If print on demand became widespread, publishers could cut their fixed costs and solve the perennial problem of stores returning unsold books. But that would throw into doubt almost everything else about the way big publishers conduct business, since they’re compensated based on the range of services they provide, from editorial guidance to storage and distribution. Print-on-demand technology would make it harder for the publishers to justify keeping a large majority of a book’s wholesale price.

This statement appeared in a Business Week article about Amazon’s challenge to mainstream publishing and the role of print-on-demand (POD) in that strategy.  While it has the breezy know-it-all tone of the business press, I don’t find their analysis of why big publishers aren’t doing POD to be compelling.  I don’t have the numbers myself, but to make their case, they would have to do something like compare publisher profits to the number of books they remainder or destroy from big print runs.  Otherwise, the story just comes off as what it is: empty, tech-fetishizing cheerleading for Amazon.

In any case, it misses the much larger elephant in the room, focusing only on the production of commodities rather than the production of the means of production of commodities.  In other words, the article focuses solely on the circulation of printed books rather than the extensive process necessary for a printed book to enter circulation - including but not limited to the very large machines that make it possible to sell books at wholesale prices and still make a profit.  I don’t know much about these machines, I admit, but part of what annoys me about the article is that it doesn’t provide any comparison between the productivity of the machines used in POD and that of traditional presses.  Instead it opts for looking at POD as the cure for all that ails mainstream publishing - a cure they are refusing to take because it would threaten their power.  This may be true in some way, but it may also be true that the POD option isn’t economical for mainstream publishing in the first place.

I think it is far more likely that big publishers don’t want to use POD because, on the one hand, the machines they use are likely far more efficient at printing large runs and; on the other hand, they have invested a lot in these machines and the distribution network that makes them profitable.  Big publishers don’t want to make a switch to small batch, POD publishing because they are, by definition, big publishers.  

In general, POD puzzles me.  It enters the debate about the future of publishing in an odd place.  Most people gunning for innovation in book publishing focus their energy on digital only, e-books and other e-reading platforms that will replace the printed codex as the dominant delivery mechanism for long form content.  POD seems to say all that is true, but people will likely continue to want printed books for whatever reason so we should still have a way to print books.  And for small runs or books that have a really small and/or dispersed market, it makes a lot of sense.  For the next Stephen King pulp title, not so much.

I’ve never seen any analysis about publishing that says their biggest overhead is in overprinting, warehousing, and distribution, but if these were the primary problems (or if the current solutions weren’t working) I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be doing more about it.  On the other hand, the article itself opens by noting that Amazon remains pretty invested in the warehousing and distribution of books.  In this sense, POD appears less as a model of efficiency than as one of Amazon’s strategies for distributing “the long tail.”  It is unlikely, for instance, for it to be efficient for Amazon to do POD for big bestsellers that would require huge print runs in a limited amount of time.  

I’m a little fuzzy on the larger scale POD operations mentioned in the article CreateSpace is an Amazon affiliate that will distribute independent authors’ via Kindle or POD print books.  It also aids indie musicians and moviemakers in online distribution via Amazon. Lightning Source specializes in printing small runs of books for small presses, and appears to have some of the enormous presses that likely sit in the warehouses of major publishers.  In each of these cases, the POD is only part of the bargain.  They also help some with marketing (i.e. it appears on Amazon’s webpage), distribution, and in some cases design.  As major publishers would also point out, they don’t offer anything in the way of editorial guidance or real direct marketing to bookstores or libraries, but they are still rather large scale and “full service” as publishing operations.

This is especially true when the article put these in the same category as the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which is the perennial hero of POD stories.  It was launched almost a decade ago, though the actual machine didn’t emerge until 2007, when it was named by Time as one of the best inventions of that year. It’s is now manufactured (and serviced) by Xerox.  They started out at about $50k a pop (according to the Time article above) but now run about $100k. They will produce a book - complete with binding and full cover color - from a digital file in a little under 5 minutes, depending on the size of the book.  Video of the machine in action here.

It’s impressive as a machine, but has taken a long time to catch on.  It had only sold about 30 of the machines by 2009 and it’s parent company at the time, On Demand Books, had hoped to sell another 60 that year, with sales boosted by a partnership with Google’s public domain book search.  According to Rick Anderson, writing last August, there were only 45 machines; other sources claim there are about 70, but the website for the company currently shows it remains under 60.  Anderson claims that the low number of titles available through digital vendors limits its uptake, but he also cites a lot of technical problems they’ve had with the machine at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, where Anderson works.  Alongside static electricity problems that the company worked out when Brigham Young University bought one, he mentions that,

It takes about five minutes to print a 300-page book — as long as the machine is warmed up. If it isn’t, you’ve got to let the glue melt, which will take 45 minutes to an hour. [… .] we had issues with balky and leaking ink jets, malfunctioning sensors, and recalcitrant cover feeds, all of which have been fixed or mostly fixed at this point. And we’re still waiting for a color text-block printer that will communicate effectively with the machine, despite having been offered that option initially. For now we’re still making do with black-and-white (we can print covers in color without any problem) 

Many of these bugs will get worked out to some degree the more people adopt them.  On the other hand, as anyone with access to an office copier can tell you, machines like these often require a lot of maintenance to keep up with the use.   Still, it doesn’t make sense to speak about the EBM in the same breath as industrial size initiatives like Lightning Source.  And it is hard to see either as viable alternatives to the scale of major printing operations of mainstream publishers.  Maybe I’m wrong, but these sound like apples and oranges.  

Certainly for some publications, for instance academic monographs, it makes a good deal of sense if it is also paired with digital distribution.  Adding currently out of print titles would also be a fantastic gift - as the Utah Library found when they were able to print out a 300 year old German manuscript for a faculty member there.  In other words, anything that couldn’t be efficiently printed at scale.  But almost by definition, none of these are the purview of the major houses Business Week claims are challenged by this model.  

While it is just one story, it is of a type in that it looks for disruptive technology as the leading edge of cultural and social change, rather than thinking of it as a part of a total strategy that would make little sense outside of that strategy.  At the same time, it ignores far more significant social and cultural disruptions.  For instance, is it more important that Amazon offers print on demand or that Amazon offers authors a 70% royalty rate for Kindle books?  One could argue that they aren’t all that distinct.  If an author was reticent about signing onto Amazon’s platform for that price - say, for instance, because they also want their book in print - having the print on demand is a nice backup.  If your ultimate goal is to get out of the pulp business altogether - and slash those labor costs for warehousing and shipping - then POD is useful to entice more first time authors to the platform.  On the other hand, if your business is the pulp business, it hardly makes sense to try retrofitting your infrastructure after the fact.

None of this points to the real disruptions that these emergent models suggest: namely,  is there still need for editorial input in the publishing process? And what are the archival and historical consequences of a model like Amazon’s POD taking hold? Both of these are questions with widespread implications, ranging from mainstream publishing that is the subject of this article, to scholarly communication, which is under increasing pressure to be open source.  Having a big stack of print books may be less and less important for bookstores, libraries, and publishers in the future, but this will not eliminate the extensive human input that goes into creating, curating, and preserving content.  

Right now, the argument remains superficially focused on technologies that will likely never catch on completely.  It should be focused on instances where Amazon - or other publishers - help to create alternative institutions that fulfill these more essential functions - functions that often cost a lot more than amortize in the short term and often continue to cost money long afterwards.  The longer we think about this as a decision to be made by clashing industrial titans instead of broad social questions requiring deliberation and concerted action, the less the answer we get will reflect anything approaching a thoughtful solution for the future.

