>> SPEAKER: Hi.
I'm Mary Minnow, but I'm not speaking on behalf of IMLS.
I'm also with librarylaw.com, and I'm the attorney for the Califa Group, a consortium
of California libraries who has set up our own Adobe content servers, so I'm speaking
on that behalf.
So, we were asked earlier what was the library museum archives key business, and my work
is mostly with public libraries, and people need to be able to borrow books, and people
need to be able to borrow e books.
So, do we need libraries to make that happen?
I mean, really think about it.
How many of you are borrowing directly from Amazon or Oyster or Scribed?
Yeah, it's very easy.
It's a very seamless experience.
So, in some respects, I would say that libraries are the worst way to borrow e books, except
for all the others, because when we talk about our core values of what libraries represent,
that's when things start shifting, and you might think, well, maybe libraries are the
only place, or the worst place, but better than all the others.
John Paltrey wrote a new book hot off the press called Biblio Tech.
I highly recommend it.
It's why libraries matter more than ever in the age of Google, and he says if we do not
have libraries, if we lose the notion of free access to most information, the world of the
haves and have not's will grow further and further apart.
So, let's take a look at the library core values and how they translate in the print
world and the e book world.
In the print world, you go to the library and you borrow a book, pretty easy, and I
didn't know until I went to library school that the libraries are working with vendors,
sometimes directly with publishers, they're getting the books on the shelves that they
bought maybe 30 years ago, and they have a circulation system, and the libraries own
the books, and they own the shelves.
E book world, you could take the easy way and pay some fees and join Oyster or Scribbed,
and you could, instead, choose to click through and go with what's available through the libraries,
but you're paying, if you're going with the pay for play version, then you're paying a
monthly fee, you're paying again and again for each book that isn't available.
It's really not the best of all worlds, but the worst of all things, it's part of the
business model, is that they are tracking everything you read, and they're making that
available to the publishers.
When you click on the library, you're taking your chances, and behind the scenes, the librarians
are, for the most part, renting, they're renting the content, they're renting the bookshelves,
and they've got a circ system that they didn't design, and both, after a year, they choose
to switch vendors, and both the books and the shelves can disappear, right?
So, the core library values, which are equity of access, anyone can borrow, including people
with print disabilities, preservation and privacy, the freedom to read, after 9/11,
just take one story, a 10 year old boy of middle eastern descent came into the library
and wanted to borrow a book on airplanes, and his father said you better not do that,
so privacy is so essential to our freedom to read, because if people are watching what
we're reading, then we watch what we read.
So, can we build those values into a library based e book echo system?
Equity of access, we've got the, hold up your drinking glasses, openlibrary.org, which is
for, I didn't say Brewster, which anyone can borrow a book, and in fact, you've got, privacy
is completely secure, because you scrub the IP addresses, you're the only ones I know
that really do that, you've got disability access out the wazoo because you go up to
the current books, but what the open library doesn't have is that big plethora of the current
books for everybody else, and, so, we still have gaps, gaps, gaps in terms of being able
to buy things, being able to own things, which is essential for having control over the privacy,
for having control of making things available for disability access, if they're not already,
and we certainly don't have it for the pay per play.
So, I am an attorney for Califa, which is a consortium of the California libraries,
and we have over 75 of our members who have joined the ANKE platform, which is for e books,
so we have our own server and loan out the books, we have a shared collection, but we're
just starting to roll out the complexity of allowing each library to buy their own books
with their own tax money for their own users, and that's a huge need, and the biggest need
is to have that marketplace so that we can make the books available to them so they can
seamlessly buy, and we don't have that, and that's something that doesn't make sense to
create on each individual level, nor does the hosting make sense on each library's jurisdiction,
that's something where I could see pooling our resources and making a shared hosting
available and making a shared marketplace available, especially the negotiating with
the publishers.
So, that's what I see as our gaps, and John Palfrey says it's up to the libraries to shape
rather than merely react to the forces around us.
I'd like to turn it over to Micah.
You've been tracking the numbers.
What can you tell us about e books, library users and consumers?
>>MICAH MAY: Thanks, Mary.
So, first, I just want to say quickly, just a thank you to IMLS for inviting me to speak
to this distinguished group.
I'll do my best.
I have been thinking a lot about e books, especially in the last 6 months, and so a
couple facts to me that are interesting.
