Today’s DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at the potential for the Amazon Kindle Fire to disrupt the tablet market as we know it now. First is a link to an eight minute video by Clayton Christensen in which he describes his theory of disruptive innovation. Then there is pointer to an article from the Harvard Business Review blog describing the Kindle Fire’s place in the disruptive innovation graph. Finally, some guesses as to why Amazon is selling the Fire for $200 when it costs about $210 to build one.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Clay Christensen Explains Disruptive Innovation

“This is the model I tried to summarize in The Innovator’s Dilemma, and I’d just like to quickly review it for those who have not yet had a chance to read that book.”

- Watch and Listen: Clay Christensen Explains Disruptive Innovation, Harvard Business Review blog

In this 8-minute video from 2008, Clayton Christensen describes his theory of sustaining and disruptive innovations. As long time DLTJ readers might suspect, I’m a big fan of Christensen’s work, particularly how it can be applied to libraries and higher education. One would be hard pressed to find an clearer and more concise explanation that what is offered in this set of slides with an audio narration. If you are interested in more, check out a list of references I’ve put in a shared Zotero library.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is a Disruptive Innovation

Disruption occurs given two criteria. The first: that incumbents move upmarket to the most profitable segments, ignoring low-end competitors at the bottom of the market. The second: that the low-end competitor introduces a product with a scalable technology or business model advantage at its core that has the potential to displace the incumbent.

This is exactly what Amazon has with the Kindle Fire. It’s not just a low-end competitor to the iPad. There is scalable technology at its core that the present-generation iPad lacks — the extensive use of the Cloud. That is why Amazon can get away with shipping a device that has only 8GB of memory. What’s more, the Fire has a business model advantage too — Amazon is using content to subsidize the hardware.

This means that the Fire has the potential to disrupt the iPad.

- Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is a Disruptive Innovation, by Rob Wheeler, Harvard Business Review blogs

Now if you listened to the 8-minute video described in the first entry of this week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads, you’ll have some context for reading this article. Predicting what new innovations will disrupt the marketplace is hard, and Christensen’s model points only to signals of what to watch out for. Apple may do something radical to reduce prices or stay ahead of user expectations (but not so far ahead that they overshoot customer’s capacity); that is their dominant market position advantage. Or Amazon may stumble and not deliver on moving their product “up-market” in the face of feature oversupply by Apple; that is the new entrant’s challenge. But the model is useful in predicting and/or categorizing the sequence of steps that each is taking in their efforts to dominate the marketplace.

Amazon Fire More Than Just a Digital Content Reader

“The real benefit of the Kindle Fire to Amazon will not be in selling hardware or digital content,” read a Sept. 30 research note accompanying the analysis [of the cost of the Kindle Fire components]. “Rather, the Kindle Fire, and the content demand it stimulates, will serve to promote sales of the kinds of physical goods that comprise the majority of Amazon’s business.”

That strategy could pay off for Amazon in the long run. “So far, no retailer has managed to create an umbilical link between digital content and a more conventional retail environment,” the note added. “With Kindle, Amazon has created the most convincing attempt at this yet.”

- Amazon Kindle Fire Costs $209.63 to Build: Analysts, by Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek

First off, there are companies that specialize in figuring out the cost of components that make up a device? Who knew?

Second, and more important, is the observation that the Kindle Fire represents a way to make proprietary the optimization of part of the supply chain to create a better user experience. In The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care Christiansen, along with co-authors Grossman and Hwang, describe a similar optimization with the Apple iPod: “Other Companies’ attempts to assemble systems from modular components resulted in difficult-to-use, unreliable products. But by optimizing end-to-end the integration of its iTunes music store and the designe of its iPod player, Apple created an elegantly simple system which companies with nonoptimized, industry standard architectures cannot now compete.”¹ When you couple the money-losing price of the Kindle Fire with the bundling of a free month of Amazon Prime (which gives customers free two-day shipping in addition to access to commercial-free movies and TV shows), I think we can guess that the user interface of the Fire will be intended to make more frictionless the process of buying physical and digital goods from Amazon. (Or, as one blogger put it, “The real benefit to Amazon is that it acts as cash register to buy more Amazon goods.”)

Footnotes

1. Christensen, C. M., Grossman, J. H., & Hwang, J. (2009). The innovator’s prescription: a disruptive solution for health care. McGraw-Hill Professional. p 268.