The global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu - these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university - are legion. They live all over the world, but especially in Latin and South America, in China, in Eastern Europe, in Africa and in India. It’s hard to get accurate numbers, but any perusal of the tweets mentioning library.nu or the comments on blog posts about it reveal that the main users of the site are the global middle class

From Christopher Kelty’s excellent overview of what the shutdown of library.nu means.  Of course I think it’s excellent because he mostly repeats the points I made in my post on the closure the day after it happened.  I don’t know if I’d call all of the users middle class, but I guess by global standards anyone with access to a computer and time enough to fiddle around with digital books is fairly affluent.  In any case, the point he makes at the end about the pricing structure is almost identical to that of the MPEE contentions - except that Kelty mistakes the strategy of high pricing as being solely an attempt to limit the market to high income countries.  

I think they’d rather have a global market, but since it is a global digital market no matter what they do, they can’t tier the prices in emerging economies to make these books more accessible there without also making them cheaper for us in the global North.  Since the latter is still the main source of their income, they are in a pinch. This is also why they saw the shutdown of the library as a success - not because the global community of scholars was relying upon it, but because a student down the road at UT might opt for a free textbook rather than the overpriced one in the campus bookstore. 

Still, the comparison with AIDS meds at the end is apt if only because the country at the center of that controversy - South Africa - is also home to a thriving market of contraband textbooks.  As I mentioned in my post, the MPEE report mentions South Africa in this context.  The two are, as Kelty says, very different.  Few people die because they don’t have access to a textbook.  

But they are quite similar in the homology of the relationship between what we might call their autonomous fields and the economic field.  Bourdieu long ago pointed out, in separate places, the way that both the cultural field - things like art, media, and, in this case, scholarly communication - and the scientific field (pdf) - research for things like medicines, technological improvements, and even basic science - are governed by unique sets of local standards that have a particular relationship with the economic field as such.  

To take the Cultural field of production as an example, Bourdieu claimed it was, in effect “the economic world in reverse.”  This had (at least) two meanings for him. On the one hand, he used it to discuss the way a specific kind of capital governed the market for art and culture such that practitioners were seen as more legitimate the further they could distance themselves from a purely economic goal.  In other words, the finest art or culture is that which has the least commercial value - or, more accurately, the least interest in achieving short term economic gain.  This is, importantly, in the context of French culture shortly after the postwar era.  In this context, those who were clearly aiming for some popular commercial audience were seen as philistine golddiggers rather than artists dedicated to the spirit of their craft.  This is a difficult thing to grasp in a US context, where most of our cultural institutions seem to take market success as a sort of democratic tally adding up to quality or at least cultural significance (e.g. every Monday morning we’re treated to news of the weekend’s box office take, the reports hinting at this being an index of true culture.)  But we are also familiar with what this means in precisely that market: when the Monday morning returns are delighted by the size or longevity of a small independent (e.g. “quality”) film’s showing at the box office polls.

In academic publishing - though textbooks are supposed to be a bit more profitable - the general ethos is, as Kelty suggests, geared more towards creating, “a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship.”  For the generation of academic knowledge - be it the highly technical knowledge of science textbooks, or the deeper investigations of human history, society, and meaning in the humanities - we have built, over many long centuries, a set of institutions that are meant to be, for better or worse, somewhat immune from the demands of the state or the market.  Though the supports for this are dwindling and the ideal is quickly slipping away, the central mechanism of this was to provide scholars a stipend of time with which they could do these investigations - investigations which they would effectively provide for free in order to advance the goal of human enlightenment. 

In this way, the cultural field is very similar to the scientific field.  Both are often seen as most legitimate (among the people in the field anyway) when they are not aiming at commercial gain alone.  Scientists are supposed to be rigorous in avoiding conflicts of interest which would nullify their objective investigation of scientific fact.  And, in the case of developing pharmaceuticals, their main goal is supposed to be the curing of human ailments, with the profit generation resulting from this activity secondary.  Therefore, in both cases the ethos of the creators - and of the field of that creation - bears some moral weight in the arguments about how those creations should be distributed.  If scholarly publications or patented medicines are kept out of reach by seemingly arbitrary IPR laws, it seems an affront to the ultimate goals of these fields.

Maximalist critics might say that IPR helps protect not only profits but the sustainability of the enterprise itself, but when Elsevier has a profit margin of 36% and the industry average for Pharma is 19% it’s hard to argue that the prices couldn’t come down a bit without harming the industry - particularly when a good portion of the value of both is produced by publicly funded researchers.  The disconnect, therefore, between the stated values of the field and the monopolistic fashion its wares are distributed creates a clear moral dilemma which the letter of the law alone can do little to mitigate.

 Another sense of the idea of the economic world in reverse, however, shows why so much is at stake for these IPR hungry corporations - and, perhaps, an insight into the kind of investment that is necessary for the creation of valuable human knowledge and culture. Bourdieu was speaking about a different set of market orientations in a particular market - more geared towards the future gains, rather than short term rewards.  The overall arguments of the book are muddled together in my memory, but he presents Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot as a particularly illustrative of the strategy of something like “true culture” publishers.  These publishers, on the one hand, might be seen as closer to the ethos of the field of cultural production - they publish somewhat esoteric, high culture works that may have a small audience today.  But over the long term, they may actually even out: works like Godot have a longer shelf life, and may sell for many years afterwards.  While this could be seen as an early iteration of what we now understand as something like the long tail, it is really an observation about more fundamental cultural conversations.  Godot will likely not go out of print for some time because it remains an important cultural landmark.  

Perhaps best illustrating his argument (and the stakes the publishing industry has in this reversal) is the process one would need to go through to read this essay by Bourdieu in its original, 1983 publication.  If you were not a scholar whose library paid the fee for archival access to the journal Poetics, you would need to shell out about $40, paid to Elsevier, which now owns the rights to the journal.  That’s a hefty chunk of change for a 30 year-old, 40 page academic article - particularly when you consider that it was later collected in Bourdieu’s book on the topic, meaning that, for $18 or so you can pick up the $40 article along with some priced individually at $40, $14, $25 (for one day of viewing on your computer); others apparently unavailable online or only to subscribers of the journal; and several translated for the first time in the book.  It sounds like a tremendous bargain, except if you consider that the prices are really meant to be fear inducing security gates meant to compel not first world customers per se, but first world academic libraries into signing onto “Big Deal” packages, for which the per article value is significantly better. 

Like the small independent publishers that first published Beckett’s play, these journals likely had no intention of ever charging $40 for someone to read this article by Bourdieu.  At the time, publishing the article from a well known sociologist was important for the prestige it gave to the journal in terms of the journal’s place in the field of scholarly argument.  I can’t find a history of, for instance, the journal Poetics, but I would assume Elsevier had little to do with publishing this article initially: they just acquired the rights to its back catalog, just as small independent studios eventually go out of business or are otherwise acquired by larger ones, who then acquire the rights to their back catalog.  This back catalog becomes extra valuable precisely because of this long cultural value for these scholarly arguments.  Acquiring these rights becomes almost like an aristocratic title in the feudal age: with the right lawyers and enough fear, you can create a regular flow of capital from property whose value you’ve done little to create or improve.  The economic world in reverse is reversed to become the economic world per se.

While Elsevier and JSTOR, two of the owners/distributors of articles in this collection, are surely responsible for adding some value to the article after the fact - when Bourdieu’s article from Poetics wend online in 2002, it arguably became more useful as a resource than before (though at $40, it is of limited availability).  They would argue that their work to digitize the article and create infrastructure for its discoverability is a significant improvement, worthy of the hefty fee they are charging for it.  But the same could be said for the infrastructure the volunteers at library.nu helped create for their free works.  It is true that it was not as impressive as that of an Elsevier journal, but it certainly was impressive and functional enough for Elsevier to join with a number of other international publishers to have it shut down.

