TechTalks Transcript
Do E-Books Sit on E-Shelves on Your Campus?
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Calvin Lowe [CL] |
 Karen Coyle [KC] |
April 5, 2001
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JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for spring of 2001 and to this session on "Do E-Books Sit on E-Shelves on Your Campus?" You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and our session is coming to you today with the support of the CREN member institutions and also with the support of Adobe, who is now offering many e-Book solutions, helping to transform the way students and professors access and distribute course materials.
I'd like to welcome Howard Strauss of Princeton as our technology anchor for Tech Talk. As you know, Howard is a well-known web technology expert and portal expert. Usually Howard and I, along with our experts, are all calling in from different places, but today thanks to the Syllabus Spring 2001 Education Technology Conference, we are in a small conference room in the middle of the Cincinnati Convention Center, following a talk by Howard on "Portals, a Perspective from the Year 2015"-or was it 215, Howard?
HS: No, it was 2015, Judith.
JB: [inaudible]�
HS: We discussed last night portals and the year-excuse me, the year 215, which were quite different back then.
JB: They were really doors, right?
HS: Probably stone arches. But we covered, I think, all that material last night.
JB: All right, we're not going to talk about [inaudible], we're going to talk about e-books today?
HS: Yes, we are. Thank you, Judith!
JB: You're welcome.
HS: I didn't know I was going to talk about e-shelves. I mean, I had all the stuff about e-books and now you spring e-shelves on me, which is a real problem.
Anyway, I'm Howard Strauss. I'm the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. Today, we'll engage our guest experts, Karen Coyle and Calvin Lowe, in a lively technical dialogue that will answer your questions about the emerging strategic technology of electronic books, or e-books, and we'll ask Calvin and Karen those very important follow-up questions. You can ask your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this live webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archive.
William Shakespeare said, "That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet," but when we call a book an e-book, is it still a book? We never had to think about what a book was before. It was whatever was printed between the hard or soft covers that protected a bunch of printed pages. If we stick to that definition, an e-book is definitely not a book.
Bill Clinton, who liked to be very precise in his use of English, pointed out the importance of having the right definition for a word when he said, "That depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." If the word "is" can be ambiguous, we certainly need to refine our definition of what a book is. Perhaps a book is better defined by what you do with it than its physical makeup. If we do that, we discover that a book is many things. It is a dictionary where we look things up, a college textbook that we go through chapter by chapter to master the materials in a course, a Stephen King novel that we read for pleasure, a scholarly journal, a comic book, an instruction manual, a magazine, an atlas, a book we read to children who cannot yet read themselves-and the list goes on and on. All of these kinds of books can be put in digital format and made accessible both on the web and on specialized e-book readers. In fact, a peek at barnes&noble.com or amazon.com reveals that there are hundreds of e-book titles and many publishers are now offering at least some textbooks in digital format. So it might seem that the e-book problem has been pretty much solved!
But digitizing a printed book just provides another way to distribute and read it. It is not yet certain, however, that e-books have a clear advantage over printed books. Perhaps e-books need to adopt features unavailable in printed books, such as personal annotations, multimedia simulation, hypertext links, interactive exercises and the like. Would such an e-book still be a book? The answer, I suspect, is "it doesn't matter."
Publishers, libraries and other people whose main business has traditionally been books-in a broad sense of the word "book"-are feeling some pressure to better control their business by moving into the digital age and turning printed pages into bits. They want e-books that are actually digital versions of printed books. But the real reason we need information in digital form is to meet the needs of an educational system that has radically changed from what it was just a short time ago.
The majority of learning today is done by non-traditional students, a population that has become increasingly mobile, moving around the world and changing jobs frequently. Even in a traditional classroom - which may soon be very untraditional - no professor can teach the same material year after year in the same dull talk-and-chalk technique used for hundreds of years. We need a better way to distribute and deliver information to multitudes of people and we need instructional technology that no longer solely relies upon Gutenberg's invention of typographic printing in 1450. E-books, or whatever we call those digital ways of delivering information, will have an increasing impact on every part of our lives where we deal with information. In the 1950's, it seemed like the twentieth century would be the start of the Nuclear Age. It turned out to be the start of the Information Age. Now that we have the essential tools to change the way we deal with information, what will we do with them?
We'll look at the world of e-books - or whatever other name we call them - on today's webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Right. Why, thanks, Howard, and you know, as we were getting ready for today's talk on e-books, I started wondering. It is kind of exciting. I think we're finally starting to see the infrastructure for teaching and learning taking shape and we may be looking, as we look at e-books, we're going to have-are we going to have e-students or bionic students or just kind of see a picture or vision of what students are actually going to be carrying around with them.
HS: It'll be a lonely place if there's e-students and e-books and e-professors.
JB:At any rate, we'll see what is in students' bookbags as we move forward here. I'd like to introduce our two experts to today's Tech Talk, Calvin Lowe and Karen Coyle. Our first expert, Calvin Lowe, is president of Bowie State University located right in the Washington/Annapolis area. And prior to coming to Bowie State, Calvin was Vice-President for Research and Dean of the Graduate College at Hampton University where he helped to establish a Research Center for Optical Physics. You may wonder how he went from optical physics to e-books.
