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.

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.

The Horizon Report for 2011 is out now, and they’ve created a video summary of their conclusions. It’s a great jumping-off point for anyone who might be interested in understanding how people are harnessing technology for their learning and community-based goals.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now that I’ve been afflicted with Sudden-Onset Adulthood (both a house and a baby are imminent), I’m hoping to devote more time to getting back on the blogging horse. Expect more thoughts on this report (and other stuff, hopefully) soon.

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.