Could children be better readers if we went “back to the future,” even in the era of e-books and calls for massive budget calls? I’ll share thoughts.

But first let’s hear from Andy Strong, a children’s librarian at the library in Rockford, Illinois, during the 1990s:

“When the library cut its hours, it drastically reduced storytime programming. In fact, service to parents and young children is a shadow of what it once was.

“In its heyday, mothers and children would leave the library with armloads and tote bags full of books. Head Start would routinely bring busloads of children to dedicated storytimes weekly, introducing new families to the joys of reading and the power of library use.

“Part of the mission of assuring an informed citizenry is in supporting the growth and development of our youngest future sovereign citizens. And I would argue that learning to pull a book from a shelf with one’s own hands, and learning to read from a book with pages is qualitatively different than using a screen. The research is already starting to bear this out. Add to this the caution regarding health effects from electronic devices, and I think I’d prefer to cuddle up next to my child with a non-EMF-emitting paper book, thank you.”

The LibraryCity take: I don’t agree with everything above—for example, a Kindle isn’t the same EMFthreat as an old cathode ray tube monitor, especially if you don’t use WiFi—but oh how right Andy is about library priorities!

We need to reinvent early childhood education, family literacy and library storytelling hours to accommodate the new technology.

Children should learn to read from e-books as well as p-books, the gateway drug. That means not cutting the number of branches or their hours. If librarians or teachers can visit receptive families at home to tailor-make family literacy programs, based on what they find there—well, so much the better.

Football, baseball or basketball game on the tube? Then on the spot, the visitor could ask a few questions to guide the family to appropriate books or other fiction or nonfiction.

E-books, including the open access variety favored by the Digital Public Library of America, could drive down the costs and allow the books to pop up instantly on the e-reader gadgets the librarians were accustoming the families to.

As I see it, a national digital library system among other things could team up with local libraries and schools on family-oriented pilot projects that used both e-books and p-books and focused on words and stories and related them to children’s surroundings, as opposed to relying simply on technology alone.

Parent-child reading, with both generations asking questions and commenting on the content, as opposed to fixating on techno frills, is the ultimate social medium.

Related in the New York Times: Before the First School Bell, Teachers in Bronx Make House Calls.

Detail: I’ve shortened the paragraphs in the quote from Andy.Similar Posts:

• Helping kids get going on e-books: The wrong approach could HURT them
• Tips for using e-readers in children’s book clubs: Attn. parents, libraries, and schools
• More ammunition for a national digital library system playing up early childhood education and a family literacy approach? Thanks, Messrs. Kristof and Friedman!
• E-book strategies for Rockford, Illinois: LibraryCity’s guest column in local daily
• How e-books and a national digital library system could boost student achievement

[Via Library City]

After buying the Kindle, she discovered she liked it so much she has used it it constantly ever since—though mostly for travel and commuting, where a slim device that can replace a ton of books is most useful. She will “always choose a ‘proper’ book” for reading at home.

Parks does not have an “emotional attachment” to her Kindle, but acknowledges that some generations might, and thinks that it is a good thing that something has moved non-readers to start reading.

It’s true this isn’t really “news”, but it’s nice to see that at least some e-reader skeptics can be swayed enough to enjoy the device for its advantages without assuming it’s going to “kill” reading.

Wright compares Kindle Select to Michael Roberts’s MP3.com independent music distribution site, which allowed independent musicians (such as Wright) to upload mp3 tracks to catch the attention of the Internet audience.

That was, without question, the most fun I’ve ever had online. MP3.com started providing tools for musicians, including the ability to upload mp3 tracks and convert them into a CD — so you could sell your CD alongside the tracks you were giving away from free. No one had ever thought of this before. It was nuts. And the best part of it was meeting other musicians.

MP3.com set up forums and the musicians would talk, trade recording tips, talk about what kind of marketing worked and what didn’t, advertise shows, and organize meet-ups in the real world. The best part was it was completely cross-genre — I was a punk/noise musician but I was making friends with country musicians, house musicians, funk musicians, metal, hip-hop, gangsta rap… you name it. And I got exposed to music I never would have considered listening to before hand. I still carry most of those MP3′s around in my collection.

