Shaken, the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Chicago Police detective Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels, is the latest acquisition from AmazonEncore, Amazon.com’s publishing arm. The book will start out as a Kindle exclusive, which you can now preorder for $2.99.

If you were listening to this instead of reading it, this is where you’d hear the record scratch sound. Didn’t Amazon lose the battle with publishers to keep Kindle titles below $9.99?

Konrath isn’t stupid. He’s done the math, and discovered that it’s far more lucrative for him to sell ebooks at the 1-3 dollar range than the 10-15. The sabermetrician in me is doffing his cap at his ability to exploit this new market niche.

But one niche I don’t see here is one for lending of ebooks. This deal with Amazon almost seems like one of those 360 deals concert behemoth LiveNation has been signing with artists like Madonna and Jay-Z. With those, Live Nation assumes total responsibility for the artist’s business – from CDs to concerts to merchandise, in exchange for a cut of all sales. Amazon is in a similar position, as they now handle the production, the sales, and the distribution of Konrath’s book. Not to mention Amazon’s considerable promotional power. Quoth Konrath:

I signed a print deal with a company that can email every single person who has every bought one of my books through their website, plus millions of potential new customers. I’ve never had that kind of marketing power behind one of my novels. I’d be an idiot not to do this.

The 360-degree deal is a win-win for Konrath and for everyone, right? Shaken gets published where it couldn’t previously, Amazon gets to thumb its nose at Macmillan and co., and readers can find out what kind of trouble Jack, Herb, and Harry are up to for a fraction of what they previously paid. But of those 360 degrees, not one of them is something that libraries can be a part of. Shaken will be available in print (again, published by Amzaon) in February 2011. But what do we do for those patrons we have that are used to downloading his stuff from our digital collection. (And yes, we have at least an ebook or e-audiobook for all 6 prior titles in the Jack Daniels series.)

Amazon has been notoriously standoffish in their dealings with libraries. If Konrath’s deal is a bellwether for other authors to follow suit, we may need to be concerned for our digital collections.

What are the key concepts for libraries in the near future? I’ve boiled it down to the following 6 concepts:

• Consolidation – Using APIs and open access to push data into the stream, and making it easier for patrons to use our resources
• The Cloud – Ubiquitous access and synchronous editing changing the way people are learn and work
• Compression – Devices getting smaller, smarter, and more powerful provide us with more opportunities for service at point-of-need
• Control - Gesture-based interfaces offering a whole new way of examining and manipulating data
• Copyright - Digital distribution models will bring publishers to our door closer than we think
• Creation – Our responsibility toward curating user-generated content, and fostering healthy discourse through media

Please view the slides in fullscreen to see my crib notes. What do you think the technological game-changers will be?

Reference 2.0 is mobile, digital, and social. We need to maximize the combination of these.

–Joe Murphy

Breakneck tour of the state of digital reference. I’m a little overwhelmed by Madeline Kriescher (implementation strategies), Joe Murphy (futurecasting), and Jan Johansson’s (data and visualization) state of the industry. The whole thing leaves me with a lot of questions, fueled by the still embryonic state of this technology. It’s the same thing with Web 2.0 – we know what the tools are, but how to put them together is another issue entirely. And I say this as someone for whom mobile service has been a major focus for my last year or so of work.

I guess what’s really giving me pause is the quandary of what we need versus what will actually work. The state of mobile technology is still pretty clunky. I keep thinking of the article Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998. Do we really want to be interacting with our 2009 patrons using 1998-era tools? Can we use our advanced devices – i.e. our desktop PCs as the hub for all our conversations? As these tools continue to advance, this may become less of a problem.By driving the traffic to a central location on our end, our reach to all the points in the could becomes quicker, and the seams stop showing.

I’m particularly interested in the data/visualization tools presented by Jan Johansson. I remain convinced that we need to develop some kind of saberbibliometrics – new ways of looking at our collected data, perhaps in ways that transcend the traditional departmental boundaries. Tools like Google Gadgets and ManyEyes can help us do this, and display the info in new and exciting ways.

Hit the jump for raw notes.

