Not that I have anything against WordPress.com, which should be evident when you visit the new site which is a self-hosted WordPress installation. See, recently, I’ve been working on a website for our Friends of the Library group. As we worked on updating their site from a static HTML set up to a dynamic website, we talked about actually taking all of the staff’s websites and housing them under one roof. So the couple of story time blogs that my co-workers have, a volunteer site hosted in another location, and Not All Bits are going to have happy new homes in a place of our own making!

I can’t turn that down, because that sounds awesome.

So, while I’m still doing some updating, re-themeing, and stuff — you can certainly dig on the new site and expect to see the same stuff there that you did here.

But wait, there’s more!

Since Not All Bits will be moving to a site with a more local focus around my town, my library, and our community, you’ll start seeing new articles geared toward those things! I’ll be posting some of the questions we get regarding downloads, books, and the like and answering them. (I’ll be anonymizing the original poster’s information, of course.) I’ll talk more about the things going on in my library and in my town. In other words, there’s just going to be more good stuff and, if you like it here, I really think you’ll like it there too.

Come see me!

Needless to say, with a name like “Snapshot Day” we also took some pictures. So I snagged my camera and went around the library just shooting whatever caught my eye. When photographing people, I tried to remain a bit removed from them — not only to respect their privacy but also to get a candid shot of someone just using our library.

Anyway, I uploaded the images to my Flickr account into a set called Arizona Library Snapshot Day. Go check ‘em out if you have the interest!

PS: All the images in that set are copyright under a Creative Commons By-NC-SA License. See something you like? Feel free to use it.

Seriously, big shout outs to Gretchen, Johnny, Stephen, Greg, Nick, Tim, Terry, and the whole IT crew. They’re awesome geeks who walk that fine line between geekery and needing to explain how things work to totally non-techy librarians. Believe me, having to do that myself on occasion requires a good working knowledge of English and Nerd.

Thing is, IT can only do so much and they have a real job to do making sure things don’t go bazoo with our networks, computers, ILS, and all that happy stuff. Given that we are pretty much a Microsoft shop, we need to use things like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. I’m sure I could stick my head out there and see some of my Dear Readers nodding their heads in agreement. Internet Explorer has one big advantage over Firefox and Chrome in that it’s easy to maintain on an enterprise level. Why Mozilla and Google haven’t pulled their heads out of their dark places and released some kind of enterprise tool for their browsers is beyond me. Wanna overtake and/or kill IE? Make it easy for IT departments to update, maintain, and control your browser and you can watch IE burn.

But that’s not what this is about.

This is about how I, and probably you, need some real tools to do your job. At the very least, you need some better tools to make your job easier. Sure, you can use a brace and bit to drill a hole, but wouldn’t you rather use a cordless drill? Take the browser situation for example. I’m an information professional and IE just doesn’t cut it. I need a big boy browser that I can customize from hell to breakfast and make it easier to help my patrons with their informational needs. That’s why I use Chrome.

“But, Dan, you pink haired cyberbrarian — you just said you’re working in a Microsoft library. How did you get IT to install Chrome?” you might ask. (Let’s pretend you asked. Play along, it goes with the flow of this article.)

No librarian is complete without one.

Easy, I have a flash drive with Chrome on it, and a whole lot of other librarian goodness that makes my job easier, more fun, and keeps me working and entertained throughout the day. It amazes me how many librarian types don’t know about PortableApps, so that’s that I’m here to drop on you today.

PortableApps is a website that carries a bunch of different apps for a bunch of different tasks, but they all have one thing in common: You can install them all on a flash drive and take them with you. The upside of this is that you can get yourself some amazing, free and open source apps, install them on your flash drive, and then use those apps on any PC with a USB port. I keep a Sony flash drive around my neck most of the day and the only time it’s not around my neck is when it’s plugged in and getting used.

So here’s a set of apps that I recommend to help you get more done, enjoy your job, and generally make your life easier.

Browsers

As a librarian, I need a real browser. I prefer Chrome, others prefer Firefox, and no one wants Internet Explorer. Thankfully, PortableApps carries both Firefox and Chrome. Functionally, there is no difference between the app that you install on your flash drive and the browser you’ve installed on your computer at home. All the plugins, themes, and extensions work just fine. Recommending extensions for Chrome is a totally different article I’ll write later, but there are ways of using Chrome itself or extensions for Firefox to sync your bookmarks and settings from one computer to another. That way, wherever you go, that’s where your browser is and it looks the same everywhere.

CamStudio

Screen casting, the making of a video using your computer’s desktop as the “theatre,” is really catching on over the last couple of years. And why not? I can make a video showing patrons how to download stuff from the library’s digital collection. You could make a video showing staff how to create a tri-fold brochure in Publisher. It allows them to look over your shoulder without being in the same location, time, and vicinity as your shoulder.

Thing is, most screen casting programmes cost money, or have licensing fees, or at the very least require IT to install it on a given workstation.

Or you could just download CamStudio and take it with you wherever you go. Using CamStudio you can record a full screen or just part of a screen and snag a show of everything you do there. Then it saves it as an AVI file which you can share with others, send to YouTube, or whatever. While it’s not as full featured as some screen casting tools are, it works really well if you just want to show someone how to do something.

