The e-books is dead! Long live the e-book!

Photo credit: cehwiedel

As quick as we are to declare the death of print and the ascendancy of the e-book, it seems that we are quicker to rush to the gallows of the e-book the moment sales begin to falter.  Or at least that's what I got from Nicholas Carr's most recent review of the state of e-books: "Don't Burn Your Books--Print Is Here to Stay." 

Carr takes a look at some of the recent Pew surveys about e-reading habits, and sales figures for popular e-readers and concludes that readers have decided their Kindles are only good for hiding copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, and that really they'd rather be playing video games on their tablets, or guiltily sniffing the ink between two hard covers of a Pulitzer Prize winner.

While he's not totally wrong, I think that his arguments largely miss the point of why we should care about whether people read a digital or a print text. What's worse, his article reeks of a snobbery that is frankly unhelpful when we talk about the reading public.  Really, what we should be concerned about is not how folks are consuming texts, or whether they're reading the "right" texts--but whether folks are reading at all, and getting anything out of what they read (be that information, titillation, enlightenment, connection, empathy, or thrills).

Based on the sales of genre fiction versus literary fiction and non-fiction, Carr points out something that several Bookaneers presented on and blogged about back in 2010 (please don't watch the video of our conference presentation, because it's embarrassing, just know that it's there): that we read differently for different purposes, and that reading for information and reading for narrative require different technologies (see also Freeda's post about ideal e-books for academic reading).

While Carr chalks up the popularity of genre fiction in e-book format to the shame that he expects readers to feel about "the kind of light entertainments that have traditionally been sold in supermarkets and airports," I would attribute it instead to the addictiveness of  the only novels that most people are reading.  Romance novel addicts will tell you that they read them as fast as they can get them, and if the Amazon marketplace is closer than the supermarket, then they're going to read even more, even faster. Furthermore, even if readers wanted to read things like, say, textbooks on their e-readers, they can't, because the makers of both e-readers and e-books have utterly failed to adapt their technologies to anything other than linear, narrative reading.

There is a consistent conflation in Carr's piece between e-readers and e-books, and it makes for a muddied analysis.  It makes perfect sense to me that e-readers will disappear as single-use technologies when tablets have become their equal in portability and readability and their superior in versatility.  But just because we're not buying Kindles anymore that doesn't mean that we will be reading any fewer digital texts, or any more print texts.

True, paper books are a real pleasure to read.  The codex, as a technology, has had hundreds of years to adapt perfectly to our hands; our eyes; and the way that our brains access, interpret, and recall information.  There are many good reasons why we should keep reading books in print, but until we face the fact that digital texts will coexist with, and perhaps supplant printed texts, we can't focus our energy on what really matters: getting texts (digital or print) that suit our reading habits and needs.  Who cares whether e-reader manufacturers are making or losing money on our reading (because that's what these past 5 years of e-reader boosterism really comes down to, right?)?  What we should care about is getting high-quality, abundant, low-cost, accessible reading materials into our own hands and the hands of our students.

More on the value of libraries

These ideas must be floating around the ether right now. Last week I wrote a post about the persistent narrative of doom and demise of the library, in response to a similar post by Barbara Fister at Library Babel Fish. Now today, First Monday has released its latest issue, including this article by Jessa Lingel, "Occupy Wall Street and the myth of the technological death of the library." Lingel writes,

What we see here is that some of the very tools that have been hailed as signaling the demise of libraries (mobile devices, the Internet) are in fact being used to create an enduring record of what goes into the library. Here, tools of digital media are not exposing the irrelevance of libraries, but instead offer the means of developing it into a complex, sophisticated and digitally–accessible entity.

She goes on to discuss how the People's Library at Occupy Wall Street, and libraries in general, can reflect, instill, and reinforce the values of their community not just through the collection but also through the policies and decisions they make.

Returning to Shera’s ideas that libraries are a reflection of a community’s ethics and values, it makes sense that a movement founded on (at least the ideals of) democracy, free exchange of ideas, egalitarianism and openness would create a library with a collection development policy, with an egalitarian work force and open lending policy.

After I wrote the post last week, I had a discussion with my partner about the value of policies in an organization, when/why/how they are created and also when/why/how they are enforced. This article is well worth the read, thinking about how the values of a library are reflected in all the decisions it makes, even seemingly innocuous ones about what kind of software to use or the length of lending periods.

Community College Online Learning

Bookaneers,

It was splendid to see most (Wesley, I'm looking at you!) of you last night. Since teaching is so much on our minds at the moment, I thought I'd share this Chronicle article about the progress and pitfalls of online courses at the community college level.

According to Rob Jenkins, a professor of English at a Georgia community college, the demand for higher completion rates for state and nationally funded colleges, has led to a push for more online courses. Online courses mean more options for folks who are fitting in school between jobs, or who have a hard time getting to campus, which, the received wisdom suggests, should increase completion. Jenkins disputes this claim, though, with a fairly compelling argument:

... online enthusiasts point to a 2009 "meta-analysis" by the U.S. Department of Education that, they say, shows that online courses are not only cheaper and more convenient but also better. The report looked at 99 individual studies of online learning conducted since 1996 and concluded that "on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."

