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I'm not very good at staying on top of blogs without RSS feeds, so I only noticed today that Liberry Blooze is back after a brief hiatus. Because it's written by a fellow Minnesotan librarian, I'd have to read Liberry Blooze even if it was really boring. But this blog is one of the funniest that I've read in quite a while - and that's not just counting library blogs.
This Slashdot discussion about bn.com's decision to discontinue selling eBooks reminded me to write about my own experience with eBooks.
First, my experience of eBooks at work. About a year ago, my library started subscribing to netLibrary's eBook collection. These titles are now catalogued, and I come across them from time to time in my reference work. The downside is the somewhat cumbersome individual registration process, complete with another username and password to remember. The upside is that once this has been completed, library users can login and use available eBooks anywhere with an internet connection, 24/7.
Still, even when the initial registration has been completed, accessing an eBook from a library catalogue is a multi-step process.
- Select the link within the library catalogue to view the eBook in netLibrary
- Login to netLibrary
- Decide whether you just want to browse the book briefly or "check it out" for a longer period (during which time, other users can't check out the book - obviously an anachronistic concession to copyright law)
Unless your internet connection is really slow, all of the above is still probably faster than pulling a book from the library shelves.
netLibrary has several enhancements for the eBook medium. It allows you to search the full-text of the book for search terms. This is particularly nice for reference librarians who might be trying to find whether a particular book mentions a particular issue. A good printed index is better than most search engines any day, and fortunately, if a book does have an index, you can browse through it on netLibrary. netLibrary also allows you to make bookmarks and notes in the books that you are reading.
I have noticed that some netLibrary books can be viewed natively within the browser, while other titles can only be viewed via the Adobe Reader. I don't know if this is because of DRM (Digital Rights Management), but it is far more cumbersome and difficult to view titles within the Adobe Reader. Also, the variation here is disconcerting.
I have tried printing a couple of pages from a netLibrary book and didn't have any problems. So on the whole, the netLibrary collection of books is a helpful addition to our library's collection. netLibrary's law collection is not huge, but it does contain a lot of Nolo legal self-help titles which my academic library doesn't get a lot of, but which are useful to recommend to pro se people. One concern that I have about netLibrary is that although it's a decent enough collection, it's homogenous. There is little room for customizing a library's netLibrary collection. I worry that as library budgets are cut, which tends to happen, cash-strapped libraries might rely more on their netLibrary collection (which is also quite cost effective for the library) as opposed to their print collections which are chosen locally. The danger is that library collections, like bookshops, will become too homogenized and centralized.
I'd now like to mention my experiences reading an eBook at home on the Adobe Reader. This has been my first experience with eBooks at home. Until the recent release of the Adobe Reader, no eBook readers were available for Mac OS X users. I downloaded two eBook versions of Nineteenth Century novels from Amazon. They were much cheaper than the print editions - only around $2-3. I am not interested in buying eBooks unless I get a substantial discount!
There were a few hoops involved in getting past Adobe's much-reviled DRM, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. Of course, I haven't yet tried to move my eBooks to a different computer, so I haven't really felt the claws of the DRM personally.
So I'm now reading Charles Dicken's Dombey and Son on my iBook via the Adobe Reader. This book is over a thousand pages long. I thought that it would be strange and difficult to read a novel like this as an eBook. Actually, in some ways it's more comfortable. I can lie in bed with the iBook on my chest and have the Adobe Reader automatically scroll at a slow speed which matches my reading. This saves me from a lot of scrolling and I can easily vary the speed if I need to. If I'm feeling particularly lazy, I can have the iBook read the book aloud to me. Admittedly, computer-generated voices are still quite nasty and very expressionless. It's also nice to be able to change the size of the text, and highlight pages and make notes without damaging the book. As a librarian, I have a major and irrational hang-up about marking up my own personal copies of books.
I think that eBooks have a lot of potential and I hope that they can work out. One of their biggest attractions for me is that they can reduce the growth of my bulky and heavy printed book collection. (It's so easy to accumulate books, and if I move back to Tasmania, I'm going to have a huge freight bill to move it)
If eBooks ever going to take off, they'll need to overcome these three hurdles. Cost - eBooks must be significantly cheaper than printed books. Although I bought Dombey and Son and Anna Karenina cheaply - this was for the most generic bare-bones Amazon.com eBook edition. I should also be able to buy an eBook of a Penguin edition with a critically acclaimed translation and introduction for only a little bit more. Content - People need to get into the habit of reading eBooks. This won't happen until it's the rule and not the exception that all new titles are published as eBooks. DRM - This must be easy to set up and unintrusive for the average reader. DRM which makes it difficult for consumers to keep their purchased content as they upgrade their hardware or software, or backup their purchases will keep people away from eBooks.
