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Category Archives: Libraries

Long-overdue ebook availability update

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

It has been a while since I’ve looked at the total number of ebooks and audiobooks available in our library’s OverDrive system. Over a year, in fact! The figures are encouraging, though:

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425
August 2011 5,197 1,139 5,773 880 12,989
January 2012 6,271 1,208 11,560 1,543 20,582
April 2013 6,999 1,516 20,281 3,410 32,206

The growth is clearly in the ebooks, rather than audio books, which is unsurprising, as audiobooks are generally a lot more expensive.

I’m still very much a hybrid reader but do prefer to read books as ebooks if I have the option. When I read physical books I miss the option of tapping on a word to find out its meaning or of increasing the size of the text when I’m reading in low light levels or when my eyes are tired.

I recently re-read my own two books and found a few editing errors in both. Those have now been fixed. I’m working on a third Hawley Lodge book (with more of an historical angle to it) – but progress is slow due to a lot of other commitments at the moment. Watch this space!

Finding my next read…

22 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries

≈ Leave a comment

…is so much harder than it needs to be. I like the book recommendations from sites   like Goodreads and often use them to go hunting for a library book. Because the two libraries of which I’m a member also have access to ebooks, the first place I look is the online catalogue of the Ontario Library Service. But the book I’d like to read is only available to borrow as an ebook about one time out of ten, so then I have to go to the online library catalogue of Library 2 (the more convenient to visit of the two libraries) to see if they’ve got it, leaving Library 1’s online catalogue as the final resort if I can’t find it anywhere else.

It’s a time-consuming process and often a frustrating one. I don’t know what it is about the library catalogue software used in these small local libraries, but it is fairly clunky and hard to navigate. What I would really love would be to be able to register my membership of these libraries with my Goodreads account somehow and then have information about the holdings of the libraries (digital and physical) appear in the Goodreads website instead of having to schlep off and do all my searching on the three different, difficult, other sites.

Finding a book could be a lot simpler, I’m sure…

Library ebook availability update

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Libraries, Websites

≈ Leave a comment

This was originally just a short post to update the numbers of books available through our library ebook service here in Ontario. Then it grew a bit.

The last (approximately) six months have shown another big increase in the ebook fiction and non-fiction categories, with both nearly doubling.

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425
August 2011 5,197 1,139 5,773 880 12,989
January 2012 6,271 1,208 11,560 1,543 20,582

I’d be really interested to see some usage statistics on how many patrons are actually downloading books from these electronic library services. I imagine they’d show a similar steady increase.

UPDATE: Sometimes it’s useful to be friendly with a librarian. I chatted with the CEO of one of my local libraries about ebooks and Overdrive yesterday. This is a library in a small town, serving a population of only 1,800 people. The librarian was happy to share some of the statistics for use of OverDrive materials with me.

The results are interesting. I was expecting to see a steady growth in take-up by patrons of the OverDrive option for checking out books over the course of 2011. The figures don’t really support that expectation.

New users of library ebook system, 2011

There’s the expected post-Christmas spike in January and December, but the graph doesn’t reflect a rapid take-up of ebook borrowing in this particular library. 28 new readers in total.

The usage of OverDrive shows the sort of growth I would have expected:

Items borrowed through OverDrive

But the numbers involved are still very low: a total of only 249 items for the whole of 2011.

It’s very hard to measure the value of access to OverDrive for a small library. It costs around 10% of the library’s acquisition budget to provide patrons with access to the service. But with only around 30 active borrowers, it seems only to be being used by less than 2% of the library’s potential user population. For people like me who don’t live close to a library and who have the tools and skills to use it, the ability to download books from service is greatly appreciated. But with budgets getting increasingly tight for libraries, the cost is not all that easy to justify. It doesn’t help that there is no alternative to the OverDrive system: there isn’t any competing service which might help to drive down the price.

The other aspect which I found interesting from our library’s statistics was the demand for items in OverDrive. The graph below shows the number of unique individuals who borrowed items from that one library in each month of 2011. It ranges from two to nine people.

