Amazon has finally made Kindle ebook borrowing available at more than 11,000 public library locations in the U.S., which is fantastic news. This also means that borrowed Kindle books work on any Kindle device and all devices that use Kindle apps,and even PC-reading with the Kindle Cloud Reader.

The Amazon.com page – Public Library Books for Kindle – has some simple steps on how to search and borrow Kindle books from your local library.

Instructions:

1. Visit the website of a U.S. library that offers digital services from OverDrive.
2. Check out a Kindle book (library card required).
3. Click on “Get for Kindle.” You will then be directed to Amazon.com to redeem your public library loan. You may be required to login to your Amazon.com account — or create a new account — if you’re not already logged in.
4. Choose to read the book on your Kindle device, free reading app, or Kindle Cloud Reader.

“Users can also highlight passages, add notes, and bookmark pages in the books, without worrying about defacing the actual book. Highlights, notes, and bookmarks are stripped from the book when your time with a volume ends, but Amazon saves them on its servers for if you ever happen to borrow the book again.”

At the moment, the initial offerings of Kindle-supported ebooks at libraries appear to be somewhat underwhelming. But, it’s a start.

And from the publishers’ perspective, the new Kindle-Library Loan union appears to be the cause of at least some consternation. From The New York Times: “Amazon’s Kindle Connects Library E-Books” –

“The introduction of the Kindle, the biggest-selling e-reader, opens up library e-books to a wider audience, heightening the fears of publishers that many customers will turn to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits.” 

Clearly, there are some issues still to be determined between balancing the need on the one hand for publishers to preserve their ebook sales, and for establishing what lending rights a library is entitled to with an ebook on the other hand (i.e., how many times can an ebook be loaned?). In the longer view, I would find it hard to believe that Kindle ebooks in libraries isn’t a good thing for all parties involved. This is, after all, kind of a big deal, in terms of making ebooks that much more mainstream to all book readers. Think of Kindle book borrowing as a potential first step in the consumer/ebook relationship lifecycle. The more that ebooks become a familiar part of mainstream book culture, the more people will become comfortable with the idea of buying ebooks as well.

After all, some of that tension between libraries and book publisher sales is simply an old question with a new twist — some people prefer to buy books, and some people prefer to rent books. At least for me, I have to think to myself if a book warrants buying and owning forever, or is simply a two-week affair, to be read and forgotten. If I borrow a book from the library, chances are I wasn’t going to buy it in the first place.

From that same NYT article came this interesting piece of information: “About 67 percent of libraries nationally offer access to e-books, up 12 percent from two years ago, according to the American Library Association. Most libraries work through OverDrive, which acts as a middleman between publishers and libraries.” I was pleasantly surprised to see that many U.S. libraries offer ebook access.

The New York Public Library (“Library Books on Kindle: A Visual Walkthrough“) has a simple, but excellent walkthrough for checking out Kindle books. I hope other libraries noticed, and will follow suit on this one for the sake of their users.

PC World (“Amazon Kindle E-Book Lending Program: What It Needs to Succeed“) take a wide view look at the new Kindle Library loaning program, and some of the key challenges. A little more context on the tug-of-war with the above mentioned issues of Kindle loans vs. book publishers’ bottom lines –

“publishers fought with the Kindle’s lending program, which allowed Kindle owners to lend e-books to anyone with an email address for 14 days. Though lending on the Kindle maintained the e-book’s DRM, the two parties made an agreement that publishers would be allowed to designate which books it wanted to be lendable. The result: Not that many are. Basically, if publishers aren’t happy, the Kindle Lending Library won’t work.”

The new Kindle library borrowing could in theory be as good an opportunity as any for libraries and publishers to experiment with new models of book rental. Here’s a very intriguing thought – 

“Create Two Plans: One-Off Rentals and Monthly Subscriptions – Students now can rent e-textbooks for a much lower price than the physical textbook or the e-textbook–Amazon should do the same for the Kindle Lending Library. Give consumers the opportunity to rent e-books one at a time–say two weeks for $2–or let them pay a flat fee through Amazon Prime that offers better savings.”