In effect what we have is a continued market failure in these areas.  Market failure is a concept that is only relevant to a fully commodified society dreamed of by libertarians and neoclassical economists - i.e. where the market is said to best supply our social necessities.  Market failure refers to the failure of the market to supply a necessary (and possible) social good because the production and distribution of latter good fails to satisfy the needs of for-profit corporations to bring it to market - or, from the other direction, when the needs of for-profit corporations make it virtually impossible to legally meet the demand at the level theoretically possible in the case of immaterial goods.  Kelty sees this as a crisis in the business model of publishing; but with the general attempt to base the accumulation of global wealth on the frail infrastructure of IPR it seems clear that this is a more fundamental kind of failure, one that will likely take a long time to unwind before we fully understand its ramifications.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of new pirate sites cropping up.  For those of you who discover them, please keep a low profile. The lawyers are watching now and they want to get paid even more than the publishers.

Library.nu: Modern era’s “Destruction of the Library of Alexandria”

The description above may come as a surprise to people who never sampled the wares of this fantastic resource.  But the description, made by someone named Samir Huseyn on Twitter earlier today, is a fitting one.  It was likely nowhere near as extensive as the library of Alexandria, but the last time I visited, it had thousands of pages and likely almost 100k objects in its catalog (according to the story below it was over 400k).  But for the global patrons it served its most attractive quality was that it served them all up for free.

As of yesterday morning, the library.nu is no more.  For the past 24 hours, dedicated users and community members scrambled to find out what had happened to it.  Over the past few weeks, there have been dramatic changes to the login interface.  At first, the login page would display nothing in the way of the works behind it; then a week or so ago the previous login page was replaced altogether: now library.nu pretended to be a “book review site,” displaying only the reviews members had left of the pirated works they previously dispensed.  By Monday morning, the site was dead, its member rolls purged to prevent login from the direct link, the main page (ironically?) redirected to the Google Books frontpage, and the admin email producing an automated response:

I started watching the Twitter feed for “#library.nu” or its alias gigapedia.info for any word of what had happened.  My first difficulty was finding anything about it in English. Amidst the Chinese, Korean, Continental and Eastern European languages, there was an occasional English tweet, but most of these were of the “WTF?” variety: no more info except a confirmation that something was going on.  A post on a Spanish language blog confirmed that there was something amiss, though that was last week.  Like many previous tweets - or the English ones I could read - what these actually illustrated was less that there was something wrong with the site and more that there was a deep, globally felt felt fear that something might happen to it.  With Megaupload, BTjunkie, Pirate Bay, and other sites falling (even, as it were, in a SOPA-free world) recently, it was a reasonable concern.

This morning, it finally came out (first in Italian then German then English)

An international alliance of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, has served successful cease-and-desist orders on a piracy operation with an estimated turnover of £7m

The two platforms, sharehoster service www.ifile.it and link library www.library.nu, had together created an “internet library” making more than 400,000 e-books available as free illegal downloads. The operators generated an estimated turnover of €8m (£6.7m) through advertising, donations and sales of premium-level accounts, according to a report by German law firm Lausen which helped co-ordinate the alliance.

The other publishers involved also comprised Georg Thieme; HarperCollins; Hogrefe; Macmillan Publishers Ltd; Cengage Learning; John Wiley & Sons;the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson Education Inc; Oxford University Press; Springer; Taylor & Francis; C H Beck; and Walter De Gruyter. The alliance was also co-ordinated by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein) and the International Publishers Association (IPA),

If the list above seems like an unlikely bunch of transnational interests, that’s only because you never visited this library.  It mostly trafficked in science and engineering textbooks (like many such sites) with an abundance of other monographs and trade titles, including enormous collections of journal articles and the latest epub and .mobi encoded editions of bestsellers.  These were all carefully cataloged, with metadata linking them to subject headings, a description telling you what kind of text it was - whether it was merely a page image capture, one with OCR making it searchable, or a fully digital, publication quality pdf.   

None of the files for these books, however, were archived on the site.  As the news reports allege - and as several astute users identified early on - there seemed to be a direct linkage between the locker site ifile.it and library.nu.  Many files were mirrored on both ifile.it and mediafire, but all of them were at least hosted on the .it site, perhaps signaling the reason the Italian Publishing Association was one of the first parties included in the crackdown (according, anyway, to my rough translation of the Italian news releases.)  And though there wasn’t advertising on the library.nu site, major advertisers (some of whom seem to be party to the crackdown, others like Hotels.com are less directly involved) placed prominent ads on the pages of ifile.it.  It’s actually quite sensible that they be connected, though I’m sure the actual legal and financial arrangement is more complicated: why go to the trouble of separating these if it could be easily demonstrated all the money was going to the same pot?

In any case, as with the Megaupload take down (and many others before that) the overall haul of the operators is hard to pin down - is £7m the turnover in one year? Throughout the life of the site? Does it include operating costs for hosting the 400,000 works?  And, since this is a coalition of international publishers (or at least an international coalition of publishers) what percentage of their income does this £7m represent?  I suspect the reason there is even mention of this amount is that this is the most important thing they can charge: simply giving away files is a tough thing to prosecute unless you can also prove there was some ill-gotten loot on the part of these IPR thieves.  On the other hand, there are clearly other relationships here.  I don’t know what ebooksclub.org is, but most of the obvious publication grade pdfs were, at least for a time, given a prefix indicating they were from that site.  That site now defaults to library.nu, so maybe this is another layer of the operation.

I don’t want to get wrapped up in the INTERPOL intrigue - though I’m glad to have some more insight into how the operation functioned behind the scenes, from here on out the media story will be mostly focus on vilifying them for trying to fill an important but underserved niche.  It isn’t merely, as the news stories so far have dutifully reported verbatim from the press release, that these are “freeloaders who make unjustified profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due reward.”   And it is laughable to claim that this takedown will create, “a more transparent, honest and fair trade of digital content on the Internet.”  As the music and movie industry have demonstrated, giving more power to rightsholders is usually the best way to create a more opaque, monopolistic and ultimately unfair trade in digital content.  

None of this is to say that the International Publishers Association isn’t perfectly correct in calling this an illegal operation and its main owners “criminal” (though “highly criminal” seems a stretch); it was very likely illegal.  Whether this is right or not is another question entirely.  But this wasn’t just a “lucrative operation” (we don’t actually know how much it cost to operate it, and if the MPEE study of torrent sites is any guide, there were likely lots of costs involved since they were paying for actual hosting. UPDATE on this from Torrent Freak says they barely covered hosting costs)  If it was in any way “organized copyright crime” it was organized in a very widespread way, with community members encouraged to submit their resources to the site to be cataloged and stored.  More importantly, it obviously served a need, particularly in what the MPEE calls “Emerging Economies.” In looking at the global outcry on the Twitter feed, it is clear that many people in foreign markets relied upon this as an important resource.

For me, it is mostly an inconvenience.  Instead of being able to easily find and quote a passage from a digital copy, I’ll have to take the time to find a print copy from my bookshelf or my library. Then I’ll have to type the whole damn thing like someone from the 1950s.   Like most first world pirates, I’m as likely to buy a print copy once I download a digital one, if I haven’t already bought it). And since most of my interests are in the humanities and social sciences, I will rarely find a book I absolutely couldn’t afford to buy (though I’ve come across a few).  But for many people in more dire straits, the loss of this library represents not just the loss of an intellectual resource, it may mean the difference between being able to afford their schooling or not.  

