In the Wall Street Journal (Feb 11), JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG has an article about an experiment by Random House to begin selling books one chapter at a time. This seems to follow the model that has become popular in the music industry.

Random House Publishing Group’s experiment appears to be the first time a major consumer publisher has offered a title on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It will sell the six chapters and epilogue of “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” for $2.99 each.

The move comes at a time when retailers and publishers are looking for clues into how readers want to access digital content. Most recently, Amazon Inc. announced that it was buying audiobook seller Audible Inc. for about $280 million. Late last year, Amazon introduced its Kindle electronic-book reader, a device with built-in wireless Internet access that quickly sold out upon debut.

Publishers are convinced that as it becomes easier to download books, and screen technology improves, an ever-larger number of readers will opt to receive digital content.

I walked away from tonight’s MIT Communication Forum presentation thinking about the parallel between broadcast television and libraries. Heroes producers Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw were the presenters for a conversation titled: nbc’s heroes: from “appointment tv” to “engagement tv”? Hearing these two producer/writers (yes they are currently on strike!) speak about the transition taking place in broadcast television enabled me to see the strike from another perspective. But the thing that was most striking to me was to think about an industry that is facing some of the same issues that libraries face.

Technology isn’t exactly leaving broadcast television behind…, but the economic model looks less and less viable. Cable, Internet, cell phones, etc. all mean that broadcast television is no longer the dominant model for receiving what we’ve known as television programing. Heroes is on the forefront of developing a transmedia content model. They use the Web, comic books, dvd, and greeting cards among other media to provide content, and not simply another mechanism for delivery of the same content. Web content supplements but is distinct from the core series that is broadcast.

The economic model for libraries seems to me equally problematic. The volume of information being produced esclates rapidly, the costs for materials increases faster than our budgets can support, and we function in an increasingly transmedia environment.

I’ve long thought the NPR model for developing a broad based support network might helpful for libraries. NPR’s transition from relying primarily on government support to listener support is an interesting model for not-for-profits organizations. The nbc.com/heroes model is an interesting model for profit-based industries. They maintain their core product, but are spinning off a wide variety of content delivery systems that engage their user base and provide additional revenue streams.

I’m not quite sure where this leads, but I could imagine a library maintaining its core mission to support the teaching and learning that takes place in the institution, but spinning off other ventures that would generate income. That’s not a business plan, but perhaps the beginning of a vision.

Lorcan Dempsey suggests the difference between the rights of ownership of copyright protected materials and licensing are not as different as one might at first image:

What this means is that a large part of library collections is still in copyright. The library ‘owns’ the cost of storing it, shelving it, keeping it at the right temperature, and so on. It can be shared and borrowed in its current form. However, the library does not ‘own’ it to the extent that they can freely re-format it and allow it to be used by many parties.

In this sense, the gap between the materials that libraries ‘own’ and the materials that libraries license is smaller than we are used to thinking about.

His point is well-taken. I especially appreciate his inclusion of the ongoing cost of storing and preserving the item. What he’s describing may be more akin to a “lease-to-own” plan. If the library (or individual that purchases the book) keeps a book long enough, the rights of ownership do eventually include the right to copy, digitize, etc. The work eventually moves into the public domain. But the cost is quite high.

Scott Bennett’s article and cost analysis, Just-in-Time Scholarly Monographs builds in more detail case models to compare what he calls “Just-in-Time” versus “Just-in Case” models for libraries. “Just-in-case” strategies would acquire books in case someone might need them. “Just-in -time” strategies acquire a book only when it is needed. Nearly 10 years old, Bennett’s cost models continue to provide a helpful model for modeling the cost of various strategies for providing ready access to materials.
I’ve been thinking about how to control the cost of housing a book for the long-term, and retrieval of that book for use by library users. The cost of digitizing books has decrease in recent months. One of my primary costs is retrieval of books shelved off-site. I recently calculated it cost us over $50 to retrieve and return an item from off-site shelving.
Shifting to digital access to these materials may be more a more cost effective means of providing access to lesser used materials.

Wired cover’s Nicholas Negroponte’s address to LinuxWorld.  I still think this is a fascinating project, designed to address the problems of cost and infrastructure…

Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who hopes to give $100 laptops to the world’s children dismissed recent criticisms Tuesday and said his project could begin distributing the computers by early next year.

The What if Wal-Mart Ran a Library?

I wish I had thought of this….

