PETRONA

Some thoughts about restricting e-readership

Those of us (and our numbers are increasing rapidly!) who like to read in e-format often bemoan the way in which publishers sell the "rights" to their books on a regional basis hanging over from the world of print as the only reading medium. Of course, print readers (myself included) also find it frustrating not to be able to read a book after perusing reviews of it, if one does not live in the "right" (righted?) region. But for the e-format (including digital audio), this restriction seems even more pointless.

Bernadette, in an excellent post at Reactions to Reading, put her finger on one reason why this regional  division is a no-win for publishers - piracy, which as everyone from the CEO of the major publishing companies down to the youngest kid on the internet block, admits occurs on a massive scale. (Never by me or anyone in my house, I am of the honest but frustrated quarter of content users.)

I have two "hats" that I wear in the context of this debate. First, as a reader, I want to read a book as soon as it is published, not wait for some artificially imposed geographical business model. In the world of scientific research, this is the norm. When a paper is published, it is published - people argue about subscription vs "author pays" or the size of the unit of publication, but the argument is how readers pay for access, not about whether one can access at all.  Second, my other "hat" is that I work for a publisher - not, thankfully, on the business side, but on the scientific journal/editorial side. So I can see at first hand the large amount of value a publisher adds to the raw material. In the case of scientific publishing, there is an incredibly large investment in the editorial selection process, for example. I am not as closely familiar with book publishing (though my employer is an internationally leading publisher of books). Even so, I can see the resources that are put into both print and e- (digital) books, and am well aware that this is considerable. (There are many other factors in addition to editorial and production costs, of course.) 

The point for the reader is not price, it is access. Based on my long experience of scientific publishing, it is not necessary to restrict access geographically in order to run a viable business. This is why news items such as these lose me completely -

Waterstones has removed from its website the ability for anyone outside the UK to buy e-books, with "no plans" to reinstate them.

WH Smith has removed e-books from people's e-readers. That is, people who have paid to download a book. The information provided to these paid-up customers is minimal.

The UK Publishers' Association last week agreed that it would restrict library borrowing of e-books to those who are physically present in the library. (See, eg, this Guardian piece.)

This last piece of news is appalling: "I can't believe the PA has declared war on libraries in this way" wrote Luton's librarian at the Bookseller website. Yes, indeed, the very point of e-books is that people who do not live near, or cannot get to, a library can now read! How ludicrous.

I understand concerns on the behalf of authors, and I understand that publishers want to stay in business (and booksellers, but that is also a slightly different story). I know that issues often seem more simple to those outside a situation than they are in reality, but what I am questioning is what we learnt years ago in the scientific publishing sphere - base your business model on some form of payment per download, not on deciding who can read the content based on where they live. The payment can be made directly by the customer (book purchaser) or library on behalf of its patrons,
or borrower (lending fee). Public libraries could also use a variant of the site-licence model in place at academic libraries, in which the price paid for the content is proportional to the number of readers of that content; as well as providing books and other content for free according to whatever criteria they choose (including providing out-of-copyright books free). 

The point of this post is simple - there are technological solutions in place in other parts of the industry for what is termed "e-commerce". Why aren't organisations such as book publishers and governments' library authorities exploring these to reward authors and publishers, instead of exploring technical means to restrict access to non-rights-holders and/or people who have not paid? To paraprhase Bernadette, even if not perfect, the former means some income; the latter encourages piracy. The former also gives the customers (readers) the message that the publisher likes, or even is proud of, its content and actively wants people to read it. (This Telegraph article, for example, is about the increase in library membership bought about by the e-format.) Those new readers might then go on to read more, instead of watching TV or playing computer games - that is, the publisher has a great opportunity to increase its customer base with this format. The latter seems to me bad for business, and provides a rather Scrooge-like image which can hardly be good PR for an industry that is under so much pressure in this era of "instant availability" and from Google Books et al.

I do hope that publishers' organisations will soon find a way to remove the geographical element of their rights arrangements - in their own interests as well as in readers'. We are living in a global community,  after all.

British Library offers test drive of e-readers

Via press release, The British Library is offering people the chance to try three e-readers from Sony and iRex Technologies currently available in the UK. The e-reader display will give visitors the chance to familiarise themselves with the devices and to explore the benefits of the e-book revolution. Devices on display include the Sony Reader, iRex DR1000 and the iLiad as the library seeks to equip people with the digital literacy skills to be able to use such technology for research and reading.
Traditionally, e-readers have struggled to compete with the traditional book due to issues with low battery life and the use of harsh back-lit screens. Overcoming these obstacles through the use of e-ink technology, e-reading devices are more capable of satisfying reader expectations and can deliver additional functions such as the ability to vary font size, access WiFi, and make annotations.
The e-readers on display have been pre-loaded with material currently available. However, in the future, the British Library hopes to exploit e-reader technology to facilitate access to its own digital collections, allowing readers to explore rare and often out-of-print items. Here is what the British Library has to say about these e-readers:

	Sony Reader:	Encased in stylish brushed aluminium, the Sony Reader is super slim, intuitive to use, easy to navigate and with an exceptional battery life of up to 6800 page turns.
	iRex DR1000:	Helping the environment, the DR1000 allows companies and individuals to print directly to an e-reader, cutting out the need to print billions of pages every year.
	The iLiad:	With an integrated Wacom tablet and stylus, the iLiad allows users to annotate works, bringing e-books one step closer to being a replacement for the real thing.

Are you reading, Henry?

Via Brave New World blog: Private detectives are being used by Norfolk County Council to track down unpaid fines for overdue library books. "It is reported [by The Telegraph] that library users in Norfolk alone have over the last six years paid £1.4m in fines for overdue books."