GIMP

Sooner or later, you need to edit a picture or graphic. If you’re stuck in standard installation hell, where the only image editor available to you is Paint, then you will dance and sing for a little programme called The GNU Image Manipulation Programme or The GIMP.

The GIMP is an open source photo and image editor much like Photoshop but without the hefty price tag. Personally, I’ve done everything from simple image creation of library ads for display on a big screen TV to outright artwork using nothing but The GIMP. It’s feature packed, does much of what Photoshop does, it’s free, and you can pop it on your flash drive.

Just as an example, here’s an ad for our library’s big screen TV display. 100% GIMP from start to finish and probably ten minutes of work. Try doing that in Paint.

Are you experienced?

XMPlay

I listen to music almost all day. The only time I don’t have tunes going is when I’m out on the front desk and even then, if it’s night, and it’s slow, and I can keep the volume down…. Well yeah there will be music.

Thing is, a lot of Internet radio stations use the PLS format to broadcast. PLS is short for PlayLiSt and it’s a way to point to a online server full of musical awesomeness by using a teeny-tiny file, maybe 350 bytes. It’s a very well known, widely accepted way to stream music over the Internet.

Naturally, Windows Media Player hasn’t the foggiest idea what to do with it unless you install an add-on which you probably can’t install since IT locked down the computers. (That is, after all, their job. So don’t blame them.)

Listening to Digitally Imported's Vocal Trance station.

No problem, get yourself a copy of XMPlay and let the music flow freely!

XMPlay is a very small, but well done, bit of software. It’ll play MP3 files and a whole lot more. Better yet, it handles streaming audio like a champ. What I usually do is use Chrome to download the PLS file and save that to a folder on the flash drive called Audio Streams. Then I pop a shortcut to XMPlay in that folder along with all the PLS files. Pick the station you want to listen to, drag and drop it on the shortcut icon, and you’re chair dancing!

In the dictionary under "recursive" it says "see recursive."

Zint

As any librarian can tell you, sometimes you just need a damn barcode. Zint can do that for you. Indeed it does barcodes in so many formats I think they made some of this stuff up.  (There’s really a barcode format called Aztec Runes? Who knew?)

You can use it to generate a lot of barcodes or just one. Then it’ll save them as PNG files for you to print or do whatever you need to do with them. While I don’t use Zint all the time for barcode creation, it really helps me out when I need it. Besides that, it makes QR codes too.

LightScreen

Just as you sometimes need a barcode, you need to do a quick screenshot. Maybe you’re sending a picture to IT so they can see that weird error you keep getting. Maybe you just need to send something to someone so they can see how you managed to find a buried file. Either way, we can all agree that the standard Windows Print Screen leaves a bit to be desired.

And that’s why you’ll love LightScreen. It’ll capture a full screen (nice), a given window (very nice) or an area that you draw around using your mouse (oh hell yes). See that picture of XMPlay above? LightScreen. Just moves the app to the middle of my screen to get a good iamge, set for an area capture, and that’s it. I quickly had a file called Screenshot01.jpg on my flash drive.

In Conclusion

There’s a whole lot more to be had as far as PortableApps go and the handful I suggested really doesn’t even scratch the surface. Hit up their list and see what appeals to you. I can honestly say that, as a librarian with a technical bent, these apps come in useful all the time. I may not use all of them every day (though I use XMPlay and Chrome every day), they’re incredible when I need them.

Give them a shot, all you need is a flash drive. Mine is a Sony 4GB jobbie and there’s plenty of room leftover after I get all this stuff installed!

No wait. I mean a different Generation X.

Digital Natives were something I heard about a while ago at various library conferences and in various library publications. It was supposed to refer to all the kids growing up with technology that my generation (Generation X) found ourselves merely ushered into. Some of Gen X were “Digital Natives” while others weren’t. It all depended on your definition of the terms. Me, I certainly didn’t grow up with a computer in the house. I didn’t get my first computer until I was ten.

I still remember TV remotes that had five buttons: power, channel up, channel down, volume up, and volume down. The kids a few years behind me, those who are teenagers now, were to be the true digital natives as they grew up with a lot of the “new tech” in their very own households.

Thing is, they’re not. At least not around here and not around the areas of many of the other people I’ve discussed this with. I regularly help teens discern the difference between a browser’s URL bar and a search engine. I’ve helped them learn that typing someone’s email address into that URL bar doesn’t actually send them an email. Yes, to search Google, you kind of have to go to Google. No, Google doesn’t really search our library catalogue, you’ll have to go there. No, typing the name of our library into the URL bar won’t take you directly to our website.

For some, this is an apt description of a network administrator.

Many of them know what the Internet is, what it does, and what its for. The problem is that many don’t have any idea how to make it go, let alone what makes it go. I’m not saying they have to, either. I’m a very competent driver of automobiles and I only have the basest knowledge of how a car actually works. They don’t need to be geeks, sure, but there are so many that just don’t get it. The computer is a magic box full of YouTubes and Facebooks and the Net is a vast network managed by sorcery and fae creatures.

Then I look at the children of my generation. My own kids and the children of people roughly my age, let’s say 30 – 40 years old. They have a very different technology at their fingertips than today’s teens did and what makes that technology different is that it is literally at their fingertips. We, and by “we” I mean my generation and before, grew up with computers and tech where we are actually physically removed from the computer by at least one step.