And finally, Wired (“Amazon’s Kindle Gets a Library Card“) sums up reasons to be optimistic about what Kindle library ebooks means for everyone:

” It’s a good thing for readers, because they’ve got access to more free content. It’s a good thing (I hope) for libraries, who can reach or reconnect with a wide range of patrons in different media. (Let’s hope whatever deal they struck with Amazon doesn’t prove ruinous, or gets slashed back by budget-busting administrative and government crusaders.)

It’s also a good thing, I think, for Amazon. When the Kindle was introduced, there were many people who argued that Amazon was only trying to preserve one kind of reading — direct individual purchase of popular new books — and grind every other model to dust.

Now, Amazon’s much more eclectic. Whether it’s book borrowing between users, textbook rentals, libraries lending books to local patrons, or (potentially) subscription content for Amazon Prime customers, they’re experimenting with a wide range of approaches to connecting their customers to books.”

Image may not be safe for work. If you work in a library or bookstore.

Fascinating article from NPR (“Hard Choices: Do Libraries Really Destroy Books?“), that falls under the category of: “Things we may occasionally wonder about, but don’t really want to think about.”

As a self-professed book pack rat, I can sympathize with the hard task of choosing what books should be kept, and what should be discarded forever. Since libraries are constantly tasked with separating the wheat from the chaff in the face of an ever-increasing number of new books, and the demands of space, someone has to do it.

“It’s not about the destruction of books based on content or community objections; it’s about the destruction of books because libraries (and sometimes bookstores) don’t know what to do with them, or don’t know what to do with them that makes economic sense.”

Certainly, not every library can afford storage expansion projects like Oxford’s Bodleian Library (The Telegraph: “Bodleian Library expansion: so many books, so little space“) but, could digital storage eventually obviate the need for those kind of hard choices? Eventually, maybe. But for now, book digitization still costs both time and money, both of which are limited resources for libraries. Moreover, there is the point to be made that not every book is worth saving. That too is part of the function of the library — deciding upon which books should be preserved, and which shouldn’t.

Here’s a link to the surprisingly interesting Cracked.com article which inspired that NPR question about libraries in the first place: “6 Reasons We’re in Another Book-Burning Period in History“. Reason Number One?  ”The Books Are Going Digital.”

I appreciated the historical aside of the microfilm movement in the 1980s, if for no other reason than reminding us that what seems like the best new storage technology ever changes quite a bit in just a couple of decades –

“This process actually goes back about three decades — in the 1980s, it wasn’t actual digitization that was solving libraries’ space issues, but a hip new technology called microfilm. By scanning books and newspapers onto microfilm, an entire library full of books could fit into a filing cabinet.”

Reason #5 (“It’s Cheaper Than Giving Them Away”) addresses something I’ve thought about at one time or another. Donating books certainly sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice also costs both time and money. Explanation, along with with helpful zombie analogy below: 

“And we’re talking about a lot of books here — these libraries are having to cut down their stock in a hurry. Imagine you’re the manager of a library, and some accountant tells you that you need to get rid of 100,000 books, and do it in a week. You really have two options. One, you can get a bunch of academics to scour your collection and painstakingly rate each book according to its value and importance. Then you can hire a bunch of people to take down the 100,000 least important books and painstakingly stamp and debug them, one by one. Your second option is to get the computer to spit out a list of the 100,000 least borrowed books, and hire a few people to walk down the aisles with their arms out, throwing those books in a shredding machine. 

That second option is much quicker and much cheaper. Sometimes you can find a paper recycling centre that will pay you for the pulp, so destroying the books leads to a net profit. Nobody likes it, but for a librarian it’s like your best friend just got bitten by a zombie and you’re the only one with a gun.”

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I don’t even remember hearing about this incident regarding the previous closing of the Waldenbooks locations and the left over book inventory. Sure, it makes sense from the dollars and cents perspective, but one wonders if there’s also an element of if-nobody-wants-to-buy-them-then-nobody-can-have them.   — Huffington Post: “Why Won’t Borders Donate Books Their Soon-to-be-Trashed Books?“

Time magazine posed a question worth thinking about: “Is a Bookless Library Still a Library?” This certainly gets into interesting existential questions about what makes a library a library — thinking about a library as simply a collection of books can be somewhat limiting, after all. It makes more sense to be thinking about not only what a library is, but what a library does.

