E-books Discussion Presses Plenty of Biblio-Buttons

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What was arguably the most provocative program of the entire IFLA World Library and Information Congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was also, ironically, the least formal and structured of the entire conference. “Can the New Book Economy Guarantee Freedom of Access to Information?” was a freewheeling August 15 session, with Kenneth Crews of Columbia University’s Copyright Advisory Office moderating a panel of publishing experts who made some surprising predictions about the future of publishing and how libraries fit into the picture.

IFLA Senior Policy Advisor Stuart Hamilton introduced the program by citing the recent decision by HarperCollins to limit the number of times a library can lend HarperCollins e-book titles. He reminded the audience that HarperCollins was also sincere in its support for libraries and was trying to balance its relationship with libraries with what the firm could do for authors. Hamilton asked the panel what librarians should do to influence the contracts and pricing models that will be used in this new publishing environment “to be sure that we get our business and service models correct.”

Crews baited the panel with questions about how e-books are effecting a transformation in services, in libraries, and in reading. He launched the discussion with the assumption that the transition to e-books will neither reverse itself nor cause the immediate demise of print books, but that publishers and libraries are scrambling to adjust to this new reality.

Panelist Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive said that every country has to come to terms with the digital environment. “Where’s the money?” is the issue that still has not been addressed, he said, noting that future e-books “will not be digital versions of print.” The future will be network-based and much more interactive, he observed, noting that Amazon has just released a cloud-based reader. “This will transform the publishing industry and how libraries do what they do.”

Y. S. Chi, president of the International Publishers Association said, “We are about to undergo the single most significant transformation of what we have called the book for the last 300 or 400 years. It’s about reinventing the experience between an author and a reader,” he observed. “It’s a struggle between incumbents and challengers. We are barely in chapter one of this transformation; brace for a marathon.” Chi predicted that the central reinvention will occur when authors can do for themselves all the things that publishers do “as easily as word processing or the typewriter.”

Chi emphasized several times that publishers and libraries alike should not look for one grand solution but rather should navigate by “launching a lot of small ships—even if they sink.” His advice to librarians was something along the lines of going with the flow instead of “building a 100,000-ton freighter and taking a long time to do it.”

While Crews monitored audience response to the panel via a Twitter feed, Chi opined that “libraries can easily become publishers” in the new digital environment, largely because libraries and librarians have the public’s trust.

Brantley stated what many have observed for a long time: “We are all publishers now.” Libraries need to own the responsibility for acquiring content under non-licensing terms, he said, and reassert stewardship over cultural product. There is so much that librarians can do that isn’t an exception to copyright rules, he said. “The elephant in the room is the ability to pay for things. You are not just going to acquire content, you are going to acquire tools that will maximize how people use that content. Librarians have done a poor job of understanding the problems that publishers are having,” Brantley said.

Mid-program, three new panelists joined the discussion: Magdalena Vinent, president of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations, Puerto Rican author Elidio La Torre Lagares, and Steve Potash, CEO of OverDrive, a global digital distributor of e-books and audio books.

Vinent emphasized that sticking with the print business model will fail. “People want to do the same thing as in print,” she said, “But this is not possible. We must invent new ways of making sustainable access to information possible.”

Lagares talked about how the language of technology has infiltrated the Spanish language in Puerto Rico. “We had to adapt,” he said, and publishers have not been able to catch up with technology. “But we have not seen anything yet,” he added, suggesting that we should be talking “not about the future of the book but about the book of the future, not about the future of the library but the library of the future.” Of the HarperCollins effort, he said the company “is trying to take control of something that they eventually will lose control of.”

Potash enthused that “e-books in libraries are flourishing in the United States,” experiencing 300–500% growth per year … “and that’s without Amazon’s Kindle—and that is coming.” Access to as much material as possible in all media formats is what it’s about, he said. Chi observed that “it is always about the money.” We are in the middle of it, it’s happening, he said, but how do we maximize availability? “Libraries cannot afford going forward to be in the model they were traditionally in; the library is going to be the connecting point, a source of discovery, enabling people to sample assets wherever they live.”

In response to a concern from the audience about the privacy of patron reading records in the new digital environment, Potash jumped to the defense of publishers. “OverDrive does not know who you are or what you read,” he said. “Only the library does.” “Amazon and American Express know more about me than I want,” added Crews, “from buying paper books.”