HS: Yeah, we wonder!
JB: You wonder about that! Well, it looks as if he migrated into the digital information field when he developed a method for converting paper-based machine drawings to computer assisted design files. Karen Coyle is a specialist and she's out in-you said Oakland today, right?
KC: Oakland, yes.
JB: Is a specialist in digital libraries at the California Digital Library at the University of California. She's chairing the ALA (American Library Association) Task Force on E-Books and participates in a variety of e-book standards bodies such as the Open E-Book Forum. Karen has been working in this space of technology and information query and access since the 1970's when she worked with a UN agency to develop an early computerized library catalogue. Karen created the first computer-generated list of periodicals for the university system in Italy before returning to the United States to work at the University of California's pioneering Online Union Catalogue. Welcome, Calvin, to Tech Talks.
KC: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to a very interesting discussion.
HS: You're going to provide that, Calvin!
JB: That's right, you're part of it.
HS: We're just going to sit here and listen to the interesting things you say.
JB: And welcome, Karen.
KC: Thank you very much.
JB: Okay, Howard came up with his usual 35, 36, 37 questions so we discovered in our prep session that we'll probably get to, what, about ten today with our experts.
HS: We're just going to do one and let them do all the rest!
JB: All right, here we go! Good!
HS: Karen, what do you mean by an e-book anyway? Is that the content, the device, the format? Tell us what you mean by e-book and when you're done, maybe Calvin can disagree with you. Or agree!
KC: Well, actually, I don't think it is all clear what most people mean by e-book and it is being used for both the file, for the content of the file, for the specialized device that's used. My preference is that we call the file itself the e-book, in other words, the content.
HS: So whatever thing is in digital format, we're going to call that thing the e-book?
KC: Exactly. We call that the e-book. If we have a special machine that the e-book appears on, then we call that the e-book device.
HS: That's the special machine, but the special machine is not like a laptop or a desktop. It's kind of a special thing.
KC: No, and as a matter of fact, general purpose devices are very popular as a way to disseminate e-books because, of course, most people do have a computer and most people do not have one of these specialized e-book devices which have just come onto the market and are still a bit expensive.
HS: How expensive?
KC: Ranging from about 300 to 700 dollars.
HS: Whoa! Seven hundred dollars!
JB: That's more than-�
HS: I mean, that's the cost of a computer!
KC: Yes.
HS: What do they do that is $700 worth of stuff? I mean, why would you get one of those rather than a computer?
KC: They have some advantages. One thing, they're very light. They weigh about like a trade paperback, rather than weighing like a computer, so they can be maybe a little bit under a pound. There are some handheld ones that almost the size, a little bit larger than a palmtop that are just a few ounces. Of course, those have smaller screens. What these e-book readers have is they have the ability for you to store up to 40 or 50 actual books in them. They allow you to annotate those, to make links between them. They have dictionaries so that you can get dictionary definitions of any words that are in the text, and what's being worked on now are ones that have sound and will actually read the book to you or, for example, give you pronunciations of words. So they do have features that you don't have in your general purpose computer and they're lighter weight and more portable.
JB: What about the screen displays, Karen? Are they good enough to be read anyplace, or is that still a drawback?
KC: Well, the screens are actually pretty good, although one of the things is that the screen technology is what's keeping these devices small because a good-quality screen is actually hard and expensive to produce, which is what we've seen happening with laptops. You know, it's only recently that laptop screens have gotten to be anything larger than tiny and there's the technology question. The screens are actually quite clear and the books themselves have the ability for you to modify what fonts are used and you can read them either in a backlit mode or a non-backlit mode, so you can read them in the dark. And many people think it's just wonderful to be able to read books in the dark without waking up the person sleeping next to them when they are up at two AM with a mystery novel that they can't put down.
HS: Karen, I hope I don't spend a lot of time sleeping next to someone who's reading their laptop or reading some special-�
KC: [inaudible], exactly.
HS: I'd feel that was a failure on my part.
KC: Yes, exactly.
JB: We're not going there, Howard!
HS: But what format is this stuff offered in? I mean, this - you called it an e-book, the digital stuff that's on the device.
KC: Right.
HS: Is it offered in HTML or XML or PDF or something special? What are folks doing? Are they doing everything?
KC: It's actually offered in all of those formats and more. One of the market incentives for the people who are producing e-books is that they tend to make their money off of the creation of the e-book itself and so you have many proprietary formats. Microsoft has its own format for the Microsoft Reader. There's a format for Palm for reading on the palmtop device. There are also some general purpose formats. Many e-books come out in PDF, which is the format that most of us read in Adobe Acrobat. And then the Open E-Book Forum is working on an open standard that all e-books can be rendered in and this one is based on XML, which looks very much like HTML.