Whatever do I mean?

I mean that I’m removed from the very computer on which I’m typing this post by a single physical thing, actually make that two physical things. I’m controlling, editing, and creating text on this computer via a keyboard, a physical object removed from the computer itself by a distance of, oh,  perhaps six feet of USB cable. If I want to manipulate other things on screen, like buttons or check boxes, I need to rely on yet another physical thing removed from the computer by at least six feet of USB cable – the mouse.

My kids, and perhaps your kids too, aren’t so removed from their tech. When I handed my (at the time) three year old daughter an iPad, she figured it out within half an hour. She knew what the NetFlix logo looked like and she knew how to find videos she wanted to watch by looking at the covers. She didn’t even need the ability to read to successfully navigate the device. Sure, she wasn’t firing off emails or hitting up Reddit. Still, she was delighted to discover Dora the Explorer videos and was equally happy when she discovered that there’s this book-like thing that involves Winnie the Pooh. She started turning pages on the Pooh eBook with absolutely no prompting at all.

My seven year old son is even more mind bending. He reads and he’s doing pretty well with the whole reading thing. Typing isn’t a strong suit but he knows what the letters are and how they form words. So he and I watch this awesome Minecraft series called Coe’s Quest. Now, Coe’s Quest is a series on YouTube and there’s a lovely YouTube app that comes stock with the iPad. Thing is, he’s not 100% sure how the app works. But he does know that if he goes to Safari, does a search for “Coe’s Quest 132″ (no quotes, and the 132 is the episode number) he’ll get a list of results and the first result is usually what he wants. He’ll tap that, the iPad launches the YouTube app, and brings up the video.

I’ve never taught him how to do any of that stuff.

I’m certain my children aren’t wunderkinder so I asked others and, sure enough, their kids totally “get” their iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, and things like that. And, it just so happens, I have a theory as to why.

And while fourth quarter earnings leveled, we expect growth in Q1 2012...

You touch them.

They aren’t removed at all from their tech like we normally are. They’re not even used to being removed from their tech. My son can use a mouse and keyboard, and you can tell that he finds it to be a clumsy experience. He wants to touch the screen on my laptop and have something happen. That makes sense to him.

Picture this – you have have a counter top and there’s a empty cup and a full pot of coffee on the counter top. You want to move the cup to the coffee pot, take the coffee pot off the heater, pour yourself a given amount of coffee, replace the pot, and then pick up the cup and drink it. Got that in your mind? Good. Now, you have two choices to make this fairly simple series of events come to fruition you can:

A) Have someone do it for you, all the while you’re giving them directions about the cup, its placement, how much coffee to pour, and all that. Or you could-

B) Do it yourself.

The way I see it, my generation and before have gotten used to, and very good at, option A. The mouse and keyboard are our ways of directing someone else to pour our coffee and how much. Yet we’re still removed from that tech just as much as we are from our (hypothetical) coffee. Our kids, they’re used to option B. They are, in a very real way, touching their data. You want to make a video full screen on the iPad.  Do you click the maximize button? No, you simply take two fingers, place them close together on the video, and then move them apart like you’re expanding something tangible in the real world. Do you want to type something on the iPad or Android tablet? Fine, you physically type on the tablet.

Let me give you one more example you can see between the two generations. If I’m listening to something on my phone, or on the iPad, or whatever; I want to change the volume, what do I do? Without fail, I almost always reach over to the side of the device and fiddle with the physical up and down volume buttons to adjust the sound.

My kids, and I bet yours too, will tap the screen and use the on screen volume adjustment to fix things they way they like. And you know what? They’re actually more correct in doing so because, at least on an iPad and my Droid X, you can make very minute adjustments using the on-screen sliders. If you use the physical buttons, they adjust things by percentages or by a standard amount. There’s no precise adjustment like you get with an on-screen slider.

Like the other digital natives, today’s children don’t really understand what’s going on behind the scenes. My kids, and yours, haven’t the foggiest idea what a DNS is. They have no idea the difference between a static and dynamic IP. HTML 5? CSS 3? What?

But just like I have barely any idea how my car can turn my pushing down on a pedal into forward momentum, they too don’t need to know how everything works to use it well. And that’s the point, they’re using it far better and far more intuitively than the previous natives have been.

At least once a week, on various sites, I see links to articles that are behind some kind of paywall. Sooner or later the comments light up with how they can’t read the article without paying for it or subscribing to a service they really don’t want.

But let me back up for a second. There may be those out there reading my drivel that haven’t a clue what a paywall is. So let me catch them up really quick. A paywall is the “wall” you hit when you’re trying to access something online and you find that you can’t view it, or view all of it, unless you cough up some money. You’ll see this a lot with newspaper websites, magazine sites, and the like. Most of them will give you a couple paragraphs of the article and then a “click here to buy the rest” button. Needless to say, in your quest for information and knowledge, paywalls throw a roadblock in your way.

That’s not the weird thing I was talking about. Paywalls are very much a “business as usual” kind of thing and just another part of the Internet. What’s weird is all the little hints and tips and tricks that I see for getting around them. Apparently on some sites you can hit the stop button really quick and it’ll load the full article. Other sites you can feed the link to Twitter, then access the link through a Twitter account and that works okay because the paywall allows through traffic from Twitter. I’ve heard of a couple of apps and add-ons for browsers that will redirect you around these paywalls and so on and so on.

