Entry at Teleread titled: The library tech skeptic at work: Good Kindle advice for Amazon from Walt Crawford, despite his past misses
Excerpt: Behold! A few nice words about the Kindle have come from none other than Walt Crawford, a well-known library automation guru and tech skeptic—even if they show up with major conditions.
I’ll get to Walt’s somewhat pro-Kindle remarks and K-related advice in time. His very qualified praise is blog-worthy since he has just about made a career of skepticism toward futuristic library tech. For now, here’s a little context for you to take in, while the suspense builds about the exact Crawford quote.
Librarians partly to blame
Line from Teleread article: In this vein, I’m glad that Walt mentions ePUB, the IDPF standard and its adoption challenges, but I hope he’ll grasp that librarians are partly to blame for the format not succeeding as quickly as boosters hoped.
–Just putting the line out there for possible discussion.
Suggestions for librarians re .epub
Thanks, Bibilofuture, for the pickup of the item. While I very much think the library world could be doing more for ePUB, I meant the comment in a constructive way. You can’t solve a problem without being aware of it.
Ideally librarians will ask vendors for timetables for the availability of ePUB books at the consumer level.
If there are problems, then librarians need to know what they might be–and team up with vendors on solutions.
None other than Steve Potash, president of the IDPF (idpf.org), the group behind the ePUB standard, is also founder of Overdrive, one of the biggest suppliers of public library e-books. It would be wonderful if OverDrive, which has laudably announced its support of the standard, would tell librarians:
–When ePUB will be available to the company’s library customers, if this process hasn’t started already?
–How widely ePUB will be available? For all OverDrive libraries? For all books? What percentage of books by what time? Will it end up being a preferred format? Is OverDrive encouraging publishers to follow Hachette USA’s excellent example and use ePUB as a standard distribution format?
–What OverDrive will do, in terms of tech support, to help libraries and their patrons make the transition?
–Will there be ePUB-capable readers promoted besides Adobe Digital editions? Although hardly flawless–it currently lacks CSS support–FBReader is an interesting open source alternative. I hope that librarians and the open source community can combine efforts on other readers that work with ePUB and pay special attention to ease-of-use issues. Could library groups even offer grants to responsive open source developers?
–How open is OverDrive to offering ePUB books without DRM, _when publishers allow this_. I know the library world is accustomed to certain business models, built around expiration. But how about offering not just DRMed editions of books but also those that would be easily readable via a Web browser for people who don’t want to mess with DRM. Access could still be timed. Ideally the online format would be something that allowed quick browsing. Beyond that, there is the possibility of using social DRM in a limited way, combined with permanent checkouts. I’ll explain these terms tomorrow in a TeleRead post discussing new models for libraries. Meanwhile, of course, DRM has the obvious disadvantage of gumming up the works so that even ePUB books aren’t readable with open source programs like FBReader.
Not to pick on Steve! I’d suggest that librarians ask the same questions of other vendors, such as NetLibrary, in a constructive way. I don’t know Walt’s current status with NL—whether he has direct or indirect relationships–but perhaps he’ll have some ideas.
At any rate, I hope the library world will see the possibilities here. Robust e-book standards will be far, far better for libraries than the proprietary approaches favored by Amazon. You can bet that Jeff Bezos has his eye on the library market. Great! But librarians and others, not Jeff, should make the rules.
Thanks,
David Rothman
[email protected] | 703-370-6540
http://www.teleread.org/blog