HS: I just have one more follow-up question for you, Karen, and then I'll go over and give a bunch of questions to Calvin here. But you said that people make their money on the e-book. Are you saying - it doesn't sound like they're giving the readers away - excuse me, the devices away, so what do you mean, they're making the money on the e-book? It looks like they're making lots of money on the devices as well. KD: Actually, they aren't. The devices, because the devices are being sold in very small numbers still and we don't exactly know how small but we know that it's small, that most of the companies that are making the devices are not actually making their money off the device. What they're making money off of is, of course, that middleman role of being the distributor for a whole number of e-books such as those that you see on Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.
HS: Okay, Calvin, we're talking about all these e-books and how nice they are and how nice they are and things like that. Do you see them supplanting textbooks in colleges and universities?
CL: Well, I think it's going to be a long time before that happens and it's going to depend on the development of the technology. But if I might, I'd like to go back to your first question [inaudible].
HS: Sure! You can do whatever you want here.
CL: Well, I consider the digital information to be the e-book, and the device - I guess instead of calling it the e-book device, I kind of think of it as the branch library where information is housed. And in some cases, you're going to have very advanced branch libraries such as the laptop computers. In some cases, you're going to have some that are not very advanced, such as some of the readers that are out there now. But I do believe that we [inaudible] in the not-too-distant future where this information will kind of, the e-book will kind of flow into whatever device that happens to be handy and I think that the most handy device, if that day is in your terms, will be a laptop computer. Whereas at my university, we require all of our entering freshmen next year to have laptop computers and we're actually going to give them the computers. So if we have e-books available, whether they're textbooks or other kinds of books, it will be on the laptop computer that these things are going to be most-�
HS: So I mean, with everybody at your university very soon having a computer, will people still be buying textbooks? Why not just use all e-books? Do you see that happening at your university or other universities?
CL: Well, I hope that happens at some point. I don't think we're at that point anytime soon.
HS: What's holding us back? It sounds like everybody at your university and lots of universities now have computers. I look at Barnes & Noble, I see lots of titles. Why isn't it happening?
CL: Well, I think it is really going to be a matter of having the technology to display the kinds of information that you might find in - I don't so much think of entertainment type books, but for instance, journals or for textbooks where you have very-if you have a textbook on biology, for instance, you might have very high quality photographs and so forth in that book or very detailed star charts or something in an astronomy book that doesn't really convey fully in the electronic format yet. So when those issues are addressed, I think that you might start to see a decline in paper kinds of textbooks.
HS: Karen, do you think that's true? I mean, are the displays and things just not good enough yet? Or what do you see holding this thing back?
KC: Well, there are a couple of things. I was sitting here nodding while Calvin was speaking-�
HS: But we couldn't see that!
KC: Could you hear that?
HS: No! You were nodding? Nod louder! This is audio, remember! So you have to nod very loud for us to hear it.
KC: Okay! It's definitely true that there is, at this point, no screen display that is as clear and as detailed as what we can do on a page. And so there are certain kinds of images that we just really can't display well on a screen. A couple of other things, though, that I think are holding things back - most of what you see coming out in e-books today are either very old classics such as those that were produced by Project Gutenberg, which was a project to produce books in ASCII, and all of those were books that were in the public domain. And people actually went through all the effort of typing them back in. And then you get absolutely brand-new books and this gap in between is for both legal and for technical reasons. New books that are produced today are produced in digital format In other words-�
HS: You're saying the publishers just necessarily produce them in digital format before they print them?
KC: What goes to the printing press is digital, and therefore they have a digital file that they can render as an e-book.
HS: And probably the authors are doing them on text processors anyway, so right, they actually start digital.
KC: They start digital. If you move back just a few years, you don't have a digital file, and even if the books were sent to the printer originally in a digital format, oftentimes those files weren't retained.
HS: But you could scan the books, you could OCR them, you can do things like that.
KC: Scanned books, though, the scanning technology still is far from perfect. The OCR'ing is far from perfect, so it's more effort. In other words, it's going to be more expensive to do older books than to do brand new books.
HS: Okay, we've been talking about e-books in classrooms. What about e-books in libraries? Calvin, do you want to talk about the use of e-books in libraries, what impact that might have on libraries and how they're going to be used there?
CL: Yes, I think that's a very interesting topic. At a university such as Bowie State that's fairly small-�
HS: How small?
CL: We have about 5,000 students. But also it's small-�
HS: That doesn't sound small to Princeton!
CL: Well, also small in terms of yearly operating budgets that will sound small to Princeton! But-�
HS: Okay, you win on that one.
CL: So we are going to always look for ways to have information available to our students for their work and to our faculty for the work they carry on and so the issue for us will be how to make that information available more than the kind of look and feel of the book, if you will.
HS: So you see it as a cost saving measure? You're saying that your university just can't have the library it really would like to have because it's so small unless you find some way to get your costs down, is that what you're suggesting?