Patrons with items checked out

Compare that graph with the one below, which shows how many unique individuals were waiting for items in each month. This never dropped below four and got as high as 13 in January 2011. The access the library pays for is not unique access to materials for our library: we are sharing that access with other libraries all over Southern Ontario. Consequently, users of each of the libraries in this system are competing with each other for library materials in a way which would be much less likely to happen in real libraries. More than once, I’ve discovered that a popular item in OverDrive has 68 people waiting for it, while the physical copy is there in my local library, on the shelf.

People waiting for items

So now I’m torn. As a tech-savvy user of libraries, I adore being able to get hold of ebooks (relatively) easily. But I know that many other library users find the process of downloading books through OverDrive to be too complicated to attempt. Librarians are rightly worried about the effect of providing this access on their book budgets and on their services in general.

I think what I’d like to see is the ability for small libraries to build their own ebook collections, rather than having to use a centralised service like OverDrive. I’d also like to see those collections contain items of local interest and by local authors: materials that are never going to be picked up by the big publishers but which are significant to the library’s immediate community. It bothers me that the librarians’ skills of selecting, curating and sharing materials are being bypassed by centralised, standardised services which don’t allow for any variation and which don’t necessarily provide the best service for the public (those waiting times for ematerials are only going to grow as more people use the service).

Ebook availability (and classification)

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries

≈ 1 Comment

Time for one of my periodic spins around the virtual bookshelves of the Ontario public library system to report on the state of our ebook collection. Here’s a table showing the growth in availability of ebooks since December last year.

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425
August 2011 5,197 1,139 5,773 880 12,989

 
It’s pretty impressive, with the number of books almost doubling in that time period. Also interesting is that the number of fiction ebooks has now surpassed the number of fiction audio books. One thing I’ve noticed about my own use of ebooks is that I’m more likely to pick up non-fiction titles as ebooks than I would in the physical library. I don’t think I’ve ever browsed the non-fiction shelves in the smaller library that I use on a regular basis, and in the larger one I’ve only ever looked at one or two sections. In the virtual library I fall across books that sound interesting more often, even if sometimes the classification seems a bit odd (Zombies: A Hunter’s Guide seems an unlikely candidate for the section on ‘History’, for example, while Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is classified as ‘Non-Fiction’. Or perhaps I’ve become a bit out of touch with the world and it’s my perception that’s the problem. Maybe zombies and sea monsters really are roaming the earth and oceans…).

More stats

25 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries, Websites

≈ 1 Comment

I’ve been diligently adding the books I’ve read since I’ve been living in Canada to LibraryThing and (more recently) Goodreads. I should probably just plump for one or the other, but each has features that the other lacks. I find LibraryThing more intuitive to navigate and Goodreads has some cool elements such as the ability to display statistics on your reading habits.

My Goodreads stats for 2010 and 2011 tell an interesting story. I’ve read the same number of books in two months of this year as I read in the whole of 2010. A large percentage of them have been ebooks, read on the ereader I got for Christmas, although there are a fair few library books in there, too. With the exception of the two Percy Jackson books, which I bought as a gift for my daughter, I haven’t paid for any of them: I’ve either downloaded them from free ebook sites, used coupons from Smashwords authors or borrowed the books in audio or ebook form from the public library’s OverDrive site. I was dismissive of audio books in an earlier post, but I’ve listened to three since then, mainly because they weren’t available in any other format through OverDrive. Listening to an audio book has turned out to be a pleasant way of making a usually private activity into a more social one: my husband and I are enjoying listening to a book together in the evenings.

More books have become available through OverDrive since I first posted about it at the end of December. The figures are now:

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425

An increase in availability of all content of 143%, then, and a particularly big rise for the ebooks, with a 278% rise in available fiction titles. No wonder I’m reading so much…

Ebook quality

28 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Editing, epublishing, ereading, Free reads, Libraries

≈ Leave a comment

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

She was watching them and biting her Up.

…from the sideboard as! I held their attention…

Ill work on Terence and make another stab at the diary.

“J think he lost the battle because of his hemorrhoids.”

Kõiõing-neeaies as sne spoêe.

