Tuesday News: E-book borrowing, new Shakespeare exhibit, Georgian gift guide, and revealing new photo book
Publishing Newsdigital books / e-book lending / Georgian Era / gift guide / Libraries / museum exhibits / photography / Shakespeare16 Comments
New Study Finds Low Levels of Digital Library Borrowing – According to this summary of the latest Book Industry Study Group findings, libraries are not doing a great job of appealing to patrons who read digital books (you can download the executive summary for free here). Of library patrons surveyed, more than half know that their local library has digital lending, but only 25% have actually checked out a digital book in the past year. These are not readers who eschew digital content; they apparently just are not getting it from the library. Why? Well, surprisingly enough (not), it seems to be a lack of interesting digital content:
The report found the biggest impediment preventing patrons from borrowing more e-books was the lack of e-books’ availability, followed by a preference for print books. Another major consideration was that the loan period for e-books is too short. Patrons were also far more satisfied with their library’s selection of print books than for digital content. For example, 90% of patrons were happy with the selection of print adult titles, but only 51% were happy with the choices of e-books. The pattern was repeated across all content categories, including newspapers and magazines. Only 39% of patrons said they were satisfied with the selection of both digital newspapers and magazines, while 65% were happy with the range of print magazines, and 63% satisfied with the selection of print newspapers. – Publishers Weekly
William Shakespeare’s tryst with a female fan – Historians are so thirsty for personal information about William Shakespeare that the discovery of an anecdote (read: second or third-hand gossip) written in the journal of 17th C law student John Manningham will soon be exhibited at the British Museum. Manningham was allegedly a friend of a friend of Shakespeare (through John Donne and Ben Johnson), and the story is being offered as insight into the “real” W.S. The anecdote concerns both Shakespeare and actor Richard Burbage:
After one performance, a female admirer gave Burbage her name and address and invited him to pay her a late-night visit, using the code name ‘Richard III’.
In true Shakespearean comedy style, William overheard this encounter and that evening, when Burbage arrived to call on the woman, the playwright was already on the premises. . .
The diary entry, dated 13 March 1602, forms part of a wider exhibition which Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library, said “will seek to cast a new light on how Shakespeare became the cultural icon he is today”. — The Telegraph
The Georgian Gift Guide – Need a gift inspired by Georgian England for Hanukah or Christmas – or just because it’s December and you can get a lot of crap on sale? Author Donna Thorland has put together a list of creative gifts that harken back to 18th C England and Colonial America. There’s at least one item on that list I’m going to be purchasing (and maybe I’ll even buy a couple extras for gifts!). — Donna Thorland
This New Photo Book Documents Everything We Touch in 24 Hours – Paula Zuccotti, a product designer and “trend forecaster,” has written and photographed a fascinating new book in which she invited a variety of individuals, from friends to artists to people she met online, to document everything they touched within 24 hours. As Zuccotti points out, technology is vastly changing the way we engage with physical objects and consume media. What a fascinating way to think about how we move through our days and interact with our environment.
In her work, Zuccotti has seen firsthand how the behaviors of people across the globe are being altered by technology, infiltrating every aspect of human life. Through work at her consultancy and research laboratory TheOverworld, Zuccotti has witnessed how clients no longer request that the company research individual products. The company is no longer asked to investigate how people watch TV, for example; instead they are tasked with predicting “the future of entertainment”.
“This erodes the links between behavior and objects, affecting the semantics of how we interpret things,” Zuccotti says. “If we see someone with a book we know they are reading, but someone holding a tablet could be watching a movie, booking a holiday, shopping or making a video.”
“As technology becomes more embedded and invisible, it changes our physical interactions with things, sometimes further reducing them, sometimes giving us new objects to play with,” she adds. “In light of these rapid shifts, 2015 seems a ripe moment to capture our objects as they stand today—and their roles as narrators of personalities, preferences and emotions.” — GOOD Magazine
The library survey doesn’t surprise me. I also find the number of copies frustrating. I’ve been next in line for a week for the one copy of a book. If I’d decided to go with print, I’d most likely have it already.
@Lostshadows:
What did surprise me is that the BISG survey is off. When corrected for a flaw in the way the survey group was chosen, the actual adoption rate is much lower.
The problem with the survey mentioned in the PW article above is that it was only conducted online, which means it was set up to miss or under count part of the population, namely those with lower incomes, less education, and less access to the web.
Libraries would have MUCH better ebook selections if publishers didn’t jack the prices up so high (sometimes triple or more the cost of a physical book) and slap so many restrictions on them (only 25 checkouts or 2 years, and we have to re-buy them) And don’t get me started on all the books that simply aren’t available — pretty much ANYTHING that isn’t from one of the Big Five, and only some of their publications.
Not only does this seriously restrict what we can offer, it’s killing our budgets for traditional materials. My print fiction budget was reduced 25 % this year, to try and squeeze more money out for ebooks.
(And then there is the horrible, horrible software. Honestly, this whole experience with digital materials in the library has been disastrous….)
Exactly what Hapax says. I buy for children and teen, including ebooks, and sometimes a book can be $50 to $60. It really limits any chance libraries have to develop a truly solid e-content collection.
Speaking as someone who does use digital library books, the size of the waitlist at many of them indicates that they are being used voraciously in my area.
I’m in Ontario and my library has a great selection of ebooks, including gay romance from one of my publishers. (They have a few of my books too, but as paperbacks :-)) They seem to have the new books in really fast. Sure, it’s a wait for the new Nora Roberts but my TBR pile is huge; I can wait.
The Seattle area has two active library systems and I’m a member of both. I regularly check out digital content from both systems, and am more often than not in a hold queue to get an ebook next. Which doesn’t surprise me. Seattle IS a town of readers. AND computer nerds. ;) I often hit the library first to check out an author I don’t recognize, and my usual fare from them is either SF/F or historical romance.
