Great subject. I don't think this will be analogous to LPs replaced by CDs replaced by downloads. I think all formats will flourish together as there are certain situations where one is better than another.
For example, I regularly listen to Audible downloads while walking into work, but I'd never listen on the Tube, as there's too much background noise.
However, I often find myself reading books on my iPhone when I'm on the Tube. One of the Aps ('Classics') gives you 10 or so classic books for just £1.50, and they make perfect Tube reading.
But then I also read plenty of paper books because my favourite place to read is in the bath.
Good luck with the talk.
M@
The main issue Philip Pullman is angry about is the sacking of the school librarian, not the removal of physical books and replacement with e-books - the article says that non-fiction will go online, and fiction will be held in an unstaffed (or at best staffed with unqualified staff) reading centre.
Full disclosure: I'm a qualified librarian in the academic sector. I'd personally say that you're right to say the format the pupils are reading from is irrelevant - doesn't matter to me if they're reading an e-book, a physical book or listening to an audio book on CD/MP3/whatever. However, I'd argue that children and teenagers benefit from the availability of an experienced, trained person to advise them on what's good to read, what's suitable for them and to also pass on enthusiasm and a love of reading.
The teachers will be too busy already without the added burden of advising children on what to read outside class time, so the end result is likely to be pupils picking books fairly randomly (if at all), not enjoying them as much, and so getting turned off reading for pleasure. Also the collection will not be well managed, added to, etc without a librarian looking after it.
Finally, in a world where the amount of information available to us is growing exponentially, I think it's barmy that a school is sacking someone who is trained to manage information efficiently and effectively, with the ability to pass on the skills necessary to find and evaluate info on to the next generation - unfortunately we find some new university students have no idea how to find information on their subject, let alone how to make use of it in their work without committing plagiarism.
Sorry, rant over. The discussion sounds good, hope you enjoy it!
It also worth noting that the pupils were the ones who started the campaign to keep the librarian(according to the article).The children obviously know the service given to them by having a librarian.
Young people generally do not come out or spend time in support of anything, so I feel that the people involved should take note.
I know that when I was in education, every academic/school library I went to had a specialist librarian without which I would have found it harder to use all the information available to me.
I am a regular consumer of books in electronic format, increasingly so the past couple of years, as, living in Morocco, it's much more difficult to get hold of new reading material in paper format.
My big issue with eBooks is the incompatibility issue. I can list off the top of my head five different, mutually incompatible eBook formats I've used in the past five to ten years, of which only two or three I can currently read on my primary device, which is, incidentally, a Nokia E61i, a telephone with a screen that's only just big enough to get a decent screenful of text presented for reading. On my current phone I have two different programmes for reading eBooks. On my previous Palm device, I had four, all working in subtly different and slightly incompatible manners, so you were never quite sure which button to press for something as simple as "next page", let alone something complex like starting up autoscroll or adjusting its speed.
It's gotten to the point where I refuse to purchase more eBooks, as I can never be sure that I'll be able to continue reading them next year or the year after when I change phone or move onto a electronic ink reader, or whatever. I will only now read books in HTML or plain text format. A lot of books are freely available on the web this way, and legally so. If I find myself downloading a book that is not freely available in an open format, I make a point of adding the dead tree edition to my next Amazon order.
This is similar to the MP3 versus M4P versus WMA issue. Except it's much more insidious as I've already been bitten two or three times by not being able to take a book along with me due to different format issues. My previous big stalwart - Mobipocket - has now bitten me due to the fact that there is no Macintosh desktop client for the format, so I can't easily manage or convert files into Mobipocket format any more.
I read online a lot. A wealth of "proper" fiction is out there if you know where to look, and I'll admit to indulging in some "fan" fiction too. I tend to point my phone directly at their websites to read these tales.
I'm lucky, as I read in very few places where I have no coverage. In London this would not be the case, and some sort of offline reading setup is needed. I have a few books downloaded onto my phone for when this becomes an issue, and I update them from time, as and when I get to a computer.
