Empowering the Reader in a Digital World
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Presented at Computers in Libraries 2011 Conference by Chad Mairn, Librarian @ St. Petersburg College and Al Carlson, System Administrator @ the Tampa Bay Library Consortium. New examples of digital reading material—ebooks, emagazines, enewpapers—are appearing every day. So are devices and software to read them. But is epublishing a growing trend or a passing fad? Is it a valuable tool or a solution in search of a problem? Speakers explore the jungle of acronyms for formats and DRMs, the many types of readers, and more. They don't have all the answers, but they will provide sensible planning guidelines and opportunities to make a difference for your patrons.
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Empowering the Reader in a Digital World
- 5. What is a Book?
- 6. What is a Book?
- 9. Formerly music’s King of the Hill
- 10. Took over that whole eco-niche
- 11. Once “the” format for home movies
- 13. So, will these be replaced by…
- 15. Back to the Future
- 24. eReaders, Formats, and DRM
- 27. Just as digital music turned this…
- 28. … into this
- 29. ePub turns this…
- 30. … into this
- 31. A few “dedicated” eReaders
- 32. Kindle 2 and Kindle DX The Kindle DX can hold 3,500 books. If each title weighed 2.5 pounds then it could hold 4 tons of books ( Information today , May 2010)
- 33. Barnes and Noble Nook The Nook was the first eReader with digital lending between the Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac OS, and Android Smartphones.
- 34. Sony eReader
- 35. Copia eReaders are considered the “first social eReading experience designed so you can discover, connect and share what's meaningful.”
- 36. Skiff eReader
- 37. HP’s Flexible Display This mylar-infused sheet will hold an image without power.
- 39. Steve and his iPad
- 42. Some Android eReader Apps Laputa Google eBooks Kindle Kobo
- 46. We have no idea
- 49. Dueling Formats The cassette/CD format difference is easy for our patrons to see and understand. But .EPUB vs .AZW… ? Not so easy.
- 50. Dueling formats AZW EPUB
- 51. If format were the only issue… www.calibre-ebook.com
- 52. Same Format, Dueling DRMs EPUB w/ Adobe’s ADEPT DRM EPUB w/ Apple’s FairPlay DRM
- 53. Dueling Formats and DRMs AZW using Amazon’s DRM EPUB using Abode’s DRM
- 58. I am upset! This is so frustrating! I don’t care what it is called; I JUST WANT to read an eBook!
- 59. A reader who has figured it out
- 62. ePub and Public Libraries
- 70. eTextbooks Al & Chad Chad & Al
- 71. Consider this eTextbook pricing breakdown … 32.3% (paper, printing) + 22.6% (college store) = 54.9% of the cost of textbooks. So, why aren’t we using eTextbooks?
- 75. The Kno, textbook tablet
- 76. The Application requires 46MB of hard disk space; books range from 50KB to 1GB per title. (Source: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nookstudy
- 80. Appropriate Library Response to these Problems
- 84. More Joy
Editor's Notes
- This man may be a patron trying to figure out how to use his new eReader. Or he may be a librarian trying to figure out how to help a patron with an ePub question. Nahhh! He’s too well dressed to be a librarian. Well, either way we have some help for him today.
- Here’s what we’ll do in the next 45 minutes
- Our notion of a book has changed over time. We could call the first cave paintings “books”; they stored information in a commonly understood format over time. The clay tablets used by the Babylonians were more portable and were definitely “hard copy” Imagine taking those to school in your backpack. Books got lighter when papyrus came out and got ‘longer’ with the development of the scroll. Which, actually, was a lot like reading a PDF document on your PC screen.
- Gutenberg and his drinking buddies created the ‘form’ we’ve been used to most of our lives: think sheets of dead tree wrapped in a leather or cardboard shell. And, after years of people saying that “it couldn’t be done”, Amazon launched the latest form of the book, the electronic eReader. But, once you got past the cave paintings and developed an alphabet, it was always “words in a row”, sometimes with illustrations. The book is the contents, not the package.
- Let’s take another look at some of those formats I just ran by you. This used to be King of the Hill for Audio
- Then it was totally replaced—for all practical commercial purposes—by this.
- This used to be THE way to watch movies at home
- Then it was totally replaced by these. And NetFlix is phasing the delivery of these out in favor of streaming. Are you beginning to hear Kansas singing “Dust in the Wind?”
- I was wondering whether this type of book was about to be totally replaced…
- … by this type of book. The best way to find out would be to travel into the future and just look. That turned out to be impractical. So, I thought it might be useful to find a transition from the past that was similar to this possible transition, and look for clues that indicated a major shift. Clues we could see at the beginning of the process, not after it was too late. I chose to look at the transition from VHS to DVD’s I got some help from Ask A Librarian, and I came up with this.
- Write down this title and Google it when you get back to work. It will give you ammunition when you talk to your boss and coworkers. It was written to help the DVD industry understand why their sales of players flattened after only six years. They thought the plateau meant they were doing something wrong, so they commissioned Judson Coplan to do a study. It turned out that they had done everything right. So right, in fact, that they had achieved ‘full’ market penetration about five years ahead of their original schedule. And faster than any ‘device’ had done before. Before they even thought of saying, “Are we there yet?”, they were there.
