On Kindle Singles

My days in the humanities are far behind me, and however much I like to think that I live in the world of the arts, most of my days are today spent in the social sciences.  But although I do love researching the odd piece on information theory or learning styles, or drilling down through StatCan datasets (The #longform is dead; long live the #longform), there’s a big part of me that still is interested in the way arts and culture affect our lives.

So it’s always nice when something like Amazon’s Kindle Single comes along, which can not only shake up both camps, but also bring them together.  Face it, the Single is a marketing tactic that will encourage the production and consumption of a different (I don’t want to call it “new”) literary form.   Perhaps our society’s collective ADHD, brought on by the very devices that gives us books in a digital format, will be a captive and willing audience for the Single, and perhaps the Single is just what we need – literary value found in something somewhat longer than a short story but nowhere near as long as a novel.  It’s a novella, but not quite – it’s a Single.  It’s short, it’s catchy, and it’s just what you need to finish your day while sipping a sugar-laden coffee-style drink in your favourite third place somewhere between work, home, and daycare.

But I digress, wildly.  I’ve read and listened to some complaints about the Amazon Single as a potential driver for new literary production, i.e., that a marketing tool might affect literary production or objects of literary value.  I’ve got to take issue with these complaints, which I think are so often borne of the idea that every book is a sacred text.  I love literature and I love writing (e.g., beside the Austen and Conrad on my bookshelf is a mechanic’s guide to engine repair from the 1950s) but I’m well aware that the literature we read is not a stream of eloquent prose that comes to us straight from the author’s mind.  The writer may have a muse, that’s for certain, but the writer also has a literary agent, an editor, and a publisher.  And the publisher has a designer for the book’s cover, a PR team to handle merchandising, marketing, and general promotions, and a budget to push the text far and wide so that we, the loving reader, might be hooked.   And I also know that the physical form of the book has not been static.  The book – the physical object that contains the text – is dynamic, and the container has certainly affected the contents in the past.  Penguin Books developed the affordable paperback in the 1930s, which facilitated the production, promotion, and popularization of the longer text, and ostensibly turned the novel into the grand literary form we count on it to be today; Gutenberg increased accessibility to the written word, but so much of the texts from the early modern period are pamphlets; the great epic poems that we read in our Great Books and Classics courses often had no container at all and therefore were developed  around mnemonic aids which helped the poet and speaker memorize the content.  Texts of high(er) literary value will continue to exist, regardless of the form of their containers.

I’m not a scholar in the history of the book and I don’t pretend to be.  Many of the claims I just made are bold assertions that have been painted with broad strokes and may not stand up in a real argument.  But one thing I will contend is that literary value will still be found in texts we produce for digital readers, whether their length has been determined by the writer’s inspiration or if the writer’s inspiration has been affected by the constraints of the container or of the publisher’s promotional aims.  Is literature “improved” by the written word in longhand?  A case can be made, certainly, but at the same time I refuse to believe that digital readers, e-books, or Kindle Singles pose a complete threat to literature, writing, and reading.

DRM, Canada, and the long arm of contract law

One of my projects at work this month has been to promote the use of e-books.  I’m of two minds on the use of electronic book formats – I think the end user will one day see an incredible benefit from them, but I also think that until e-book readers (both software and hardware) become more user-friendly, e-books will remain subordinate to print editions, especially in the humanities.

At any rate, I’ve been reading a lot of contractual fine print on account of this project.  I’m up to my ears in Terms of Services Statements, Copyright Statements, and Privacy Policies, and some of the clauses in the contracts make me cringe.  Let’s look at some parts of eBrary‘s Terms of Service as an example (there is nothing out of the ordinary with eBrary’s TOS, by the way; I’m selecting it only because it is the reader I’ve been using this week).  You can find a link to the TOS at the bottom of your eBrary e-Reader page.  These links are routed through your own institution’s proxy server, however, so I’m instead linking to the TOS as listed on the eBrary corporate site.  The link may be different, but the terms remain the same.

1. Rights, Restrictions, and Respecting Copyrights

(a) The text, images, and other materials available on this site (collectively, the “Materials”) are protected by United States copyright and other applicable laws. You may not engage in any acts inconsistent with the principles of copyright protection and fair use (see the United States Code, 17 USC Sections 106-110). For example, you may not copy, print, reproduce, distribute, transmit, modify, display, or otherwise use the Materials or copies of the Materials, except that, subject to the other terms of this Agreement:

Unless you live in the United States (and the United States is admittedly a very large market), you’ve got problems at the outset.  These terms bind the users at my institution – a Canadian undergraduate university – to copyright laws developed by another nation.  Leaving aside the fact that an interpretation of these laws will be at best imprecise and uninformed because most LIS professionals are not lawyers and most users don’t bother to read an e-book vendor’s TOS, we’ve got a jurisdictional case study that I’m sure no WIPO representative fathomed in 1967.

The eBrary case presents an interesting dilemma in Canada.   Many Canadian Knowledge Research Network consortium members use eBrary to gain access to Canadian primary materials and critical literature.  This means that the Canadian-resident students and staff I serve are accessing Canadian materials through their Canadian university (which is normally subject to Canadian statues), but are bound to a contract framed by foreign law.  How many Canadian LIS professionals are forced to operate merely on the good faith of the vendor in a situation such as this?  Although I have no reason to believe that an organization like eBrary would intentionally place an entire consortia into a situation that could end only in litigation (that would be a complete and utter relationship-destroying measure), this sort of dealing still puts the Canadian LIS professional in a very weak spot.  Although I may know a thing or two about Canadian copyright law, especially as it pertains to fair dealing and libraries, archives and museums, I certainly can’t speak much to US copyright law, and I don’t think the majority of LIS professionals in Canada could, either.

