PVLD Director's Blog

The future of reading - teen edition

In all of the discussion about e-books and the future of readng, one thing that is starting to emerge is that teens and young adults still want to read and own physical books.

We've seen this in our family as my high school and college-aged nieces and nephew put a trip to the library book sales high on their list of things to do when they visit from Canada, and invariably go home with bags so loaded with books that we run the risk of excess baggage charges. Younger family members also request books as gifts and welcome gift cards that they can use to purchase "real books". To my knowledge none of our family members under the age of 30 owns an e-reader, and those that have tablets don't seem to use them for reading.

At the library we recently explored using teen volunteers to help teach adults how to use e-readers, only to learn that most of the teens don't have or use an e-reader.

This recent article from publishers weekly highlights that while many teens do read digital content, in part because it satisfies their desire for instant gratification, they also want to own the paper version....it seems to be "and" rather than "or" with this age group. And while the article notes that in the recent holiday season Barnes and Noble sold five times as many e-books of Young Adult titles as print ones online, and Amazon also reports that sales of Young Adult e-books outstrip those for e-books overall, I have to wonder how much of that is because of the growing popularity of Young Adult fiction with adults who no longer could be described as young. Just witness the current popularity of The Hunger Games, which is being read by adults across the country, including many book clubs...or these observations from an article in the Los Angeles Times a couple of years ago.

If teens and Young Adults represent the future, then the future of reading may not be as different as some would have us believe!

Reading Is Not Optional

Great interview with author Walter Dean Myers, the new Ambassador for Youth Literature, on Morning Edition this morning.  Click here to listen to compelling story about why reading is important to success in life, the importance of reading to kids early, and why gritty realism is an important element of Young Adult fiction.  Good luck in your new post Mr. Myers!

A hopeful view of the future of libraries

My friends Rosario and Carolyn shared this of Facebook, and it is too good not to pass along. It's a great description of what libraries are and can be...as the author puts it places of new ideas, not old books. Happy reading, and happy New Year!

http://toptrends.nowandnext.com/2011/12/28/in-praise-of-libraries-and-librarians/

The E-Book Wave

For the first 7 of my nearly 8 years at PVLD the most common question I got out in the community was "We have the Internet, why do we need libraries?"  This past year, the question has changed.  It's now one of several variations of "Why do we need libraries if we can get nearly every book we want on our Kindle?"

My response usually touches on the digital divide and the role libraries play in bridging it, the aesthetic value of print, and the fact that libraries also offer e-books and they are free...but I have to confess that my words usually sound weak even to me.

The truth is that, especially as we face the first holiday season in which the price point of decent e-readers is low enough to make them an extremely popular gift, it feels a bit like iwhen I am heading into the ocean for a swim and look up to see a giant wave about to break on top of me.

This time the wave is a technological one, but I suspect that the only safe response is going to be the same - dive as deep as you can, , let the wave tumble you around without fighting it, and hope you can keep your balance once you are able to get your feet on solid ground and your head above water.

The signs of profound change are everywhere, and as articles and blog posts like these make clear, they are disrupting the entire writing/publishing/content distribution ecosystem:

http://www.idealog.com/blog/how-many-christmases-until-we-see-a-whole-new-industry notes that the % reduction in sales at bricks and mortar bookstores is doubling every year -from a 1% decline in '09 to a 2% decline in '10 to an estimated 4-5% decline in '11....and probably 10% or more in '12

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/39210/  identifies the rise of consumer e-books as one of the 5 disruptive technologies of 2011

 http://ebookfriendly.com/2011/12/15/3-out-of-top-10-best-selling-kindle-books-of-2011-are-self-published/ points out that 3 of the top 10 bestselling Kindle books are self-published

http://copyrightandtechnology.com/2011/12/04/a-bleak-future-for-public-libraries-and-e-books/ provides insight into just how vulnerable public libraries are to some of the new e-book distribution models arising in the public sector

Just the fact t that these links reflect just a sampling of articles and blog posts that have been published in December alone is scary enough, but when I read the contents all I can think is that libraries are in no way prepared for the wave that is about to hit.

I'm pretty sure that the PVLD staff is not alone in heading into the holiday season knowing that as fast as we've tried to grow it our e-book collection can't meet current demand much less what we expect once all of those Kindle's are unwrapped; Overdrive, our e-book lending system, is not easy to use (especially when contrasted to just downloading an e-book from Amazon); and our staff is struggling to learn the quirks of all of the devices and is not as well-equipped as we would like to help patrons learn how to use them.

We're putting some plans in place to help us cope with the post-holiday wave, and we'll make it through the near term rough surf...but I'm honetly not sure how we, and all public libraries, will adapt to the fundamental changes rocking our world.  The one thing I do know, is that getting out of the water is not the answer... 

(Thank you California State Library for sharing the above links)

 

 

Book Bike

Just because it is a beautiful day for a bike ride, and instead of  being at my desk writing my monthly report I wish I were out and about on one of these!  Thanks Patrick Sweeney for sharing

http://tucsonvelo.com/news/book-bike-will-take-library-for-a-ride/9635

Hard Choices

Like libraries everywhere PVLD has limited physical space and a myriad of demands for that space...with one of the biggest demands being the need to house all of the books, magazines, newspapers, CDs, DVDs, and even audio- and video-tape items in our collection.

With limited space and a constant influx of newly purchased items, the librarians are constantly "weeding" the collection of older items to make space for new ones.

