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First US Public Library With No Paper Books Opens In Texas
cold fjord writes "Bexar Country in Texas has opened a new $2.3 million library called BiblioTech. It doesn't have physical books, only computers and e-reader tablets. It is the first bookless public library system in the U.S. The library opened in an area without nearby bookstores, and is receiving considerable attention. It has drawn visitors from around the U.S. and overseas that are studying the concept for their own use. It appears that the library will have more than 100,000 visitors by year's end. Going without physical books has been cost effective from an architecture standpoint, since the building doesn't have to support the weight of books and bookshelves. A new, smaller library in a nearby town cost $1 million more than Bexar Country's new library. So far there doesn't appear to be a problem with returning checked out e-readers. A new state law in Texas defines the failure to return library books as theft."
Is it a presidential library, perchance?
A library without books is... pointless. Why not just build a Starbucks or a McDonalds. Or, actually, an empty room. What a waste.
Every time I've visited a library in the UK all the users are just browsing Facebook or playing games on the computers, or lending out DVDs of Hollywood movies. Cutting out the books entirely would seem like a sensible move because nobody seems to read them.
10,000 books? WTF? Even if they're sloggy PDF files at 5 megs each, that's only 50GB of books. You could fit that on a USB Key. I have 60,000 books on a drive. They're assembled as a collection in Calibre, and then indexed in Dropout. I can get any piece of data I want from them. My Personal Portable Library five times larger and thousands of times more useful than BiblioTech. What a pathetic piece of crap.
There are plenty of online book sharing sites with millions of books available. For Free. Assemble your library NOW before the authorities shut it all down by force, or the neoliberal fuquads running the tech companies make it impossible by altering the direction of technology (dumb datapads hooked to private clouds is the first step...)
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
while paper books actually do have some advantages...most libraries do not carry multiple copies of that book. A major advantage here is that every one of their readers can have the exact same book on it at the exact same time so 12 people in 12 households can all enjoy it at the same time.
Secondly, if you read the article, this is actually a poorer area of the city in which many households do not have internet access. So putting it all on the web would still NOT benefit them.
Do I think there should be an online library? Of course, its ridiculous that we do not have one yet in fact. Its a holdover from money-grubbing publication houses who want to continue to create an artificial scarcity of their product to keep prices higher than they should be. But is this a bad idea? A waste of money or time? Not at all, its a step in the right direction, and a big one at that.
If I wanted to read the Internet, I could stay home.
And lose access to the paywalled resources to which your library subscribes for use within its facilities.
Which is exactly WHAT for a municipal library?
In the early 1990s, students at my middle school were required to make a speech about a controversial topic based on research. A common method for this was to use the "InfoTrac" system on the catalog terminals to select, preview, and print articles. Another was the "SirS" binders.
Talk to a librarian about the cost of replacing popular dead tree books. It's significant. Will it be more or less than e readers? Hard to know. But some libraries spend upwards of 10% of their budget replacing books (number obtained from a conversation with a local librarian, YMMV).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Okay, time to bring up a new topic.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.
Clearly if someone has the digital file en masse for these kinds of e-libraries, then it's "not hard" to POD it. Then people could get their cumulative favorite 100 "tree books", but the library doesn't have to stock the massive 30,000 item collection with Long Tail problems.
POD is here. *Five years ago* the Hardvard book store had a prototype (cover art rights issues, sure) that produced books as solid as anything done by the pros "in about an hour".
But I'm amazed that no one is constructively talking about POD in these "future of books" discussions, even at the risk on the store side of the big chains folding. (ProTip - why would I even order from amazon if I could get my copy in my hand at lunch?)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The big elephant in the room I still don't see really taken seriously is ... Print On Demand.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book. Cost may be an issue for e-readers today, but you already can get some pretty damn cheap e-readers if you are willing to buy something other than the big name brands. So if you are talking about the future of books, not just trends over the next 5-10 years, it is most likely going to be incredibly cheap color e-ink tablets that most books are read from.
No one knows the future for sure, so perhaps POD will have its place, but I find it doubtful.
I completely disagree that the internet is a "better source". It's a stunning *complementary source*. But books (medium, to be discussed later) are the exclusive domain of a ton of "long form content" with certain types of structure that don't really exist per se in the internet.
I didn't mean to say that the internet is a better source for all information. My rationalle for calling it a better source was simply that it is a better source for most of the information people need. I am easily in the top 5% of physical book purchasers for personal consumption in the developed world (probably top 1%), but even I realize that most of the time I need to learn something I do not turn to books (either physical or e-books). They are for highly specialized content and for reference information that has not yet been posted online (which is more and more rare as the years go on). And for novels, if you are into that kind of thing, but those transition to e-books even better than the non-fiction books I read.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Preservation of information for future generations, and conversely providing information generated past generations to the present.
