It’s E-book week: How do libraries provide content?

This week, March 3rd-March 9th, is considered E-book week officially. (There is a bit of controversy whether it is this week or next, read more here.) I find that it is a good opportunity to talk about e-books, e-readers, and the library’s role in this second wave of electronic reading.

The failure of the first wave of e-books came from people who were unwilling to read a book on a computer screen. The infamous rocketbook went down in flames for this reason, and many others.

The second wave of e-readers have attempted to make changes so that they are more consistent with how people read print books. They are not back-lit (thanks to e-ink technology), they are very light and small (size of paperback), and they can hold more than one book (the Sony Reader can store 100 books on its internal memory alone.) So the industry is learning how to make changes to e-readers so that this new technology will be easily adaptable. You can read a recent debate between the two major competitors Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader here. As far as readers go, you cannot move their cheese and expect them to utilize your products. There are an overwhelming amount of readers that will never part with a printed book.

There are, of course, many problems with the e-readers. They are very expensive ($400 for a reader versus $20 for a book), the technology can break, the screen reader is not perfect, and (most importantly) you cannot freely pick and choose what content to put on it. For instance, Amazon Kindle only works with Kindle adapted files, the same with the Sony Reader. Amazon is much better because, well, they are Amazon. The Sony Reader books must be purchased from the Sony Reader store.

In my opinion, providing content on these devices, or future e-reader devices is the biggest problem when it comes to devices. This problem is not immune to e-readers. If you have an Ipod you know that you can only play ipod compatible music or movies. The format wars for e-readers, commonly referred to as the tower of e-babel. Format wars are not uncommon, but they limit the ability to use these devices.

In the past year, libraries have accelerated their roles in adapting to the e-book market. Overdrive is one of the top providers of downloadable e-books, audiobooks, music, and movies for their patrons. A big consortium is the Greater Phoenix Digital Library. How do libraries fare in providing digital content to its users via Overdrive? Generally, the content is excellent, but the formats are limited as is the convenience.

E-books and audiobooks provide the highest level of selection. The latest popular fiction and non-fiction can be found very quickly. The audiobook selection is also excellent. Upon viewing the catalog, I could tell that the audiobooks were very popular as there were very few that were not on hold. The e-books were much more plentiful. After some research, I noticed that many libraries that are going to overdrive or going with audiobook only selections. I would bet the reasoning was that the format is easier to download and the devices are more plentiful. I can get a cheapie mp3 player and play anything I download on overdrive. However, the e-books are quite complicated.

To download an e-book and read it on a e-reader, I have to downgrade my adobe reader to 7.0. I would have to look at the compatible devices. Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle are not part of the compatible devices. Therefore, I wanted to read something from overdrive, I would have to use a device like a pda or smartphone to do it. Not exactly the library market. We need to find a way to make this service work with popular e-reader devices. This is a good connection because I believe e-readers will be more popular if the content connected with services like overdrive. The reason why they don’t work now is that neither will read a Digital Rights Management protected pdf. In order for libraries to make the e-book/overdrive program a success, the e-readers must be opened, or Overdrive must provide content that can be used on any device. A good example of this is Manybooks.net They take the books from Project Guttenburg and make it easy to download the e-book you want into the format you need. It works with Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle, and you can even put a book on your Iphone. If overdrive worked in this way, you would have an explosive new model of electronic content that would boost a major segment of the population.

Many of these programs and devices are still in its infancy, but there is a golden opportunity for libraries to provide greater content to an increasingly digital world. Can we make the changes?

 

An introduction and why you should blog

I wanted to introduce myself and to thank Anali and the members of the group for the warm welcome. My name is Jeff Scott and I am the Library Manager for the City of Casa Grande Public Library . I blog over at Gather No Dust, a blog about my experiences running a public library.

I have been blogging for about a year and a half now and it has been a very rewarding experience. I think I have contributed to the library “grey” literature in this way. I feel like my thoughts are much more focused and that I can act and implement my ideas more quickly and effeciently. I started blogging because management is a mystery to many librarians. I wanted to bring my experiences and share my story so that more people can understand how a library is run and how management can work.

Some of the items I plan to talk about here are:

Work productivity (Sort of like a lifehacker for library and librarians, see my first post about using delicious)

Practical uses of technology (How to use technology tools to improve services and market the library)

Usability of libraries (I like to experiment with the different ways my library works and could work. I will write some of those items here.)

I think many librarians should be blogging. I know it is difficult to find the time with the workload of librarianship, but so many people could benefit from your experience. I started blogging because I found myself responding to PubLib so much. I began to think, that there should be a place online that talks about this or about what I am doing. So many people can benefit from blogs just as they would from conference programs or library journal articles. That is why I like the MCLC Techtalk blog so much, it treats the posts as if you presenting a program.

