Tag Archives: e-books

Some thoughts on e-books

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E-books are everywhere these days. I’ve tried just about every platform and delivery variation that exists, and there are a lot of them. I like the concept of them; it’s the delivery and packaging of them that I despise so much.

Last year was arguably the breakthrough year for e-books in the conscience of the general public. Millions of e-book readers were sold (think Kindle, Nook, iPad) and there were widespread reports that e-book readers were one of the most popular Christmas gifts. The most popular e-book provider for libraries to provide e-books for their patrons — Overdrive — reports that it is overwhelmed by demand as a result.

Overdrive, to me, is the poster child for what’s still very wrong about the packaging and delivery of e-books. In terms of criticism, where do I start? The incomprehensible user interface? The complicated process of figuring out what your local library has actually subscribed to? The horrible experience (which has only recently been improved a bit) of trying to check out and download an e-book on a mobile device like the iPhone 4 that I use? And here’s another criticism that is exacerbated by the huge increase in demand that I previously mentioned: the inability to limit one’s search/browse to just those e-books that are available for checkout. Last night as I lay in bed I used my iPad to try to find a new e-book to read on Overdrive. I limited my browsing to e-books available in ePub format. There were about 125 pages (each with about 20 results) of books to choose from. I spent half an hour painstakingly paging through the results to find an e-book — ANY e-book — that was avaiable to check out. I wasn’t even bothering to search/browse by subject or known author or anything sensible like that. I just wanted to first see what e-books were actually available and then see if any of those looked interesting to read. But could I do that? NO, of course not.

And then there is the issue of Adobe’s idiotic DRM that goes with checking out ePub format e-books on Overdrive. Users are required to create an Adobe ID before they can actually read an e-book they have checked out. I have a problem with that, first of all, because I resent having to created a superfluous account with Adobe and risk having to be on their registered list for marketing of other Adobe products that I couldn’t care less about. But it gets worse. I had an e-book that I was reading on my iPhone 4 and I had verified my Adobe ID. Unfortunately I had a problem with my iPhone 4 that required me to restore it to factory settings, wiping out everything on the device and starting over from scratch. I restored everything on my iPhone include the Overdrive app. The e-book I was reading was still checked out to me so I downloaded it again. However, in the meantime I had forgotten my Adobe ID password and had to reset it. When I tried to access the e-book and was asked to verify my Adobe ID, I was told that basically I couldn’t read the e-book because it was already assigned to a different user. Argh. Adobe’s DRM is apparently very stupid.

I don’t have a Kindle although I’ve used one a little bit. I don’t have a Nook but I’ve seen and held one for a little bit. As previously mentioned, I do have an iPhone 4 and an iPad. I think both devices easily and clearly trump Kindle and Nook in terms of e-book reader capability. I particularly despise Amazon’s proprietary Kindle e-book format; kudos to Barnes & Noble, Apple, and others for pushing the ePub format instead. I have to say that of all of the e-book reader software I’ve used, though, Amazon’s Kindle software is probably the best.

Lots of other important issues revolve around e-books, including what their popularity means for public libraries, which are still heavily tied to the print — or, as I like to call it, the “offline” — world. There is a big impact on booksellers too, especially independent booksellers. I was interested to read an online article about this very issue in today’s Daily Herald, which mentioned my all time favorite independent bookstore in St. Charles, IL: Town House Books. (Interestingly, the owner of this bookstore sees no noticeable impact.) Other complicated issues about e-books include copyright, DRM, etc. Overall I am happy about the rising popularity of e-books and I plan to continue to read them. But e-book providers — Overdrive in particular — have a long way to go to make the user experience palatable.

The value of quality in metadata

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I have known this to be true for years (I started out as a serials cataloger, after all), but the value of quality in metadata has recently been reinforced for me. Quality metadata is absolutely essential to building robust and flexible applications involving search, taxonomy, and retrieval of information for libraries (and for other organizations, too).

In previous posts I’ve described some of what I’ve worked on as a team with others in my library that relates to creating a better way for our users to find information. This includes “turning the catalog inside out” in order to integrate cataloging metadata (MARC) into our new portal web environment. This metadata supports several dynamically-generated A to Z lists of e-journals and e-books to which we provide access. It is also the foundation for keyword searches (what we are calling “Quick Search”) when results for e-books and e-journals are integrated with results from other kinds of library resources such as our extensive product literature database.

