Publishers Weekly has an interesting piece on an American Library Association panel on e-books and libraries January 8th. The panel featured a number of librarians and e-book experts, including Sue Polanka of the “No Shelf Required” blog and Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive.
The panel focused on the opportunities and challenges e-books offered libraries. Kahle in particular was outspoken about the need to prevent an oligarchy of a few powerful corporations from taking control of digital media for the future.
[Kahle] expressed his longstanding concern over Google’s efforts to scan collections “and sell it back to us,” and urged libraries not to give up their traditional roles. “What libraries do is buy stuff, and lend it out,” he said, suggesting that libraries “digitize what we have to, and buy what we can,” but not to let the promise of licensed access turn libraries into agents for a few major corporations. “We do so at our peril.” He also urged more dialogue with publishers and vendors about the future of digital content and the role of libraries—but he also urged bold action.
He also touched on the Open Library partnership with the Boston Public Library, involving scanning and lending in-copyright books, claiming there has been “nary a peep” from publishers wary of infringement, nor has the Internet Archive come in for legal trouble over its practice of copying and preserving web sites. He suggested it was because copyright owners recognized the non-profit, culturally-important nature of these projects. “We’re just doing what libraries do.”
Sometimes we forget that the e-book revolution is as challenging to libraries as to publishers—possibly more so. Certainly the rise of the e-book is going to bring a lot of changes to these cultural institutions. But as an earlier story today also noted, librarians are putting a lot of thought into how to adapt to these changes.
(Found via archive.org, which also has video and HD video of the panel discussion available.)