The first is about the size of the market.
So, I think this has really been an important dynamic in our positively evolving relationship
with publishers in that, wow, consumer e books have largely plateaued in terms of consumer
e-book sales.
Library e books spending is growing rapidly.
In 2009 it was about 30 million.
In 2013, which is the most recently available, it was 111 million, so that's a compounded
annual growth rate of 35 percent.
Now, that can't continue, but even at half that growth rate, by 2020, we're looking at
well over a quarter billion dollars the libraries are spending on e-books out of a $1.2 billion
total public library acquisitions budget.
So, there's a lot of money libraries are already putting into e books, and it's growing very
quickly.
Second, it's worth noting that libraries generally cannot keep up with demand.
So, even with those fast growing collection budgets, we can't maintain the same.
We shoot for no worse than a 5 to 1 holds queue, and in E, we can't come even close
to supporting that financially.
Third, that, you know, circulation, it's worth noting that even with this exploding growth,
library e book use lags really far behind commercial e book consumption as compared
to print book consumption.
So, we all saw Amazon's news two Christmases ago when they sold more e books than print
books.
That's already very old news, and because there's a slightly thinner margin on e books,
e books make up about 28 percent of trade publishing revenues, in libraries, we circulate
about 7 percent of our circulation in E books, so there's a huge gap between where consumer
demand would appear to be based on the market and where use in libraries is.
So, even with the rapid growth curve, there's tremendous need and opportunity for our e
book purchasing to expand.
Next, it's worth noting that this is a very small market with one very dominant player.
It's fairly obvious, overdrive sells to 91 percent of libraries in the United States.
There are a couple of new ones that have already made a good go and that are I think in the
black, but we're mostly all using the same vendor products to serve e books to our users,
and finally, I think it's fair to say that NYPL and other libraries are not completely
satisfied with those products.
So, while they have served us well in many ways, they got us started in this business
when we didn't know how to get started, they brought many publishers to the table, there's
a lot of good that's been done by having these vendor solutions, I believe that it's time
for us to look beyond that and think about libraries taking a broader role and really
owning our library user experience around e books.
So, those are some of the facts that I think are interesting.
>>MARY MINNOW: What should libraries do to step up our game?
>>MICAH MAY: At the most fundamental level, I think it's time for libraries to own their
relationships with users around e books.
I think that we've accepted a model where our service of this important format type
is done entirely through third parties, and the result is that we don't control the interfaces
in which they interact.
Those are often much more commercial than the interfaces we would deploy in our own
environments.
It means we often don't hold the user accounts where they are putting their private information
and where they will return for their next transaction, it means we can't control the
privacy, we can't work on that issue ourselves, so I think we need to own those user relationships,
and anyone who's building a business in the private sector would start there.
That's kind of table stakes, right?
You don't give someone else your consumer relationships.
I think as libraries, we have the ability, the potential to have deeper relationships.
We're more trusted, and we have many services to offer beyond e books, and we can't draw
those connections and build that relationship unless we own it on a technological level
first.
Second, I think we do need to reduce the cost and the ROI.
The return on investment in our e book collection has fallen, so even as we've increased the
budget that we spend, we get fewer circs per dollar.
That's not a sustainable environment or an environment we want to see in our fastest
growing content area, so I think we need to work on that, and part of that is price per
se, which I'll talk more about that later.
I think part of it is having inventory management control.
Right now, we don't have the ability to set important controls on things like automatic
check out and loan periods, we can't optimize holds queue.
So if I have 15 holds come up today, they could all become available at once or when
I am out of town.
There's no work being done to optimize our inventory.
I think we could come close to doubling the real circulation we get out of our collections
if we owned that and dealt with it as an inventory optimization problem.
Next, I think we need a single sophisticated point of contact with publishers.
I had the wonderful opportunity in 2012 to join Tony Marx, IMPL President, in approaching
big 5 publishers, and most were not selling e-books to libraries at all.
Many different parties worked on trying to cajole them into the market and since then
have maintained relationships with those publishers, and one thing that I see as a big problem
is the lack of a central point of contact.
That doesn't necessarily mean one person that interacts with the publishers., but between
each publisher and the library industry, I think there needs to be an empowered and sophisticated
point of contact.
So this could be distributed amongst libraries.
