Rekindling reference? E-book readers and reference collections

Article Type: Editorial From: Reference Reviews, Volume 25, Issue 1

In the last quarter of 2010, the time of this writing, the e-book phenomenon has become a permanent fixture in the world of both libraries and publishing,with ever more presses scrambling to decide which platform or format to use for distributing their books electronically. The emergence of the e-book reader and other “smart” handheld devices for delivering and presenting texts has changed everything. As Shaw (2010) notes, we have had an active e-book publishing industry for many years in the ASCII text archives (often with public domain works) and later web-based database sites for online books catering especially to academic and scientific clients. However, the landscape has changed considerably in the last few years with the tremendous rise in popularity of e-book readers. Indeed, e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle and its competitors, have opened up new avenues for distributing books. Libraries are struggling in the midst of this new world of e-publishing, trying to decide how to use ever-shrinking budgets to cover both traditional print resources and now e-books, as well as, potentially, e-book readers to go with the desktop computers and laptops that already figure prominently in library expenditures. For readers of Reference Reviews, a very pertinent question is how reference publishing will be affected by the rise of popular e-reader hardware. Reference publishers and libraries alike must decide whether reference resources such as encyclopedias, handbooks, and other familiar tools are suitable for consultation on an e-book reader; they must examine their users’expectations, the market trends, and the technological developments before deciding whether to embrace this format as a means to reinvent the reference book. E-readers and future devices might help rekindle reference along with other library services – indeed, they are perhaps the future of reading– but the prospect of an e-reference collection mounted on a portable reader is somewhat uncertain.

The e-book reader has long been the goal of developers of electronic texts,though it is still a relatively new delivery method for these texts. Although the e-book delivered via computer screen dates back to the birth of Project Gutenberg in the early 1970s, the first handheld devices for reading books did not appear until the late 1990s, when portable computing beyond the notebook first became a reality. Rocket ebook and SoftBook were the first e-book readers. Rocket ebook had to be connected to a PC and came with a capacity of 4 or 16 megabytes, or about 16,000 pages of text; SoftBook could store only 2 megabytes,but it had an internal modem and phone jack to download files directly from the larger popular trade publishers and major news magazines. These first devices were novelties, however, and despite some early adopters, mainly among public libraries (who quickly discovered that the technology had a very short shelf life), the limitations made their impact negligible upon what was, at the time,a mostly web-based e-book market. Nonetheless, other companies explored how to improve upon the early e-book reader designs and find the unit that would transform the industry.

When Amazon, the largest online book retailer in the USA, launched its first generation Kindle device in 2007, the e-book reader finally came of age. With its much-touted e-ink display, a storage capacity of several gigabytes rather than a few megabytes, and the ability to search for and download titles wirelessly, the Kindle changed the landscape of electronic publishing. The Kindle is now in its third generation, and with the launch of the Kindle store for Amazon.co.uk in 2010, the device has become the greatest selling item from that retailer, with many publishers scrambling to produce texts in the proprietary Amazon AZW format. Other e-book readers have since appeared: alongside the Barnes and Noble nook and Sony eReader, Apple has also entered the e-book race with various applications for its new iPad, as well as other handheld Apple devices linked to the iTunes store. According to recent Publishers Weekly figures (Publishers Weekly, 2010), Amazon’s Kindle accounts for 48 per cent of e-book sales in the USA, with Barnes and Noble a distant 18 per cent and Apple/iTunes 12 per cent, though Amazon has never released exact sales figures for its device. The sudden appearance of wireless e-book readers has had a ripple effect throughout the publishing and, by extension, library world. Studies on the long-term impact of e-readers upon those who use them are understandably preliminary, but some, such as Soules (2009), suggest that the new generation of e-readers is poised to change well-established reading habits, and libraries must now plan for emerging e-book technologies. Certainly publishers of fiction,other mass market titles, newspapers, and magazines have benefitted from the e-reader explosion; these are the sectors of the publishing industry currently seeing the most advantage from the availability of these different devices.

There are, however, a number of issues that face publishers of more specialised material such as academic titles or reference works, issues that affect libraries seeking to provide material in new formats to patrons. Do e-readers hold as much promise in the reference publishing universe as they do in the popular reading universe, and, by extension, can libraries utilize e-readers both for their general reading collections as well as for their reference collections? Many academic presses have reservations about proprietary formats for readers such as the Kindle and are therefore only slowly adopting the new format; at present, only 32 per cent of university publishing houses are making titles available for Kindle, versus the 92 per cent using Google Books and the 84 per cent using established web-based e-book vendors such as NetLibrary and ebrary (Milliot, 2010). Lingering copyright concerns and the problems of licensing content to institutions when the devices are better suited to an individual consumer have also meant that those publishers have not been as quick to develop titles for e-reader platforms.

