The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. 

The issue is concentration not royalties.
Cloud Culture
The End of the Information Age
Problems facing Libraries
How Libraries can serve and thrive
Trends
Resistance is futile
How libraries must serve society 
by embracing cloud culture, 
the end of the information age, 
and inevitable technological and 
social trends
Kent Fitch
National Library of Australia
and Project Computing
Resistance is futile
Paul Goodman
 "New Reformation: Notes of a 
   Neolithic Conservative"
... embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition
to construct the world as one thing 
rather than another, 
to value one thing over another,
to amplify one sense or skill or
attitude more loudly than another ...
Neil Postman
 "Technolpoly"
The most important thing 
about a technology is
how it changes people.
Jaron Lanier
 "You are not a gadget"
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise.  Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media.
We are rapidly putting the Information Age behind us.  Of course we rely on information and the machines that process it more than ever, but information is no longer our culture's dominant metaphor.

David Weinberger
 "Knowledge as a
   Network"
Now we have hyperlinks.  Rather than trying to contain knowledge in a rectangular object we can hold in our lap, hyperlinks burst outwards, eager to connect to other ideas.  The intelligence of our species continues its progress from our skulls to our books to our networks. 
Knowledge  increasingly is found at the network level, and thus now has many of the properties of the network, just as it used to have the properties of books. 
Knowledge-as-network  benefits from the many differences and disagreements it contains, rather than by settling matters. 
It assembles itself around the interests of the seeker... 
Books are ... bulky and heavy.. too expensive.. circulate too slowly..

With respect to retievability they
are poor.  And when it comes to 
organizing the body of knowledge,
or even to indexing and 
abstracting it, books by themselves
make no active contribution at all.
J. C. R. Licklider
 "Libraries of the future" 1965
Yet we continue to behave as if these forces are going to go away or stay static. 

 Stephen  Rhind-Tutt
 "Between Now and 2020, 
   Libraries Should…"
They create multiple instantiations of the same catalog record. 
Some librarians prefer to disparage Blogs, Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, et al rather than work out how to build on them.
Libraries continue to invest in physical media. 
Technology
Capability
Cost
Digital
  information
Quantity
Cost
Quality
Google, Apple,
  Amazon, ...
Capability
Computation
Storage
Network
Charles Leadbeater
 "Cloud culture: the promise
    and the threat" EDGE
More cultural heritage stored in digital form
+
More accessible to more people
+
People better equipped with more tools to add creatively to the collection
=
Exponential growth in mass cultural expression
=
Cloud Culture
Computation
Storage
Network
commodified
Fast network
location deemphasized
Economies of scale

Advantages of pooling
Cloud Computing
But...
You are not a gadget...
Whether or not it draws on new
scientific research, technology is
a branch of moral philosophy,
not of science.
Marx
Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
The medium is the message
Marshall McLuhan
We do not ride on the railroad; 
it rides upon us
But lo! men have become the
tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
Technological Determinism?
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.  What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

 Orwell feared those who would deprive us information.  Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

 Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.  Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. 

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.  Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture...
Neil Postman
 "Amusing Ourselves
   To Death"
Why does this matter?
Who is making our tools?
and why?
The trouble with Books...
The trouble with E-books
The Competition
Hard To Use
Expensive
Networks are.
Vannevar Bush

"As we may think"

 The Memex
Doug Engelbart 

"Augmenting
 human intellect"
David Weinberger
 "What matters now:
   Difference"
The hyperlinked world - the Web - is made 
for this way of networked knowing. 
A hyperlinked world includes all differences
and disagreements, and connects them 
to one another.  We are all smarter for having  these differences only a click away.
David Weinberger
 "Knowledge as a
   Network"
David Weinberger
 "Knowledge as a
   Network"
David Weinberger
 "Knowledge as a
   Network"
Ted Nelson

Xanadu

Hypertext

Council on Library and Information Resources
study April 2010, Paul Courant & Matthew Nielsen
$4.26 per year per book
(maintenance, cleaning, electricity for temperature control, staffing, and circulation, amortized building & housing costs)
Hathi Trust e-book
$0.15 (B&W), $0.40 (colour) per year per book
Offsite High Density, non-circulating, non-display storage: 
$0.86 per year per book
10:22 Feb 10th via web
Alain de Botton

Pat Schroeder
former president & CEO
Association of American Publishers

We have a very serious
issue with librarians.
John Sargent
CEO Macmillan
You get the book, read it, return it and get  another, all without paying a thing. 