It could be that I walk up the street and talk to folks at Simon and Shuster, while
Califa manages someone that is local to Californa.
Between us, we should be having one clear conversation.
Publishers are still fairly small businesses, even the biggest of them, they are scared
of interacting with 9,000 different libraries or even with 50 different states.
They need for us to come together and present them with a counterparty that they can interact
with in a new way, and I think if we can do that, there's tremendous progress to be made
with better licensing arrangements with those publishers, they're very open to experimenting,
but right now, we don't have that advocate and that point of contact, and frankly, incentives
are not aligned for vendors to be that person.
So, I guess, finally, I think we need to really explore different models for how we approach
this, and I think to solve this problem holistically, there are many win/wins to be had, and there
are roles for a lot of different kinds of players especially in such a fast expanding
space.
If we don't step up, I think we risk just being kind of a pass through provider of a
service, and that's not what we want to be in the future, but if we can step up, I think
we also have opportunities to explore different kinds of relationships with private companies
who often play a very important role in this space, but it may require us thinking a little
bit outside of the traditional vendor/customer box.
>>MARY MINNOW: I heard you write you would negotiate with a New York publisher and we
could negotiate with some California publishers and share that marketplace as it were so that
I could buy from the New York publishers and you could buy from the California publishers.
That's what you're talking about?
>>MICAH MAY: That's what I think we need.
I think that it's time to fill this gap in our national digital platform.
I think we're ready.
So, you know, some things about this vision, so first of all, I think the proofs of concept
have been done, they've been running for awhile, Califa is a great example.
I like other examples like NC LIVE in North Carolina which was very focused on local content
and has a great collection and then there are projects that are about to go live like
the Amigos network in Texas, Eagle project in Colorado but it's these things just screaming
for scale.
Once you go to the trouble of interacting with a publisher and on boarding their content,
you want to bring that to the whole country.
There's almost no variable cost in doing that.
So, it needs scale, but I think these existing platforms have proven that libraries can handle
the technology.
We should not be intimidated by it.
It's been done and in very small budgets, and we can easily aggregate a budget that
is more than enough to build the technology.
I think we need to come together around models that can really put this to work.
So, some things about that vision.
First of all, I think we can build this in the near term, so within a couple of years.
Two years, I think we could potentially have this stood up and working.
I don't think this is a five year project or ten year project.
I think it could start with e books, but I think it could very quickly expand to include
a lot of other media types, music, audio, comic books.
Fundamentally, the model is not format dependent.
I think we could follow some principles that have already been laid out and have really
resonated.
So, one example of that is readers first, which is a small sort of library user group
that has been pushing pretty hard in a very focused way around interoperability between
e book distributors, and I think we could really advance those principles by sort of
getting in the game directly and providing an alternative I think this could quickly
become self sustaining.
So, if you think about the growth in the market that I described with, you know, already well
over a hundred million dollars being spent, and by 2020, easily a quarter of a billion
dollars will be spent by libraries, it doesn't take very much of that in savings to sustain
this effort, so it doesn't have to be a cost center, it doesn't have to require grant funding
on a long term basis, all we need is a start up investment, and I think this can become
self sustaining.
I think it could also potentially spin off funding to support other leadership work so
it could become a model for that.
I think some elements need to be centralized, so, you know, I know that's a little bit of
a dirty word in this room, but I think the idea that we empower someone to go and sign
one license with a publisher and then anyone can fall in and use those same terms, I think
we need to empower a few staff to do that, so there needs to be some elements to be centralized.
At the same time, I think many elements of this work can be decentralized, and I think
it could offer some really compelling new kinds of library work to library workers of
the future.
There's no reason there has to be one person who interacts with every publisher.
I think interested and capable libraries or other institutions including private companies
from across the country could approach or other creators and owners of content like
authors and onboard their content using standard licensing agreements to a national platform
where any library could buy it.
They could then get a small percentage of that sale, or in some other way be compensated
for that work because it is work.
And they should be made whole and know it is sustainable.
So, it doesn't have to be that we deputize one negotiator.
We could decentralize that as long as we coordinate it and put it all in one place.
Hosting and the technology doesn't have to be centralized.
In fact, it shouldn't be.
We should have one common platform in the sense of running the same technology, but
we should have many nodes so you get it from your local nodes so that there's redundancy,
etc.
