One week out, we’ve got to ask ourselves the inevitable question: is it sustainable?

So far, we’re seeing some qualified successes in a number of categories. Here’s the chart compiling the before-and-afters that I’ve received so far. Titles that have gained in Amazon ranking since the awards are noted in green, while those that have shown a post-announcement drop are marked in red.

Chart the First:

What do we see here? For many of the awards, the difference has been dramatic. Children’s books don’t tend to make the Amazon top 100, and both Dead End in Norvelt and A Ball For Daisy cracked the top 20 within a day of the award announcement. Belpré winner Diego Rivera: His World and Ours reached #2200 by January 23rd.

Even awards given to a group of books showed considerable gains. 8 of the 10 Alex Award winners leapt up by significant degrees. Of the two that didn’t make the leap, The Night Circus held steady, and Salvage the Bones is likely coming down from a much bigger bump – that of the National Book Award.

There may also be evidence of awards affecting the other formats a title comes in. Upon seeing that Daniel Kraus’ Rotters had won the Odyssey award (given to the best audiobook for children or young adults) I mistakenly logged the Amazon rankings for the print book.

The result? Pre-Odyssey, Rotters had an Amazon ranking of 412,089. The day after the award announcement, it had climbed to 37,357. That’s a pretty big jump! (By contrast, the ranking for the audio CD version of the book is somewhere in the 900,000-1 million range.) This is just one example, but it would seem that the award has had some effect on sales.

Where we go from here

I feel like we’re scraping the tip of the iceberg here. I think there are a number of things we can do to flesh out these initial findings and create some truly bombproof data. Do you think you can pitch in? Here are the tacks I think we can take:

Find another measurement rubric to corroborate this information. Amazon metrics are nice, but they don’t give us the complete picture. Beyond the fact that Amazon is only one seller, the ranking number doesn’t give us any information about the number of books sold. (For all we know, the difference between positions #100 and #10,000 on the sales chart is just a handful of books.) I’m hoping to identify other sources of sales information. If I have to hack into the Bookscan database, so be it.

Identify non-award winning titles to serve as a control group. Getting a bump in sales is one thing, but some of these awards can set a book’s sales on a wholly different trajectory. It’d be nice to gather some of the “contenders” from various key categories. Assuming I can find a way to get historical sales records, the differences should be pretty stark. If anyone can suggest a few control titles, it’d be a big help to demonstrate the comparisons.

Create new ways to measure how libraries can influence sales. Is there merit in libraries honoring books that libraries themselves cannot circulate? Neither the current Printz nor the Newbery winners are available via current library eBook vendors. I don’t want to espouse scorched-earth tactics, but we’re putting ourselves at risk if we continue to celebrate titles that cannot be shared. Maybe we can create a better carrot, so that such a stick isn’t necessary.

Several weeks ago, I had a conversation on Twitter about creating tools to highlight titles that are available  via Overdrive, Cloud Library, or Axis 360. If we have a good set of metrics in place, this could go a long way toward quantifying those things we previously considered to be intangible. All we’d need is a framework, and a list of titles to work with.

Cautious optimism
So far, the results of this experiment have been quite positive. On the eve of ALA’s big eBook summit with selected Big 6 poobahs, we’re finally starting to see some signs of being recognized as valuable parts of the publishing economy. The door’s been opened a crack. Let’s see if we can blow the sucker off its hinges.

Can you help? Leave a comment, or email me at theanalogdivide at gmail if you’d like to pitch in.

So much of what we do to fuel the engine of book discourse is intangible by nature. As a profession that holds quantifiable information so dear, it’s a sad irony that we’re unable to document just how much we’re able to contribute to book sales, be they e- or p-.

But an opportunity to do just that is just around the corner.

After all, Midwinter is coming.

At Midwinter, ALA gives out awards for notable books in a host of categories. For awards like the Newbery or Caldecott, this can mean immortality. Children’s titles are notorious for having short shelf lives. Getting that silver or gold medal on your cover ensures that your title will be noticed (and purchased) for years to come. But we haven’t really been able to quantify how much of a bump these awards provide.

I suggest we do that this year.

Here’s my cockamamie idea: I’d like to get a snapshot of where the award-winning book in each category currently stands sales-wise, and then compare that to its sales after the award announcements. We can take a look at how the title’s Amazon ranking is affected, and use this to get a rough idea of just how much a library-given award can contribute in terms of added sales.

