 There it goes. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event, where we cover essay, interviews, and any library topics that may be of interest to Nebraska libraries. We have our own commissions that do that and see our guest speakers. We have today a number of those. We do these things every morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. They are free. They last for about an hour. And we do record them as we are with today. So if you are unable to watch, to attend a live session, you can always watch the now very long list of our recordings that we have out there. And we do a mixture of types of things. We do interviews, book reviews, web tours, any training sessions, informational sessions, anything we can come up with that might be of interest. So, and today what we have is one of our monthly, on average, monthly sessions. Tech talk with Michael Sowers. Michael Sowers, sitting right here next to me, is our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And about once a month, he comes on and tells us about the new tech of the last month that he's come across that may be of use in interest to libraries, and also has guest speakers as he does today. So I am going to pass things over to Michael and maybe go ahead and take it away. All right. Great. Thank you, Krista. All right. Okay. So as Krista said, I'm Michael Sowers. And what we're doing this month is we are going to talk about eBooks. And so we have a presentation by Joyce New Year, who we'll be switching over to in just a moment. I believe she is on the line. And because there is a kind of an online eBook summit, the Library Journal is sponsoring coming up, I believe, next week. So we thought next Wednesday, opposite us, in fact. Yeah. So can we go ahead and bring Joyce in on the call here? Joyce, hold on just a second. We're going to swap some things around. She's unmuted. Okay. Do I have to make her a presenter, though? We're always going to do that right now. Yeah. Let's go ahead and do that. Joyce, are you there? I am here. I am here. Okay. We'll give us one sec here. We're going to go ahead and switch over. Joyce works at the University of Nebraska Omaha. And I've actually twice before heard this presentation. And Joyce and I always have very interesting discussions when she's done. So Joyce, what I'll do is I'll just let you go ahead and kind of introduce yourself a little more and give your presentation about what's going on at UNO. And then we'll kind of turn this into a discussion. Okay. Thanks for inviting me, Michael. And I'm happy to be here. And hopefully we'll have some good questions also besides our spirit to discussion, as you call it. I am the director of patron services here at University of Nebraska Omaha. And I've been that for about four years now. The first slide that's showing right now is stressing again what Michael already has said about the virtual summit. And I am attending in what highly recommend that to anyone that's interested. I think it will be very informative. There's some great people that are speaking. This slide shows a copy of Library Journal back in January, which if you haven't seen it is also a good source of information. And the picture says ready or not about e-books and e-readers. It's not anymore if it's when they're here. It's happening and libraries need to figure out what it is they're going to do with these things. From this article, I've got this slide put together. Josh was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and talked about how for the first time there was a set-aside special area for e-readers only. So back in January there were hundreds and lots of them coming on the market. These two particular ones, you can see what's happened to them. There appears to be like three main players now for the e-readers. And mostly it's a lot about the cost. The top one, the Q pro reader was going to sell for $650 to $800. Nobody's going to buy that, especially where the e-readers have lowered their prices. The skiff reader canceled. This one is selling and I put this here to give you a picture of what other companies have looked at doing with e-readers. I kind of like this idea. On the left hand side there's an e-reader with e-ink on this side and on the other side is essentially a netbook, LED screen. It has a keyboard. You can type notes on it and you can go back and forth between those two screens easily. It is a little pricey but you get more than just an e-reader. This one is on the market and it's being sold. I haven't heard anymore about how well it's liked or disliked. The Nook sold at Barnes & Noble, a very popular one at this time. They lowered their prices and then Amazon lowered their prices. It has the e-reader on top and then the LED screen at the bottom. That's a touch screen and you can scroll through that. This one lets you share a book with one other Nook reader, but you can only share that book once and you cannot read it while you're sharing that. The other company in the game is Sony. They have three, possibly four now, sold in Borders and Best Buy. Borders also has their own reader. It's called a Kobo. It hasn't got as good as reviews as these other three companies. Then the Kindles, which is really affordable at this point at $139. That's for the model that is only the Wi-Fi. If you want the 3G Internet, it's $189. The Kindles are what the University of Nebraska Omaha are loaning. We have some of the original models and I can tell you this third one is really nice. It's a little bit lighter, a little bit smaller. You can actually use the keyboard like you text with your thumbs on your smartphone. The other Kindles before that had a little bit wider dimensions and it was harder to type on that keyboard. This one's easier. It's the only one right now that has accessibility for the blind. There was a lawsuit that the Federation of the Blind filed against Kindles when they were doing their prototype with DX in five other universities, I think it was, and they sued Kindle Amazon because the blind could not access it. So now they've changed that and what it does for the accessibility is it will read the menus to you. You push one of the, it's the lower right hand button and the menus are read to you so you can access that. Kindles have the text to speech, which is very nice for people with disabilities. The font can be changed, which is common on most of the readers now. Amazon has now let Kindles be sold in Target, Best Buy and Staples. That's new for them. Mostly they've been selling them from their website. So putting them out there