We, like many other libraries, are also finding that in this era of downloadable and streaming e-books, audio, and video the demand for physical items is trending downwards, while the demand for space for people in the library is growing.

Taken together, these factors mean that each month we remove a large number of items from the library collection - over 5,000 in September alone. The decision to remove a book is never easy and we take a number of factors into consideration including its age, how recently it has circulated, whether it is a "classic" or the only available copy in ourlibrary or in our region, its condition, etc.

Once a book is removed we make every effort to dispose of it responsibly. Those that are in very bad condition sent straight to the recycle bin, but most are sent to the Peninsula Friends of the Library for their book sales. Those that can't be sold individually (and the market for used library books with their stickers, labels, and stamps isn't as big as you might think!) may be sold in bulk to the film industry for movie sets, to interior decorators seeking books with a certain "look", or to dealers. The remainder are often donated - they have gone to schools in needy areas, shelters for the homeless or battered women, the county jail, military hospitals, the local Boys and Girls Club, and many other places. After all of these avenues are exhausted a book in reasonable condition still may end up in the recycle bin...and when a member of the public discovers that we are "throwing away books" all h&*!&@ can break loose!

Deciding which books get removed from the library, and then deciding how to dispose of them, is one of those aspects of library operations that most people don't think about, so it was refreshing to find this article on the National Public Radio blog. It's a pretty good overview of the process many libraries go through in managing their collections.

The NPR post makes reference to this article from Cracked.com which is a bit more pointed and a bit less representative of how PVLD handles disposing of books, but is a succinct articulation of the challenges nonetheless.

I think most librarians feel that every book has value, and "getting rid of" any book is not easy, but making those hard choices is part of keeping our libraries and what they contain relevent to our communities...so we do the best we can to keep the things that should be kept, responsibly dispose of those that can't, and balance all of the competing needs for our physical spaces. In the process do some books get destroyed forever? The answer is yes....but what is the alternative? To become a mausoleum for books? I doubt our comunities will continue to invest in public libraries if that is what we are.

How would you handle this dilemma?

You Go Girl!

In honor of Banned Books Week (coming up the last week of September)...thanks to Rob Firch of The Hammock Papers for sharing this story.

P.S. I had a pretty great 5th grade teacher, Mr. Bauer, but every time I read Rob's blog I wish I had had him as a teacher in elementary school.

Reading - the first freedom

My friend Eileen, owner of the fabulous White Square Fine Books and Art in Easthampton, MA, shared this blog post via Facebook today.

It's  a salutory reminder to librarians of the unintended consequences of policies that we might implement with the best of intentions, like requiring a child to be able to print their name before they can get a library card (which I should stress is not PVLD's policy), but more importantly it is a beautiful description of the tension between the adult responsibility to protect young people, and the joy that comes from  "reading - the careful selection of books and being given enough privacy to quietly read them myself" which is, as the author points out one of a child's "first freedoms".

I can so vividly remember getting my first library card, and the joy of picking out a big stack of books to take home...books that I chose my very self.  Can you?

 

 

 

 

A next-generation e-book

An amazing look at how digital technology is transforming the experience of "reading"....now to figure out how libraries will participate.... 

What happens when all content is available online for free?

Like many of my colleagues I have been thinking about the growing momentum of the transition to e-books (and e-magazines, e-music, e-movies) and the implications for libraries.  The blogosphere has been awash in commentary about the relationship between libraries and publishers of e-content, and I keep starring posts in my Google Reader account so I can go back and try to make sense out of all of the thoughts and ideas. 

My own thoughts are largely inchoate, and I'm not even going to try to put them in writing until they have had more time to, as one former colleague put it, "ferment". 

One blog post that I have find myself coming back to again and again is "What Are Libraries For?" by Hugh McGuire guest-posting on In the Library With the Lead Pipe ,.  Hugh goes beyond the complaints about current-e-publishing and content-licensing models that have been dominating a lot of the discussion in the library world, and tackles the fundamental question - "If ebooks will become dominant, and if community libraries have, to date, structured their existence around a dying function (lending print books), then how will libraries remain relevant in the future?"

He goes on to ask the even scarier question about what happens to libraries, which have had as one of their primary functions the distribution of books,  if e-books not only become dominant but no longer cost anything to access.

I will not recap his arguments than to say that I think he is right when he predicts that over time (and maybe a fairly short period of time) content will be both ubiquitous and freely available calling into question some of the functions that we have long promoted as key to our mission, and in which we invest the majority of our resources, obsolete - namely assembling, housing and providing access to content.

The post concludes by putting forth two key roles for libraries in the future.

The first, as community spaces for interaction and the exchange of ideas is one that we play now and I think we can continue to expand, although if this is truly a core purpose (rather than the ancillary activity it is today)  it will require a total re-envisioning of everything from what skills our staff will need (think facilitation and group process skills rather than information organization and retrieval) to how many staff we actually need to how our buildings are designed. 

The second, helping people manage the superabundance of freely available digital information, I find harder to imagine - not because we don't have the skill but because people don't see this as one of our roles today and I don't really see a pathway to changing their minds.  Perhaps our role in this arena will be to use our skills in information organization to design the digital tools that will help people manage their own content.  In any case this points to a possible role for librarians, but not really to a role for libraries as institutions other than perhaps as places where people can come to learn about how to use these tools.

Whether I agree with his conclusions or not, I thank Hugh for asking big questions at a deeper level than I have seen in most other writing on the topic...and for providing input that helps push my own thinking along.