Academic Book Week – Is digital the future of the academic book?
Image by Laurence Winram
This week is Academic Book Week (9-16 November). Various events and activities are being arranged at universities across the UK. Here at St Andrews a few academic and Library staff thought we might have a discussion on the Library blog, to see if we can elicit some views and opinions from anyone interested – staff and students – in the question of what the academic book of the future will be, if it continues to exist at all.
So we are posing the question: ‘Is digital the future of the academic book?’
My answer is ‘yes’ – but it’s not an emphatic ‘yes’, or an unhesitating ‘yes’. More of an ‘Em … yes … probably … eventually.’
A quick fact from the Library perspective. Our Library catalogue is turning from printed book to ebook on a trajectory that might look at first sight as though we’d be providing nothing other than ebooks in just a few more years. Of the 1,203,000 records in SAULCAT, 445,000 of them are for ebooks (ie 37%). However, the progression is not smooth. A large chunk of these records have arrived in big batches as a result of us acquiring records for services based on large out-of-copyright digitised book bundles, such as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online. These services give us books that – for the most part – we don’t own in print.
Moving into the in-copyright territory, it is not so easy to see such big bundles of ebooks becoming available to replace their print alternatives. Many publishers do offer selective bundles of their book content, and while some of these are good offers (eg Cambridge Histories, Cambridge Companions, Loeb Classical Library, etc), we need to be careful that we are not duplicating too much of what we have in print, or buying a lot of content that we don’t want in order to snag the good stuff in the bundle. On the other hand, for new material on an individual title basis, it is often sensible to opt for the ebook over the p-book, both to save on shelf-space and to be able to meet the demand for multiple simultaneous use. The Library frequently gets caught in a no-win game here, however, between publishers on the one hand often trying to restrict the multiple usage to infeasibly low numbers, and users saying they’d rather read in print anyway, so why don’t we buy large numbers of hard copies instead? And there is an increasing tendency for core textbooks to be offered to libraries in ebook form – though usually at a very high price. Our undergraduate medics, for example, now follow their curriculum largely on the basis of a small number of high-cost e-textbooks.
So the progress, from the Library’s perspective, of print to digital books, is gradual. We have a significant quantity of books only in print form that our users want to read, and we must manage them for many years to come as a large physical inventory – even though we would expect to see the rate of acquisition of print drop year by year. We might therefore expect, as a profession, to slide towards an all-digital future for books, hopefully giving the library world plenty of time to adjust its skills and management strategies to fit the new order (the question of how libraries and librarians will operate in the all-digital future is one for another series of blog posts).
Might there be a game-changer, however, that would propel us faster towards that future? Just a few weeks ago, Google won a court case in the US in its interminable battle with the Authors Guild over the vast quantity of digitised books that it has obtained since starting the Google Books project in 2004. This allows this huge reservoir of content to be made available to researchers under ‘fair use’ – akin to a copyright exemption, meaning that its digital book snippets service can be retained, and the copies of the books it has digitised which are held by its partner libraries can be made available, for example, to users with disabilities.
If this is an indication of how the world is moving, it might just signal the prospect of this vast repository of in-copyright digitised books becoming purchasable – after many more court cases – through a market in licensed content, a huge online bookshop of out-of-print ebook material. How would this work? Imagine any title you look for on Amazon or its competitors having a cheap Kindle copy available. Google could deliver this via its existing Google Play Books service, one of Amazon’s competitors in the born-digital published ebook market. As Kindles and other e-readers become ubiquitous, and their functionality improves further, the arrival of a mass of digitised book content representing the published output of much of the last century, with titles available for a few pounds per download, is certainly possible to imagine.
It could take many years yet. The authors – and publishers – might block it for decades. Google might disappear and not be replaced by a similar behemoth. But the digitised content exists, and its provision – via a market structure – would be a public good in a world of Kindle users. The worst case, surely, is that the content would remain lodged in the aggregated digitised content repository, Hathi, until it enters the public domain, many decades hence. But the likeliest option, in my view, is that it will be resolved legally, in the medium-term (10 or 20 years perhaps). Then libraries like ours would find that much of the material they have on the open shelves or in store would be available digitally. If we closed the shelves and stores, and sold off the buildings, could we save enough for the Library to be able to rent the same content in digital form, in perpetuity? Would Google make us an offer to allow that to happen? The transformation that would follow any such legal resolution would doubtless itself be a lengthy transition.
But it would lead us to downsize our physical libraries. We could eventually reach a point where the only printed books we retain are those that are rare, or whose material form is deemed crucial to the full experience of the works they embody (books in art history, for example, may fall into this category); these would be the book equivalent of the experience of analogue music recordings on vinyl, treasured by a minority of listeners. They would then sit alongside the printed books we hold in our special collections – so that the entire physical inventory of an academic library would be a special collection.
Will the printed book survive? Yes. Will digital be the future for the academic book? Yes to that too.
John MacColl, FRSE
University Librarian & Director of Library Services
Let us know what you think; how would you answer the question: Is digital the future of the academic book? Email [email protected] with your thoughts.