Tipping Points and Moments of Zen | Peer to Peer Review
Back down from the Ebook Summit, and I'm still sorting through the experience Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MNSep 30, 2010
I feel as if I just slalomed down from the peak after yesterday's day-long virtual summit, Ebooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point, and landed upside-down in a snow bank. Let's see if I can right myself and if the head-spinning will stop long enough to get my bearings.
The first event I attended tossed me into a rapid-fire chat about ebooks. Chats are always interesting because, despite their reputation for being "synchronous," having a coherent conversation with 60-plus people all typing as fast as they can is intriguingly disjointed, a layer cake of ideas, with responses to questions some distance from the original query, with a lot of flavorful if unexpected filling in between.
Then I listened to the results of a survey. Libraries are buying more ebooks. I can't remember whether the survey found that library users are reading them. I blame this lapse of memory on crashing down from the summit. Everything is still spinning, ever so slightly, in a counter-clockwise direction. That double vision thing will go away soon, right?
Then, just I started to listen to Ray Kurzweil, I was urgently summoned by a beep and a message to get on the phone already and connect up for the panel I was on. What, really? Oh wait, I'm an hour earlier than Eastern Time Zone. Okay, okay, where's that phone number?
I got connected and everything was copacetic, though I still think it's hilarious that panelists were all instructed to be sure to use a landline and old-fashioned handset because that newfangled stuff—cell phones and Skype and hands-free headsets?—doesn't have sufficient audio quality. Oh, the irony . . .
Get your skis on!
I spoke about how important it was to make sure that as we shift to ebooks we don't lose our core library values (though I did manage to lose my place in my slides). Eli Neiburger told us that if people keep thinking libraries are about books we are so doomed, but all was not lost because we can totally rock if we just stop clinging to the codex, already, because printed books are so doomed. Then Steve Potash said some reassuring things about how Overdrive was working on it, but frankly? It's all a bit of a blur.
Then I took a break to scarf a bowl of soup and meet with my first term seminar students, who seemed a little surprised to see me (yeah, I had my time zones all messed up, sorry about that) and then back to the Summit where I caught the tail end of an excellent panel on Google Books (the library edition). Though I missed Andrew Albanese—dang—I heard half of Karen Coyle's talk, reminding me who the smartest person in the room is. Then Kevin Kelly made some soup out of books using his special recipe: it's all going to be in the cloud, and streaming, and there won't be any authors or separate books anymore, but rather a nirvana of constant interactive creativity, the whole world working together on one vast, ever-changing virtual cloud-book, but meanwhile watch out for his new book, coming out next month. The streaming thing, and the end of authorship, uh, yeah—it's inevitable, but at least you'll have something to read while you wait.
Then I had to log off and get caught up on email and p-mail and set up a committee meeting and finally staggered home to down a large gin and tonic and start on this column. (Hmm, maybe that has something to do with that spinning sensation.)
A funny thing happened on my way to the summit
Early in the day, as I started to log in, I realized my recent upgrade to Windows 7 meant that my computer setup was not as ready as I thought. While I was sure Windows Media Player was somewhere on my computer, and that I had downloaded that Adobe thingy that was required, the software check for the summit informed me I was unprepared. A short panic attack and a call to the college's technology hotline brought a student named Matt to my office. He calmed me down and efficiently made sure everything was working properly. I took the opportunity to ask him what he thought about ebooks. He made a face. "Too many devices and formats to support?" I asked.
Matt nodded politely, but that wasn't the problem; platforms and formats were no biggie to him, it was the books. He wanted to be able to highlight things, he told me, and scribble notes in the margins and share his books. He wanted to do all those things easily while studying and while analyzing texts in class next to other students, and you couldn't do any of those things nearly as easily with digital texts. But it wasn't just convenience he was talking about. He frowned and thought for a minute before he could find the words for it. "I want to be able to hold it in my hands, you know?"
This moment of Zen, brought to you by a tech-savvy young student, the demographic that was constantly invoked while imagining the future during the Summit, the future library user who supposedly is way past the boring old codex and is going to abandon libraries if we don't hurry up and get digital. He wants to interact with books, just as Kevin Kelly predicted, but ebooks don't let him do that. And there's something solid and connected about interacting with a text that won't change, that you can actually touch, that you can act on without worrying how it's acting on its own.
Of all the pronouncements I heard yesterday, I think I'm most likely to remember that short conversation before Matt turned the computer over to me and said, "okay, you're good to go." As we talk about the digital future at my library, I'm going to take his technical preferences and needs to heart, and I'm going to talk to as many students as I can, not just rely on the visionary oracles. After all, he was there for me when I needed his expertise, and he knows his technology.
Thanks, Matt. I owe you.
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 recently been published by Minotaur Books.
