How e-Books Could Smarten Up Kids and Stretch Library Dollars: A National Plan

I remember the poverty beat from my newspaper days eons ago in Lorain, Ohio -- a steel town near Cleveland -- where Toni Morrison once lived.

Believe me, I didn't see many welfare mothers with shelf after self of Dickens and the rest, or even romance novels. Today millions of children are still growing up in bookless homes. But suppose a well-stocked national digital library system existed for Americans of different ages, along with the means to encourage schoolchildren and others to use it. Among those benefiting:

• Students at small colleges without big budgets for either paper or electronic books.
• Workers who want to upgrade job skills.
• The elderly. In the future many baby boomers may face challenges of their own -- the inability to drive to the public library or read books of normal type size.
• People in cash-strapped library and school districts. With cost-savings in mind, a city council member in Los Angeles is already advocating e-books. "I just believe that with technology moving forward, we could save a great deal of money in not having to buy thousands of books each year when they could be made available online," a news account quotes Councilman Bernard Parks. He's off on some details, but yes, if nothing else, libraries shell out big bucks to store and manage paper collections. "E" could automate plenty.
• Writers and publishers who are suffering from slumping book sales and could well stand a little economic stimulus, in the spirit of the old Federal Writers Project.

Ideally the e-books would be just the start. Imagine blending the system into local schools and libraries, while letting states and localities tailor the national collection to their particular needs. Teach the teachers how to work the library system into their lessons. Getting e-books and other items online isn't enough by itself.

The key would be a full-service approach to help open up the digital library system even to technophobes. For example, we could promote the use of the right laptops and tablets suitable for reading -- even by people who normally were uncomfortable with computers. Slender Kindle-style tablets actually would be easier for many elderly people to use than large-print books. The latter books can be too heavy for the arthritic to hold. Instead of requiring government-issue gizmos for all, we could use the ePub e-book standard and otherwise make certain that a variety of machines would work with the national library collection.

But why not simply a "Kindle in every backpack"? In Florida Robert Kingett, a near-blind student who suffers from tunnel vision and other conditions, says the Kindle is just a useless slab of plastic for him. He hates the Kindles E Ink screen since it isn't as readable for him as a desktop monitor. But he might be very, very happy with zillions of additional books available on his existing desktop or laptop, particularly with text to speech enabled. That's what the right approach would make possible. Especially it could popularize devices such as book-friendly laptops that could be folded into tablets.

We could even cost-justify the digital library system by encouraging the use of the same hardware for tax documents and other paperwork, including health records. Imagine, too, the kick-start that this could give to newspapers. With the right hardware it would be more comfortable to read them at leisure rather than darting from Web page to Web page.

TeleRead, the above plan, is an evolving idea that I've advocated since 1992 in various forms in places ranging from the Washington Post to Computerworld, an MIT-published information science collection and TeleRead.org. Could the technology have finally caught up? I think so. It's the business details and others that we need to get straight. Library e-books are borrowable at thousands of public libraries. Trouble is, the collections are too small and don't address many people's needs -- especially those of children, who will respond better to books precisely matching their interests. Ask any literacy expert.

Other problems exist with library e-books today. Just last week the New York Times told how certain publishers were worried about getting proper payment for use of library e-books. Houses such as Simon & Schuster, which publishes Stephen King and Bob Woodward, are even shunning the library e-book market for this reason. But under TeleRead, there could be provisions for fair compensation based on the popularity of titles. A small telecommunications tax could pay for the system, and so could the cost savings from uses such as electronic forms. Significantly, America is spending hundreds of billions on telecommunications-related activities, many times the expenditures on books.

To keep TeleRead's cost down and reduce culture-war clashes, moreover, we could start out with education-related materials and books out of copyright and expand from there. The system could be carefully developed in steps in a way that did not pre-empt the private side -- I'd hate for government-related institutions to be the only sources of books. But they do have a role to play.

In 1967, the great poverty warrior himself, Lyndon Baines Johnson, said: "I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge -- not just a broadcast system but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can use. The country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital. A scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York. A famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspiration into some far-off classroom, so that no child need be neglected."