A touch of common sense

The British Library story rumbles on. This is what my favourite Times columnist, Richard Morrison, had to say about it, with his ever-fresh, "common cultural man" perspective:

The extraordinary newfound popularity of the British Library among undergraduates racing to finish their dissertations - or simply using the place as an upmarket pick-up joint - has supposedly made life difficult for other users. But there's a simple answer to the Reading Room's overcrowding crisis. The BL is open for just 58 hours a week. Indeed, only on Tuesdays does it stay open after 6. But I seem to recall that there are 168 hours in a week. Yes, I am making an outrageous suggestion - but I'm also serious. The BL should turn itself into a 24/7 operation.
Why not? The prospect of studying in total peace through the night would appeal to many scholars. Quite a few are night owls anyway. And the BL can hardly complain that it doesn't have the staff or money to stay open all hours. It employs more than 2,000 people. And it owes us. We taxpayers forked out £500 million to build it, and now pay well over £100 million a year to keep it going.
If my local Tesco can manage to stay open all night without a penny of subsidy, the BL should be offering at least as good a service to the long-suffering public.

Makes sense to me.

Too groovy for scholarship

As I've observed before, it's a small world, that Internet. Today on the train to work I read an article in the Times about lack of space at the British Library reading room: "Two years after one of the world’s greatest libraries opened its doors to undergraduates and anyone working on research, high-profile writers and academics say that the struggle to find a desk is now intolerable. Library directors stand accused of increasing visitor numbers to boost funds and performance bonuses."
The problem is, apparently, the students. Initially rallying (mentally) to the defence of this much-maligned societal group, I read on and realised that the issue is not so much the students per se, but that they go into the reading room and don't read -- rather they sit around chatting, etc. Whether they really are students, or whether they are just random people wanting to spend a day in the warm and dry, there are plenty of places in the BL to go and chat -- over a drink or some food if you want to -- without having to go into the reading room. So it does seem a bit strange, even antisocial, to natter in the reading room while others are trying to concentrate. It is rather like reading your book quietly on the train when someone plonks themselves next to you and starts to organise their next trip somewhere by yelling down their mobile phone, as happened to me tonight on the way home.
As it happens, I was due to have lunch today with an eminent author and senior academic who, coincidentally, was in London to do some research at the BL: Professor Dame Honoraria Grump, FRS, B. Lit, VC, OM, so I asked her opinion. She confirmed that the queues are just as described, and that she is frequently reduced to perching on a windowsill if she is lucky, because she cannot arrive very early at the BL due to the distance she has to travel to London. We speculated that the students may not have vacation access to other London University libraries if they live in London but study at universities elsewhere, and/or that individual universities' libraries may not, these days (as opposed to "our day")  be very good compared with the BL.
When I arrived home tonight, I opened my "home email" and found that Dave Lull had already sent me a link to the online version of the Times article. Far flung we may all be, our little band of brothers and sisters, but our minds are in tune!

Here's some more from the Times, you might enjoy it:

"Lady Antonia Fraser and Claire Tomalin have swapped horror stories of interminable queues. Library users complain that the line to enter the new building in St Pancras, central London, has recently been extending across its enormous courtyard.
Lady Antonia said: “I had to queue for 20 minutes to get in, in freezing weather. Then I queued to leave my coat for 20 minutes [at the compulsory check-in]. Then half an hour to get my books and another 15 minutes to get my coat. I’m told it’s due to students having access now. Why can’t they go to their university libraries?”
Of particular irritation is the notion that many undergraduates now come to the library to relax, meet and text friends, and play on laptops, rather than to read books. “It’s become a social gathering,” Lady Antonia said.
Ms Tomalin described the crowds as intolerable: “It’s full of what seem to be schoolgirls giggling. I heard one saying, ‘I’ve got to write about Islam. Can I have your notes?’ It’s what you expect to hear in a school.”
Of the long queues she said: “It is absurd. It’s access gone mad. Access has many good points, but making the British Library, which was for specialist readers, into something for general readers seems to me terrible.”
The historian Tristram Hunt said that it was a scandal that it was impossible to get a seat after 11am when students were there. Many people travelling from outside London complain that they cannot get to the buidling [sic] any earlier. “Students come in to revise rather than to use the books,” he said. “It’s a ‘groovy place’ to meet for a frappuccino. It’s noisy and it’s undermining both the British Library’s function, as books take longer to get, and the scholarly atmosphere.” "

An author at the library

Penny Vincenzi, who has shot straight to the top of the UK paperback charts with her latest book, An Absolute Scandal, is one of those authors whose latest book I invariably read (via the library) at a time in my life when I read anything and everything, from Aeschylus (yes, honestly) to Waugh (Hillary and Evelyn) and all points inbetween. Then I stopped reading her. I can't remember why, now, but it was probably because I was too busy writing my thesis to read novels and then forgot, or maybe I just drifted away. Now, it is too late to pick her up again I think, because I am probably too "out of sympathy" with the genre - and I already have three lifetimes of books to read in my literal, electronic and metaphorical queues.
But I did smile to receive a link to a lovely article in the Independent (careers section) from the indefatigable Dave Lull today (the man who keeps the Internet going, single handed), about how Penny Vincenzi's first job was as a librarian -- and not just any librarian, but a Harrod's librarian. "There were far more private lending libraries then," she explains. "Boots had one. At Harrods, you got a book straight away; you just rang up and ordered it and it was delivered that afternoon, sometimes by horse-drawn van". The article continues: "Penny handled readers whose names began with the letter S. "Sir Malcolm Sargent was an absolute sweetheart, very polite." The famous conductor was unusual: "Most of them were absolutely horrible. We were minions." "

Shakespeare in open digital form

Via an industry press release, I discover that a group of "foundations, government, post-secondary institutions, and libraries is breaking ground in the presentation of Shakespeare for the masses. As open digital content, William Shakespeare's 32 pre-1641 quartos will soon be available for scholars, students and the general public." This project is apparently possible in principle because Shakespeare did not give permission for his works to be printed, so the quartos being digitized in this project are originally "foul" copies: working drafts written down from people's memories after performances and published as "paperbacks".
The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is coordinating the Shakespeare initiative, with partners including the University of Maryland, which will provide the technology and platform for people to conduct research, including analysis and comparisons, of the quartos. Another partner is the Shakespeare Institute, whose teachers, students and scholars will provide feedback and guidance on the prototype. Also involved are the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, Oxford University, and high-school teachers in the Washington, DC area.
Publishers do not appear to be part of this initiative, so it will be interesting to see what role they take, if any.

