The adrenaline-pumper of the week? American Libraries has just run an article titled “The Elusive E-book,” by Stephen Sottong, former associate librarian at California State University, Los Angeles, whose faculty home page appears with the headline, “Retiring on September 26, 2003.”
Dissecting the Sottong piece, an information manager named Stephen Leary writes: “People won’t read entire books on these readers, Sottong assures us, yet that’s exactly what I have done myself. I’ve read dozens of books on my Sony reader, and on my desktop computer as well. Somehow I didn’t make it into Sottong’s academic research. Like other book lovers, I read many at one time. A reader is a great leap forward for many like me who don’t want to carry around a load of print books.” Exactly.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if librarians recognized the full potential of E and started worrying in a major way about e-book standards and the need to back off from an excessive reliance on DRM? Public libraries urgently need to consider new access and business models. Articles like Sottong’s, alas, steal time away from more useful efforts, including those by Isabelle Fetherston to educate the library world about the benefits of e-books for the elderly.
The first thing which comes to mind on this sort of thing is that the author is perhaps completely ignorant of the real online push for ebooks. He hasn’t really done his research and noticed that many of the ‘younger’ generation are so well adapted to digital technology that the possibilities held in eink and ebooks is terrific.
It seems to me just another example of the older generation having difficulty trying to keep up in the digital age – something which ebooks has really been hurt by in my mind.
These new-fangled motorcars are noisy, dirty, and foul-smelling contraptions, not to mention that they frighten the livestock. It certainly goes without saying that people will never take to them as a viable alternative to the time-tested horse and buggy.
You perhaps scanned my article and missed several important points just as Mr. Leary did. I did not say that people will not read books on hand-held devices – they will. I read on a PDA. Where they won’t read is on computers with fixed monitors. The article pointed out the physical differences between reading on those different devices. I fully agree with you (and so stated in the article) that what is needed is standards to facilitate adoption of devices. The current ones are not really usable for lending libraries; although, as Ms. Fetherston points out, they may have practical applications for a select audience. I assure you I have done my research and have been doing it for 12 years.
Many thanks for taking time to reply, Stephen. I totally agree with you on the distinction between Kindle-style devices and desktops when it comes to reading entire books. The other Stephen apparently missed some important nuances that I’d have expected him to catch. So it’s really great of you to write in.
Yes, my strong preference is for quoting and linking to source content in situations like this. Alas, your article wasn’t and isn’t available on the open Net—just behind a pay wall, ALA does not provide bargain subscription prices for nonmembers, and deadlines prevented me from tracking it down, which I wanted to do for a follow-up.
Now here’s an idea. See if ALA will grant you the right to let us reproduce the full article here so people can read it without any filters.
Thanks,
David
Addendum, 6:52: If nothing else, can ALA kindly put your article on the open Net—especially given the topic? Ask ’em and let us know what they say.