I’d be intrigued to see our local library stats on this compared to the national average!
(Also, I have donated money to both library systems out of general gratitude for their digital excellence. Thank you, Seattle Public Library and King County Library System!)
My library is getting better and better with their digital content (that’s for both ebooks and eaudio), but then I live in a bigger city so that might be why. I go to my library first for an ebook before I buy it. I also add books to my wish list in my library account all the time. It does sadden me that the ebooks cost the library so much…sort of defeats the purpose of the library doesn’t it.
My problem with digital libraries (which I use a lot) is that discovery is so tedious. There’s no way to filter or to improve recommendations. So, if you’re interested in romance, but not paranormal, you have to either guess from the title (is ‘Love at First Bite’ a foodie romance that I’d like or a vampire romance that I’d not make it past the first page of?) and wade through pages and pages of stuff you have no interest in.
If you do check out romance, the recommendations never change and there’s no way to say, I read one of these, never suggest this author again.
The result is I sometimes borrow books that I don’t make it past page 5 in. Because I follow these things, I know that cost my library something, but if I wasn’t interested in the publishing industry, I’d assume it was no different in cost from leafing through a book in the library and putting it back on the shelf.
I check out ebooks from the library almost exclusively. I live in a small town, so the library is also small with a limited selection of new releases, but it’s part of a regional library system that includes a small city, so the ebook collection is much better than the local book collection. I used to use bookmobile and mail-a-book services, but ebooks are much more convenient, and I’m guessing cheaper for the library as well.
It’s frustrating that the prices for libraries to purchase ebooks is so much higher, because I’d like the digital collection to be larger. I’ve been requesting ebooks to be added to their collection, and they’ve been very quick to get any of the m/m romances, but have only gotten one of the SF books. I’m guessing publishers like Samhain and Dreamspinner Press have much lower prices. The m/m romances are circulating though, and they actually got Heidi Cullinan’s Christmas series without me requesting it.
@Nate: That’s not quite right. The two surveys are measuring different populations. The Pew study surveyed their entire response panel, i.e., people who may or may not use the library, while the BISG study surveyed library patrons, i.e., people who are already using the library. So we would expect the Pew numbers for ebook usage to be considerably lower than the BISG numbers.
Online surveys are not inherently less reliable than offline surveys. Both have inbuilt flaws that good designs compensate for. You can, for example, adjust to capture people who do not answer online surveys as long as you are trying to understand other aspects of their decision-making (in this case, whether they visit the library or borrow ebooks). Pollsters regularly design online-only surveys in ways that weight the proportional rural, poor, older, and other respondents so that the overall sample is nationally representative in ways the pollsters care about. At this point, offline surveys probably have as many problems as online ones. Good pollsters are working on these issues all the time. Obviously the self-selected, non-random polls that people mistakenly call “surveys” are rarely representative of anything in a statistical sense, but that’s a whole different issue.
For readers who are interested in understanding the issues around polling today, this article by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker is an excellent place to start.
@GeriUpNorth: A bigger problem is that a lot of the smaller niche publishers (and, afaik I know, NO self-published authors) are available for libraries to even purchase on ebook.
I don’t want to get too much into the technical details, but basically, for libraries to offer digital books for checkout, they have to go through third-party software vendors. Those vendors arrange for licenses with publishers, and in turn offer them to libraries. The third party vendors think of BOTH publishers and libraries as their clients, so it is obviously not in their best interests to negotiate the best deal for libraries (and readers). Also, the vendors don’t generally want to deal with small niche publishers — too much effort for too little return.
This is also why libraries cannot simply go out and buy ebooks the way the public does (and why we cannot add donated ebooks to our collection; a HUGE source of frustration for me personally!) It is very hard to explain to the public that that book they see on sale for .99 cents may cost the library sixty bucks, but more likely we cannot offer it at all.
@hapax: And that’s one of the many reasons I haven’t asked our library to carry more/other digital books/authors: the cost to them and the lending restrictions are outrageous. Even with donations from library patrons, none of us can afford what they have to pay.
On the whole, our county library does reasonably well and I am often surprised at what they do have; someone there loves the Vorkosigan saga for reals. Neighboring San Francisco, with its enormous readership and voracious appetite for digital books, has an extensive collection, and wait lists numbering into the 100s for many titles.
The universe seeks balance, in this case between what readers want and what libraries can afford, but publishers and third party vendors have no interest in anything except profits and/or driving down digital readership.
Los Angeles Public Library e-media is sensational, even better than Seattle’s public library (I use both), I check their catalogs daily and rarely have much of a wait for requests. The Santa Monica Library is great for new print books, but their digital catalog is lacking. I also use the L.A. County and Maricopa County libraries too. It’s rare that I buy e-books these days, my library choices are just too good.
@hapax:
Which ebook service does your library use, hapax? Quite a few libraries have purchased my ebooks to use through Overdrive (via Smashwords), and Smashwords has also recently started a second library venture with something called Gardners Library. [I know with Overdrive that all the self-pub books are off in some separate section, but they’re definitely in there – I don’t know much about Gardners.]
Smashwords allows self-pubs to set special prices for libraries, and so I set mine to about half the regular price because I was a massive library user when I was a kid.
@Andrea K: We use OverDrive, but it’s through a consortium, and some of the libraries won’t agree to the module that allows us to purchase through Smashwords. On the plus side, another one of our vendors has software “in development” that a library can use in coordination with their acquisition and circulation software to add DRM-free ebooks directly to their collection! If it works, it promises to a way out of this overly complicated mess.
It’s admirable that you allow libraries to purchase your ebooks through a discount; quite a refreshing change from some authors (none who regularly comment here!) who look at libraries as little better than licensed thieves!