Legal action against the digitization and limited distribution of orphan works unexpectedly hit the news again this week. This week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads starts with an overview of the lawsuit filed by authors organizations and authors against Hathi Trust over plans to make digital versions of orphan works available to university users. And while we’re wondering of libraries’ role in providing access to digitized works, we should also take note of an article in American Libraries Magazine on what we could learn from Blockbuster’s fall. And lastly, I point to a story of one author’s experience when her own self publishing with Amazon ran afoul of a publisher’s desires.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Hathi Trust Taken to Court

The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University. … “This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights,” said Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like it to some, but writing books is an author’s real-life work and livelihood. This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection. These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books.”

- Authors Guild, Australian Society of Authors, Quebec Writers Union Sue Five U.S. Universities, Authors Guild blog

Just days before what could be the final status hearing before the judge in the Google versus Authors Guild et al. case, the Authors Guild in conjunction with two other authors organizations and eight individual authors filed suit in federal court against Hathi Trust and five of its member universities. And with that suit it would seem that the Authors Guild has begun a full-throated assault on libraries. In a subsequent post on the Authors Guild blog, they announce that they have found the author of one of the orphan candidates identified at the University of Michigan. The tone to me isn’t so much that they are pleased for the author that they accomplished this (they don’t say whether the author was a member of the Guild or not), but that they took great pleasure in rubbing librarians’ noses in it:

Just before we filed our lawsuit, we did some cursory research into some of the names on the list of “orphan works” candidates at the HathiTrust website to see if we could find contact information for a copyright holder. …

We weren’t hopeful, because we knew that research librarians were behind the project, and they were likely to be especially careful to avoid any embarrassing slip-ups in this first go-round. We thought, at best, we might find the representative of some obscure literary estate. We were wrong.

A bit nasty, eh guys? I imagine they are trying to fire up their membership for this fight against arguably one of the great institutions of America — the library. At the very least, you’d think that if they were trying to help their members that they would prominently post the link to the list of orphan work candidates in their postings, but it took a reader deep in the comments to offer a link.

In any case, this is being set up as a fight as dramatic as the original Google vs. Authors/Publishers lawsuit. Here are some things you should read, in ascending order of length and comprehensiveness:

1. Wards of the Court, Inside Higher Ed
2. The Orphan Wars, James Grimmelmann’s The Laboratorium
3. ARL’s Resource Packet on Orphan Works: Legal and Policy Issues for Research Libraries, with extensive commentary by Jonathan Brand of Policy Bandwidth

Avoiding the Path to Obsolescence

Blockbuster was much in the news last fall, though not in the favorable light it once enjoyed. The cultural phenomenon and former stock market darling that once prospered through aggressive marketing, savvy exploitation of technology, and keen insights into customer preferences filed for bankruptcy in September 2010. Though some analysts thought the filing could give the franchise time to reinvent itself, others predicted that the onetime video-rental colossus is steps from the graveyard of retail obsolescence.

There is a lesson or two for libraries in this riches-to-rags story.

- Avoiding the Path to Obsolescence, by Steven Smith and Carmelita Pickett, American Libraries Magazine

This is a great article. Although they don’t say it specifically, the authors point to Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Specifically, how an organization’s Resources-Processes-Values framework prevents it from reacting to innovations that are disrupting its products/services. Even if you aren’t familiar with Christensen’s work, I highly recommend reading this article.

On Self Publishing and Amazon versus Traditional Publishers

In January, 2010, I signed a contract with one of the Big 6 publishers in New York for my next novel. I understood then that I, like every writer in the business, was being coerced into giving up more than 75% of the profits from electronic sales of that novel, for the life of the novel. But I was debt-ridden and needed upfront money that an advance would provide. The book was scheduled for hardback publication in August, 2012, and paperback publication a year later. Recently that publisher discovered I had self-published two of my story collections as electronic books. To coin the Fanboys, they went ballistic. The editor shouted at me repeatedly on the phone. I was accused of breaching my contract (which I did not) but worse, of ‘blatantly betraying them with Amazon,’ their biggest and most intimidating competitor. I was not trustworthy. I was sleeping with the enemy.

- Sleeping With The Enemy: A Cautionary Tale, Davenport Dialogues

On the heels of last week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads entry on Amazon’s tactics for end-to-end control of book publishing comes this view from the author’s perspective. Publishers are getting squeezed from all ends by new models of getting content in the hands of readers. If we could, do you think we can throw into the air all of the pieces of the author-agent-publisher-printer-library-reader chain and sort them into nice neat lines of responsibility and value-add without all of this name calling and lawsuit-filing?