Authors of self-published books are often criticised for poor editing. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to edit one’s own writing – this is one area where a book that goes through the traditional publication process is almost always going to have an advantage. Almost always…

The examples above are not from a self-published book. They’re from the first ebook I borrowed from my public library (via the OverDrive service I discussed the other week). In theory, from a book which has undergone a rigorous quality-control procedure. Oh yeah?

They’re clearly errors which have crept in through an OCR (optical character recognition) process. Which has been poorly checked. Now I haven’t paid anything for this book, having read it through the library service, but if this is the same file that is made available for purchase, then I would have paid between $6.07 and $7.99 for it. And would have been even more annoyed by the mistakes. It’s not just self-published books which need careful proof-reading.

The book is an excellent read, by the way, despite the distracting errors.

Libraries and ereading

29 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries

≈ 4 Comments

I’ve been watching the rise of the ebook with interest over the last few years. When you’ve made a work available to the various ereader formats, you can’t help but get sucked into the ereading universe. I could easily see the appeal of carrying many books around on one small device and, having read a few books on my computer, I could see why an e-ink screen would make for a more pleasurable experience (not to mention the ability to comfortably read in bed or in front of the fire).

This was the Christmas when I finally succumbed to the fascination and acquired an ereader. As I’ve already explained in this blog, I’m not a big buyer of fiction books for myself – I rely heavily on the public libraries for my reading habit. One of the big advantages of an ereader was going to be the huge amount of free reading material that’s available online, through Project Gutenberg and services like Feedbooks and Smashwords. I was also excited by the possibility of renting more up-to-date ebooks from the two public library systems to which I belong.

Well, I was excited until I started examining their stock. One of the libraries uses Overdrive, which is run co-operatively as part of a big investment in Ontario libraries. The other uses NetLibrary. Here’s what they offer, in terms of content:

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
Overdrive 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
NetLibrary 1,950 2,903 4,953

I don’t know how many books the physical libraries hold, but according to a 1990s paper by Moya K. Mason, the median number in Ontario libraries is around 35,000 books. So there’s a long way to go before the number of ebooks rivals the number of physical items in our libraries.

UPDATE: I’ve done a bit more digging and have discovered that the smaller of my two local libraries (the Overdrive library) holds 23,000 items, while the bigger library (the one that uses NetLibrary) holds 80,000. So it’s quite a significant difference in percentage terms, with the equivalent of 27% of the stock of the small library available in ebook form, but only 6% of the larger one.

Now, if I did a lot of driving, then the audio books would be great. But I don’t, and it’s quicker to read than it is to hear a book. The number of items of interest to me in these collections is therefore reduced even further (but obviously that will be different for many other people, that I’m happy to accept). It’s early days, still, and I hope that these numbers will improve over the coming months and years. I’ve provided them here as a benchmark for future comparisons.

I’d like to make a few observations on the usability of these services. Of the two, I found Overdrive more intuitive to navigate. As you can see from the table, I couldn’t easily separate non-fiction from fiction titles in NetLibrary. This is fairly fundamental – in most public libraries there’s a clear physical division between the two. But in NetLibrary I wasn’t able to simply divide up the stock in this way to get an estimate of the number of fiction and non-fiction titles. Unless you know what you’re looking for, NetLibrary isn’t easy to navigate, generally. Overdrive was definitely superior in this respect, with books browsable by popularity, as well as by title, author and category.

In Overdrive, I quickly found three books that I’ve been wanting to read. None of them were instantly available and there is a limit to the number of books that I can ask to reserve (three). In each case, there are between 12 and 23 people ahead of me in line. I’ve no idea what that means, in practical terms. There is a standard loan period of two weeks (this is the usual loan period for the equivalent real-world library, too), which can be altered to three weeks in the Overdrive system. But I don’t know if that means I’ll have to wait six to 12 months for the books I’d like, or if the system has more than one licence for each of those books, which would mean that they should become available sooner. Time will tell (and these physical restrictions seem bizarre, frankly, when we’re talking about a few kilobytes of data, not an actual book). At least there were some books that I knew I’d want to read. I didn’t find any in the NetLibrary collection (it doesn’t have copies of Stieg Larsson’s books?!), even when searching for the three books I’d ordered from Overdrive.