But you know what’s really weird? Not a single one of those tips, tricks, hints, or workarounds ever seem to involve “Hey, did you check the magazine and newspaper database available via your local library?”

So dig this.

Two days ago I came across an article that sounded really interesting. It’s called The Unleashed Mind and was on the Scientific American website. Well, as things go, I fell over the link to the article but didn’t actually have time to read the article right then. Now, I know there are things like Evernote, Instapaper, and stuff, and believe me, I use them. (Though I prefer OneNote over Evernote.) But nine times out of ten, if I see something that I’m interested in and want to check out later, I send it to my email. Just pop the link in the body and hit send. I check my email a lot, but my Evernote and Instapaper? Not so much.

So I sent myself the link, completely unread, until this morning. This morning I had a spare bit of time and wanted to read the article. There was much brow furrowing when I opened up the link and found two paragraphs and a paywall. Turns out the article wasn’t just a Sci-Am website thing, but it was published in Scientific American Mind, one of their print magazines.

Now I suppose I could’ve Googled about, maybe found a backdoor. Maybe I could’ve fiddled with the site and found a way around their paywall, but I didn’t. My first instinct wasn’t to launch Google but to head over to my library’s website so I could check the magazine databases. Sure enough, our EbscoHost MasterFile Premiere subscription carries Scientific American Mind and in a couple of minutes, I’d sent the article, in full, to the printer. It’s sitting next to me as I write this.

There are a couple of magazines I read on a regular basis just by looking them up in the database. Like most people, I don’t read a magazine cover to cover, I just want to see which articles look interesting and read those. Most librarians know that you can email these articles to yourself, or export them to read later (perhaps on your eReader of choice), tag them, export them, and more.

As librarians we use these kinds of databases on a regular basis, if not everyday. Yet how many of our patrons know about them? I’ve had more than a few patrons go wide eyed and googly when I showed them that, even though we don’t have that issue of Consumer Reports, I can still get that article rating the washing machines. It might be worth mentioning to our users that, yes, we can help you blow right by paywalls and it’s perfectly 100% legal. Sure, we won’t be able to access absolutely everything for you, but when it works, it’s awesome.

Just another one of those underutilized resources you could plug in a novel, and useful way!

More like Awesomov, am I right?

I like to read deep, thought provoking science fiction. The kind where you sit back every so often and think “Yeah, not only could such-and-such happen, but the author totally nailed the human condition and the human response if it did happen.” I love reading essays, especially short well written essays like the classics from Isaac Asimov (who, coincidentally, is also a science fiction author). I like to read Christopher Hitchens’ essays because they’re awesome and make me think. I like to read insightful scientific stuff by Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Greene. I love to read history, especially the history of science or the history of Japan. Scientists and/or samurais are pretty hard to beat.

And sometimes I like to read about people f**king.

I don’t mean the occasional romance story with cuddling, cooing, soft lighting and making love at midnight. I mean bodies slapping where the only thing missing is the bad disco soundtrack. I also, on occasion, pick up something bizarre. Something that’s not pornographic, but damn, the title alone is enough to twist one’s brain. For instance, there is a book titled The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians. There’s another one called Ass Goblins of Auschwitz. Then there’s The Egg Said Nothing which sounds fairly sedate yet the cover would draw some interesting stares on the bus. (Especially from the more interesting people who may not actually be so interesting to you.)

There’s another really good book called Just Friends by Anne Thomas. It’s a romance novel about a guy who totally falls for, and has some marvelous sex with… another guy. While attitudes have changed towards homosexuality, I’m kind of a low key guy and don’t really need jerks approaching me and sermonizing about the “sinful literature” I’m reading.

Sometimes I do want a fairly standard romance novel that may or may not have hardcore sex. I’m a librarian, in order to properly serve my patrons I need to read any genre there is – at least that’s my cover story. I don’t want to deal with the crowd of people who’d frown on a dude reading Phantom Waltz nor do I particularly care to harmonize with those who might think it’s awesome. I’m reading, leave me alone.

All this brings me to my point, something I try to cram down my dear readers’ throats in the post title. Have you ever noticed that Kindles have no covers? (Neither do other eBook readers, but the words “Nook Tablets have no covers” just didn’t flow properly for me.) There’s a couple of things that are awesome about this development of coverless reading and you’ll see more and more of them, especially after people open their presents on Christmas.

This picture was worth several thousand words.

Since an eBook reader doesn’t have a cover, I can sit in a coffee shop, on a bus, kick back against a wall outside the library, or stand in line at the supermarket and read my book- and no one needs to know that I’m reading The Gentleman’s Guide to the Golden Age of Menage a Trois. (Sadly, not a real book.) This bit of increased anonymity means that one can enjoy their guilty reading no matter where they go or what they’re doing. Seriously, I’d say most of us have read a book that we want to keep reading, to take with us, but fear the bit of social ostracism that might occur if we go out with a book sporting a cover like you see on the right.