However, after the site went public, MP3.com instituted a “Payback for Playback” program, which split a pool of money among the artists whose tracks were most played—a very similar idea to the Kindle Select lending library. This program served as an apple of discord, Wright writes, effectively ending the camaraderie and leading a number of artists to try to game the system. 

Wright sees history repeating itself with the Kindle Select program, and points out that Amazon already has problems with people trying to game the self-publishing system with plagiarized and duplicate content. He wonders how long it will be before the same thing happens with Kindle Select.

He also points out that giving Amazon exclusivity over works harms the publishing ecosystem as a whole. Even if Amazon is accounting for the lion’s share of income right now, keeping content off of its competitors handicaps the competitors’ ability to compete with Amazon.

In the end, whether authors go with Select or not is up to them, but it’s good to hear from all points of view on the issue. It remains to be seen whether Select is vulnerable to gaming or not. As Wright acknowledges in a postscript, the limitation to one book checkout per month for $80/yr Kindle Prime subscribers does restrict how badly the system can be abused, but he is not sure that necessarily removes the vulnerability.

A fundamental legal question involved in construing a contract is what the parties intended at the time the contract was made. The intent must be manifest in some form in the written agreement. A secret intent by one party that the word tomato also includes avocado won’t bring avocados into the contract.

The classic formulation is that there must be a “meeting of the minds” of the contracting parties or else there isn’t a contract or the contract is limited to only those subjects for which the minds met.

A big problem HC has with its case is even showing an intent by both parties to include what we recognize as ebooks today into the 1971 contract in the absence of any language that points to an ebook.

Passive Guy points out that later contracts still have the same problem. Some try to future-proof themselves by adding a “whether now known or hereafter discovered” clause, but the problem PG finds is that implies a meeting of the minds about something neither party knew anything about at the time they signed the contract.

And even though the Julie one wasn’t, a lot of these contracts were drafted after e-books or similar information-retrieval systems were known to exist. One such system, Lexis, was very big in the legal world in the mid to late 1970s, finding its way into law schools in the 1980s and eventually every lawyer’s office—the same lawyers who wrote contracts for the publishing industry. Yet none of the publishing contracts from this era bother to mention it or anything like it.

Absent any contractual mention of ebooks or electronic books or a reasonably detailed description of an ebook reading and distribution system resembling one the lawyers knew intimately, the only reasonable conclusion is there was no intent to include ebooks in publishing agreements of that era.

Just sayin’

I look forward to finding out how the Julie case unfolds. It will be interesting to see if the judge’s preliminary ruling bears any resemblance to that from the RosettaBooks case so long ago—and whether HC similarly drops the case if it appears not to be going its way. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Not ebook related, but this is so interesting that I just had to post it.  From Open Culture:

The great French filmmaker François Truffaut would have turned 80 today, and to celebrate, we’re bringing back a wonderful series of audio recordings — Truffaut’s lengthy interview with another legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock.

Back in 1962, François Truffaut, the inspiration behind French New Wave cinema, met with Hitchcock. And, assisted by a helpful translator, the two directors talked through Hitchcock’s life and vast filmography, moving from his early films shot it Britain (Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent), to his later Hollywood productions – North by Northwest, Psycho and Vertigo. In total, Truffaut and Hitchcock talked for over 12 hours, and, several years later, Truffaut published a now classic book based on these conversations: Alfred Hitchcock: A Definitive Study (1967).

More in the article.

Last week’s issue of Bloomberg’s Businessweek included an article titled Amazon’s Hitman. If you haven’t read it, you should. It is enlightening.

The gist of the article is that Amazon is gearing up to challenge the publishing world on its own turf: the signing of and creation of big-name authors who sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books. And this assault worries the Big 6 publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Random House, and Harper-Collins – with good reason: Amazon has more market value and disposable cash than they do combined.

