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Will Kindle Kill the Library? As If!
For my birthday this year (forgive me if I don't tell you which one), a beloved relative gave me the new Amazon Kindle, which we have all seen touted as the next big thing in terms of books and literature. It's a fine device, and I like it a great deal. For one thing, I love being able to download a book to read anyplace I am, with just the click of a button. Many a bus ride in Los Angeles has been made more palatable by my ability to download the sample first chapter of some book and then read it for free. And, when I am doing my reading for my MLS classes as part of the Cal State Northridge/ University of North Texas SLIS program, almost nothing is nicer than to download full text journal articles to the Kindle and then make the type bigger so I don't get the dreaded Library School Eyestrain.
Publishers and publishers' agents apparently loathe Kindles because they lose money on people downloading e-copies of books instead of buying the more expensive, inky editions of the volumes. By that argument, though, publishers and agents have also long hated libraries, who have actually served as the ancient version of Kindles, lending out books for people who don't buy them. Those agents and publishers have clearly forgotten their childhoods, when a beloved librarian read them "Amelia Bedelia" at their Storytime for Twos session.
When the Kindle - and now its Sony analogue, The Nook - was first released, a variety of pompous (and oddly smug) prognosticators of technology gleefully predicted how these electronic devices would either spell doom for libraries or, at least, force libraries to totally change their shape and form. Who would need to go to a library to take out a dog-eared, sticky, hardcover copy of Steven King's "Under the Dome" when they could easily download it right to their lovely little electronic device? Maybe libraries would inevitably be forced to pulp all their books, feeding them into paper shredders one by one, and replacing them with Netlibrary or Amazon.com accounts, so people could instead check out Kindles and then download all the books to their hearts' content. Why, they could just chuck out all those unhygienic books entirely and replace them with computer consoles.
And, yet, having had this Kindle for a while now, I can assure you that librarians may sleep soundly in their beds. The Kindle is not likely to replace books. What I have discovered - and I admit, my discoveries are anecdotal - is that all the Kindle has done is create different classes of book. A voracious book lover will tell you that there are two kinds of books. There is the book you treasure. You buy it, fondle it like a lover, accidentally drop crumbs in the folds, get fingerprints all over the corners, read it again and again, put it on your shelf, and then leave it for your grandchildren as a cherished heirloom. Oh, my Narnias! Oh, those Oz books! Oh, Lord help me, those Harry Potters!
And then there are the books you really don't care too much about. The ones you read once and then forget. You know, the latest blah thriller or drab book about some old ghoul Senator that's out of date next week. No one is going to use a Kindle to download and buy books of the first type. It is the second sort of book, the impulse or "junk" reading, which is the Kindle's stock in trade. These are what I, at least, prefer to download.
But, let us not forget, that these not-so-valuable books cost dollars for you to have them Kindled - and at the library, you can just check them out for free (or, rather, paid for by our tax dollars)! Yes, you can Kindle the same book for ten bucks, but when you've read it, the e-copy just sits there in the virtual realm, with no physical body, until the Kindle breaks and then it's gone forever. It has no shelf space or corporeal purpose. And, if it is one of those second types of books I'm talking about in the previous paragraph, you're not going to read it ever again. I believe you can't even donate the rights to read the e-book to the library (and that is actually a commendable thing that libraries should be examining). Really, you might as well just check the hard copy out of the library and then return it.
We read that some libraries check out Kindles and allow patrons to download books to them. And, yet, this seems like a system that just hasn't been thought out yet to the point of being sensible. Amazon, we understand, charges much more to libraries to download books than it does to the general public. There may also be an additional "per download" licensing charge. This suggests that a paperless, electronic version of a book could be far more expensive than an old fashioned dog eared version of the same work. And, at the end of the day, the library doesn't even have a hard copy of the book to put back on the shelf for browsers to pick up!
Meanwhile, there's another aspect of the Kindle that is downright unsavory for all readers. As it turns out, just like at a library, the book you get Kindled isn't actually yours. In the library, by contrast, the book belongs to everyone. However, on your Kindle, the book belongs to Amazon.com (or to Sony or to whatever company is making the next version of the e-book). If you remember, a few months ago, Kindle deleted all copies of George Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles because of some kind of a rights issue. And now, as I discovered to my dismay, they have also disconnected the Kindle's "text to speech" option, which turned any Kindled book into an Audiobook.
Admittedly, I understand the reasoning behind this: It was another rights issue, and there is so much money to be made on audiobooks that they didn't want people to use the Kindle for such a thing. And, yet, I can't imagine a world in which a publisher could walk into my house or library and snatch a book or an Audiobook off my shelf. But they can do this on a Kindle. My 80-something year old grandmother, who happens to be blind and loved hearing books read via the Kindle's text-to-speech, was quite displeased when they disconnected the function without telling her.
For a reader, a Kindled version of a book that you can get for free at the library may have some transitory, "Fin de Millennium" glamour - but, at the end of the day, those ten dollar charges for books in which you don't really have sustained interest start to add up. And then, we'll all be back at the library.
Submitted to California Libraries by:
Paul Birchall
Cal State Northridge/ University of North Texas, SLIS 2011
Posted on February 18, 2010 9:35 AM | Permalink