By means of experiment, I’ve also placed a hold on one of the ebooks I’ve ordered in printed book form from the library. It’ll be interesting to see whether it’s the ebook or the dead-tree version that arrives first.

I don’t want to see our public libraries closing, and I think that if they get their act together in relation to ebooks, then they’ll become relevant to a whole section of society that simply sees libraries as irrelevant to their current way of life. In a world where many ereaders allow users to buy the book they want instantly from the Internet, where is the appeal of waiting for a long, artificially-created line of people to download a digital file before you can (apart from the financial one)? And if the file isn’t even there in the first place, then they won’t take the time to look for one, next time. I know it’s early days, but this is key to the future success of libraries. It’s a chance they can’t afford to miss.

Instant gratification and libraries

24 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Libraries, Writers

≈ Leave a comment

I was delighted to find that one of the local libraries I use has at last got its catalogue on the Internet. (There’s a misplaced apostrophe in its banner but I’m hoping that is the responsibility of an IT person, rather than the library’s staff!) The library itself is small and serves an equally small town of around 2,000 people. The other library service I use is much bigger, with five branches and around 25,000 potential users. Their catalogue has been online for a number of years.

Both sets of libraries are excellent and I find their services invaluable. If I can’t find a particular book, then I can order it through inter-library loan and get it pretty quickly. Now that both catalogues are online I can easily check from home whether a particular book is in the library and physically on the shelf. Which is a fantastic thing to be able to do, don’t you think? A far cry from the old days of card-catalogues and having to visit the library to find out such things.

Today I made use of this new facility to check on the availability of two books: Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Both books have had a fair bit of hype about them recently and eventually the hype filters through to me. In the larger library service, there’s a 19-day wait for the Gilbert book and an even longer one for the Larsson one (44 days). In the small library both books are showing as ‘available’ and I’ll be there when it opens tomorrow to get my hands on them. Hooray for tiny library services!

I only really heard about Eat, Pray, Love today, when I arrived, through a winding and distraction-strewn route at Shannon Rigney Keane’s blog and her post Olé to You Nonetheless, which introduces Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creative genius. It’s a great talk and I’m really glad to have found out about it. What a wonderfully funny and intelligent woman Elizabeth Gilbert is. I wouldn’t normally have picked up a book with the word ‘pray’ in the title, but having heard Elizabeth’s talk, I figured that it wasn’t going to be the sort of book I assumed it would be. (Forget covers, there’s a whole lesson here about not judging a book by its title, too.)

Anyway, the point I think I’m trying to make here, very slowly, is that within a few short minutes I went from thinking ‘I might enjoy that book’ to finding out that the library had it on the shelf. Tomorrow (unless I’m very unlucky and someone checks it out in the next hour) I’ll have the book in my hand. That is very close to instant gratification, I would say. And yet one of the arguments that people seem to be making about public libraries is that we don’t need them because we can get everything instantly from the Internet. And sure enough, I could download a copy of the Larsson book from Kobobooks.com for $7.99 and the Gilbert one for $10.49.

$18.48 for two digital files (which will be read just once) RIGHT NOW. Or $0 for two solid volumes tomorrow morning (I will be in the town anyway, so there is no additional cost for fuel to get there). For me, it’s an easy choice. I am always happy to pay for a book that I know will be read more than once and which I can see on my shelf (cookery and gardening books fall into this category) but for everything else (all my ephemeral reading), the library (or a free ebook) will win nearly every time. And in the future, as more people get ereaders and libraries get access to ebooks for their patrons, it will be possible to get to that content even more quickly. Next time you want a book, investigate the library option as well as the online ordering one. You might be pleasantly surprised by how quickly (and reasonably) you can get what you’re looking for.

Libraries are a fabulous resource and are increasingly under threat of cuts or closure. Use them or lose them.

Free ebook

The Roman and the Runaway

Ebook: $2.99

The Viking and the Vendetta

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