In this case, the occasion for reflection is the opening of Drexel University’s new bookless Library Learning Terrace, which has led at least some people to wonder: ”when books disappear, does a library lose its definition?”

This is somewhat of an overstatement — the books don’t truly disappear, but are moved from one medium (print) to another (digital). The role of libraries is changing, as the nature of their collections change. Some discussion (check out: Inside Higher Ed: “Bookless Libraries?“) rightfully centers on this shift from thinking of the libraries strictly in terms of a place, and more of a structure or system in which information is found:

“The history of libraries … has been marked by evolution: They were founded as places where materials were collected and stored. Then they shifted their focus toward connecting clients with resources.”

Of course, the “bookless” library is not without recent precedent. There’s Kansas State University’s Fiedler Engineering Library, which opened back in October 2000. There is also the University of Texas at San Antonio’s own bookless library here. While San Antonio makes a point of claiming its library as being the first, actual bookless university library, perhaps this is much ado about nothing (Inside Higher Ed: “A Truly Bookless Library“)?

“The fact that San Antonio has actually built a literal version of what many in the industry hold up as symbol of the inevitability of the electronic as the prevailing medium in academe may be commendable, but it is not ‘earth-moving’” 

Not earth-moving, because in terms of ‘booklessness’, we’re really talking about a matter of degree. Libraries everywhere are of course all dealing with this very same issue — “reimagining the physical space of the library” – that is part and parcel of the shift from print to digital.

And perhaps what garnered the most popular attention thus far in terms of bookless libraries, was Stanford’s Engineering Library last summer. In actuality, Stanford’s move was to change over about seven-eighths of their physical books on the shelf into digital form.

A fair question to ask at this point is: what’s the big deal, anyways? I think it’s because we like our libraries. We have a sentimental attachment to the library as a place of shared learning. And when change happens, in any context, we seldom do get to see dramatic changes, because big changes are an accumulation of many small changes along the way. But the notion of a ‘bookless’ library is somewhat dramatic. Stanford shares some reflections on the clash between New and Old (Stanford University: “‘Bookless’ library at Stanford looks to the future“), which even the idea of a bookless library elicits:

“It makes a lot of people nervous, the idea of a bookless library …  In fact, some people really don’t like that phrase. But it is very interesting; it’s gotten a lot of press because it creates a sense of tension between the old and the new.”

For a more measured response on booklessness, The New Yorker (“The Dawn of the Bookless Library“) has some reflections on what all of the fuss is about. Yes, perhaps the distinction is merely academic. Or, perhaps it isn’t: “it isn’t some sort of thought experiment (if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear, will it still make a noise? If a library contains no books, is it still a library?) or Borgesian symbol.”  

Some of these observations might seem obvious in retrospect, but you know, sometimes we need reminders about the obvious, too. While it makes for better (or at least more passioned) debate to think only in terms of either/or, this/that, there is something almost démodé about framing the debate simply as Old vs. New, Print vs. Digital –

“Books aren’t obsolete; they’re so ubiquitous that they can’t even fit into a traditional campus and, like mushrooms, branch underground to cover entire states. In that light, reactions to the “bookless” Stanford library seem to be missing the point. They’re more a sign of how Manichean gut-feelings about literature are these days—either the digital world is an insidious devil, reluctantly acquiesced to or assiduously avoided, or the Internet is about to usher in a renaissance of reading, and digitization is a kind of messiah shedding light and learning on the world. Everyone knows there’s a middle ground but, when the whiff of a word like “bookless” floats about, no one ever seems to be standing on it.”

And in other news, the Los Angeles Times reports on a proposed bookless library plan incorporating a “Netflix-like system” of book loans (Los Angeles Times: “Tomes’ time might be up at Newport Beach library“). The bookless library approach could make sense, but as the Times notes, not every library experiments works — in particularly mentioning the Long Beach Library and Baltimore County library plans of years past: “The question is whether people are ready for bookless branches.”

Hey, this is some neat news. Google Books and the British Library today announced a partnership to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright books, pamphlets, and various other periodicals (spanning some 40 million pages) from 1700-1870. The Wall Street Journal (“Google to Make British Library Archive Available Online“) has some of the best coverage on this, along with insights into the backstory that went into the making of this Google/British Library collaboration.