Some of my blogging tips:

You should read and comment more than you write.

This helps with maintenance issues on your blog. The more you read, the more content there is to write about. Furthermore, commenting on other blogs helps the discussion and will lead more people back to your blog.

You should not read just library stuff

Read funny stuff, stuff that you are interested in, not just libraries. It helps for a more well-rounded experience.

Comment on blogs

This is the easiest thing to do even if you don’t blog. A comment can be as powerful to convey a message as a post itself. So if you are reading something and don’t agree, say so!

Don’t be a slave to your blog

Update when you want to and post about whatever you want. If you get too concerned about content, you will find your blog to be a chore. Right about whatever is on your mind whenever you want! Afterall, it is your blog. Furthermore, you don’t have to update your blog regularly! That’s right, most people read blogs through an RSS aggregator. That means people just read updated blogs. They won’t notice if you don’t update. Most people don’t unsubscribe from a blog that hasn’t been updated, they usually unsubscribe because there are too many posts or that the posts are too long (or just doesn’t interest them). So go ahead, state your opinion, document your experience, help the library world with your creative ideas and opinions. We will all be better off for it.

 

How to share your reference brilliance without any extra work using bookmarks, del.icio.us, and firefox

Every reference librarian has been there. They find this great site for a patron, bookmark it, and it is there waiting for them when they return. This works great for that librarian, however, other librarians may not be aware of this fantastic link and the information isn’t shared. Sure, you can save the link and place it in a wiki or on the library’s website, but that takes a long time. If you have several links and haven’t updated in a while, it can be a real pain to keep up. However, there is a solution! You can use several different techniques and programs to share the information gathered. You can use this same technique to transfer your bookmarks to another computer.

The simple procedure: Exporting bookmarks from Internet Explorer
There is a separate support page available here that explains how to import and export bookmarks in Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 6
To export the Favorites folder, follow these steps:
1. Start Internet Explorer
2. On the File menu, click Import and Export, and then click Next.
3. Click Export Favorites and then click Next.
4. Click Favorites and then click Next.
5. Type the name of the file that you want to export the favorites to. By default, the export file is named Bookmark.htm.
6. Click Next and then click Finish.

You will then have an html document of your bookmarks named bookmarks.htm. It should be available when you go to My Documents. You now have a full list of your bookmarks categorized by the folder you created. You have several things you can now do with your bookmarks:

1. Import them into another browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox
2. Put them into a webpage
3. Import them into delicious

To import bookmarks:
1. Go to File and click on Import and Export and click next
2. Select Import
3. It should profile the directory of what you would like to import. You can also browse to find the file
4. Click import, and the files should appear

Put them in a webpage
If you go to View and then click on source data, it provides the html code for the webpage. You can paste this code into any webpage. If you have a simple editor (like a What You See is What You Get or WYSWYG editor) you only need to copy and paste this page in.

Put them in delicious
You can also import this link list into a http://del.icio.us/ account for everyone to see. This way, you don’t need to copy and paste code for a webpage, you just import into delicious. Delicious is a social bookmarking site. Social bookmarking means that you can share the bookmark with multiple people. If you don’t have a delicious account, one is freely available by going to the website and clicking on get started. You can enter your information and once finished, click on import and it will import that same bookmarks.htm file into your delicious account. Voila! you now have all of your links online, categorized in your way, available for everyone to see, and now you can update it whenever you have a new bookmark. You can drag a button called Post to Delicious into your Internet Explorer browser. By clicking on this button, the webpage you are at is sent to your delicious account instead of into your local browser. For a list of libraries that use delicious, click here.

This also generates an RSS feed. This feed can send the link out to different locations on your webpage, to other users, or anyone who subscribes. I won’t got into detail abour RSS feeds in this post as it is a minor piece to this procedure. It is also covered in detail here: If you would like more information, you can watch this brief video

Okay now you want to get fancy
This next part requires a firefox download. Ask your administrator to download firefox on your computer or to allow it to be run from a flash drive. You can get a flash drive and download portable apps Firefox edition. Once installed, you can download a plug-in called delicious plug-in. Once you have this part installed you can click on a button in your browser and you can stay on the same page you are on when you bookmark. It also simultaneously keeps the bookmark in your browser. A pop-up window comes up with the url and title, plus an option to add notes and tags. With a portable app like this, you can carry all of your bookmarks around wherever you go. At a conference? Plug in your flash drive and have all of your bookmarks at the ready. It can be a lifesaver.