Joseph J. Esposito has written a really fascinating article about what a libray might be like if Wal-Mart ran it…

abstract: The giant retailer Wal-Mart is used here as a metaphor for large-scale industrial processes that are being brought to bear on many industries in the evolving global economy, but by and large not on academic institutions and libraries in particular. It is anticipated that the application of such processes will reshape the world of libraries as we know them, with an increasing division between the support of undergraduate education and the requirements of research faculty. While there will be significant opposition to the introduction of such processes, especially because of the resulting disruption of the lives of academic librarians and their institutions, inasmuch as the decisions to make these changes are driven by increasing economic pressures and will be made by authorities above librarians in the institutional hierarchy, the Wal-Martization of the academic library is inevitable.

I’ll not try to summarize Lorcan’s rather long posting, but rather urge you to read it. Then read it again. I’ve been reading the long-tail postings for awhile, and have made several comments on this blog. Lorcan’s post is the most thoughtful comment about how Long Tail applies to libraries that I’ve read. It pushes us to think about a different business model for libraries.

I’ve read it once. I’m going to think about it and will probably comment on it in a future posting. For now, read it…

Half of the books published (or at least cataloged in OCLC), have been published since 1977.

Let me remind us all again of the Lavoie/Schonfeld numbers and the breathtaking fact that half of our printed books are under 30 years old. We realize, on that scale and even with a limited sense of geometry, that the new half life of printed information will soon be 20 years and less. In other words, there is reason to think that the collections and content we will need to manage will more than double within our lifetimes and probably double twice or three times in the lifetimes of the very young. Growth of that scale cannot be managed by business as usual. ( Ann Okerson, 2005 )

Ann is pointing to a problem that I’ve mentioned before. The workflow of most libraries today is built around a model that won’t easily scale up to the rapidly increasing rate of publication. The data that Lavoie and Schonfeld use is only for print books. When you add digital content to that as well, we see the production of information increasing at nearly exponential rates.

Okerson understates the problem. This is particularly the case for when most library budgets remain flat. However, it is not simply a matter of flat budgets. Library workflow needs to radically change to demand and benefit from collaborative relationships with publishers and vendors of information to allow for easy exchange of information that can enable libraries to develop scalable models for their workflow.

Business Week Online has an article that is rather optimistic about e-books, primarily based on new display technologies. I think they are right about the technologies. But I don’t think they have really looked at how people read.

Digital Books Start A New Chapter
Many experts are convinced that digital books, after plenty of false starts, are finally ready for takeoff. “Every other form of media has gone digital — music, newspapers, movies,” says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the William Morris Agency to start her own company that will focus on books and technology. “We’re the only industry that hasn’t lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner.”

Sellen and Harper identify a technological trend. Simply put, “Today, rather than print and distribute, we distribute and then print.” (p 14) The GPO has come up against that.
Mission Impossible: Printing in the Digital Age

“The nature of printing is changing,” said Robert Tapella, GPO’s chief of staff. “It isn’t necessarily that printing itself is going away.” In the next 300 years, the nature of printing will likely change again, he added.

Therein lies GPO’s dilemma: As the world moves away from paper and ink, how does the agency ensure that all government information is accessible and searchable for all time?

» What to expect from Web 3.0 | Software as services | ZDNet.com
Phil Wainewright began a series of postings entitled “What to expect from Web 3.0″ in late November. He suggests that Web 3.0 will see the creation of a “commodity” API layer made up of companies (and their API services) like Google, Amazon, etc. He projects “an almost perfect market will emerge and squeeze out virtually all of the profit margin from the highest-volume services.”

On top of the API layer will be an “Aggregation Services” layer that takes the work out of discovering all of the lower level API services. The end-user will interact primarily with the top layer that provide “Application Services.” But these won’t be like the software applications we use now (MS Office, etc.) but will be “a new class of composite applications that bring together functionality from multiple services to help users achieve their objectives in a flexible, intuitive and self-evident way.”

Lorcan Dempsey comments that:

As more activity moves onto the network, we begin to build up from the lower layers to create richer, more complex structures. We are beginning to see greater value created in our bibliographic applications. What will we do as we aggregate harvested metadata, digitized books, cultural heritage materials? We need to find ways of making aggregation routine, so that we can more readily build out the services that “help users achieve their objectives in a flexible, intuitive and self-evident way”.

Focusing on collections I think leads to the commoditization of libraries. Even focusing on aggregation doesn’t lead to a productive future for libraries, though we need to work closely with aggregators. In Waineright’s model, libraries as  (or as providers of) application services leads to a profitable future.