CL: Right. We need to get our costs down and we also need to be able to have more information available than we could possibly store on shelves and have the physical space to have access to because there's the idea of kind of customized libraries, if you will. A library collection can change from time to time in a very fluid way. So there is a place for e-books in the university and I think we're probably going to get there, in my opinion, faster than we're going to get to the kinds of libraries where people might go to look at a book, to sit down and enjoy reading a novel or whatever.
HS: Karen, how do you see e-books affecting libraries? I mean, are people going to take these things out? Are they going to borrow them for short periods of time or how are they going to interact? What's a library going to look like once there's lots of e-books around?
KC: Well, we actually have a number of libraries using e-books today and my point of view, of course, is sort of the opposite of Calvin's, which is, I come from a very large library system which is-�
HS: So you want to get your costs up?
KC: Yeah, right! All nine campuses of the University of California, so within our collections, we have something like 18 million different titles. So we cover most of the world's literature. What our problem is, of course, is that a professor holds a class in some book that doesn't normally get checked out very often. Suddenly, 60 people want to read it in the same week. And what we see e-books as being able to do is to allow our collection to sort of expand virtually, based on demand.
JB: It sounds like electronic reserves, Karen. Have we found a solution to that?
KC: Yes, it is very similar to the idea of electronic reserves. And we actually are looking for e-books that match our reserve lists so that-for one thing, of course, books that are actually placed physically on reserve don't last very long. If you imagine a book that's checked out every two hours for a week or two and taken over to the photocopy machine-�
HS: I assume it gets never returned.
KC: Well, the problem is they only last for a couple semesters.
HS: Track [inaudible] down.
JB: Okay.
KC: So oftentimes, e-books are being seen as the added copies that can - if we can make this kind of arrangement with the publishers - as of yet, they're a little bit reluctant. But to allow us to allow the number of copies to expand based on the need, and then they also become available to anyone who is entering the library virtually from home and those who do their papers at 3:00 in the morning when the library isn't open.
JB: What about the idea that - or let's branch off to talking about electronic journals and database use, Karen. Where do these fit into the e-book picture? I mean, we come back to just, we've been talking about just what is an e-book. We hardly know what an e-book is anymore, and perhaps even what a journal is. How does all this fit into the picture of e-books and content resources?
KC: They actually have different histories, and of course, databases and electronic journals have been available in digital format for over ten years. Databases have been available in digital format for almost 30 years now. E-books are kind of late-comers to this.
JB: Can't publishers kind of model after the database structure and rights access?
KC: No, because databases don't generally use the same kind of rights access. Most of the databases that we have are bibliographic. In other words, it's abstracting and indexing services. You look up information about a journal article and then from that, you can link to the actual copy of the journal article. And many of the journals that these link to and that are available electronically are academic in nature. This is a very different world from the commercial publishing world, and books are tending more than journals to come out of the commercial publishing world. There are different interests and there are different players. So we've had both of these happening, but they've really been happening very separately. These are different universes that so far have not really come together. They definitely have not come together around a single business model or even their data presentation models.
HS: If we have regular libraries where people have to go and get books, it's pretty clear that the library has to be somewhere near the people who want to go off and get the books. But with e-books, do we still need all these libraries or can we just have everything in one spot or could we have people just getting stuff [inaudible]? Should people still be building bricks-and-mortar libraries, Karen?
KC: It depends on who you are and who that library serves. And as a matter of fact, the California Digital Library which I work for is an all-digital library.
HS: It is? It's all digital?
KC: It's all digital! And what we are-�
HS: You don't have a single book? You don't have a shelf?
KC: Well, I mean, only my personal books, but no, we don't have books. We don't have shelves. And we serve the digital needs of the University of California. Depending on what constituency your library serves - for example, if your library is at an institution that does a lot of distance education, you may not need very much of a physical library presence.
HS: Just who has access to this library? Can I get access to it?
KC: Access for most of it is only for those who are within the University of California at the moment. However, the state of California is looking at the idea of having a statewide digital library as well.
HS: Yeah! I mean, it sounds like there's a real opportunity for consortiums and people to get together. And in fact, it sounds like that's a really good solution for schools like Calvin's. I mean, if he could get access to that library, wow! I mean, he'd come from his relatively small library to this incredible collection. Are there plans afoot to try to do that kind of thing?
KC: There are a lot of activities like that happening. As a matter of fact, some states have put all of the large libraries and the university and research libraries in their state together in a single consortium and by doing so are essentially sharing a single set of digital files or digital access codes because oftentimes you don't bring the files actually into the library, you go off and access them on the distributor's or the publisher's site. So there is a lot of consortial work happening. The difficulty there, of course, is figuring out how - the publishers have to make the transition to figure out how they can sell the stuff digitally and still make the kind of money that they made when they sold it in hard copy.
HS: Well, I look at Amazon.com, though, and Barnes&Noble.com and it looks like the e-books cost exactly the same as the printed books. They don't even have to print anything and they don't have to distribute it! They don't have to do anything. It sounds like they can make some money off this things.