into the other department places are, that's a little bit new for Amazon, but also tells you that the competition is pretty stiff. So about e-books now we've covered some of the e-readers. You can also get, the iPad lets you have applications for free for any of those e-readers. Kindles you can read on your iPhone, iPod, iPad, your PC, and Kindle is the only one that syncs across all of those devices. So if you start reading a book on your Kindle, you pick your iPhone up and want to continue, it picks you up right where you left off. That's a nice feature. So about e-books and why they're here to stay, for one of the reasons it's cost. It's much cheaper than the printed equivalent. And I have a slide later that compares what we save buying e-books instead of the hardcover. Portability speaks for itself. Kindle holds 3,500 books. A lot easier on your back when you carry it in the Kindle. Accessibility, same thing. They can be purchased and downloaded immediately. That's a really nice feature in our patrons like that. The increased market, I think this is an interesting statistics for libraries to pay attention to. E-book sales could reach as high as 20 to 25% by 2012. That's in the next two years. That a quarter of all sales will be e-book sales. The last platform is something I was just speaking about that you can get Kindle on those devices listed. There is a kind of a format war going on. Amazon has been ridiculed for having its own proprietary format, which is the .AMZ. They now natively support PDFs. The one that appears to be winning, the format that appears to be winning is .EPUB. Those are also the format that the free books you can access on the internet in different places like Project Gutenberg. Those are .EPUB. Kindle also accepts those. You have to go through a little bit more rigmarole to get it on your Kindle. I look for Kindle to change that. They can't remain competitive. Sooner or later, everyone is going to use that .EPUB, and I would assume that Kindle will too. We need that format settled. There needs to be a standardization, and I think we'll see that coming soon. Then the last point of why e-books are here is the conservation piece. Stop killing trees thing, and then also conservation of space. It saves a lot of room on your shelf when you're putting it on a Kindle. This is about the Internet Archive, if you haven't heard about it, and a good example of what libraries are doing in the e-book realm. Two-thirds of the American library is offered e-book loans in 2009, so that it's happening in a lot of libraries. I did want to mention there's a website called Libraries Loaning Kindles. I haven't checked the last time it was updated, but it had a good list of all types of libraries, which are Loaning Kindles. Back to the slide. What about the libraries? The last thing I would point out of the bullets that Open Library is doing to comply with the copyright is only one person will be allowed to check out a digital copy of an in-copyright book for two weeks, and then while on loan, no one else. The physical copy won't be loaned. The copyright is an issue that needs to be taken care of, decided, the DRM, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. So UNO, like I said, is using Kindles, and one of the reasons why we chose Kindle are those listed. It is connected to Amazon with the 3G wireless, so there's no USB that you have to hook to APC. It downloads instantly. And we leave the titles on the Kindle when we check them out. So every title we've purchased on that Kindle stays there, and it's available if you want to read that. And our patrons have said they really like that. They may check the Kindle out for a certain title, but they end up reading some of the others. I have read information that e-book readers have done a lot for the increase in reading in general across the world, actually. More people, you're reading more on the e-reader devices than they were reading with just hard copies or paperbacks. Amazon did come out with their figures and no, they don't print them. I know Michael's itching to jump in on that one, that Amazon said they outsold their e-books, outsold their hardcover books. And I think that was back in June. And now recently they said that e-books outsold the paperbacks, which is one reason why they can sell the Kindle at $139, which is below market price for the device. To make the Kindle, it costs them $189. They're selling it for $139, so they're losing some money on the e-readers. They're making it up, selling their e-books. Attributes, again, important to the library. We can exchange the titles on up to six Kindles, and that comes from Amazon. We do not do that. We haven't done that yet, even though we can, and we'll get into that a little more later when we talk more about the copyright and owning, whether we own the title or we lease the title. And Michael and I will discuss some of that later on. Our average cost for the book is $9.99, and we've paid as little as $0.99, although we also have some of the free titles on our Kindles now. And the most we've paid is $135, and that was a math research book that actually sold, I think it was around $350 if we would have bought the hardcover. Some of the issues we had to think about before we started circulating the Kindle, we needed some way to protect the device, so we bought some inexpensive camera bags instead of purchasing the ones that Amazon charged $50 for. We purchased some camera bags, and those have worked well. The Kindles tattle tape, so if they go through our security gates, it does beep. The Kindle, the bags have protected it. We have not had any broken Kindles. The only thing we've had to do is replace the battery on some of the first editions. We have nine Kindles right now, and they are all still working. Acquisition policies, who makes the collection development decision? I am also a subject specialist and reference librarian for the sciences, so I'm involved with some of the collection development already, which made this maybe a little bit easier for the rest of the people in the library to think about. What we've done is let the circulation staff purchase a title for patrons that have requested them. If it's no more, then $50. If it's over $50, then they ask myself or the dean, and after they purchase that, then they catalog the title and the author as soon as they can get to that, so our catalog is also updated right away as much as possible. The cataloging was also an issue, how do we go about cataloging this? I'll show you a slide later. There's two different ways. You can