From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2016 11:09:40 -0700

Rick, Thanks for your question about dismissive reference to current
"ebooks".  I'll try to be brief.

There are many publishers and vendors who provide today digital
representations of books, usually works where there coexist a print
version and a digital version.  The digital representations known to
me vary in my judgment from failures to dismal failures.  First, they
do not successfully reproduce the functionality of print books.
Second, they are licensed to libraries on terms that most commonly
involve the deliberate further crippling of what functionality they
have or could easily have in order to sustain the business model of
the publisher and/or vendor.  These things are commonly spoken of as
"ebooks", a term to which I regularly object (as you saw) because I
believe their failures of functionality are too egregious to be
accepted.   Attaching a playing card with a clothespin to the wheel of
my bicycle to counterfeit the noise of an internal cumbustion engine
does not make it a motorcycle.

I believe four kinds of progress are needed:  (1) A better and
standard format for the digital representation of existing printed
books, e.g., for mass digitization projects, where we assume that the
original format is determinative and needs to be reproduced as well as
possible; flat file PDFs have their virtues but the only digital
advantage they bring is network transmissibility.   (2) A better and
standard format or set of formats for representing new work in digital
form, with or without the option of creating a separate printed
version of the same argument.  In this case, there needs to be high
functionality in matters of notes, links, images, embedded media, and
the like.  In this case, "book" is a useful conventional name for
bundling together and presenting argument and narrative in ways that
take advantage of the possibilities of new media without being
constrained by being the e-representation of an old media artifact.
(3) Significantly better business models and practices for delivering
this content to users and especially library users without the
deliberate crippling that now occurs.  (4) As I indicated in my
posting this week, work on metadata and discoverability, heavily
dependent on standards, is also essential.

An historical aside:  Kindle's format works reasonably well for novels
and other material where a single line of discourse, usually
narrative, runs from page 1 to page xxx and where the only
functionality required is to see the words as written in sequence,
"turning pages" one at a time.  That format works as reasonably well
as the papyrus scroll did in antiquity, and of course there is a mass
market for such products, allowing Amazon to settle for what it has
created.  No existing format known to me, however, has the same
functionality as the codex book had at an early state of its history,
say the sixth century of the common era.  That is the behindhandedness
we must overcome.

I'm grateful to the other posters for pointers to some good work now
going on, and I would say that the JSTOR Reimagining the
Monograph project seems to have laid out the desiderata quite well.
We have a long way to go.

Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State University


On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 6:50 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:44:16 +0000
>
> Hi, Jim –
>
> I’m interested in your phrase “what publishers and libraries persist
> in calling ‘ebooks.’” I get the impression that you’re suggesting
> “ebooks” is the wrong term for the things to which you’re referring.
> Am I mistaken – and if not, can you expand on that?
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
> Marriott Library, University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> On 12/11/16, 2:37 PM, "LibLicense-L Discussion Forum on behalf of LIBLICENSE"
> <[log in to unmask]
> on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>     From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
>     Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2016 14:02:15 -0700
>
>     Jill O'Neill of NISO has an interesting place from which to observe
>     the various insanities and inanities of the market in what publishers
>     and libraries persist in calling "ebooks" and she has an excellent
>     posting on the Scholarly Kitchen on the theme:
>
>     https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/12/05/monographs-transparency-and-open-access/
>
>     Observe that it's not just that "discovery tools" fail in this case
>     (without a lot of hunter-gatherer work on the user's part), but they
>     fail because traditional metadata don't capture quite enough:  we
>     don't want merely title, author, keywords/subjects, and similar
>     information, but we also want to know things about conditions of
>     access.  If we're lucky, it's as simple as OA/Paywall, but in this
>     case it's something that happens to be OA on a site that has a range
>     of kinds of materials, and the first discovery tool in fact
>     misinformed her about the conditions she would find there -- and it
>     was only stubborn persistence that got to the final revelation.  So
>     this is a case where the issues are one part technology of ebook and
>     two parts legal/contractual questions of access to resources.  What
>     will make progress happen?
>
>     Jim O'Donnell
>     ASU