Dealing with the files is still not a polished experience. There's no easy way to know in which of your various collections of formats you have a particular book, or which disk it might be on, let alone where you've backed it up or if you've loaded it to your reading device. There isn't, as yet, one central repository where you can browse your titles to your heart's content, no "virtual bookshelf". You may have several of them in your various desktop programmes, but you can't necessarily order them in a sensible manner, such as sci-fi first, then general fiction, then reference, etc, or even get your multi-volume series in the right order on your listing!
I continue to believe that eBooks will be the future of reading. It is amazingly convenient to just pull out your phone and start reading when you find yourself with ten or fifteen minutes to kill, and it's much more portable, or legible in low-light conditions.
I still enjoy reading physical books, in fact, I just finished cataloguing about 200 of them in my own personal library that were previously stored elsewhere. And it's much more user-friendly as an experience. Hell, you can even lend physical books out to your friends!
So where do eBooks need to go? The format wars need to stop. There either needs to be One True Format that people can implement readers of their own to read without encumbering themselves in licensing deals and silly amounts of money, or, what is more likely, that eBook publishers need to stop faffing about with DRM on their formats, which is roughly the same thing.
Also, getting those eBooks organised needs to be a much easier and smoother.
Wow 
Fantastic comments so far - thanks so much.
M@ - never knew abut 10 books for £1.50 sounds like a great bargain for Classics.
Edith - I think you're dead right when you say children needing real people as mentors. I can't thank my English teachers enough for encouraging me with my reading and writing. I'm not sure how a virtual learning environment can do that - unless there's some sort of recommendation tool built into it. Who knows?!
Minty - good point, I'd missed that it was the children themselves that started the campaign.
Moof - sounds like you have very valid points there about the formats of the e-books. With music we're luckier to an extent that there's one (more or less) standard format. Also fully agree about the wealth of ways to currently get your books organised (I have about three virtual bookshelves and don't do a great job organising any of them - but do have reasonably well organised real bookshelves).
Look forward to seeing other comments, these will be really useful for our discussion
Moof - hear, hear!
I've read a lot of book and a lot of ebooks. And I would agree that one is not a replacement for the other.
Ebook readers have come a long way, but they still have far to go before they can rival, let alone replace, real books.
LCD screens require power and still are nowhere near the clarity of the printed word. e-ink screens have been used in some devices recently and they're a big advance: the screen is much more resistant to ambient light and the white background is mat and less obtrusive whilst reading. They're even much better in terms of battery life as the screen draws no power apart from when its contents change. But every ebook with an e-ink (gah, too many e's) produced so far is horrendously expensive for what it is.
The big problem in ebooks, as I see it, is the publishers. Traditional businesses have been very slow to understand technilogical advances and have sought to impose their existing business method on the technology with no regard as to whether it's a successful marriage or not. Just look as how long it took the record industry to embrace downloads and how badly they've done it. It took Apple to come along and change that... and even their approach is not perfect.
Sony have been trying to push e-readers recently, but their devices can only access books from their online bookstore, or those of approved third parties. The selection is paltry to say the least. And Sony and the publishers seek to impose extra restrictions not present in the real book market:
Want to lend an ebook to a friend? You can't. Want to copy an ebook to other devices you own? You can't. Want to read a wide selection of books? You can't.
The Sony Reader launched in the UK recently with a price of £200. Sure, you get a CD with 100 "classic" ebooks with it, but you'll find the price of further ebooks to be excesive. Dick Francis - Silks is £15.19. Julie Birchill - Not in My Name is £10.39. So an ebook costs pretty much the same, or more than, a real book, depite almost zero reproduction cost and it's far less useful. A further look through the online store reveals a paucity of selection. Should you wish to read anything unusual or interesting, you're out of luck. If you only like populist works, then you'll be fine. If the books cost the same as real ones, what are you paying 200 quid for the reader for? Portablity. That's all. Given that I only read, at most, two or three books at a time the, by using an ereader, I'd be gaining little or nothing at all.