catalog the Kindle device itself. The 245 title field would be the Kindle, and that's what we've done. We wanted the titles and the authors to be searchable, so we put those in the 700 field for the alternate author, alternate title. So you can search our catalog, and if you type in outliers, it will come up as an e-book on Kindle number one. Same with the author, if you type in Malcolm Gladwell. I don't remember his last name. If you type in his last name, then his books will come up also on the Kindles, and we do that right at the circulation desk. We don't have to have the cataloging department, which was really, it's very nice to work across departments and some of the other libraries I've talked to have had issues with that. We're fortunate here at UNO that we do, we work well together, we collaborate, we're talking to each other all the time, so this involved cross-departmental with collection development, cataloging, circulation, subject specialist reference, everyone's been involved from the very beginning, and we continue to be. We started out with wanting to use the Kindle as an interlibrary loan device, and we tracked that for a while to see what kind of title availability there was. At the time, and this was the beginning of 2008, there weren't a lot of research type titles available, but we did anyway. In our library loan department, when a patron requested a loan, a book, then we looked to see if Amazon carried it as a Kindle title. If they did, we sent an email to the patron and asked them if they would be interested in getting this title right away on the Kindle, or they can choose to have it traditionally in the hardcover, which may take three to five days depending on where we're getting the book from. And we still continue to do this. When we first started, it was about a 20-80%. 80% did not want to try the new technology, they just wanted it as a traditional hardcover. That's flipped now. More people are a lot more willing and interested to use the Kindle, and most of the reasons there are is because it's so quick. They can get it right away instead of waiting. Some of the reasons why they did not want the Kindle title is because of citation. In research, when you're doing your bibliographies, the title pages change on the Kindle, the book pages change on the Kindle as you change the font, so they do not match with the hardcover copy. Citing that becomes an issue then when you're writing a research paper. The nook has answered that, and the last time I checked the numbered pages match the hardcover, the hard copy of the book. So it may be that you're on page 247, five different page turns on the e-reader, but it does match for research purposes and citation. I think that's going to get worked out too. We didn't get a lot of use in the beginning then for Interlibrary Loan, so we moved to having it available for bestsellers. We had had a lot of patrons request bestseller books, and typically academic libraries don't carry those at all, but we thought, why not if patrons are asking for them? Maybe that's a good thing that we could use the Kindle for, and that's where we've got our most use and continue to. All nine of our Kindles are out most of the time, and they're also waiting on hold. So they get used heavily. The bestseller list has been really a good idea for patrons, and they like it and continue to use it that way. The other option we looked at for a little while when I ran out of money to purchase the titles, you can check the Kindle out as the device, and you can register that Kindle in your Amazon account and buy the books that you want to read. So instead of loaning the books, titles to read, we are now loaning the device, much like we loan our DVD cameras, we loan handicams, we loan voice recorders. We're now loaning the device, and people tried that, but not near as much as I thought they would. You can purchase, if you went on vacation for two weeks, we have a two-week loan period, you could purchase the books you wanted to read on our Kindle, then you give the Kindle back to us. We would erase those titles because we did not buy them, but you would still have access to them through your own Kindle or your PC or your iPhone. I'm interested to see what happens in the future. We'll still continue to offer that, but so far the best thing has been using the Kindle for bestsellers. I had a book group check out four of them, four people in the book group, not a big one, but they all were able to get the title for themselves and use the Kindle that way. I think that's probably a good idea too, especially maybe public libraries might be looking at that as an option. This is our circulation policy. One of the things that a question that usually comes up is, well, it's an expensive piece of equipment. Aren't you afraid you won't get that back? In academic libraries, we have it a little bit easier than the public libraries. We can hold transcripts if they still have our Kindle, but we have a form that they sign every time that says, if you break or lose or destroy, then you owe us this amount of money, and we go through that with them every time they check that out. I think that's about all on this slide. We do use them for monographs only. We do not use them for magazines, newspapers, even though they're available for that. That kind of looked like more of a nightmare than we wanted to get into, so keeping it strictly for use with books has worked really well. These are the circulation statistics for September, September this year, and it's from the very beginning that we began, that we started circulating. So total circulation is 424 for all of the Kindles, and that is an average of 47 checkouts per unit. The average cost of the book has been $13.33. Implications for collection development, patron initiated collection development, and that's some of the discussion we've had in our collection area, and this is a good example of that. I know that at least one of the purchases that I've made, at least one person has used that and checked it out. I can't say that for some of the books that I buy that go on the shelves. I try to buy what people are interested in, what I think are interested in, but we all know that there's books on the shelves that never get checked out. When you have the patron initiated, you know at least one person has read it, and typically many more. This is a comparison that I talked about a little bit earlier, that the hardcover cost compared to the Kindle cost, and we saved $255 by buying the Kindle title instead of the hardcover. This is a screenshot