On this front, even in the first world students have faced increasing textbook costs and as Audrey Watters points out, etextbooks have been a very poor replacement precisely because they actually exacerbate the cost.  Not only are they no less expensive, but they can’t be shared, or sold, or bought used.  Add to that that they have less functionality than a regular textbook (for the most part you can’t annotate them well and no one supplier has all of them: instead of going to one bookstore for all classes, they have to make deals with different vendors with different interfaces) and it makes it so that even the people who could afford to prefer an e-text over a real one would be more likely to look for it elsewhere.  

The most exciting venture on this front in the legit, publisher owned e-textbook world is at Indiana University.  It is a fine project in its own way - they’ve developed an HTML5 hosting platform that allows for lots of cool highlighting and social sharing options -  but to listen to the IT head who had to negotiate the deal it had a lot more to do with lawyers than educators.  For one thing, they had to join with several other schools to make it possible and negotiate as a group.  All of the other schools were also large universities and the lawyers trying to make arrangements with just five publishers racked up a hefty bill.  With all this heft, the only way they were able to negotiate a slightly reduced price for the content they were accessing was by forcing every student to buy the book - no used books, no shared books, no borrowed books: the cost of the e-textbook is included as a course fee charged to every student in the course.  And they are allowed access to it through a University portal for as long as they are in college, then they no longer have access to the text.  

All of this for saving an “average” of $25/textbooks, meaning if you happen to be one of the 5300 students in the program who takes all the classes in the program, then you will average that savings; if you’re only taking one of them, you might be saving a great deal less.  It’s a good plan for students like Obama’s health plan will be for the uninsured: you’re forced into a plan that prioritizes corporate largess over its human priorities, but at least you get served.  As the New York Times put it, it is a program which “Focuses on Bulk Savings, not iBooks.”  Or, in the words of the IT head, Osborne

The model is agreeable to publishers and authors because they are guaranteed income that would otherwise be lost if students bought used textbooks. “We thought, ‘What if we made a model that gives money to the publisher and the author every year, provided it’s low enough for students to afford?’ ” Mr. Osborne said on Thursday.

I’m not faulting Osborne for beginning from what would be good for publishers: though his primary mission is to his students, he realizes that the only way he can even begin to imagine serving them, is if he starts by considering what would be good for the rightsholders that effectively make all the rules in this environment.  Only by beginning from what will make them happy can he hope to serve his educational mission.  

So far, we’re still in the relatively developed world. What led me to library.nu yesterday was discussions I had with a few people about the new open education courses at MIT, through their platform MITx.  It is basically an extension campus on the web, only you may or may not be able to turn it into a credential.  They don’t seem to be aiming as high as the Stanford AI MOOC that led to around 500,000 students starting the course at some point (only 30,000 or so finished.)  But it is still billed as a good, economical way to get the information.  More importantly, in the higher ed-tech-disruption circles, it is seen as more evidence that online is the wave of the future.  

But scroll through the course and you find that the textbook is written by the professor - but owned by Elsevier.  There are excerpts from the text on the website, but if you want the whole book, you have to buy it from Amazon or the publisher.  So students might be able to take a free class, which may or may not get them any closer to a college degree, but if they really want to understand the material, they have to buy an $85 textbook.  I suppose it is a small price to pay for a college class, but a cynic could point out (not me, of course) that it’s also a fantastic way to sell more books.

Again, I don’t fault the professor or the institution for trying to work this out in an above board, satisfactory fashion.  Elsevier has powerful propagandists and likely much more powerful lawyers: they consistently preach a doctrine justifying their 35% profit margin by speaking of the incredible value they add to the works they publish - and if you ever stop believing, they remind you how much you’d need to pay to absolve your wayward soul.  Even if you wanted to argue - you couldn’t.  In any case, this is a very special arrangement that has to be made for this model to work.  If the only classes schools can offer online are those where the professor has written the main text, it might be a slim set of offerings indeed: hardly the basis for a new model of education.  And, again, central to it is the problem of the textbook.

The outside option here is that schools start using open educational resources, and there is a large movement around this as well - both schools trying to develop them and educators developing texts to use.  If this was a more common practice, it might begin to eat away at the smug satisfaction textbook publishers must feel when they walk away from delivering a deal that so cravenly favors them over students.  Preventing a shred of (their own) humility is the main goal of these publishers, which is why library.nu was so important to eliminate.

Once we slip the heavily fortified borders of the so called First World, the existence of library.nu is easily explained by the same situation that the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report does for movies and music “piracy.”  

Multinational pricing in emerging economies, [in contrast with domestic], signals two rather different goals: (1) to protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits and (2) to maintain dominant positions in developing markets as local incomes slowly rise. Such strategies are profit maximizing across a global market rather than a domestic one, and this difference has precluded real price competition in middle- and low-income countries. Outside some very narrow contexts, multinationals have not challenged the high-price/small-market dynamic common to emerging markets. They haven’t had to.

In other words, multinational companies have to protect their price gauging at home by making sure there aren’t pirated works available in the global, digital marketplace: if you are a regular old student, you might just avoid the hassle altogether and get a digital copy.  The more widespread this practice became, the more acceptable, the less money they would be able to force from each student, at least on average.  So they have to kill a service when it grows, not because it threatens their international market per se, but because it threatens the one at home.

Likewise, this means they have to be careful about even the price of legal textbooks in markets of middle- and low-income students (at home and abroad) (especially in technical fields where the cultural discount doesn’t eat into its global value, i.e. the English version could suffice worldwide).  Even if the textbook was just marginally cheaper across a border or two, core students might be tempted to have one shipped - or an enterprising businessperson could start some sort of portal where the cheapest textbooks in the world are shipped everywhere else.  

Maybe something like this already exists, but the price of US (and European) textbooks is targeted at their core market in roughly the same way are the goods of the movie and music industries that are the main subjects of the MPEE.  This means that, for people who live in a market like South Africa, political, economic, and racial restrictions and divisions make (or have made) affordable textbooks hard to come by.  As the report notes, in South Africa,

Textbook piracy remained ubiquitous and, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), was responsible for larger total losses than either film or music piracy throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

mind you, this was before digitization.  I suppose if students there want affordable, legal, knockoff textbooks, they’ll have to get Bono to beg for them like he did for AIDS generics. Or they could just head over to library.nu.  Or could have. 

I’m not defending criminal behavior, but as I’ve said before, economic realities mitigate against a clear definition of just what is criminal in this context.  Whatever the juridical shortcomings of the digital library they made possible, it was the easiest way for anyone to get digital content from these publishers, even if they wanted to pay top dollar.  And a quick glance at the nationalities or at least linguistic diversity of its mourners on Twitter should exhibit how wide a potential public it could serve.  This was a working model of the library of the future; a functional collection that made education and exploration possible in unheard of fashion, but still needed vast improvement (and, of course, a legal license.)

In some ways, its (possibly) ironic redirect to Google Books is a sly nod to its brethren.  Where Google Books - and its settlement with publishers - fails, it picks up the slack.  Hate searching for passages in a book and only being treated to snippets because a publisher demanded it: search in Google Books, then stroll over to the library.nu and actually be albe to read a couple of pages around it - like all of them.  

