Posts BOOKS AS BRAND
If you’ve been to any library conference in the last three years, then you will have heard the finding from the OCLC 2005 Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report that surveyed Internet users worldwide:
“Books” is the library brand. There is no runner-up.
I think it would hardly be different today. I wish it was.
Our first duty is to our current users – users who, on the whole, cherish books and respect us for our loving organisation and custodianship of these. But, if we want to have clients in 25 years time – and exist in 25 years time - then we need to position ourselves to serve future clients too.
Day 106 - I am a l ibrarian . Uploaded to Flickr on January 10, 2007 by cindiann
BOOK LOVERS vs READERS
In a post on Boing Boing dated 2 December, guest author Clay Shirky writes about the future business models that publishers should consider, To Publish Without Perishing (Clay Shirky guestblog post) . He takes issue with James Gleick’s recent article in the New York Times How to Publish Without Perishing .
Gleick suggests that some items – encyclopedias, telephone books – are better in online format. He argues that: “It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover”. He sees the recent Authors Guild vs. Google decision as a gift of unlimited longevity, even for the most modest titles, and continues:
What should an old-fashioned book publisher do with this gift? Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered.
Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.
Clay Shirky describes Gleick’s essay as ” so well written, so cleanly expressed, and so spectacularly wrong “.
There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick’s logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we’ve read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It’s the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words!
In the same way the internet has forced newspapers into a ‘news vs. paper’ moment, the publishing world is in a ‘readers vs. book lovers’ moment. In this environment, the single most important choice anyone in publishing has to make is this: “How many generations do I want to be in business?” Because hawking Ye Olde Codices to aging connoisseurs is a one-generation business.
Businesses don’t survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher “To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks.” (emphasis mine).
SHIFT OF PERSPECTIVE?
Now, I’m not going to take sides between Gleick and Shirky. I am going to make an observation about academic libraries. The people who make our funding decisions – senior university administrators and academics – tend to be from a generation of book-lovers. The people who make our acquisitions decisions – our senior librarians – tend to be from a generation of book-lovers.
Personally, “book” is so associated with “library” that it will take a very mindful, deliberate and very foreign-feeling shift in perspective for me to be able to consider “library” without it being based on “book”. For the students I serve today, and will serve within five years, there is no such shift needed to decouple “book” from “reading”. And if libraries are about reading, information and connecting people, then it probably is a shift I need to make if I am going to help libraries survive for at least the rest of my career.
Espresso Book Machine – University of Michigan
NEW MODELS ?
More than one prominent library speaker starts their presentations with statistics showing that book sales are increasing. According to a very comprehensive article from the New York Magazine on 14 September 2008 about the future of publishing, The End , the statistics for the United States are that :
Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected.
The discussion at the end that mentions alternative book distribution models is well-worth reading. They particularly discuss Amazon’s Kindle and its current economic model (don’t make much money, but offer sweet deals to publishers to encourage them to license to this format) and touch on print-on-demand models ( like the Espresso Book Machine).
WHAT TO DO?
On my own “to do” list?
- Find out more about new publishing models and licensing structures.
- Find out more about reading-dedicated devices – kindles and illiads and Sony readers and screen technologies that make it easy to read in bright sunlight.
- Find out more about the “reading” functions on converged devices (like the iPhone and mobile phones). Is it really possible to comfortably read a whole book on one?
- Educate myself more about Digital Rights Management and which e-books can be read with which e-book reader software on which machines.
- Investigate models for academic texts that involve library-provided materials that can be read off-line.
- Find out more about what the University of Michigan Library is doing with their Espresso Book Machine.
- Think even harder about “last copy storage” projects and whether they make sense for Australian academic libraries.
- Think about preservation / archive vs accessibility issues with e-books.
- Ask some people under 30 what they think about books vs e-formats. (If you are under 30, please let me know in the comments ).
- Try reading a fiction e-book from start to finish. (I have bought two that use the Mobipocket, and have been irritated that I can’t flip the screen to portrait so I can hold my eee 1000h like a “real” book. Fuddy Duddy me. )
Quick comment: am not under-30, but… I have read e-books on my PDA quite happily. Would love to try an e-book reader sometime (PDA died).
I also note that many people still say they can’t read onscreen, referring to their desktop computers – but I’m finding that I can, quite happily, the more I do it.
I should say at this point that I am a definite book lover (have more than 3,000 books at home) but don’t see it as an either or scenario- e-books do not mean the end of print books.
Thanks for this – lots to ponder!
Hi,
I have been experimenting with ebooks for some time. Out of interest I downloaded War and Peace onto my PDA as the ultimate test of readability. From the onset I thought I would dislike the experience, in reality I really enjoyed reading from my PDA. On a 1 gig card i can carry around 100′s of ebook titles.
I did read a while ago that in Japan more titles are now published in ebook format than print (fiction works for mobile phones). I do believe at some point in time a killer app for ebooks (or multi use device) will gain critical mass and radically change the way mass society chooses to access information.
[...] a comment » From another gem of a post by Kathryn Greenhill she points us to Clay Shirky’s guest BoingBoing blog post about publishers [...]
I do remember reading some research recently where school children were asked about the format question and a clear majority could not see themselves reading most of their books online in the future, so I think it is important to recognise this is a lot more complex than old and young. It is more complex than just having physical objects or only having electronic copies. I’m 25 and I prefer to do my pleasure reading with a book rather than an electronic text, but I find ebooks really useful in an academic context, so I think that strength lies in publishers offering a multitude of options which can then be selected according to context of use.
[...] Något jag ständigt funderar på. [...]
Just wanted to say thanks for this post–that to-do list is inspiring and utterly sensible.
Hi!
I really enjoyed reading this!
I´ve loved reading all my life, and love surrounding myself with books, magazines, newspapers etc BUT I also enjoy the freedom of being able to read in any format possible.
In my work (I´m a library consultant) I use my Sony Ericsson P1i, where I´ve downloaded Mobipocket which I think is an excellent program for reading e-books.
The real breakthrough for me though, was when I invested in the (now not so ) new iPhone/3G. With it comes the program eReader which also brings an excellent choice of free books to read. Thanks to the generous display, I´ve had a very satisfying experience in rereading Catcher in the Rye among others.
If we ever get a good reading device on the market here in Sweden, I most certainly will invest in one.
By rhe way, have you seen http://www.tumblebooks.com/, which is said to have been a success among kids?
as an under-30 and an advocate of all things electronic, i thought i’d jump in and say that until recently, i didn’t think ebooks would have a significant impact on my reading habits, nor would they really take off for leisure readers in general. i don’t think i’ve ever seen someone using an ebook reader in australia, and i’ve seen very few people reading on a pda or other multi purpose small screen device. but, having had a play with a sony prs 505 ebook reader recently, i think that if i owned one myself, i’d happily do all my leisure reading on a screen. i love the idea of not accumulating more physical stuff (from the girl who has just ripped her entire cd collection in preparation for giving it the heave-ho), and books are something that seem to breed in my house. i’d rather we bred e-ones than p-ones.
your to do list is practical and there’s a few things on there i could definitely do with following up on myself. maybe we should do something collaborative. an online learning program focussed on all things ebooks?
I am with Con. I don’t think age is necessarily a factor that determines if a person can happily read an e-book. I have read an entire book on my Treo and was about to try out my iPhone. The thing that stopped me on my iPhone was the badly formatted (extra line breaks not removed by a conversion) version of the book that I wanted to read. Its important to consider that not all e-readers are equal both in the hardware or software and not all e-books are well formatted. It can be the details that will make the experience unenjoyable.
I have found one clear advantage of reading an e-book. When struck down with middle of the night wakefulness one doesn’t have to turn on the light and disturb your partner in order to read your book.
Also when considering the way the young “read” we should also consider audio books. My 13 year old always goes to sleep listening to his latest book not reading it.
[...] a little worried about the future of the library (that bastion of free speech). She asks What future the library? and suggests that those institutions would be wise to prepare for a bookless future. [...]
[...] E-books – my list is here [...]
Sorry for commenting so late – I’ve moved house and had that pesky festive season stealing my time, only just catching up with my blogs and news.
I’m over 30. ‘Nuff said… %) I have a personal library of several hundred (maybe a few thousand – haven’t counted lately) books of all kinds. You could call me a book lover – I’ve lugged a few hundred kilos of dead trees around with me all around the state of Western Australia by now. And four years ago I made the conscious and deliberate decision to not unpack the books. I’ve saved four 2m bookshelves’ worth of space in the house, about a day of unpacking and arranging, and I’ve almost not missed them. I take random books out of boxes sometimes, and read them (just to prove to myself I can still read books I think) and I still think books are friends that are always there, power cuts or no.
I’ve *almost* gone to the point of selling the majority of the books, and I’d be better off if I did, as I wouldn’t have to store them and keep an eye on their state of preservation. I’ve resisted so far – after all, a cookbook is easier to balance in the kitchen than a laptop, and a programming manual can be opened on the table beside the laptop without requiring an extra screen. So I’m kind of conflicted.
I do know that my reading habits have changed. Once, I’d take fiction books out five or six at a time, and read my way through a series or collection. Now, I tend to absorb more fragmentary information, news articles and short stories, online puzzle games and so forth. And for me, TV also took over some of the escapism – I didn’t have a TV until I was in my mid 20′s and never really started watching TV regularly until I was in my late 30′s, so that may have more of a bearing on my changed habits.
I’d always loved being in the library since school days, and for decades, you’d find me in my local library at least once a week, and averaging three visits a week. I’d take out science fiction, fantasy, comedy, Asterix & Obelix comics, books on the various sciences, technical books – you name it, I’d read it.
I now find libraries are to me more a repository of “useful” information, that is, a)- information I am going to put to practical use, such as cooking gardening or DIY, or b)- information I’m researching for my own education such as histories, biographies, and (blush) pop-sci books along the “How It Works” sort of line…
Also used my local library to go online, print documents, and loan DVDs and audio CDs for entertainment/information/etc. The role of the library for me, a non-student average Joe Bloggs, had changed. I found more of the information I needed online, and in fact I think the Internet became for me what the library had been in my younger years.
Now I find that I want to go to a library to ask the librarian about something that Google and Wikipedia haven’t given me a result on. And I find that librarians today are younger than me, and don’t seem to have as much information in their heads as I recall those much older than me librarians had… %)
Maybe librarians should be less regarding themselves as “guardians of books” and more as “guardians of knowledge.” Books have been invaluable to human development and need to be preserved and kept – but knowledge is all about information, and information is what’s in those books. And these days a lot of that information flows just as well through the Internet to my screen.
[...] the reading. This blog post began with a blog post by Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter. In Our brand is books. Then what? she wrote about how users see libraries as being about books, but then moved on to the more [...]
[...] I am both a “booklover” and a “reader”! [...]