CIL 2011 - Day 2 - eBook Models and Challenges

This presentation was in two parts. The first portion was presented by Sujay Darji of Swets. And was a description of Swets entry into the eBook distribution business.

Subscription agents, like Swets, are primarily know from periodical subscriptions. Publishers have been approaching subscription agents asking for a way to distribute content. Subscription agents had been working with e-content for journals for over 10 years and this required some infrastructure changes and research into the field. Different agents have chosen different methods and approaches to the problem.

Meanwhile librarians are struggling to keep up with all of the different models. It's been difficult to compare vendors with different pricing models, different styles, etc. Swets did a survey of librarians and decided for a variety of reasons to focus on an acquisition model rather than an access model, which meant they didn't need to establish a new platform and didn't have problems complying with different demands from different publishers. Swets set itself up in a position of an “aggregator of aggregators and publishers.” As a subscription agent the goal is to provide access to many titles from many publishers without having to worry about platform changes. There's a free access research tool from Swets.

The second presentation, was made by Stephen Abram, was far more interesting and challenging, and like most Stephen Abram presentations is more difficult to summarize.

In his presentation he stated that historically we have made all kinds of compromises for different media. Reflected light works very well for fiction (and end-to-end experience), but other light levels have different impacts on reading different kinds of media. Reading bright light increases stress. Reading a dimmer light brings that down to an action level. We need to evaluate the media that different material use. We like to take the old way of doing things and just make it electronic rather than thinking about what we can do with current technology to make something.

When interviewing a 13-year old who had been told by his teacher to depend on sources from the government, the boy said that he used Wikipedia anyway, since “Who are you going to trust, the government or the people?”

From the research that he's seen 1/3 want print, 1/3 want pure electronic, 1/3 want hybrid reading. People learn in different ways (text based and visual) and formats need to accommodate these different learning styles.

How would you reinvent the book?

• We are moving to an article level universe.

• The Chapter and Paragraph Universe

• Integrated with visuals, video, sound and speech, social web, interactivity

Abram emphasized that the FCC Whitespace Broadband Decision is going to have a huge transformational effect and that effect will go global.

He also emphasized that if we win our arguments on text-based books but ignore multimedia and other options we will lose the big picture.

We need to move faster together.

It was a good, thoughtful presentation.