The article discusses the history of the relationship between the Amazon and the publishers, along with what Businessweek thinks is Amazon’s thinking. But with all of their crying the blues, the Big 6 currently are in the driver’s seat; all they have to do is be willing to drive.

There is no reason why the Big 6 can’t offer exclusive deals to Kobo and B&N. Give them a 3-month exclusive selling period for expected ebook best-sellers and do away with the agency pricing during that period. After 3 months, make the ebooks available to everyone and reinstate agency pricing. This would boost competition and play against Amazon’s exclusivity program.

I suspect that this scenario won’t occur because the Big 6 simply do not have the spine. I don’t see any antitrust violation — if Amazon can do it each of the Big 6 can do it, too — but even if there were a possibility of antitrust violation, do it anyway and keep the program going while you hash out with the government the antitrust issues. That hashing out could take years, which would give Amazon’s competitors an opportunity to become real competitors. More importantly, it might well be an effective weapon in the crusade to keep competition in publishing alive.

Instead of wringing their hands and acting as if there is little to nothing they can do, publishers need to creatively fight Amazon’s onslaught while they are in a position to do so. Right now Amazon has no Stephen King-level authors in its stable. Amazon still needs the resources of the Big 6 to fill out its ebookstore. Remember that it was Amazon that caved in the dispute with Macmillan and brought agency pricing to ebooks. But the day isn’t far off when the advantage will shift to Amazon and the Big 6 will be able to spend their days writing their own obituaries.

The difference between Amazon and the publishers is that Amazon is willing to continue to lose money on its book operations for as long as it takes to control the field, relying on its other business to shore up its balance sheet. In contrast, the Big 6 are unwilling to lose money even for one day, even if it means their ultimate survival. Jeff Bezos is capable of thinking years ahead, like a great chess player who can think dozens of moves ahead; in contrast, the Big 6 CEOs are like the starting chess player, unable to think strategically even one move ahead, let alone several. Bezos has the spine to tell shareholders no payout this quarter or next; the Big 6 CEOs do not.

Yet the Big 6 have an opportunity to shakeup the ebook market and turn it, at least temporarily, until Bezos’ next countermove, in their favor while simultaneously shoring up Amazon’s biggest competitors, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

Right now exclusivity is working a one-way street. Although the Big 6 declined to participate in Amazon’s current experiment, it is worth noting that Bezos had no compunction about asking them to do so. If the Big 6 won’t offer exclusivity to B&N and Kobo, perhaps B&N and Kobo should approach the Big 6. This is the one area in which Amazon is vulnerable. It is one thing to have exclusive rights to a self-published author’s books, but quite another to have them to a Stephen King’s writings.

The ball is now in the court of the Big 6. What will they do to counter Amazon? If I were a gambler, I’d say the odds were that all they will do is complain but do nothing substantive. There wasn’t much at stake in the agency pricing showdown on either side. An exclusivity arrangement with B&N and Kobo, however, puts a lot at stake. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

(Via An American Editor.)

The video was recorded during the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2011 Membership Meeting.

Title: “Preservation Status of e-Resources: A Potential Crisis in Electronic Journal Preservation”

Direct to Video (59 minutes)

Direct to Slides (.ppt)

Presenters:

• Oya Y. Rieger
  Associate University Librarian
  Digital Scholarship Services
  Cornell University

• Robert Wolven
  Associate University Librarian
  Bibliographic Services
  and Collection Development
  Columbia University

E-journals have replaced the majority of titles formerly produced in paper format. Academic libraries are increasingly dependent on commercially produced, born-digital content that is purchased or licensed. The purpose of this presentation is to share the findings of a 2CUL study that assesses the role of LOCKSS and PORTICO in preserving each institution’s e-journal collections. The 2CUL initiative is a collaboration between Columbia University Library (CUL) and Cornell University Library (CUL) to join forces in providing content, expertise, and services that are impossible to accomplish acting alone.

