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Author: Gavin Ferriby

Verlyn Klinkenborg's Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader, published in May 30, 2010 New York Times, correlates some interesting insights from librarians and academics.
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Verlyn Klinkenborg's Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader, published in May 30, 2010 New York Times, correlates some interesting insights from librarians and academics.

Klinkenborg's first major point bears repeating: reading is a subtle thing.  For an intellectual activity, it does depend upon look-and-feel: book design.  The designers of books, using skills and concepts honed over decades and centuries, really do know what they're doing when they select a typeface, weight of paper, and other design elements.  "Glass and pixel's aren't the same."

His first example --that no matter the length of the book, the iPad's iBooks reader always shows six pages past and six pages ahead --correlates with the results of e-reader pilot projects summarized by the trade journal Campus Technology at three colleges: Northwest Missouri State University, Arizona State University, and Princeton University.

"Students need to be able to ... quickly skim through passages to refresh and compare information." (p. 28)  "Princeton participants, especially once finals arrived," [were frustrated by] "the inability to skim and flip through pages on the Kindle DX as quicly as they could with a traditional textbook." (p. 30)  Traditional printed book design allows quick skimming, review, and comparison, as well as easier note-taking and highlighting.

A 400-page textbook in biology or physics or economics allows a student a tactile sense of where in the book he or she is, and color-coding pages, page headers, footers, and margin colors allow quick retrieval when information or memory needs to be refreshed.  This is not a trivial requirement, and current e-book readers simply lack it.

Klinkenborg goes on to note how ugly e-book texts appear in comparison with their printed cousins.  The very ability e-reader manufacturers celebrate --you can change the font face, size, etc.-- allow us to  make "them resemble all the more our own word-processed manuscripts."  In other words, they can look simply ugly, and often do.  In the rush to promote e-books, e-publishers seem to have completely forgotten the important aesthetic and design considerations which go into a professionally-done, finished book.

The bigger problem, Klinkenborg notes, is that he grew up reading books, not texts.  A contemporary, well-done, professionally designed book, suggests an authority, intellectual and publishing market niche, and an affiliation: a book from Princeton University Press, Knopf, O'Reilly Publishing, and Alysson Publications each carries some sense of affiliation and intended audience --in crass terms, "brand." 

Many, many e-books are public-domain recycled texts that carry no sense of their own dates of publication, intended original audiences, or publishing origins.  Above all, they have no sense of place as editions --is a public-domain 19th-century translation of Dante better or worse than an in-copyright 20th-century translation?  The long and complex problem of publishing rights has high-jacked the cultural agenda of e-book purveyors, and no amount of legal muscle or sheer money from Apple, Google or Amazon is likely simply to make those problems disappear.

Finally, Klinkenborg notes that "most of the books I’ve ever read have come from lending libraries," even though he has a personal library (and probably, one guesses, extensive).  How e-books, once they have grown past their horrendous aesthetic problems and legal challenges, can interact in the common cultural "third space" known as a public or academic library really remains to be seen.

Klinkenborg's brief article --paired with the summary of e-book pilot projects in Campus Technology-- strongly suggest that when matters come to a head, e-books simply aren't there yet.  Someday they will have arrived, and libraries ignore e-books at their peril.  It behooves any academic library to build an e-book collection to anticipate this reality.  The present finding is hard to ignore, however -- currently e-books fail significantly even in their most non-aesthetic "hardest" use, the academic textbook. 

The sheer arrogance of e-book purveyors and promoters in ignoring the lessons learned by centuries of print publishers and authors will have to be mended before e-books will really move forward.

This brief video (duration: 4:18) provides a convenient introduction to the way that books are digitized, and how a very creative University Press is handling the numerous production and distribution details involved with moving from printed books to e-books.
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This brief video (duration: 4:18) provides a convenient introduction to the way that books are digitized, and how a very creative University Press is handling the numerous production and distribution details involved with moving from printed books to e-books.

Sacred Heart University Library is considering a trial of Cambridge Books Online during the summer of 2010 -- please respond to this post if you have any thoughts about this!

Two recent discussions --in very different venues-- take an interesting look at the role of reading, individual knowledge, and disciplined reflection in the Internet Age.
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Two recent discussions --in very different venues-- take an interesting look at the role of reading, individual knowledge, and disciplined reflection in the Internet Age.