of our catalog, so you can see what it looks like when you look up like running with the demon title. It will come up and look like this, and then you can see it's on Kindle number four. The mark record for those of you that like cataloging, this is what that looks like, and you can see there in the 700 field is where we added the authors and the titles. And again, circulation staff does this at the circulation desk, so it's updated as quickly as we can. We check the Kindles when they come back in to make sure that these titles are still on that Kindle. If one of the titles or some of them have been erased accidentally, which can happen, we can download them again from Amazon, and we've not had any trouble with that. I should mention that before we check that Kindle out, we de-register it. So it's in our name with our credit card. Before we check it out and the patron walks away, we have de-registered it. Therefore, they cannot buy anything else with our account. Now, like I said before, they could register it in their own Amazon account and purchase things to put on the Kindle. Again, not too many people have done that. A couple have. When they bring it back, we erase it since we did not purchase it. This is an example of North Carolina State University just showing you that there's other libraries doing it and how they're doing it. They do it a little bit different than we do. They have 35 Kindles that they had loaned, and they also have two Sony e-readers. This is the mark record for their Kindle, and you can see in the 245 field is the title. So they've chosen, instead of using the 245 field for the Kindle, they've used it as the title. Another way to do it, both of them work fine. They're both searchable. They have two Sony e-books, and what they've done with their two Sonys are load them with all of the free classical, you can see some of the titles here, and those exist on those two Sony readers. However, they put those in the 505 field, so not searchable. You just know that if you want a classic title, it's going to be on one of those Sonys. But again, another way to use the e-readers. Future considerations for libraries to think about, and this is from the Library Journal article in January by Josh, but I think he brings up some good points that the DRM needs to be taken care of. Users will start demanding more access to library materials in the ways that are convenient to them, and that's the key I think we need to think about. If I know that the library has an e-book, I would really like that on my Kindle or on my desktop, so being able to push that out to them, I think is the future where we're going to, and the Kindles, the e-readers, how we're using them right now, probably a transition piece. Nobody really knows how it's going to end or what it's going to look like, but for the time being, our patrons like what we're doing. A little bit about the formats and devices that we talked about and his comment on what we're offering patrons is like a little bit like an 8-track tape compared to what they're getting other places. The e-reader device shipments doubled in 2009. Again, another statistic that's important to pay attention to, our patrons are using them, and we need to pay attention to that, what they're using, where they are, and what they're doing with their devices. How can the library fit there? This is an example of a high school in Florida that will be giving their Kindles to their students this year and 2100 of them, in fact. Their textbooks are going to be loaded on the Kindles, so public schools are using them. I found this article interesting in Ghana. They gave Kindles to their students, and it makes sense when you look at the last bullet point, landlines and paper books are expensive. They're infrastructure heavy dinosaurs. The way to deliver content to the people in Ghana right now is a lot better through the Kindle. You're sending it over the networks cheaper and faster than sending them in paperback form. One more issue, and then I think we're about done. Self-publishing is becoming more and more a factor. You can see one of the reasons. Amazon offers 70% of the sale back to the author. That's not happening in traditional publishing models. Again, what will libraries do about self-publishing books? They're coming. They're here. There will be more of them. How will we use those in our collections? That's all I have, Michael, and happy to answer anybody's questions. My contact information is there on the screen. Feel free to call me or email me, and I'll give you whatever information. Happy to share what we know, and maybe you can help me with some of the other things. Turning it back over to you, Michael. Great choice. That was wonderful. We're laughing here at the moment at your caption under the photo there. I got to tell you, it's pretty different to give this talk with nobody responding to you. You wonder if everyone has gone to sleep. Oh, no, no. We're here. Michael and I were sitting here chatting about different things that came up throughout the session. Do we already have one question coming from the audience? We'll let everybody know if you've got any questions, please. I've always got plenty of questions. I've even warned her that a couple of them are coming up. Just go ahead and type them into the Q&A area. I'll let you go ahead and Crystal read some of these out. We've gotten her ready. We just have one so far that was more about sales of genres types of books. This is in general. Someone was wondering if you even have this kind of information. I'm not sure. But just total sales. How does sales of popular fiction compare to nonfiction? I know for Kindles and Amazon promotes this, their mainstay what they're selling most are the New York Times bestsellers. Fiction versus nonfiction, I don't know, genre. I don't know. I would guess that there's a way to get at that information. But I do not know any of the figures with that. Maybe, I don't know, Michael, do you know? I don't have figures, but I have kind of a anecdotal story that publishers are noticing two things when it comes to genre fiction with e-books. One is the Harlequin-esque sort of series. They put out 13 a month or something, and they're numbered in the thousands at this point, are selling like hotcakes electronically because from what they've told, most of those readers don't keep those books. And as somebody who has managed a library friend's bookstore, I know nobody keeps those books. They get them, they read them, they go off. So that and sales of more adult erotica content has completely