Nice try. But that study has serious flaws, especially as it pertains to community colleges. In the "Effectiveness of Fully Online Courses for College Students: Response to a Department of Education Meta-Analysis," Shanna Smith Jaggers and Thomas Bailey of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University point out that only 28 of the 99 studies examined in the Education Department report focused on courses that were fully online. Furthermore, only seven looked at semester-long courses, as opposed to short-term online programs on narrow topics, "such as how to use an Internet search engine."...

Even more alarming, for those of us on the front lines at community colleges, is the fact that all seven of those studies were conducted at midsize or large universities, five of which were rated as "selective" or "highly selective" by U.S. News & World Report. Those are not exactly the kinds of places that typically attract at-risk students—the ones least likely to complete their degrees. Community colleges do attract such students, and in large numbers.

Moreover, in six of the seven studies, withdrawal rates were not even mentioned, meaning that the research gauged only how well students performed after completing the course. The studies didn't tell us anything about those students who didn't complete the course.

Two other studies by researchers at Columbia's Community College Research Center do shed light on the role that online courses play in college completion—and the news isn't exactly good.

The more recent of the two, as reported by The Chronicle in July 2011, "followed the enrollment history of 51,000 community-college students in Washington state between 2004 and 2009 [and] found an eight percentage-point gap in completion rates between traditional and online courses." That comes on the heels of a 2010 study that reached similar conclusions about community-college students in Virginia: "Regardless of their initial level of preparation ... students were more likely to fail or withdraw from online courses than from face-to-face courses. In addition, students who took online coursework in early semesters were slightly less likely to return to school in subsequent semesters, and students who took a higher proportion of credits online were slightly less likely to attain an educational award or transfer to a four-year institution." [for the full article, please visit the Chronicle of Higher Education and look for the article "Online Classes and College Completion"

In any class, using as many different means of delivering ideas and content as possible increases your chances of reaching students with different needs, resources, and learning styles. As we consider how to incorporate technology into our classes--or our classes into technology--we should make sure that we're opening up ways for students to access ideas, and persist with their studies, rather than closing them down. I believe that there are useful ways of taking our teaching online--but I also believe that it requires a careful consideration of the possibilities and limitations of our present technology--and the strength of the human connection that can come from face-to-face instruction.

Books that the Bookaneers are reading

Before we split up fro the summer, we bookaneers discussed a reading list that we would all work on, so that we had something productive to talk about at our first meeting of the new school year. I can't remember what I agreed to read, but I brought a copy of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it to New York with me, and I'm cracking through it. I wanted to share some of my impressions so far.

In the Winter, fellow bookaneers Rachel, Freeda and I, along with our buddy Caroline, worked on a project to study the Amazon Kindle as an educational delivery tool. (The video of a presentation that we did at the iEdge conference, along with a brief description of the project can be found here) As part of our research, we read a handful of books and articles that Tarleton Gillespie, a professor of communication at Cornell, recommended to us. (As another of many asides, we read the whole of Gillespie's Wired Shut for our reading group and loved it.) The Future of the Internet was part of that list.

For the Kindle project, we mainly focused on the chapter entitled "Tethered Appliances, Software as Service, and Perfect Enforcement" in which Zittrain talks through a number of examples of devices like the Kindle, TiVo or OnStar that have been designed to resist tinkering or repurposing, and the consequences and dangers of those devices.

This time around, I've started reading from the beginning, and I'm grasping more of what Zittrain sees as being at stake in that later chapter. According to his narrative of development and innovation, generativity--which he defines as the quality of an object to be built upon, adapted, and put to many different purposes--has been the distinctive quality of modern computing that has allowed for an explosion of development over the last 25 years. Zittrain describes play, cooperation and good faith as characterizing the communities of coding behind the internet, and how productive those communities have been as a result.

Unfortunately, generativity--which requires that a device be left open to change and therefore, in some ways, incomplete--has also been the quality that has made the modern computer vulnerable to exploitation from the outside. During the years when the PC was mainly the purview of the hobbyist, this vulnerability wasn't exactly dire. But, now that we live our lives largely mediated by computers, viruses, malware, bad code and a host of other vulnerability make the generative PC increasingly worrisome and unattractive.

This is Zittrain's explanation for why appliancized devices--computerized gadgets like the Kindle or the iPod that are designed for only one purpose and that are difficult to repurpose--are gaining in popularity. Zittrain is concerned about this trend for a number of reasons, which I won't go into until I've finished the book.

So far, friends, the book comes highly recommended. But why take my words for it, eh?

If you're interested in what else the bookaneers are reading, stay tuned, I'll post a reading list soon. And maybe by fellow bloggers can say a few words about what paper or ebook is on their bedside table at the moment.