But did you notice something most of the books I linked? They’re all fairly inexpensive, even as far as Kindle books go. They’re especially inexpensive when you compare them to Kindle editions of the latest bestsellers. That makes them attractive for a lot of reasons. First, at those costs, they’re an impulse purchase. If I’m looking to read something fun, and you give me a list of fun books, I’ll look at many things and one of those things will be the price. I can buy SUPER AWESOME BESTSELLER for $14.99, or I can read this thing over here that looks interesting for $3.99. Heck, for $3.99 I can buy four things instead of just one. Even if they’re not the best writing in the world, nothing like a great American novel, they’re fun and they’re cheap and I can have more of them.

BEST TITLE EVER.

This isn’t a new business model at all. There used to be these things called “penny dreadfuls” which were the predecessors of the pulp magazines of the mid-twentieth century. They were cheap, sure. Of course the writing contained therein was one step above or below Highlights for Children. In some cases, they wrote stories about real people but the stories were full of lies, damn lies, and fabrications.

But by god they were entertaining.

Then, just like now, people would cock a sneer at you for reading such tripe, trashy “literature.” Many would, in the style of Capote, tell you that it’s not even writing, it’s merely typing. There’s truth to that, and as an ardent fan of Truman Capote, I agree and I love to read things like In Cold Blood.

I also love to read murder mysteries involving shabbily dressed alcoholic detectives who are as likely to throw up at a crime scene as they are to investigate it and, for some reason, they totally get the hot girl in the end. Oh and the victim? They died with clown makeup on their face and that face was wrapped up in a plastic bag.

Now that, my friends, is entertainment. And it’s cheap!

Patrons of our libraries are no different than any other readers except for the fact that it’s a safe bet that a regular library patron reads more than the average reader. They want those amazing, award winning novels and sometimes, they also want absolute trash. Trash in all its wonderful, fun, and entertaining glory. And now they can have it! They can have it easily! They can even check the stuff out without ever looking a librarian in the eye – a librarian, one who is an ultimate judge of literary character. (Well, we are, aren’t we?)

So let me ask you, will your library stock it? I’m not worried about collection development ethics and whether or not something is too filthy for your collection. I’m talking about a lot of collection development policies that basically run towards archaic ideas like “Well, if we wouldn’t put it on our shelves, we don’t want it in the eCollection.” Or “It doesn’t have a starred review in two major book review magazines and Publishers Weekly never even mentioned it.” Or my favourite “This looks like it’s self published, or published by some tiny, independent press. We don’t add that kind of stuff to the collection.”

Well, let me give you a (five) word(s) of advice. RETHINK YOUR COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICIES. Libraries are finally accepting that the eBook revolution is upon us and, bucko, come this Christmas you’re going to see another massive explosion of interest in eBooks. There’s a complimentary revolution going on alongside this that has just as much to do with the soaring popularity in eBooks and you ignore it at your peril. Amazon and B&N both have made it incredibly easy to self publish and have your work displayed in a big online store. And before one discredits self publishing as vanity, let me hit you with one last fact before I get out of here:

This massive bestseller started out as a self-published book.

Oscar Wilde. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Christopher Paolini. Beatrix Potter. Louis L’Amour. James Redfield. Virginia Woolf. These are just a few of the famous authors you will most likely find on your library shelves. All of them writers, all of them self publishers. One of the founding fathers of the United States was a notoriously unabashed and completely unashamed self publisher – none other than Benjamin Franklin.

If you have a bias against cheap, self-published or independently books, especially if they happen to be eBooks, I advise you to get over it. Welcome to the new world of publishing and the new frontier in reading, which as the penny dreadful illustrates, isn’t so new after all.

And as a historian, you feel even more connected to the old adage that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Now, as a technology advocate (which I’m told is a new age term for “computer geek”) I’ve watched the history of tech change so rapidly and flash by so quickly, that history can repeat itself in as little as ten years.

Case in point: Penguin Publishing.

Penguin decided that what it really needed to do was to stop allowing library users the privilege of checking out Penguin e-books for Kindle, Additionally they suspended new books from the popular OverDrive service used by many libraries. The reasons behind this were “security concerns.” I guess that they’re worried about library users checking out Penguin eBooks and then pirating them.

More and more, publishers are looking at library based digital lending programmes the same way the music industry viewed Napster back in the early 2000s. I can honestly say that when it comes to a technical person like me, the possibility of pirating a loaned Kindle book isn’t far off. It can be done, certainly, but given who I see checking out the most books from our digital collection, it’s not bloody likely.

See, I’ve helped a lot of people with their eReaders, and eReader questions and support, and demonstrated how they can get stuff onto their devices from our websites. You know who most of them are?

Your mom.

No seriously, a lot of them are older folks. Not exactly senior citizens though there are a fair amount of them. Most of them are middle aged and older and have absolutely zero interest in pirating a book. That’s fortunate since, given the questions I’ve had to answer, they also have no technical knowledge that would facilitate pirating a loaned eBook. They do exactly what librarians think they do – check out an eBook, download it to their device, read it, and return it so they can check out more eBooks.

Libraries have this habit of buying a lot of books at once. You’d think that publishers would be into that. Likewise, with the digital eBook revolution ongoing, we’re licensing more copies of eBooks at once than any mainstream consumer. Look, if I buy an eBook of Ready, Player One, I’m buying one copy of it. Meanwhile, libraries will buy or license multiple copies, at once, and thus put more money into the publisher than I ever will.