Although LOCKSS is considered a successful digital preservation initiative, neither of the CULs felt that they fully understood the potential of the system for their own settings and collections. In support of this goal, a joint team was established in November 2010 to investigate various questions to assess how LOCKSS is being deployed and the implications of local practices for both CUL’s preservation frameworks. This study was seen as a high-level investigation to characterize the general landscape and identify further research questions. One of the practical outcomes was a comparative analysis of Portico and LOCKSS preservation coverage for Columbia and Cornell’s serial holdings.  A key finding was that only 15-20% of the e-journal titles in the libraries’ collections are currently preserved by these two initiatives. Further analysis suggests the remaining titles fall into roughly 10 categories, with a variety of strategies needed to ensure their preservation.

Direct to Slides (.ppt)

Direct to Video (59 minutes)

[Via INFOdocket]

From the press release:

Copia, the interactive eBookstore, announced that music critic Will Hermes will answer reader questions inside his book, the acclaimed Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.

Starting today, anyone who purchases a copy of Hermes’s much-lauded book from Copia can use the site’s free eReader app to post questions to the author in the margins of the eBook. Hermes will respond to the questions through Feb. 21, 2012.

While users have always been able to create and share notes on any eBook purchased from Copia, thanks to the platform’s app, this promotion marks the first time readers can converse with an author in the margins of their eBook.

“We are thrilled to have Will Hermes debut this promotion with us and showcase the interactive possibilities of our app,” said Seth Kaufman, VP of Merchandising and Marketing. “Will’s book is great conversation starter, not only because it breaks new ground in music history, but because it dishes on so many musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and David Bryne.”

Hermes, a senior critic at Rolling Stone and a frequent contributor to NPR and the New York Times, has earned rave reviews for his examination of the New York music scene from 1973 to 1977, a vital five-year period that gave birth to punk rock, disco, and rap while also jump starting innovative minimalism, salsa and jazz scenes.

“I love talking about the book, and music in general, and this platform seems like a really interesting way to do that,” said Hermes. “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is about artists pushing into new territories of communication; this sort of virtual book club definitely fits the spirit.”

“We look forward to other authors following Will’s lead and using our app to create special experiences for their readers,” added Kaufman. “In a retail environment where so many books are priced exactly the same, it’s nice to offer readers some truly special added value.”

To learn more about reading and talking to Will Hermes, visit www.thecopia.com/willhermes.

From The Bookseller:

Self-published crime writer Kerry Wilkinson claimed the top spot in the UK Kindle bestseller chart for the last quarter of 2011, Amazon has revealed, as speculation mounts that the online retailer is planning to open its own physical store to push its exclusive book sales.

Wilkinson, from Lancashire, published his novel Locked In, one of a series featuring detective Jessica Daniel, using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing tool, and sold “hundred of thousands of copies” of it in the three months before Christmas, according to Amazon. The e-book is currently selling for 98p and the paperback, published by KAW Publishing, for £8.53 on the Amazon site.

A second self-published author, Katie Stephens, saw her novel Candles on the Sand rank as the fifth bestselling Kindle book in the third quarter of 2011, according to the company.

You might not see today’s Google Books-pointing doodle as a moneymaking effort. After all, these Dickens e-books are free. And yet, surely, the aim is gravitate your mind and habits over to the Google eBookstore, where money is exchanged for enlightenment.

It seems clear some people will grasp at whatever straws they can find to make whatever Google does fit with their preconception that anything it does must be evil nasty commercialism. Come on! Dickens was known for his books, and Google has a great collection of them available for free. Why not link to them? Maybe someone will click through and read one, instead of just glancing at the Wikipedia entry about the man.

But no, Google must be crassly commercial for daring to give away these e-books that are undoubtedly infected with some sort of memetic virus that will make people want to come back and pay Google money.

Sheesh.

This is why the Guardian piece observing how much of e-book sales genre-fiction makes up is really hilarious from a genre fan’s point of view: snooty Guardian writer Antonia Senior confronts the fact that “downmarket genre fiction” is driving e-book sales.