It's like Netflix, but you don't pay for it. How is that a good model for us?


If there's a model where the publisher gets a piece of the action every time the book is borrowed, that's an interesting model.

In the past, getting a book from libraries
has had a tremendous amount of friction. 

You have to go to the library, maybe the
book has been checked out and you have
to come back another time.  

If it's a popular book, maybe it gets lent
ten times, there's a lot of wear and tear, 
and the library will then put in a reorder.

With ebooks, you sit on your couch in your living room and go to the library website, see if the library has it, maybe
you check libraries in three other states. 

"First sale" is a nuisance
EULA and licensing are "flexible"
Tim Spalding
Founder
LibraryThing
Ebook economics: Are libraries screwed?
Pre web, information was
produced by few large and powerful publishers
discovered by metadata hand-crafted by librarians
expensive and centralised
Post web, information is
produced by anyone
discovered by fulltext and hyper-linking
cheap and distributed
Full text search
Get it online
Get it now
Access from anywhere
Context
...over 70 percent of researchers go to Google
 routinely for scholarly content
 ... A candid comment made by one respondent  in 
the Scotinform study encapsulated this challenge: 
“I sit in one of the largest national libraries
 in the world and if I want to know 
 something, I Google it.”

THRIVING or SURVIVING?
National Library of Scotland in 2030
Baby steps...
(necessary but not sufficient)
Big, plausible target
Simple to use
Starting to show context (but...)
Prefers electronic formats / instant access
Platform for engagement & collaboration
Readers as collaborators
tag, comment, correct, group editions, create lists/guides/trails
Two-way links to wikipedia
on time?
resistance is futile
CONTEXT!
Keeping books  -->
  connecting to many things
Control -->
  responsiveness
ILMSs -->
  versatile, inter-operable systems
Operating independently -->
  operating collaboratively
Passive recipients -->
  co-creators
Expert users -->
  generic users/everyone
Providing customer service -->
  self service
Traditional cataloguing -->
  new forms of descriptive metadata
Investment in reading rooms -->
  investment in a range of channels
Our vision for Kindle is 
every book ever printed 
in any language,
all  available in less than
60 seconds.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon
“Google's mission is to organize the
  world's information and  make it
  universally accessible and useful.”

remixtheory.net/remixImages/googleHand.jpg
ptufts Flickr
go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
Apple claim 300K
ebooks were
downloaded on day 1
“The advancement and 
  diffusion of  knowledge is the
  only guardian of true liberty.”
James Madison, 1825
Copyright
davidsilver Flickr
“The idea of having only one company
  control the library of human knowledge
  is a nightmare”
Brewster Kahle
Why is Google setting
the agenda via a class
action settlement?
Extending the 
Public Lending Right
to eBooks
John Sargent
CEO Macmillan
You get the book, read it, return it and get  another, all without paying a thing. 


It's like Netflix, but you don't pay for it. How is that a good model for us?


If there's a model where the publisher gets a piece of the action every time the book is borrowed, that's an interesting model.

go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
A 2.5 year-old has a First Encounter with an iPad
So...
"first sale"
price discrimination
secondary market keeps prices down
licensing, not ownership
no "coasting" on past acquisitions
libraries just collateral damage
Reading alone: How ebooks will kill 
the smallest libraries 
JohnPastor Flickr
Every 7 weeks, video uploaded
 to YouTube = total broadcast
 content of NBC+CBS+ABC since 1946
...including reruns
Promotion of cloud culture
an open, public cloud?
...and test-patterns
...the hive mind
...multiple choice identities
Stephen Schneider
Climatologist
Stanford University
“Can democracy survive complexity?”
The transistion to digital
old focus: container rather than content rather than context
+ user generated descriptions