Of course, in order to get a snapshot of a book’s pre-award sales, I’m going to need to know who’s going to win. Good little librarian that I am, I don’t want to compromise each committee’s commitment to secrecy. So I’m going to need someone from each award-bestowing body to take the snapshot, and share it with me after the fact. Call it a white-hat black op. Are you in?

How you can help:Do you belong to one of the committees listed below? Send me an email (theanalogdivide at gmail dot com) to let me know you’re willing to rise to this challenge.

Once your group has selected its award winner, go to Amazon and take a screenshot of its Amazon ranking (here’s an example, for 2004′s Newbery winner, The Tale of Desperaux.) If you want extra credit, find its position on the Amazon Top 100 list for its main category (such as Children’s Books, Teens, or Mystery), and take a screenshot of its ranking.

After the announcement has been made, we’ll go back and see whether these titles move up or down on the list.

Categories:
I’ll update this as volunteers come in. If there’s an award that I’m missing, please let me know.

• Alex Awards – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Andrew Carnegie Medal
• Coretta Scott King Book Awards
• Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement
• John Newbery Medal – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Margaret A. Edwards Award
• May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture
• Michael L. Printz Award – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Mildred L. Batchelder Award
• Odyssey Award
• Pura Belpré Awards
• Randolph Caldecott Medal – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal
• Schneider Family Book Award – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Stonewall Book Award – Barbara Gittings Literature Award – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Stonewall Book Award – Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Stonewall Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• Theodore Seuss Geisel Award
• William C. Morris Award
• YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults

CODES Reading Lists – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
There are probably too many titles on these lists to measure everything. But if we can pick a couple of titles off of each list, it might serve as a good sample.  It’d be nice to have at least one title from each category:

• Adrenaline
• Fantasy
• Historical Fiction
• Horror
• Mystery
• Romance
• Science Fiction
• Women’s Fiction

Additional categories (and volunteers) are trickling in.

• Listen List (audiobooks) – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
• YALSA Great Graphic Novels List – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

I hope you’ll join me in this crazy experiment. Questions? Comments? Suggestions for better data? Let’s talk in the comments below.

But at the risk of sounding like an Overdrive apologist, I want to urge some restraint on the part of my colleagues. After all, they’re hardly the only party making these rules here. Remember the letter Overdrive CEO Steve Potash sent out to libraries when #HCOD first went down? Here’s the relevant quote:

[O]ur publishing partners have expressed concerns regarding the card issuance policies and qualification of patrons who have access to OverDrive supplied digital content. Addressing these concerns will require OverDrive and our library partners to cooperate to honor geographic and territorial rights for digital book lending, as well as to review and audit policies regarding an eBook borrower’s relationship to the library (i.e. customer lives, works, attends school in service area, etc.). I can assure you OverDrive is not interested in managing or having any say in your library policies and issues. Select publisher terms and conditions require us to work toward their comfort that the library eBook lending is in compliance with publisher requirements on these topics.

Overdrive Partner Update, 2/24/2011
(Thanks to Bobbi Newman at Librarian by Day for archiving this letter.) 

This would help to explain why Chesapeake Public Library is subject to these terms. As a new Overdrive customer, they’re subject to a new contract – a set of hoops set by Overdrive, guided by the set of hoops their content providers have forced on them to provide content in the first place. If they didn’t have this geographic restriction, they couldn’t provide books to Chesapeake at all. But if your library has a program to offer materials for non-residents, you should be very concerned. Because your existing contract will expire at some point. Soon enough, we’ll all be subject to these terms.

But here’s the thing we should be outraged about: Our vendors have been doing this for years.

I’ll give you an example. For the past two years, I have been working with the Youth Services department to provide easier library access to schoolchildren in our area. We’ve been working to coordinate classroom management software with student library cards to give kids one-click access to the library catalog and databases. You may have seen this accomplished to great success in Nashville, through their Limitless Libraries program.

But some vendors have stipulated that schools and similar organizations cannot access library-purchased databases while on school grounds. This despite the fact that students would be using their individual library cards to gain access. They fear that the schools would abandon their own subscriptions in lieu of what the public library has to offer. After all, why sell your product to one organization when you can sell to two?

Wanting to be team players, we approached our vendors about this issue. The schools hardly have the money to purchase books, let alone databases, so we figured any sale had to be better than nothing. But Scholastic (for one) continued to take issue. Valuing our local partnership over the products Scholastic was selling, we terminated our contract, and dropped several useful databases including Lands and Peoples, the New Book of Knowledge, and The New Book of Popular Science.

