Well what about digital books?

Today, I have asked Callie to discuss her views on digital or e-books since this is a topic that comes up frequently in our discussions.

Well what about digital books?
Callie Hammond

Every time we mention that we are starting a nonprofit to create and support school libraries, 9 out of 10 times the return question is: "Well, what about digital books?"

It's a question that I personally find annoying, aside from my work with Library Build. I love books. I like their smell, their feel, their pages, you name it. I do not ever want to look at a screen 15 hours a day. I'm already on the computer too much as it is! Reading, holding, and finding a book is a personal experience, and to me, computers and their screens are simply impersonal.

Yesterday, Amazon.com announced that in the past 3 months they have sold more e-books than hardcover books. What bothers me about that statement is that it leaves out paperback books. More people buy paperbacks than hardcovers anyway - I (usually) try to wait until books I want are in paperback because they are so much cheaper.

The second part of rebuffing the Amazon.com statement is that the print industry is still churning out the hardcovers while e-books are still only a small part of the industry. Wired.com had this to say:


"The overall e-book market is still a 90-pound weakling next to the Asiatic elephant of print publishing. According to a report from Publisher’s Weekly last year, hardback sales were projected to be about $4.4 billion in 2009 (including both adult and children’s titles), while paperbacks were expected to generate $5.1 billion in revenue, audiobooks $218 million, and e-books just $81 million — less than 1 percent of the print equivalents. That’s not even counting textbooks, Bibles and professional books — with those included, Publisher’s Weekly estimated the overall book market at $35 billion in 2009."

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/amazon-more-e-books-than-hardcovers/#ixzz0uQdP9IDl

Also, as Cnet.com points out, alot of those e-books on Amazon are from self-published authors who list their works for 99 cents and get a few people to buy. Obviously those people are better served by e-books (just as most people are better served by online blogging than publishing their own books). So how many of those people are eating in to the e-books market?

So how does this affect school libraries?

The general argument is always that kids today like computers and digital books so much that making everything digital will increase kids' enthusiasm, and thus, their literacy. But thats not so. Ralph Raab wrote an article for "American Libraries" entitled "Books and Literacy in the Digital Era" in which he argued the following:

"According to Todd Oppenheimer in his book The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom, and How Learning Can Be Saved, from the early 1990s through the first part of this century, school districts across the country spent billions of dollars promoting computer-based learning, promising that computers would engage students in a way that books could not. A school district in Union City, California, spent $37 million to buy computer equipment and software—and paid for it by cutting science equipment and field trips. An elementary school in Los Angeles dropped its music program in order to hire a “technology manager.” But we need to ask ourselves: After nearly two decades of this philosophy, have we seen a rise in literacy? The answer, sadly, is no—or at the very least, not nearly enough to justify what we have lost in the process."

However, an option like the Kindle or the Nook could inspire kids to read more than they already are (aka, if they are already literate). But this argument does not lend itself to creating an entire digital library without books, magazines, research journals, etc. As Raab states, "since copyright issues will most likely never be resolved, people will always need to find a physical book on a physical shelf. Also, not every book can be digitized; there have been different versions of books throughout history, and permission will never be granted by every institution to digitize those editions. The works of William Shakespeare are an example: They have been changed and modified through successive editions over the last 500 years. We will never see every version of his works on Google."


So. Yes, people, digital books and e-books are cool. But they will never replace tangible books, nor should impersonal digital libraries replace tangible (and personal) school libraries.

- Callie