In enormous servers, in buildings around the world, are all the books.  Archive.org has them; Google has them; Hathi has them; and those they don’t have they’re adding every day.  But instead of being able to magically call them up on your device using the contemporary technology in all its glory, like a chump you still have to putter around trying to find where a digital version can be legally bought in a format you can load onto your e-reader with a set of rights even remotely resembling those you would get for roughly the same price in a physical book, i.e. you can mark it, save it, sell it, lend it,  give it away to Goodwill or send it to poor kids in South Africa.  In other words, most of the time you have to sit back and bide your time until the pirates really sink this ship and make it possible for literature, libraries, scholarship, and reading to move into the 21st century for the bulk of the world’s population.  Today, for all its faults, we lost one important trailblazer for that future.  As one Tweet put it:

The upside of total human annihilation for creative alien scavengers of the future

I would like to start a journey - towards thinking about the library of the future - with what might be a peculiar example.  P.D. James begins her novel The Children of Men with an explanation of the tragedy that has befallen humankind in the late twentieth century: “For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought.”  Namely, they are unable to reproduce.  The story opens in the year 2021 with the observation that the last human born of natural birth – to a mother in the Brazilian favelas 25 years earlier – has died.  The finality of this young man’s death, what it signifies as a milestone in the history - and the future - of the human species, is part of what prompts the narrator’s reflection.  

The future, in this case, is one in which the human species no longer exists.  This presents a vexing question that we often pose in relation to individuals, but rarely in relation to entire cultures, societies, or even species: what would you do if you knew you were going to die?  Live it up with all the drugs and meaningless sex you can muster. Travel to all the places you always meant to go. Finally and fully engage in a deeper relationship with a supernatural diety or earthly soul mate.  The answers to these questions animate James’ account in lively ways, particularly in relation to the inhumanity that seems only possible on a grand scale of an entire society – when fascism, violence, hate, and xenophobia see little need to hide themselves for the sake of posterity.

But in a sense the exhaustive variety of possible answers to this question would likely find their representation somewhere among the myriad members of the species.  So it isn’t surprising that one of the inclinations James highlights is something like that of several Early Modern sonnets: to attempt to guarantee immortality through archiving one’s thoughts (or the youthful beauty of one’s lover) in writings and one’s writings in a folio. When Shakespeare records the living memory of his beloved, for “the eyes of all posterity” or Spenser uses verse to eternize the virtues of his, they did so with the reasonable belief that, even if no one found his writing or was inspired by it, someone COULD find it. Someone alive, later.  

For those living through the parallel universe of James’ book, there could be no such promise.  Recognizing that this might make the situation sound even more desperate, James presents, if ever so briefly, a source for hope on this front.  In the late 1990s, shortly after the last natural born human took his first breath, scientists had discovered alien life on a far off planet, thousands of light years away.  There is no contact with this lifeforce, no communication with its beings, no guarantee they had or ever would have the capability (or desire) to visit the literally posthuman planet earth.  Yet the glimmer of hope gives those inclined to speak to the ages the motivation to carry on.  As James tells it, “We are storing our books and manuscripts, the great paintings, the musical scores and instruments, the artefacts.” 

Every piece of human knowledge and culture would be carefully archived in as uniform a fashion possible, with as many redundancies as the system would allow.  Shortly, they would be sealed up as the last humans died off, so that when the alien life comes to earth, they will be able to learn what we were, what we did, what we thought, and, perhaps most importantly, how we felt about it.  It would likely take generations (assuming aliens live about as long as humans) of dedicated alien scholars poring through these archaic codexes of whatever variety they took before they could finally claim to understand us.  But to the hypothetical crafter of (hopefully) universal metadata standards, this possibility was enough.

James doesn’t give insight as to why the human race is dying - except to say that its inability to discover the cause of this disaster is the crowning insult of its misplaced faith in science. But it is not outlandish to imagine a time when something like this scenario could come to pass.  In previous years, nuclear holocaust topped the list - here the insult to science was that man was too active, discovered too much and then did things to cause it.  Still, at least there is agency involved.  In our current era, the most likely doomsday scenario is caused by us doing nothing at all: we know a great deal about climate science; we can predict with computer models what the sea-rise in Bangalore will look like; can calculate the human cost of this otherwise unimaginable catastrophe; yet for the most part, we do nothing.  This is the recurring lesson science fiction has to teach us: that we place too much or not enough faith in science, that we had the answer, but our hubris and greed kept us from turning the tide: in other words, our base humanity keeps us from using our science to its most enlightened potential.

This is a grim foundation on which to build the library of the future: a masoleum for the interstellar archeologists who might one day be interested in our culture.  But we really should look on the bright side: just think, when those aliens discover this vast trove of information they will be able to do whatever they want with it. While this could mean they use most of the storage media for fire wood or a coltan salvage yard, in the best case, they would be even more advanced than us, technologically, socially, and culturally.  In that case, they could create infinite copies to distribute throughout their society, drawing upon the networked knowledge of everyone to help interpret and understand the lost civilization they had happened upon in their travels.  

They would be free to reinterpret works using their own cultural framework, making sense of them despite (or even because of) the distance in time and space.  And this reinterpretation could take any form they liked and be redistributed and reinterpreted until the ideas and history we had bequeathed to this galactic posterity merged with the great mind of the universe and we achieved an immortality Shakespeare could not dream of.  All of this would be possible whether the works were from Shakespeare’s time, published in the nineteenth century, recorded in the twentieth, or released as an ebook in 2012.  All of this would be possible not just because diligent archivists kept track of it, or brilliant coders fabricated a Rosetta Stone legible to the stars, or curious extraterrestrials plugged away at understanding it: no, all of this would be possible because, for these incredibly fortunate future invaders, all the information in the history of the planet earth will be in the public domain.

Roundup post

  • danah boyd reprises her infamous manifesto on open access publishing, saying “Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry.” I feel a little more sympathetic to junior scholars who send work to journals of the evil corporate variety, but she usually makes waves so its worth noting.
  • Andy Baio’s post on young people’s perceptions of copyright set the Twitter abuzz last Friday, surveying Youtube videos and users and finding that they have an almost comical misunderstanding of what copyright means.  The phrase “No Copyright Intended” or “No Infringement Intended” shows up often, indicating that many users seem to think their release of any claims on the material they have created (using others copyrighted material) is enough to shield them from legal action.  From this Baio proposes a thought experiment (on the lines Lessig proposes in Remix) of what will happen when these people reach voting age and are able to get elected to office. Rob Beschizza, on BoingBoing, notes that 

Isn’t it also interesting how many young artists still instinctively honor the idea, as they see it, of copyright? Respect for other artists comes naturally. People don’t stop respecting copyright until they see how little the claimed principles have to do with the reality of enforcement—especially when it’s used to condem their own creative expressions as a form of theft.              

  • Heather Morrison, an ABD student at Simon Fraser and powerhouse of information about Open Access resources, provides her “early year end” report on the success of open access.   From her perspective, the emerging challenge of Open Access is the challenge of success: “How can we track all these resources and make it easy for people to find and use them?”  This seems to connect Open Access with the library and information sciences in a very direct way, namely, while creating new, legitimate platforms (and, as boyd points out, practices) is essential, just producing open access scholarship isn’t enough: we need to develop new forms of curation and data management for that scholarship to be useful.  
  • On that topic, it took this story from across the pond (Economist) to alert me to the CHNM initiative Occupy Archive, which is collecting materials from and about the Occupy movement for the purposes of historical preservation.  

Without some system for organising, collating and preserving the Facebook pages, YouTube videos and blogs the movement is generating, the materials may be lost. For archivists, the question is not whether Occupy movement has political legs, but if its history has a future.

  • Michael Robertson analogizes digital music with hot dog vending to show both the absurdity of contracts with record labels and in reason Spotify and other platforms will never make a profit in the current environment.  In the process, he reveals information that had previously been shrouded by nondisclosure agreements (just as Big Deal journal subscription packages with libraries have been for years). For me, this is further evidence that the morass of licensing books for a massive e-library would likely be an unsustainable nightmare in the current legal environment.  These initiatives would be made unsustainable by the people with the most to gain from their success, namely the copyright holders like the record industry. As Robertson describes it:

The supplier will always elect the formula that captures the largest amount of money for themselves, completely disregarding the financial viability of the store. If the store miraculously managed to generate a profit, the landlord would simply raise the rates after two years.

