Last Wednesday, Library Journal and School of Library Journal hosted a virtual summit on ebook: Ebooks: Libraries at The Tipping Point. The summit drew over 2100 attendees from public libraries, academic libraries and vendors. You can read LJ's summary here.
Prof. R. David Lankes, from School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, made a closing keynote: The New Librarianship in the Age of the Ebook, (video | slides | mp3) and here I'm trying to wrap-up his ideas and envisions in the presentation.
The fear that libraries don't have a future in the ebook age and think "we are so screwed" comes from the perception that libraries are about owned artifacts, books in buildings, DVDs, or other tangible collections.
Lankes is so disappointed with current implementation of hardware and software of Ereaders and Ebooks, because they are so "boring". They are all chasing one model of what a book is (the traditional paper book that we are so used to) but unaware of the great potentiality in ebooks. We discuss a lot about their storage, production, display, transmission, but they are not really helping users to solve their problems, which is comprehension.
According to Lankes, reading is a two decoding process:
- Physical decoding; // pull words off the pages, quite environment and comfortable eink display;
- Cognitive decoding; // how we make sense of the words.
Why current ereader and ebook implementation are boring is that they focus too much on "physical decoding" and unaware that reading is a lot more than just pulling words off pages. The curve of reading is not how fast we input those words into eyebrows, but how fast the words can meet with other ideas in our minds and how fast we can comprehend.
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| Retrieved from Amazon.com |
Think about a classic use case scenario, a young lady is reading a Kindle book on the beach, just like what you would expect to do with a paper book, but ebook is far more beyond this. Ebook is not paper book in electronic format.
Internet and ICTs have made the massive change from documents to conversations. So, the question is, how can we go further?
While part of reading is very isolating, the larger concept of reading is extraordinary social. And the connections of books need to be recognized and established. Books relate to other books and books also connects to other medias, blogs, movies, soundtracks, etc. If you ask Lankes to name a book like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", he would probably say "The Dictionary of Star Wars", because these are the books he read to his six-year-old son. That's how he connects the books and everyone has his/her unique way of connecting (my annotation: here is how Han, Song, a Chinese journalist and sci-fi writer classifies his books). And this kind of connections cannot be found through cataloging system. We should have dynamic ways to connect them, instead of MARC record, RDA, or FRBR. (Think about what MARC record for Google looks like?) and it's librarians' job to create these connections for their community.
Documentation of artifacts comes from ongoing conversation, comes from people creating knowledge. If you read books, it's part of your knowledge creation process. Authoring and reading are merging.This is the knowledge building process and you are the author of your knowledge environment, the author of your ebook environment. And here is an example of what future book may look like, via @rdlankes.
If I don't get this wrong, what Lankes envisions is an application, built in the ebook environment but not limited to, enabling knowledge sharing and connecting people with resources they need. The idea is not new at all, that is exactly what we talk about libraries, librarianship, and reference services, but we should "think beyond artifacts and physical limitations, focus on conversation and learning, not reading". Through partnership and collaboration with authors, publishers, vendors, producers, libraries and librarians should be active in shaping the game and LEADING.
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