We had similar issues with other vendors. Some asked us to pay larger fees to “expand” access – to an audience that we had already purchased access for. Others recognized what we had to offer and allowed this partnership to continue. In each case, we discovered requirements in the contracts that we hadn’t seen before. These are just a few examples. But geographic restrictions are hardly a new thing in our database agreements.

This is what happens when we well-intentioned librarians are expected to negotiate deals with these companies – and their experienced contract lawyers. We expect them to share our values of open access and sharing, while they’re beholden to their own profit motives. Essentially, we’re bringing hugs to a knife fight.

While that’d be a nice kicky line with which to end this post, it doesn’t really provide any answers. Well, what now? Speaking as librarians, as responsible consumers, and as stewards of public funds, we’ve got to start paying closer attention to the terms our vendor contracts lock us into. This is especially important with respect to Overdrive. Remember: they’re only providing “negotiable” terms based on a framework set up by the publishers. I’m guessing the alternative to the different catalog was no catalog at all. We channel our rage to Overdrive, and we continue to reward the Big 6 with free promotion, literary awards (i.e., free promotion for life), and continued billions of dollars in print book revenues.

I’m confident that a new way can exist. There has to be a model out there that allows books (both the p- and e-varieties) to proliferate, to share and to sell. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t see people like Gluejar, Library Renewal, and the folks at Douglas County Library System attempting to create a new niche. We’re starting to gather data that can help us move in the right direction. Outrage is good, but we need to channel it in the right direction.

The #hcod issue has gone a long way toward demonstrating the passion and dedication librarians feel toward their collections. There have been some fantastic responses (not to mention some fantastic efforts to gather them all), and each day shows that our understanding of the issue is continuing to evolve.

But there’s a prevailing sense of “well, now what?” hanging over this conversation. All this noise is creating an opportunity for someone from HarperCollins to reach out to us. It’s up to them to make that happen, and we’ll see if any of these entreaties go beyond the PR boilerplate we’ve received thus far.

As something of an Open Thread Thursday discussion, I’d like to posit a couple of questions.

1. What does our ideal ebook lending environment look like?

2. What are we willing to pay for it?

Our ability to reconcile these two questions will go a long way toward showing us if a lending model for ebooks is even worth pursuing.

What do you think?

A brash statement like a boycott can get a lot of attention in the short term. But where do you go from there? You’ve created an us-versus-them mentality, and asks other parties to choose a side. Given that both library and publisher interests lie in getting as many books in the hands of as many readers as possible, any move that actively prevents this from happening makes us no better than the publishers.

It’s the equivalent of holding our breath till we turn blue, or threatening to take our ball and go home. It’s an ultimatum that at best ignores the practical issues plaguing publishers and libraries and at worst makes us look hysterical. We’ve already got a growing portion of the public on our side. Let’s not do anything that makes us seem shrill or unreasonable.

Rather, I think we need to acknowledge this for what it is: a business transaction. To this end, we need to enter the fray with an open mind, a willingness to negotiate, and some clear-cut demands. I think Sarah Houghton-Jan’s eBook Bill of Rights is a fantastic starting point for us to begin this dialogue with the content providers. Because it needs to be spread to as many places as possible, I’m reposting it here:

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

This is a wholly worthwhile set of demands. (Thank you, Sarah, for putting this in such clear, effective terms. And even bigger thanks for making it a CC0 document.) Now we have to ask an incredibly tough question: how much are we willing to pay? Assuming HarperCollins and the rest of the publishing industry offers us a seat at the table, we need to be willing to put a price tag on the product we want to see.

What do you do in the meantime? Make your voice heard. Be reasonable. And share your letters, both to publishers and to authors. We’ve got a lot to learn from one another.

4:36 QUICK UPDATE: I linked to Eric Hellman’s poll on how much libraries and publishers alike are willing to pay for more flexible ebook content above, but I think it deserves wider attention. Libraries and publishers alike need to add their responses.

But there’s been little response from HarperCollins itself, aside from this:

I figure the least I can do is take them up on their offer. So here’s what I wrote:

Hello HarperCollins -

Since you’ve made an effort to reach out to libraries, I figured at the very least I owed you an email. I can blog and tweet and post the #hcod hashtag until the cows come home, but until libraries and publishers are talking to one another, it’s something of a lost cause. It’s important to remember that we have a common goal: getting books into the hands of as many people as possible.