Then, you know, I think that there are other elements in terms of curation that could be
decentralized.
So, you know, if acquisition staff choose a bundle of books that works well for their
library, the system should be able to share that information with other staff and other
libraries, and so that could feed things like recommendations to patrons, and it could also
be creating shared carts or collections that other libraries can buy in the same way.
So, I think there are roles for a wide range of libraries.
>>MARY MINOW: Let's say you've negotiated a license with a publisher in New York, and
I think I can do better with that same publisher.
I don't want to use that license.
Can I still do that in your vision?
>>MICAH MAY: Sure, I guess.
I think, you know, so I've had this conversation with at least all of the big five publishers,
and I think one thing that they want, a couple things they want.
My belief is that they need some level of central point of contact.
If you could go back to publisher and get a better deal, then maybe you call me before
you approach them and we coordinate that in some way.
I don't think there's that many people out there beating on publisher's doors trying
to negotiate on behalf of libraries, so it should be possible to coordinate those efforts.
I also think they need access to a broad marketplace.
So, you know, in New York, we could not put up a Douglas County model or a Califa model
and work with the publishers that are right down the street, because they're frankly not
open to selling to a fragmented marketplace.
So, I think we need to come together and put up a national offering in order to entice
all of the content into that marketplace.
Once we've got that marketplace working, I think we can be very flexible about who we
empower to go and improve the deals that we get.
I just want to underscore one thing there, which is that I really believe there are deep
and meaningful win/wins here.
So, part of that win/win is that any improvement we can make in terms of the margin that libraries
pay and therefore returning some credit to libraries will immediately be reinvested in
content.
So, that can drive further growth for publishers selling to libraries, which is one of their
fastest growing areas in this field.
So, they are excited, I think, about selling more to libraries, and this could help with
that.
I think the other thing we can do is think about our shared goals of just instilling
a love of reading in every person and promoting books and broader discovery of a wider range
of authors and a wider range of titles.
So, I think having this sophisticated type of representative, so at least someone speaking
on behalf of the library community, where at least someone has a real personal relationship
with mentored in the publisher will start those kind of conversations that could lead
to a lot of benefit.
>>MARY MINOW: And, so, what would be your vision for the next steps and a call to action?
>>MICAH MAY: Yeah, so, I think, you know, I think if we could do this, there's a lot
we could do.
I mean, maybe I can say before that a little bit about what I think the impact could be.
So, users, you know, would be able to borrow books directly from their libraries, which
I think is the key and the overarching point.
I think we could allow new libraries to build stronger relationships with users.
We could also save a lot of money if you just back out a small percentage of that large
market, and by improving ROI will have a similar magnifying effect.
With those strong relationships with the publishers, we open new frontiers and I think it potentially
fosters a collaborative paradigm and some new kinds of institutional structures with
libraries that could create a jumping off point for other shared projects.
In terms of a call for action, I think that what Maura said this morning we are building
on at least a decade of experimentation and some live work, so NYPL in 2012 wrote a grant
called Library Simplified, and through the IMLS funding this summer we are going to be
releasing an open source e-reader.
That is just one piece of this puzzle.
It is the piece which most touches the users.
Any library will be able to deploy it free.
We are going to try to help you if you need it to set it up, and we just submitted another
proposal when, if funded, will commit NYPL to building a lot of this stack, a lot of
what we need.
We won't be 100% there, maybe 70-80% there, but we have already committed to building
what it will take to build the national digital platform.
What we need is help.
We just had an amazing conversation at DPLA Fest about this, identified the pieces of
this stack and who is working on this, and found some user groups.
So I encourage anybody who is interested to work on that to dig in and find out how specifically
you can contribute.
You can contact me or anyone who is working on this.
You can join and participate in the groups who are working on this.
Readers First is a good example of this.
I think you could
deploy finally, I think committing to using this platform if and when it's built will
make all of us investing in it more confident in that investment, so that could be in the
form of some kind of pledge to buy from it.
We can talk more about that, but I think getting to the point where we know there is appetite
to start working in this way will make those of us who have taken this small piece of the
digital platform and trying to charge a head on it real, and that's all things libraries
can do.
I think if you're not in a library, you may be able to provide financial support.
Many of you are funders.
I think you can encourage libraries to get involved in this effort, and I think you can
share your ideas, and we need those too.