It is an all e-books edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads this week. The biggest news was the announcement of the policy change by HarperCollins for ebooks distributed through OverDrive. Beyond that, though, was an announcement of a new sharing model and program through the Internet Archive. Lastly is a slidecast recording of a presentation by David Lewis on the future of library collections.

Before continuing, a quick apology and explanation. E-mail readers received a pair of extra Thursday Threads messages and RSS subscribers got a dump of unrelated posts; I’m sorry. The cause was an update of this blog’s WordPress software to version 3.1 and a conflict (maybe this one) with the SimpleTags plugin. I believe all is well, but I won’t know until this post is published.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

HarperCollins Puts 26 Loan Cap on Ebook Circulations

In the first significant revision to lending terms for ebook circulation, HarperCollins has announced that new titles licensed from library ebook vendors will be able to circulate only 26 times before the license expires.

Mention of the new terms was first made in a letter from OverDrive CEO Steve Potash to customers yesterday. He wrote [emphasis in original]:

[W]e have been required to accept and accommodate new terms for eBook lending as established by certain publishers. Next week, OverDrive will communicate a licensing change from a publisher that, while still operating under the one-copy/one-user model, will include a checkout limit for each eBook licensed. Under this publisher’s requirement, for every new eBook licensed, the library (and the OverDrive platform) will make the eBook available to one customer at a time until the total number of permitted checkouts is reached.

Though the letter leaves the publisher unnamed, HarperCollins confirmed today to [Library Journal] that it is the publisher referred to.

In an odd one-two punch, this past week saw a disturbance in the status quo of e-book licensing. The first punch came in the letter from OverDrive [PDF] (part of which is quoted in the Library Journal article excerpted above). The second in that Library Journal article when we learned that the publisher pushing for the change of terms is HarperCollins. Since then it has been the source of a great deal of discussion by librarians and a few authors, much of it in the form of tweets with the hash-tag “#hcod” (short for HarperCollinsOverDrive). Damage control comes in the form of open letters from OverDrive and HarperCollins. There has been a call for a boycott. Bobbi Newman, one of the first to jump on the story, is maintaining a list of news articles and commentary.

As you can see, much has already been said about the issue, and since collection development is not my specialty, you probably shouldn’t look to me for an informed opinion. (If pressed, I will suggest that it is a perfectly reasonable collection development policy to not buy access to material with terms that are not in the library’s and patron’s best interest.) Instead, there is so much oddness in this new policy that I find I can’t put myself in HarperCollins’ shoes. First, using OverDrive as a proxy for announcing this policy change seems wrong (and, frankly, unfair to OverDrive). Then as word spreads, you don’t make your own announcement, but rather talk to a reporter from Library Journal. Then as news spreads through the day, you send a single tweet. In fact, you don’t really publicly respond until five days after the twitter universe and biblio-blogosphere have been talking about it. And it is pretty much a non-engaging, public relations response. (You do get credit, though, for allowing open comments on your blog post. But some of that credit is taken back because you aren’t using a company branded blog. Really? A typepad.com blog? One of the tenants of most information literacy courses I’ve seen is to look for the source of the information, and it requires extra effort to take this blog seriously because it isn’t in the harpercollins.com domain space.)

If I were to guess, this seems like a trial balloon that was badly floated. I certainly can’t fault HarperCollins for trying something new in the ebook licensing world, but this one has fallen flat.

Internet Archive and Library Partners Develop Joint Collection of 80,000+ eBooks To Extend Traditional In-Library Lending Model

Today [February 22, 2011], a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive announced a new, cooperative 80,000+ eBook lending collection of mostly 20th century books on OpenLibrary.org, a site where it’s already possible to read over 1 million eBooks without restriction. During a library visit, patrons with an OpenLibrary.org account can borrow any of these lendable eBooks using laptops, reading devices or library computers. This new twist on the traditional lending model could increase eBook use and revenue for publishers. …

Any OpenLibrary.org account holder can borrow up to 5 eBooks at a time, for up to 2 weeks. Books can only be borrowed by one person at a time. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (viewed using the Internet Archive’s BookReader web application), or a PDF or ePub version, managed by the free Adobe Digital Editions software. …

Publishers selling their eBooks to participating libraries include Cursor and OR Books. Books purchased will be lent to readers as well as being digitally preserved for the long-term. This continues the traditional relationship and services offered by publishers and libraries.