 

Libraries have long been a part of the book-culture ecosystem, but we’e largely been ignored, or paid token lip service. But we have a role to play, and we’re eager to have a role both as content purchasers and as enablers of further book (be it e-, audio-, or otherwise) purchases. But publisher policies need to help facilitate that, not make it more difficult.

 

There’s a huge body of content being written right now on this subject, and I’m sure many of you are going through as much of it as possible. So I won’t take up too much of your time.

 

My question is pretty simple: how can we get a seat at the table? Is it possible for us to discuss this as business partners rather than antagonists?

 

Thank you,

Toby Greenwalt

I encourage everyone who has a stake in this to send a message in to the email HarperCollins has created for us. Just remember to keep it civil, and if you’re willing to share, please do so in the comments.

03/01/2011 UPDATE: I received a message in response from HarperCollins, directing me to read their “Open Letter to Librarians,” attached to the email as a press release. Suffice it to say, my question wasn’t answered. I share Peter Brantley’s response to the PR-speak: “meh.”

What

I talked a bit yesterday about the response to HarperCollins’ new ebook policy, and I’m pleased to see just how many others are speaking out. There are even a few non-library inroads, including Galleycat, BoingBoing, and ReadWriteWeb.

But it’s the Librarian in Black that strikes a nerve with her post, Library eBook Revolution, Begin. Sarah’s posts spells out many of the ways concerned librarians, authors, and readers can take action right now.

As the #hcod uproar has shown, librarians across the country are spoiling for a fight. But what’s the best approach? I’ve seen calls for angry confrontations at ALA, removing offending titles from library shelves, and outright boycotts.

But I would argue that the picket line isn’t the place for this battle. Rather, I think we need to take this struggle to the boardroom. Like it or not, publishers have a vested business interest in keeping libraries happy. If they want us to continue purchasing and promoting their titles, we need to hear about new terms – before they’re set into stone.

Because 26 checkouts isn’t the only issue that needs addressing. Several other people have addressed the other change to Overdrive’s policies here, but it merits re-quoting:

Another area of publisher concern that OverDrive is responding to is the size and makeup of large consortia and shared collections. Publishers seek to ensure that sufficient copies of their content are being licensed to service demand of the library’s service area, while at the same time balance the interests of publisher’s retail partners who are focused on unit sales. Publishers are reviewing benchmarks figures from library sales of print books and CDs for audiobooks and do not want these unit sales and revenue to be dramatically reduced by the license of digital books to libraries.

My library is part of a consortium, so this graf hits me where I live. This is another case where the effort to save a buck in the short term is going to have terrible long-term consequences for our eBook collections. Group buying power enables library consortia to spend more money pursuing less well-known titles. This encourages broader discovery of new books, and provides a greater likelihood that patrons won’t walk away empty-Nook’d when they find the latest James Patterson is checked out. Break up the consortium, and each library can only spend money on bestsellers. Bye-bye, long tail. What really gets my goat here is that these changes come directly from the vendor, without a thought about how this will affect activity on the other side of the partnership.

To correct this, we need to explain why taking library priorities into account make better economic sense than the current “we say jump” model. It’s a conversation we should have been having with all of our vendors. If we have to terminate our existing vendor-customer partnership to do so, so be it.

I’ve spent a good part of the last year working on a project with the public elementary and middle school districts in my community. Our primary goal is to ensure that every student has a public library card. But we’re also working to provide greater access to our electronic resources. Our hope is to create strong digital literacy skills from an early age, with a goal of improved research abilities and net ethics in the long term. We’ve been working with faculty, parents and students alike, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our pilot partnership with one school district is well entrenched at this point, and we’re enthusiastically moving forward with the remaining local schools.

But there was a snag with our of our database providers, whose terms of service stated:

If remote access is included it shall not be permitted from any public or private third-party educational facility or library institution other than those of the Licensee.

This is an understandable term on its surface. Libraries and schools make up this vendor’s bread and butter, so they need to make sure schools don’t say “why are we paying for this product, if we can just get it in the library,” and pulling the plug.

But here’s the thing: public school libraries in my community don’t even have a book budget. They don’t currently subscribe to this vendor, and they’re certainly not going to subscribe any time before their current financial situation gets better. (Raise your hand if you see that happening any time soon. Anyone? Anyone?)

