Libraries and publishing’s Ice Age
From a recent piece in Salon, titled “Read it and weep“:
Who will survive publishing’s Ice Age? Undoubtedly, the companies that can command developments in the impending digital book revolution. Early next year, Amazon will release the second generation of the popular Kindle, and the Sony e-Reader currently has more than 300,000 users. But the biggest shift might happen on cellphones. Lexcycle has created an e-reader platform for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Stanza. Since the application debuted in July, it has built up 600,000 users. So far, Lexcycle has partnered with big publishers like Random House, Pan Macmillan and Harlequin, as well as self-publishing companies like Smashwords.
Anyone who’s been following big publishing news in the last few months has seen the trend: hiring freezes, pension freezes, layoffs, and even freezes on acquiring MSS. Which is sort of nuts–publishers publish. It’s what they do. If they decide they can’t afford to buy MSS any more, they’re basically deciding they can’t afford to exist.
Does this mean publishing is dead? Maybe yes, a bit. Maybe no. Jason Boog, who wrote the Salon piece, suggests that smaller, niche-based companies and on-demand printing may be the future of publishing. He also points to digital book readers (see above) as a major trend and a mission-critical strategy for publishers.
What does this mean for libraries? How many libraries do you know that lend Kindles or similar devices? How many have subscriptions or publisher deals that allow them to offer e-books on demand? How many academic libraries are doing this? And how many academic publishers may start looking to print-on-demand or digital publishing in the next few years, as traditional print publication becomes ever less feasible?
I know at least one person who got a Kindle for the holidays, and another who wants one (but can’t afford it yet.) I’d love to have one but the price is way too steep. I’d love the library to have one available to lend out to students, but so far the content seems pretty heavily oriented to leisure reading, not scholarly study. E-book readers: make a well-designed tool that sniffs local wireless (i.e. Touch), has a page-like reading experience (i.e. Kindle), and offers high-quality interactive color graphics so students can read, rotate, modify, and annotate drawings, plans, and graphs (i.e….?) Make that, and let’s see if we can get past PDFs on laptops in the next few years.
Never waste a good crisis…
Return to posting: Designing from libraries
We’ve been snowed under in Portland for the last couple of weeks–work closures and the holidays have conspired to keep me from rolling up the garage door on the blog. But now we’re thawing out (raining, actually) and I’m going through some of my Google Reader backlog to see what’s going on in the library-ish parts of the world.
Here’s a fun item from the New York Public Library (actually from Apartment Therapy and Design*Sponge, but NYPL is the sponsor.)
Design by the Book: NYPL partnered with Design*Sponge to select and invite five visual artists to plumb the library collection, then create a work of art based on something they found that inspired them. The NYPL then posted video interviews with the artists about their work. Check it all out at the NYPL website (which isn’t loading for me right now, sorry.)
What a great example of something I’ve been thinking a bit about lately: “activating” the collection. That’s my own term, but I probably picked it up from somewhere else, since nothing is truly original.f Every so often, in the midst of meetings and emails and drafting policy, it occurs to me that we’re sitting on these incredible collections, with really wonderful, mind-blowing stuff in them, and that the best way to reach out to our users is through that stuff. Exhibits are great, but what are some other ways we can “activate” the collections to bring users in and remind them of the riches we tend and steward for the comomunity? This is one terrific idea.
