Almost Time - Cow Creek Book Festival 3/31

It's almost here!  This Saturday, March 31st is the inaugural Cow Creek Book Festival.  Our special guest, Clare Vanderpool will present at 10:30 am in the library auditorium.  This is a great opportunity to hear from a local (Wichita-based) Newbery Award-winning author about the craft of writing!

Also, there will be a number of other really wonderful local and regional authors speaking throughout the day.  Weather permitting, the big tent out in the lot at 10th Avenue and Main Street will house all the fun and festivities!  If the weather is bad or it is too muddy, all activities will move in to the library.

Authors will have books for sale and there will beopportunities for author autographs as well as talking about writing, getting published, etc. will abound.  Please stop by and enjoy!

et tu, Random House?

Random house has announced new ebook pricing for libraries.  I think it's called gouging.  Here's a definition, so let's see if the situation fits:

Price gouging is a pejorative term referring to a situation in which a seller prices goods or commodities much higher than is considered reasonable or fair.

An example given from the March 12, 2012 issue of Library Hotline stated that a purchase of Jean Edward Smith's Eisenhower in War and Peace was made for $40 on February 29th.   On March 1st, that price had tripled to $120.

A Random House spokesperson stated that they felt the pricing was fair considering ebooks don't "wear out" and that new titles are made available to libraries at the same time they are released to consumers.  The question in my mind is, "When were we (librarians) asked about these criteria?"

The answer is that there was no attempt (with which I am familiar) to sit down with librarians and talk through a different model.  We are reasonable people.  We can help publishers and authors.  We help grow readers who in turn become book buyers.  We will, at least at lil' ol' Hutchinson Public Library, agree to a reasonable scheme for maximum number of ebook checkouts per copy before we purchase new copies.

The alternative is to set up our own system for circulating ebooks and negotiating our own contracts with willing publishers and the authors of the MILLIONS of ebooks published outside of the traditional publishing industry.  That seems like a great ecosystem in which public libraries might play the role of publisher as well as outlet for budding authors, local historians, and others who have a story to tell and no way to tell it through the traditional publishing process.  The time for temerity is now - no "best" way has appeared for libraries regarding ebooks.  In order to survive, we must blaze our own trail.

Accessible Broadband...for real

There has been a lot of talk about access to broadband Internet connections in rural areas here in Kansas.  Mainly because virtually all of Kansas IS a rural area.  The farther west you go from the Kansas City-Topeka corner, the less likely you are to find any ability to connect to a true "high-speed" Internet connection unless you live in the limits of some reasonably sized town.

Now, we can argue until we're blue in the face about why and about who is responsible, but the bottom line remains that the Internet is to modern life what the rail system was to 1890's life.  That is, if the railroad didn't come through your town, your town died.  Plain and simple.  The Internet functions the same way.  Business and opportunity in the information age follow the bandwidth.

I just finished reading this article.  It presents a solution to the very problem outlined above.  It likens the Internet to the system of roadways for which government is usually responsible.  Why not treat the Internet the same way we treat roads?  For institutional customers like us, a public library, this makes especially good sense.  For attracting business to a state like Kansas that struggles at times to compete with neighboring states, the appeal of access to exponentially greater bandwidth might entice people to move here.  After all, in a world that includes easy access to fast Internet, you can live just about anywhere, right?

So it's not just libraries?

Apparently, Penguin is out to alienate ALL of its customers.  I was just reading about the latest shenanigans involving Kindle versions of ebooks through OverDrive in this news brief from TechDirt.  For some strange reason, they are forcing Kindle users to borrow books only through USB connection, not wirelessly.  I'm not sure what this is supposed to accomplish, other than acting as an irritant.  Perhaps it is just another bump in the long, slow decline of major publishing houses.  They seem to be taking the path of the music industry giants by trying to throw up higher and higher hurdles for people to get access to their products.  I think this is a poor strategy since self-published titles rose from 29,000 in 2004 to 2.7 MILLION in 2010.  The savvy author doesn't need a huge publishing company to get a book out there anymore.

I cannot stress this enough - libraries have a great opportunity here.  This is no time to panic, this is the time to act, and act decisively.  Libraries have the rare opportunity to be the SOLE middle-man in the author-to-reader supply chain.  Libraries could directly interact with the authors of many of those 2.7 million titles and publish and help distribute those ebooks if only we set ourselves up to do it.  That means the network and server capacity to circulate and even potentially act for authors and readers as a store-front or a gateway to book sellers.

This article makes me think we might want to add extra precautions opening boxes of paper books from Penguin as well!

Technology Survey

Please help us choose the correct path!  We are at a cross-roads with our laptop check-out program here at HPL.  It is time to replace hardware and we want to make the best purchases we can in order to meet the needs of our patrons.

We have been circulating (in house) laptop computers for about 3 years now and those machines have served their purpose.  What we want to know is what do people really want from this type of service.

The survey HERE is very short, but any comments you can make will help us decide how to make our next batch of circulating electronics purchases.

I am no prophet, but I sure can ramble on...

AUGH!  MY EYES!

For a over a decade, ebooks were something of a curiosity.  They never quite caught on, mainly because the content was far ahead of the delivery device.  No one wanted to sit in front of an old CRT monitor to read a book.

Then LCD monitors became widely available and at least you could read an ebook without destroying your vision.  But still, the ebook wasn't quite ready.  People still did not want to be stuck at a desk to read.  Even lounging with a laptop to read a book was not really that great.

But which one do I buy???

And then a few years back, the ebook reader was born.  A small, lightweight device with enough memory to store a lot of books and a display (e-ink, especially) that was easy on the eyes.  When combined with retail juggernauts like Amazon, who could afford to sell the devices at a loss because they knew they would make it up in content, ebooks have taken off.

So what, right?  Libraries can just buy a big bunch of ebooks and check them out through their own websites or catalogs or what ever.  Were it only that easy.  It didn't turn out that way.  Suddenly, libraries that had been dealing with those little computer files for years found themselves cut out of the market.  Publishers began treating "books" like the music industry and the software industry treat their content - as licensed things rather than purchased copies of things.  Add to that the problem that there are very few companies that cater to the library market when it comes to ebooks.  There are OverDrive, the up-start 3M Cloud, Baker& Taylor's Blio, and a few others, but mostly there are the big publishers with their newly-bared disdain for libraries.  That disdain, long-held (and in my opinion irrationally so) in the form of a "Public Library Loans = Lost Sales" mentality, is a big problem for libraries and ultimately for literacy and the legacy of accumulated knowledge of our culture.

What's a library to do though?  Little old HPL can't muster the monetary resources to change the tide...or can it?  The answer is:  Maybe.  There is a library system in Colorado that is blazing a new trail, the Douglas County Libraries.  They are negotiating their own contracts with publishers - not any of the "Big Six" so far - but many good publishing houses.  They are negotiating to purchase copies of the electronic files that constitute ebooks and making agreements with the publishers to circulate them and protect them from copyright violation just as libraries have done with paper books for centuries.

Maybe we can do this too at HPL.  I honestly believe that this is the path into the future for libraries everywhere and that we MUST do it.  Libraries must retake their position in the world of the "printed" word.  This article from the journal Public Libraries outlines much more clearly than I can what must happen in the very near future.  I think it must happen in many libraries and at all levels.

And in the spirit of rambling, here's an article outlining some reasons why we might NOT want to throw out those darned old paper books.  A new Library of Alexandria in Richmond, California?