The first author is Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, who has gone on to found a renowed public-interest wiki Citizendium.org and the directory of educational videos online, WatchKnow.org.  With a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Theory of Knowledge), Sanger is hardly one to down-play the role of the Internet in civil society, or to be accused of being a Luddite by the rhetorically inclined.

Sanger's article in Educause Review, Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age, can be found here (in .pdf here)

Sanger discusses in some detail the importance of individual knowledge, rooted in (but not exclusively):

  • memorization --how can you really know something that you don't remember?
  • individual learning (as differentiated from social knowledge learned in groups); and
  • books --complex, deep strands of thinking that require absorption and uninterrupted attention.

The second author is Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, a long-standing, mainstream Christian publishing empire famous for devotional literature and Bibles.  Far from special pleading from a print publisher, Thomas Nelson is in fact a leader in electronic publishing, and Hyatt has led the transformation.

Hyatt writes in defense of books, of the activity of reading as a way of viewing the world --you can read his blog-post here.

Beyond (or because of) his broad and deep commitment to digital publishing, Hyatt values serious readers' "ability to follow extended arguments and enroll their imagination in
the reading experience."  What Hyatt regards in peril is the ability to engage in extended conversation with its potential for transformative exchange, replaced instead by a media-driven amusement that  "will become the ultimate value against which everything else is measured."

Libraries, like Universities (and especially University Libraries!) have a cultural agenda: that the examined life is definitely worth living, that such examination requires reflection, conversation, and an openness to the experiences of people very different from contemporaries --people of the past.  Amusement, group knowledge socially constructed in networks heedless of group and individual memory --these things are no replacement for the examined life.  In fact, Plato might suggest that they are merely the shadows upon the wall of the cave in which most people live their lives, unaware of the light and the source of the light outside the cave.

Do I cavill with a straw man?  I hope so, but fear that I do not do so.  As contemporary Americans we pride ourselves on a world-wide cultural now built especially upon science, medicine, and technology --but we also prefer the disconnected amusement the some even disparage the "old" knowledge based upon remembering, individual reflection, and reading. 

Sanger and Hyatt, from very different perspectives and social and business locations, converge on similar points.  That convergence is worth pondering.

Why collect anything locally? The answer is: here, now, and in person.
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Libraries traditional collected various materials, especially books, journals, printed material of all kinds, and sometimes art pieces or other physical items. As time went on the list expanded to sound recordings and videos, whatever the device (LP records, CDs, DVDs, etc.)

At the same time, libraries embraced cooperation: the "inter-library loan office" (resource sharing) at Sacred Heart University Library is a vital service.  "Loan" is now a misnomer: more than half of our resource sharing transactions obtain a copy (digital or photocopy) which is not to be returned --a service, not a loan.

Indeed, with such cooperation, with e-books, with digital media of all kinds and better players (iPads, Kindles, iPods, and all their kin), why bother trying to gather or collect anything?  Why not simply depend upon the network?

This is the crux of the pundits' argument that libraries will simply disappear in the brave new information world where everything is available freely and easily.  Unfortunately, that world doesn't yet exist, and is unlikely to do so.  Information will not be available freely and easily for the simple reason that a great deal of it will continue --at least for the foreseeable future-- to be controlled by for-profit corporations (e.g. Ebsco, Elsevier, ProQuest, and their kin). 

Of course, such information can be easily accessed via web browsers --but only with the right authorizations and passwords.  The proxy server makes some of this invisible, especially on campus, but those authorizations are still there.  The great information data-banks that corporations have built can exchange data but are no more likely to merge than will the great and regional banks suddenly coalesce into one financial institution.Information will remain divided into corporate silos, some openly accessible, some not.

The first thing that the library does is manage access to much of this environment of information.  All of this environment?  no --think of Google.  Even Google, however, has numerous aspects (Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Patents) which are little known to most users.  Librarians --libraries are primarily a service, not a thing-- are critical navigators in this environment.

