The Ghost in the Machine
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for March 2005
“So.” That’s the first word I heard—the one Seamus Heaney chose for the Old English opening word hwæt in his luminous translation of Beowulf—while sitting in the Midwinter Meeting exhibit hall in the very crowded (and peculiarly configured) convention center in Boston.
I was basically wandering around loose, looking (frankly) for a column idea. I’d already discarded several for this month, including the internet’s multiple roles in the tsunami disaster and its aftermath, and the response of ALA leadership to the Google/library/digitization thing, each remarkable in its own way.
So I’m meandering around and ran across a sign that said “Downloadable Audio Books.” New to me, so I sat down to listen to a presentation, and a quite interesting one at that.
The idea is pretty straightforward, so I won’t bore you with the details. It’s a good one, though, and a natural extension of a number of existing technologies and services. Apparently, similar library circulation models for music and video are on the horizon; I imagine these will all be popular. I’m ready, I can tell you that.
There are already at least two major players in the library market; and while the basic concept is easy enough, a number of serious considerations are involved in offering a competitive service: an attractive pricing model, of course; a reasonable and comprehensible circulation strategy; copyright and rights-management protections (recognizing the understandable squirrellyness of publishers who don’t want their audiobooks whizzing around for free); technology and standards; and so on. Nobody seems to be iPod-friendly yet, which is apparently a target-demographic thing; downloads can be sent to other digital music devices and players, though.
Market decisions
So I can now borrow “books” from anywhere; in the library, of course, but also at home, sitting in my neighborhood bakery, in a hotel room—anywhere I have good internet access. There appear to be two different approaches to circulation models: one-book-one-borrower or buy-a-block-of-circs-and-do-whatever; that will likely be a market decision. We could also reignite the access vs. ownership debate here, the contours of which are by now quite familiar, so let’s take that as read, shall we?
A few other things occurred to me. This service could also raise once again the “what is the building for?” question. I think it reinforces the very real proposition that while the “library” encompasses, needs, and draws energy from the building and all the stuff that goes on in there, it is also more, bigger, and broader than that—it’s the sum of all the interactions between users and the resources provided and selected by the library staff and the services that staff provide.
So now it gets interesting. Let’s assume all of the tricky issues get resolved. In the presentation I heard at Midwinter, the vendor rep said that buying a block of circulations and having access to all these books (his firm’s model) meant that the library wouldn’t have to make selection decisions—implying that financial constraints were largely the reason we had to select in the first place.
Access trumps selection
Hmmm. That question is now raised in a real and vivid way: Would unfettered, albeit prepaid, access obviate selection? Readers’ advisory would still be important, but does this imply that collection development would become passé—or even counterproductive—in such a world?
Let’s go one step further. The basic idea here is really about freedom. My 18-month love affair with my iPod continues unabated; I particularly relish the freedom it gives me to listen to the music I want to hear, when and how I want to hear it. I can download and buy music on my own terms too. Now the book—the holy of holies for our profession—is about to enter that world, and the long-term impact of that may well be of significant import to libraries and how people perceive them in the years to come.
I thought it particularly apt that it was Beowulf that I flashed on, that initial evocative hwæt ringing down 10 centuries or more—first shared by speech and chant and oral tradition, then frozen in print for a millennium, now freed and revived in speech, digitized and transmitted at the speed of light, able to be shared more broadly than its composers could ever have imagined all those years ago.
The monster Grendel is now at large again, poised to stalk cyberspace in his native form, no doubt to ensnare new victims—at least until the 21-day browsing license expires
. . . but that’s another story.
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