Until publishers embrace ebooks and capitalise on their advantages to provide users with more of what they want, then the ebook business is going to remain the small potatoes that it is now. The different formats exist only to profit the publishers, not the readers. The restricted e-bookstores are the same.
Ebooks cost almost nothing to reproduce so the prices should come down considerably. Ebook readers need to be freed from their manufactures, in that it seems ridiculous that I can't place my existing collection of ebooks on a Sony Reader because Sony won't let me. It's like a paper manufacturer specifying that only Hammond Innes books can be printed on their paper. Expand the range considerably. Every book ever printed should be available as an ebook, not just a select few current best-sellers. Why can't we have out-of-print and unusual books too?
£1.50 for 10 classic books sounds good, but all the books are available as ebooks for free already. Look up Project Gutenburg to find a huge range of free classic ebooks, more modern texts from sympathetic authors and even audiobooks.
The real value in a library is with the librarians, rather than the books. It is they who help you find what you are looking for and have the expertise to know what they stock, what they ought to stock and how to find and access that stock. A library without a librarian is like the internet without search engines... and I remember those days.
In the incident that drew Pullman's ire, the qualified librarian is being sacked, the factual books places online and the fictional books left in an unsupervised room. The children are free to read the factual books via a computer (which is hardly a suitable analogue for a real book), but what do they do if they need to take away the book? Should the school provide at-home acess then only children with computers can read the books and only upon their computer. And there will be no advice or assistance to help them find what they're looking for. The fiction books will be available, but again without any useful assistance. This will hardly encourage kids to read or find new authors and subjects to enjoy.
I'm as nerdy as they come. I've been using computers since 1979, the internet since 1989, I have a vast collection of ebooks and other electronic information sources and a huge variety of devices on which to read them. And yet, if I'm researching something, I go to a library first. I rely on knowledgeable librarians to help me find the information that will be the basis of my further research. Google is no replacement.
The reason the librarian is to be sacked is not that she's been obseleted by the white heat of technology, but rather that her employers can save her salary and dazzle people with the lure of technology to make them feel like they're gaining something when they're not.
Growl, snarl, rant, rage, moan.
Oh and I should mention that the library debacle that Pullman is concerned with is covered int he current issue of Private Eye.
Total off-topic, but your photo of recent snow is featured on BBC website 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pi...res/
7744595.stm
Oh, I wish I could sit in on this panel. I'm fascinated by this topic, especially since I publish books myself. Hope you'll give us an overview.
More fantastic responses
Jon - you're spot on with publishers being like the record industry to still use an existing traditional model to deal with something non traditional & new. As you say physical books are currently much easier to share than e-books.
Also love your comment "A library without a librarian is like the internet without search engines"
Alex - thanks for letting me know.
Collin - we will deffo give an overview and put the results & takeaways of the session online.
Look forward to more thoughts - this is definitely going to be a lively discussion
I don't mind how information is delivered, as long as it's accessible - and books beat most formats for one-to-many efficiency (save text files & MP3 for those of us who don't mind consuming our info. electronically) -- what with books being sold without chains&padlock or 'this book will self-destruct within a month of reading it' DRM bombs as most eBook/non-MP3 format publications are currently sold to the few of us who put up with their rubbish.
Only 57% of UK homes currently have broadband (as of earlier this year), presumably it's mostly those with broadband who bother with eBooks/audio versions (save those who still use CD walkmans), so until we start sorting out mobile phone screens & delivering Project Gutenberg out-of-copyright text through cross-platform readers, around 40% of the UK population won't find electronic formats very useful at all - maybe this is exactly what we need to do, I've never understood why mobiles generally don't provide decent text readers so we have only one device to lug about.
Anyway, look forward to the session @anniemole !
Hmm touched a nerve there Annie!