Using MARC data in new and more flexible ways is wonderful and exciting to me, but the excitement recently was replaced with anxiety when I realized that key pieces of data from those MARC records were not well maintained — not of good quality and reliability. This included something as deceptively simple as the ISSN(s) associated with each journal record. Once the problems were understood, I immediately outlined a project to update and, if you will, upgrade, the metadata for every e-journal to which we provide access. That’s around 1,600 “for cost” journals in addition to potentially ten times that amount in open access journals. That’s just a smidgeon of what many other libraries, especially large, academic libraries, have in terms of the scope of their e-journal collection. Still, it’s a very large amount for my library to handle and with our already lean technical services staffing, we could sure have done without the extra effort and time that’s required to apply the fixes.

When I arrived in this job I was told that cataloging standards were much looser here than in a typical academic library, and this was deemed to be “a very good thing.” Maybe so, but I can’t help feeling that a little more care and effort to follow national cataloging standards throughout the years would have saved me and my staff a lot of extra effort at this juncture. I am very thankful for such freely available software tools as Terry Reese’s outstanding MarcEdit program, with which I have been able to minimize this extra effort as much as possible.

One of the more memorable sayings from my first boss (and he was full of memorable sayings) that relates to this issue is “Don’t gild the lily.” By this he meant, let’s not waste our time trying to create the perfect cataloging record; he argued (and I agree) that there really is no such thing. I’m not saying that my predecessors should have had staff create perfect records. Rather, I am saying that more attention should be paid to key data elements to make sure they are up-to-date and accurate. I know many would say, “Oh, yeah, there’s the rub.” Meaning, the real question is, what are the key data elements to which we need to pay attention and keep in good shape, and who gets to decide that? I’ll leave my answers to those questions for a future post.

The Abbott Report

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I recently read a final report from the task force on the university library at The University of Chicago, written by Andrew Abbott, a professor of sociology there. It is fascinating reading and I hope it will receive widespread attention because it touches upon many issues that large academic and research libraries are facing. The angle at Chicago may be somewhat different than some other places but I think it is broadly illustrative and informative. It is interesting to note Abbott’s discussion on the theory of library research. For example, he boldy states the following:

“There is a good deal of writing about libraries and library knowledge from an informational science (IS) standpoint, but the theory of knowledge it presupposes is rooted, like IS itself, in engineering-based theories of information that turn out to be largely irrelevant to what it is that humanistic research actually produces. And in any case the information science literature arises basically within the professional debates, which to this writer seem driven more by the familiar dynamics of interprofessional competition than by deep thinking about knowledge.” (emphasis mine)

Another highly interesting point made in this report is that research data on library usage at Chicago points to the fact that the dramatically increased availability of e-resources such as e-journals, e-books, and databases has not replaced reliance by Chicago students on traditional library material. As Abbott puts it:

“There is no evidence whatever of substitution of electronic for print resources at the individual level. The two seem synergistic.”

This is great stuff because it flies in the face of assumptions that we too easily make about e-resources vs. print materials. We often assume, in other words, that print resources are less valuable, less often used with the advent of e-resources. Granted, the mix of students and the culture at Chicago may be somewhat unusual, but even so, this conclusion has significant ramifications.

There is more, much more here to enjoy and to stimulate thinking about the role of libraries.

Two gadgets away from nirvana

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“…Two gadgets away from nirvana.” I had a good chuckle over that line, which is part of a much longer post about the possibilities for e-books from SimonWaldman.net. The author outlines some good points about the way that certain pieces seem to be aligning in a positive way for the e-book market (both for the publisher, and for the reader). Honestly, I am not (yet) a fan of e-books at all, from the angle of one who has managed or provided access to a fairly large (several thousand) collection of e-books in a library, as well as from the patron angle. One of the best implementations of e-books that I’ve seen in the past few years is Safari Tech Books Online (available for libraries through ProQuest). Other e-book collections and services, however, are not particularly user friendly as of yet, including those provided by netLibrary, eBrary, and Overdrive. The last vendor in particular bugs me because it does not support or allow e-books to be downloaded onto an iPod. I’m sure my local public library and its consortial members have put lots of money into providing access to these e-books from Overdrive but this glaring omission in functionality renders the service useless to me.