The fate of libraries in the ebook revolution

Colin David wrote a post called “Your Library Is Dying” in a web magazine Splice Today.  David reminds us that our libraries are woefully underprepared and or untrained in the latest social media. Librarians aren’t familiar with many of the new information resources like blogs and RSS feeds or how to conduct advanced web searches in order to help patrons. They might not have an inkling on the ebook revolution.

It’s an interesting read, even if it might not match your experience in your library.  I think it’s a really mixed bag across libraries. I’ve been able to visit many libraries in the two cities I’ve recently lived in.  They seemed in some branches to be well equipped. I think libraries try to be very diverse. Is your experience like mine?  My libraries have a decent collection of DVDs, now replacing the many VHS tapes (thankfully), with selections in features, documentary, educational and kids. They have a sizeable number of PCs equipped for Internet access. They have a great deal of books and sections with new releases, both in print and audio.

My libraries also hold events with authors, they mini galleries on display, their meeting rooms can be reserved and often are, they have computer classes on basic subjects. Seasonally they offer tax preparation and have awareness programs e.g. for Black History Month or Asian-Pacific Heritage Month. They show feature films and even film series in whatever branch has the cinema-style venue.

Libraries are designed to be very diverse. They attempt to reflect the culture and community around them and attend to those diverse needs. They also as you might sense, are constantly running activities as a test bed to see what sticks. Like any business, they will play up or downplay them as interest waxes and wanes over time. If nobody attends the Hitchcock film series, then they won’t likely be holding it again next year.

It’s not necessarily the library’s job to teach since they aren’t schools. Nor are they community centers. They also could be forgiven for being behind the times if none of their patrons were requesting the latest and greatest information, programs resources etc.  If they are giving their patrons what they want and satisfying people coming in the door, are they doing a good job while still dying?

Regardless, you can only carry on without evolving  for a few years before you start to lose the older patrons while not gaining younger ones. Younger patrons will want to use it to perform in school and take multiple library resources to synthesize new ideas or output an intelligible paper. Adult patrons will be seeking to research specific subjects, to become someone by supplementing a career path.  Very young and much older patrons might just be looking for entertainment and interesting things, maybe even an escape or a meeting place for discussions with peers.

You might agree that a library needs to change with the times but also believe that young people who only used their web-connected phones will miss out on a lot of the tactile benefits of books and the atmosphere of a library, you are not alone. The library can serve the connected culture while maintaining a non-electronic classic atmosphere.

I think you’ll find that most libraries have been looking at these issues over the past 5 years or so. How they act on them will depend on their funding, their staff’s abilities and from their education and experience from other libraries.  As dull as some libraries can be, they can come from a very creative place. So the problem solving to maintain relevance will occur.  And there are many commercial partners and resources available to bring things like ebook and audio rentals to beef up the library offerings so they don’t have to go it alone.

Your Kindle is now dry

Wired has a product review today on the M-Edge Guardian Case for the Amazon Kindle. It looks water tight and absolutely unnecessary. You see the reason for these kinds of hinged plastic cases for digital cameras is that people actually go underwater to snap pictures of family and poisonous jellyfish. Nobody that I know of would be reading a book on sharks or diving safety 3 inches or 30 feet under the sea or at the community pool. Protection from the occasional splash or sudden rainstorm is where a case is needed. The M-Guardian weighs a pound and basically disables the joystick controller on your Kindle. How does this feature or the price tag of $80.00 for this make sense? I’ll tell you where it makes sense. If you tend to set your ebook readers where you might accidentally sit or drop a grenade on them, a case like this would be nice insurance. I suppose reading in bed you might rollover on it or push it off the mattress too.

Weatherproof cases bring the question front and center, why isn’t the Kindle or any other e-reader designed to withstand a little water or a little heat or cold to begin with? Added longevity would seem like a much better upgrade for people than a few extra shades of gray on the their screen. Wouldn’t you love to know your Kindle is just as safe in your steamy hot car on vacation as your car’s factory stereo, or that you could forget the reader on your back deck and the sudden summer rainstorm you didn’t hear coming of won’t kill your chances to read your digital library?

By the way, Wired says that the M-Edge Guardian case is the first waterproof kindle case, but I don’t believe it’s the first and it’s certainly not the only one.  The Trendy Digital WaterGuard waterproof Kindle case looks like a much smarter buy at $15 from Amazon and TrendyDigital’s online store.

