Libraries Happen

Michael Scotto's Just Flash is a children's book about a strange animal trying to figure out its identity.

Flash is the only animal of his kind, but he wishes he could just belong to a pack like everyone else at the zoo. He first tries to become another animal, in order to fit in. He tries to be a giraffe; he tries to be a gazelle; he even tries to be a zebra. Along the way, though, Flash realizes that it's more rewarding to be himself – no more, no less.

Libraries and librarians crossing over from print to digital must feel a lot like Flash. Even newly born entities like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are finding themselves in an awkward period of not knowing what they should be.

I was a guest at a recent DPLA "Audience and Participation Work Stream" meeting that brought together participants with a variety of perspectives and experience, but joined by a deep concern for the future of libraries. We met at the Dallas Public Library, just after the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting at the nearby Convention Center. Our charge was to help articulate "why we need a public library when it's all on the web" and suggest how to attract involvement from all types of libraries.

The DPLA has the incredibly difficult task ahead. It must weave together many distinctive strands of activity emerging from a strong but inchoate desire for the missions of libraries to continue in new more powerful ways.  It's encouraging to me that the DPLA leadership is spending a lot of time learning about the needs and desires of diverse communities. But I think that sometimes our understanding of what libraries are today holds us back from seeing what the library movement could be tomorrow. Separating the essential from the institutional manifestation is not always easy to do.

During my time in Dallas, I had the fortune to witness a "library" happening in its purest, most human form.

YALSA is one of the American Library Association's many incomprehensible abbreviations. YALSA stands for the Young Adult Library Services Association. I don't really know much about what YALSA does, but on the Sunday exhibit floor of the ALA meeting, I saw more than one group of teenagers roaming the exhibits wearing YALSA T-shirts. On the way back to my Dallas hotel, I shared a subway train car with one of these groups. I started chatting with two of the teens. It seems that the librarian at their suburban Dallas high school had organized their expedition. The teens had made off with huge bags full of books courtesy of the exhibit vendors.

Sitting on the other side of the train car was a Hispanic family- a young mother, her daughter of perhaps 6 years, and an older man who was probably the girl's grandfather. The little girl was reading what appeared to be a fast food restaurant placemat, but it didn't seem to interest her much. The YALSA teen next to me noticed. She asked the mother, "Are you going a long way on the train? I have some books here she might like." And out of the bag appeared a copy of Just Flash. The girl's eyes lit up. For the next 20 minutes I watched the girl enchanted by an illustrated story that had appeared as if by miracle, chosen specifically for her. As I got off the train, a second book was emerging from the teen's bag.

I don't know what sort of animal libraries will evolve into. Maybe librarians will ride trains with mega-book digital libraries on memory sticks for kids who need them. Maybe restaurant placemats be ultra-cheap reading devices. Whatever stripes it wears or what name it answers to, the simple act of letting a book bring joy and wonderment to a little girl will define what a library must be, no more, no less.

2011: The Year the eBook Wars Broke Out

Open war is upon us, whether we would have it or not. These incidents in 2011  seemed like twitter-inflamed kerfuffles as we lived through them, but with the perspective of time, we can see they were preludes to a fight to the death.

1. Harper-Collins and Overdrive Stop Pretending

In a year or two, libraries may consider the Harper Collins limit of 26 circulations of a list price ebook through Overdrive to be a relative bargain, as all of the other large publishers will withdraw from "pretend-its-print" ebook licensing.

2. Amazon occupies Overdrive

Libraries mostly welcomed the possibility to lend their Overdrive ebooks to patrons with Kindles. Libraries are fundamentally service-oriented institutions and ebooks on Kindle is what the users wanted. But at what cost? Do the traditional library values of privacy go right out the door? Do libraries realize that patrons gone to Amazon might not come back?

3. The Penguin Strikes Back

The big publishers have watched Amazon's market power grow and see a future of slavery to an internet commerce master. Only Penguin allowed hostilities to break out, however, as the Amazon occupation of Overdrive broke the penguin's back. The target of opportunity was library lending. Evidently Penguin decided that a frontal assault on Amazon would be suicidal.

4. Prime Pretends to be a Library

Amazon added ebook borrowing features to their Amazon Prime service, revealing it as Amazon's answer to Netflix, and without even thinking about it, as a service that could eventually compete directly with public libraries. Now we see why Amazon wanted to get in on that library thing.

5. Publishers Decide Google is a Lesser Evil

Publishers looked back on the halcyon days when Google Books seemed poised to establish a new world order for ebooks with nostalgia. A separate, anticlimactic settlement between Google and the Association of American Publishers appears to be in the offing. It's Amazon that they're afraid of now.

