The Scholarly Kitchen has a post up reporting on a new service which may turn out to be quite significant for libraries. The service allows users to rent access to ejournal articles from several leading publishers (including OUP) for small payments:

Users can sign up for three types of membership:
1. Basic. Pay as you go at $0.99 per article for a 24-hour rental
2. Silver. A monthly subscription plan at $9.99 , which allows 20 articles at any one time with a 7-day rental, and
3. Gold. A subscription plan of $19.99 allows unlimited rentals with no rental period

Reading further down you come across this quote which contains a rather alarming description of libraries as “information silos”:

Still, others like Geoff Bilder of CrossRef have been promoting the idea of an iPubs service for some time as a way of dismantling the information silos built by publishers and libraries.

This links to an article describing the use of Mendeley, an increasingly popular site for collaboration as a recommendation engine for scientific papers. The idea is that Mendeley could function as the perfect discovery tool for such a service, completely cutting libraries out of the picture. In other words, what we may be witnessing are the creation of Web 2.0 services that both find articles for users, and then provide them with easy ways to get the content through micropayments. Google Books would be the obvious way to provide such a service for ebooks.

How many years will it be before we start to hear administrators speculate that they could better spend library budgets by shutting down libraries and giving faculty and students a certain amount of money each year to simply rent what they need? If you think this kind of scenario is alarmest read this recent article on a talk given by a Univeristy of California assistant provost on the future of libraries. There are obvious counter arguments to be made on the real value that libraries and information professionals provide universities, but in times of shrinking budgets they may seem less than persuasive.

While optimists have declared that this could be the year of the e-textbook, early indications are that students are not warming up to the Kindle DX as an e-textbook platfrom. Teleread is pointing to an interesting article in the Daily Princetonian that seems to indicate that students are finding the experience frustrating:

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

The complaints in the article about difficulties in note taking and the lack of a standardized way to represent page numbers are familiar and should come as no surprise:

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”..

“The Kindle doesn’t give you page numbers; it gives you location numbers. They have to do that because the material is reformatted,” Katz said. He noted that while the location numbers are “convenient for reading,” they are “meaningless for anyone working from analog books.”

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Three recent stories highlight the way mobile technology is being exploited to provide very useful tools for both those who have difficulty reading text and those with communication impairing conditions. The Bits blog has a post up discussing how the latest text to speech technology on iPhones and netbooks is offering an affordable way to communicate for those in the early stages of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The post comes with links to related apps, software and hardware.

Meanwhile, Teleread has a couple of posts up discussing new technology for those with difficulty reading text. The first is a very clever application developed by Nokia to translate text messages to Braille. The video embedded in the post is worth watching to see how vibrations are used to represent the Braille letter. The second post describes a small pen-sized scanner that can be used to convert text to speech word by word for those with dyslexia as well as those studying a second language.

The Gadgeteer blog explains:

The ReadingPen is handheld pen shaped device that allows students with learning disabilities to improve their reading skills using the pen to scan over unfamiliar words and phrases encountered in books, magazines and school assignments. They can then access word-by-word definitions, synonyms and translations, and even hear the words spoken and spelled aloud. The pens are priced between $199.95 and $229.00.

One conclusion we can draw from these developments, as the Bits post emphasizes, is that they help to indicate just how ubiquitous and practical mobile technology has become:

Moore’s Law is a funny thing. Computing gear ticks along, getting faster and often cheaper at a steady rate. But, every now and then, we hit an inflection point where things change in a drastic fashion. Such is the case with the iPhone from Apple and with netbooks -– products that nailed the right recipe of horsepower, size and cost at the right time.

Teleread has a review of the new “Good Reader PDF Viewer” iPhone app. Although not used for ebooks, pdf’s are the common file format for academic ejournal articles. The ability to easily view an article in pdf gives the iPhone and iPod a considerable advantage over dedicated ebook readers for students and researchers since ereaders (outside of the very expense Kindle DX) have yet to provide a convenient way to view pdf’s.

Given the hundreds of thousands of articles in pdf that most academic libraries now have access to, a workable pdf viewer could provide an immediate solution for those wishing to provide their users with the ability to view articles on a mobile platform. This makes even more sense when you take into consideration the popularity of the iPhone and iPod among students, and the fact that providing the same content for ereaders would involve mass conversion from pdf to epub (and the very real possibility of having to pay publishers and vendors for the new epub versions). Which begs the question, is it possible to get a site license for an iPhone app?

The Bits blog at the New York Times has a post up describing Google’s plan to extend their Google Checkout system to allow newspapers to charge for viewing content. The development, first picked up by Nieman Journalism Labs, is outlined by Google in a document prepared for a Newspaper Association of America task force, ‘…a task force of newspaper executives charged to explore “platforms for monetizing digital content.” (The committee was formed after the NAA’s secretive meeting in Chicago last spring.)’

In the document, Google outlines how this might work:

While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year. The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time.

The vision behind this is straightforward: content, at least premium content should not be free. As they put it:

Google believes that an open web benefits all users and publishers. However, “open” need not mean free. We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models — including content available only via subscription.

This development has implications beyond the newspaper publishing industry. A successful method for charging users to view full text newspaper articles could also be used to monetize Google Books. That is, by giving publishers a way to charge users for viewing large portions of copyrighted ebooks which they find through a GB search, publishers might be more inclined to put their content on the Google platform. What would Google gain from this? Nieman Journalism Labs reports:

In a brief paragraph entitled “business model,” Google suggests that it would share revenue in a similar fashion to the iTunes App Store and its own Android Market, both of which take a 30% cut of revenue.

