In Front of (e)Readers

To quote Will & Grace, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV, January 7–10, was “a nightmare/delightful!” Five times larger than even the largest library conference, the show's 35 football field–long bazaar of technology marvels and gimmicks—along with thousands of reps hawking them—was almost enough to put a person off gadget lust for good.

The diamonds in the rough, luckily, give us hope for gadget-kind. These drive the real stories that come out of CES and highlight the underlying ideas and needs pushing technology forward. So instead of thinking about every device debuted at the show—most of which won't ever make it out of the prototype or first-run phase anyhow—I entered CES looking for what your intrepid, technology vanguard patron will expect when s/he walks through the library doors. (Of course, I couldn't ignore the gadgets entirely, so check out the sidebar for some of the goodies from the show.) On the exhibit floor, I imagined myself in their shoes, excited by not just the possibility of porting materials from one device to another but by the potential for media outlets and personal content libraries to converge as well.

It's time to start prepping on the ways our patrons will soon be expecting to interact with content. Admittedly, the tech coming out of CES is geared toward the well-off, those able to gamble on a gadget that might never work out. But where they lead, broader markets often follow. So while flexible lending—direct-to-device downloads and hassle-free content portability—may take time and pressure from users and the library community, now is the time for libraries to get out in front of their users on whatever technology they'll soon be embracing.

First and foremost, great news for readers: 2010 brings more ereading devices than anyone knows what to do with. The New York Times called the massive number of debuts at CES “A Deluge of Devices for Reading and Surfing,” while Gawker was more to the point, writing, “There Are Officially Too Damn Many Ebook Readers.”

In 2007, Amazon prompted the current ereader frenzy with the Kindle and its tightly controlled integration with Amazon's online marketplace. This year, with a mature market full of ereaders available at a wide range of prices, users will start demanding more access to content—including library materials—in ways that are actually convenient to them. So, now, instead of getting bogged down by the details of screen size and file formats, publishers and librarians can and need finally to get to work hammering out one or more models that give readers flexibility. Library content chained via digital rights management (DRM) to desktop and laptop computers just won't cut it much longer, nor will content from providers that hew too closely to unwieldy web-based platforms, especially as consumer outlets grow up and learn that inflexibility works against them.

The two most arresting book-related demonstrations at CES—of the Copia and Blio ebook platforms—looked beyond the ereader; in fact, they didn't even feature ereader devices as the primary hook. Rather, they aim at something broader, that content on a device is just one small part of a larger reading and content-consuming experience with which the platforms integrate.

First, Blio: the brainchild of Ray Kurzweil, in partnership with Baker & Taylor and the National Federation of the Blind, Blio stands out as a software ereader in a sea of hardware.

The idea is to meld the reading experience with intake of media, including audio, video, and web content. For materials from publishers that grant linked text and audio rights—and a large question here remains as to exactly how many publishers will get on board—users will be able to toggle between the two, or a mix of both, resizing and reflowing the text to suit their needs. Moreover, as software, Blio isn't tied to one device. Indeed, its appeal stems from its ability to sync content to anything that will run the Blio software (Windows PCs to start, then iPhones, Android phones, and later Mac and Linux computers via a web-portal version of the software).

One example of how it might work involves a variation on a pitch we've all heard before but which may soon finally pass the grandparent usability test: say you have a forward-thinking patron who really enjoys a good genre mystery or two a week. This patron wants to read it on her iPhone when she's taking public transportation to work. But when she's back home, maybe she wants to pick up where she left off with the audiobook version instead of tuning in to NPR while foraging for food.

For works distributed via the Blio platform, things like audiobook versions and large-print formats are more like extra features on a DVD than formats to be purchased separately.

Of course, Blio is not the first to claim multidevice support, or the ability to embed web snippets and other content into primarily text-based products. What may set it apart, however, is that it embodies the idea that these features do not merely add value but are instead central to engaging with a text.

Kurzweil is adamant that such flexibility is required to offer equitable access to content and that “multimodal presentation helps comprehension” in a way unparalleled by any stand-alone format. (Kurzweil, in fact, wrote a series of prescient columns for LJ in the 1990s, outlining many of the things he hopes to achieve with the Blio platform; see “The Futurecast,” beginning in the LJ 8/91 issue and appearing monthly). Indeed, if Blio succeeds, it will likely be owing to its focus on multimodal access and the portability of content that that necessarily entails.

Taking off from where Blio's social features stop is Copia, similarly device agnostic. It's a social reading network centered on thecopia.com—slated to go live this month—as much as it's a retail outlet and ebook library. Come June, the company will separately release its own passel of maritime-named e-ink readers (e.g., Ocean, Tidal), but the innovation here is the ability to capitalize on people's desire to extend their existing online relationships rather than selling to individual consumers buying into isolated devices.

According to the company's demo, the Copia web site will link directly into users' existing social networks and offer a variety of social reading features like those found on LibraryThing and GoodReads, such as recommendations and popularly held titles. But the platform will also take that important step beyond presenting bibliographic metadata, hooking in to the full content of the materials.

Users who opt for more relaxed privacy settings will be able to join groups based on shared interests and shared reading lists and will further be able to share among network contacts excerpts (as allowed by the publishers), highlights, and annotations of content they've purchased or downloaded.