Do yourself a favor, consider the less expensive and lighter 2.8 oz  TrendyDigital WaterGuard case for your Kindle if you’re interested in protecting it from the elements. If the massive savings wasn’t enough to convince you, an added plus is even if you didn’t have your Kindle with you on your float trip weekend, this case is mostly a simple bag and you could protect other items with it such as your wallet, phone, small camera and other thin materials from liquid disaster.

Update: There is a nice compromise called KlearKase that has both the weather and shock protection for a middle-ground price of $40.00 and weight of 6 oz. KlearKase seems to be the right option for watergoers and rough and tumble sit down smashers.

Wired offers useless guide on how to design a tablet

Apparently Wired has a Dr. Jeckyll / Mr Hyde on staff. They both are writing under the pen name of Charlie Sorrel. At first I thought today’s article “How to Make and iPad beating Tablet” shouldn’t have made it past the editors for how useless it is, but when I discovered that Charlie also wrote a piece from January “10 Things Missing from the iPad” it became clear that he’s basically phoning in for his paychecks at this point just to fulfill his part of the Wired initiative to tell everyone about how great the iPad 5 times a day.  Today his was a real gem.  Here’s my least favorite part of the article, which I can’t wait to pick apart.

“Hardware is almost irrelevant, on the outside at least. The iPad is a slab of aluminum and glass with an absolute minimum of ports and buttons. Rivals counter this by promising USB ports, SD card slots and the like. The problem? Compatibility. If you include just one standard USB port, people expect it to behave like one, and they’ll plug in printers, mice and everything else. This requires drivers, which in turn adds complexity and eats into precious flash-memory space (a recent Epson printer driver update for the Mac was almost 1 GB in size).”

Under the Software area, Charlie doesn’t do much better unfortunately. “Design an OS that makes it easy to do what people actually want to do with a tablet.”

Oh do tell us, what do most people want to do with a tablet? No real information for us? No actual research, just commentary? Thanks. Because people want to do everything. Sure they want to touch the screen.  And?? Charlie might have mentioned that unlike Apple’s iPad, tablets are where people want to take written notes, and possibly even get them transcribed to text. They want to use them for business, they want to hack and to load their own applications without agreeing to some ridiculous terms.  They also might want something open. Sure HP has the Palm OS, but we also have Android out there, with a ton of apps in a store, and a lot of developers to tap into. In fact, you might even say Android is probably the best choice given the work that’s been done up to this point and the open nature.

Apps.  Here’s where Charlie REALLY reveals the inner Hyde (ahem, d*****bag).  Starting out with the truth: “The success of Apple’s App Store isn’t about the sheer numbers. Most of the apps out there are junk”

This I fully agree with Charlie on. We know the iPad and iPhone apps install well and you want them to come with protections so you don’t get hosed. He goes on to say… “The App Store is so successful because it is closed. Don’t agree? How’s the Android Marketplace doing?“

Ok Charlie Sorrel, we want either Jekyll or Hyde on this one. You’re not helping us or yourself here.  So the sheer numbers of the App Store don’t matter AND there’s mostly junk in the Apple App store, despite it being closed.  BUT hey, numbers matter when you want to sucker punch the Android Marketplace?  If you really want to know how the Android Marketplace is doing, why not actually look at it?  Because it’s doing quite well. They just got a decent app for Dropbox yesterday. I’ve been able to get apps for UStream, File browsing, translations, conversions, a plethora of great Google add-ons. Pandora has been a real gem.  Barcode scanners, porn, etc. And I’ll tell you, if I liked to play games on my Nexus One, I’d be buried by all the games listed, from the traditional to the brand new.  I wouldn’t say it has everything, because I haven’t found an ideal daily Buddha quotes app I’ve been dreaming about, but to answer you, the Android Marketplace is thriving.  I run a dozen apps or more and they’ve all had software updates for improvements in stability and customer feedback, as you’d expect. And every new Android phone and other devices could take advantage of these. AND if I wanted to access more dangerous apps that aren’t subject to their approval, I can turn off that security feature and look at using those, whether I was taking a risk, or testing for a programmer friend.

By the way, all the apps I install inform me of what portions of my Phone the app can gain access to, so I can choose to say no if I don’t want app X to access the internet. I dig that. And maybe the iPhone does that too, I’m not sure. But I like to know what’s going on underneath.

