Eli Neiburger, Associate Director of IT and Production at Ann Arbor Public Library, was the lead speaker at last week's E-Summit sponsored by the New Jersey State Library and the New Jersey Library Association. Here is a list of some of the main points of his speech:
1. Libraries are screwed, thanks to the growing popularity of ebooks and the restrictions that publishers place on them.
2. Ereaders are a flash in the pan, enjoying their moment of superiority in the marketplace.
3. People mistakenly use the term obsolete when what they really mean is outmoded; something becomes outmoded when it is no longer wanted in the marketplace because it has been replaced by a more efficient technology.
4. The audience for ereaders is different than the audience for smartphones.
5. Recreational readers are not interested in paper.
6. Kindle owners don't actually own the books they have downloaded; the content has only been leased.
7. The price of ebooks will drop to 99 cents.
8. In the future, the people who will make the most money are those who give their content away for free but thencharge for extras in the app stores and online; these additional products will be bought by an author's "superfans."
9. It is only a matter of time before we see ad sponsored books that will be given away free to the people who want to read them.
10. Publishing houses will go the way of ice houses.
His recommendations for libraries not to be screwed are as follows:
1. Build storage infrastructure - servers and technicians to take care of them - so that libraries will have the mechanisms in place to own rather than lease the content of the ebooks they pay for.
2. Make deals directly with those who hold the rights to the content that a library would like to own. He offered Barry Eisler and Amanda Hopkins as two authors who are successfully and profitably self publsihing.
3. Libraries should leverage the fact that they represent the aggregate buying power of the communities they represent.
4. Libraries should emphasize the unique content created by the people who live within the community that the library serves; libraries will therefore need to set themselves up as the place within the community where people can have access to the necessary tools to create and publish their own content.
5. Libraries should also provide a range of experiences that members of the community cannot get elsewhere.
Neiburger is an engaging and energetic speaker and his presentation was definitely one of the more upbeat talks about the future of libraries that I have heard in quite some time.
His comments were not so upbeat, however, if you happen to be in the publishing business.
I also hope Mr. Neiburger will accept my apology for spelling his name wrong in last week's post. I( need to take more to heart Lynne's advice about proofreading.
