ReadersFirst, the international coalition of libraries seeking to reassert control of user discovery and access for digital content, turned out on a rainy, cold afternoon at Seattle Public Library during ALA Midwinter to discuss their goals with the library vendor community. Members of the ReadersFirst (RF) steering committee ran over the organization’s history and mission, and then elicited engagement with senior representatives from the companies selling services that often, at present, conflict with the goals of RF.

RF seeks a common, cross-content discovery layer in the library catalog so that users only experience the library’s own web services. RF’s goal is for content providers and platforms, such as Overdrive, to provide APIs that enable users to request and retrieve materials without additional vendor interaction. For example, ebooks could retrieved “under the hood” from Overdrive without the user needing to re-authenticate or encounter systems beyond the library catalog. Currently, because libraries are forced to subscribe to services from multiple vendors, the user’s experience of digital media use is fractured with multiple vendor accounts, and ebooks are then accessed through different paths ranging from download to cloud-based access. As steering committee member Christina de Castell of the Vancouver Public Library said, “We don’t need the reader to know where the library bought the ebook from.”

Tom Galante of Queens Public Library reinforced, “The reader should be able to look at their library account and see what they have borrowed regardless of the vendor that supplied the ebook.” Continue reading →

San Antonio, Texas has a history of supporting mavericks; in fact, the word originates from a signer of Texas Independence, Samuel Maverick, whose grandson, Maury, also held true to his surname. Now that Bexar (pronounced “Bear”) County, San Antonio’s home, is committed to building a new public library, BiblioTech, that will be devoid of all printed books, County Judge Nelson W. Wolff stands to follow in hallowed South Texas footsteps. Judge Wolff is a progressive politician who was also the founder of Sun Harvest Farms, a natural foods grocery store chain. As an elected County official, the Judge is something of an overlord along with the County Commission over many essential County-wide functions and services, including taxes and infrastructure investments.

“BiblioTech,” a play on the Spanish word for library, biblioteca, will open up on the south side of the county as a test of the proposition that providing a mix of services centered on Internet access and access to e-books is a cost effective strategy for providing information resources and library services to far-suburban and rural communities. Although the city has been providing library services to the county, it recently upped the tab from $3.7MM to $6.7MM – the highest city-county bill in the nation. As growth in unincorporated areas outside the city limits continues, the city has found it increasingly expensive to provide library services to areas without much in the way of their own tax base.

BiblioTech fits into Judge Wolff’s pattern of encouraging the long-term development of San Antonio. The vision anticipates a multi-location facility providing community information needs, with the first site serving as a model; it would be open into evening hours, available to registered County residents, and would provide access to up to an anticipated 10,000 ebook titles, supported with a pool of up to 100 e-readers. On January 15, 2013 the County gave its permission to release an RFP for an e-reader provider, a RFQ for an architect to remodel some existing underutilized County space, initial budgetary capital and operations (for computers and ebooks, among other things), and the creation of an advisory board.

Taking advantage of a visit to San Antonio, I was able to sit down with the Judge to talk about this new initiative and its longer term goals. In a wide ranging interview that included senior staff, I was impressed with his awareness of the overall public library environment. Partly inspired from the local UTSA engineering library, which went bookless in 2010, and Stanford’s engineering library, Wolff is alert to the dramatic shifts in digital access. I raised the most obvious objection from other library directors – that no digital library can be comprehensive today because of publisher reluctance to license their books – and he readily acknowledged that not all literature could be presented to county residents through an ebook platform. Yet, he was hopeful that forward-looking demonstrations of community libraries such as BiblioTech would encourage publishers to enlarge their offerings, reaching readers that lacked any bookstore.

Judge Wolff sees BiblioTech as not just a model for Bexar County, but far beyond it. With great enthusiasm, the County’s staff is rapidly gathering information about e-book vendors and licensing models; educating itself about national initiatives such as ReadersFirst; and has contacted innovative libraries ranging from New York Public to Chattanooga. BiblioTech will have a strong children’s area, with dedicated technology support and a concentration on children’s e-literature. More broadly, as expected from a leader long engaged in State and local politics, Wolff is beginning to consider what mix of community information needs can be presented through its facility; citizen education is considered an important element. And, perhaps because of its newness and innocence, it seems everyone has leapt to provide assistance. Even praise on the layout, size, and staffing of Apple stores has brought offers of help from unexpected places.

The serious grappling with what future libraries will embrace extends well beyond how they will address books. The BiblioTech team is also considering digital access to music and movies. Although the Judge’s staff had little exposure to maker spaces and some of the other forms of technology engagement and education, they were eager to learn about the range of opportunities. Wolff has been instrumental in bringing large concerns into San Antonio, such as Toyota’s newest truck manufacturing facility – on the same side of the city as BiblioTech – and has formed strong ties to Rackspace, a native San Antonio startup. and powerful cloud storage and computing provider. The opportunity to reshape libraries in San Antonio is significant, and with it there is an opportunity to inform what libraries look like across the globe.