Via MobileRead, Flurry.com is reporting, in data “computed from a sample size of over 1,600 live applications and 60 million consumers across four platforms: Apple (iPhone and iPod Touch), Google Android, Blackberry, JavaME,” use of iPhones for ebook reading increased 300% from April to July. Further:

…most surprisingly, we have observed that just behind the largest category, games, eBooks has emerged as a strong second…According to Apptism, an App Store tracking service, eBooks represents the second largest application category in the App Store with 14% share, only behind Games, which comes in at 19%.

Via Information Today comes news that Google Books is now offering downloads in ePub. This comes hot on the heels of Sony’s announcement that it will soon only sell ebooks in ePub. Joseph Esposito has an excellent post at the Scholarly Kitchen on what the growing acceptance of ePub is going to mean to academic publishers.

Google’s announcement is yet another step in the migration or digital reading from PCs, whether desktops or, more likely, laptops, to other devices — netbooks, iPhone, iPods, mobile phones, and a growing number of dedicated ebook readers. (As someone remarked on a Twitter feed I saw recently: “Another day, another ebook reader.”) This creates some problems for publishers. First, which of these many devices should a publisher support? Second, what about all the money I’ve sunk into creating a database of books and articles in PDF format? Will I be able to use them?

This isn’t just an issue for publishers. Libraries are going to have to look at somehow getting ePub versions of all the pdf ejournal articles and ebooks they’ve purchased over the past decade. If they hold the ejournal articles on their own servers, they’ll have to manage the conversion themselves. If they link to the vendor or publisher they can at least expect the publisher or vendor to do the conversion. In this case though it isn’t beyond the realm of imagination to foresee academic libraries having to pay a second time for material they originally purchased in pdf. Although it is far too early to know what conversion costs would be like, it’s pretty safe to say that that no library will have budgeted for it. Even minimal costs would be keenly felt by collections budgets already feeling the stress of the recession and continuing increases in subscription and monographs costs.

Yesterday, at an event hosted by the New York Public Library, Sony announced their upcoming, 7 inch wireless ereader, the “Daily Edition” (see here and here). As might be expected from the setting, Sony didn’t use the event just to hype their new reader, but to emphasize their new partnership with Overdrive, and through it with public libraries throughout the United States. As MobileRead reports,

In addition, Sony is introducing Library Finder. through the Sony Store, Library Finder will enable readers to find books in libraries, by entering their zip code. Assuming they have a library card for the library in that area, they will be able to download borrowed books to their PC and send them to their Reader. Borrow time restrictions are implemented in software, with the book simply expiring at the end of the loan period, so no late fees would accrue.

While this may have been a necessary move on Sony’s part, an attempt to counter the strength of Amazon’s ebook store, it was also inevitable that the maker of an ereader would eventually see the advantages of tying their product to the growing library ebook market. The prospect of using an expensive ereader to read books for free from public libraries is bound to persuade fence-sitters that it now makes sense to purchase one.

Meanwhile the growing success of Overdrive’s public library service will soon have faculty and students asking of their university libraries, “Can I get this book on my Sony Reader?”

The future for publishing may be uncertain, but the future (at least the near future) for makers of dedicated ebook readers seems crystal clear. With about a million dedicated ebook readers owned by consumers in the US alone, and with ebook sales continuing to increase by leaps and bounds, the market for ebook reader manufacturers looks promising indeed. In fact, a recent report by Credit Suisse indicates that, “E-readers are on track to penetrate about a third of the U.S. adult book-reading population in five years…” It’s no surprise then that number of new ebook readers said to be in production is almost too large to track. Among the well known new devices:

- Sony has released two new readers, both at significantly lower prices than their earlier lines; a wireless ebook reader is apparently upcoming
- and speaking of Sony, they’ve announced that users will soon be able to download mangas onto the PlayStation Portable device and are making plans to allow users to extend its functionality as a reader beyond comics
- Plastic Logic’s long awaited flexible, large format ereader is to be available for purchase in early 2010
- Fujitsu is apparently shopping around for a plant in Taiwan to put their colour ebook reader into large scale production
- iRex is set to release an 8.1 inch touchscreen wireless ereader
- Acer have announced plans to expand into the ereader market in the near future
- and of course there’s Apple’s much ballyhooed tablet device, said to be released to the public in the coming months, and, although backlit, may prove popular as a platform for reading ebooks
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Inside Higher Ed reports on the American academic library community’s response to Google Book Search. Jonathan Band, legal counsel for the Library Copyright Alliance, points out the irresistible appeal of a product that might contain most of the world’s published literature:

Speaking at a panel on the Google settlement at the National Press Club here Tuesday, Band said it is obvious that any library that hopes to remain competitive will be forced to purchase an institutional subscription from Google Book Search.

“[The university’s] faculty will insist upon it,” he said. “Its students will insist upon it.”

“There’s a product they have to have, and in essence there’s one supplier,” Band added.

Library concerns should be twofold. First the undeniable deja vu quality of finding themselves tied to another content provider in a monopoly position. As Elsevier, Springer and others have discovered, fortunes can be made by selling scholarly content to a captive audience. The second concern is that Google intends to allow publishers to sell ebooks from Google Book Search. Any publisher or vendor that is able to sell DRMed time specific ebooks (on the Overdrive model) to owners of ebook readers, cell phones, netbooks etc will be in a position to out maneuver libraries, particularly if the vendors keep prices affordable (say, 50 cents per week).

Meanwhile, either to demonstrate their dominance of the market place, or as a sign of hard times, Elsevier have announced higher than expected journal price increases. Which begs the question, how are Elsevier, Springer and the other commercial academic publishers going to respond to the new Google Book Search world? Cooperate or compete? And how long before the commercial publishers go full circle and begin complaining about Google’s unfair monopolization of the academic market?