Bibliotech by John Palfrey

I read Bibliotech by John Palfrey. This is one of those books that’s best read hot out of the oven (i.e. shortly after it’s published). I kept wanting to know what’s happened in the decade since he wrote it, in 2015.

It’s probably not the best book about libraries out there. It was ok, but I stuck with it more because I’m interested in the subject matter than because I thought it was especially well done. He really hit his stride in the law chapter, which makes sense what with him being a lawyer and law professor. He doesn’t have a library degree and is not a librarian, but he did spend years as a library director. I was skeptical reading a book about libraries by a non-librarian, but his perspective had its pros. He’s head of a school, so he can bring his expertise and experience in education to bear on how libraries can support students and adapt to the digital world.

On public space to think

In a digital era, spaces where people can come to study, read, and think are essential for communities and individuals to thrive. We already have too few such open, public spaces. (67)

This complements the discussion of silence as a public good in The World Beyond Your Head—the book I read just before this one. Silent public spaces allow people to think and create—ultimately to make more money and earn a better living. Reading these two books back-to-back, I realize that why I love being in libraries and parks in cities might be partly because they are preserved public spaces largely without things competing for my attention. The opposite of the airport. No TVs nor announcements overhead.

On ebook growth

A clear trend in the growth of ebook circulation over a four-year period...4 million ebook checkouts in 2010 grew to 16 million in 2011, 54 million in 2012, and 79 million in 2013. (42)

...before long readers of all ages will prefer digital materials to print. (92)

This book was published in 2015. Based on that 2010-2013 trend it does seem inevitable that ebooks and other digital formats would take over. I remember hearing Jane Friedman say she thought the same ten years ago. But print has had a resurgence. About 70% of all books sold nowadays are print, if I remember correctly. I still read books exclusively in print (mostly from the public library!).

On decentralization, the Web

Although individuals and particular institutions played essential roles in designing and building the Internet and the web, the key institutions and its growth have been highly decentralized and inventive in their mode of governance...especially in the early days of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s...a motley assortment of brilliant imaginative people working more or less in loose coordination with one another toward a common goal...Often bearded white guys in sandals, they are brilliant scientists, and the pioneers of the digital era: Vintage Cerf and his colleagues early on; Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, who invented the web and his peers at MIT; Jon Postel and his friends who dreamed up and managed important naming conventions. (95)

Palfrey goes on to mention the IETF and W3C, too. The point he’s making is that the Internet is a marvel of decentralized cooperation with some key points of centralization (e.g. the domain name system) and some outsize contributors/funders (Jon Postel, the US gov/military). He’s getting at the recommendation that libraries should coordinate their digitization in a similarly decentralized way. Is Libby just that? Maybe just for ebooks/audiobooks/magazines. It launched a year or two after this book was published.

He also mentions Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive (popularly, the "Wayback Machine") as an example of an open-source digital knowledge/archival system (96). And Wikipedia. Apparently Wikipedians coordinate with librarians (not surprising), and I wonder how many prolific Wikipedia editors are librarians. It makes so much sense. Librarians are among the most knowledgeable, well read people in society. They are trained researchers. They are stewards of information to the public, whether in physical spaces like a library or online ones like Wikipedia. He does later mention that some European libraries have “Wikipedia’s-in-Residence.”

On the Digital Public Library of America

The DPLA uses a domain hack! dp.la - using the ccTLD for Laos. Palfrey’s thesis (or the DPLA’s thesis) is that we need libraries to be networked platforms (Library as a Platform? LaaP? No). That libraries ought to coordinate with one another on a shared free and open source platform rather than compete to build walled knowledge repositories (107-8ish). Did the Digital Public Library of America succeed? It’s website is still up and running, and by the looks of it things are going.

On teaching librarians to code

The skills librarians need to develop in order to operate at scale look a lot like the skills that Google, Amazon, Mozilla, Khan Academy, and Wikipedia staff members develop through their day-to-day work. Creating these newly curated sites involves simple forms of computer programming, such as scripting. (142)

This sounds pretty out of touch to me. Did building Khan Academy just require “simple” programming? Or Google or Amazon or Wikipedia? I have no doubt librarians are capable of becoming good programmers—I think librarians would probably make fantastic programmers, actually. Bookish word nerds tend to love programming. To that point, later in the book Palfrey says that “the most digitally savvy librarians are some of the most digitally savvy professionals anywhere” (217). And I buy that. But this sounds like the whole “teach displaced truckers to code” thing.

Instead of training librarians to be programmers, it might make more sense to convince programmers to work for libraries (or really on these shared library “platforms”). Programmers can collaborate with librarians, and sure maybe some librarians become programmers themselves. It probably would’ve been tough to recruit programmers in ZIRP times when the book was written, but in the current tech hiring and political climate I bet a lot of programmers would love to work for a library system. Right? It sounds compelling to me.

On preservation

The chapter on preservation presents a tricky problem. And my gut is just that so, so much digital history will be lost. It reminds me of the retirement of .yu and with it the erasure of Yugoslavia’s digital identity.

On law

First sale doctrine in copyright law allows works on the secondary market to be lent, sold, donated, or disposed of—and only copied for archival/preservation per Section 108 (20). But digital works like ebooks are typically licensed to libraries—not sold or donated—and therefore have more restrictions. Brewster Kahle (the Internet Archive creator) advocates for mirroring the “first sale doctrine” analog model by digitizing copyrighted print books and lending them out one at a time. He’s got 150 libraries on board at the time of writing (again, 2015). Some publishers (a minority, it sounds like) have signed onto this, notably Random House.