Dear Publishers. Lots of people use computers. Most of them aren't actually pirates.

Study after study indicates that library users buy more books than people who don’t regularly use the library. Yet publishers don’t seem to understand that in the same way that the music industry still doesn’t seem to fully understand that people who listen to streaming music on the Internet buy more music than people who don’t. At least the music industry is coming around and things like Spotify actually make it so the recording companies can make money, and no one has to pirate anything. There’s no reason to pirate a song if you have Spotify. You can use Spotify to listen to the song any damn time you want to listen to it.

Does that mean I’ll never buy the song? Of course not. See, I use the free version of Spotify. This means I can’t use Spotify on my phone or on the iPad or iPod or stuff like that. In other words, if I want to listen to that awesome song on my Droid X, I have to buy it. I would rather spend the money buying the music than I would to subscribe to Spotify. Either way, someone in the recording industry is going to make ten bucks off me every month. (Quite possibly more if I find several new albums I like.)

The CEO of Macmillan once compared library eBook programmes to “…NetFlix, but you don’t pay for it,” and went on to ask how that’d be a good business model for publishers.

Well, gee, I don’t know.

Last I checked, NetFlix has to pay the movie industry a boatload of money to stream movies and thus the movie industry is making money from licensing deals with NetFlix. Spotify, Pandora, and similar services all pay money to the recording industry so they can stream music and so the recording industry is making money from licensing deals with Spotify, Pandora, and so on.

Here’s a wakeup call for publishers and content creators everywhere. Streaming is the new lending. When the library lends me a book, I’m not supposed to keep it. I have to give it back. Sure, I could steal it, but most library users worldwide don’t steal library books. Likewise, when I stream a movie from NetFlix or listen to Little People’s “Start Shootin’” on Spotify, I can’t keep those either. I’m just borrowing them. The only difference between checking out a book and streaming something over the Net is that, with a stream, I have nothing to give back.

Books can check out anytime you like, but they can never leave.

To return to the library metaphor, streaming is like going to a library, looking at a book, and then leaving it there. Does the publisher get cheated? No, because the library paid for the book. I didn’t even take it. I left it there. Maybe I’ll come back and read it again, maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter much anyway because the library will buy more books even if I never walk through the doors again.

Likewise, with an eBook I borrowed from the library, I have nothing to give back there either. The book “returns itself” in that it becomes unusable on my device and it’s noted in the library’s digital collection that the lending period has expired and the eBook can be lent again.

So if Penguin and other publishers don’t see all the many ways they can make money from eBook lending, then they have some incredibly short sighted leadership who are cheating not only their readers, but their customers, future customers, and ultimately, their investors.

One person said I don’t get it and that if occupations are defined by the tools they use and those tools go away, then naturally so too might the profession. I don’t think I’m daft here and I don’t think I’m being off hand when I say that all professions are defined by the tools they use. That’s actually what makes a profession, the ability to use tools in a way that most people don’t understand. I can use a scalpel, but that doesn’t mean I should perform surgery. A doctor might be able to search with Google, but according to some medical librarian friends of mine, that doesn’t mean doctors are good at using Google.

Either way, let me lay this out in a context that I understand and that might clear a few things up – by using science fiction.

You ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation? You notice how they have these things called replicators and that’s how they get a lot of their stuff? For instance, if Picard is thirsty he orders “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot” and the replicator not only makes the tea, but it can also make a cup and saucer to properly serve it. Hungry? Have the replicator make you some food, anything you want. It occurs to me that, if we actually had this kind of technology, grocery stores would be in a hell of a jam, wouldn’t they?

Well, that’s kind of what I see libraries facing in the very near future. Apple’s new iPhone with built in Siri (Now with GPP, Genuine People Personality!) makes it so you can just talk to your device and get what you want. It won’t be long before this is available on an iPad and soon I can just pick up my iPad and say “Siri, get me the latest James Patterson book from the iBooks Store. Put it on my Visa card.”

So transformation is not only desirable, but one hundred percent necessary. Now we come to the next question:

Are we ready?

Some ideas about what we could do to enhance our services and further that transformation came up in comments and through conversations. Here’s a short list:

• Help people create blogs, web sites, or teach them how to self publish.
• Teach them the best and most efficient ways to find what they want online.
• Create apps to better access our services from anywhere in the world.
• Go to public places, businesses, and even private locations to teach, instruct, and serve their information needs.
• Set up work spaces, shops, and places for people to learn how to makes things.
• Help them learn how to create and distribute their ideas. For instance, a library studio that helps people make videos and post them on YouTube.

There are far more ideas. Ask fifty librarians and you’ll get fifty ideas. So what would it take to make this happen? I’m a technologically oriented guy, but creating an app is something I wouldn’t be skilled at. There are many working in library IT departments who might be able to create library apps, but do they have the time, backing, and resources? I’ve been known to make videos to post online, but I’m using my own equipment. The library doesn’t really have the money to purchase the necessary stuff to make a video studio, let alone two or three of them.

