As expected, this holiday season saw an explosion in the sale of tablet computers and e-readers. According to this article from MSNBC (shared by our Facilities Manager Charles Crouse), during December Amazon.com sold over 1 million Kindles of various types each week, and during the week between Christmas and New Years Eve over 20 million Adroid and Apple IOS mobile devices were activated and over 1 billion mobile apps were downloaded.
We are certainly seeing the effects of this in the library, as patrons come in with their new devices seeking help with everything from connecting to our WiFi network to downloading e-books. As I wrote in my earlier post, the staff is doing its best to help - our "Getting Started With E-Books" guide is prominantly featured on our website, we have invested in a selection of devices for staff training, and we will soon begin to offer small group (2-3 people) hand-on training to the public by appointment. We also continue to beef up our e-book collection, which now has over 1,000 titles.
I'm sure we will make it through this wave in decent shape, but I am less confident about our institutional ability to respond to the tectonic shifts that are generating these waves.
My friend Derek Wolfgram posted this article ("Why Best Buy Is Going Out of Business...Gradually") from Forbes on Facebook this morning. It's about Best Buy's failures during the holiday season just past and what they say about the company's ability to survive in the digital age but, as Derek pointed out, the issues identified are as relevent to libraries as they are to retailers:
"Moving online required new thinking, new management structures, and new strategies. It would also require integrated front and back-end information systems. Customers would expect inventory to be transparent between the web and the stores, and that specials and “exclusives” would be consistent across all channels. Whatever attributes they associated with a retailer’s brand—whether price, quality, convenience, expertise, service—would need to be translated to the online experience and enhanced.
To compete successfully against new online retailers, traditional retailers would also need to find ways to transform the expensive liabilities of physical locations with limited hours and high labor and inventory costs into assets that complemented rather than competed with the online experience.
...Amazon neither invented nor appropriated its basic strategies from Best Buy or anyone else. It simply does what consumers want. Best Buy does what would be most convenient for the company for consumers to want but don’t, then crosses its fingers and prays."
Antiquated back-end inventory and database systems that do not integrate seamlessly with the online experience, expensive physical locations with limited hours and high labor and inventory costs, inability to carry sufficient inventory to fulfill customer expectations, systems that are based on what we think the customer should need....sounds eerily familiar.
I know libraries and librarians across the country and around the world, and certainly here at PVLD, are working hard to fundamentally change our operating models so that we can surf the waves of technological change rather than being crushed as they crash over our heads...but I do worry that the changes are not as fast, or as fundamental, as they need to be.
Excellent, Kathy. I just cross posted to FB and hope you cross post to PVLD's FB page. Everybody needs to read this.
Posted by: Fran aka Redondowriter | January 04, 2012 at 12:43 PM
As long as I'm around, I'll fight for our public libraries and BOOKS. While libraries do need to evolve with the times, that doesn't mean they will "go out of business". Business models change and evolve, but the need that libraries serve will always be there.
Not everyone has a tablet/laptop/computer, and even those that do, don't have access to all the information in just ONE Bookshelf of a library, not to mention the entire building.
Posted by: Random | January 04, 2012 at 04:33 PM