Events at The Women's Library

Via a friend and colleague, I today learnt about The Women's Library in London, "a cultural centre housing the most extensive collection of women's history in the UK. Access is free and open to everyone". She told me about a literature course, which sadly owing to other commitments I cannot attend, called Significant sisters: key fiction, key themes. The course, on Saturday 29th March and Saturday 12 April, introduces "key women writers exploring women's roles in earlier periods, this two-day course will discuss two unforgettable anti-heroines via Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country: a contemporary novel steeped in the nineteenth-century, and a satirical novel from 1913 that feels surprisingly modern. It is led by writer and lecturer, Lynn Knight, author of the biography Clarice Cliff."
The Women's Library also has a well-established book group, "a welcoming and informal place to discuss a wealth of work by women writers. Please feel free to attend occasionally or regularly. Read the book and come to share your thoughts! Sessions £5 including wine, soft drinks & nibbles." Thursday 27 March, 6.45pm: Black Girl/White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates; 24 April: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley ; 29 May, Beloved by Toni Morrison; and 26 June, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Do take a look at The Women's Library website for lots more events and services.

Goodbye to Good Library Blog

Link: The Good Library Blog: How to be a public servant.

Tim Coates, prime-minister-in-waiting of Britain, has hung up his hat. He writes:

"I started out by observing that just as we have come to expect that very little of the money we pay to charities arrives with the recipient we intend we have now to realise that the public services in our country work in much the same way. They are more about employing people than being any help; and they are about seeking ways of obtaining even more money from the public while giving little in return. Those things are not right. I am not stopping my attempt to revive the UK public library service-- I'm just going to climb the mountain again from a different side. (or bomb it from a different direction)"

Philistines of Croydon

Tim Coates, Britain's Prime Minister in waiting, will not be surprised to know of this story. My stepdaughter has finished her degree and after a well-earned (self-funded) holiday in Thailand, this week moved to London to look for a job. She's living in a friend's flat in Croydon and will be temping while she applies for next year's round of graduate schemes in her chosen profession. In order to carry out her research for this process, she would like to join her local library. But she can't get a library card. While she was a student, her official address was ours, because she moved so often that it was safer for her mail to come to our house and for us to redirect it. Hence, she can join Kingston upon Thames library, but that is not near where she now lives. Similarly, she can join the nearest library to Hay on Wye, where her mother lives -- but that isn't a stop on the Northern line. If she were to have utility or local tax bills at her current abode, she could get a library card. But she's only staying there temporarily until she gains employment and can buy or rent her own place. So she's stuck.

No wonder the library system is running down and out of users, when it is made so difficult for anyone to join. I would gladly pay the Croydon library a security deposit to the amount they think reasonable in order for Eleanor to have a library card. But their system does not work like that. It is hard enough for young people to live independently and to gain employment these days. Why on Earth are things made needlessly more difficult for them by the very organisations that exist to promote learning and literature, and that should be one of the beacons of any civilised society?

Are there any other views on Public Libraries?

Link: info NeoGnostic: Are there any other views on Public Libraries?.

From Chris Armstrong's post: "Most readers of iNG will be aware of concerns voiced here in the past about what is happening (or not) to public libraries in the UK. Those same readers cannot fail to be aware of the continuing onslaught from Tim Coates in The Good Library Blog on any body which has any responsibility for public libraries: from CILIP to MLA; from Demos to the (now closing) Laser Foundation.

Now, we have Richard Wallis of library systems producer, Talis weighing in with a reasoned analysis of the state of play so far." [links provided in iNG blog post linked above.]

Chris concludes: "Talis are very committed to libraries (obviously!)... I wonder if that extends to hosting a forum of the great and the good - professional bodies, government, MLA, and the concerned - to work out a way forward that will benefit the public and their libraries?" Good question.

Inter-library loan, new style

The National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information and MyiLibrary, the e-book aggregator owned by Ingram Digital Group, have formed a partnership to launch a new service called eBook Loans. The service provides an interlibrary loans model for academic e-books, and includes electronic books from scholarly publishers including Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Blackwell and Springer.

According to the various press releases, each e-book loan will cost US$25, payable online using a credit card. Users will be given 30 days access to an e-book through a URL received in an e-mail immediately after paying. After 30 days this link expires automatically. Hence libraries will reduce their loan administration and costs of physical couriers.  Publishers should also benefit from this new source of revenue, while users will gain instant access to books that they need. Given the e-format, I think the service would be more useful if it were for academic articles rather than entire books, but if your research involves reading sections of books rather than the whole thing, and your institutional librarian has a credit card or will refund your own for this purpose, not too bad.

Email Britain campaign

Can you believe this? Without any apparent irony, The British Library has started a campaign to collect people's emails for a digital archive. The ‘Email Britain' campaign, which will run throughout May, asks the British public to make email history by forwarding a memorable or significant email from their sent mail or inbox, for inclusion in a digital archive that will be stored at the British Library for future generations.