On top of that, we designed a system that required every student to have a library card in order to access the database. If nothing else, it would help to reinforce the value of the library card as a gateway to valuable information. We took every effort to play by their rules. We even offered to pay a premium for schools to allow students to access what their taxes have already paid for.

The vendor’s response: Sure, you can pay a premium. Just pay the per-site fee we’d normally charge the schools. With over a dozen sites to deal with, this charge would have been more than ten times what were currently paying. Failing to bring the vendor to our point of view, we cancelled our subscriptions outright. What made business-sense to them didn’t make service-sense to us, so we walked away.

In this case, we were lucky. Plenty of other products exist to take the place of the inflexible vendor’s offerings. At this point, there isn’t really a viable replacement for Overdrive’s eBook selection. Maybe this an opportunity for someone else to step in.

One thing should stay clear: the vendors behind this digital content have a right to make money. They do so by selling access to libraries. But we’re not the endpoint for that access – our patrons are. If the vendor imposes restrictions that negatively affects that access, libraries need to advocate on behalf of their users. But in order to do that, we’re gonna need a better seat at the table. To get that place, we’re gonna need a revolution.

• Bobbi Newman, spurred on by Joe Atzberger brought the story to wide bibliosphere attention. At the time, the only news we had was that a “certain publisher” was imposing these limits.
• Library Journal‘s Josh Hadro reveals that HarperCollins was the publisher in question.
• Smart Bitches, Trashy Books was the first site out of the librarian echo chamber to broadcast the story. In the roughly 30 minutes since they first published the story, they’ve already gotten 10 comments. Thanks a million, SB Sarah!
• And authors have begun to voice their concern. Courtney Milan (not a HC author, but still), has expressed her reservations in an impassioned blog post.

This presents the question: What are we going to do about it? The librarian echo chamber is a limited audience, and if we wish to preserve our seat at the growing e-book table, it’s important to make sure a wider audience is aware of these changes. There are many routes for us to take here – educating our readers, local media, and anyone else who thinks libraries are important.

But I want to focus on the content creators, as this model can be incredibly damaging to the relationship (and continued success) that authors currently enjoy. One of the biggest advantages libraries offer writers is the ability to facilite discovery of a a their entire body of work. With a 26-checkout limit and new books coming out all the time, libraries will have to abandon older titles in order to stay current. A reduced breadth of titles in library collection can lead to fewer chances for ongoing readership. And if your backlist has gone out of print? Well, lotsa luck to ya.

Authors need to understand the potential long-term effects of this. Does your publisher have an interest in sustaining your visibility? You may need to take this into account as you consider your next contract negotiation.

Those of you reading this should consider the vast number of HarperCollins authors, and get in touch with them. I’m curious to know what they think.

And tell more people! The hashtag for the conversation is #hcod.

UPDATE: Blogger extraordinaire Eric Hellman (see this piece from yesterday for just one of many examples of his unique brand of insight is on point with this fact:

That brings up two more significant lists of authors (and lists of significant authors) whose visibility is affected by short-sighted ebook policies.

UPDATE 2: Have you contacted an author? Have they responded? I’d like to start gathering all the responses together in one place. Please post any relevant links in the comments.

“This is an unconference. We can do whatever we want.”

–Mark Beatty

So I’ve traveled deep into the belly of the beast (the OCLC conference center in Dublin, OH) for the inaugural LITA unconfrence. Working under the theme of “The Everywhere Library,” we’ve assembled to share what we know and (hopefully) push the state of library technology forward. I’ll be posting my notes here over the next couple of days, with additional bits of context and commentary as events warrant. If you have any questions, or anything you’d like me to ask about, please post a comment here.

You can keep track of #litacamp09 activities on Twitter, and also check out the Camp wiki for more information.

“They think of computers as work machines, whereas I think of the computer as, like, my best friend.”

–Jessamyn West

I’m at the Computers in Libraries conference through Wednesday. I’ll be posting my notes here, along with other assorted commentary.

I love this quote – I’m not at the session, but it just blew up the Twitterverse – and I think it encapsulates a lot about how I feel about how we can use technology to facilitate connections and Connect People to Awesome. Nothing helps to build friends like more friends, right? I’m excited to discover more ways to make this stuff work.

You can also follow the action by tracking the Twitter hash tag #cil2009.