Future of the library - Seth Godin | Hacker News Reader

Future of the library - Seth Godin

sethgodin.typepad.com

56 pointsaghilmort32 comments

Real URL without top frame:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/the-future-o...

Looks like this submitter might need an education:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aghilmort

As far as the user-interface of printed books are concerned there is a very minimal, and understandable, set of features:

    - it boots instantly
    - has a high contrast and high resolution display
    - is viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light
    - permits fast random access to any page
    - provides instant visual and tactile feedback on the location
    - can be easily annotated
    - requires no batteries or maintenance.

Current e-Readers cannot meet all of these specifications.

Books do a great job of conveying static information; computers let information change. In my opinion, the local library will continue to exist as a place of knowledge if it can evolve to provide the tools to access changing/shared information. Otherwise, it'll just end up being a quiet place for students to work.

Current e-Readers cannot meet all of these specifications.

We are pretty close, actually. I've booted my iPad only a few times in the past 3 months. The rest of the time, it's been in standby mode, and it "comes up" pretty much instantly. It is high contrast/high resolution. If it's not high contrast/high resolution enough, this is bound to improve. I've never had a problem with viewing angle or in dim light. Bright light visibility should improve. Random access has been good for me, including the use case of using programming books for reference. There is visual feedback, and I haven't missed tactile feedback. There are ways to annotate PDFs on the iPad. The iPad requires no batteries, and the maintenance has been limited to syncing and updating OS software.

So, to meet your requirements, the next iPad just has to:

    - be viewable in bright light
    - incorporate tactile feedback (or equivalent)

Perhaps improve in these ways:

    - increased display resolution
    - reduced maintenance
    - better annotation

Another advantage of real printed books is that real printed books are also inexpensive enough to be routinely given as gifts to small children, even in dirt poor families. IMHO, this is important as early readers are often young enough to be ridiculously rough on pretty much anything they play with, electronic or paper. They also lose things a lot. The difference with paper books is not that they're more durable, but that one book getting damaged or lost doesn't destroy a child's entire library and doesn't have a high replacement cost.

For me most important:

Printed books don't come with an additional amount of 999 books. They invite to focus and read one text. eBooks invite to browse the other 999 books too.

At the end of the day we may find that we only blew our time instead of having enjoyed a good story (or whatever you wanted to read).

Some may say that we can ignore the other 999 books. But then, startup firefox, find a 300 pages text and measure how long it takes until you check something else.

My preferred way to read is to have a physical and digital copy. The digital goes wherever I go, on my laptop and iPad, and is easily searched with a query string. The physical stays at home, and has all of the advantages you mention. I love having both, and feel handicapped if I only have one. But it's still not ideal...

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I envision a future where we'll have the best of both worlds; a physical book with double-sided e-ink pages. The front cover is a touch-screen running iBooks, letting you swipe around to find something to read. Touch it, and all of the e-ink pages instantly display the book.

Now you can easily flip through it like a normal book, far faster than an iPad. Text-searching is a breeze, impossible with a paper book. Using your stylist, mark pages with notes, highlight them, do whatever. A small microphone lets you record audio notes, tied to a passage of text. Everything saves and syncs to the cloud, following you wherever you go.

Errata auto-downloads and updates your books as needed. A small camera, integrated into the hard-cover lip that extends above each page, tracks your eye-movements and watches what you read, looking at facial expressions and pupil dilations, to determine what you found most important. In the future if some information it saw you read is wrong, you'll get an auto-email or tweet telling you about it.

Every paragraph in the book will be connected to a community-discussion board, where you read and ask for clarification regarding confusing text, similar to djangobook.com. It's a social reading experience, letting the community at-large make comprehension easier.

Physically the e-ink Book comes in many different sizes, from small and pocket-sized, to large and biblical. Text auto-adjusts, similar to the Kindle. Battery life is measured in months. Embedded video, audio, and animation is common.

Something like that will kill paper books and e-readers, since it marries the best of both worlds.

some minor points:

> - is viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light

they don't work great in poor light (I usually read in bed at night and have to use a head-lamp to brighten the page)

> - can be easily annotated

though you can go an add annotations to library books, the situation with annotating them is less than ideal. ebooks are potentially better in this respect.

the other thing w/ physical books is that they easily get heavy when you have to carry around several of them.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

It's really refreshing to read this -- my wife is a librarian, and when she tells people that she has a Masters degree in library science, people will literally scoff and say things like "why do you need a Masters degree for that?" As a whole, it's a disrespected profession, not just because people look down it, but because most people think it's irrelevant. (At least teachers, who are shit on even more than librarians, are relevant in everyone's eyes.)

And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside.

He lost me here, is he really suggesting that modern libraries need to become vocational training centers?

The constant references to 'dead paper' belie the denials that Mr. Godin is not anti-book. Of course he is. And with that blind spot in his perspective he misses a number of advantages found only in a library. I've been wandering up and down the aisles of libraries since just after I learned to read. The number of things that I read that were not on any particular list is countless. Bit hard to do with a search engine. And there is no point in even trying to describe the problem of the enormous number of books not yet digitized. Does anyone seriously think that just because a book is 'old' that it's contents have no value? Most of the necessary and important books on both chess and weaving (to name to disparate subjects) are 'old' and for the most part are not available in digital versions. I guess in Mr. Godin's universe we throw all of that away and start over. Small aside---did you know that there is a library with over a 100k volumes on chess? These are just some of the holes in his arguments that occur to me as a book-lover and library-fan...

A book is not defined by being made of paper. Godin is pro-book but recognizes that the future of the book is as a digital file.

I don't think anyone is arguing that there is a continuing role for librarians who act as archivists of valuable paper books. But that number of librarians is vastly less than the number currently in existence.

