Don't Do It Just Because You Can

Technological advancements made in the past decade have certainly made librarians and libraries more efficient, more varied, and more approachable in the delivery of their services. Social networking allows for the online promotion of programs and services, as well as a way to communicate with others in the profession to exchange ideas. Vodcasting, podcasting, and blogs have allowed librarians to create material of their own and distribute it openly over the Internet, expanding their community far beyond their immediate geography. Video games have become a viable part of a library’s offerings; they represent the increasing amount of technology that libraries are making available to their patrons and the increasing diversity of collection development and programming.
All in all, there are few faults to find with the grand role that technology and new media plays in the daily life of a librarian. However, there is one form of media that librarians should approach with caution and that should not be engaged in simply for the sake of progress: e-books.

While resistance is ultimately futile, libraries should not rush to integrate e-books into their offerings. The majority of patrons don’t even own e-books readers (or e-readers) as of yet, and purchasing these devices to loan out to patrons could prove problematic. Unlike and Xbox 360 or a desktop computer, which is going to remain in place at the library and not be put solely into the hands of a patron, an e-reader is highly portable—and therefore highly fragile. They are quite expensive; the combination of fragility and cost represents a grim prospect for something that would be circulated as often as a book. Libraries could be staring down significant loss recovery budgets should their stock of e-readers falter.

The reason of fiscal awareness, however, is not the primary reason for avoiding e-books and e-readers for now. Put simply, libraries could find themselves getting the raw end of the deal when it comes to developing their e-book collection due to digital rights management, or DRM. DRM is the bane of all consumers of electronic media, be it music, movies, or video games. The easiest way to understand DRM is that it is something that restricts how may devices a given piece of electronic media can be installed on. Inherently, it’s to prevent piracy and the breaching of copyright law: to keep me from installing an MP3 on my iPod, my friend’s iPod, his cousins, iPod, and so on. While the base reasons for DRM are understandable, some publishers are absolutely paranoid about piracy (or are simply, to be blunt, overcome with greed) and go above and beyond understandable measures to protect their copyrights. This hinders library service.

Take, for example, Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle only supports Amazon’s native format of e-books, so everything one purchases for the Kindle must be purchased from them. Libraries stocking Kindles for distribution cannot search for the best price on the e-books they wish to install on the device. One can only download a book a certain number of times, so if you want to download To Kill a Mockingbird to multiple devices, you will eventually have to repurchase it. This is true even if you re-format a device and wish to re-install the e-book to it. What’s worse: at no point in time during the purchase is the customer informed of this (Cohen, 2009).

It’s easy to see then, why e-books should be something libraries approach with caution. Strict DRM gives a publisher almost total control over how a user buys, stores, and shares content—even after said user has paid for it. This translates into more costs for libraries, and if not more cost then certainly underserved patrons, as this service would be limited in number.

With that being said, there’s no need for libraries to shun them completely. There are e-book readers that support DRM-free formats, such as the simple .PDF used by Adobe Reader. There are apps available for other devices, such as the iPod Touch or Black Berry smartphones, which function as e-readers. There are publishers that release e-books free of DRM, and there is a multitude of books (especially those in the public domain) that are sometimes only available in a digital format. If your library is fully depleted of your copies of a work by Homer, and a student needs it for a classroom reading, then a quick Google search could generate numerous sources to find these works online; if this student has a portable device with an e-reader, they could walk out of the library with a portable, paper-free, convenient copy of the work they need.

Unfortunately, e-books are still in something of infancy. The dedicated e-reader is a fairly new concept for a mobile device, and publishers are still fearing (or exploiting) the digital frontier. It’s best for libraries to wait and exercise caution now, so that they are not engaged in aggressive damage control later.

References
Cohen, Dan. (2009, June 19). Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head… And It IS Ugly. Article posted to http://www.geardiary.com/