KC: And they do do advertising and I think that one of the things - we were talking a little while ago about what's holding up the development of e-books. And I think one of the things that's holding it up is this fact that the publishers are having to make this transition from hard copy to digital. And at the moment, they're very reluctant to sell the digital for quite a bit less because they're afraid that they'll lose hard copy sales.
JB: Karen, let me just interrupt here for a moment and remind everybody that now is a good time to send in your questions to Karen and to Calvin and the e-mail address is expert@cren.net.
HS: Okay, Calvin, you were talking about all your students reading these things on the laptops that they're going to have shortly. What about reading these things on PDA's? Do you think people are going to do that?
CL: I think PDA's are a perfectly good e-book device, if you will, especially for those 18 or 19 year olds who have very good eyes and can see those tiny screens! I think as the PDA's develop, that they are going to be really viable readers. One of the things that I carry around in my pocket sometimes is an iPAC, the little compact PDA that I like very much. And it basically has all of the other tools on it that I might like to use such as spreadsheets and word processors and even other kinds of software that might do things like data modeling and that sort of thing. So I think that the PDA's, the concept of the PDA is right for e-books and the PDA may actually turn out in the future to be something larger.
JB: Have you tried reading an e-book on your PDA yet?
CL: Yes, I have!
JB: Which one have you read?
HS: On your iPAC?
CL: On my iPAC, yeah.
HS: Yeah, have you read a textbook or a phone book or a novel?
JB: Or do you want to say? All right, maybe we want to move on here!
HS: Calvin mentioned something about better palmtops. Karen, I think that when we talked to you before, you mentioned that there was some kind of better device coming or some device more suitable for reading e-books? Could you tell us about that?
KC: There is a model coming to the United States sometime in the next few months - I think like late summer - from Korea. And this is called - unfortunately, it's called the Hiebook, which undoubtedly means something in Korean.
HS: But what does it mean in Korean?
KC: I have no idea! But it-�
HS: We hope it's okay!
KC: It is like a slightly enlarged palmtop with a screen that's about twice the size of the palmtop screen and the entire screen can be used for the book. But in addition, this device will also play MP3's, it will keep your calendar, you can take notes on it and it can have many of the other features that e-books have which are annotation, bookmarking, that type of thing. I mean, it seems to me that we have to get down to something that you can easily slip into your pocket or your purse or your backpack and that you're not going to notice the weight or the size.
JB: It sounds like it's almost the size of a paperback book.
KC: It's like a small paperback book. It's like the old Pocket Book concept.
JB: Okay.
HS: That sounds like a good size. Do you have any idea what the price of that thing is going to be?
JB: That's a good question!
KC: I believe that they said it was going to go for around $250 or $300 and that's only black and white.
HS: Oh! All in black and white.
KC: Right. But then again, most of the books we read are only black and white.
JB: That's very true!
CL: I think this move towards smaller devices is not really the way things are going to finally work out. I mean, how many of us carry around a DayRunner or a DayTimer or whatever that's the size of an 8 � by 11 sheet of paper? Or slightly larger than that. So I can sort of see the day arriving when you're going to carry that sort of device around and not something that you'll slip in your pockets and all your stuff's going to be right there, including the e-book device.
JB: I think you're probably right. I think we've got a question coming in.
HS: Yes, Judith, we have a question from Kevin Schalla at Illinois Institute of Technology about security and privacy. Kevin says, "Is there a system in place for preventing e-books from being copied?" Why don't we just take that question? He has a couple questions here. We'll take these one at a time. So how do we deal with these things being copied?
KC: Well, there are a number of different ways that you can deal with it. One of the reasons why the publishers themselves like the separate e-book device, dedicated device, is that those are not general-purpose computers and all they can do is communicate with the vendor's website and upload and download books. So from those, it'd be very difficult to make a copy. In other words, the hardware itself prevents that kind of copying.
HS: Right, but if a book was offered in PDF format or any format that you can get on the web-�
KC: Right, when it's offered in PDF format, Adobe has developed a system called Web Buy which adds a certificate along with the PDF file, and without that certificate, you cannot open up and read the PDF file. And also, that certificate is tied to the hardware that originally downloaded it so you can't copy that file with its certificate to another piece of hardware.
HS: Can you print it?
KC: That is one of the permissions that you can have through the certificate. The certificate says whether you can print, whether you can copy, whether you can lend the book.
JB: Interesting! So there's a whole raft of "privileges."
KC: Exactly. Now, in the works through what used to be called the Electronic Book Exchange which is now combined with the Open E-Book Forum is a very complex trust management system which will presumably allow vendors to sell books that cannot be copied, that can be opened only under the permissions that are allowed, so they can actually sell you a book that you can only read on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:00 to 5:00.
HS: But that acts like people only use one device. I mean, in my office, I have one computer, I have a laptop that I take with me sometimes and I have a number of devices. It seems like there's at least some more work to do here.
KC: There is definitely some more work to do and what, of course, we run into here, which is something that you've covered in previous shows, is the issue that we run into generally in the e-commerce which is we are not yet able to certify individual people. In other words, we can't say, "John bought the book, John can read the book."