And for those that have been following Google Books closely, the word “copyright” readily comes to mind anytime Google Books makes the news. The WSJ has some rather interesting comments from Simon Bell at the British Library on the copyright question:

“Nevertheless, Mr Bell expressed slight frustration that the project will not go beyond 1870: ‘What we really want is the 20th century, but we Europeans are often locked out of our own culture by copyright laws. So, for instance, the First World War poets, which are pre-1923 and therefore out of copyright in the USA, are still in copyright in Europe. There is an absurdity there. … The 1870 date we’ve chosen is very conservative and none of the European libraries has released anything that is still in copyright’”. Hmm.

Out of personal curiosity, I also perused several UK periodicals. Reactions are mixed (example, The Register: “British Library hands 200 years of history to Google“).* The Telegraph has a thoughtful response assessing the benefits for both Google and for the British Library (“Google and the British Library seek relevance together“), opining that such digital initiatives “represent a forward-looking attitude towards fulfilling the Library’s obligation to preserve and make available the written word in all its forms.”

The BL materials to be digitized and made freely available to the public are an eclectic mix of history, politics, and culture — ranging from feminist pamphlets about Marie-Antoinette, to natural history treatises, such as those involving this hippo.

You can find a link to the official statement from the British Library, which has a sample of some of the digitized items in question, here.

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* In that same article from The Register, I did learn about some older news of interest — that the British Library and Microsoft joined forces back in 2007 to digitize a couple of Leonardo da Vinci notebooks (The Register: “Vista and British Library put da Vinci online“).

You can check out the virtual da Vinci notebooks here (added bonus, this alternate link I found doesn’t require the crappy Shockwave plug-in, yay!).

The British Library’s Virtual Books collection is really, really good. Worth a visit, which you can find here.

Google Books Library Project - It would be impossible to talk about digital library collections without mentioning Google — one of the most impressive and most-discussed of all of the digital book scanning projects. The stuff from Oxford’s Bodleian Library is a must-see for Isaac Newton’s Mathematical principles of natural philosophy from 1729, the first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma. I’m a fan of the Inside Google Books blog — especially when spotlighting things such as Nietzsche’s mustache.

Columbia University Digital Collections – The Digital Collection is a mix of things. The Digital Scriptorium is neat, in an esoteric kind of way. The best stuff by far are the online exhibitions from the Rare Book & Manuscript Library — “Shakespeare and the Book“ (which includes the rarest of the rare, Shakespeare’s First Folio) and “Our Tools of Learning”

The British Library Online Gallery – Arguably one of the best digital collections in the world. The Shakespeare collection is second to none. The Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and sketches are amazing; and the original, handwritten and hand-illustrated manuscript of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the library’s most beloved treasures.

Oxford Digital Library – It probably goes without saying, but there’s a lot of stuff here. If I had to pick a favorite, it’d probably be the First World War Poetry Digital Archive.

Princeton University Library Digital Collections – Check out the DeBussy, Handel, and this remarkable Aristotle artifact.

New York Public Library — I wish more of their stuff was online. Which isn’t to say there isn’t neat stuff to see. The Walt Whitman manuscripts and William Blake books are excellent.

Digital Collections@Stanford — Couple of neat items in The American Enlightenment collection (some neat items ranging from Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbon, and others).

Hannah Arendt Collection, Bard College — A fascinating collection of annotated books from her personal library, letters, notes, postcards.

Yale University Library Digital Collections — The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has some good ones. Particularly cool is the American Literature collection, with Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams

Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship – The Signature Collection is worth a browse to see Brown’s impressive digital Abraham Lincoln collection.

Cambridge University Digital Images Collection —  Excellent quality Gutenberg Bible digital images

Indiana University Digital Library Collection – Check out the Isaac Newton collection; the page images of which looked completely indecipherable to me, but cool nevertheless.

World Digital Library — A vast, wide-reaching collection of things from all over the world. It’s not the easiest in terms of navigability — sort of the garage sale collection item on this list. But, there are some truly interesting things collected here. I’d recommend browsing by topic, with this link.

(And I didn’t know that Google was working with the Library of Congress on this. Neat).