Heresy alert! A few words on Wowio, public libraries, e-bookstores and the glories of mixed business models

Pop quiz time! Which e-book source is carrying a smarter collection of downloadable titles—including the one to the left? Just which is a public library? And which is a profit-driven company supported by ads?

Book Source #1: Focuses on popular books from brandname publishers. Half the time, alas, I end up disappointed because the title I wanted was just an audio book. DRMed to the gills. Harder to use. Minimal organization of nonfiction by subject. Reminds me of an airport bookstore. Great people involved. Less than optimal site.

Book Source #2: Doesn’t offer you the biggest bestsellers of the moment but carries an enticing mix of quirkier and often far-more intelligent books—the kind you’d expect from librarians interested in midlist and backlist titles. No DRM nightmares. 100 times better organized. More of a site for the thinking reader.

Like it or not, Source #1 is a public library, deservedly regarded as one of the best systems in the United States, on the strength of its p-collection and first-rate reference operation. Source #2 is Wowio, the ad-supported service, which takes E much more seriously.

Discoverabilty: Why Wowio leaves public library collection in the dust

Mind you, Wowio carries some e-junk. And for all I know, my more favorable impressions of its collection could simply reflect the better organization of books. No, Wowio is far from perfect—I want to see more subcategories within the fiction, for example. But the discoverability still leaves the public library’s collection of downloadables in the dust.

In praising Wowio, let me further qualify my enthusiasm. I’d like many more fiction titles to be there. And I continue to hate Wowio’s fixation on PDF; file bloat and lack of reflowable text can make this format a nightmare on small-screened computers. But I have a workaround, Mobipocket Desktop, which converts the PDF. The e-books are still in a proprietary format and jumbled in places, but, unlike the library books, they’re readable in the open-source FBReader, which can handle nonencrypted Mobi.

My newest Wowio downloads

As keepers, not just loaners, I’ve just downloaded the following books from Wowio to enjoy whenever I want and for as long as I want:

• The Courage to Survive, by Dennis Kucinich. This is the one I’ll probably read in full
• Who’s Who in Dickens, by Donald Hawes. Just the ticket if you’ve lost track of a character’s name? I can load it on a PDA and use it while I’m reading off another machine.
• Shakespeare and the Young Writer, by Fred Sedgwick, whose reasonable premise is that young students will write better if exposed to the writings of the Bard. I won’t read this one immediately but will return to it when I have the time.

Not exactly the stuff I’d find among the downloadable books in the typical public library! Constrained by budgets and the feeling that public libraries must cater to the immediate demands of the taxpayers, some libraries are increasingly bestseller oriented at the expense of mid and backlist choices.

Heresy time

So let me be outrageous and suggest not only E for libraries, but also the very judicious use of ad-supported books to maintain and ideally increase the number of titles. No, we’re not talking about something toxic like Channel One—forced exposure to advertising. Instead I’m suggesting the following:

1. Librarians choose books by merit and popularity.

2. A patron checks them out, as he or she can do now.

3. When a book expires, the patron can select from the following options:

• a) Not give the title another glance.
• b) Switch from regular DRM to social DRM, the anti-piracy precaution that Wowio uses. In other words, the book will identify the patron by name to discourage copying to P2P networks. No, there will not be an expiration date. The patron can keep the book forever and even build a personal library—available forever—out of the collection of the library itself. Not every book would be available as an SDRMed book, and for budgetary reasons, patrons would have quotas. It is important to compensate publishers fairly since in this case we’re talking about something closer to ownership than a loan. The operative term might be “permanent checkout,” a phrase I’ve used in the TeleRead blog before.
• c) Buy the book from booksellers, who give the library a cut of the revenue. No need to mess with sample chapters. The patron would already have finished the book and would now want to make it part of his/her permanent collection. Here’s to book ownership, a great way to promote literacy! If libraries could quickly zap title-related information associated with the names of patrons who wanted this, and if they would let people buy books via anonymous digital cash, then so much the better.
• d) Get the book instead for free, or at reduced cost, with ads embedded in it.

Significantly, this mix of approaches would still let librarians, not advertisers, be the main gatekeepers here and avoid inflicting ads on children or on those who did not want them. As a further precaution, to avoid the distractions of being in the bookselling or advertising business, public libraries could farm out these functions to private agencies that would negotiate for the best deals.

Of course, my dream remains a tax-supported national digital library system in the TeleRead vein, well integrated with schools and public libraries. But as I see it, we need private bookstores and ad-supported books, too. The greater the number of business models, the more chance that patrons can find just the right book. Also, to be blunt, the Bush Administration scares the bejesus out of me. It’s warred against federal environment libraries, for example, and cannot be trusted on issues such as family planning. So, as much as I want a national approach to reduce the famous savage inequalities among different cities and states, not just in schools but in library service, I don’t want the book world to be too dependent on the Washington. A decentralized library system is not enough.

Finally—a word on the role of e-booksellers, whom I dearly want to thrive in the interest of offering a wide variety of books, not just the library-blessed variety. Via subscription plans, some bookstores could become libraries in effect and themselves experiment with mixed models. Here’s to competition between public and private sectors, so that neither will become smug!