  • As if to cement this instinct, Librarian in Black reveals the fact that Amazon’s Overdrive catalog for ebooks is different for different libraries.  The Analog Divide asserts that this true of other vendors as well. Since these arrangements are likely shrouded in the same sorts of NDAs, it becomes hard to compare the deal you are getting - or even to understand what the deal you are getting entitles.

This is what happens when we well-intentioned librarians are expected to negotiate deals with these companies – and their experienced contract lawyers. We expect them to share our values of open access and sharing, while they’re beholden to their own profit motives. Essentially, we’re bringing hugs to a knife fight.

  • More on Libraries as Hackerspaces, this time from NPR
  • Canadian artists are lobbying to legalize file sharing, which should make Canadian torrent site isohunt happy.  It would be paid for by a P2P tax, which might make Canadian internet users sad.

more, soon

Contrary to many futuristic projections—even from bibliophiles who, as a group, enjoy melancholy reveries—the recent technological revolution has only deepened the affection that many scholars have for books and libraries, and highlighted the need for the preservation, study, and cherishing of both.

- William Pannapacker in The Chronicle, talking about the continued relevance of books as material objects and bookstores and libraries as sites of serendipitous discovery.  The need to preserve or approximate serendipitous discovery is an ongoing theme I hear often in relation to the potential transformation to a purely digital ecosystem for books.  Pannapacker spends most of his column discussing the continued aesthetic appeal of books as objects (a fact publishers are keen to), he is also concerned with how those objects work as components of a system of discovery.  Library stacks and bookstore shelves provide a different sort of organized chaos from Amazon’s “recommendations”  which tend, in my experience, to favor more recently published books rather than the “deep tracks” you might find sitting on a library shelf.  The nostalgia people feel for this is also pragmatic: finding unexpected books in this way is a mysterious, organic process which defies algorithms alone.  

And that’s part of the problem: most people’s everyday experience with e-books and e-libraries is based on like Amazon.com or Google Books, where, on the one hand, browsing the stacks is impossible and the adjacent texts you can discover are likely chosen by a mathematical formula rather than a more thoughtful set of metadata.  While these are relatively decent platforms for reading and even searching ebooks, they are poor methods of serendipitous discovery, at least as we normally experience it.  Amazon, for instance, provides on a sort of social network function, recommending books other people have also bought, and certainly I’ve found new books this way.  Goodreads recently launched a similar book recommendation engine which, as more people sign on, will likely become smarter at making predictions. The predictions, on the other hand, are based more on what other people like rather than what a bibliographer might see as a deeper relationship.  And anyway, seeing a few recommendations is not like browsing a shelf.  Google is beta testing its own version of a virtual bookshelf, which would be great if its metadata didn’t remain a complete disaster.  

 Like digital libraries more generally, the solutions (and problems) of serendipitous discovery seems to fall into three categories.  These are aside from the problem of actually getting and using the book or text once you discover it, but are related.  Going from back to front, the biggest problem is having content in the database.  In some ways, this is where Google has stopped with its process.  Get all the world’s information and put it online.  (I know they claim they will organize it, but when they say that they usually mean they will tell computers to do it).  This is a big problem, to be sure, as even I could create a perfectly organized, beautifully designed digital library of 45 books.  Populating that library with more volumes than the average physical library is one of the few things that makes it more appealing than walking over to the academic library.  Google and Amazon start from the content and work forward.  Their insufficiency is in the other two realms.  

One of these is metadata.  Though there is much more to it, if we are thinking of how to replicate the library experience, we should consider the backroom coding that helps organize the information on those shelves.  Metadata is a area I’m coming late to, being new to the library world, but it is also an area that is in flux.  The Library of Congress, for instance, recently announced that it felt the dominant model of metadata, MARC, should be slowly phased out.  This fits with the move towards forms of linked data, using Resource Description Framework (RDF) codes for every piece of information on the web.  CLIR, Mellon and Stanford recently held a workshop on this topic in relation to libraries and several of the DPLA Beta Sprint projects focused on either linked data or metadata interoperability. Importantly, this is the area where, despite its claims to the contrary, Google is in dire need of help from more invasive, expert forms of organization.  

But even with good content, well organized in the back end by good metadata, the average user will expect elegance and functionality in the solution to the most obvious problem: the interface problem.  Namely, how do you create an interface that provides the tactile satisfaction of walking through a bookstore or library, while having it still remain digital or virtual.  

Joe Esposito, writing at Scholarly Kitchen, takes a short cut.  He has proposed the idea of what he called a “Metadatatorium” where a physical space would remain to house the books, but the purchasing (or in the case of libraries, borrowing) would actually be done by waving your e-reader in front of a ISBD or QR code on the physical object.  In this, he’s inspired in part by this French video

Owners of these spaces would get a cut of purchases and could create more energy around their spaces by opening them up to performances, readings, book clubs, and so on. This would increase the possibility of serendipitous discovery as well as the communal and social aspects of bookshops.  Esposito doesn’t discuss how these books would be organized (i.e. what kind of metadata he’d rely on for their organization) and he seems to fall back on the organic, experiential sensibilities of the bookshop owner or library bibliographer for populating the content.  (Even more problematically from a legal and economic perspective, he prefers the agency model currently used by Apple’s iBookstore.  While the latter may have some appeal to publishers, this week both the EU and the US Justice Department are investigating this model for anti-trust violations.)

For a more virtual experience, researchers at the University of Calgary have elaborated several possible models of what they call “Bohemian Bookshelf Supporting Serendipitous Discoveries through Visualization.”  They begin by elaborating a complex understanding of how serendipity works, using a combination of personality traits (observation skills, open-mindedness, perseverance) and environmental factors (coincidence and prior categorizations of other people); then they speculate on what is needed to facilitate serendipitous discovery in a system, settling on four main factors: Multiple access points, multiple pathways, juxtaposition of information, and the flexibility to allow for curiosity and play.  They then speculate on how to organize books along a variety of axes and present them in a more organic manner according to these factors. As they describe it: 

The Bohemian Bookshelf consists of five individual visualizations: the Cover Colour Circle, Keyword Chains, Timelines, the Book Pile, and the Author Spiral. Each of the five visualizations provides a unique overview of the dataset from a particular perspective, as we will describe below in more detail. At the same time, the individual visualizations are interlinked with each other: the selection of a book in one visualization changes the views of the other four visualizations to in relation to the newly selected book.

They provide some illustrations of what this might look like in practice, helpfully collected here by someone else.

Their elaboration of a variety of interlinked interfaces is probably one of the best overall ideas—though it doesn’t seem all that deeply informed by metadata issues as the closest they get to a thematic arrangement is the keyword chain.  Add to this the fact that many useful manuscripts have no cover art at all (at least in hardcover) and it is clear the books this model has in mind are mostly trade books of some kind.  Still, the dynamic nature of the interface would allow for discovery of those volumes, provided they are part of the database and have the right keywords. 

The interface problem seems to be the other major concern of the DPLA beta-sprint projects.  The project bearing the greatest similarity to the Bohemian and Google Bookshelves is the project from Harvard.  It is a combination of a multilibrary, metadata-userdata “LibraryCloud” with a front end interface called ShelfLife.  Right now it suffers from having less content, but eventually it could be very effective as an engine of serendipity.  

Perhaps more innovative is the ExtraMuros project, which helps not only visualize collections geographically, but also allows users to curate data in a variety of collections. The DPLA page is here; and the demo can be found here.