For example:

The ebook world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It’s not future classics that push digital sales, but more downmarket fare. No cliche is left unturned, no adjective underplayed. At the time of writing, the bestselling Amazon Kindle book was Asylum Harbor, by Traci Hohenstein. Crime sells. Try a sample, I dare you. In digital, dross rises. But does this have implications for publishers’ decision-making, as we increasingly migrate?

“Dross rises”? Really? Just because literary fiction makes up 20% of market share, science fiction 19%, and Christian fiction 16%? (And presumably other forms of genre fiction, such as mysteries and crime thrillers, romance, and so on much of the rest.) One imagines Senior making little “ew” noises as she contemplates what dreadful taste the masses have in literature.

Of course, she does have a point that e-readers make people feel more free to read brown-paper-bag e-rotica (in addition to less prurient genre fiction), secure in the knowledge that nobody can see their book’s cover. There’s no need for print publishers to come out with boring-looking covers for popular children’s fiction so adults won’t be ashamed to be seen reading it on the train.

Senior does admit that even she has a fetish for male-oriented historical fiction, reserving her bookshelves for “books that proclaim my cleverness.” But she closes by bemoaning the “boundless idiocy of the unobserved reading public.”

Really? In this era of rampant movies, TVs, computer games, and other distractions, I’d just be glad that they’re reading something at all.

Now a new site, StoryBundle.com, has sprung up that promises to do for e-books what the Humble Bundle does for games: select a few quality independent e-books and allow people to set their own price for the DRM-free bundle. It still seems to be in the planning stages—the site is taking the email addresses of interested parties but does not yet have any bundles on offer.

It will be interesting to see how well it does. One of the secrets behind the Humble Bundle’s success is that many of the titles it offered had already made reputations of their own, and gamers saw this as a chance to snag these popular titles cheaply. Will the Story Bundle offer titles with similar reputations? Are there any independent titles with similar reputations?

I also wonder whether the Story Bundle will do the same as the Humble Bundle and pick a charity or two with which to split the take—I suspect that’s another part of the appeal in that it allows people to feel good about donating to help a charity they support at the same time they support the creators of the works they buy.

At any rate, I’ve signed up for the bundle’s email list and will post again when they announce their first bundle. I wonder what it will include?

(Found via GalleyCat.)

As I’ve said before, this device could be quite useful in education and for Internet access in places that don’t have a lot of money to spend on computers. I could see public libraries and Internet cafés offering banks of browser-equipped Pis for patron web browsing—assuming they become available in the kind of mass quantities you’d need to support institutional orders.

And, of course, they could be used for e-reading by people who have a TV but can’t afford any other computer equipment, even a tablet.

I look forward to their availability, and plan to order one myself as soon as I can.

(Found via Ars Technica.)

"We are grateful for the judge’s decision in our favor," said John Ossenmacher, ReDigi’s CEO, said in a statement. The company added that "ReDigi is breaking down the barriers that have kept consumers from enjoying their intrinsic and lawful ownership rights to their digital purchases."

Of course, this is only a preliminary ruling that ReDigi can keep doing its thing until the outcome of the trial. It doesn’t necessarily mean the company will come out on top. Still, it’s an interesting start to what will probably be an especially interesting legal challenge with profound implications for all forms of digital media, including e-books. I can hardly wait until the trial itself starts.

From a Chip Chick post.

The QOOQ tablet really shines with a subscription to QOOQ’s services, though. A subscription will net users 3,500 interactive recipes from some of the world’s top chefs, 1,200 of which include video instructions. Those recipes are accompanied by a comprehensive and detailed wine list and suggestions for each meal. There are also 100 featured chefs that offer up video tutorials for individual cooking techniques, in addition to whole recipes. That by itself isn’t overwhelmingly impressive – those kinds of resources can be found with a little poking around the Internet. The QOOQ tablet does have some more tricks up its sleeve, though, with a cool feature that automatically adjusts recipes to account for how many people are being served. Over time, the tablet will feature recipes and tips tailored to each user’s preferences and habits. The recipes are a nice bonus, but the QOOQ tablet’s main purpose is to make life in the kitchen a little more efficient, and it seems like it will be successful in that effort.

A lot more details in the article.