These Ebooks have no Clothes

These Ebooks have no Clothes 

Why the future of ebooks is different from what you might think

                                    by Earl Lee

A kind of conventional wisdom has developed about the future of ebooks in libraries. In a recent post on COLLDV-L, Luke Swindler states that “With the passage of time, e-books will become increasingly accepted if not expected in lieu of print.” In his post, Swindler describes the many drawbacks of ebooks, but for him the eventual domination of ebooks over print seems certain. 

This result seems inevitable to everyone, like the melting of the glaciers. Even in studies that demonstrate the popularity of paper over ebooks, the authors feel compelled to proclaim the eventual victory of the ebook. The purchase of more and more ebooks is being pushed by vendors and encouraged by public library boards and library directors who positively salivate at the savings in staff costs and physical space. Smaller and smaller libraries providing access to more and more electronic texts seems to be a growing trend. The future, as many see it, is that one day a branch of the local public library will be indistinguishable from the Red Box at McDonald’s where people get their DVDs. Many of us wonder if this is a future we want.

But critics are starting to appear. At the 2012 Charleston Conference, Beth Jacoby described student dislike of ebooks, an attitude that has been widely noted by other librarians. Also, she wondered if there might be “a connection between learning style and the preference for print.” Similarly, an article by Maia Szalavitz in Time “Do E-Books Make it Harder to Remember What You Just Read?” (3/14/12) presents evidence that print texts are better formats for readers who are trying to retain information and ideas.  Electronic texts provide little physical context to support the act of remembering concepts, and this difference can be measured. People are simply less likely to retain information presented in an electronic format, compared with print. And readers seem to sense this viscerally.

There is a story that has made the rounds in Management classes for many years. It goes like this:

Once upon a time a pet food company created a new kind of dog food that was incredibly cheap to produce, and they rolled out a huge marketing campaign to introduce the product to customers. Despite hiring a first-rate advertising agency, sales were very disappointing. In desperation, the CEO called in all of the top executives for a brainstorming session to figure out what had gone wrong with the campaign.

 The meeting went on for hours. Statistical analysis was brought to bear on the problem. One VP argued that the mix of TV and print ads had been wrong. Another argued that the campaign had been too sloppy and had failed to feature the product logo enough. After the debate had raged for hours, the CEO felt the group had accomplished very little. He asked if anyone else had any ideas. Finally, one newly hired employee raised her hand and said, "Maybe the dogs don’t like it."

This, I believe is the main problem with ebooks. Many patrons don’t like them and prefer the familiar paper books. Their reasons may seem trivial, but I believe that these reasons are directly related to the experience of reading. I don’t want to discount the many people who have charged in and bought new and shiny nooks and kindles, but I don’t believe that ebooks will play a dominant role in the future of intellectual life in this country, much less the future of publishing or the future of libraries. The ebook format simply does not provide the tactile stimulation that serious readers, and especially scholars, want. Walking across campus here at Pittsburg State, I see many students carrying books—many have taken to using book bags with wheels to get around—but I rarely ever see a student sporting a new nook or kindle. The difference between electronic texts and paper is a serious issue for sophisticated readers. Entertainment, maybe—but Enlightenment, no.

Libraries may purchase video games like Halo or Call of Duty, or even Madden NFL 2012, which appeal to a young audience. But this is not the same audience that turns to scholarly and literary books. Your typical teenage adolescent may like the Harry Potter books, the Twilight books, or (hopefully not) the 50 Shades of Grey series. Such fantastic fictions are enjoyed by many readers, and they may even inspire a high degree of product loyalty, not to mention endless reams of fan fiction. These books, games and videos also help the circulation statistics of public libraries; but I don’t think any of us really believe that they will be remembered, much less read, in thirty years. Much like the novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, they will be recalled only in history books on the popular culture of the last century. Perhaps ebooks are a suitable format for this kind of popular fiction, much as cheap newsprint was in the 19^th century. 

Focusing on these kinds of entertainment media runs counter to the mission of libraries. And collecting these entertainment-oriented products is usually framed as a compromise to our "customers." We don't need to emulate bookstores whose sole purpose is to sell stuff without any concern for the results. Book selection should not be driven by the current fad or by the pressure to buy what's popular today. This notion of patron choice is what drives the hokum about Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA) which is the current hot topic in collection management. This idea makes about as much sense as letting students pick their own textbooks for use in a class.  People who have little knowledge of a subject and even less experience with books really don't know how to select books. Students who can't figure out the veracity or reliability of web pages probably are not going to be good selectors. Patron selection is clearly a garbage-in, garbage-out process. As tempting as it may be, librarians can not abdicate responsibility for what goes on the library shelf.

But where libraries are concerned, the most telling fact about ebooks—and the one thing that ebook promoters try to avoid—is the lack of statistics that can be gathered to demonstrate ebook usage. Even though ebooks have been around for some time, the software for measuring usage doesn’t seem to have advanced much at all. We can measure the number of times an ebook is “touched”—that is a person has pulled up an ebook to look at it, at least momentarily. But is the ebook really being used? Some librarians have found that students look at the ebook briefly, in order to see if it is worth reading, and then go request the book in paper from inter-library loan. If only “touching” an ebook is the major way it is being used, then the argument for more ebooks falters. And if students realize that they can, often just as easily, use Google Books or the “search inside the book” feature on Amazon, then the future for ebooks becomes rather bleak.

Ebooks certainly have a role to play, but it is not the role that we suppose. They are not destined to be The Masters of the Universe that intellectuals and scholars turn to for study. But ebooks do have their uses. Students have access to reference books, journals and government documents in electronic form, which they can use to get the necessary facts for their research papers. But paper books will continue to dominate our cultural lives for many years to come. Assuming that we don’t get lost in our social media and hundreds of cable channels, our culture will survive. And the paper book is here to stay.

Earl Lee is Collection Development Librarian at Pittsburg State University and author of Libraries in the Age of Mediocrity (McFarland, 2001). His most recent book is From the Bodies of the Gods (Park Street, 2012).