Libraries, E-books, and Monolithic Solutions
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for April 2003
What do library buildings have to do with e-books? More than you might imagine.
If you believed the digital gurus of the 1990s, new library buildings—and particularly big ones with lots of stacks—should be as passé as new print books. With everyone dispersed to postsuburban enclaves made possible by the digital economy, there’s no place for those physical monuments full of dead trees nobody wants.
This month’s American Libraries demonstrates that cities and colleges continue to build big new libraries and expand old ones—and that print books continue to be an important part of those libraries. As with print books, the death of physical libraries presumed a monolithic solution to a nonexistent problem—and, as with most (or all) monolithic solutions, it didn’t and won’t work that way.
In Being Analog (ALA Editions, 1999) I wrote about libraries as physical places and the complex uses that argue for large buildings. Five years later, the arguments are still valid—in addition to collections, libraries provide a place for people to meet, study, read, research, play, and find answers to their questions.
The death of e-books?
Guess what: E-books are not dead. Even setting aside print-on-demand, electronic full-text journal articles, and other things that aren’t really e-books at all, there continue to be several healthy, growing but modest e-book markets. That’s a good thing. Like the death of print, the supposed death of e-books reflects exclusionary thinking or the love of monolithic solutions: that everything must work just one way.
It makes no more sense to believe that everything that has appeared in book form should appear on bound pieces of paper than it does to believe that all these things should exist only as displayed on screens. Ever since 1992, I’ve had two problems with claims for e-books:
- E-books were being touted as monolithic replacements for all print books, which I thought neither likely nor desirable.
- Specific applications and specific kinds of e-books were being oversold with little or no regard for drawbacks in the technology.
With few exceptions, the first problem has dissipated. Oh, there are still a few people out there who believe it’s just a matter of time before all reading migrates to the screen (or some other e-device). This year, it’s the Tablet PC; two years ago, it was the Rocket eBook; 10 years ago it was high-resolution readers that would be ready two years from “now”; two or five or 10 years from now it will be e-ink in some form. Find the right device, and everyone will want to read everything on it—magazines, newspapers, books will all fade away. That view survives, but it’s now held by a fading minority.
The second problem continues to vex e-book marketers and gurus, particularly because too many of them need a multibillion-dollar marketplace that may never emerge. Healthy e-book segments show sales in hundreds of thousands or low millions of dollars a year—not billions. The wild discrepancies between promise and reality can, in turn, lead journalists and observers to the opposite error: the belief that e-books are dead.
They aren’t, unless you define “e-book” as “dedicated, single-purpose reading device for general audiences.” In that case, I’d say “e-books” are at best comatose—but that’s a ridiculous narrowing of the range of possibilities. When you look at the broader range of e-books, you see some significant successes and some areas where substantial markets may yet emerge.
Avoiding the monolith
E-books never posed a threat to all print books. They would not and will not work as a monolithic solution, not only because of technological problems and reading preferences but because monolithic solutions don’t work. The same can be said for virtual libraries as wholesale replacements for physical libraries. The term “virtual library” may be a misnomer, but digital collections and digitally distributed services have improved the operations and quality of many, perhaps most libraries. As a monolithic solution, virtual libraries were and are doomed to fail—but that doesn’t mean they have no place.
The best libraries have more than one room. The best libraries use more than one medium. Most real-world problems require more than one solution. That’s life—messy but wonderful.
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