HS: But of course, when I buy the book--
KC: "Fred can't read the book."
HS: --you can't do that. It seems so strange to me. If I buy a paperback or even a hardback book and I get done reading it, I can just give it to Judith and then she can read it and then she can give it to someone.
KC: Right. It's these systems [inaudible] sophisticated enough-�
HS: I mean, aren't publishers out there saying, "Whoa, that's a real problem"? When I give it to Judith, it should just disintegrate or something like that.
KC: Yes, there are some publishers who feel that way. But again, the proper use of these permissions would be that you could give it to Judith. The main thing is that when you give it to Judith, you have to no longer have it. And with a computer file, when you give it to Judith, you've made a copy for her. The idea is that your copy has to become disabled when her copy becomes enabled. It has to control that for every copy that's sold, only one copy of that can exist. It's a technical problem, but there are people very aware of it and who are working on it.
HS: Kevin also asks, "Are there expiration dates in e-books?" When you get an e-book, is it only good for a certain amount of time?
KC: The model that's used for Net Library, which I believe Calvin's familiar with as well, is when a library lends a book, it lends it for a period of time. At the end of that period of time, the book expires.
JB: And when it expires, what happens to it?
KC: You simply cannot open it up anymore. You cannot read it.
HS: So you've downloaded it onto your machine or to some device but-�
KC: It becomes unreadable.
HS: So the only thing you can do is erase it.
KC: Yeah.
JB: Like expiration dates in software then, basically. Okay.
KC: And the idea is that they could also sell - that's a library lend so it's very similar to borrowing it from the library except that there's no way for you to be late because it goes back to the library.
JB: Oh, no!
KC: Exactly! But there is also the possibility in terms of having this rights management that they could sell you a book that only existed for a certain period of time.
JB: I would like to go into - we haven't talked much about textbooks, actually, electronic textbooks and there seems to have been a couple of announcements recently from publishers that they are, in fact, moving fairly aggressively. One announcement, from Pearson, I believe, they were making like hundreds of books available by fall of 2001. Karen or Calvin, have you any experience with this or how many people are adopting these kinds of textbooks?
KC: I'll let Calvin handle that one!
CL: I'm not sure that, at least here at this university, anybody has moved yet to the point of adopting these sorts of textbooks. I think people are going to be very interested in seeing exactly how these things work and how they look and the kind of look and feel of the textbook interface on the computer, if you will. But it seems to me that part of the discussion that we've been having about rights could be answered with kind of access or connectivity. The question is what is valuable in an e-book? Is it the information that's valuable or is it the file itself that's valuable?
HS: What do you mean by that? It sounds like you're saying the same thing, the information or the file.
CL: Well, let's speak about a textbook or any book that's a printed book. The content of the book is valuable and the book itself, the cardboard and the paper and so forth that goes to make it a book is also considered valuable. And so it seems to me that part of what we like to experience, again, is that look and feel of a new book when you open it or a new textbook when you open it and it has crisp pages and so forth. With the electronic part it's really just the information.
HS: So you really like the tactile nature of the book and we're going to sort of lose that.
CL: Well, we're going to lose that, but that's okay because I think that's just the way we've been socialized into liking or not liking things, and digitization, we'll be socialized into liking something else. But I can certainly envision a library, a virtual library on campus or whatever where I don't have to have all those books on the shelf in my office or derive any pleasure from having those things on the shelf in my office, but I do want to get access to those books. That information does not have to be downloaded into my e-book reader. It just has to be somewhere that I can connect to it.
HS: Um-hum. Karen, a lot of universities now are using course management systems like WebCT or Blackboard and things like that, and that's really what's delivering a lot of information on the course. Do you think that e-books or e-textbooks are going to be tied to that course management system? Is that the way to do this thing?
KC: Well, I think that that's going to be the ideal way to do it because one of the problems that we all have in libraries, at least, and I'm sure in the development of courses as well is if you develop a website that has information and you send users out beyond your own realm to gather information, they oftentimes have a hard time coming back once they get out there. The interfaces change. I think the ideal thing is to be able to bring the information into a sort of controllable area that is part of the course or that is part of the library. So the model that we often have today is that you have to go to a publisher's website and log onto that in order to get the data, but that takes it out of the context that-�
HS: Yeah, the course, that seems like-pedagogically, that seems very bad.
KC: Right, that's very bad, and once the students get out there they may never get back. If that's step three of what they're supposed to be doing, they may never get to step four.
HS: Right, they'll go off and send e-mail messages to their friends.
KC: Yeah. One of the things that publishers are looking at is developing standards for delivering information digitally, I believe, with the hope that their data will be able to start to interact with other digital systems that deliver information. [inaudible] of course, that the publishers want to be able to know how much of their data is being used and by how many people because that's what they expect to use to get compensation.
HS: Calvin, since it really is the professor who chooses the book, what would make a professor choose an e-book over choosing a physical book? When the professor decides to teach this class, to say to his or her students, "We're going to use this e-book" vs. "We're going to use this physical book."