I can walk into my nice, but hardly cutting edge public library and look up my hometown paper's front page for December 8, 1941 and read about the reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack. I can look for science fiction books published in the 1950s by publishers that have gone out of business. I can find strange, but interesting books that have never been digitized and are very hard to find, like a military history of the bicycle written in the 1960s.
If I go to a *world class* library, like the main branch of the Boston Public Library, I can examine rare manucripts, maps and sheet music, although they have been making an effort to digitize that stuff. If I needed a service manual for a fifty year-old TV set, this is the first place I'd look.
I can understand going primarily ebook for a community that can't afford a real library, but even such a library needs stacks where it preserves books of local interest for future generations. Given that they've given up physical books and all the associated expenses, 10,000 books seems like an awfully thin collection to me.
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Like most libraries, our local has embraced all manner of e-technology. Although the vast majority of users still prefer 'real books," they also offer e-books, e-reader loans, music downloads, and audiobook downloads, as well as access to a large group of databases.
As an end user I'd call most of this a disaster. Books are simple - you sign it out, take it home, and renew it until you're done reading it. If someone else needs the book they can place a hold, and you can't renew it any more. If you need a book not on the shelf you can place a hold.
I had been using them for audiobooks to listen to in the car on my Android phone. This worked great except that pretty much the only company servicing Canadian libraries is Overdrive, and their software is bar none the worst that I've encountered.
Still, it was just usable enough that despite the really poor selection of audiobooks, the limited number of "copies available", the lack of any way to renew books, and the really, really, really horrid interface on either PC or phone, I could live with it.
This year Overdrive updated their software, with a new added "feature": you could no longer limit downloads to WIFI. Or even pause a download in progress. As a consequence one ill-timed audiobook download consumed my entire month's cel phone data cap in less than a day.
I deleted it, and let my library know that I was using Pirate Bay from here on - faster, easier, better selection, and no chance of getting hammered with data overage charges.
Beyond that it's pretty well known that publishers define an e-book as only being downloadable for a few dozen times - alleging that this replicates the physical life of an actual book. It's an obvious lie, and ignores the longstanding practices of rebinding and repairing books - something that libraries have done for many decades.
Our library has a pretty remarkable section of CDs on loan, and actually has surprised me many times with the stuff that they have on the shelves. The downloadable music offering Freegal lets you grab a grand total of THREE songs per month. DRM free, but kind of useless.
At the end of the day I wish that our library would go back to lending physical artifacts - the restraints on them by the publishers makes any attempt to provide e-content pretty much impossible.
Three Squirrels
I can think of several places where groups of people would like to control the information, and many who would do it if they could
Many on the Religious right would like to either scrub or reword evolutionary and or biological references. Physics and astronomy texts are a little suspect also.
Many on the industrial right would want to alter, remove references research in Greenhouse gas
Many on the left might like to remove non-PC texts
No doubt many groups would find objectionable stuff they would like to change. Any of these groups might like to alter or remove text, and if public bookburning events are any indication, it's pretty pointless to argue that they wouldn't.
Some sort of trusted authority with a massive hashtag listing?
Although I would really enjoy the rewritten stories about Jesus and the founding fathers raising the flag on Iwo Jima, and working tirelessly to end slavery.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They spent $2.3 million on a public library, and they fill it with Apple? This is absurd, everyone and their brother will be using them and they'll be locked down anyways. They can buy equivelent Windows machines for half the cost and they'll work just as well if not better. For eBook readers why not Kindle? A Kindle costs $199 which is half as much as the cheapest Apple tablets. Besides this would have given Amazon a chance to step up and become a champion on education. It really is a waste of tax payer money to purchase Apple products for continuous public use.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book.
I know I am in a very small 'paranoid' minority on this one but- POD gets you the ability to read the book, without having a psychological profile of you developed based on the relative times spent on each page. A profile that can and will be sold to advertisers (if only to fund the library building and license costs) . A profile that can and will be stored forever by the NSA so that should they ever find a reason to 'target' that 'collected data' it is there, and able to either help them understand and/or misportray your personality.
If the only users of libraries were people who only read text, I would be OK with an all e-reader library. However, I've noticed that my local library's children section is well used, and a lot of those users are early readers and parents of early readers who take out books where the illustrations matter as much as the words. And many of those books are large format that don't do well in a smaller format. It seems like a library going to an all e-reader format is abandoning an awful lot of the books for early readers.