{"id":553,"date":"2008-12-04T09:35:16","date_gmt":"2008-12-04T00:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/04\/our-brand-is-books-then-what\/"},"modified":"2008-12-04T09:35:16","modified_gmt":"2008-12-04T00:35:16","slug":"our-brand-is-books-then-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/04\/our-brand-is-books-then-what\/","title":{"rendered":"Our brand is books. Then what?"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOKS AS BRAND<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you’ve been to any library conference in the last three years,\u00a0 then you will have heard the finding from the OCLC 2005 Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources<\/a> report that surveyed Internet users worldwide:<\/p>\n

“Books” is the library brand. There is no runner-up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it would hardly be different today. I wish it was.<\/p>\n

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 –\u00a0 then we need to position ourselves to serve future clients too.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Day 106 – I am a l ibrarian<\/a> . Uploaded to Flickr on January 10, 2007<\/a> by cindiann<\/strong><\/a><\/h6>\n

BOOK LOVERS vs READERS <\/strong><\/p>\n

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) <\/a>. He takes issue with James Gleick’s recent article in the New York Times How to Publish Without Perishing<\/a> .<\/p>\n

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”<\/em>. He sees the recent Authors Guild vs. Google<\/a> decision as a gift of unlimited longevity, even for the most modest titles, and continues:<\/p>\n

What should an old-fashioned book publisher do with this gift? Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don\u2019t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won\u2019t win on quick distribution, and you won\u2019t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clay Shirky describes Gleick’s essay as ” so well written, so cleanly expressed, and so spectacularly wrong “.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.” <\/strong>(emphasis mine).
\n<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

SHIFT OF PERSPECTIVE? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, I’m not going to take sides between Gleick and Shirky. I am going to make an observation about academic libraries.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Espresso<\/a><\/p>\n

Espresso Book Machine – University of Michigan<\/h6>\n

NEW MODELS ? <\/strong><\/p>\n

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 <\/a>,\u00a0 the statistics for the United States are that :<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The discussion at the end that mentions alternative book distribution models is well-worth reading. They particularly discuss Amazon’s Kindle<\/a> 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n

WHAT TO DO?<\/strong><\/p>\n

On my own “to do” list?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Find out more about new publishing models and licensing structures.<\/li>\n
  2. 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.<\/li>\n
  3. 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?<\/li>\n
  4. Educate myself more about Digital Rights Management and which e-books can be read with which e-book reader software on which machines.<\/li>\n
  5. Investigate models for academic texts that involve library-provided materials that can be read off-line.<\/li>\n
  6. Find out more about what the University of Michigan Library is doing with their Espresso Book Machine<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  7. Think even harder about “last copy storage<\/a>” projects\u00a0 and whether they make sense for Australian academic libraries.<\/li>\n
  8. Think about preservation \/ archive vs accessibility issues with e-books.<\/li>\n
  9. Ask some people under 30 what they think about books vs e-formats.\u00a0 (If you are under 30, please let me know in the comments ).<\/li>\n
  10. Try reading a fiction e-book from start to finish. (I have bought two that use the Mobipocket<\/a>, 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. )<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    BOOKS AS BRAND If you’ve been to any library conference in the last three years,\u00a0 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.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BXdd-8V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}