The only reason why DRM exists is because the content providers don't trust their customers. In this case, Adobe doesn't trust Adobe Reader users not to upload their eBooks onto a web site where anybody could download them for free, or make them available to the world on peer-to-peer file sharing services. I think that content owners have a legitimate concern here. But the thing is that trust is a two-way street. For consumers to buy-into eBooks, they need to trust that they're not paying money for something that will disappear in a year or two - or whenever the content owners happen to feel miserly. So how can content owners say to consumers, "trust us that your eBooks will not disappear because of a computer problem or one of our whims" when it's clear that they don't trust consumers at all?
Hmm - today on two of my main news sources, I've seen this wire story about librarians being upset about the librarian action-figure.
Here's the Sydney Morning Herald's version. Salon is a bit more detailed.
I think that the librarian action figure does perpetuate that stereotype of the dowdy middle-aged librarian who hates noise. I also think that the librarians should lighten up a little about the issue.
Of course, there are so many young, hip and non-shooshing librarians. I would like to think that I'm one of them and that therefore the action figure doesn't represent me. I don't need to denounce the idea of the action figure or criticize the model for it, because I'm comfortable with who I am.
Maybe it's also because I'm a guy. Because most librarians are female, and so most of the librarian stereotypes do not, can not apply to me, I'm used to ignoring them. For me, the stereotypes have always been wrong and non-applicable, but many women might find the stereotypes downright insulting.
This isn't to say that I never catch any grief about being a male librarian - inside or outside the profession - but that's an issue which I'm leaving well alone right now.
I would have been chuffed if the action figure had been a nerdy-looking guy who was shooshing people, because that would have been a message to the world that sometimes men are librarians. People talk about how positive Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Giles was for librarians, especially male librarians. Well, it is was positive in the sense that Giles was good-looking, knowledgeable, as well as a courageous & able fighter. On the other hand, especially when Giles actually was a librarian (seasons 1-3), the Scooby gang would constantly stir him about tweed, smelling of dusty and musty books, being pedantic and humourless, and liking cross-referencing. Giles brought some of this on himself by constantly railing against the infernal machines (computers) and the internet. Frankly, he was a bit of a luddite.
My point is that although Giles was a mixed portrayal of a librarian, I still really appreciated it that he was there.
And as a law librarian, I would rather choose the librarian's negative image than the lawyer's! At least there aren't books of jokes comparing librarians to the lowest form of life :) On the other hand, the negative image of lawyer's is somewhat counter-balanced by portrayals of the the rare, courageous lawyer fighting for justice.
That's what librarians need to do. Don't take the clothes and the shooshing so seriously. Instead, reinforce people's positive associations with librarians. We know how to help people find what they're looking for - whether it's a novel for light reading or understanding taxation law. We tirelessly fight for people's freedom to read (and therefore, think) without harassment by the government. If only that action figure's other hand was giving the finger to John Ashcroft!
We shouldn't be so defensive and scared of the negative stereotypes because no matter what you are, people will always take the piss out of you, especially if you take yourself too seriously.
Not that I really care, because AOL Journals still don't work properly for Mac users, but if you use AOL on the new version 9.0 Optimized (for Windows), then AOL Journals will work properly for you, without needing to open up IE 6 to do your blogging. That's a step forward for Windows, but I'm not holding my breath for them to get AOL journals working properly for Mac users. The bug being that it is impossible to have a entry which contains both a title and links.
Wow, almost two weeks have passed and I've had very little time for blogging. So I guess I'm a little behind in my plans to transition to TypePad. I've been busy at work, having been participating on a hiring panel with the Dean and Assistant Dean of the law school. It's been very interesting - and helpful, hopefully - for me to get this experience on the other side of the process. Oh yes, our campus was hit really hard with Blaster and SobigF. I didn't open any of the stupid attachments, but even so, I received over 6800 emails on the first day! Of course, my Mac was all right, but I still need to use my work PC for a few things.
Things have been busy - in a good kind of way - in my personal life in the last two weeks. That's probably all that I can say here. I do have a LiveJournal where I discuss my personal life in more details. This one is at a deeper level privacy than the explodedlibrary. It's a curious thing for a librarian - who's mission is about allowing access to information - to devise a mechanism for revealing information to some, while restricting it from others. Blogging is not an all or nothing activity - hence the need for layers.
As blogging and other virtual community activities continue to develop, will these issues of privacy become problematic? There is a tension between the need to share information with kindred spirits while concealing it from casual Googling. Will the wedding of the future involve not just an exchange of rings, but each person's identities on the web?
Could a formalization of a friendship be sharing one's friends-only journal?
Alternatively, maybe I think about all this too much.
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