Just imagine the possibilities here in the context of a citywide One Book program. As they read the book on their devices, they share annotations, favorite passages, and links to other content with the social reading group they found via the library's web site. One city, one read, a lot of shared experience.

Right now, both Blio and Copia are closed in the sense that while they work on multiple devices, they remain exclusive ecosystems. Neither company had any explicit details available about plans for library lending, though Copia reps mentioned discussions with providers like OverDrive, while Blio reps insisted that their own plans for lending would be forthcoming. (See the editorial, p. 8, for more on lending models.)

The other buzzworthy trend at CES was “convergence.” This isn't a new idea to librarians or tech folks, nor really anything new in the world of consumer electronics. But the convergence specifically at issue in 2010 is something that libraries need to work into their long-range plans or risk being overlooked as patrons gravitate toward services that better meet their content needs and desires.

Basically, the barriers among devices are breaking down, both in terms of the way they're able to interact with one another and how they differ. Gadgets of all kinds are starting to look and feel like proper handheld computers, able to run all sorts of software, while desktop and laptop computers are taking on more and more nontraditional duties, like streaming media to TV sets, stereos, and other household appliances.

The big hardware debut on this front was the Boxee Box, a device that runs the Boxee social media center software and connects to your TV or home theater setup. Boxee has been around since 2008 and is a modification of the popular Xbox Media Center thousands of gamers and others have used to open up their consoles to serve as a dedicated content hub.

The Boxee Box lifts this media center idea out of the quagmire of enthusiast software into the vastly more viable plug-and-play arena. Plug the box into your television, hook it up to the Internet, and you're up and running with channels of content like Netflix for movies, Pandora for streaming radio, and local media collections many users have amassed over the years via SD memory cards or USB. (Apple tried this with the Apple TV, but it's tied too closely to iTunes for most people's tastes and isn't as open to the variety of content channels). The Boxee Box will also come with a well-designed remote featuring a directional pad on one side and a small QWERTY keyboard on the other. So, now users are primed to interact easily with both local and remote content through what's called a ten-foot user interface—essentially, a simplified series of menus navigable with just a remote and readily visible from sofa distance.

All this set-top box stuff is great, but what does this have to do with the domain of content offered by libraries?

Well, the connection was made for me at CES when I heard about another admittedly small, somewhat obscure media center option for the Linux operating system called Enna. These media center software suites are now a dime a dozen, but this one does something different: along with the standard menu options for music, video, and image collections, Enna offers a “Bookstore.” As of right now, this is a little bit of a misnomer; there, users will find content channels that offer a feed of daily comic strips called GoComics, as well as a manga repository called OneManga, where users can page through chapters available online.

But the potential for a genuine bookstore content option is striking, for Enna and all media centers, both software and hardware. If we really are hurtling toward convergence, it makes an awful lot of sense to be able to acquire book, audiobook, and video content right from a household's central media hub (something Apple is almost certainly thinking about, given the company's recent entrance into the bookstore game with the iPad and the iBook app just as this story went to press, and its role as distributor of nearly every other content type).

Take the format convergence we're seeing with Blio, as well as its platform-level mobility of content also demonstrated by products from Copia and others, and mash all that up with the idea of a centralized home media source like Boxee or Enna, or any of a dozen others, and think about what your patrons will be getting used to.

Go back to that first simple example of our genre mystery fan toggling between ebook and audiobook. Now forget listening to the audio through paltry smartphone speakers, or in-ear buds. Upon arriving home, she picks the menu option on her media center–based software that's in touch with both her mobile device and her library account, et voilà, audiobook streaming to the speakers in the kitchen, picking up right where she left off.

Or take a parental example. It's no secret that a lot of parents park their kids in front of the tube with the remote and a Dora the Explorer DVD. Content-as-babysitter arguments aside, replace Dora with a high-res, page-turn version of Where the Wild Things Are (the book, not the recent film!). Isn't that better? Add in multivoiced narration tracks, and you're approaching something really engaging that doesn't rely on strobe-light animation techniques to lock down a kid's attention.

Of course, all of this optimism comes from the patron perspective and ignores a lot of library reality. If I'd taken a jaded librarian's approach, I could have come up with 15 reasons why none of this would ever work before I'd even left Las Vegas.

As we're all too aware, digital library content is still locked up by and large in either clunky formats or dedicated consoles. DRM doesn't frustrate most librarians because we're anticapitalist, free-content absolutists; it gets us worked up because it's a pain in the neck for our patrons, and more often than not it stops this convergence idea dead in its tracks.

When I pitched the rough outline of this future vision to David Burleigh, director of marketing for OverDrive (one of the only content-oriented exhibitors in the ebook pavilion at CES), and asked when it might become library reality, he told me, “Where the technology goes, we're right there.” But, there's a rub: the convergence I'd described, he said, requires a complex intersection of hardware and software rights.

It sure does. And that's a problem we have to solve.

Since libraries first started giving patrons exactly what they want in an increasingly wide variety of physical media formats, there's been a tension between serving those for whom Blu-ray is already old hat and those who can't or won't let that old VCR give up the ghost. But in terms of electronic downloads and lending, the issue is being resolved without us even noticing—and not in a good way. Consumers are already being led toward convergence of media by vendors catering to their disposable incomes; libraries are still offering patrons the digital equivalent of 8-track tapes. We either press now to make sure libraries have a seat at the table, or start making peace with being shut out entirely.