This press release from the Internet Archive largely went unnoticed on the eve of the #hcod onslaught. It was covered in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog and in Library Journal. The latter has a few more helpful details: “IA founder Brewster Kahle and director Peter Brantley also told LJ that small independent publishers Cursor, OR Books, and Smashwords will donate ebooks license-free to the Open Library for lending to all Open Library members. With this venture, IA hopes to establish a “first-sale precedent” for e-lending, according to Brantley.” One must be from one of the participating libraries to check out books. My experience with most Internet Archive efforts is that the initial announcement is very subtle and not picked up widely, then slowly grows to something substantial. I expect this project will follow much the same path and will have a noticeable imprint on the profession in a few years.

Slidecast of David Lewis’ “Collections Futures” Talk

• Context
  • The Big Shift
  • Interlude with Clay Shirky
  • A Bit of Disruptive Innovation Theory
• Collections in “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century”
• What Will Be Easy and What Will Be Hard

So far in DLTJ Thursday Threads I’ve intentionally avoided pointing to items inside this blog — preferring to link to events, resources, and conversations elsewhere. I’m going to make sort-of-an-exception in this case because what I’m ultimately pointing to is not my work. It is a slidecast (recorded audio synchronized to slides) of David Lewis’ presentation at the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting. Starting with a foundation from John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison called the “Shift Index” [PDF], Clay Shirky’s “How Social Media Can Make History” TED Talk, and Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theories, David walks through the possibilities for three strategic issues facing academic libraries: Complete the migration from print to electronic collections; Retire legacy print collections; and Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content. The slidecast is about 75 minutes long and well worth the time as a thought-provoking view of what libraries should be doing to survive the next few decades.

At the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting, David Lewis (Dean of the IUPUI University Library) gave a talk entitled “Collections Futures”. I’ve followed David’s ideas since we crossed paths a few years ago; his ideas on applying Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theories to libraries ring true to me. This presentation is in part an update on his earlier work on this theme and an expansion to include new ideas from Clay Shirky and John Seely Brown.

With David Lewis’ permission and in keeping with the Creative Commons license he used to publish the work, I have synchronized his slides and the audio recording using Slideshare.net. That effort is embedded below and is available on the Slideshare site.

A couple of notes on the conversion.

• Slides 17-24 are out-of-sync with the audio recording. The speaker flipped through the slides quickly and SlideShare.net enforces a minimum of 10 seconds per slide. The slides catch up to the audio at slide #25.
• SlideShare.net did not convert the graphs on slides 67, 68 and 69. Snapshots of those slides are included below:
  67. 
  68. 
  69. 

The sources listed on the second to last slide are:

Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009.

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, New York : McGraw-Hill, 2008.

Clayton M. Christensen, “The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care” (video), May 13, 2008, MIT World, Available at: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/594

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, “Measuring the forces of long-term change: The 2009 Shift Index,” Deloitte Center for the Edge, 2009. Available at: http://www.johnhagel.com/shiftindex.pdf

John Hegal III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves Smartly Made Can Set Big Things in Motion, New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Lewis, David W. “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century.” College & Research Libraries 68(5):418-434 September 2007. Available at: http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/2007/sep/Lewis07.pdf and http://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/1592 [Note: Links changed to point to updated locations]

If you are interested in more sources about applying Clayton Christensen’s theories to higher education in general and libraries in particular, see the Christensen in Higher Education Zotero group library.

My gratitude to David Lewis for sharing his thoughts and for allowing me to make them more accessible.

If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of “disruptive innovation” in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to subscribe to my FriendFeed stream where these topics and more are posted and discussed throughout the week.

The User-Driven Purchase Giveaway Library

“[W]e have reached the important tipping point where digital files can be read on machines that are nearly as good as paper books and where paper books can be created and delivered nearly as quickly, cheaply, and reliably as digital files. This makes it possible for libraries to radically rethink their fundamental approach to providing documents to users.

In this EDUCAUSE Review article, David Lewis — dean of the IUPUI University Library — proposes a brief thought experiment where he argues that it is more cost-effective for academic libraries to stop purchasing physical items just-in-case. Rather libraries should acquire the rights for digital delivery and print-on-demand production of works from publishers, suggesting that the licensing and production costs would be cheaper in the long run than buying, cataloging, circulating, and storing the physical artifacts. Lewis mentions use of the Espresso Book Machine, a earlier topic on DLTJ and I’ve commented on Lewis’ work before, and I highly recommend looking at the full description of his thought experiment.