7. Disclaimer of Warranties

THIS WEB SITE IS OFFERED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS. AS A CONDITION OF USING THIS SITE, YOU ASSUME ALL RISK OF LOSS RESULTING FROM THE USE OF, OR RELIANCE ON, THIS SITE OR ANY MATERIALS IDENTIFIED, LOCATED, OR OBTAINED BY USING THIS SITE. EBRARY AND ITS SUPPLIERS AND LICENSORS MAKE NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE ACCESSIBILITY OF THE SITE OR THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS OR TIMELINESS OF THE MATERIALS. EBRARY AND ITS LICENSORS AND SUPPLIERS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ALL CONDITIONS OF QUALITY. NO USER SHOULD RELY ON OR ATTEMPT TO TRY ANY INFORMATION, ACT OR OTHER EVENT PORTRAYED ON THIS SITE. AS WITH ALL INFORMATION AVAILABLE THROUGH THIS SITE, LEGAL, FINANCIAL, MEDICAL, HEALTH, AND SAFETY RELATED INFORMATION IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR ADVICE FROM A QUALIFIED PROFESSIONAL. BECAUSE SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT PERMIT THE EXCLUSION OF CERTAIN WARRANTIES, SOME OF THESE EXCLUSIONS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

This clause should remind us that the texts we read and interact with on eBrary are not our time-worn, dog-eared Penguin’s Classics.  Despite the fact that academic libraries pay tens of thousands of dollars in annual licensing fees to accommodate access rights for their communities, the portal their users must employ to view the text – the web site – is offered “as is.”  If the web site ever crashes, eBrary will not be held responsible.  If the notes and annotations one saves in an account disappears (a slim possibility, I admit), eBrary will not be held responsible.  If one chooses to use an e-book as opposed to borrowing a similar text but the site crashes over the long weekend before a funding application is due, eBrary will not be held responsible.

But perhaps the best part of this disclaimer is the statement that, “NO USER SHOULD RELY ON . . . ANY INFORMATION . . . ON THIS SITE.”  Excuse my excessive use of all-caps for a moment, but I wanted to mimic eBrary’s demand that we acknowledge and understand its blanket concession that its main product (information) and its main service (information dissemination) can ever be relied upon.  Ever.  In an attempt to safeguard itself from ridiculous lawsuits, eBrary has warned us that we can’t trust any of its wares to ever be reliable.  If only i could have put a disclaimer like that on every essay I ever wrote.

Sigh.

[eBrary Terms of Service]

e-books and the humanities

Inside Higher Ed published an article this week on the recent controversy surrounding the decision by the Bird Library at Syracuse University to store rarely used texts at a site 250 miles away from campus, which has stirred debates in LIS and scholarly circles. I’ve been reading commentary in my twitter stream and RSS feeds that considers many of the subjects touched on in the article, from the role of the library and the librarian (book depository or learning commons?  Book Lover or knowledge and asset manager?) to the role of the book in the academy itself (essential to the programme, or redundant in the wake of digitization?).

There are a lot of subjects to tease out of this one post, especially on the profession’s ability to promote its mission to the wider public.  Face it, we don’t know what to call ourselves, we don’t properly and consistently explain what we do to the public, and people often don’t understand the role we play in their institutions and in society at large.  Although the subject of identity and promotion is dear to my heart, the Inside Higher Ed article touches on an undercurrent always topical in LIS circles, which is the place of the monograph in contemporary scholarship.  As we see in the original post (and also witnessed in the always-superb Little Professor blog, there is a genuine concern for the role and the place of the book in humanities libraries (let alone the scholarship!) today.  As a one-time arts student, I appreciate this concern; I spent many days and nights leafing back and forth through texts in order to immerse myself in and learn how a writer’s language and rhetoric toyed with her – and my own – understanding of the text.  So much of our literary and intellectual culture exists in a paradigm that demands individual and constant reflection of the words on the physical page, but the interaction with the text that e-books offer the reader is a poor substitute to the relationship we have with the words we find in print.

That the printed word is vital to humanities research is a truth.  That the printed word is being replaced by its digital cousin, however slowly, is a fact as well.  Economic models, and more importantly,  our culture’s interactions with the word is changing, or has already changed the way in which books are published, collected (or licensed/accessed) and read.  But I think it’s still far too soon before we should hold a wake for the monograph; so long as e-book readers remain prohibitively expensive and DRM continues to offer few benefits to the end-user, and e-book platforms such as MyiLibrary and eBrary refuse to enter consensus on a common look and utility, then the e-book will remain secondary to the printed text.

I’m not suggesting that the e-book will forever be a poor cousin to the printed and bound copy of a text – far from it.  I’m merely contending that we are still a few years away (maybe as few as 2 or 3, maybe as many as 5) before the hand-held e-book reader reaches a critical mass in the marketplace and eclipses the print edition as the format students turn to first. Until the day comes when a plurality of the public carries their own e-book reader, then the printed copy will be the main source for the humanities.

But what of the day when the e-book does assert dominance over the printed text?  Will we dispose all of our bound originals?  Will scholarship on the author’s interaction with the physical object or the study of book history fall by the wayside? Likely not.  These, and others, are strong disciplines and I don’t think the humanities will allow them to wither on the vine. Scholarship in the humanities and the tools of the scholar may change, but it will not disappear. On the contrary, our study of the actual physical text will be more important than ever, especially after such a monumental shift in reading culture will have occurred with the shift to e-readers.