On the Audible front, whilst I think they're a great idea (if books are unabridged of course - I won't say what I think of the alternative!) they are VERY expensive compared to picking up a paper copy. Often twice the price of the paperback or more - sorry I'm not paying double the price for the convenience of listening to a book out loud rather than in my head. Also, theres lots of free quality audio material around now - I completely fill up my commute with podcasts from the BBC, TWiT network etc My ears don't have time for them, music and audio books mores the pity...
And on the text format issue I couldn't agree more - although I do wonder whether this flexible screen technology thats coming up is going to sort all that out - the reason that currently there are multiple competing formats is because there are multiple competing devices you can display them on. Once something cheap and ubiquitous appears on the market (an A4 size flexi-screen you can roll up and put in your bag perhaps?) I can see one format becoming dominant. My justification for this argument is that, even though lots of competing music file formats have been developed over the years MP3 is dominant these days, only because manufacturers got on the band wagon and adopted it - you can play MP3s on almost everything. It certainly wasn't adopted because it was the best - empirical tests show that both Apple AAC and Ogg are better in terms of quality/file size
Is that a rolled-up 1mm thick £25 flexiscreen in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me??
Of course they'll never catch on.
I used to claim that mobile phones would never catch on.
I was wrong so I later claimed that I wouldn't be seen using one.
I think they should give away the first few dozen pages of any book to both suck you in and check compatibility.
Out of copyright stuff should be free anyway and that would make these things worthwile alone when the price of them drops (mobile phones and their contracts were originally very, very expensive).
And what about all those forests that will be saved ?
I could go on but my mobile's ringing.
Emilicon - good points - 
like the "this book will self destruct within a month of reading it" analogy - although I spose this could work for authors who want to give away samples of their books electronically & then encourage people to buy the rest of the book in some other way.
Londoneer - also like the "is that a rolled up flexiscreen in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me" point. Formats certainly seems to be king in this discussion & surely that must take collaboration between the publishers, authors & manufacturers of e-book readers.
Mark - I'm one of the biggest technophobes I know (well amongst my techie friends - compared to non techie friends I'm a geek). My iPod gets laughed at cos it's first generation & my mobile phone was the same until recently. I'm reasonably early adopter on some things but rubbish at upgrading and keep things till they break, so I expect my eventual e-reader purchase will follow a similar pattern.
Thanks again for all the great comments They are truly appreciated.
I agree with Jon Justice about that school getting rid of the librarian. But it's good how it's backfired on them and rather being seen as technologically forward they're being called philistines by one of UK's best children's (and adult's) authors.
People should think twice before they think people will embrace technology for technology's sake.
Great discussion BTW
No real time to read through all the great comments.. or comment in depth. but, quite simply.. if I drop a book I am reading in the bath (as I have taken to recently.. lack of sleep makes falling asleep in the bath all too common right now!!) I can put it on the radiator, and have a wrinkly but readable book.. if I drop an e-reader in the bath? OUCH!
Samsung are currently showing off a foldable OLED screen. With this in the middle of a mobile, reading books on your phone becomes a lot more practical.
Hopefully this link of it in action will work:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=G2...h?
v=G2SCZvU8sGU
Hi Jon - that looks perfect for mobile e-reader especially if helps make phone thickness with the foldable screen thinner than the old Nokia Communicators/similar - if they also manage to ditch all the DRM-restrictions imposed by publishers it will be ace (except for bathtub reading I s'pose - though there are lotsa all-enclosing-plastic mobile protectors with floats for inadvertent sailing water drops etc., so maybe our bathtub readers might head to marine suppliers?).
With this sort of technology we might skip buying PCs/larger laptops and going straight to mobiles (with screens such as Samsung's) or else just using laptops the size of the Asus Eee 1000 for readers - and having a lowlight screen setting for book reading to emulate the advantages of the Sony reader instead of buying a piece of technology that just ties you into more DRM controls...
Joe - yep I think I missed that from Jon's first comment - thanks
Fimb - I only read mags or papers in the bath mainly cos I don't like getting my books wet, so I wouldn't have that problem
Although there is a company called www.overboard.co.uk that makes the waterproof electronic protecting thingies that Emilicon refers too.