Amazon’s Kindle Singles e-books: One shrewd business move

Amazon’s Kindle store is getting more like a music store everyday. Now you can buy a whole book or just a single—an e-book that’s about twice as long as a New Yorker feature. In a statement, Amazon called on writers, business types and other big thinkers to create Kindle Singles.

This post on ZDNet is an opinion piece about Amazon’s announcement for the Kindle Singles program. A “Single” is intended to be longer than an article but shorter than a full length book — about 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages, according to Amazon’s press release). But what it really seems to be about is the disintermediation of traditional publishers in the Kindle digital distribution world.

Blackboard to Sell Online Courses Through New Partnership

Blackboard announced today that it is teaming up with a for-profit education provider, K12 Inc., to sell online courses to colleges that want to outsource their remedial offerings. The companies say their plan will offer a new way for students who lack basic skills to get caught up. Blackboard would sell online courses that are designed and taught by employees of K12. The courses would be delivered on the Blackboard course-management system. It is the first time that the company has sold full courses, and not just software to deliver them.

Very interesting. A posting at the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus news stream. This is arguably a Christensen-inspired disruptive path. Blackboard and K12 create a product that takes the unwanted consumers from market incumbents (those that need remedial work to meet the minimum standards for starting credit-earning courses). While doing it establish a tight vertical market where you can add value. Then move “up-market” and start to take other low-margin consumers from incumbents. Will we see Blackboard teaming up with for-profit education companies to offer associates and bachelor degrees next?

How energy-efficient is cloud computing?

Researchers have found that, at high usage levels, the energy required to transport data in cloud computing can be larger than the amount of energy required to store the data.

The researchers looked at the aggregation of energy needed to store and process data on a user’s own computer versus using servers “in the cloud.” The PsysOrg.com article is a brief summary of the study to be published in the Proceedings of the IEEE.

One Step Closer to a National Digital Library

Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America’s collective intellectual wealth within everyone’s reach? Robert Darnton, the historian who directs the Harvard University Library, has been one of the most public champions of the idea. This past weekend, Mr. Darnton convened a group of 42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds to talk about how to build that library. In a short statement, the group endorsed the idea of “a Digital Public Library of America,” envisioning it as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources” drawn from the country’s libraries, archives, museums, and universities.

This is another short news post from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus news stream and it takes the form of an interview with Robert Darnton. Although the details of a U.S.-oriented National Digital Library still seem to be sparse — the most comprehensive information comes from an article by Darton in the New York Review of Books — the implementation of this concept is certainly something to keep an eye one.

North America is gaining its third¹ major bibliographic record utility server this month with the unveiling of SkyRiver.

SkyRiver Technology's Pre-launch Homepage

SkyRiver was founded by Jerry Kline, one of the principles behind Innovative Interfaces, Inc, and its president is Leslie Straus, former vice president for worldwide sales and marketing until 2006. The Library Journal article indicates that Kline is providing the financial backing of the effort, and that it shares office space and administrative support with Innovative Interfaces. No word yet about who the development partners are (although the article says that at least one is an ARL library) or what the subscription pricing will be. The SkyRiver website, though, does encourage people to come back to http://skyriver.com/ for the formal launch on Friday, October 9th.

For the record, the other major North American bibliographic utilities that I’m aware of are OCLC and LibLime’s ‡biblios.net, with the footnote talking about the possibility of the Open Library as a bibliographic utility. As with ‡biblios.net, I think it is useful to think about the introduction of SkyRiver to the bibliographic utility universe in the framework of Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovations. And in that framework, I’m not sure these efforts will work — while SkyRiver and ‡biblios.net are arguably quicker and more nimble than their OCLC counterpart — there isn’t much in the service offering that are not sustaining innovations in the field. Sure, the pricing model and the record re-use policies might be different, but the existence of SkyRiver and ‡biblios.net may just force OCLC to move in these directions as well. After that, there are no distinguishing factors. Clearly, this is going to need more thought…

The text was modified to update a link from https://biblios.net/ to http://biblios.net/ on February 11th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. or fourth? Does Open Library count as a bibliographic utility?