Exactly. TeleRead would be a meaningful start toward LBJ's goal. Hello, Barack? How about modernizing our creaky library infrastructure?

 

Comments

[SarahBolme]

A free International Children's Digital Library already exists on the Internet and can be accessed by anyone. The website is http://en.childrenslibrary.org/. Teachers, parents, librarians, and children can read digital children's books right on this website. The site hosts over 4,000 books for children three to thirteen years of age.

[davidrothman]

ICDL is a great cause, Sarah, and I'm delighted you mentioned it, but people should keep in mind that it's no replacement for a well-stocked national digital library system with millions of books for people of all ages.

Thanks,
David

[garyd63]

Here we find more of the same from readers who have read all their long lives. We're in for a surprise when young readers without the backgrounds in reading of those touting ebooks start moving their thumbs screen pages faster than their minds. they will be skimming and skipping though any work of fiction with subplots, unreliable narrators and demanding ideas. Long time books-on-the-page readers have worked hard and long to master reading skills totally foreign to a generation brought up on twittering.

[David Rothman]

Thanks, Gary. A few points in reply:

1. Display quality will keep improving--which should help.

2. A comprehensive strategy of the kind I described would train teachers to update their techniques for the era of e-books.

3. Young people are going to be screen-oriented whether we want them to be or not--so we might as well digitize books so they don't just do Facebook and Twitter and the rest.

4. TeleRead in the end would vastly increase the number of books available to young people and others--making it easier for them to find titles they actually wanted to read. The more reading they do--including the recreational variety--the better they will be as readers.

Thanks,
David Rothman

[garyd63]

Thanks, David. In response:

1. It’s hard for me to see how “display quality” translates into a deep reading experience. Better displays will mean more graphics and video, not more comprehension of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s haunting prose.

2. Get the teachers and then you can nail the students, right? Reading, as anyone who has thought a moment about it, is not a point and click exercise. It’s hard labor that turns into glorious work. Teachers need to know _this_, teach _this_.

3. “Young people are going to be screen-oriented whether we want them to be or not” . . . yeah, you’re right. So we can join them and add to the blank tide or recognize this as a moment of resistance, a time for back fires not coal oil on the flames.

4. We can only truly read one book at a time–the rest is the hollow satisfaction of the “completist.”

[Michael Pastore]

Bravo, Mr. Rothman!

In his vision for the future of ebooks, and open access to knowledge for everyone, David Rothman has been more than a decade ahead of his time.

Now that time has come: almost. Ebooks are continually in the news, and in the public consciousness. What is not yet understood, by enough folks, is the need for the open formats and free access that Rothman is championing. The closed systems of one or another particular ebook reading device are not giving us the major advantages of the genuine digital reading revolution -- just an iota more of convenience.

Michael Pasore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

[Karen McQuestion]

I like this writer's progressive take on the future of the ebook reader. Although this new technology is causing growing pains for the publishing industry, my hope is that once adjustments are made this will be a positive all around. I like the idea of ebooks benefitting students, libraries and those with vision problems. As a writer, I have my own selfish reasons for loving ebooks, and the Kindle in particular. In the past few months I've released three books on Amazon's Kindle, and have been amazed by the results. I've had excellent sales and great reader response. It's been a wonderful opportunity for me to get my work out into the world, and for readers to try a new author for little cost. I've heard from readers that they love the "sample" option of the device which enables them to read a few chapters free, with no obligation. This is an exciting time to be a reader and writer.

[kemstone]

I am 1000% in favor of this idea. In addition to all those societal benefits you mentioned, people could finally have tens of thousands of works of brilliant LITERATURE at their fingertips! I for one am salivating at the prospect. As an American living abroad, English books are hard to come by, and the only ones offered are usually political biographies or Dan Brown-type best-sellers. I can't get anything GOOD to read, and it boggles my mind that with all of the millions and millions of gigabytes of useless information on the internet, there is STILL practically nowhere to go if you want to read a good history book, biography, or classic novel!