skyrocketed because nobody can tell what you're reading when you're on one of these devices. So, you know, you can read it on the train without being embarrassed, I guess. I had never thought about that. There's been some interesting statistics around that I've seen. I do have another question from the audience. You've mentioned that you had not had any of the Kindle's break so far, which is great. But what sort of service is available if one does break? What would you do if one did break? Oh, that's a good question. At this point, because it's uncertain where the market's going, it's uncertain where libraries are going to go, we would not... Okay, so the first part is what are the options? You can't, you can go buy a new one. That's your option. If it's within the first year of warranty with a new one, then Amazon will replace it. If one of the older ones, we have seven of the first generation, which look like dinosaurs. They're only two and a half years old, but they look like a dinosaur compared to this new Kindle. So, part of me is hoping that some of them do break so we can purchase new ones. And at $139, much more realistic to purchase that for our budget than the original $399 that we paid for those beginning, for the first iteration of it. So, we would... At this point, right now, I can tell you if one broke, then that one's gone. We would buy another third edition because they're getting used heavily. And I think it's a good time to mention, again, the title costs you average $10 per purchase, much less expensive than the other books we're purchasing. So, my $1,000 budget can go a long ways to our title purchasing. Does that answer it? Sure. Yeah, these things aren't designed to be repaired. I mean, really. No, they're not. You didn't think so. I guess my vaguely humorous question from that would be, so if I broke one of the first generation ones, would you charge me $400 or $139? Yeah. And that's a replacement. So, I can tell you what we do with everything else that gets broken in replacement. We would charge you the money that we paid for it because we lost that money. So, if we paid $350, that's our money gone and you broke $350, that's what we would charge you. So, if you're going to break one, go for the newer one. Yeah, for the time I'm not even eligible to check one out. I have one comment I'll throw in. You mentioned people and research and one of the reasons they were choosing the print over the electronic was the pagination issue. Yes. And I have a Sony reader and I've noticed that EPUB deals with pagination a lot better than the Kindle format does even when you change the sizes. But another thought I had is because I'm doing research myself and I can't exactly photocopy for my files something off of the ebook. But if I get the prints, I can not copy the whole book because that would completely violate copyright, obviously. But copy the couple pages I want to keep on file. And this is where I'll lead into everybody listening who don't know me very well on this topic. I'm somewhat of a curmudgeon when it comes to these ebooks. So, this is where Joyce and I always have the fun discussion. The spirited discussion, yes. Well, I own one and I use it. So, I'm not a complete Luddite when it comes to these things. Krista, you had a comment that you noticed? Yeah, there was some. I was, unfortunately, as I was monitoring the session and questions and whatnot, I kind of have heard on a slide that you had something about when you're loaning a digital copy that you don't loan the corresponding physical copy due to something to do with copyright issues. I kind of missed what is that all about? That's the Internet Archive, openlibrary.org. They are digitizing a lot of the ebooks. Well, they don't have to digitize them if they're already an ebook. That overdrive is using, and their goal is to truly have it free. They don't want to charge people for the content, which libraries are all about. So, in order to loan ebooks that are still in copyright, this is what they're proposing to do, is they will loan that ebook copy to only one person at a time, and if someone's reading that, they won't loan a hard copy. How they're keeping track of that, I do not know. But I was looking for information on what libraries are doing in the ebook realm, and this is one of, it was an example of what libraries are doing. Okay, I get it. So, they're proposing how they want to do it. Okay. Interesting idea, yes. We can have one more question. Can you purchase e-readers that are preloaded with classics? Purchase from the companies themselves, I don't know. Not that I'm aware of, and the classics are free, so you can purchase an e-reader and load them yourself. Yeah, I've seen maybe the Nook, possibly some of the new Sony readers, they come with like, you buy it and you get 100 free books, and they are classics, and basically, you get to download them if you want them. They don't come pre-installed on the device. But they're at no cost if you do want them yet, because they're out of copyright the whole thing. Yeah, it's also the main stuff. Yeah. And then going back to, I guess, maybe what I had just asked you about the whole Internet Archive and Overdrive thing, wanted to know if that will affect the use of Overdrive. Now, this is just your proposal, right? It's not exactly how they're doing it yet. Right, right, right. This is their intent. That's the latest information I had, was that their intent is to do this. I don't know about Overdrive. I don't know any kind of interaction between Internet Archive and Overdrive, what the discussion has been. So I'm not sure where they're at in that agreement. So then the answer would be keep an eye on the issue and listen to your Overdrive people and ask them what's up. Yeah. Well, and the whole Google Books thing is coming out. They're putting out their own platform, their own e-books that's supposed to be device agnostic in theory and work across the board. And somebody has just mentioned that in the questions or a different question? No, no. Okay, let's go to that. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I was trying to slide a little bit. One of our librarians here in Nebraska at Valentine Public Library would like to know if you'd be willing to share your format for the lending form that you're using for this. Sure. Absolutely. A lot of people have asked for that. So yeah, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. We already have it. Yeah, I can send it to you or I can send it to Michael and you can put that where would be the easiest for people to find that. Is it something that's online or just a paper? No. I can send a PDF. It's only in paper because they sign it. We go through it with them when they check it out. We want them to know what they're signing. And do keep in mind this form. It talks about the university's policy on proper use. So you'll have to adapt it to your library, but I'm happy to share that, sure. Okay, yeah. If you send it to Michael, we'll put it up when we put up the recording for this session. We'll add that to there so that anyone who wants to can use it and modify it for their own purposes at their own library. Okay, thanks. All right. Okay, I've got a big one in this process. I'm going to take back control here of the screen choice. So you should see that momentarily. Excuse me. Just a sec here. And I'm just going to throw this in here. As we're going along, you guys all should be now seeing a Flickr page. This is my office in my home, which I just remodeled earlier this year. And this is only a small portion of the collection. So just to kind of give you a little background as to where I'm coming from, I love books as even physical objects. So that's some of where my whole thing about eBooks comes in. But that being said, and I'll tell everybody that's listening that I did warn Joyce about this one. There has been some talk on the library blogosphere the last about week, which of course, Joyce, you were on vacation, right? Yeah. So I warned her about this yesterday. And it's centered around Netflix as the example. But I think it completely applies here. And I've provided a whole bunch of links along with today's recording for this. Basically, how it started was somebody posted on the Tain the Web blog that they're at an academic library. And what the library has done is they've gotten themselves a Netflix account and will basically kind of get Netflix DVDs for their, I believe it's just faculty at the moment, but possibly there might also be students involved in this. And how wonderful that was and how much money it saved. And then some other librarians kind of got on and said, okay, wait a minute, you're completely violating the Netflix license on this. And isn't that a bit hypocritical because we're trying to teach our patrons how to pay attention to copyright and license things properly and not just copy anything they want and basically we're breaking the rules. That library came back and said, well, if Netflix ever asks us to stop, they will. We will. And they haven't. And Netflix has kind of half responded saying, well, yes, you're violating the license, but we're not, it's kind of a don't ask, don't tell situation. We prefer that you not because that's not what the terms sort of say, but we do love libraries, so we're not going to come after you. Right. And just last week, I participated in an online session with some people in publishing about e-books. And I got a question about, well, how does this all affect libraries? And the guy said, well, you know what? Our license says it's for individual use only. Therefore, technically, if a library was to do this, you would be violating our license. So here's where I'm kind of putting Joyce on the spot. Whether I agree with these licenses or not, are you not doing things that you're not supposed to be doing and is that right or wrong? Oh, no. And Krista, you have a... Well, I have a comment to that myself, actually. I know what Joyce said, what she thinks, too, but I think, and I was thinking about this as well when I saw the things going on about the Netflix issue, that it's slightly a different situation because libraries, when they did start wanting to do something with the Kindle and Amazon, some always just jumped in and started doing it, but then others said, you know what? Let's ask. Let's contact Amazon and say, really? Your terms of service say this, however, where a library would like to do this, what do you think? And there was a lot of message, if you look back over the history of it and history, we're talking like the past years or two. People got responses from Amazon saying, well, maybe, I don't know, sure. Lots of different ones, but basically Amazon, they did go back and forth with them. It wasn't just a, man, we're just going to not follow it anyway and figure it out later if they come after us. It was the opposite. The libraries went and said, let's ask. And Amazon did give some answers. They haven't put out a full-on, here is our policy for libraries, but they were asked with Netflix. It sounds like for some of us, our reason the libraries didn't do the same thing. And that's where I don't understand this. Well, if you guys, the libraries figured out to go through this process about Amazon and Kindle, why didn't you do it with Netflix? Sue asked, say, hey, you know what? It says this, but we'd like to do this at our libraries. Libraries are good, so you probably will be open to us, but we'd at least like to ask. That is the part that I get confused. Why didn't they go through the same process? And then we can ask these libraries who did it to say, why not do the same thing? At least ask. Let them know we're interested. We want to do this, not just say, we're going to wait and see what happens, because they did it differently with Amazon. It was, I don't understand that. So let's let Joyce completely defend the whole university. What I think is that Amazon, Netflix, all these companies need to put together something that will work for libraries, put together a license, an agreement, whatever. Yes. Hey, you know what? You're right. Libraries are great. So many readers do do that. They have a library program. You can go, you can get, they've got it. They have a specific thing that you can subscribe, purchase them, and for libraries, and they do it. These guys should totally jump on board and do that. That's what I think. Well, yeah. Yeah, and I think that that's the way we all agree on, please Amazon and Netflix come out with something, talk to the libraries, and help us. We'd like to join with you instead of trying to work around you or get by with what we can. I think, I read that, Michael, and I'm glad you gave me heads up. It was interesting to compare and contrast. One of the things that, to me, looks a little different. The Netflix, and they talk about it as a lease, as a loan, and so we're loaning this to you. We've leased this content to you, and this is our terms of service. Amazon's terms of service says, we grant you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy. And that talks, to me, that sounds more like what a