From the BL website: "Email has become the most important communication tool for the 21st century with millions of emails containing rich and diverse content sent in the UK every day* – none of which have been captured and archived on this scale before. The Email Britain collection of real-life emails will provide an important snapshot of British life over email – the good, the bad, the ugly and the amusing – to produce a unique social history catalogue of life and culture in Britain today which can be read and enjoyed by Library visitors for centuries to come."

"To contribute to the Email Britain archive, emailers should go to this link or email directly. Emails should be submitted under one of the following categories in the subject box of the email: Blunders, Life Changing Emails, Complaints, Spam, Love and Romance, Humour, Everyday Emails, News, World Around You, Tales from Abroad."

I think I will spare them my emails, in particular my Spam.

Love books, love libraries

From an email I received today:  "Love Libraries is inviting you to get involved in shaping and planning the future of public libraries. As a valued Love Library Champion, we would love to hear your thoughts on the services that are most important to you, and how libraries could be improved to meet your needs and expectations."

I don't know what Tim Coates will make of this, but I did the survey, which took less than a minute: said that books are important; libraries should be open for longer hours; and suggested a single library card for any borough or town. If you want to do your bit for books, here is the link to the survey, which is open until 31 May.

"Your response will form part of a consultation, led by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) on the future role of the modern public library. The results will be available later in the year on the Love Libraries website."

Library of Congress blog

The Library of Congress has just celebrated its 207th birthday with its first-ever public blog. The Library of Congress has long been a pioneer and leading provider of online content, with a website that makes 22 million digital items available at the click of a mouse and receives 5 billion hits per year. The LOC's blogger is Matt Raymond, director of communications. He's already picked up on the Dilbert pointy-headed boss's blog, which has been making me smile for the past few days. There is lots of serious stuff there too, I write hastily.

Tim Coates calls a spade a spade

Link: Publishing News - News Home Page - Batt to stand down at MLA.

" CHRIS BATT IS to stand down from his post as Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council at the end of this year. Batt took up the post in December 2003, overseeing library reforms such as the 'Framework for the Future' document outlining long-term strategy for the service.......... One of Batt's most vocal critics, library campaigner Tim Coates, has said the vacancy now creates a great opportunity for the service. “It is a chance to put things right and take a different and better path which addresses what the public wants. Batt led the move to reduce the number of books in libraries and, along with an expected reshuffle by Gordon Brown later this year, it could mean a clean slate and a much needed fresh approach.”  "

As regular readers know, Petrona's longstanding advice to Tony Blair, when he decides to quit,  is to hand the country over to Tim Coates, and not to Gordon Brown or anyone else. But if for some unknown reason he doesn't take up that sensible suggestion, this latest news might put another idea into his head. 

On the purpose of public libraries

In a post On the Purpose of Public Libraries, Annoyed Librarian vents her spleen at a "typically excited" attempt to attract teenagers into a local library via provision of video games. So should libraries try any attempt to get people in through the door by any means (even to the extent of providing strippers, as one droll commenter suggests), in the "strange assumption" that they'll stick around to read, and to be informed and educated, as is the core mission of a library? As Annoyed states:

It seems to me that public libraries no longer have any coherent and compelling mission. They just want to get more people to use them somehow, anyhow. They just want to be all things to all people. Of course it can't be done, and what might happen is that they fail to do even what they could do well. The goal is just to get bums on seats, and if the libraries are filled to capacity with gaming teens or whomever, then that sad goal will have been accomplished. The new mission of public libraries: bums on seats, luv! It certainly makes me proud to be a librarian.

There is, inevitably, a healthy discussion in the comments in the attempt to find a modern library mission statement. One can read plenty of news about various depressing initiatives in the UK -- turning libraries into "ideas centres" and so on -- at the excellent Tim Coates' (future Prime Minister of the UK) Good Library Blog. Tim's blog is replete with sensible plans for how to run a library service, largely and tragically being ignored as far as I can tell.

Librarians' life on Earth

Dave Lull sent me a link to a YouTube posting, so because it was from Dave I went nervously to check it out even though I usually steer well clear of this teenager (in my mind) zone. The video Dave refers to is called March of the Librarians . When I realised it featured the Seattle 2007 librarians' convention, I steeled myself and turned on the volume to hear the commentary, as I was convinced Dave was going to be in it, and I didn't want to miss him if so. Unfortunately, despite plenty of bearded characters, he was not singled out, so I don't know if any of them was him. My curiosity unsatisfied, I switched my volume back to silent, and can only hope that, if he was there, he did not fall victim to a "vendor". If you are more interested in what librarians, rather than penguins, get up to in their natural habitat, then check out the video. I can promise that it is all very soothing.

A blog is born

Announcing the birth of a new blog: Reference@ Duluth. This is a very special blog, because although it is not actually Dave Lull's blog, it is run by colleagues of his  as representatives of the References and Services division of the Duluth (Minnesota) library -- so I am wondering how much longer Dave's blogospheric activities will be limited to being a "delightful cross pollinator" and owner of a tribute blog.

So far, the categories are Duluth history (rather an alarming proportion of lynchings);  "notable Duluthians" (so far only one but a nice one); and resources (the genealogical meta-database Ancestry). Rock on, Duluth librarians.

A footnote: I know from experience at work that it is hard to make a link out of a string with an "@" sign, because the string wants to turn into an email address. So maybe its name will change to ReferenceATDuluth -- as I wish could happen to websites like [email protected] and so on. (See, it has tried to turn itself into an email address!) What I did to make the link to Reference@Duluth is to make the link without the @ and add the @ in later. Any better ideas?

More about private libraries

The other day I wrote a post which included, in passing, mention of a private library. Not having heard of one before, I looked into it some more and found the Association of Independent Libraries, founded in 1989. From the organisation's website:

"The largest and best-known member library is the London Library, which houses one million books and serves over 8,000 members just two minutes from Piccadilly Circus. The smallest is the Tavistock Subscription Library which houses just 1500 books in a restored portion of a tenth and eleventh-century abbey building. The oldest is Chetham's Library, founded in 1653 for the benefit of the people of Manchester.