CL: I think that many professors choose books based upon their evaluation of how well the book conveys-�
HS: But let's suppose we have a book that's available in both formats. It's available in a physical format and also available in an e-book format. What would make a professor choose one format over another, given that it was the same book?
CL: It will be based on how well the book conveys information or conveys the knowledge to the student in the class. I think if e-books are just simply a copy of what can be done on paper, I'm not sure that other than the access to a wide variety or easy access to a wide variety, what would be the advantage that would make a person choose an e-book.
JB: Calvin, actually, since we're asking this question about what advantages there might be, it occurs to me that maybe folks out there who are listening have selected e-books and maybe folks that have done that might send us a note and tell us why they did that. And again, the e-mail to send that to is expert@cren.net.
HS: Another plug for the show here! Karen, how do you feel about that? Why would people choose an e-book over a book, a printed book?
KC: Well, they shouldn't choose an e-book over a printed book unless it presents some added value. And e-books are-�
HS: You mean distribution is not enough? The fact that it's available on the web is not enough?
KC: In a way, that is added value, yes. If many of your students are going to be at a distance, if you're in one of those commuter colleges where the students aren't actually on campus very often, the greater distribution and the distribution at different hours, I think, is added value. Other reasons for choosing it, I think that there are a lot of specialized uses of e-books that we ought to look at.
HS: Like?
KC: Many libraries are looking at e-books as being ideal for their older readers because you can change the font. You can make them all large print books. E-books, I think, are going to be very good for literacy training and by literacy training, I mean both people learning to read and those people learning to read in other languages.
HS: How is that going to help?
KC: Because the e-books have built-in dictionaries, they can have explanatory text in them as compared to just the plain text, they can also read out loud and they can do pronunciation and all of this may be very helpful for the teaching of languages. And there's a community that's very interested in e-books that we haven't talked about yet, which is the blind community. And they're working on a standard called Daisy, which is Digital Audio something. I forget what [inaudible].
HS: There's enough acronyms out there.
JB: Probably "interactive" in there somewhere.
KC: [inaudible] acronyms. And this will be an interesting standard that allows spoken books-and that's books being read by a person-to be coordinated, the voice to be coordinated with the actual written text so that you can have a book that you could either listen to or you can read it. You can stop it at any point. It can start up again, which right now audiobooks don't do well. It can give you both pronunciation of terms if you're reading it, or if you're listening to it, it can give you the spelling of terms.
HS: Do either of you, Karen or Calvin, have any experience with seeing people actually using books? I wonder what kind of things have worked and what haven't with people actually using these things, or things you know of?
JB: Actually, I was going to ask a similar question, saying have you seen students using these in innovative or creative ways? What has struck you about how people are using these?
CL: Well, you know, we're sort of in the front end of introducing all this stuff into the universities. I don't have any good stories to tell you at this point about that, but I am looking forward to this first semester with the extended number of laptops around and to see how that works out.
HS: Karen, you said you have this whole digital library so you must have had a lot of people using this kind of thing.
KC: We have a lot of them using digital material. The e-books we have, about-�
HS: But not e-books? I thought-�
KC: Well, there are - in our libraries, I think we have about 20 or 30 thousand e-book titles available. They've only been available for about the last six or eight months, and we've done some studies to see which ones were the most used, which ones weren't. The people who used them, both professors and students, were very enthusiastic about them. They really liked being able to get to the books whenever they wanted. They liked being able to cut and paste, and some of the e-book software, if you clip a quote from it and you paste it into your document, it automatically adds the footnote. That's very popular.
JB: That's neat!
KC: And so even though people's experience at this point is spotty because there is no one discipline for which we have a full range of works-in other words, there's nothing that you can study today that you can study entirely digitally.
CL: So what's the most popular book?
KC: The most popular books were always in technology and business.
HS: Calvin, we normally just never allow that! We ask the questions! But we'll let this by this time!
KC: Make an exception for you! Yeah, the most popular books were business and technology, and I think technology's an obvious one.
JB: Yeah.
KC: Because when you need that JAVA reference book, you're already sitting at your computer and you don't usually read those cover to cover. You use them as reference books.
JB: Karen, just one more question before we kind of start wrapping up here - or maybe two, who knows? Is there anything really obvious that people can't do yet with the e-books?
HS: That they want to do.
JB: That the want to do, thank you. Is there anything that's kind of on the list of, gee, [inaudible]�
HS: If only-�
JB: Yeah, if only they would include this feature?
KC: You know, I think it isn't really the technology itself that people are having trouble with but the - what can I say, the delivery model? What we ran into was the fact that the library buys an e-book. If someone opens it up to read it, it is checked out and no one else can get to it. And what we really want is for e-books to act, to kind of replicate themselves virtually. We need to find a way that we can fairly compensate publishers for that.
HS: So it's really a licensing problem.
KC: The biggest problems right now seem to be in the licensing and business models which are still very immature. I'm quite confident that these things will get worked out.