Others advocate for some sort of royalty model that compensates authors/publishers whenever a work is lent out. There’s also “buy-to-unglue,” a crowdfunding model of sorts that unlocks the book for free after N ebook copies have sold. It caps the author/publisher revenue I guess, but might lead to a higher average revenue because buyers feel like they’re fractionally donating to the public (toward the unlock threshold/goal). The legal conundrums only get trickier when you go international, where books are subject to different law in different jurisdictions. Some countries (France, Singapore, Scandinavian countries) are ahead of the US in digitizing libraries, apparently.

Orphan works are another tricky legal situation. The law prohibits digitizing works whose copyright holder is unknown. There are millions of such works in the US and orders of magnitude more in Europe (presumably the older the country, the more old books without known copyright).

On privacy

...librarians may be society’s most effective privacy advocates. (202)

Print books are like cash and ebooks are like debit cards. Cash is anonymous, but bank cards are trackable. Print books don’t leave a trail (except for the library’s internal system, which can be safeguarded) whereas ebooks (say, from Amazon) do.

Libraries are being (have been?) disintermediated by for-profit companies (204). Read: Amazon. Whereas librarians tend to care deeply about reader privacy, Amazon doesn’t. They sacrifice privacy for reader convenience and company profit. And now with the authoritarian turn here and elsewhere, it is even more concerning that companies would forfeit reader privacy, i.e. turn over reader habits and histories to law enforcement.

On serendipitous book discovery

The joy of unexpected discovery has enormous appeal to people of all ages and all walks of life. The library browsing experience is strongly associated with the concept of serendipity...New ideas and new connections between fields can be created as a result of these unexpected findings. (207)

That is how I found this very book, actually. And it was a joyful discovery. Not at my local public library, but at my Aunt and Uncle’s house for Christmas. I was talking to my family about book construction (binding, sewn signatures, trim size, etc.—everything but the words), and I pulled it off the shelf to use as an example. Only after that did I realize that the words themselves were of interest to me.

On libraries as a third space

Without the public spaces that libraries provide, the most vulnerable people in our society will not have safe, comfortable places to go access information, think, write, and learn. (209)

I like libraries as a “third place” for communities. I have often counted on libraries as my third place in Cincinnati—both the CHPL public library system and the Mercantile Library (which is “private” but quite affordable at ~$1/week for books, coworking space, yoga, events, etc.). If we move back to NYC I’d like libraries to continue being my third space. I liked my local Greenpoint branch of the Brooklyn Public Library when I lived there. There are 60-something BPL branches, so wherever you live there’s one a walk or bike ride away.

On Amazon et al

My primary fear about the future of libraries...is that those in the for-profit sector are working much more quickly and effectively to address many of these same problems, only with a profit motive rather than the public interest as their driver. And they have much more capital and talent devoted to the task. Right now, I’d put much greater odds on the programmers and graphic designers at Amazon, Apple, and Google than I would on those in the library community to figure out the next big thing and information and knowledge management. (212)

He cites counterexamples, too, of Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Carl Malamud (public.resource.org), Sue Gardner and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla), Aaron Swartz (Creative Commons, RSS, Reddit). But I get the sense that Amazon has only increased its dominance over books and publishing in the last decade.

...libraries could use a twenty-first-century Andrew Carnegie to invest in the digital equivalent of the Carnegie libraries of the analog era. (213)

These early philanthropists and their gifts remain controversial to this day. Some worry about accepting “tainted money” from rapacious capitalist to pay for public goods. Others fear the impact of the paternalism of the wealthy on our cities and towns… towns that accepted the Carnegie gifts had to commit to taxing themselves at a rate of 10% of the original gift to pay for upkeep of the building, books, and library staff salaries. (220-221)

As I read the book I wondered why Palfrey wrote it, and if he’d issue a call for funding. I care enough about libraries to donate and email/call my local representatives when a budget proposal calls for cuts. Earlier this year I was one of many to email our Ohio reps, and the budget cuts were removed from the bill. It felt good. I don’t know how much our grassroots pushback moved the needle, but it made me hopeful.

Everything but the words

Now that I’m writing and publishing my own book, I like to take note of a book’s construction. All the choices made outside of the writing itself—everything but the words. Reading Debbie Berne’s The Design of Books is helping me develop a discerning eye for such details.

I read the hardcover. It has a jacket, which I always take off. There are nine 32-page sewn signatures, so 288 pages if you include the front and back matter. The trim size feels a bit smaller than most hardcovers, like a novel you’d hold open with one hand leaning up against a tree in the park. The paper stock is the thin, rough sort they use for old literary novels (think: Penguin classics). And it’s “paper” colored, as in off white or sandy. As for typography, chapter titles and page numbers are set in sans serif. Serif body text. The cover title is set in two fonts split between two lines: a serif for “Biblio” and a sans serif caps-locked “TECH”, which I didn’t like visually but also because it’s ambiguous (is Bibliotech one word?). Cerulean blue endpapers complement the navy case wrap. Plus decorative white and blue head- and tailbands. Re word count, this book has a bit less than 300 words per page by my eyeballing, so call it 300, and it’s 230-some pages, so round down to 200 (because I rounded words per page up). That’s 60,000 words or so. I wonder who imposed that word count.