From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 20:11:23 -0700


My thanks to the various contributions here.  Carey Newman was most
provocative, essentially telling me in the very nicest possible way to
get over it – stop wanting an e-book to please my book-wanting eye.
Others performed more as enablers for my hankering, and I’m still
inclined to accept their encouragement. I had forgotten, until one old
friend here reminded me, that it was another old friend, Mike Jensen
at National Academies Press, who first successfully implemented the
cripple-your-book strategy for making material available on-line and
sustaining print sales.  Revolutionary twenty years ago, an albatross,
I fear, now for many of us.

            BUT:  the Jensen strategy put the crippled books up on the
open web for worldwide free access.  My complaint a few nights ago was
about “e-books” that we “buy” at a price I could complain about and
that are only accessible to our university community inside the
paywall and come crippled.  That’s a distinction with a difference, I
think.  In the new technical language of librarianship that I’ve begun
to master, that’s nuts.

            AND:  I learned one incidental thing in reading this
thread and looking at the Open Syllabus thread started by the article
the other day in the New York Times.  Of their
books-most-frequently-taught (where, as somebody pointed out, they
follow in the footsteps of the BYTES project Ann O. led some years ago
and which produced, on a smaller data set, quite similar conclusions),
33 of the top 50 are readily available in open access, howbeit often
in translations that now ring a little quaintly to our ears.  The
aging of translations gives print publishers the opportunity to keep
lots of versions of Augustine and Plato and Marx in print, selling
briskly in exactly the place – the curriculum – where open access
might be thought most welcome.

            ONE COMMENT:  To my admittedly biased eye, the structure
by which our vendors make content available for discovery, then charge
us when we begin to use it (so many clicks into the content and the
library has bought it, though the user does not know they have
triggered a purchase) is potentially useful, but right now, the number
of clicks is too small and the price is too high.  I still wonder if
publishers actually see what a hash the e-book vendors make of their
products.

            SO:  what is to be done?  I’ll go back to Toby Green’s
admirable post and ask him to say what it will take and when it might
come about for there to be the premium e-book editions of which he
speaks.  I still seek (and tens of thousands of ASU students need)
books that are fully functional when accessed on-line.  Charts,
diagrams, illustrations, footnotes, indices, hot-linked references and
cross-references, ease of use – in short, digital objects with the
ability to meet the demands of those who could be reading the same
book in print and of those who want to take advantage of the new media
to get new functionality:  when and how can we get these?  We can
argue about price later, but that artifact does not now exist.

            The e-book hasn’t been invented yet.  Who will do it and when?

Jim O’Donnell