Peter Brantley Tampa Internet Archive Florida The Presidio 11.2011

Let’s explore out some of the ramifications for libraries of the ebook market explosion.

Let’s assume ebook market penetration

continues to grow rather rapidly.

In fact, let’s assume that the ebook market is around an 80+ percent market in <= 5 yrs. (for trade at least) - via Mike Shatzkin, Idea Logical Co.

Providing access to ebooks requires a

platform based service with an attractive catalog and technical infrastructure.

(‘Cuz you don’t put ebooks on shelves).

Ebook platforms aggregate user data,

intentionality, preferences, and social information.

(Nothing inherently evil about this; it comes

with the territory).

Overdrive is current de facto national digital

library platform for public libraries. 3M and others might present effective competition.

Overdrive occupies a sweet spot, but it

requires sophisticated contract licensing and negotiation skills, and well-developed engineering capacity.

Overdrive does not function solely as the

intermediary between the library and the publisher. They are also the intermediary between a reading system retailer and the publisher.

In a manner, they sell rental access to ebooks

to nook and Kobo users, via libraries. It’s just that the libraries pick up the rental fees.

In other words, they are in acting as a

distributor of books, just like Ingram. (In fact, in book markets, they operate

exactly like Ingram.)

Overdrive’s ability to support EPUB, an open

standard for digital book packaging, reduces its overhead costs and permits it to serve a wide number of users and reading systems.

When Overdrive provides access to EPUB-

format ebooks with vanilla Adobe ACS DRM, they can gather usage data across consumers with different reading systems.

This is why Overdrive has been active in the

digital book standards community. With an open standard, they can host books

in a single format to serve multiple channels: B&N nook, Kobo, and other reading systems.

But not everyone uses the open standard,

EPUB. Amazon uses its own Kindle format.

In Overdrive’s new agreement with Amazon,

it is not permitted to distribute Kindle files; it’s role is deprecated to a “network switch” on catalog metadata.

Amazon provides Kindle ebooks direct to the

library user, via the user’s Amazon account.

The privileging of Amazon – retaining its

proprietary ebook platform and the data aggregation it generates – is prophetic.

Overdrive, 3M, and similar vendors are not

unique in having a massive catalog of books with a technical infrastructure capable of serving public libraries.

Both Amazon and Google have massive and

deep catalogs in digital books, international in scope. (Both companies are establishing ebook stores in other countries).

Google’s catalog encompasses long historical

period; Amazon’s includes exclusive offerings from current authors.

In October 2011, Pearson, a very prominent

publisher, announced a partnership with Google that provides access to a free LMS bundled with Google Apps for Education.

It is easy to imagine a library systems vendor

(III, Sirsi, Ex Libris) partnering with Google to provide library subscription services to GBS.

(Library subscription was one of the proposed

commercial models in the failed Google Book Search settlement proposals).

ILS vendors could integrate GBS title access

into library catalog discovery interfaces via APIs. (They do this with the bibliographic APIs for HathiTrust and IA’s Open Library.)

Amazon has already partnered with a library

systems vendor (that would be Overdrive). But they now also offer renting of titles, or

the lending of titles on a subscription basis, direct to consumer.

Announced 04/11/2011, Amazon Prime

customers will get “free” borrowing for ebooks (i.e., free rental) through their subscription, just like they get access to streaming movies.

Amazon Prime Library

For Amazon, the loss of revenue from lending

(versus selling) is more than compensated for by increased traffic to the Amazon web site.

That’s the value of a platform.

You can take a “loss” on one service if you

drive increased traffic to your other services, because some of that traffic will convert.

So where would this likely leave us?

Like HE libraries, public libraries license

access to the majority of the electronic content that users request and expect.

Libraries will continue to license access to

ebooks, vs. buying-to-own, because they need access to platforms.

Amazon Prime Lending suggests that public

libraries are becoming the public hospitals of ebooks: struggling to finance support for the underprivileged through community dollars.

Is there an alternative?

In 10/2011, State librarians through COSLA

endorsed library participation in the Internet Archive’s Open Library lending program.

Libraries contribute books for digitization and

lending access is provided to the participating libraries. California, North Carolina, and Kansas are already participating.

The COSLA endorsement, while a first step,

leaves unspecified the funding sources that are required to support a large digital book database.

It requires significant communal effort and

funding redirection & reallocation by many State and public library systems.

(DPLA seems to be vacuuming up available

private grant funding, fwiw.)

For IA to develop a comprehensive library, it

would have to aggregate not just older <2001 digitized books, but develop an acquisition program for frontlist titles with publishers.

Ideally by buying them. But up until now (11/2011) the purchase of

ebooks has been limited to niche distributors (Smashwords, Gale) or alternative presses.

It is not yet obvious that publishers would

participate in public library title acquisition if there are commercial sector alternatives for lending platforms.

Libraries would need to demonstrate that

lend does not fully substitute for purchase. I.e.,: the lending market does not greatly impinge upon the book purchase market.

It also creates curious market issues if Open

Library successfully competes with Overdrive services via collectivization of public library interests.

If we all band together. If we all work together. It is an interesting future.

We cannot be confident in this scenario.

It is not mad for libraries to “write off” ebooks

and focus on services that will be attractive in the future.

Longer term trends suggest this. An

increasing number of things that today we call “ebooks” will turn into enhanced websites.

“As EPUB evolves as a format it seems clear that it

would allow for more and more interactivity, more and more functionality, and still work within a broad range of web browsers and/or web-based renders and readers.”

- Brian Sandusky, Kaplan Publishing,

2011 IDPF Board candidate statement.

You see it everywhere. Not just in Wikipedia

and cookbooks, travel guides, music scores, building codes, and most legal information.

The Push Pop Press*’ Our Choice by Al Gore Jr

is the most beautifully designed mixed media offering to date.

(*now owned by Facebook, interestingly.)

In other words, the market for content will

itself diminish the role and importance of books for libraries.

This suggests that direct (e)book provisioning

by libraries, in all forms, will diminish over the long run – even as we see circulation increase today.

This isn’t all bad.

Really, it’s true!

It will permit libraries to invest in the things

that matter, like digital media and learning.

It will provide added impetus for libraries to

open digital media learning centers in their communities, modeled on Chicago’s YouMedia.

It will encourage libraries to concentrate on

community resources, such as partnerships with new local newspapers – for example, “Berkeley Side” and “Mission Local” in the Bay Area.

It will foster investigation of personal data

archiving services and time-lining support.

The next library: providing digital media services for

community and individual needs.

It’s a very, very different library. But, these are different times.

peter brantley director, bookserver project internet archive san francisco ca @naypinya (twitter)