normal book is. So we purchase a hardcover book, and now we have the rights, and it's called, I looked this up, hang on, First Sale Doctrine. So I've purchased a book. I now can do what I want to with that, including, if this is personal, and libraries aren't going to go do this, you can go sell that book, because I've purchased that. I now have the right to do what I want to with that book. We've approached the Amazon and Kindle with the same basic idea of, and that's why we've only put the title on one Kindle at a time, the book that we purchased from Amazon lives on Kindle number one. We could have bought the hardcover book that lives on our shelf. So we're talking about only one title, one purchase, which we bought and they gave us the right to a permanent copy. Now we can loan that, just like we loan a hardcover book. And that's the stance that we've taken. And then the First Sale Doctrine, I think it's different. The difference is that the difference between the leasing of the Netflix and then the purchase of, and I know you're just itching to jump on this, Michael, the purchase of a title from Amazon, even though they have our record, they could take it back from us from any time. The terms of service right now say that we have a right to keep a permanent copy. Yeah. So here's my follow-up question. I mean, I agree with you completely in principle. I mean, I really do, and I wish the organizations, these companies, you know, these companies would agree, things like that. But, okay, so let's just say tomorrow Amazon says stop. Yeah. Do you think the university would try to make those arguments back, or do you think you would just stop? We'd stop. We'd stop. Okay. Fair enough. I mean, we can't spend, let's not talk budgets and money right now. Sure. We can't, there's no way to spend a bunch of money defending that. And when we started the whole thing, the dean and I talked and said, yeah, if we were subpoenaed or we were told to stop, then we'd just stop. Is that a good way to, is that good business? It's a pretty gray area, I think. So all of this is a really gray area that we're operating in, and that's like what you said, Christa, would be great if we could get this formalized. Let's have terms of service sired out. Let's do an agreement between libraries and Netflix or Amazon. I would like them to know how many kindles I have sold for them. Quite a few. After people have tried them, they go out and buy them themselves. Let's talk. Definitely. Yeah. Like I said, I'm off more for open access, ultimately with me personally. And so getting out of their own of maybe the library in particular. I've gotten literally free credits for eBooks and had a hard time trying to pick a book that I wanted to read but wouldn't actually own. Because these things, you really peg these companies and they say, we're licensing you to have access to that content but you don't own it. And the write a first sale doctrine does work off the concept of ownership to which you may own the device but the library doesn't actually own the content that you've quote unquote purchased. You've licensed it so you don't actually own it. And this is where I'm not saying necessarily because of this library should boycott all eBooks because we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot. But that's kind of my core issue with how this is all playing out. Yeah. It's with databases and a lot of other stuff we do these days. Right. Right. And if you look at the terms of service for Amazon and I'm reading it right off of it, it says Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy. Can they go back on that? Sure they can. Nothing. And like you pointed out the databases are doing things to us all the time and Amazon could do that to us too. But that the terms of service with Amazon use a different statement than what Netflix says. True. Oh yeah. And I'm not trying to 100% compare to Netflix but if we're bending the rules where is it okay to do that and where isn't it? And I might if we had more time we have another question that comes in and we're running a little short but just the one response I have to that keeping a permanent copy it probably doesn't say though that you can hand that permanent copy over to somebody else either. There's probably a non-transference clause somewhere in there also. But anyways we have a question from the audience. Yeah we had a comment, a question about, and this is an incident that I knew about too, the time when Amazon removed copies of 1984. 1984. Yeah and then put it back because it was actually a... It was a pirated, it was an unliked copy. Right. How do you deal with the privacy issue of that of them and like I said it says that you have the right to keep it but then Amazon took it off people's... Well actually I think that right to keep it actually got added after the 1984 issue. Oh really? I think. Don't hold me to that but there was some sort of response. I don't know. But yeah so... The 1984 that was a third party person company, third party that Amazon allowed to sell their stuff. Third party people can't do that. No just to get a little copy there. It usually clears it up pretty quickly. Oh the issue is the privacy. I tried to answer your question. What I just wanted to say is that not only are you going to book or move a note so you're going to have access to some personal data on that privacy issue. I didn't see what people had to do with that. I didn't see what people had to do with that. Maybe the privacy of all of this is a whole other piece of discussion on that one. So thank you very much. This is wonderful. I think it really... Yeah, do you think she's still there? She shouldn't be. Oh do we lose choice? I'm sort of here. Oh no there you are. You completely broke... Can you... Okay you completely... Yeah we can hear you now. You're up in that last... So I have no idea what you were saying. I hope it was nice. Oh yeah no it was basically thank you. Okay thank you. Yeah we started a little late. I got maybe five more minutes with a kind of loose sense to carry up here but Joyce I just wanted to say thank you very much. Remind everybody about the eBooks libraries at the tipping point virtual summit which is happening next week. It looks like there will be an archive. There is a cost to attend live. It is not free but it is pretty darn reasonable. It was like 20 bucks or something like that. It's a full day event. You can get a site license if you want to show it to a whole bunch of staff people things like that. So I don't know if the archive will be free or not. It does