At great length --with all this! why collect anything locally?  The answer is: here, now, and in person.  When students and faculty are in "inquiry" mode, they want resources: the old amusing saying, "librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find" is true in a way.  There is no finding without searching.  Finding can mean materials online, and materials at hand.  We still live in an  environment of mixed media.  Some people prefer printed resources for a variety of reasons: layout, familiarity, ease of use, portability.  As mentioned before, paper is (all said and done) not a bad storage medium.

So the question: why collect? is answered: to serve students and faculty here, now, and in person.  The question can't be "how many print resources do we have?," but "how good are the print resources we have?"  Who now would bother to build a library to hold all the books available?  Who is really ready --now-- to walk into a library with no printed books at all? 

The ease with which one private secondary school in Massachusetts disposed of its print collection is belied by its dependence upon other schools' print collections --resource sharing.  They simply outsourced their print needs to other schools --pleasant news to the budget officer, but with the an effect similar to living on take-out food rather than cooking your own in the kitchen.  It's not a bad thing to do for one meal or another.  But all the time?  What happens in the long run?  What happens when they lose access to critical intellectual resources because they have become unavailable due to contractual disputes between database providers? 

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"There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old's
life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a
childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially
crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing
ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book
about orcs." (p. 172)

The positive environmental impact of e-book readers is highly underestimated, and the negative impact of many printed volumes is highly over-estimated.
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Readers may have missed this engaging opinion piece in Sunday's New York Times: How Green Is My Ipad?

Granted, a true environmental audit of the life-cycle of either a printed book, or an Ipad, is presently an inexact science.  The authors present a plausible analysis, but it contains several asssumptions or unknowns, and given its length can't begin to get into the technicalities of print book production: illustrations? acid-free paper? binding type?  size of the volume? etc. --details which do matter in this context.

Still, very rough figuring in the world of libraries:

One e-book reader has the approximate impact of 100 printed book circulations (each circulation counting as one use, which is a debatable assumption).  Given the impact of individuals going to a library to get a book (on foot on campus, or using an automobile? or public transportation in a city? or a bicycle?), one might err generously and say that the approximate impact upon global climate change and human health would add up:

one e-book reader = 150 paper book circulations

but even that might be too generous.  Then must be figured in the cost of storage, retrieval, processing, and repair of printed books, which is a practically incalculable per-piece figure in an academic library with perhaps many hundred thousand volumes --some of which will remain in the collection for centuries or decades, while others are ephemeral.

A very general conclusion:  the positive environmental impact of e-book readers is often overerestimated, and the positive impact of many printed volumes is usually under-estimated.  In fact, paper is not a bad storage medium, in bulk.  It is expensive and time-consuming to handle.  On the other hand, the impacts on human health and global climate change of e-book readers and changing electronic formats cannot be over-looked in a pundits' rush to proclaim the death of the library.

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Recently the librarians at the Ryan-Matura Library have been undertaking a massive project of weeding the Reference Collection.  Why weed?

As discussed in the previous post, readers interact with books in various ways.  Certainly the picture book, the beloved literary book, the cookbook, and the telephone directory all are treated differently, and yet they are all books.  To be sure many would want to save the literary book, the cook book --but who really wants a bulky local telephone directory from a few years ago? 

Information ages at varying currency, and we all know that the telephone book is easily out of date, though the current one is still more useful and once thought.In addition, the advent of e-books and reference and journal databases have made earlier, printed directories obsolete --with notable exceptions.  The New York Times printed indices from decades ago are still considerably superior to the content of the New York Times online index for the same years.  Some reference books --the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopaedia Britannica (10th edition)-- remain iconic works of scholarship despite their age or format, or presence online (in the case of the OED).

The Library at Sacred Heart University exists to support the teaching and learning of the University --and not, alas, true faculty research, for which we have too little room in the present structure.  Superannuated reference books of less than stellar quality simply are no longer used, and have been occupying valuable space on our main floor, while students have lacked seating, especially at peak periods of the academic year.

Consequently, librarians are undertaking a careful, but thorough, weeding of the reference collection, with the aim of making more student seating available, and the remaining reference collection more useful and accessible.  As reference sources migrate to online formats (or have already done so!), the same librarians are evaluating new online resources --already Literature Online has replaced many of the old Gale volumes, WestLaw has replaced a great many legal volumes, and the Oxford English Dictionary Online supplements the iconic printed volumes.