Together, the Association's members possess over two million books and have many listed buildings in their care. Many also possess charitable status. They combine the preservation of their historic collections and beautiful buildings with the supply of the latest books and periodicals, a personal service to their members and research facilities for non-members."

Here is the association's directory page, listing all 28 member libraries, which seem to be all over the UK. There are also links to publications and to information about news and events.

In one of those many strange coincidences of interconnectednesses that I keep coming across, the editorial in the Times books supplement this Saturday was about these "subscription libraries", as Erica Wagner calls them. She is a member of the London library, paying  £195 a year for the privilege.  A far better deal than gym membership, says Wagner. 

Library legacy at This Space

I have just read an inspiring post about the power of reading, over at This Space blog. Dave Lull sent me the link (thank you, Dave), but I would have got there eventually myself as I have recently added this blog to my blogroll, and hence Bloglines subscriptions.

If you want to know why public libraries are a good thing, please read Steve's (This Space) post. Here is a part of it:

"This is why I am so bitter about people who blithely refer to "elitist"literature and tell us that we should all read trash because that's really what we want to read isn't it and to deny otherwise is pretentious. Rather than appealing to democratic accessibility, this smacks of the elitism it claims to resist. It was my good fortune that Portsmouth library chiefs stocked books by writers these inverted snobs refuse to read, discuss and learn from for fear of opening minds and actually changing anything. But it wasn't only my good fortune."

How true. If you haven't been there before, I also recommend a visit to Tim Coates' Good Library Blog. It is depressing reading -- a kind of catalogue of cutbacks -- but Tim is vigorously campaigning on behalf of books and readers in the UK in the face of a depressing mountain of smug red tape and jobsworths. Well done to him. (He will be the next Prime Minister, incidentally -- or should be.)

Redefining public libraries

A "guest contributor" in today's Times, Helen Rumbelow, writes that public lending libraries have had their day. She states of libraries:

"With each passing year they decline: in the past decade, book-borrowing has dropped by 40 per cent while the cost of the service — now at £1.3 billion — has risen by the same proportion. But the response to this failure is always a new bout of hand-wringing, a new set of celebrities pleading for the public to return. This is because to be anti-library is thought to be anti-book, literacy and all nice, decent British virtues that come with being shushed by a lady in a cardigan. Well, I am daring to report that books are booming in Britain, with sales up by 3 per cent a year since 2001. If you want the truth, it is that books have killed libraries."

She goes on to opine that because books are so cheap to buy online, and information so easy to research and find on the internet, that there is no need of libraries.

"To judge from the scene I witnessed at the Idea Store — and the statistics back this up — books are decreasingly the draw. This flagship centre (they don’t call it a library for fear of putting people off) has escalators delivering people from the street straight into the brightly coloured halls. I stopped by the toy-filled play area, went up in the groovy lift to peruse the massage and dance classes, and had a cup of tea with a fantastic view of London through jewel-hued glass. The place looks great and it is thriving, except for those poor neglected shelves.

"At the Idea Store I had a radical idea. Let us admit that people can buy their own books if they want to. The one exception to this is children — libraries are vital for encouraging reading and literary tastes. Children’s libraries should be lavished with funding but could be located in the kind of places where they go anyway, such as play centres or after-school clubs — all the better for helping with homework. For everyone else, we should completely redefine what we want.

"If the Government decides to compete with £1-an-hour internet cafés, fine. If it wants to provide shelter on a rainy day, somewhere for those at a loose end to sit and read the newspapers, good. The book stock could then be centralised and if you wanted one you could order over the counter or online, to be picked up or delivered to your home in 24 hours, just like at the best independent bookshops.

"Don’t think of it as the end of libraries, just the start of millions of personal ones. The library is dead, long live the library."

I wonder what Tim Coates will make of this point of view? Certainly he would agree with the idea of internet-powered economies of scale, such as central ordering. But the dream of a public reading place, stacked with books, pleasant to sit in (to do your homework or read quietly if there is no peace where you live -- or no internet connection) is a hard dream to forgo. But is it a hopelessly unrealistic, outmoded concept, as Helen Rumbelow suggests?

Join in the library debate

There's a heated debate about public libraries over at Books, Inq, starting out with a post by Frank Wilson that links to Tim Coates' mission statement for UK libraries (you can trace the links via the Books, Inq. post).

Go and have a look, and please comment -- Frank has called for non-US readers to comment as most of the ding-dong is from within the US. Minx has done so -- good comment, Minx. Susan Balee is the voice of wisdom and reason, as ever.

Libraries on the web

The Good Library Blog now has a podcast to explain some of the entries. I don't have volume on my computer, but I would bet that Mrs Ginger Biscuit and Lord Cream Cake are worth a listen.

Public libraries using Web 2.0 technologies are highlighted on Information Wants to be Free. Meredith says, "I know there are a lot of libraries that are doing really exciting things with social software and other technologies and deserve a lot more notice. So which public libraries in the United States do you think are doing the best things with Web 2.0 technologies and why? " Meredith mentions half a dozen or so that she knows, and asks for more. You can bet there won't be many, if any, from Europe - a suspicion borne out so far by the comments to the post.

More about SixApart's Vox -- a blog with a book library -- on Science Library Pad. (SixApart is owner of Typepad, this blogging platform.) As well as providing a very useful overview of Vox, Richard has been posting interesting articles about the Long Tail and Chris Anderson's book of that name, which he's reviewed for the journal Nature. Some of these posts are featured on Librarian's Place, so please go there or to Science Library Pad to read them. Science Library Pad always features interesting articles on technology in science publishing or libraries, for example how university presses might benefit from collaboration with academic bloggers, and the controversial (but could be true) argument that the semantic web dream will never work for two reasons: people lie; and people are lazy (links provided for further explanation!)

