Pull quote: “Because when I think about what other thing of value that libraries have that could potentially be traded to publishers in order to get an equivalent set of value back from them in the way of ebook rights, I keep coming back to one thing:
Information. Information about our patrons, information about our circulations of individual books, and demographic information about our users and what books they read.”
Pull quote: “If you want to reward creators who made the books that you love instead of feeding a voracious supply chain that manages to spit a few pennies of royalties to an author for every $14.99 out of your pocket, then now is the time to send a message to that publishing establishment.”
Pull quote: “At present, many story-telling apps are essentially eye- and finger-candy, but these are very early stage efforts. We may never collect apps – or be able to collect and preserve apps – in the same way that we build libraries of physical books. The diversity in hardware, tools, and authoring may be too great, at least for a while, for that to happen. Frankly, even though I have great concerns about this, at the end of the day, I think we’ll figure out new ways of sharing stories. True digital standardization has yet to come, and we don’t even know where to watch for the vector of its arrival. But these are most exciting days in publishing that I’ve ever seen.”
Pull quote: “’I hate to say it but one could argue that in a way if DRM goes away it’s bad news for libraries, at least as long as ebook downloads are still expected,’ said Bill McCoy, the executive director of IDPF, the trade and standards organization that develops and maintains the EPUB standard. ‘After all even putatively anti-DRM folks, like O’Reilly, don’t want libraries to loan books to patrons who will never have to delete them, and so they are using DRM with library loans.’”
Pull quote: “For the purposes of study, and for the use of these texts for study, it would be useful to have a certified ‘Urtext’ version, a quality digitization with corrected OCR that scholars agree represents the text as closely and accurately as possible. This might be a digital copy of the first edition, or it might be a digital copy of an agreed ‘definitive’ edition.”
Pull quote: “Just like Amazon Web Services have enabled thousands of scaleable web startups and has made thousands of established companies more efficient, I predict that Amazon Publishing Services will enable thousands of new publishers and make thousands of established publishers more efficient. Amazon’s Editing Turk will connect thousands of writers to pools of editors who will work harder at a lower cost. Amazon Creative Services will provide illustrations and graphic design. Amazon Elastic Curation will match groups of consumers with new authors writing the books they want to read. And Amazon Creative Capital will help visionaries invest in promising projects and writers. Amazon will spend to achieve scale wherever scale drives economies, and everywhere else, Amazon will provide hypervisors to match talent with tasks.”
Pull quote: “Does the book cite other books? Journal articles? Blogs? Websites? Well, connect me – not just to bibliographic information that I can port into a link resolver and then cross my fingers. Take me there: right to the page that the author discusses. Make the connectivity that we expect on the web a standard feature of ebooks. Is there an allusion to some other text? Identify the allusion and give me the option of linking to it. But also give me the option of turning off all of the annotations — sometimes I just want to read without interruption. Especially if I’m reading James Joyce.”
Pull quote: “In other words, libraries will need to get ready to accommodate a flood of “non-traditional” types of publications. Curious as to how we had handled this one, I looked up the record in WorldCat and the record has “CreateSpace?” listed as the publisher. This is accurate, but the cataloger was forced to put in the question mark since it was not listed on the publication itself. Time for some new rules, folks. Either that, or we will increasingly find ourselves standing on our heads to make these things conform to our opinions of what they should be.”
Pull quote: “It’s been widely discussed that DRM is the biggest impediment to ebook portability. But portability can be implemented without eliminating DRM. All that’s needed is a digital-signed-receipt system. No difference if DRM were set aside for something more magical, morepotterish. Customers would receive a proof of purchase that could be presented to any authorized reading platform. It’s not comic-book science, it’s mundane coding stuff. I mean, you’ve hired some great techies, big publishers, why not listen to them for a change? Plus, coders are a lot cheaper than the antitrust lawyers you’re not listening to.”
Pull quote: “An ever-growing copy culture is likely to generate over-reactive calls for IP enforcement, and ultimately be increasingly disruptive to legacy publishers, but it will also prove to be hugely beneficial to the growth of a global reading culture. This tension between formal culture and its informal siblings is something that we have often naively contested, but in reality it is more of a symbiosis.”
Pull quote: “Libraries Online Incorporated (LION), a consortium of twenty-five Connecticut public, academic, and school libraries, has imposed a moratorium on the purchase of ebooks from Random House. The action, which was unanimously approved by LION members on March 20, is in response to the March 1 price hike put in place by Random House that doubled and sometimes tripled the price of ebooks for libraries.”
Pull quote: “For too long, publishers have been worrying about the wrong thing, chasing pie-in-the-sky DRM that has never worked at stopping piracy, and will never work. In the process, they’ve fashioned a scourge for their own industry—a multimillion-dollar liability that their customers will have to absorb in order for publishers to get back any leverage at the bargaining table. And every book you allow a tech company to sell with DRM only increases that liability.”
Pull quote: “The ur-number seems to come from a 1997 report written by Michael Lesk titled “How Much Information Is There In the World?” In that report he provides the proposed calculation for the “size” of a digitized book, and the guesstimate that the Library had 20 millions books. To be fair, this report also makes a guesstimate about the size of collections of photographs, video, and audio, and comes up with the figure of 3 petabytes worth of collections. For 1997, this was a very well-informed estimate.
But the numbers that caught the public’s imagination were the ones for books. And that 10 TB figure is everywhere.”
Pull quote: “Of course, whether any of these solutions will bear continued investment as ebook prices continue to fall, and customer acquisition of ebook titles become increasingly trivial, is an open question. Libraries may be creatively trying to figure out ways of patching the hole in the side of the Titanic, without realizing that too many of the ship’s watertight compartments have already been breached.”