My own ideal would actually require even more intervention, but would likely create an invaluable resource in and of itself. Not only would it aid discovery, but it would provide a visualization of deep connections between works.  I see the digitization of libraries as a unique opportunity to construct the outlines of another kind of “distant reading.”  The goal of this project would be to visualize the scholarly (and cultural) impact of a given work.  Ideally, a library of this kind would work more like Google Scholar, where books  and articles are included in the same framework.

I call it the Citemap. The proposition is this:  if/as we scanned/linked in the documents, we would pay special attention to the works cited and/or the footnotes.  On a basic level, the final project would show us, visually, what works each individual work had cited in making its argument, and more importantly, what the cultural importance (again, measured by citations) of those works was.

For example, take Raymond Williams classic examination of the idea of The Country and The City.  The reference section begins on page 167 of this pdf. Here the work in question, Williams’ book, would be the Node Work, the center of the node.  Depending on the filter you were using, you would be able to visualize either all the works that cited this work or all the works that he cited.  The size of any node would be determined by the number of citations.  According to Google Scholar, Williams’ would have a pretty good size node, as he has over 3000 other works citing his.  Likewise, most of the early works he cites (e.g. Virgil, C. Marlowe, P. Sidney) would have large nodes.  In each of these cases, it would be clear that both the work itself, and the works it draws upon are of some larger cultural significance. You could scroll over each node, ideally, recentering the study on a new node, checking how it fit within the larger network of both literature and secondary literature.are some central canonical texts—and what those are or have been at any given time (ideally you could also control for the timeline, rolling back the network to a snapshot of publication date to see when a work became popular or culturally/critically significant).  As we go through the data, figuring out a way to visualize these as a network would help to show the way these central texts are related to one another (or not.)

While there are a great deal of critical projects a resource like this could spawn, for the present purposes it would replicate in a virtual, visual way the most common source of my own serendipitous discovery: other authors’ bibliographies.  It wouldn’t have quite the tactile appeal of sitting with leather-bound volumes of cream colored paper, but there’s nothing to say you can’t go find a printed copy of the book you discover in the citemap (or the bohemian bookshelf, for that matter.)  

The real silliness, however, comes in the decision to rename the bill in the House, from PROTECT IP to ePARASITES. I sometimes believe there is a congressional office for acronyms, staffed by some very silly people. When I first heard this new acronym, I thought it was a parody. Although I now know that the “parasites” referred to are websites that facilitate unauthorized sharing, I initial concluded that it was a joke referring precisely to those industries supporting PROTECT IP who want the taxpaying public to bear all the costs for their failures to innovate.
Kevin Smith on the Silly Season of IPR legislation.

Source: blogs.library.duke.edu

When ships landed at the port of Alexandria, vessels were searched, not for contraband but for books and maps. These were confiscated, copied and then returned to their owners. The copies were added to the library. A truly unique feature of this library is that it was not a private library but instead was established by the state. The library was open to all, so it was, in effect, the first public library. [… .] Today, several excavations have revealed scientific and historical documents that would have resulted in the industrial revolution having occurred 1500 years earlier. Among the lost documents included the methods used to build the pyramids and the Parthenon, alchemy, natural plant medicine and utopian philosophy.
Laura N. Gasaway, LIBRARIES, USERS & THE PROBLEMS OF AUTHORSHIP IN THE DIGITAL AGE, DePaul Law Review (2003), volume 52 , issue 4 , p. 1193-1228  

Seems like a good argument for a state run collection with absolutist collection policies (all ships entering the port were searched for books and maps that were then copied and collected) and open public access.  What future knowledge will be lost as a result of our present “silly season?”

Devil’s Advocate on PDA libraries….

In Friday’s Inside Higher Education, Steve Kolowich gives a summary of a report by the Advisory Board Company (report not publicly available) on trends in Higher Ed libraries.  The main focus of his article (and possibly of the report) is on the cost efficiencies of Patron Driven Acquisition, or PDA.  The particular model he discusses is one facilitated by the E-Book Library (EBL).  The report evidently focuses on one university library’s experience using this service, and finds significant cost savings relative to other models of acquisitions.   Aside from the fact that this feels like a piece of PR (via a paid consulting group’s non-public report shared with the journalist) masquerading as journalism, the arguments in it are pretty shoddy.  I have two main problems with this piece, but my primary concern is that this is not really “Patron Driven Acquisition.”  In fact, the real news here isn’t that PDA might be worthwhile, but that EBL is offering discounted access that would possibly save schools money.  

First of all I understand the reason for PDA. Rick Anderson from Utah has been advocating this for several years.  The idea is that, instead of so-called speculative acquisition—where librarians try to estimate what recently published books will be of use to their patrons—there should be some sort of patron-driven model where the library instead finds only books people at the university want.   According to Anderson, speculative collecting is wrong about half the time: ”About 50 percent of the time, the things we pick don’t get used or don’t get used in 10 years.”  

The counter argument is that the life of a research library is longer than 10 years: deep collections create a long tail of resources which might be valuable further down the road.  Anderson’s argument against this, mentioned in the Q&A at the ARL/CNI conference last week, in this blog post in 2009, and probably many other places, is effectively that Amazon serves the long tail (and Google, etc.)

While older books that were once difficult or impossible to find are now often both easy to locate and cheap to buy through online sources like Amazon and Bookfinder.com. And there is no longer any need for a book to go out of print. Millions of books that were until recently lost to the public’s view are now freely available online, thanks to Google; current books that are still in copyright but can’t be distributed normally in an economically sustainable fashion can be sold one at a time through print-on-demand utilities like the Espresso Book Machine  

Technology has made keeping fully stocked catalog of possibly valuable books virtually obsolete.  If you don’t buy that apparently useful scholarly monograph for your collection, it will likely be available in some digital format someday in the future.  Anderson notes, “not all publishers make their books available in this way, of course, but the option to do so now exists where before it did not.”  More on this in a moment.

I see the logic to PDA, but on the other hand, there is something to be said for thinking of a library collection at the institutional level.  On the one hand, contrary to Anderson, there is the long tail to consider.  Most of the IHE is focused on the year to year circulation data.  So, for instance, we have the heart of the article, bulging with cost-benefit efficiency porn:

Grand Valley State students can browse the full texts of 50,000 e-books from the EBL catalog. The price of those e-books operates as a series of “triggers”: If a student spends less than five minutes in one e-book before moving on, the library pays nothing. If a student spends longer than that, it triggers an automatic one-day rental, and EBL charges the library between 10 and 20 percent of the list price. The fifth daylong rental triggers an automatic purchase of the whole book, at which point students can use it at their whim at no additional cost to the library — unless usage exceeds 320 hours per year, which triggers the purchase of a second electronic “copy.” [… .] Purchasing all 50,000 e-books in EBL’s catalog would have cost Grand Valley State’s library $3 million. Buying all 6,239 EBL titles that patrons used in 2009 would have cost $550,000. But only 343 of those were used enough to trigger a purchase. The library paid only $69,000 

This is important to consider, and it is useful to be able to parse the usage out like this (though I wonder how much they pay for students who open a book, leave it that way, and forget about it because they are chatting with a friend or watching a video in another window.)  But what we are really talking about is a new form of access to a particular database on a year to year basis.  The library doesn’t “acquire” the book in any sense of the word: it merely pays a service for digital access on an annual basis.  So long as the service finds this profitable and the licensing of a particular book is available on their platform, it sounds simple enough.  

Anderson has faith in the market to provide access to a book for which there is demand, but as the record industry has shown time and time again, the fact that a good can be digitally distributed or archived is almost completely unrelated to the reality of its future distribution. Even records with a historical significance, and popular demand (linked here is the “We Are the World” CD, which is #8 out of all 1980s records in Amazon’s catalog and has been out of print for some time) are no longer distributed by anyone official: used distributors will send you a premium priced copy, but that’s about it.

