teachers get a break.

What else can or should libraries be? What is the need for a library when the cost of information isn’t much of a factor, especially for the taxpaying and voting middle class? (Those on the wrong side of the digital divide aren't a political force, like it or not.)

 
On a side note, personally I am going to LOVE being able to buy a page of a book. Think of the convenience and economy. The LWW is currently reading Ellis’s American Sphinx : The Character of Thomas Jefferson. Let’s hypothetically say I am doing research on Lewis and Clark. I can either...

• Drive 20 miles into town to the public library (and hope it’s not a night it closes at 5PM).
• Find the book (if it is not checked out).
• Find the chapter that focuses on L&C.
• Pay $.25 per page to print the relevant pages.
• Drive home. (Think of those gas prices!)
• Retype the quotes I want into my paper.

or

• Do an Amazon search.
• Locate the pages I want from the Ellis book.
• Pay my pennies.
• Copy and paste the info into my paper (properly cited of course).
  

And this is from someone who believes in libraries! Help. I need your thoughts! What can or should ALA be doing?

Comments

[John Pederson]

Sounds like you need a Purple Cow. http://www.sethgodin.com/purple Give me something to be passionate about in your library. 12 years ago I laughed as my friends opened one of the first coffee shops (you know, the new kind) here in Duluth. It turned out to be much more than coffee. Just like this is much more than email. Or a discussion board.

Serve coffee in the libraries. Open them until 10:00 each night. Invite the community in. Get remarkable.

[Laura]

My argument is/was/will be WHAT IS THE CONTEXT? If you buy individual pages, do you get the context of the facts/argument? Some people are savvy enough to decipher that, or to know that they want Page X from Book Y. But most people (including the students we struggle to teach) don't. So they'll go to the site, look up their topic, print out the relevant pages, and insert them into their paper *without* understanding the context. Could be a biased argument (eg, the Jews caused WWII) or could be a flawed argument (eg, the moon is made of Swiss cheese) or the author playing Devil's Advocate or any number of other "problems" that could have been solved if they'd gotten more than the one or two cited pages. But they won't know, because they aren't getting the full context of the idea/quote/page.

And *that* is worth worrying about.

[Lori]

Librarians should be teachers. We should offer classes and be much, much more proactive at reference desks and have much, much more proactive programs in schools. We should be teaching information literacy to... well, everyone! Public libraries should be hooking up with school libraries to make sure that all students, PreK-12, end up as information literate. However, the landscape of information is constantly changing, so we need to educate adults as well. There should be classes offered, free of charge, in public libraries everywhere that actually interest people. And public librarians need to be HUGE advocates of their own programs, who are extremely good at PR and at advertising their programs. Get butts in those seats! Get people to want to come to your programs by offering programs that people want to come to, by advertising often and well and in the right places, and by making programs remarkably great when people get to them. That is what the call for librarians is in this day and age. Also, we should all be keeping on top of these new "technical advances" - although I'm certainly not convinced that this is an advance by any means. We should be incorporating them into our programs at our school and public libraries - they are yet another way that the information landscape is changing and we need to educate our patrons/ students about them.

If the ALA has not been invited to the table to talk about these changes, they should do everything they can to invite themselves. We need to stop being so docile.

[Christopher Harris]

Doug,

I wrote http://schoolof.info/infomancy/?p=54">A Brief Treatise on Books a while back where I expressed many of the same concerns you had, but also many of the same optimistic views we are all sharing here. My concern is the equation: libraries=books. Books are just an information storage technology. Sure, it is a technology that has been around for a few thousand years, but really it is no different than a usb drive being a storage technology or an iPod being a storage technology. Books are just something we are more comfortable with due to a long association. Think of this as brand loyalty.

Libraries, I would postulate though, should not be about books, but rather about information and information access. They are the gateway to knowledge, the bridge over the digital divide, the intellectual commons of our society. They happen to be a place where we store our collectively purchased information using the "book" storage technology, but they are more than books. As I wrote, it isn't that I don't like the technology behind books. I love books; I love beautiful books with colorful bindings. I am a sucker for buying multiple editions of the same book with new illustrations or a leather slipcover. But I will also admit that I don't read as many "books" as I used to. Not that I don't read stories or access information - I just tend to access them digitally. A library can still provide this, but only if we agree that libraries are about information and information access and not just about books. As we move into the digital realm, libraries are even more important in the roles I suggested above, as gatekeepers, bridges, and commons.

So pardon me, but I have some gates to open, bridges to build, and commons to tend. (And I do tend to ramble on in my comments)

[Jacquie Henry]

eBooks have been around for quite awhile now. They have not been wildly (or widely) popular. My reference ebooks and databases are heavily used. But for reading a whole book - nothing beats a book. And I don't think our love of physical books is simply familiarity.

Indeed - that is the genius of Amazon's idea. They have found a way of combining the convenience of online searching, with all the benefits (both intellectual and tactile) of "real" books. I work with high school students. As web savvy as they are - they still use books. And - when they access information via computer, they hit the print button. Their minds simply process hard copy information better than the same information on a computer screen.

I am concerned about both the convenience AND the cost of information. Libraries need to be as easy, convenient and user-friendly as Amazon or Google. Library patrons should be able to search the full text of all the books in the library they are visiting (or searching online). The big question - how will libraries acquire books in both the physical AND the digital format? It should be a seemless process. We should be able to order our books from a jobber as usual - along with marc records AND the full text of the book. Our OPACs should be searchable by subject, keyword AND full text. And - what about the books already in our collections? How do we acquire the digital version of those books?

I worry about libraries falling behind. How will we provide access to the books we own if the publishers are only interested in working with Amazon and Google? Who will negotiate for us???

[Christopher Harris]

Jacquie (hello neighbor!),

Great points! This got me labled as an infamous "MARC Hater" pretty much across the state of NY, but I agree that catalog searching needs to be updated to reflect what is possible with modern technology. I think you hit the nail on the head that the power of Amazon Pages and Google Print is the deep searching/direct access capabilities they offer. If we could finally come up with an OPAC with full-text searching (preferably supported by human indexing), federated access to every information source possible, and communication tools to connect the librarian to the patron...well, then we might be on to something.

Actually, as Doug has pointed out before, the potentials are great. Remember that in our flat world we will have more and more access to more and more information. And yet we still need infomancers to guide us through the mess. Maybe one solution would be if Amazon Pages could sell bulk packs of pages to libraries. Perhaps with a micropayment of something like $0.001 per page, libraries could still manage to provide "free" access to resources.

[John Pederson]

I'm back. I couldn't get "The Cluetrain Manifesto" out of my head today in relation to this post. Cluetrain is written from a business perspective. http://pedersondesigns.com/2005/04/02/k12-education-learning-and-getting-on-the-cluetrain/ is what happens when you do a little find/replace work and give it a school tilt.

What do you learn about libraries when re-reading the 95 theses?

[John Dyer]

This ought to change the college textbook market just a wee bit.

Imagine an instructor telling her class to purchase pages, 5, 6 and 7, 33 to 38, and the glossary, rather than having the students purchase the $55 textbook.

What about the secondary market? Will there be one?

[Eric]

Good points all. Libraries need to surface where the users are and provide a clearly superior value proposition. There are some efforts under way like Open WorldCat to make discovery easier (BTW for the book you mentioned, American sphinx, the OWC link:
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0679444904