Weeding is never merely a case of "out with the old." Professional expertise strongly suggests that quality printed reference works can be consulted more when they are not so obscured by unwanted and superannuated material.  Online reference sources frequently guide users to print materials not considered before because of the sheer labor of tracing the references.  As always, the current needs of teaching and learning in the University guide our decisions towards maximizing our investment of money and time and achieving effective learning outcomes.

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Butler_Library2

(p. 181) Deo stopped on the steps of Low Library and Pointed across the quadrangle at another monumental building . . . . This one advertised itself with names carved in the granite frieze above its broad front: HOMER, HERODOTUS, SOPHOCLES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, DEMONSTHENES, CICERO, VERGIL.  "That is Butler Library.  It's such a beautiful library.  I love it.  It's the library in my heart."  He was laughing softly.  "I loved that library.  I like to be back here, actually."

--Tracy Kidder: Strength in What Remains (New York: Random House, 2009)

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How do people use books?  If e-books are coming (....or not?), will they supplant printed books?  Is the end of printed books, at hand --leading to a far-off historical survey  "The History of The Printed Book 1450-2050"?

People use books in simply countless ways.  For a period in the twentieth century, "using books" meant "reading," and "reading" meant "cultural reproduction."  The text, in other words --the printed text-- was simply an accessory, a means to an end, much the same relationship of "ingredients" to "food" --the latter being a far more expansive, culturally-laden term than mere instrumental "ingredients."

The evolution of the e-text has forced re-consideration of the printed text.  For librarians, "reading" often came to mean "engaging in cultural production or reproduction," but librarians were always deeply aware of the instrumental uses of volumes of printed paper, gathered into quires and sewn into durable bindings.  The uses are many:

  • The book not meant to be read all the way through: reference books.  Think the automotive or equipment bluebooks --consulted for various bits of information.  One definition of a reference books is, "a book not meant to be read cover-to-cover," but referred to for discrete bits.
  • The text-book --no fun to read, but intensely studied (even memorized) --replete with graphs, diagrams, tables, illustrations, and now even DVDs.
  • The cook-book --indispensable for kitchen knowledge --sometimes not read all the way through, but sometimes.  The sheer exuberance of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was so beautifully caught in the film Julie and Julia.
  • The technical manual --think how-to on steroids.  Some (yellow ones) are for dummies, but most are for very smart people, or at least, people trained in a certain field.  One could read all the way through Linux Network Servers, daunting as that might be to many.
  • The musical score --not a technical manual, and not always played all the way through.
  • The phone book --ever moved to a new community?  Could you live without it?
  • The multi-volume comprehensive account of something-or-other: for example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life, or Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.  One could read all the volumes --but who really does so?
  • Collected essays, either by an author, or on a topic, problem, or event.
  • The index, abstract, or guide to other items that have been published, somewhere.
  • The novel --ah, pride of place!  And other literary books --the gateway to true reading as cultural production.

Only a few of those are the clear referents of "cultural production," although they are all certainly cultural productions of one kind or another.

So what of e-books --when they come, what will they replace?

The first, most logical kind of printed book that e-books have already replaced (to a very large extent) is the multi-volume reference work.  Encycopaedia Britannica has swiftly re-invented itself to compete with the new Wikipedia, a resource that has its own problems.  Multi-volume reference works were always essentially databases, and the features associated with full-text searching (such as the ability to search lexicographical citations in the Oxford English Dictionary Online) offer substantial new usefulness.  Index and abstracts were never really very useful in print format --they were only useful because there were no alternatives.

Textbooks and technical manuals have followed swiftly --some computer applications now come with minimal reference material since manuals and user-developed sites are so plentifully available.  Collected essays --which behave like journal articles, but appear as bound monographs-- have very successfully migrated to e-books.

Cookbooks and telephone directories, however, have hit a curious bump in the road.  Does anyone else remember the predictions of the demise of the telephone book? --and yet here in 2010 they are alive and well.  In part, this is due to the dreadful interface of most online telephone directories.  If I want to know the name of a pizzeria in Bridgeport near my workplace, WhitePages or some other source will be happy to tell me about pizzerias miles away, and I will have to dig up local establishments from buried listings, or use a very cumbersome search interface which also collects as much data about me as possible.  Online recipes are very popular, but cookbooks continue to sell --glossy, illustrated, and less bare-bones than the old Joy of Cooking, but equally useful in a working environment (the kitchen) where spattering grease or batter, or vapors, may interfere with a screen, even an iPad.