say over here the left full archive available. And it will be available for a limited time. Limited time so if nothing else bookmark eBook-summit.com and check it out and maybe even after next week you'll be able to access the material if you can't participate live. Joyce I want to say thank you once again for doing this. We greatly appreciate the time especially the first day after getting back to the office. It makes it easy to prepare I'm sure. And I've got a few other things we're going to cover. Joyce you're welcome to stay on the line. We're going to go ahead and turn your mic back off. I think we're done with the questions. Yes thank you very much for that. And so I'm going to go back to my bookmarks here knowing that or guessing that we're probably going to take pretty much the whole time just on that topic. And thank you everybody who sent those questions and those were wonderful. I did just bookmark a couple of other things. And the bookmarks list for this session are a lot of the articles that have been posted and coming in regarding the Netflix situation if you're familiar with that. I think it's not exactly 100% spot on but it is completely relevant to this. In fact I think it even made like chronicle of higher ed. I mean it's getting some and other sites like the consumerist and read white web. So it is getting some non-library press about this topic here. I almost half wonder if getting the non-library press to talk about it is going to force the issue and hopefully in a good way to the way we want it. So let me just point out one or two other things here that I had bookmarked to talk about. Internet Explorer 9 beta has been released. This came out early last week. I believe it was maybe at the end of the week before. It's getting some really good reviews. It's very streamlined. It's very fast. I've been playing with it, especially if any of you do any sort of web development you might want to be running this on a machine taking a look at it. And so that's kind of my software pointer for this month. You might want to definitely take a look at that. It will replace IE 8 if you do install it. So there's no way short of maybe getting a virtual machine going to run 8 and 9 simultaneously. So you might not want to run it on an actual staff machine that does everyday work. But I am and it works. I haven't had any serious problems with it. So just something to check out. And I will also point out with IE 9 that there is a 64-bit native version. So if you're running a 64-bit computer, you can do that. And I've had mixed reactions. I got one computer it's working great on and one computer it refuses to work on. So just kind of a heads up. It's beta software. And I think only other thing I mentioned here is there is a Twitter thing coming up that came out of the doc library in Delft. Oh, follow a library. Follow a library day on Twitter. And, Chris, have you been reading about this? I kind of bookmarked it and then forgot about it. I've been promoting it. So the idea is to promote your library's Twitter feed. There is a particular day. Or actually the feed. And to follow, get people to follow libraries on Twitter. Yes. There's a very cool video that actually I link to somewhere that might be there. I'm explaining about it. I think is the doc page. And it's actually what they want to do. I mean, sure, promote your library. That's the video which we will not play live. We'll let you take a look. It's not just promote your library, but it's promote your favorite library. So even if you're not a librarian, it's like if you follow your library on Twitter, share it on October 1st. So if you're your patrons, what you could do on your Twitter stream is suggest to your patrons to share your library. Like say, hey, my public library, my favorite library is this. It's my public and it is on Twitter and here it is. So that's, it's not just librarians saying, follow us, follow us. It's anyone out there, share your favorite Twitter library or libraries on October 1st. And get more people to follow them and use them and realize that it's a good resource for marketing and communication and connections, et cetera, et cetera. So that's my stuff. That's it. That's it. Well, and we're about at an hour or so. We'll go a little long here. We've got some wrap up to do, but I think I planned it quite well. Any other outstanding questions from the audience? Not that I can see. I'm just having some questions in there. I'm having some questions and issues. Okay, we're just, we're just making a last minute. No. Okay. No new questions. Okay. Well, then thank you very much for attending this week. Yes. That was great info from Joyce. The recording of the session along with her form that she mentioned will be posted on our website this afternoon or tomorrow. We'll let you know when it's up. I hope you will join us next week when we will have some staff here from the library doing a session on legal self-help and librarians, librarians being able to help your patrons with any of their legal issues they may have. So you can sign up for that one. That'll be our session for next Wednesday. And we're only for an hour during the day. So you can still do that e-books virtual summit for the whole day and just sign up for an hour. Or, as we said, it's recorded. Don't sweat it if you want to skip us and do the e-books instead. You can listen to our recording later. And do you want to mention my next tech talk? Oh, we'll assure you. Yeah, it's going to be a little different. Next month, that Wednesday morning will be... October 27th. October 22nd will be Day 27. 27. 27. Yes. Okay. It'll be Day 3 of Internet Librarian 2010 in Monterey, California. I will still be there. Christa will be freshly back from there. So our plan is that I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning. I'll get up before that. And get some colleagues from the conference to try to get their rear ends out of bed that early before the keynote in the morning and kind of do a live session from Internet Librarians. So it should be interesting talking about what's going on at the conference, what we've learned, what we found out, what worked, what didn't work, maybe, that sort of thing. So we're going to be kind of on the planes and on the left coast. All of this at west coast, left coast, whatever, California. So we'll be remoting in from some sort of laptop or something. We're still working on the details. But we'll do that a little different. Yep. So live from out west. All right. And thank you very much. And we will see you next week. Thanks. Bye.