Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Collection Building, Volume 29, Issue 4
I often attend Day of Dialog, which is an annual collection development event sponsored by Library Journal that precedes BookExpo, the largest annual book fair in the USA. This year, in addition to the interesting panel on new titles and trends in book publishing and one featuring authors of thrillers, the day featured panels on e-books and audiobooks.
The e-books panel focused on new platforms being developed that provide much more than the traditional black-and-white e-books that we are used to seeing. Copia, which is being released in the next few months, is called the “first social reading experience”. This new platform combines reading materials such as books, magazines and newspapers with social networking. This means that the reader can read a book and then discuss it with people in their social network. Copia will be available through desktop computers, iPad, smart phones and e-readers. Users can use Boolean searching and tag-based searching. Copia is geared to the new world of social media as it aims to make reading a social experience.
Baker and Taylor are launching their new “Blio Bookstore”. Blio can run on PCs, laptops, tablets, smart phones. It preserves the book’s printed format including layout, fonts and images. It also has a read-aloud feature good for children, people with physical impairments and others. Blio will provide interactivity so readers can insert notes, websites, etc. Baker and Taylor are also developing a circulation platform for libraries so that these e-books can be easily circulated.
The librarians on the panel asked about the content available through these new ventures, whether these new platforms can be integrated with new ILS systems and whether libraries can acquire e-books for a period of time and then return them for others so they will not have to house e-books that are no longer of interest to their users.
Representatives from BBC Audiobooks America, Library Ideas and Overdrive were on the audiobook panel. The Overdrive representative pointed to the importance of the cost per circulation of audiobooks (and e-books as well), the ease of use, the importance of the audiobooks being “device agnostic” and the many difficult issues surrounding licensing. Others talked about the need for libraries to ask for the business model they needed and the need to reach out to people in the social networks such as Facebook to promote library use.
These two panels point to interesting futures for e-books and audiobooks. They will have more flexibility than before, a wider variety of content and the ability for libraries to adapt them to their needs.
Kay Ann Cassell
