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The Quiet Revolution: How Public and
STM Libraries are Powering eBooks Growth |
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15 March 2004 |
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The
Open
eBooks Forum's conference on
eBooks in
the Public Library this week highlights the quiet but
significant strides that eBooks library systems are making
in institutional content markets. These lending systems are
using digital rights management (DRM) capabilities to
enforce lending and usage rules in very sophisticated ways,
driven by the need to accommodate a wide variety of usage
models supported in traditional libraries that must have
electronic equivalents. Turns out that these adaptations
may be just the thing to help power significant changes to
how publishers' content is sold - both for books and for
other kinds of premium content. It's early days still for
eBooks, but their day may be upon us from many angles very
soon. |
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Left for dead more times than a
horror movie series star, the eBooks marketplace refuses to go
away and continues to power a quiet revolution for specific marketplaces
in which the ability of eBooks distributors to manage reference and entertainment
content stands out. This revolution is overshadowed by
relatively modest unit sales compared to paper-based books
publishing, even though the eBooks marketplace is surging ahead at truly
stratospheric rates in terms of sales growth percentages (see
Shore Senior Analyst Jean Bedord's
comprehensive
report
on the eBooks marketplace and her complimentary
report
on considerations for eBooks deployment in libraries).
But the most significant action for eBooks is in lending
libraries serving the public and major institutions. An
interesting example is the
recently launched eBooks lending
platform at the San Jose, California Public Library using
OverDrive lending and rights management infrastructure. SJPL
also services the local state university campus,
training multiple generations of tech-equipped readers in this
Silicon Valley outpost on how to use eBooks effectively in
professional and academic settings. Popular
novels have their own following in San Jose, but not
surprisingly it's titles covering
hardcore technology and
business topics that seem to have the deepest waiting lists.
Put simply, serious content consumers are taking eBook lending
very seriously.
In the Science/Technical/Medical sector,
eBooks are surging forward with the launch of
eBook
Library, the institution-oriented arm of eBooks.com parent
eBooks Corporation. EBL has
announced the availability of titles from Cambridge
University Press, Kluwer, Oxford University Press, Springer,
Taylor & Francis and World Scientific - core STM publishers who
aim to use EBL as a leverage into both academic institutions
and corporate libraries. EBL has numerous features tailored for
maximizing content value on an institutional basis, including
non-linear lending models, reserve materials and course pack
assembly, as well as "photocopying"-like digital rights management. These
capabilities go to the heart of how institutions need to
consume many kinds of premium content on a variety of
platforms, providing a continuity of flexible access control
and management that most professional subscription management
companies and consumer media companies can only dream about.
As both academic and corporate institutions trade in bookshelf
space for virtual space and manage service cutbacks in a tight economy, the
cost-effectiveness and ease of maintenance and access provided
by eBooks library systems provides inarguable advantages.
Be it via public or institutional libraries, the free
availability of reader software, rapidly evolving lending and management models
for eBooks and a growing abundance of premium materials are creating a
fertile environment for developing the eBooks industry far more
rapidly than its critics may imagine. What are some of the directions that
this movement may evoke in the months ahead? Here are
a few potential developments to consider:
- Expansion into other kinds of premium materials.
The economic and user benefits of eBooks library systems are
attractive enough that they are capable of becoming
institutional and public standards very rapidly. As they do
so, they will begin to establish innovative content access
and usage models that can be extended to other kinds of
premium content. Access to common titles is just the
beginning: the ability to manage access to portions of a
title concurrently, redistribution management and automatic
expiration of access provide an environment for managing
premium content that is more responsive to many of the real
needs for managing content value at the institutional level
than traditional user-takes-all subscription models. Though
purchasing patterns and formats for journals and other kinds
of subscription content are different from eBooks,
subscription models are not terribly difficult to manage
within an eBooks library systems framework. The pressure that
many institutions feel to manage subscription costs more
effectively may find eBooks systems to be just the right
leverage to help them make effective progress in managing
content value.
- Wider acceptance of DRM capabilities at the
institutional level. Despite the flurry of activity with
digital rights management in consumer media, DRM has made
very little headway at the institutional level for supporting
premium content. Getting past the installation of DRM
controls is still somewhat of a headache, and database-driven
subscription content circulates freely without DRM. But the
repetitive use of an eBooks facility gives users motivation
to get past the installation hurdle and to get used to its
uses and benefits, while institutions begin to discover its
potential benefits for cost management and auditability.
Conflicting standards still present challenges, but DRM used
for circulation control can easily be supporting content
purchases, subscriptions and redistribution capabilities for
a wide variety of materials. Most importantly DRM features
for eBooks help to facilitate the ease of enabling content
value as much as they help to enforce publisher rights - a
key factor for DRM acceptance.
- New content monetization models. DRM-supported
eBook systems open the door to many new kinds of monetization
models for both book publishers and subscription-based
publishers. DRM helps to restore the "it-ness" of content,
defining highly portable content objects that can be
integrated easily via technologies such as Web services and
stored with auditable integrity as easily accessed "Fixed
Content" in the latest content archival systems. Delivery is
then not as central to collecting revenue as enabling usage
of content already delivered, opening up the doors to new
revenue streams from borrowed, shared, purchased or licensed
content that mix and match attributes of these models on an
as-needed basis.
The technology of eBooks viewing does not yet lend itself
naturally to all kinds of content: its DRM capabilities are
tightly coupled to eBooks file formats and eBooks readers. But
it may well be easier to start with today's eBooks distribution
management systems that are so well attuned to institutional
purchasers and to extend their delivery capabilities for
broader content types and models than to try to retrofit DRM
capabilities into aggregation systems that are not as attuned
to the real patterns of institutional usage. With many
aggregators and publishers failing to grow revenues in the
institutional space, the quiet successes of eBooks in libraries
may be just the revolution that publishers of all kinds have
been looking for. Put away your wooden stakes, folks, eBooks
are here to stay.
-
John Blossom
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