Next-Gen Digital Reference Tools

Madeline Kriescher, US Courts Library, 10th Circuit

Joe Murphy, General Science Librarian & Instruction Coordinator, Yale

Jan Johansson, Data Librarian, Congressional Research Service

MK: Describing US Courts library – work with lawyers

Diverse patron base looking for many types of service

Mostly male, mostly white, mostly 60+

Because of this, Twitter/FB/etc. tends to fall on deaf ears.

Past exp: Denver PL – SmartyPants service, which became Ask Colorado

Hows and Whys of IM Reference

• Must be tailored to patrons, and their core set of values
• Bear funding/goals/software/staff time in mind
• Training
• Marketing

Not a replacement for traditional services

Many still prefer f2f, email ref.

Get a toehold, and slowly introduce other forms of virtual reference service (text a librarian, teaching opportunities, chat)

Integrating SNing – Twitter, J-Net, Ning, YoungFeds

Linking to blogs/blawgs

Resources for referral

JM: Future Prospects & Best Practices for Reference 2.0

Mobile, virtual, and social

Using mobile devices and distributed across social networks

How to bring all of that stuff together. (Mobile technology is still clunky though – how do you bring people forward while still using a crippled technology?)

ChaCha: gold standard for mobile reference

• No account
• No shortcode
• Quick

Mobile applications – go-to point for many when searching for innovation

Where are the library apps? (not just for iPhones, but other devices)

Suite of resources

Searching and accessing books and journals, instruction, account access, tag and customization

Facebook is the new focus point. MySpace is gone for all intents and purposes, ning is too small

institutional accounts

Applications are the driver for all this stuff.

IM still a huge platform for interaction. But it’s not mobile enough. We need to be creative in how we make IM mobile. IM-to-SMS/SMS-to-IM

JJ:

Users looking for a final answer more than anything else.

Interfaces getting better for searching

This isn’t happening with our data collection tools (think SPSS, STATA, MATLAB)

Can we develop tools that create useful data visualization w/o as steep a learning curve?

Tools: LexisNexis Statistical Datasets

Data + Google Spreadsheets with Gadgets

Data + ManyEyes (visualization tools)

Bringing response/demo time to under a minute for data services – immediate effect

Inter-university consortium for political and social research – huge data sets, not as much visualization material

Census bureau – “I think it’s best in breed” – also enhanced by a visualization tool

Visual depiction of statistics goes beyond “lies, dammed lies, and statistics”- a very dangerous weapon with a great potential for misuse

Google Gadgets: tools to diplay data that has multiple variables – chart data w/multiple axes

I’m particularly taken by David Lee King’s summary of Marshall Breeding’s talk on Next Generation Library Interfaces. We’re hard at work at implementing a new catalog discovery interface of our own, so these notes serve as a reminder that we’re doing The Lord’s Work.

These blocks of text, however, reads like my wish list for what I hope to accomplish with my library’s web presence:

strategic infrastructure + web 2.0
a more social and collaborative approach
web tools and tech that foster collaboration
integrated blogs, wiki, user reviews, etc
avoid 2.0 info silos – don’t have separate blogs, wikis, etc – make sure it’s integrated

scope of the next gen library interface:
attempt to collapse silos or draw appropriately from each silo
unified user experience
single point of entry into everything
print + electronic
local + remote
locally created content

Functions and features:
Interface features/user experience:
simple point of entry – optional advanced search
relevancy ranked results
facets for narrowing and navigation
query enhancement – spell check, etc
suggested related results / recommendation service
enriched visual and textual content
single sign-on

It’s like they’re saying what I’m thinking, before I’ve been able to put it into words. Thanks, Marshall. And thanks, David, and everyone who’s been posting their conference notes. Someone out there is reading them.

Take this weekend, for example. I went to New York to see my sister’s college graduation. As part of our touristic duty, we went to visit the Statue of Liberty. My parents were concerned about getting in an early group for their flight home the next day. Without means to an Internet station for several hours, they ran the risk of being relegated to the dreaded Boarding Group 4.

I figured there had to be a way to check-in over the phone. Even talking to an operator could be an option, right? My Dad promptly pulled out his Treo, and, lo and behold:

They got their place in line, right at the base of Miss Liberty. If libraries can capitalize on this, good things are in store.