It’s easy to say we need to re imagine the library, but to do it we’ll need resources, skill sets, a willingness to learn and adapt, and the administrative vision to make it happen. After all, even if I get our Friends of the Library group to buy us the necessary equipment to say, set up a multimedia online studio for creating videos and podcasts, that doesn’t mean I have anyplace to set it up nor the time to devote to teaching people how to use the stuff.

I work with many bright and intelligent librarians both within and outside my library system. They use the Internet, they’re adept at searching, and they’re far from technologically illiterate. Yet some of them look at the video and podcast production stuff I do as something akin to magic. They read blogs, but they have no idea how to set one up or what the difference is between WordPress.com, WordPress.org, or  Blogspot. They use eReaders, but haven’t the slightest idea how to publish something for one, let alone how to distribute it online.

So are we ready? Well, no, not yet. I think we’re going to get there, but it’s going to take some time to reorient not only our profession, but ourselves as well. I have specialties that you don’t and there are things you can do that I shouldn’t even attempt. I think a good first step, especially within your own library systems, is a simple but highly important one.

Look around you. Look at your colleagues. What are they good at? What is it that they know more about than anyone else in your system? I work with a geologist, a doctor of psychology, a talented guitarist and musician, and a master storyteller. What about you? Let me tell you, it’s much easier to figure out who should do what when you find out who would be the best at it.

And if you feel the interest, leave a note in the comments about what to do after you find out who your experts are. This transformation, this change, will not happen overnight nor should it. But after you figure out who does what the best, where do you go from there?

Me, I care, but not for the reasons that you may expect.

The news was about CDs and how they’re probably going away soon. Now, as a musician and music fan, this disturbed me only a little. See, one of the biggest things I miss about the days of vinyl isn’t the warm sound you get from a record, though that’s something I miss quite a bit. You know what’s awesome about records? They’re huge. And you know what a huge record means? It means a huge record sleeve. And what do you put on a huge record sleeve?

You put this on it.

That’s not only beautiful, that’s iconic. The Beatles had this one album, you may have heard of it, where the entire cover was white… and yet that cover became one of the most well known covers in music history. We’re going to lose some of the awesome cover art we’ve grown to love once we no longer buy physical CDs, and I think that’s a little sad.

But that’s not what bothers me.

Libraries are, for the most part, defined by physicality. We talk of our branch, our collection, our books and DVDs, our CDs, our front desks, and our librarians. What do all of those things have in common? Simple, they’re real. You can touch them. Stroke them. You can see them. They’re there. If I ask you to pass me that CD, you could do it – provided there’s a CD in the immediate vicinity and we have the required proximity.

Now, pass me that MP3 file. Oh, excuse me, could you hand me that streaming video please? Hey, mac… toss me that eBook I wanna read the book jacket.

Now you’re looking at me kind of strangely, aren’t you? You can hand someone an MP3 file. You can’t read the book jacket of an eBook. You can’t hold a streaming video.

Yet all of us pretty well accept that this is where things are going. I’m not being hypocritical here either. I watch a lot of NetFlix, I read eBooks, and I listen to MP3 music almost every waking moment. Heck, I don’t even have to buy the MP3 music thanks to services like Spotify or Pandora. And for the most part I don’t want to buy things like books, and CDs, and movies if I don’t have to. I’ve already got enough clutter in my house.

But what about libraries? We live and die on physicality, the very tangible nature of things. I check out DVDs, not streaming movies. I help a patron find stacks of CDs, not MP3s. Indeed, if I do help a patron find MP3s, there’s a fairly decent chance I’m committing some kind of crime.

Now CDs are going away, and soon enough they’ll be gone. I can’t help but think that it won’t be all that long before DVDs join them. For public libraries, losing CDs means that, not only do we lose our music collection and our ability to restock and refresh it, we lose our audiobook collections as well. Those kids books with the CDs? Gone. How about The Short and Dirty Guide to Learning Short and Dirty Words in Japanese? Yeah, it’ll be gone too because it’s a kit that includes four or five CDs of Nippon profanity, kusoyaro.

No, sorry. Wrong Penguin.

What happens when we lose our movie collections because the industry finally gives up on DVDs? eBooks exploded over the last year, what happens when more people want eBooks rather than regular books? Some folks say this won’t happen and all I can do is scratch my head and ask “Why can’t it happen? Look around, it already is.” Penguin just reported a banner year for eBooks sales and the year isn’t even over.

Raise your hand if you own and regularly use a portable CD player. Sure you don’t. You use an iPhone or an iPod or an Android or some other device that probably does a hell of a lot more than play music. Heck my phone works really hard at eliminating the aforementioned collections because I can use it to read, listen, and watch.

Remember these? Of course not. We tend to block out traumatic events in our lives.

Many cities have to bid out services. What happens when some political schmuck gets the awesome, out-of-the-box-thinking idea of “instead of giving all that money to the library to buy movies and books, let’s see what Amazon.com’s bid is for providing the city with certain kinds of content.”? Oh, and before someone chimes in here with “But we provide services to people who can’t afford eReaders, Internet, and NetFlix!” all I can say is sure we do.

We also provide comfy sleeping areas and improvised bathing facilities for semi-crazy homeless people. Do you think the politicians care much about that? (Hold your emails. I know that not all homeless people are crazy, especially in this economy. Let’s face it, I worked in a public library a block and a half from the county jail. I know what kind of people can frequent certain public libraries.)