News from Maxine's blogs

Fred Kilgour, the founder of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has died. At Librarian's Place is a link to a fascinating obituary of Kilgour, from the OCLC blog "It's all good".

Librarian's place now features quite a few articles on Wikipedia, from various perspectives. They are all collected together at this link. Is this giant online, free encyclopaedia the world's hub of collective knowledge, instantly updated and epitomising the "wisdom of the crowds"? Or fickle and unreliable, no match for academic reference sources?

Web Writer links to an authors' challenge from Paperback Writer: post an e-book and she will link to it from her excellent blog. (The PBW post also outlines the author's experience with e-book publishing.)

The sadness of books and libraries

A few interesting posts on various book-related blogs.

John Baker discusses a course one of his colleagues is offering on the saddest books ever. I've only read one on the list (the Graham Greene), and as John points out, it contains only books written originally in English, which cuts out quite a few contenders. Well, the atmosphere in our house when we all finished Harry Potter 5 was "black" for days and days. Even more so when we finished HP6. Not "sad" books by the definition here, perhaps, but very powerful ones. I found "Cold Mountain" a very sad book. I have cried at many a book in my life, but I don't think "End of the Affair" (the Greene in the list) had that effect. Of Greene's books, I love "The Human Factor", which I remember sobbing over.

The Good Library Blog has been on a roll, with a run of truly excellent posts (I weep on reading them, for other reasons than them being sad literature). First, how to manage a library service, as done in Bloggington-on-Sea and, in a sane world, would be used as a template for the library service throughout the UK. Second, can we please have books and proper opening hours, not rock bands, in libraries?  Third, an opinion I am so relieved to read as I have always agreed secretly, the Dewey decimal system should be abolished! Please can libraries use an indexing system that users can understand and has some relation to how the rest of the world works? The DD system might have worked fine in the card-index era, but surely we have moved on?  Fourth, in an very un-English like initiative, a library has risen from the ashes. Others can take encouragement from the example of Bradwell. Even more radical, why bother with library fines?

Will someone please give Mr Coates a medal? Although he has to deal with the likes of Mrs Dumpling, I know who my money is on to sort out the UK's mismanaged library system. And when Mr Coates has sorted out the libraries, I hope he'll stand for prime minister (any party is fine by me so long as it isn't the nationalists or whatever they call themselves these days).

Dave Lull links update

Dave Lull has, as ever, been sending me a cornucopia of links and articles -- nice to spend a bit of time on a Sunday reading some of them.

I printed out "Scan this Book" , by Kevin Kelly, (it is long) and read it earlier in the week -- it is a great article about the future of books, and has been chewed over analysed on blogs already. If you haven't read it, I do recommend it as it is a really sensible, well written and coherent piece. What one of my colleagues calls "a good train read" (us people who work in London and have families to support having, by and large, to live some way away from our places of employment). I believe the article is free access but if the link goes to a subscription wall, please leave a comment and I will email it to you.

On the navel-gazing front are two (blog, natch) articles by David Sifry, the guy who runs the dreaded Technorati, on the "State of the blogosphere". The first of these, "On blogosphere growth" has a graph of the number of blogs against time, demonstrating that the blogosphere has grown 60 times in the past 3 years. Yesterday I commented that "most" blogs have a very short life: the figures in this article are that 55 per cent of blogs are still going after 3 months (that's 19.4 million of them), but only 3.9 million blogs are updated at least weekly. Scarily, about 9 per cent of new blogs are spam. The second article, "On language and tagging", breaks down blogs by language (80 per cent are in English, Japanese or Chinese, with Japanese the largest "language of the blogosphere"). Half of all blog posts have tags (categories), hooray! There are tons of comments to both these postings, so plenty of opinions and insights if you have the time to read them all.

While on the subject of tagging, Dave has also sent me a link to a new blog about Library Thing, a useful site on which you can catalogue your books online. I began using this service a few months ago but as I have so many, many, many books waiting to be read, as well as books that I have read and are "hanging about" the house, I gave up -- the effort was just too great, and I did not think the indexing of the site was good enough to justify the time it would all take. However, Dave's link reveals that Library Thing has now introduced tagging. "Now you can look at a book and see both the user-created tags as well as the librarian-assigned subject headings. This puts us in the middle of the age old debate: tags or subject headings? Folksonomies or taxonomies? Ok, maybe the question isn’t quite that old, but it’s certainly debated. Subject analysis is a fuzzy discipline - decisions on "aboutness" are hard. But is it necessarily a question of one over the other? Can they work together at all?" If this strikes any kind of chord with you, the Library Thing-ology (geddit?) blog will explain it all, and more.

Who is using their blog to build a brand? This article in the New York Times gives a case-study of The Huffington Post, one of the most viewed blogs in the world (of the order of 2 million visitors a month), as an example of how to achieve brand-recognition via blogging. (Again, let me know via the comments if you want an emailed version of the article or any other article linked to in this post, if the link no longer works -- they are all OK as of this moment but these articles can pop behind subscription walls in a blink of the eye.)

Moving on to the "real" stuff of content, Dave has sent me an article about "books that triggered writers' wanderlust." Nobody is going to trigger my wanderlust as I don't have any; one of the pleasures of reading books whose authors have the gift of vividly conveying a locale is that one then does not have to go there ;-) However, the article is an entertaining list of various books and the places described in them that made one reader want to visit.

Finally, of Dave's links, is an article from Guardian Unlimited "Rowling and Rushdie speak out for libraries", which describes how 150 authors, including the aforementioned headliner pair, have "pledged to help galvanise support for public libraries and combat their growing image problem" (what a mouthful!). To cut to the chase, these authors are all going to speak at libraries to say how these institutions contribute to public life. "The Love Libraries campaign kicked off in March this year with a project to transform libraries in Newquay, Gravesend and Richmond into models of a possible 21st-century reading service."