Librarians are also expressing some hesitation about e-readers as tools to incorporate into their array of digital offerings, particularly in the area of reference. Reference e-books delivered on the web have become well integrated into most libraries’ assortment of subscription databases, but e-books delivered on portable devices are more problematic from the reference librarian’s perspective. The very nature of the reading experience with the devices does not readily lend itself to consultation of reference works, or at least does not offer the flexibility of a Web-based interface for a reference e-book. A 2009 study of LIS students at the Pratt Institute who were given Kindles and asked to comment on the device from a both a reader’s and a library worker’s perspective reveals some of the limitations of the technology for use in libraries (Pattuelli and Rabina, 2010). The students recognized the Kindle’s potential as a roving reference unit and found that they frequently used the device for reading, but observed that they tended to read in short bursts(newspaper articles and short fiction), and they were keenly aware that the device was best suited to a linear reading experience. The Kindle does not allow a user to skip around inside the text or to jump directly to a specific section without some navigational challenges. The lack of pagination – page numbers replaced by a digital progress bar – and the lack of hyperlinks or a touch screen interface (with the exception of the iPad and its virtual page-turning interface) makes non-linear reading or quick consultation of specific passages difficult. Reference books, which generally are not designed for “cover-to-cover” reading, are not a natural fit in such an electronic format. The devices might work well for quick reads or bestsellers,but not other kinds of library reading.

There are also some significant acquisitions-related issues for librarians to consider with reference material for e-book readers. The pricing structure of reference titles currently available for e-readers and the problems of selection and distribution of purchased titles for institutions will need to be addressed before the devices can be widely used in library reference settings (or in general library settings, for that matter). Currently, part of the great appeal of e-book readers is the comparatively low cost of the digital editions purchased for the units; Kindle editions of most books for sale at Amazon.com are $10 or less. But reference works currently available in Kindle editions can vary wildly in price, and the pricing system itself seems somewhat erratic. At the time of writing, one of the most expensive of the 822 encyclopedia titles in the Amazon.com Kindle store was The Encyclopedia of Protestantism (RR 2004/418), Vol. 4 (S-Z Index) at$687. The entire four-volume set of that encyclopedia is available for$764 in print from Amazon, but the Kindle edition apparently consists of only a single volume for about $80 less. That is the extreme, for among the other approximately 25,000 e-books listed in the reference category, there are some that cost only a few cents and many that are under $10, though works produced by major print reference publishers often cost more than other Kindle editions. This demonstrates that publishers not only remain unsure of the technology, but are also uncertain how to price their specialized scholarly content in this new e-book marketplace.

The experience of the Eastern Kentucky University Library in 2009 demonstrates how the pricing of reference titles for Kindles has many implications for library policies. As Margaret Foote (2010) explains in her overview of the e-reader project at Eastern Kentucky, the library circulated both Kindles and iPads to students, and allowed them to purchase up to two titles of their choice from the online retailers to download onto the devices. These e-book titles were then added to the library’s virtual collection,but the library was faced with a dilemma when a student ordered a Kindle edition of The Encyclopedia of Cybercrime (RR 2009/261). The title was over the $50 limit for user-selected purchases, and the library questioned the appropriateness of the encyclopedia for access via an e-reader as opposed to print or the web. The library administration feared that their College of Justice and Safety faculty would baulk at the idea of such a big purchase for an e-book reader. As a result, the policy was revised so that only general interest reading material, not scholarly sources, would be downloaded onto the Kindles or iPads, and lower price ceilings were established.

The confusion that Eastern Kentucky faced over a Kindle edition of a reference book demonstrates why the current e-book readers pose more questions than answers for librarians today. Licensing content so that the same e-books can be used on multiple units would be one solution, and already some “bookless”or all-electronic library branches, such as the new University of Texas at San Antonio’s Applied Engineering and Technology Library, are looking into circulating Kindles with pre-loaded content, taking the selection of titles out of the patron’s hands. Such a policy would avoid giving patrons the power to buy expensive titles on their own, a terrifying notion for most acquisitions librarians; yet such measures would run contrary to the “on-demand”nature of the technology, and they undoubtedly would lead to much patron confusion and frustration. The physical limitations of the readers themselves and their usability for reference material need to be taken into account. In addition, there are also accessibility concerns with the Kindle, and several universities have developed policies for providing equal services to visually impaired students who would have trouble with the units (Blumenstein, 2010).

The portable e-book readers of today will most likely transform into some future super-unit, perhaps one derived from a merger with other smart gadgets such as Apple iPhone/ iPad, or perhaps something we cannot even yet imagine,something that will change the nature of libraries. With so many online periodical databases and other e-content sites, the web is now a full-fledged member of the library community, but the fledgling e-reader universe is still taking shape around us; both publishers and libraries will have to wait for the technology to mature before fully adopting it into their standard repertoire of materials and services. Libraries might have to wait until the market settles and the competition between different proprietary e-readers is resolved,allowing a dominant technology to emerge (much like the Betamax versus VHS or the more recent HD-DVD versus Blu-ray format wars). E-readers have certainly altered the role of books and even digital texts on computer screens, and libraries will need to discover how to tame the wild frontier of e-publishing in order to preserve their role as the provider of reference information and assistance as more and more readers hold a machine in their hands instead of bound paper.

David D. OberhelmanNorth American Regional Editor, Reference Reviews and Professor, Oklahoma State University Library, Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA