Editorial: No Cyberhysteria Here
Ebooks aren't the enemy
Francine Fialkoff, Editor -- Library Journal, 12/15/2005
The serious novel “is in danger of becoming a footnote to our cybernetic world,” if you believe Norman Mailer's assertion at the National Book Awards November 16. You may be worried that the awards themselves will become “the National Text Awards, the National Content Awards,” as emcee Garrison Keillor quipped, referring to the Google project to digitize library books. Keillor might also have been pointing to the recent announcements by Amazon.com and Random House Inc. that they would sell online books by the page(s) and the Google model being floated to publishers to “rent” access to books online for one or two weeks at ten percent of list price.
For those in the library world, neither concern is dire, though Keillor's opens a Pandora's box of issues. The books nominated for the fiction award, and the winner, William Vollman's Europe Central, seem to belie Mailer's dirge, drawing kudos both from LJ's Book Review editors and librarians. In fact, through their blogs, web sites, podcasts, journals, and so on, librarians are offering users new models of communication and creation that may eventually lead to new kinds of nonfiction and fiction, including “the serious novel.” My colleague Andrew Albanese, who writes the free weekly (now-html) LJ Academic Newswire, firmly believes that technology is the hope for serious literature: “It gives small publishers a cheaper way to produce books that wouldn't see the light of day at large houses, as well as ways to sell their books to worldwide audiences,” he says.
As for cybertext, librarians have been living through various electronic incarnations of print for well over a decade. These latest electronic forays are merely a repetition of the shift to e-journals and e-reference, with all the attendant use, pricing, and copyright models still in flux.
If the response to a recent LJ webcast, “eBooks Take the Ivory Tower,” is any indication, in the academic world librarians are embracing ebooks as assiduously as they did e-journals. Over 550 librarians signed up for the webcast; nearly 400 tuned in (the webcast is now archived at www.libraryjournal.com/learn). Eighty percent of the 152 librarians who responded to a webcast poll said they were buying ebooks. Over 70 percent indicated they'd be willing to pay a $1.99 surcharge for electronic access—Amazon's suggested price for purchasing a print/online combination. Of about 200 respondents who told us how they bought, 40 percent said they were purchasing ebooks as part of a consortial deal, 33 percent said they were buying them as part of a package, and 27 percent said they were buying individual titles.
Like online bookseller Amazon, webcast panelists Suzanne Weiner (North Carolina State Univ. Libraries) and Jim Mouw (Univ. of Chicago Lib.) also believe that ebooks stimulate the use (or in Amazon's case, the sale) of printed books. Weiner said she might be interested in looking at a pilot with Amazon to buy books “by the drink.” Mouw said buying “a chapter might be an interesting model to explore” that could turn ILL (interlibrary loan) on its head.
As usual, librarians aren't intimidated by the new. They embrace it and then try to ensure that the models developed by publishers and distributors serve their users well. They've managed to extend the dissemination of reference and journal literature via electronic delivery and put the brakes on runaway pricing. Now they're in the process of integrating their book (i.e., monograph) and ebook budgets and purchasing. While authors and publishers' associations slug it out with Google over digitization, librarians are moving ahead. There's no doubt they will face challenges protecting fair use in the ebook world. There's also no doubt in my mind that they will persevere. No, Mr. Mailer, those are not “barbarians” at the gates, those are librarians, welcoming a new format and a new technology that might just save the “serious” book.