Sue Polanka, head of reference and instruction at the main library of Wright State University, sent a message to the OhioLINK membership today about a new blog she is moderating called No Shelf Required:

No Shelf Required provides a forum for discussion among librarians, publishers, distributors, aggregators, and others interested in the publishing and information industry. The discussion will focus on the issues, concepts, current and future practices of Ebook publishing including: finding, selecting, licensing, policies, business models, usage (tracking), best practices, and promotion/marketing. The concept of the blog is to have open discussion, propose ideas, and provide feedback on the best ways to implement Ebooks in library settings. The blog will be a moderated discussion with timely feature articles and product reviews available for discussion and comment.

No Shelf Required will be moderated by Sue Polanka, Wright State University. The role of the moderator will be to articulate discussion topics, provide feature articles and product reviews, and ask poignant questions to the group in order to stimulate open discussion and collaborative learning about Ebooks. The moderator will also provide audio content in the form of interviews with librarians and those in the publishing industry.

The blog has been running for about a week, and already has topics like:

• Should eBooks be updated? (A topic for discussion)
• Book Sales Increase at Year’s End (Copy of a press release)
• ALA Program – The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing (Announcement of an upcoming ALA program)
• XReferplus – Credo Reference, Oxford Reference Online, Greenwood Digital Collection and Gale Virtual Reference Library (Product reviews)

It sounds like it is going to be an interesting place to keep an eye on, particularly since ebooks can/could be a disruptive influence on library services. Good luck, Sue!

The title of this post is true, under certain circumstances. Last week’s e-mail brought word from Michael Robertson of Backdoor Dialing – Free Calling to Millions of U.S. Phones. By using Gizmo, the freely available, no-spyware computer-based telephony application, it is now possible to call about 10% of the mobile and land lines in the country for no per-minute charge. This looks like another chink in the armor of the traditional voice telecom way of doing business, on their way to being disrupted out of existence (as they are known today).

First, let’s work through some assumptions. Gizmo is a internet application (using a suite of protocols called Voice-Over-IP, or VoIP) for mimicking what the traditional telephone company does for us now. Rather than using your telephone connection to make the call, you use your computer and its connection to the internet to call other computers or even mobile and landline phones. So it isn’t necessarily “free” — one is still paying for the computer and the internet connection — but the call that you make from your computer has no per-minute charges and is not sensitive to distance.

Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.
via Library of Congress American Memory Project

Second, let’s also work through a little bit of telephony background. The traditional phone system uses a technique called “circuit switching,” meaning that there was one continuous wire, or circuit, between you and the person you were calling. Switchboards, such as the one pictured here, used plugs to complete the entire continuous connection between the parties. It worked, but it also meant that no one else could use the same piece of wire, even if there was just silence on the line. The internet, by contrast, works using a technique called “packet switching.” The voice is digitized and broken up into bundles called packets, and those packets all share a common connection. The packets are really small when there is silence on the call, so you can fit many more of them onto the common connection. The telephone system as we know it today is a hybrid of these two techniques: a circuit between you and your telephone companies local phone switch, packets between your phone switch and that of the person you are calling, and then a circuit to the person you are calling. This is oversimplifying things immensely, but the concepts are all there.

Packets are much cheaper than circuits — you know this because your long distance telephone bill has dropped to nearly nothing and the mobile telephone companies can offer free nationwide calling at no additional charge. The mobile telephone companies can do this in part because mobile phone technology has eliminated the costly per-person dedicated circuit between the phone company and the user: mobile phones already use a form of packet switching as they communicate with radio towers. Gizmo works in a similar way by exchanging the circuit between you and your telephone companies phone switch for a computer program and the packet switching mode of the internet.

For reasons that are too complicated to explain here (but that you can read about in the Wikipedia article on the Public Switched Telephone Network), the way the telephone companies move voice packets over long distances is different from how the internet moves data packets. The telephone company method is predictable, very reliable, and expensive. The internet is cheaper, but also is a best-effort method that may mean some packets are lost in transit. Here’s the disruptive (in the Clayton Christensen sense of the word) part, though: the best-effort method is becoming good enough and is starting to compete with the predictable, reliable method based on price.

The innovation that Gizmo Backdoor Dialing brings to telecommunications is a private peering relationships with major telecommunications companies. Gizmo uses the “best effort” internet for all but the last bit of the connection with the person you’re calling, where it hops of the internet to the other telecommunications company (presumably, somewhere close to the end destination of the call). The effective cost of that call, once you have paid for your computer and internet connection, is effectively zero.