- Look at this, but pretend the red line is hard copy and the blue line is ePub. If this were 2001, what would you tell your library to buy more of? Less of?
- Got that title jotted down? It will help you argue your point when you get home.
- We’re going to quickly look into—or speculate about—how quickly the public might shift from hard copy to ePub. There are two conflicting things that humans do that will affect into this. Both of these factors will play into the adoption of eBooks. You may not ‘see’ it until you ‘believe’ it. But what happens when the book lover—the old school hard copy printed book lover--finds out that he can get the new Biography of Humphrey Davies at his local library “right now” or from B&N eBooks “right now” or from OverDrive “right now”. Does he drive to the library—30 minute round trip, if he’s lucky? What if it’s 10 at night? Have any of your friends with Kindles and Nooks told you that they just hate them? Now that I’ve got you asking yourself questions, I want to hand it over to Chad to give you some answers.
- We also don’t want them to become quaint historical relics that remind people of the ‘good old days’ but are no longer important. Places you can visit on your vacation and see the authentic blacksmith. And the cobbler and the candlemaker. And the librarian.
- For reading, this…
- … became this.
- Cumbersome became convenient. I used to carry “a” book with me where ever I went. Now I carry a few thousand books with me wherever I go.
- The Skiff hasn’t really caught on, but we love the idea of a flexible display
- So, we’re looking forward—eagerly—to an eReader that incorporates a truly flexible display and can be carried in a pocket protector.
- Easy to see why cassette won’t fit CD player
- Harder to see why Amazon e-book won’t ‘fit’ into Nook. Or, more likely, vice versa. Even if you saw the two side by side as files on a PC, most of our users won’t say, “Whoa! That’s an AZW file extension! No wonder it won’t work on a device configured for an EPUB file!”
- Calibre is a package of e-reading tools. It is a free download. It lets you convert “any” format to “any” format. But format is not the only issue
- Both of these read EPUB format, but Sony uses the Adobe DRM and the iPad uses the Fair Play DRM
- So, ePub offers some serious threats to public libraries as we know them, as well as some benefits. As librarians, we need to figure out how to exploit ePub’s power without being destroyed by it. Use the Force, but don’t go over to the dark side. Now, what about ePub and academic libraries? Chad?
- It is issues like this that keep us relevant and employed. You may say “I didn’t go to Library School for that!” Well, most of what I went to Library School for doesn’t even exist any more. Some of my class mates were blacksmiths. And I’m glad. Because this is a lot more powerful AND a lot more fun. In effect we are seeing evolution in action. The one that wins may not be the prettiest or the strongest or the smartest. It will be the one best suited to the environment it’s in. And any victory it has will be temporary, because something new will come along real soon. So: formats. Formats can be converted. (e.g. Word to PDF or HTML) You can buy a turntable, and it convert your vinyl to MP3 files as you play them. You can use calibre and convert EPUB to MOBI or MOBI to EPUB or either to djvu. [calibre-ebook.com] We may choose to do this in a hands on way. Nothing’s stopping us but tradition. There is no law that says “Libraries may not convert AZW to EPUB”. Or we may treat it as a reference question, and give ourselves a tic mark for sending a patron to calibre-ebook.com. Eventually every device that stays on the market will play every format that stays on the market. Just like the DVD player on your PC also plays CD’s.
- This is where we show them calibre at work. Import an EPUB title from a file on the PC, show it, convert it to MOBI, load it onto the Kindle Talk about stripping out DRM.
- DRM schemes are a possibly necessary evil. I’m agnostic at the moment. (calibre now has DRM-removal plugins) If you create art—verbal or visual—and sell it for a living, and if you see that others are buying one of your works, then churning out multiple copies and selling them for money that you never get, you’d want a way to protect your income. No DRM scheme is unbreakable. All DRM schemes are somewhat annoying. But many of them are sensible and innocuous enough that most people will go along with them and the violators are only a minor irritation. OverDrive checkout periods are one example. In a crude way, the way we now check out physical books is “DRM” One problem for vendors—in the broad sense—is that there is no vendor-neutral DRM scheme at the moment. Adobe and Apple are competitors, and Apple understandably does not want to have to use Adobe’s DRM scheme. What libraries can do—maybe—is be the source that has the least DRM, or the least annoying DRM.. DRM will be forced upon us for best sellers, I think, at least for a while. But we can acquire and loan DRM-free books AND show people how to move them from their Nook to their Kindle and to their friends’ Nooks and Kindles. Is the Library cool, or what?
- Here is some more homework
- Cool stuff—No overdues, no shelving, no Delivery, reduced cost, Large Print on demand Annoying stuff—Models that bypass libraries, limited list of vendors, incomplete DRM and format integration
- Note the sources of free eBooks
- This man may be a patron trying to figure out how to use his new eReader. Or he may be a librarian trying to figure out how to help a patron with an ePub question. Nahhh! He’s too well dressed to be a librarian. Well, either way we have some help for him today.