6. Authors Lob Legal Grenades at Hathitrust

Spurned by the publishers in their joint crusade against the Google heathens, the Authors Guild decided that Hathitrust might be a less formidable opponent. And indeed it was, the lawsuit exposed a number of copyright blunders by the library cooperative. But the Guild's suit seemed hasty and ill-contrived. This sort of thing happens in wartime.

7. Amazon Obliterates Borders.

Although Borders was tactically weak in many ways, it was Amazon and the rise of ebooks that killed it strategically. Barnes and Noble, if it survives, won't look anything like the book marketing machine that it is today.

8. Libraries Muster the Resistance

The emergence of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a rallying point for libraries' continuing presence in the cultural life of America was a surprise, as it went against the prevailing tea-party currents for smaller government and increased reliance on the private sector. It's not clear how the symbolic presence of a library in Zuccotti Park could point the way to a digital future, but many things that have not yet come to pass are shrouded in darkness.

9. Anti-Piracy Hysteria Threatens Freedom Loving Citizens

The powerful publishing and media industries, in a paroxysm of inept do-something-ism, seem to have convinced Congress that it would be a good thing if the intenet could be censored for copyright infringement. Sadly, the solution they've fixed on, SOPA, will be ineffective against unlicensed content and will put the Justice Department smack in the middle of our nation's information infrastructure. Carpet bombing never ends well.

There's hope.

I have learned that whenever it seems that you're falling into the abyss, you must reach for a rope. There is always a rope.

The DPLA Muster

Battle flags never made sense to me. "Why give your opponents something to shoot at?", was my thinking. As if soldiers with deadly weapon would bother rally to a flimsy piece of cloth. An idea. What's powerful about that?

Friday, I attended the plenary session that launched the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) at the National Archives in Washington DC. (with 300 others!) When it started early this year, I was pretty skeptical of the DPLA. It had no discernible plan of action, no coherent vision for the future of libraries, no business model, not even an awareness of how impossible its dream really was. All they had was... a battle flag, and a figurative one, at that.

What I saw was the power of a battle flag. John Palfrey and a cabal of Harvard academics have forged a movement from the fire of frustrated librarians, archivists, and information professionals who have recognized that a lot of the present system is broken and going nowhere fast. They sent out a call for help, and amazingly enough, that call was answered.

Although the news of the day centered around $2.5 million grants from Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund, and promises of cooperation from Europeana and the British Library, I was most encouraged by the presentations in the afternoon, from people who actually build stuff.

At Gluejar, we've been struggling with the difficulty of presenting collections of books to Internet users in a meaningful and effective way. The typical UI of a book site is pretty lame. If the site goes beyond bland lists, it may try for a "bookshelf" view. The problem is that a bookshelf can only present 50 books or so, and a decent library will have 100,000 or even a million things to display.

The most elaborated UI experiment latched on to DPLA was ShelfLife from the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. It presents books as an "infinite bookshelf" arranged vertically to best display titles on the spines. It clings to the physicality of books by using thickness to represent the number of pages in the book, and uses the height of the book to show... the height of a book. It sounds stupid, but works a lot better than you might think. Go try it.

Bookworm was another interesting demonstration, from the people who brought you Google NGram Viewer. Using the less-restricted data from OpenLibrary, Bookworm allows you to examine subject heading occurrence as a function of time, and uses this visualization as a way to expose lists of book records. Very cool, but I felt like it was a fun toy for a job that wants a ear-splitting power tool.

The enthusiastic reception for these and other projects, which seemed to come out of the woodwork in response to the DPLA call to action, convinced me that DPLA is much more than a pitch for foundation funding. The library world, and the academic community that relies on libraries, is hungering for innovation and experimentation to show the way out of ebook purgatory.

So go for it, DPLA. There will be content of all sorts from libraries, museums, and the like for you to organize. Internet Archive, Hathi Trust and others will push the boundaries on book digitization and distribution. Gluejar will do its best to stock your shelves with unglued books that people care about. My advice: do some small things well and the big things will follow. That's what battle flags are all about.

How to Fund a Public eBook Library with Tax Deductions

In California, newly (re)elected governor Jerry Brown has proposed to zero out state funding for libraries. In Britain, government cuts could lead to as much as a quarter of librarians lose their jobs over the next year. In New York, the Queens library has responded to budget cuts by zeroing out its acquisition budget, instead of cutting opening hours. In my home town of Montclair, New Jersey, a historic branch building is being closed and the reference department is being eliminated.

Given the worldwide climate of cutting libraries, the recent proposal for the establishment of a "Digital Public Library of America" (DPLA) would seem to be either the product of a castles-in-the-sky delusions, or the result of watching too many Star Trek reruns. But it's worth thinking through the DPLA for a few moments before dismissing it as unrealistic.

Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.

I don't quite understand whether or how a National Digital Library could be restricted to its citizens; it would effectively be a world library, but that's a quibble, or perhaps a warning about territorially restricted rights, but there you get the idea. It should be an international effort. The Sloan funded planning initiative should go a long way towards fleshing out the idea.

The most difficult part of building such a library will be finding stuff to put on its virtual shelves. There's public-domain material to start. Cooperative scanning and digitization of such material would create an important resource for scholars, and much of this work has already been done. Almost two million volumes worth of digitized scans of public domain works  are already available (with varying availability) through the HathiTrust cooperative. Some of these scans were made as part of the Google Books project.

Another source of books for DPLA would be material that is out of print but not out of copyright. The Internet Archive suggests that many of these works can be made available to the public as if they were physical books, as long as a physical book is held as in reserve as the basis for doing so. It not clear whether doing so would be consistent with copyright law, except perhaps for books without economic value. Manyrightsholders might be willing to donate their rights to DPLA, just as many rightsholders appeared to be willing to allow use by Google for modest compensation.

Unfortunately, many rightsholders are absent and can't be found. Many rightsholders lack good documentation of rights or may be uncertain whether rights have been properly reverted. The Google Books Settlement Agreement attempted to settle or circumvent litigation surrounding these issues; the agreement has thus far not been acted on by the court. It's quite possible that legislative action would be required to allow a digital public library to freely provide this sort of content. Good luck with that.

What's missing from the proposed DPLA is any way to stock it with content that people actually want to read. Publishers that I've talked to are loathe to give up their backlists because they believe the backlists may become valuable through digitization and enhancement. Often the rights surrounding their backlists are so murky that it would be a significant expenditure just to clear rights. The only backlist acquisitions an NDLA would be likely to afford are those that are truly worthless.

There IS, however, a way, in the existing tax code, to direct tax money toward acquiring eBooks for a DPLA, or for any library, for that matter. It's called the deduction for charitable donations. As long as doing so is consistent with their charitable purpose, any recognized charity could collect donations toward the acquisition of rights to an ebook. If the ebook was then made available under a public license, such as one of the creative commons licenses, it would further that public charitable purpose.

For example, a charity focused on finding a cure for a disease (e.g. Huntington's) could ask supporters, acting together, to buy out the digital rights to books and journal articles relating to research, treatment and patient care for that disease. Similarly, a museum devoted to the history of New York City tenements could ask supporters to acquire works of fiction that bring to life the period and lifestyle of immigrant living in lower Manhattan in the early 20th century. Libraries could join together to support all sorts of books that promote their public purposes of promoting literacy, economic development, and cultural enrichment.

Donations made in this way would be fully tax deductible, at least in the US. I don't know the situation in other countries, but I note that many European countries have unfavorable treatment for eBooks under their value added tax (VAT) systems. I learned at Digital Book World that Italy has a 4% VAT for print books, but a 20% VAT for eBooks, which are considered to be a service. The VAT for charitable donations is, of course, 0%.

Readers of this blog will recognize that this is another way to present "ungluing ebooks". I've been working on ways for libraries and consumers to join together in a market to acquire the right to put ebooks into the public commons. This could happen through a collective of libraries or through a web site like Kickstarter, or both. Once acquired for the public commons, the ebooks could be made available through DPLA or any other library or ebook distribution service.

Apart from the tax advantages, the benefit of working with charitable institutions to crowd-fund the acquisition and liberation of ebooks is that early validation of the concept will be easier. No one really knows whether people will put real money towards the movement of ebooks into the public commons. Working on a project catalog much smaller than "all the world's books" with a target audience more focused than "people who love books" will allow us to more accurately gauge the willingness of the public to support public ebooks.

I've spent a lot of time this month explaining my ideas for ungluing ebooks. The questionthat keeps recurring is whether I plan to act on these ideas by forming a non-profit. The most persuasive argument for this is that the idea of acquiring the rights to an ebook for the public commons is much easier to understand when put in the context of a public charity, such as public television or public radio. The whole idea of free books is so foreign to people that people assume that free ebooks means pirated ebooks.

For now, though, I'll be pursuing this via my for-profit company, Gluejar, Inc. That's because I talked to my lawyer. He pointed out that it's much easier to deduct the costs of a speculative business venture from my taxes than it would be to convince the IRS that this weirdo crowd-funded public ebook idea is really a charitable endeavor.

I'd like to acknowledge Juliet Sutherland, Director of Distributed Proofreaders, and Richard Cave, I.T. Director of the Public Library of Science for very helpful contributions to the ideas in this post. I'm not an accountant or lawyer; this article is not any sort of tax advice.