But is “best effort” good enough? Perhaps. Many users are switching to VoIP as a way of getting their telephone service. Neither my home nor office numbers are served by carriers that have joined the Backdoor Dialing program, but my cell phone number is. In a quick test yesterday, the quality was not noticeably different from a traditional call. When the Gizmo software called my mobile phone, the caller-id showed a number in the 580 area code. My mobile phone can even use that number to call back to the Gizmo software on my computer! (Although that sounds neat, it isn’t all that great because it is a number that only my mobile phone can use to call my computer. It is tied to the caller-id of my mobile phone, and when I tried to use the number on a different phone I got a recording that said my caller-id wasn’t recognized. Gizmo has a service, though, where you can pay for a real live phone number for your computer running Gizmo.)

So, although there is a large up-front investment in the infrastructure (computer plus broadband internet connection) to make Gizmo work, if you already have those pieces and if you make a lot of calls to people who’s phone numbers are part of the Backdoor Dialing program, you would stand to save a great deal of money with this scheme. That is a lot of “if’s” but the theory of disruptive innovation tells us that the caveats will fall away as the technology improves and gets cheaper. This is definitely something to watch…

The text was modified to remove a link to http://gizmoproject.com/call-in.php on June 9th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.gizmoproject.com/ on June 9th, 2011.

Libraries place a good deal of emphasis on collection development policies — a written statement of a library’s intentions for building its collection. It describes the collection’s strengths and weaknesses and provides guidelines for the purchase (“acquisition”) and disposition (“weeding”) of content. This is an activity that sets libraries apart from other organizations.

A number of automated systems exist for the first half of this process: approval plans, book jobber firm order systems, etc. (See the Just In Time Acquisitions versus Just In Case Acquisitions article on DLTJ for another idea about the front end of the process.) Not may seem to exist, nor are they as widely used, at the end of the process — deciding when an item needs to drop off the shelf to make way for something new. The OCLC WorldCat Collection Analysis is one such tool; this posting describes another — a way a consortia can maximize the array of content held collectively by optimizing the deaccessioning of material.

Existing Practice

The ‘discards’ list is a shot-gun approach to handling deaccessioned items — everyone on the list receives the same broad spectrum of announcements. If a subject specialist subscribed to the list, he or she would receive a lot of “noise” from announcements in unrelated subject areas. Conversely, an acquisitions coordinator may not appreciate the value of an item from a specialized field. Also, as the policy guidelines dictate, checking to see if special handling is needed on a title-by-title basis because it might be the last copy in Ohio adds a time consuming step to the discard process. This proposed “Automated Withdrawn Actions” system seeks to address the issues of targeted notification of deaccessioned items and streamlining the consortial aspects of collection weeding.

Overview of Proposed System

The AWA system can also look up the item in the OhioLINK central catalog to determine the number of libraries that hold the same title. If removing the copy in question would trigger a “last copy” situation, the software can send the same notification to the ‘discards’ mailing list with the “LAST COPY OFFER” notation. If seven days pass and no other library accepts the item, the system can generate a PCIRC transmittal slip to send the item to Ohio State University — Ohio’s academic library of last resort.

Technical Requirements

Possible Extensions

Transfer of MARC Record

OCLC Holdings Update

Offering Withdrawn Items to Libraries Outside Ohio

Other Automated Transfers of Deaccessed Items

Conclusion

By automating the actions that occur when an item is withdrawn from a member library, the long tail of library item usage can be pulled out a little further. Once unused items can find a new home and a new stream of usage via the software and workflow described here.

Why settle for mere digital copies of books (a la the Google Book Search project and the Open Content Alliance) when you can have an edition printed, bound and sent to you in the mail? That’s the twist behind a recent partnership announced by Amazon.com, Kirtas Technologies, Emory University, University of Maine, Toronto Public Library, and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

More information via C|Net News, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), and Inside Higher Ed. I’m putting this in the “Disruption in Libraries” category because it is an example of using a technical innovation to serve an un-served or under-served population — not only the digitization of books but also the ability to deliver a physical reproduction to the user. That aspect makes this program distinct from the others, and it is the first time that we’ve seen a glimpse of a reasonable business model: costs recovered and profits made that go back into the digitization program for new books. Since this is a non-exclusive agreement that puts the libraries in control, the texts can be made available freely online or available at a nominal cost to the user in a physical form.

[Update 20070704T0904 : Ack! I linked to the wrong Chronicle of Higher Ed article. Fixed now -- thanks Jodi.]