Although it is not a popular opinion, I believe that library ebook borrowing erodes ebook sales, at least modestly, particularly of frontlist titles, net of whatever positive marketing effect libraries have in introducing new books and authors to readers. Obviously, it would be useful to verify this with solid data, but it is damnably difficult to construct a reliable instrument with control cases. Determining whether (and how) innovative, alternative models of ebook retailing might impact both publishers and libraries bears further examination, and recently I have started thinking about the possible impact of ebook subscription services.

Most considerations of library e-book lending take into account the potential commercial impact on digital book markets, as well as consumer expectations of the e-books we buy. Without question, there are gaping holes in ebook functionality that frustrate readers. For example, the inability to lend an e-book I’ve purchased to my wife is a maddening display of pecuniary greed that diminishes the overall value of the publishing sector.

When it comes to the market impact of library e-book lending, there are many factors to bear in mind. One is the suggestion that potentially losing some frontlist sales while profiting from reader introductions to more authors and books is a worthwhile trade, ultimately smoothing the revenue curve across publishers’ available inventory. Many publishers, however, believe that community services such as Goodreads already do a good enough job with recommendations, while delivering more efficient and stronger direct sales.

Brian O’Leary, meanwhile, has convincingly argued that libraries are the first, best defense against piracy, bringing readers into the market who would not otherwise buy copies, and that failure to accommodate the demand for borrowing a free e-book, however inefficiently, would engender far worse consequences in consumer behavior than losing a modest number of sales from library lending. But so far, the focus of the current discussion on e-books has failed to examine truly alternative measures, like subscription access.

A much-discussed option for publishers is a subscription service to a comprehensive set of books for a modest fee, usually near $10 a month for a base level membership, with streaming access to titles that are convertible to downloadable ebook sales. This “Spotify-for-e-books” approach has seen recent entrants including 24Symbols, Jellybooks, and most recently Oyster, joining stalwarts Safari Books Online in technical literature, Tor (to an extent) in scifi/fantasy, and Harlequin in romance. In a kissing-cousins effort, Bilbary is attempting to marry borrowing from public libraries with publisher compensation via an innovative, subsidized rental model. It is also worth recalling that Google was entertaining the idea of eventual consumer subscription access to the Google Books library in its defeated settlement proposals. And Amazon, of course, could enter this market with rather trivial effort.

Thus far, however, no general trade book subscription effort has emerged, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The obvious challenge is establishing a deep, broad-enough list of titles to induce a large enough number of subscribers to join, and the appropriate rights for older backlist titles may not be present. In addition, the revenue question gets sticky once readers have been converted to subscribers. The economics are not simple, and the only thing that obviates the same, exact problem that libraries now face (the belief that library lends lead to lost book sales) is if you can attract enough people as subscribers who would otherwise not be reading at all, or otherwise reading at the base threshold of whatever membership level you can up-sell them into.

Nevertheless, there is a growing realization by publishers that setting up consumer-facing retail relationships as an alternative to Amazon’s monopsony has its benefits. This is evident in the hard slog that start-up Bookshout is encountering as it attempts to provide a vendor-neutral cloud-based bookshelf for readers. It is also evident in the launch of the beta-status Ownshelf, which is similarly attempting to crack the proprietary media silos of Amazon, Apple, and to a lesser extent Google.

Quixotically, the existence of these start-ups is reliant on the platforms created by the technology giants whose retailing arms they seek to interpose: if it weren’t for iOS and Android, and the growing ubiquity of mobile phones and tablets, these start-ups would have no chance. Unless Apple, Amazon, and Google have the gumption to eliminate all alternative e-readers from their app stores (which just might warrant a wee bit of interest from the Department of Justice) there is some room to maneuver.

But therein also lies the catch: any subscription service from publishers can’t simply rest on the laurels of a compelling list with attractive membership levels, and effective marketing. They must be able to bridge the reader, device, and catalog. In the sector of technology literature, for example, it is not for nothing that Safari Books Online hired the Threepress team that developed the Ibis Reader web application. Look for more of this in the future.

For publishers, offering a subscription alternative would have another outcome: it would make library borrowing unattractive. In other words, an effective subscription book service would nudge one of the most attractive segments of the library population into a consumer market: heavy readers, who heretofore have accepted the hassles of library borrowing rather than face the monetary burden of having to purchase individual titles. By delivering these heavy readers into a marketplace, subscription models could potentially leave libraries serving as the public community hospitals of the ebook market.

The key question is whether creating this alternative market is worthwhile for publishers. Rational publishers might recognize the benefits of moving avid readers from libraries into the marketplace through subscription models, as well as opening up a narrow wedge against Amazon. A subscription could also alleviate some piracy issues, because if there are ready market options, consumers will flock to those in most cases, rather than deal with downloading non-reflowable PDFs or uncorrected OCR’ed EPUBs from rogue digital book sites. On the flip side, a subscription service might give final proof to O’Leary’s insight that there is a market for content whose price is zero, forcing that small sector into the grey net by removing the library option.

For libraries, the emergence of e-book subscriptions may not be good news. A thriving subscription market might enervate the viability of libraries in ebook lending. Or, it might not. Perhaps library markets could be effectively married with subscription models, despite the costs of managing the synergy. But that would take a degree of flexibility and nimbleness on both sides of the ebook aisle that I have yet to see.