HS: Yeah, I think those are always more difficult than the technical problems.
KC: Yes, those are harder than the technical problems.
JB: Go ahead, sure, Calvin.
CL: Wouldn't it be great if the library, if we needed a book, it does replicate itself, we work out how to buy the other copies, and then conversely, if the book is not read for a month, a year or two years, a decade, it kind of requests a refund from the publisher!
JB: Electronic returns! They're going to love that, right?
HS: Like somebody would check it out and there would be electronic dust on the thing.
CL: But hey, if it's not used and it's in our memory bank, let's be fair!
HS: We have a question about electronic dust. No, we don't. We have a question from Ron de Gray at St. Joseph College. He points out that a while ago, he bought some electronic books in HyperCard format and he says this format, I think this is a real understatement - he says, "This format is somewhat obscure today. What cautions should we take in the purchase of today's e-books so we're confident that the format will be readable in the near or far future?"
CL: A great collection of beta videotapes!
KC: Right! This is one of the reasons why part of the e-book community, at least, is very interested in developing this Open E-Book Standard because trying to come up with a file format that can be universal enough that it's one that can be transformed as technology progresses-which it will, and it will very quickly-already some of the e-book devices, some of the actual machines that are out there have become obsolete. And the vendors have responded by allowing people to upgrade their files so that if they buy a new device, they'll be able to move their books onto it. But since this kind of technological process is going to mean that every year and a half or two years, your files may become obsolete, this is a huge problem. It's a problem for individuals. It's a gigantic problem for libraries because if you have 500,000 of these-�
HS: Oh, yeah, I don't want to think about it.
KC: --and the format becomes obsolete, it's very difficult.
HS: Makes me feel better that I'm not a librarian.
JB: It sounds like another argument for subscription stuff.
KC: Well, actually, it's an argument for keeping things in paper form.
JB: Really?
KC: Because good quality paper will last-�
HS: How can we end our-�
JB: Yes, we can't do this, Karen!
HS: We've decided after discussing this thing for an hour that paper's better!
KC: Yeah! It can last hundreds of years-�
HS: You were supposed to say this in the beginning! We wouldn't have done it!
KC: It can last hundreds of years and it would be readable as long as it lasts.
HS: On paper!
CL: So we've answered the question. A great discussion!
JB: Oh, all right! Well, we are getting close here and it is time to wrap up and I generally ask our experts if they've got a final question - or, pardon me, a final comment that they would like to make. We get the final question!
KC: [inaudible] questions.
JB: Right. Calvin, a final comment.
HS: We're just still reeling from that paper remark, Karen!
JB: Right, we just got all shook up here.
CL: Well, I have a great idea for a dot.com here.
HS: Paper.com?
CL: It's to basically have a way for people to purchase e-books and to deposit those e-books into a personal library somewhere that they can get to online and let the library worry about keeping the formats in the right form as technology develops and that sort of thing.
JB: Okay, well, I think your students are already taking notes on that, Calvin.
HS: On the laptops that they're going to have.
JB: That's right.
CL: That's right.
JB: Karen?
KC: Well, I think the only comment that I have is to sort of ask people to be a little bit patient about this, that e-books really are still in the very early stages of evolving and I encourage everyone in the academic world to become informed about them but also to be willing to become active, that the more that we express our needs, I think the more this new technology is going to evolve in a way that serves our needs.
JB: Okay, great. Howard?
HS: Okay, yeah, this is supposed to be my last question so I know this is the last chance I can comment on your statement about paper.
KC: Has to be the last chance!
HS: [inaudible]. But Karen, you were talking about people, I guess faculty and students and things should be expressing their needs with respect to electronic books. What about IT folks, information technology folks? Should they be proactive in promoting the use of e-books or should they wait for the faculty and students or others to come to them? And if they should be proactive, what should they be doing?
KC: Well, I think what they should be doing is becoming involved in the issues of things like storage, of authentication and certification. These are all areas that libraries and professors are going to be running into that they-�
HS: So they should kind of be getting ready for this.
KC: Aren't going to be - right, as adept. And I would encourage the IT folks to be closely in contact with their libraries and with the teaching departments so that as this new technology comes in, they can lend their technological expertise.
JB: Okay. Well, with that, let me thank everyone for being with us here today and please send follow-up questions and comments again to expert@cren.net and our experts are often very helpful at answering those follow-up questions. Be sure to plan on joining us two weeks from today, on April 19th, when we'll be talking about "The State of Course Management Systems Today and Tomorrow," and how they are working for the folks at Princeton with Serge Goldstein, and with Dick Heumann at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Many thanks to the CREN member institutions and Adobe and their many e-book offerings for making this event possible today. A special thanks goes to our Tech Talk experts, Calvin Lowe and Karen Coyle; to our technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, the audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Bye, Karen. Bye, Calvin. Bye, Howard.
CL: Bye-bye.
HS: Bye, Judith. This was great. Bye-bye.
KC: Bye. END OF WEBCAST