Once again, thank you to Dave Lull for sending me the links to all these articles. Dave truly makes the Internet a more human place.

Libraries and social software

Fantastic posting on Information Wants to Be Free called Libraries in Social Networking Software. Meredith Farkas writes a thoughtful analysis of the libraries' place in social software like MySpace and Facebook. "I wish playing with social software and thinking about how to use it in libraries could be my full-time job. But at the same time, I’m really pragmatic about technology implementation in libraries. I hate the idea of implementing new things at libraries because they’re “cool” and not to serve a specific purpose. So I often question why librarians are doing the things they do with social software."

Meredith's point is that young (16-25) library users overwhelmingly use these social networking sites, so libraries need to work with this. Most libraries that are using these sites don't use them effectively; those that do need to solicit feedback from students and create a portal within the software (MySpace or whatever). Most library sites don't encourage feedback, apparently.

Meredith's post is an extremely accessible account of how libraries can use these social software tools effectively. By accessible, I mean that I, who am neither a librarian nor a very technologically literate person, could easily see what she is getting at. At the end of the piece is a wonderful set of resources (links), and (so far) 25 comments (including a few bringing in Flickr, which I have noticed features many pictures of bookmobiles and the like). My main reaction to all of it is "oh, how American". I just wonder how many libraries in the UK have heard of social software and/or are doing anything with it? The idea of my local library doing anything more than providing a basic Internet connection at a few ropey old terminals in half-hour time slots is impossible to contemplate. Maybe academic libraries in the UK are better. But somehow I doubt it, I suspect that the vast majority still see themselves as passive providers of information, rather than as the kind of socially inclusive organisation described by Meredith and her fellow librarians.

Libraries missing in action

The excellent Tim Coates is continuing his informed invective about the UK library system.

His weblog is well worth a visit. Read about Bloggington-on-Sea from the perspective of some pesky Italians of 2000 years ago.

Organisations that could have helped the library services, but seemed to do nothing except draw salaries for their staffs, are being closed down. Will Ken save the day? Unlikely in my view, if not an opinion shared by some people in Bloggington-on-Sea.

Here is an informative take, from the library perspective, on the recent local elections in the UK.

(If you do not know who Ken is, here is an explanation.)

Long live Mr Coates, who obviously ought to be running not just the UK's libraries, but the world's.

Books kept by most libraries

The Online Computing Library Center (OCLC) has updated for 2005 its list of the "top 1000" titles owned by its member libraries. (Dave Lull sent me the link.) According to OCLC's website, these are the "intellectual works that have been judged worth owning by the 'purchase vote' of libraries around the globe."

The top 10, in order, are: The Bible, the US Census, Mother Goose, The Divine Comedy, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Lord of the Rings (trilogy), Hamlet and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

I find this mixture a somewhat eclectic mix, so thought I'd note the next 10: Don Quixote, Beowulf, the Koran, The Night Before Christmas, Garfield at Large, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Macbeth, Gulliver's Travels.

Of the books in the top 20, the Bible, the Koran, both Twains, the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote were once banned. It is a relief to know that Garfield never suffered this fate.

The ranking in the list is determined by how many libraries own the title in question. I don't know if multiple titles at one libraray are counted, or if there is any weighting for the number of times a title is borrowed. But the list seems to be created from more than 53,000 libraries in 96 countries. Here's a link to some more information about OCLC and how it works.

Dave Lull has also provided a link to some "fun facts" about the list. Here's a couple of sample entries:

What is the highest-ranking work written by a woman?
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, ranks 28 on the list. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, is ranked 30, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ranks 32

Who is the top monster?
Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Ranking 43, he beat both Count Dracula (75) and Edward Hyde (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ranked 141). This year the vampire, Lestat, ranked 927 on the OCLC Top 1000 list, but Shrek didn't make the list.

There is also a brief comparison of duplicate titles on the OCLC list with various others.

Thanks, Dave, I enjoyed the rather crazy experience of looking round the OCLC site.

Jenny D said...

I wonder, though, how much all of these books are read as opposed to purchased/check-out-able--the one that particularly prompts me to ask this is "Gulliver's Travels," which is a special favorite of mine but which I find absolutely none of my undergraduate students have read....

7:06 AM

Dave Lull said...

To get an idea, for U.S. libraries at least, of what's actually being borrowed, see the Library Journal's Most Borrowed Books list

12:24 PM

Dave Lull said...

Since I last checked, Library Journal itself has made it's lists available for free here with a breakdown by various categories:

"Library Journal’s Best Sellers is compiled from data on books borrowed and requested (placed on hold) at public libraries throughout the United States. It includes statistics from urban, suburban, and rural libraries."

1:07 PM

Dave Lull said...

Oops. That should be "its lists." I need more caffeine, to offset my loss of an hour of sleep to my region's move to "daylight saving time," which as Bill Kauffman points out is "that puzzling ritual of mass clock-winding ill befitting freeborn Americans."

1:17 PM

Maxine said...

Thank you, Jenny D and Dave. Do we assume that borrowed books are also read? ;-) I will certainly check the "most borrowed" link -- I posted recently on a similar list for the UK, which was not in the least erudite.

I must add its/it's to the that/which, commas and hyphens debates that roll around and around;-)

Know what you mean about the daylight saving time, Dave, we've swapped over too (a week or two before the US, which renders inter-office communication particularly tortouous). Amazing how hard it is to adapt to this one little hour difference, remembering all the darn clocks (and remembering not to change those clever enough to know to change for themselves).

Definitely, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, a "three cup problem".

5:22 PM

Maxine said...

And I see my fingers stumbled on "torturous".