The place of "literary reading" (fiction and nonfiction) seems less assured in the e-book format.  To be sure, e-book readers are wonderful for readers with vision problems --one can expand Kindle's text easily.  Traveling or commuting readers also appreciate the compact features.  But the marketplace difficulties mentioned in the previous posting (so far the point has been to sell the reading device, not the text), and infelicities of interfaces, and the sheer price of the reading devices, has limited the market. 

A bound volume is still easier to put down quickly, pick up quickly (no restart time), thumb through, annotate, sneak to the end, compare passages, turn the page corner down, and all the habits good and bad of inveterate print readers and books.  The working bookshelf in a living-space, home environment is still a desirable status symbol --complementing the wide screen TV and the stylish MP3 player of your choice.

When all is said and done, more serious "literary reading" (cultural production) is still deeply associated with the values, strengths, and cachet of the book as a cultural object.  The iPad could change some of this dynamic, and its multi-media abilities could prove critical in the lucrative textbook market.  Human behavior changes slowly, despite its technological environment.  Fountain pens continue to be sold, but they connote a value different from their worth a century ago.  The book as cultural object will continue in fond regard for some time yet --how long, who knows?  TV was supposed to be the death-knell of film and radio --the short-run effects of technology are usually overblown and the long-term effects usually under-estimated. 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la
même chose.

--Gavin Ferriby

Publishers, book sellers, librarians, and readers should all be panting for e-books and e-book readers, according to the breathless press reports surrounding the introduction of Apple's new iPad by Steve Jobs on January 25. But are they?
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Publishers,
book sellers, librarians, and readers should all be panting for e-books and
e-book readers, according to the breathless press reports surrounding the
introduction of Apple's new iPad by Steve Jobs on January 25. But are they?

Predictions
that e-books will completely replace printed books (“p-books” or “tree-books”)
have been around since the advent of the computer, often in tandem with
predictions about the “paperless office.” (Have you seen one lately?) To be
sure, authors, publishers, book distributors, and librarians have been
preparing for e-books –already Sacred Heart University Library has leased
access to approximately 50,000 available e-books and tens of thousands of
e-journals.

The
moment of truth, however, has not yet arrived. The reasons vary.


  • The e-book market right now
    is device-driven. Everyone who sells an e-book is also interested in selling
    –or supporting-- a device, and the devices aren't compatible. You can play a CD
    or an mp3 music download on many different players. Not so with Kindles, Nooks,
    E-Readers, etc. To buy a Kindle is to decide to buy e-books from Amazon, and
    only Amazon. Book retailers won't push e-readers until there's more in it for
    them    .

  • The devices aren't cheap.
    The major market for Kindles right now isn't young people, but people aged
    35-50. Why? They (sometimes) have the several hundred dollars available for an
    experimental purchase. Some of these people travel often, and a Kindle has real
    benefits for a business traveler. E-book readers so far –the iPad will probably
    be an exception-- are largely single-use devices. How many college students
    want to pack a Kindle along with a laptop, books, phone, iPod, and what-else on
    campus every day?

  • The devices have often been
    hard to read for a long time. Kindle users say they get used to it. No one
    knows about the iPad yet. A e-book reader is rarely a love-at-first-sight    .

  • Publishers are extremely
    nervous about piracy and uncompensated file sharing. Ironically, the most
    egregious piracy comes in the form of ordinary scans of printed materials into
    .pdf files which are then easily readable almost everywhere on the Web. Who
    else could read a pirated Kindle book in Mobipocket format? Even the .epub or
    OEPBS (Open Ebook Publication Structure) which can be read via Firefox is
    unfamiliar to most people. Publishers' squeamishness about legal copies –their
    core business, after all-- has contributed to reluctant embrace of e-books.

Whether
Apple can penetrated the technologically all-important youth market and the
hard-pressed and captive textbook market (markets which overlap on a college
campus) has yet to be seen. What will be the Cool factor of an iPad?
 

All
which leads to the question: so how do people really interact with e-books and
p-books?