The orphan works problem in the Hathi Trust scanning project would seem to be the most instructive case in relation to books.  Here we have a massive collection of digital works which could reasonably be distributed - or access provided - possibly to the profit of whoever the official legal owner of the work might be.  However, instead of asking that Hathi to work with them to figure out how to do this, the Author’s Guild has simply demanded that these digital versions be completely impounded until there is some future legislative action that would clear up their status.  For the libraries that own the hard copy version of the digitized file, this is not as much of a problem.  But if acquisitions going forward are primarily digital and primarily on a year-by-year basis, this would seem to be a serious flaw in the overall plan.  While Anderson and others want to argue that their patron driven system is better than a speculative, librarian driven system, it fails to acknowledge that both are trumped by what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls the “lawyer-built system.” 

If EBL doesn’t provide access to a particular book (next year, two years from now, five years from now) then that book will simply fall out of the collection—of both EBL and any library that relied upon its service for its book selection.  At that point, there would be no way for patrons to demand either access or acquisition and unless there was a separate catalog of possible books published at a particular point—books that had a particularly strong demand in the first years of their publication—there would be no connection between the vendor catalog and patron demand per se.  If no one provided access, that book would become a sort of POW in the IPR war.   In other words, being able to have a little pocket or two of (hard copy?) depth in your collection, stuff that might not be used year to year, but eventually could be important, seems reasonable, particular without some confidence that you’ll be able to find a vendor who will carry the specific books from year to year.   In a sense, then, there are two separate issues: do you have Patron Driven Acquisition? and Do you use a digital vendor?  For instance, you could have a massive hard copy collection which is the result, primarily, of patron requests of some kind or another.  Or, as in this case, you could use a digital vendor which would provide a pre-selected list of possible works from which patrons could choose.

Even assuming you use a digital vendor for one component of the collection, the benefit of having a collection that is somewhat supervised by the librarian is that, from year to year, you don’t have to monitor the collection to make sure that it is all there.  One year, a few very important books come out; you buy them; put them in the stacks; and forget about them. They are there and when patrons want them, they will be there.  The same thing happens year after year and eventually you get a collection which has some character specific to the institution.  The only maintenance that is required is to make sure the books you started the year with are there at the end.  To be sure, there are costs, but you don’t have to remind yourself of all the books the library once bought because they are in the library.  

But if, every year, or every five years, you have to change digital vendor distributors of the majority of your collection, then this process goes out of the window.  Though it is really speaking only about a single digital vendor, the upshot of the article (and of the argument for PDA in general) is that this should be the new model of acquisitions going forward.  The article assumes you can get whatever book you want—and that patrons will get whatever books they want and or need—through a digital vendor.  But this is in no way guaranteed—and the only way to check it would be to have a particularly onerous collection process whereby each individual library had to keep track of the books patrons had previously enjoyed (and vigorously used) in the past and compare it to whatever digital vendor collection exists in any given year.

You would have to have some master list X-  “these are the books that our library/patrons would like to have access to” - which you could then compare to the lists of whatever competing vendors there are at that point.  Assuming you can make this comparison with any degree of accuracy (the database comparisons between two collections with hundreds of thousands or even millions of volumes as well as the master list of books you’d LIKE to have access to) eventually, you’ll have to choose between two or three (or ten or twenty) vendors who can provide access to most of list X, but each having some lacunae—subcollection A, B, or C. No one vendor will have all the books you’d like and so you’ll have to choose, from year to year, if subcollection A or B or C is more or less important—even if it is based on previous patron driven access data.  (A possibly worse scenario is that only one for-profit vendor provides legitimate access to every book every printed—and therefore, like journals today, they have a monopoly over access for which they can charge premium fees.)

All of this points to the fact that what the article is really describing is not really Patron Driven Acquisition.  The library doesn’t acquire the book: it just gets access to it through a digital vendor.  On the other hand, if the system was truly “Patron-Driven” then the list of possible books would not be limited to 50,000: it would be a list of every book ever published—or, say, every book in the current WorldCat catalog (which, IIRC, is something like 28 million unique volumes for US libraries).  What EBL is actually offering is for patrons to choose from the books it is offering.

Instead of the praise heaped upon the EBL collection and its access model, we could look at it in a starkly different light: the fact that only 343 of its 50,000 books were accessed enough to trigger purchase sounds like their collection contains a very small percentage of actually useful volumes.  In fact, only a little more than 10% of its catalog was even accessed by patrons.  Those stats are decidedly worse on a year to year basis than the “only 50% are accessed within the first ten years” of the previous model.  This is why I say that the only real news in this article is that EBL is providing a package of access that actually represents its value to patrons, not that this model is scaleable yet.

I believe in the need for more common digital repositories and I think Anderson is on the right track in thinking about Patron Driven Acquisition in a digital environment.  But we should be leery of deciding to rely on vendor access in the meantime.  Constance Malpas’ CLIR report on cloud libraries, which Anderson recently cited as inspiring, is indeed important, but I think the takeaway is not so much that this is an inevitability.  Instead, it is that we have amazing capabilities emerging, but they are currently crippled by the legal system in place.  What this means for collection strategy in the meantime is up for argument. But whatever librarians decide, I’d recommend getting the same deal with EBL as Grand Valley.   



Disrupted by a lack of innovation: trapsing to the library for a 14yr old book

After writing my post on the political economy of innovation, my scholarly conscious was twitching.  I was sloppy in not reading Christensen’s book, instead relying on sketchy (in both senses) versions online.  But in some ways this was brought about by the very situation I mean to write about in relation to libraries. As David Lewis’ forthcoming piece on Open Access journals declares:

As open access grows, faculty and students will find increasing amounts of scholarship available for free.  It will seem odd and annoying that some articles can be easily accessed, used, and shared while others come with severe restrictions.  This will be especially disconcerting as most of the content that publishers will be fighting to protect, restrict, and extract revenue from, will have been produced by the scholars themselves and paid for by universities or funding agencies

I’ve become accustomed to being able to find just about any book I want to access online, often in a full, pdf version, from sources like library.nu.  Though Christensen’s book is available (in limited preview version) from Google Books, it was deep in the search results and I could only find it (belatedly) by going directly to the Google Book search.  All of this was indeed frustrating, since, as Lewis says, Christensen is, indeed, a scholar, paid like many academics create scholarship in order to secure a position in the halls of academia. In addition to the likely lucrative contract he has with Harvard University, since publishing this book Christensen has likely raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking and consulting fees, riffed off this book to write several others, and otherwise gained tremendously from it as a piece of writing.  Innovator’s Dilemma is 14 years old, which would have been the initial restriction according to the copyright laws that we had during the “founding fathers” era (though, to be fair, since he’s still alive, he would have been able to apply for his monopoly for another 14 year term).  Yet not only is there no public domain version of the book, his publisher is preparing to reprint it, evidently with no alterations or improvements.

This is all perfectly legal and, within the wider US culture, completely acceptable.  But for a scholar getting spoiled with open access, it is indeed frustrating.  In order to get access, I had one of two options: buy the book or walk all the way over to the library.   Option one is completely reasonable, except that I doubted I’d want to own it; surprisingly, it took a while before option two even dawned on me.  Still it seemed favorable, if not also slightly annoying. 

So now I’ve read most of Christensen’s book and have a better handle on his theory.  Which is good, since I think I missed some key points.  Getting them right is important especially in relation to the way Lewis uses Christensen’s concepts in his argument for why Open Access publishing is a disruptive innovation that will eventually overtake all other forms of scholarly publication.

Up Next: The Innovation of not listening to your customers

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