5:23 PM

Giles G-B said...

I'm a bit late to the commenting here, I expect, but thought I'd give you my two cents worth anyway. Which is:

"hmmm"

To elaborate:

"I think the extreme divergence between the top 10 books held, and the top 10 borrowed (in the US anyway, as per the list supplied by Dave) strongly suggests libraries hold what it is thought right and proper to have on the shelves. I consider myself to be a fairly well-read individual, and I have actually read (cover to cover) just 4 of those 10 (and that includes the LOTR 3)."

I wish I could fix this.

2:38 PM

Maxine said...

I can confirm you are a better-read individual than me, Giles G-B. However, no disgrace in not having read Garfield ;-)

8:53 PM

Crime overtakes romance

In the spirit of my previous posting, I have not looked at all my rss feeds, so this may be old hat, and I hope that there is a more detailed analysis out there somewhere. But I read in today's Times that "romance loses allure after book lovers turn to crime". Or, as the standfirst puts it, "thrillers have beaten bodice rippers as library favourites but a children's writer reigns supreme".

The story is that Jacqueline Wilson is the most borrowed author in British libraries, followed by Josephine Cox (romance?), Danielle Steele (ditto), James Patterson (crime), Mick Inkpen (children), Janet and Allan Ahlberg (ditto), John Grisham(legal thriller), Ian Rankin (crime), Roald Dahl (children) and Bernard Cornwell (historical fiction). (Categories by me). The absence of JK Rowling is explained by the article as being becuase she has not written enough books (she's 74th apparently) - "Authors who do best in libraries have long backlists". I also think that the absence of JKR has something to do with the fact that her books sell so phenomenally well: people tend to own them rather than borrow them (especially as they are always so heavily discounted and there is a lot of cachet in reading them the instant they are published).

The top 10 "adult fiction" individual titles borrowed are by (from the top): Patricia Cornwell, Josephine Cox, John Grisham, Joanna Trollope, P J Tracy, Maeve Binchy, James Patterson (2), Ian Rankin, Kathy Reichs. I make that 7 crime/thrillers, 3 romantic (have not read any Cox so am not sure, but the title of her book is "Lovers and Liars", say no more). Not sure if it is fair to characterise Trollope as "romantic" but I can't think of a category for her, other than that she's probably more "mainstream" than "genre" fiction.

Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs write "gruesome": books about forensic types who cut up bodies and are unfeasibly businesslike about it. Cornwell has definitely suffered badly from what Mapletree7 calls "BAD" (big author disease), and has failed to "sustain her series". Reichs I think does maintain her level, but I gave up on her books after the first three or so as I found them leaden. Patterson has crashed so much in quality that I am surprised anyone reads him now, his books are cardboard cut-outs these days (usually co-authored). I read Tracy's first two books but won't read any more, the basic premise of Monkeewrench seemed unrealistic and the character of Grace I found tiersome. Again, this author (actually a mother and daughter duo I believe) likes to be gruesome. That leaves Binchy, Trollope, Rankin and Grisham, all authors of many books which I continue to read (slightly less eagerly in the case of the former two. I have not been tempted by Binchy's latest based on the reviews, although I've enjoyed some of her previous books). Trollope is a funny author, I usually keep her latest on my pile of books to read for ages, somehow reluctant to start, but once I do I usually enjoy her. The last one of hers I read was about a women who worked in an art gallery in Florida (or somewhere); I remember very little about it apart from enjoying it, although I do recall that the ending was very contrived. The one before that was about a very long marriage having broken up, that was good. Rankin and Grisham I do enjoy, I like Rankin's character of Rebus and the secondary characters (the policeman who quit after a few of the early books and Siobhan Clarke in the later books). The plots are always interesting if over-convoluted, and the hard man Scottish ambience fun to read about vicariously. Bit cliched maybe, but a good read. Grisham has gone through over-stodgy patches in my opinion (the American disease, don't write a 250-page novel when a 600 page-one will do). As I mentioned on an earlier post, I did like his latest book, more for his lyrical and probably unrealistic account of the Italian small-town life than for the sketch of a plot. Which leaves the unread Cox. (She will stay in that category from having seen some of her book jackets featured in varoius book club magazines).

Who would be the "adult fiction" authors in my own "most borrowed" list? For crime/thriller, I would say Harlan Coben and Michael Connelly are "big" authors who are far, far better than Reichs and Cornwell in terms of plots, paciness and -- well, everything. Robert Crais, too, is a good mixture of plot, action and character-study. If you want pathologist-sleuths, Karin Slaughter or Tess Gerriston are far better than Cornwell/Reichs. My all-time favourite legal thriller is Philip Margolian, with Richard North Patterson a close second. Like Grisham, Margolian is strong on social and political comment, and writes readable, racy and unpretentious stories. RNP is also an absorbing read, but his books are far more campaigning, sometimes reading like a tract for the liberal (in the US sense) agenda, but that's fine, I enjoy them.

My elder daughter is very keen on Jodi Picoult, who seems to write "moral ethical dilemma" books, eg what it is like to be born to provide bone marrow for an elder sibling who needs transplants. My younger daughter does like Jacqui Wilson (as did Cathy when younger), although JW is not Jenny's absolute favourite. JW writes about subjects such as drug-addict mother, or baby abandoned in dustbin, or girl whose best friend is killed by a car, or girl whose best friend moves away, or children whose parents break up, who are fat, live in B&B accommodation, in children's homes, have multi-fathers or tattooed mothers, etc -- from the child's perception. She seems to be able to get under the skin of these young people who live challenging or tragic lives, without being judgemental or trying to make moralising points, but without glamourising either.

Of course, Harry Potter has to be my all-time favourite, though, as he is my daughters'. HP mixes so may genres, but crime thriller is definitely a strong element.

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