AASL and Amazon learning the hard way
Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 08:22AM 
Two interesting happenings this week on the long march toward an all-digital information future:
Chris Harris started quite the discussion about what he considers to be AASL's overly restrictive protection of its student standards. (Joyce Valenza's in her NeverEndingSearch blog does a great job of catching the tone of the conversation on AASLForum listserv here and here.)
AASL is in a Catch 22 situation - it wants its standards widely seen and used, but it also wants to control how they are used and wants them to earn the organizationrevenue. (Oh, despite these being written by "volunteer members," such standards are expensive for organizations to produce.) Judging by the tenor of the discussion on various library lists, the ill-will being generated by the controversy is costing AASL a lot in lost membership and good will. A quick (oh, I forgot that that quick is not in AASL's vocabulary) policy reversal, placing a share-alike, non-commercial use CreativeCommons license on the standards would show it listens to its membership. (#FreeTheStandards ) AASL and ALA will need to move into the 21st Century someday, whether they want to or not.
The other step back comes from Amazon that has deleted some Kindle titles, not just from its online inventory, but apparently from users' actual devices. (David Pogue's take here.) According to the NYTs, the publishers did not have the rights to offer these titles. Some critics have compared this move of Amazon's to waking up and finding books missing from your bookshelf with check for their value in their place. Personally, I see it more like turning on your television and finding some of your cable channels gone. Amazon doesn't sell e-books; it leases them to readers as long as they have a working Kindle reader. Adjust your thinking.
As anyone who has ever implemented a new way of doing business knows, even the best planned, most thoughtful transitions ever go off without unexpected hitches. All membership organizations like AASL will eventually find that they need to give very liberal copyright permissions to their materials if they really want them to be widely used - which in turn increases the power of the organization. A model for compensating authors that does not involve the use of DRM schemes like those used by the Kindle will happen and all publishers will realize that all their materials will need to be made available in scary, easily stolen electronic formats.
The directions seem clear - fewer restrictions, digital formats, alternate forms of revenue generation for producers. But these little detours are interesting!
(Added July 21 - E-book banning's potential demo'd by Amazon <http://bit.ly/11t2IC> - Manjoo writing in Slate. OK, ALA OIF - where are you? Maybe this is more serious than I first thought!)