Jon & Emilicon - that is amazing and I would read books on that. I haven't shown you my new (ish) Acer Aspire notebook thing which hardly weighs much more than my filofax & phone together & I bet more people will be using those as laptops as time goes by.
You all rock Must get you to help me with presentations more often
I have an MSI Wind - arguably better than an Eee because it has proper man-size keys (and I have thick fingers lol)
I still want something a lot lighter, thinner and bigger for a reader though - I want it to actually look like a piece of paper with no need for illumination (as with the Sony and Amazon readers). It can't be that far away, fingers crossed.
Great stuff as ever and am looking forward to your session at Amp08. There's obviously a lot to build on here and scope for a follow up session at Amp09. Would be nice to get more publishers on board and have this as one of the sessions that leads to real change in 2010.
We're hoping to have most of the venue covered for live streaming on Thursday so your readers can watch and hopefully continue to participate in the discussion.
Always nice to see a lively comments section in these dark days of 'blogging is dead' linkbait
Hi Sizemore
Good to hear the venue will be covered for live streaming. The guys from the National Year of Reading are keen to have us contribute the takeaways and discussion to Wikireadia (top name).
Blogging's been way too advanced for too many years to be dead now
Once again I'm really grateful to everyone for their comments and thoughts on this. It's FAB to see really thoughtful comments and as Sizemore says if we can get publishers to start listening to a lot of our concerns / wishes / ideas we're on the way to changing the future
Londoneer - my Acer had large keypads too
My Eee has small keys, but it fits in my hand bag
Out of interest.. are e-books searchable on readers? That would be a huge bonus, as I am often searching back through books for a quote or to check a fact.. That would be the main pull for me over paper books.
To me, the big difference between using an electronic method for consuming music and books is that for books, you're moving from a non-electronic method.
Music on the move, ever since the Walkman, has needed technology and batteries. A paper book doesn't. I can pick up any of the hundreds of books I own and read them now, whereas sound amplification has always needed some kind of apparatus.
Thanks again SO MUCH for all your input
We ran our session yesterday and I'll write a new post on this and put the slides up by Monday with takeaways & where we could go next with some ideas.
But in the meantime Emilcon, from Girl Geek Dinners who has commented above, came to the session and has written a great blog post with very comprehensive notes from the session
http://girlygeekdom.blogspot.com...re-of-
book.html
I convert ebooks to speech and listen to them on my iPod while commuting in to work. When I was driving this was the only way.
Now that I catch the train I can also read printed books as well. I still listen to ebooks as it's quite pleasant to listen rather than read, especially at the end of the day when you're tired.
When a low-cost ebook reader with a high quality screen comes out, I'll have no qualms about reading ebooks.
I have just launched a site called eBooks Just Published that announces DRM-free ebooks daily.
i believe were and how ever you can read a classical book that have been removed from our schools because of some dumb reason is ok with me. the company i worked for let us listen to what ever because it helped to get the work done faster and encreased the production and not time wasted on visiting.
Converting Text to speech is a good way to have things read to you. Technology has moved on a long way from when I was a student and I had to sit on my PC and listen to Steven Hawkins reading to me!! I paid for a software version last year and found it so useful I took the time to make a website which offers the service for free to everyone.
It creates text to speech, and it automatically saves it as a mp3 so you can put it on your iPod etc.. The voices are good quality now and if you are like me, someone who has lot of reports to read on the train/tube, then this is a very easy way to do it. Great also for proof reading, revision etc.. For those of you who want to publish you work to others we even have a sections where you can make the mp3 versions of you text available to anyone.
If you have a text heavy website then you can also put a links to the mp3 of converted text, so your readers can listen to the whole things when you have more time.
Just give it a try.
Could this be the future..... NO but is is very useful tool!
Tom
Those interested following this post might also enjoy this great article (010209) from John Siracusa at Ars Technica
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