Librarians who refuse to give up paper books are like record shops who refused to give up vinyl. Sure, a few will stick around--but the vast majority will have to move on.

Librarians who refuse to give up paper books are like record shops who refused to give up vinyl.

You write this as though the "physical vs. digital" battle has long been fought and won. The reality is that the landscape has barely begun to be fleshed out among libraries, and despite that, libraries are already adjusting their budgets to accommodate the inevitable sea change. The stereotype of the stubborn librarian in sensible shoes and tweed, clutching her Emily Bronte and refusing to acknowledge the existence of digital books, just doesn't represent the mainstream position among librarians.

Nor does that view generally represent reality. Quite a few libraries are fighting for digital version of books to be allowed for lending and the publishers are pushing back. In some cases if a library has a digital copy they can only lend it out to a single person at at time, and are only allowed to purchase a single copy.

No one is suggesting that old books be thrown away. When you take into account the shear number of books being published each year (and the number is growing) it's physically impossible to have even a single copy of every book ever published available, even via a network of libraries.

Then take into account that not every book that get published has a digital copy, and every digital copy doesn't have a physical copy the situation gets even more complicated.

Not to mention VHS movie, DVD's, CD's, books on tape, books on CD, the list is endless.

When we stop looking at the library as a warehouse and more as a resource for more than just physical copies of things, the options increase exponentially.

I might be doing this wrong, but Google Books appears to have well over 100k books with "Chess" in the title and Google has only been at it for a few years:

http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=intitle...

But this is hardly the key point. The traditional library will always have advantages over the inevitable library of the future. It won't get replaced when all of those advantages have been overcome, it will be when enough of those advantages have been overcome for enough people.

Godin isn't anti-book, he just believes ebooks will win. Given how he has made his money, it's probably not something he would prefer.

While on the whole I agree with much of what Seth is saying (the library is basically a warehouse of old books) I don't think the library itself as we see it today is going anywhere or will change in any significant way until e-books become far more prevalent than they are right now.

With an online library how are you going to "serendipitously" find new books from other domains you don't know you're interested in?

I remember when I was 14 or 15, I was going to our small-town's public library once every 2 days or so, I was reading all the SF books I could find. The thing is that the SF books shelf was just after the history books shelf, and, even though I liked history, I never would have thought of reading history books if it weren't for me passing in front of that history books shelf each and every time.

With an online library how are you going to "serendipitously" find new books from other domains you don't know you're interested in?

Google could handle this with "I'm Feeling Lucky." I seem to remember delicious.com doing something like this. How about a serendipity web app that tries to figure out/crowdsource what you never knew you'd be interested in?

Recommendation engines are getting pretty good at this. It's always going to be hit or miss no matter what method you invoke. Friends, browsing, engines... nothing will always be perfect.

You harvest book covers and then sort them by call number. Google something to the effect of "virtual shelf browser". It's ugly and isn't very effective, but neither is scanning the spines of hundreds of books.

We worry about this in my library. I believe the ultimate problem is that the value of a librarian does not scale very well and incumbent librarians don't necessarily have the skills or life experiences to pull it off. From my experience, short of working with PhDs, very few librarians actually perform complex tasks. So you have highly skilled laborers answering mundane reference questions all day.

I predict most academic libraries will cease to exist and be replaced with large computer labs and study halls, with their electronic resources managed by IT departments and daily operations (circulation, interlibrary loan, copy cataloging) performed by work-study students and paraprofessionals.

It seems to me there's a harmonious intersection between this idea of the library, and the non-Prussian-schooling approaches. Get enough of the non-Prussian-schoolers and an open-minded librarian together in one place armed with the right equipment, and this sort of stuff could just almost spontaneously start happening.

I struggled reading past the "Netflix is a better librarian" comment. Netflix is not a librarian, it is a library-like PLACE. Netflix probably hires librarians or information professionals trained in librarianship to organize their data and user experience. The public library system is only one of many endpoints for a library trained information-professional. For the past decade library schools have been re-branding as iSchools; producing UX/HCI professionals who go on to work at places like Netflix (hence the "Netflix is a library-like PLACE"). In the interest of full disclosure I am currently getting a PhD at an iSchool so I have a different understanding of the social categories "librarian" and "library." Even so, as every schoolboy knows, a thing cannot be a librarian. IT'S PEOPLE, NETFLIX IS MADE OF PEOPLE.

Libraries aren't going anywhere. I think they will transition from relatively large storage place facility physical books, to a hub for study. It's already happened, really. All my collegiate library studying took place via online databases like EBSCOhost, but this much is pretty obvious. What is more obscure, and will be more interesting to see is how the library evolves culturally in the coming years.

I think this is an important function of libraries too. It's a nice quiet place and with enough work room to read and relax. With that said, other than at Universities, I doubt many people think that's a valuable thing. The value of libraries is hard to quantify and in policy discussion that's not a good thing for libraries.

I would disagree that libraries aren't going anywhere. Any institution could subscribe to EBSCO, Gale, JSTOR, etc, etc without the overhead of a library or librarians.

What about the people who don't have a computer (much less Netflix or a Kindle) at home? 40% of American households have no broadband, and 18% have no internet access at all. They can take a book home with them, and they don't need a computer or an internet connection to use it.

Read it again, more carefully. You've made an unjustified assumption.

I agree with him... if the librarian exists online and not in an old building 5 miles away. And kids have computers. That's not enough to lure them to a library. Many libraries have Wiis and Xboxes these days. That's not working either.

Seriously? Do you have an article that talks about game consoles in a library?

http://www.aadl.org/aadlgt

It's Monday, and it's early, so I read half of that wondering why Seth Godin was writing for Reddit :-/

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