Even if the iPad included ports and a camera, there’s still the issue of choice. Some of us want a screen a little smaller or a little bigger. Some of us want to draw, and some of us want to smudge. Some of us just want a stripped down device so they can implement their own system around it.  You’d think that a company selling the most tablets would be the one to get behind, because the developers and the support would all be on that side. But when you wall off choice such as Flash, keep people from tooling with their own programs and doing their own network push to the device, you’re killing that aspect of computing that makes it fun and interesting.  The iPad is the device meant for the ultra-CONSUMER. Consume this and that, pay twice and only buy from us.

Some of us are a little tired of Apple’s revolutionary technologies, such as when they started selling music for $1 a song. Wow, that revolution brought the cost CDs all the way down to exactly where they’ve always been.  And how with your new iPod, you could do everything with your music, except of course delete tracks without your computer.  And laptops.  How awesome were those Macbooks that came without SD slots of their own for years, until the pro-only version finally got them years later. And when Apple took a perfectly good usable HDMI slot and made it more costly and proprietary.

So forgive many of us for liking part of Apple and complete despising much of it too. We think 100 other companies creating tablets, even if they only sell a few thousand each is just fine if it’s a viable business model for them, even if it makes it harder for us consumers to choose. That’s what good reviews on shopping sites and in magazines like Wired are for.

OLPC – Was it a success?

Slashgear has a scathing commentary on how the One Laptop Per Child project was a tragedy. There are several parts I agree with, but I don’t think the project was a failure. I think it didn’t reach all it’s potential. However I don’t think it was all that simple either.  I’ll make no excuses for them. They were blessed with a lot of resources and a lot of media coverage, partnerships, some real ringers in their team and they had a good idea. And I think based on the number of laptops delivered and people informed, they made a huge dent in a lot of people’s lives.

Problems? In some ways they are major, in others minor. The hardware is pretty darn cool. Sure the keyboard is small. And the biggest complaint for me would be the battery life. But they also achieved a very interesting form factor, kept the device low power, totally cool to the touch, included an innovative wireless network system and did it in a way that it could be repaired a lot easier than most devices. The screen was / is magnificent.

The failure to live up to the potential would be in several aspects of the software. Say what you want about it being a different way of thinking to use the system, but it wasn’t all that good. The journal system was slow and hard to manage. It wasn’t clear how to do certain things, such as understanding the difference between a shortcut and an actual file. Initial releases were problematic for internet connection. The system wasn’t as fast is it could have been. Clearly it was a lean OS, but we should have seen more speed.

Some people complain about this project because so many countries need help meeting basic needs. But nearl all of these complaints make little sense when you see where the laptops were delivered. These towns may not have the best infrastructure, and they might be quite poor. But they have classrooms, they have an need for learning and this project was one that gave them something new. Was it the absolute best thing for everyone? Probably not, but it continues to be a great project and resource. It’s still happening!

There was a comment made on the fact that with the laptops, we didn’t provide a curriculum.  Well that’s just stupid. There are teachers and they are expected to make use of the tool in class. They already have lesson plans there. They just use this new tool, same as if they added a TV / VCR to the classroom.  Integrating it is not up to the OLPC. How could they dictate that to all these countries.  “Now  here’s where we provide you with the 9 Lessons of the North American perspective on WWII“  Not gonna work. Examples and device training are enough. The laptops are easy to use. Screw around a little bit and you can make sense of most of it. It’s not perfect, but neither were their lives (or our lives) before the laptop became part of it.

Feel free to jump in and make a difference yourself

That’s the answer to pretty much all project criticism. There are some things that are part of a timely plan, so you’re not going to disrupt the project plan as it is, but there’s room to make a difference yourself here. And anytime somebody wants to complain about the project, best they remember that just because OLPC exists, doesn’t mean suddenly these developing cities and towns AREN’T getting something else. And if they are lacking in another area. Feel free to pitch in and make that happen. Nobody told Nicholas Negroponte that he had to do something here. He saw the need, the opportunity and went in the direction right or wrong.  He’s been to these places, he’s made the plans, got the backing, the publicity, the team. And he’s delivered the laptops. The laptops work, they are engineered well. They don’t blow all similar technology out of the water, but they do serve a good purpose. They are useful and likeable. And people appreciate them.  In that I see success.