>> SPEAKER: Any questions?
>> SPEAKER: I think Micah for laying out a very exciting and energizing approach that
I think works very well for public libraries.
I think it's important to bring into the conversation as well the experience and interest of the
academic library community, which are complimentary, but very different.
We've come off of a major revolution in, if you will, e journals, and we gained a lot
of experience and knowledge, and we made a lot of mistakes, but the purpose and nature
of e books in the academy very often focuses on course related materials, use in classes,
increasingly on the ability to search across a database, small and independent publishers,
and we're trying to wrestle through the larger issues of self publishing, increasingly focused
on how we bring research data and other complimentary and supplementary materials into the e reader
experience, and the whole, which we've talked about a lot today, is we have no strategy
for long term preservation of e books in this country, and we've got to wrestle through
that issue in some subsistit way.
>> SPEAKER: And we need to have ownership of some files.
I mean, I'm not against licensing, but we need to have one copy that we own.
>> SPEAKER: I agree with that.
>> SPEAKER: Thank you for that excellent point.
I think that's right.
I will confess that I have been primarily focused on this from a public library perspective.
I do think there's tremendous opportunity for synergy between academic and public libraries.
I need to learn more about exactly what these cases are.
In fact, one of the working groups that we agreed to kick off would focus specifically
on library use cases, and, you know, originally, it was suggested that it be about academic
cases, and then we decided it's about all different kinds of cases, so I think that
is the next frontier for this work.
We are developing a vision that I think does and can work for public libraries, and I think
the next step is to feel out how it needs to be adjusted, what are the requirements
for academic libraries and how can they contribute.
I think there's a lot of the same problems, and I would just say one example of that,
you know, my experience, often what we buy, we are not asking for the same kinds of things
from our vendors, and it's because we haven't had a use for it, but just as one specific
example around interoperability and the important of those lines that connection the pictures,
if we just started in academic libraries asking our vendors to provide API's to the content
so we can make the bibliographic information discoverable, that would allow us the piping
to start thinking about serving that content through the same kinds of interfaces.
So, I think we want to be careful about the user experience and making sure that it serves
the specific use case we're targeting, but I think there's tremendous potential there.
>> SPEAKER: Just to follow up, Jim, on your comment about e journals.
One, we did have a meeting about e books two weeks ago.
We'll be posting follow ups hopefully by the end of this week, and one of the comments
that came up was a lot of ex librarians having flashbacks to negotiating these big licenses
for e resource content, and we said how do we move those lessons forward.
So, one of the action items out of the two day meeting was to bring together our folks
that have that expertise and talk about transparency about licensing terms, best practices in licensing
for e resources, and have a work group that really moves that expertise and those lessons
learned into this e book conversation, so just kind of wanted to do a public announcement
on that.
>> SPEAKER: I just want to add a fact about the journal market, and Micah, just to put
it into context with the e book, I'm looking at an STM report, this is a publisher report,
that says that in 2008, the STM brought in $8 billion.
In 2013, it brought in $10 billion, and that 55 percent of that revenue, this now, what,
$13 billion or whatever it is, comes from the United States.
So, this is the amount of money that we are spending to rent access to content.
>> SPEAKER: So, first of all, I guess it would be obvious if I thanked my colleague for the
great conversation today.
Mary, I thank you, and I do think, having worked in an academic library and now in a
public library, that e books is actually one of those opportunities to look at how we create
interoperability between different kinds of content.
So, we often think of things, it's a manuscript, it's an archive, it's an e journal, it's a
monograph.
Actually, this is an opportunity where people actually use a format, which is an e book,
in chapters, in whole, with all kinds of marvelous opportunities with the nature of how reading
may occur in the next few years, and I think this is an opportunity for us to figure out
how we put those things together.
We, as the New York Public Library, have a great chance to actually do this because we
have such a breadth and diversity of users in our community, we have independent scholars,
we have kids who are learning to read, we have families who don't even speak English,
and they're all interested in e books, and so I think this is an opportunity to partner
much broader than our own walls, because we all share this need in common, so I just think
this is a great fertile ground for collaboration between different kinds of institutions.
>> SPEAKER: Thank you so much.
We'll move on to the next.
Well, time's up.
We just got the time's up.
Thank you.
(Applause.)