Ebooks and the Retailization of Research | Peer to Peer Review
When it comes to research, we need a commons, not a common market Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Jul 22, 2010
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This essay is part of a series leading up to the LJ Ebook Virtual Summit on September 29. |
It seems as if every day brings another breathless announcement about the advance of ebooks. Most recently, Amazon crowed that it's selling more ebooks than hardcovers. (They sell far more paperbacks than ebooks, but that's not man-bites-dog newsworthy.) The uptick in ebook sales shouldn't be surprising, given Amazon is practically dumping the Kindle reader in a price war with Barnes & Noble's Nook, and the Kindle is the perfect impulse shopping device.
David Carnoy warns that it's not wise to take Amazon's numbers at face value when the company won't provide actual hard figures, but most media outlets take Jeff Bezos's word for it that we're at a tipping point. Interestingly, the most recent figures from the Association of American Publishers indicate that new adult hardcover sales in both April and May rose by more than 40 percent over the same months last year, a rebound from last year's shopping paralysis brought on by the financial collapse.
What we stand to lose
Though ebook sales are growing fast, they still represent a small percentage of total book sales. What to me is more significant is that they represent a new relationship readers have with their books. I will leave it to others to wax nostalgic about the smell of leather bindings or the tactile pleasures of paper. The things I miss in ebooks (besides thoughtful page design; yes, I do miss that badly) are:
- Sharing. I love being able to hand a book I've read to someone else, or watch it make its way through the family, each reader sharing much more than the book itself.
- Independence. It's worrying that these books remained tethered to the mothership and can be altered at the flick of a switch. Amazon has been ridiculed for making 1984 disappear, but Google Books also offers authors the opportunity to alter or remove books at will.
- Privacy. It creeps me out that what I highlight in a Kindle book would be shared with other readers unless I have the foresight to disable that feature. (I already hate it when I find someone has underlined passages in a library book; it feels as if they're standing over my shoulder, pointing at the page, interfering with my reading.) It bothers me that publishers can learn not only what I'm reading, but which pages I linger on. For an industry that does very little market research, this seems a devious way to assess my reading experience. If I decided to study reading practices through this kind of e-spionage, my research design wouldn't make it past our Institutional Review Board because it would violate ethical and legal standards.
- Community-based assistance. The flip side of instant gratification is frustration when you aren't really sure what you want and have to discover it through browsing. When building the collections, I seek out books our students might use for their assignments but couldn't identify without help. Most of them seek books by topic rather than search for known items, and they don't want a million books, they want some good ones; preferably not too many. I have a similar experience when I visit my favorite bookstores. They probably won't have a copy of an obscure book I want, but they have lots of books that I didn't know about, and they can introduce me to them. That's why I go there.
Supply-side scholarship
Recently Alex Golub, a professor of anthropology, founder of the Savage Minds blog, and an open access supporter, reviewed the potential uses of iPads for academics and said something that I've been thinking about ever since I read it. Not only does he believe the iPad is superior to the Kindle for academic reading practices (because it's much better for closely reading and marking up long-tail texts), it represents the potential "retailization" of academic scholarship.
"What would happen," he speculates, "if journals went straight to consumers and sold articles like they were mp3s? What if you could log on to your ScienceDirect or JSTOR app and get a complete browsable list of your favorite journal articles, available for purchase for, say, 25 cents each?"
He thinks it may be time for individuals to foot the bill rather than rely on libraries, though this scenario is based on the proposition that the costs per article would be reduced by a hundred-fold. He makes this suggestion with a keen understanding of the dilemma libraries face:
Currently folks like Elsevier act as content wholesalers, selling greats bucketfuls of the stuff to libraries, who then make it available to students and professors. As journals have slowly transitioned away from paper, they have pursued business models of the 'purchase this enormous bundle of journals you don't want or else our Death Star will destroy another planet of your Rebel Alliance' variety.
Many libraries in the Rebel Alliance have opted out of the big deals and purchase one article at a time, though at a price much higher than a quarter. As Kevin Smith surmises, the hefty consumer prices for purchasing a single article are probably more of a finger-wagging disincentive than a genuine price point; it prompts would-be readers to ask their library to purchase the article or subscribe to the journal for them.
What happens when we look in the crystal ball to see the future of books? Libraries have not been a major consideration in the development of ebooks. So far, most devices (and most publishers) seem more concerned with selling direct to readers and disabling sharing. The options open to libraries are expensive, limited in terms of available titles, and often difficult for end-users. Some critics of Kindles and iPads believe they take a backward step, creating computing devices that are locked-down shopping devices. One blogger calls the iPad a "media consumption device . . . a shiny, pretty doorway to a mall where you can buy everything from books to movies."
Ebooks designed for scholarship
What academics need from ebooks is not less than what they can expect from print books, but more. They need to be able to read closely, annotate, and remix (through unfettered and accurate quotation and analysis); they need to be able to share texts, to be able to count on them to remain stable, and ideally be able to assign them to students without requiring them to purchase specialized hardware. Scholars should be able to read widely without any concern that their reading list could be subpoenaed. And they need access to a wide range of books and other materials, not just that for which there is currently a consumer market.
Golub's vision of inexpensive articles easily purchased by scholars is tempting; it would relieve libraries of an unsustainable financial burden, trying to supply every article a scholar might want with little negotiation power. But if taken to extremes, it would put an end to what libraries do: provide access to a wide range of information as a communal resource.
The challenge we face is including ebooks in our libraries without compromising our opposition to censorship, our defense of privacy as a condition of intellectual freedom, our support of sharing as a fundamental process of scholarly inquiry, and our underlying belief that access to information should not be predicated on an individual's ability to pay.
Simply providing our users with media for "media consumption devices" without ensuring they are consistent with our values would set us up for the same kind of hostage situation we face with journals. Maybe rather than seek a consumerist solution, we should ramp up the Rebel Alliance.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.