Here’s some hard reality. The people who can afford things like Kindles, NetFlix, an who are purchasing eBooks and buying music from the Internet – they’re not as likely to come to the library for any of our stuff. However, since they do have money, they’re more likely to donate to political campaigns and they’re far more likely to vote than a poor person who can’t afford any of that stuff, let alone campaign donations. It’s getting even harder thanks to the GOP and their efforts to make jolly damn sure that poor people won’t vote. Couple that with a conservative bent to cut services, and you have yourself a recipe for library obsolescence in as little as ten years.

And for all of those who don’t think anything like this could ever possibly happen – today, reality showed up to give libraries another boot in the ass.

So the question is… what do we do?

This movie is a gold mine! We need to TOTALLY STOP SELLING IT.

See, it’s stuff like this which, I suppose, makes me a bad business man.

Warner Bros is going to be pulling a Disney maneuver and locking away the Harry Potter films “in their vaults” for some time. So, very soon, you’ll not see the first movie on the shelves at the shops anymore. Then the second will disappear and so on until you can’t buy a new copy of any Harry Potter movie.

Let me stop right there and tell you about The Lion King.

As a circulation librarian, I take a lot of requests and place a lot of holds. My small town library took well over 100,000 requests last year from all over our system and filled over 99,300 right here in our library. Not bad, especially when you consider our collection is, currently, only 73,000 and change. Of those requests, one of the more frequent was Disney’s classic, The Lion King.

Ah, but there was a snag. Our copies of The Lion King were all withdrawn or removed from the collection due to damage, wear and tear, theft, long overdue, and so on. Until recently, when the movie reopened in cinemas a couple of months ago, we couldn’t replace it. It was “locked in Disney’s vaults” and not available for sale. So all of those kids, all of those parents, all of those adults who wanted to relive a moment of childlike glee – all of those people who wanted to see The Lion King…. 

Hi! Did you want to buy my movie? TOO BAD.

They couldn’t.

Now, what the corporations will tell you is that, by locking these things away you’ll drive up demand and then when you start re-releasing them again (one piece at a time, then probably as some kind of boxed set) you’ll make bank because now everyone wants it and now, for the first time in a while, they can get it.

Naturally, this includes libraries. We’ve ordered well over a hundred copies of the re-release of The Lion King. We’re restocking hard and fast because, who knows when it’ll come out again? I don’t know much about the consumer market, but I bet your average household family (mom, dad, couple of kids) didn’t buy more than two copies of that movie. I’m certain they didn’t buy over a hundred copies, yet publishers and media distributors seem to think libraries are the enemy and they’re working to limit what we can get and how many we can purchase for our patrons. Yet we buy far more than your average family would ever purchase.

That’s not the point of this however. My point is that Disney was incredibly foolish and, once again, working on a totally outdated business model when it came to The Lion King - and so is Warner Bros. I lost count of how many people came to our front desk with a kiddo or two and asked for The Lion King and then had to console said kiddos because I told them we not only don’t have it, but we can’t get it because Disney isn’t selling it. It happened a lot, as in several times per month.

You know what I also lost count of? I lost track of how many of those people thanked me for my help, told me that they understood the situation and that there’s nothing the library can do about, and then – as they walked away from the front desk – told their kiddo that it’ll be okay…

They’d just go home and download it from the Internet.

Media corporations thrive on want. They want you to want their products because really, they’re not selling anything you need. They’re selling things that you want. Now, years ago, this meant that corporations could do these kinds of things, limit the supply and drive up demand. Keeping the customers wanting, while depriving them of satisfaction only meant you got more money when the product finally shipped.

Folks, that doesn’t work anymore. People have new avenues open to them. Corporations created the culture of want and now it’s come back to bite them because now customers can get what they want, and they don’t have to involve the producer at all. They’re certainly not going to involve the producer or the corporation if the corporation is throwing roadblocks in their path to “drive up demand.”

People wanted a copy of The Lion King and so did libraries. We had money to give to Disney and say “HERE! TAKE OUR MONEY AND GIVE US YOUR DVDS!”, but no, that wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t even for sale. So people stood there, with that odd look on their faces that most people get when you try and give someone money and they refuse it. The good people might have checked around for another vendor, maybe went to WalMart after shopping at Target. And yet they couldn’t find The Lion King anywhere. They couldn’t buy it on Amazon. They couldn’t buy it at Target. They couldn’t buy it at WalMart. They couldn’t stream it on NetFlix. They couldn’t check it out from their library.

So they hopped on over to The Pirate Bay and got it there. Hey, they tried to give someone, anyone, some money for this product and they were denied a legal avenue to do so at every turn. So, right or wrong, ethical or not, they acted upon the wantingness, the desire, created by Disney, and then removed Disney from the equation. Then they went out and gave that money to someone who would sell them some popcorn to snack on while watching the movie.

My prediction? Well, it’s not a prediction if it’s a sure thing so let me just tell you what the hell is going to happen. You can watch the incidents of piracy surrounding every Harry Potter movie skyrocket as soon as they start disappearing from the shelves. People will come to the front desk, ask for the movie, we don’t have it, they can’t buy it, so they’ll go get it from someplace that will give it to them.