Lots of schools and teachers and educators have been talking about it, but Cushing Academy in Eastern MA finally did it: replacing almost all of their library with e-books. For a lot of people, myself included, it’s a shock; especially some of the information from that article and from Cushing’s own site doesn’t make very much sense. After a few weeks of thinking about this though I guess I’ll try to actually verbalize what really bothers me.
It took me a while to parse the sentence “when they checked library records one day last spring only 48 books had been checked out, and 30 of those were children’s books”. The way the Boston.com article phrased it I could interpret it to mean “48 books were checked out last spring” or “at some point in time last spring, 48 books where checked out at the same time”. My guess is that most of those children’s books were taken out by faculty and staff. So this means that in a school of 450 only 20 books were taken out of the library at that point in time. When you just look at the numbers, that’s a huge problem.
In fact, when I first saw those numbers the image I saw was librarians who are completely out of touch with the students with an unsupportive faculty that never assigns proper research papers nor teach any form of research techniques and an administration who believes that tossing money into shiny things is the quickest way to get kids to stop playing World of Warcraft and start reading Tolstoy. That’s probably not true. Those numbers do not take into account reserved books for courses and major research projects that cannot be taken out nor do they consider the amount of reading students do outside of the library. Of course, many of those 48 books may also just be lost books that the borrower never read. The only thing that the numbers say is that on that specific day students did not take books out of the library.
And why not? My theory: before we look at digital books we need to actually take a look at book distribution. I think that students in general are still reading a good amount of books. With Amazon.com and many other online bookstores offering free shipping nowadays a student cooped up in a boarding school or a college in the woods or mountains have much better access to books beyond the libraries of the schools. Even if a school library buys a copy of Twilight or Harry Potter or a Dan Brown thriller or whatever popular literature kids want to read (and that decision is a major one in setting the tone of the library and the institution) students who want to read the book usually don’t want to wait until ten others are finished before them. And if the library is filled with books that students don’t want to read, can we fault them for not reading the books?
The way I see it, though, is that this shift is not focused on increasing the amount of reading done but to change the method of access to certain resources. That makes sense, since repackaging books in a shinier format probably won’t increase the amount of reading done by kids who don’t read. Books like encyclopedias and dictionaries have already been easily replaced by more searchable CD-ROMs a decade ago and journals being online make perfect sense, so it’s only logical to extend this into other non-fiction books and research materials. But my guess is that even folks are going to print a lot of this stuff out. E-ink technology is finally affordable but it still costs me over a thousand dollars if I want to have five books or papers spread out on my table. So if I wanted to take advantage of links and databases I’d do all my searching through digital means and then print everything I deem relevant out; just like how many academics do their research. I’d imagine that students would want to do the same if all their sources were electronic; alternatively they’ll need a lot of support on learning how to cross-reference several documents, read and type simultaneously, etc. effectively on a laptop screen.
The best thing about this venture that I can see is that they are replacing the stacks with new communal working spaces. The Cushing Academy library page details some of those spaces. Of course, it’s going to take much more money to maintain “cyber-carrels” and interactive classrooms than stacks of books. But I do see this, if cultured correctly, can be a great academic resource for a community. Comfy chairs for everyone. (Or, should that be cushy chairs?)
On the topic of comfort: is reading digital content comfortable? Even Cushing, with its grants and gifts and sizable endowment, can only afford a dozen or so Kindles. This means that over 400 students will be reading on monitors. You know, those things we tell kids not to sit too long in front of? I can’t help but think that this is a Brothers Bloom-like con job where the people who decided to go through with this are secretly getting kickbacks from the local optometrists.
Ultimately, this whole thing feels a little off but I’m glad that someone is taking the plunge to see how this goes. More importantly, I’m glad that I’m not that someone. I hope they actually figure this whole thing out—or at least figure out what not to do—because I’m sure that at some point in the future when all my qualms with e-books are dealt with by the market most everyone will be doing the same thing. And at that point I’d love to hear the folks from Cushing go “this worked and this didn’t”.
But until my students stop printing out the e-mails I send them I don’t think I’m going to jump into this whole digital library thing quite yet.
Wing :: Sep.20.2009 ::
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