Visiting BookExpo America (BEA) last week, it occurred to me that, on the question of whether an ebook is “sold” or “licensed,” many publishers are dead ringers for that little girl across the street.

I attended several of the panels on ebooks and libraries, including E-books From Libraries: Good For Authors?  and How The Douglas County Libraries Model Bypasses The Vendor System & Benefits Everyone. Overall they were positive, informative, progressing past many of the logjams of years past in search of data to drive decision making, and full of praise for OverDrive’s Big Library Read, the Big 6 pilots with NYPL and others, the Douglas County Model, and anything else that might provide that data.

But when it came to questions from librarians about things like interlibrary loan and/or resale of used ebooks, it was very clear from the responses that publishers consider this transaction a license—whether or not they used the word. They felt very comfortable saying that when libraries pay for an ebook, it doesn’t come with the right to do those things. But if it were a sale, libraries would have those rights, under the first sale doctrine. There might be, as per the ReDigi case, some hoops to jump through as to which technical mechanisms to accomplish them are permitted and which ones are not, but those would be matters for the courts to settle, not publishers. (For more on first sale, licensing, and ebooks, see “Licensed to Sell? IDPF Panel Tackles Tough Questions on Digital Content.”)

Yet when Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, referred to the transaction as a license, not a sale, publishers demurred. And Aiken supplied the reason, which had not previously been clear to my library-centric viewpoint. I knew that publishers were afraid that libraries would only buy one copy and loan it to everyone in the world, and that the sale of used ebooks weeded from library collections would erode the sale of new ones. But what I did not know is that publishers, according to Aiken, have to pay authors 50 percent for a license, and only 25 percent for a sale.

While obviously the specifics may vary from contract to contract, if Aiken’s example is even close to representative, that provides a giant financial incentive for publishers to classify a transaction which sends ebooks to libraries in exchange for money to publishers as a “sale” when facing authors, and the exact same transaction as a “license” when facing libraries.

And that’s not okay in my book. I don’t really have a strong opinion on whether this transaction should be considered a sale or a license. But I strongly believe that it needs to be one or the other, not some kind of weird hybrid that offers publishers all the advantages and none of the costs of both, to the disadvantage of other parts of the publishing ecosystem.

I don’t want to derail this new, better détente we’ve got going lately. Publishers have finally decided to play with us, and that’s great. But they still need to play fair.

In a brief aside, he said “under the current law, libraries are pretty much doomed in the ebook case.” Rosenblatt’s argument was essentially that, unless libraries gain some sort of legal leverage with publishers—specifically, a 21^st century overhaul of First Sale Doctrine—the field’s long-term prospects with ebooks and other popular digital media don’t look promising.

In light of recent developments, “doomed” is probably too strong an adjective. With Simon & Schuster’s pilot program announcement in April, all of the big six publishers are now either selling ebooks to libraries or are exploring the possibility. Hachette recently resumed licensing frontlist ebook titles to libraries. Califa this month launched its proprietary ebook platform Enki, which will allow hundreds of libraries in California, and soon Kansas, to host and manage ebooks on their own servers. (Itself the topic of a BEA panel on the Douglas County Model, which featured, among others, a representative of Impelsys, which is building a solution to allow smaller libraries to more easily do so.) And there are plenty of small presses and authors willing to license/sell ebooks to libraries on far more generous terms than those currently offered by any of the big six.

But despite a bit of semantic overreach, Rosenblatt has a point. With licensing models, publishers retain control over content even after a library has paid for it. Terms can be changed, subscription prices can be raised, and in many cases libraries can’t do much about it, other than comply if they want to continue to provide access to a resource. “Libraries lend ebooks by the good graces of publishers,” Rosenblatt said.

Publisher-controlled resale

Rosenblatt was joined on the panel by Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild; John Ossenmacher, founder of ReDigi, an online marketplace for pre-owned digital content; and moderator Joe Wikert, former chair of the recently disbanded Tools of Change conference. Their presentations and discussion focused primarily on the consumer market, and never explicitly circled back to how the current state of digital copyright law impacts libraries. But their discussion nonetheless had some discouraging bearing on libraries’ situation: Aiken and Rosenblatt both argued that a first sale doctrine for digital content would enable a resale market that would inevitably destroy the value of that digital content.

Ossenmacher did gently chide the publishers in attendance over dense licensing agreements that few consumers read, but then went on to argue that most consumers are fine with licensing arrangements, and would just prefer more honesty from content providers.

“When someone goes to get an ebook that they want to buy and read, and they click through that [licensing agreement] and say ‘I Agree’ without reading it, they don’t really know what they’re agreeing to, one. And two, they feel like they’re being tricked,” Ossenmacher said. “If I don’t own it, do a Netflix deal, do some other kind of deal and let me know I’m renting it, tell me I’m streaming it, and that’s fine with me, too.”

One might expect Ossenmacher to be a staunch advocate of a new, modernized version of First Sale for digital content, considering that ReDigi is a platform that allows consumers to buy and resell digital files originally purchased from iTunes. The company recently lost a copyright infringement case brought by Capitol Records. Yet he argued that publishers had an opportunity to beat the government to the punch on this issue. By creating their own resale markets, publishers could ensure that they get a cut every time a file changes hands.

“Capture the secondary market,” he said. “Capture it. It’s yours, it’s your authors’. The ReDigi model, and the model that we believe in… is that everybody should share in the secondary market. The publisher should get a huge percentage of that sale; the author should get a percentage of that sale.”

Ossenmacher does believe there should be a model for digital content ownership, albeit one in which content producers still control how and where that content can be resold, and in ReDigi’s case what, specifically, that content can be exchanged for.

Testing limits

The panel, and the negative view that seemed to prevail regarding First Sale in the digital era, got me thinking about a story I covered in February, regarding a successful Roku lending program at the Ephrata Public Library (EPL) in Pennsylvania. EPL purchased two of the streaming devices, along with monthly consumer subscriptions to Hulu Plus and other content for each Roku, to lend to patrons. EPL Executive Director Penny Talbert described the program as fulfilling a component of the library’s mission by educating patrons about new technology. The devices and their associated subscriptions also enabled patrons to access streaming-only content, and thousands of shows and movies that weren’t available via EPL’s DVD collection.

At best, lending a Roku outfitted with a few paid subscriptions falls into a licensing gray area similar to the one occupied by pre-loaded Kindles. At worst, the lending program could potentially violate the licensing agreements of Roku, the subscription providers, and the content creators who had licensed a show or movie to those subscription providers.

That’s quite a thicket of contract law to wade through over a lending program involving one gadget. Yet as new technologies emerge, as streaming displaces the use of DVDs, and as the popularity of ebooks continues to grow, does anyone really expect content licenses to become less complex, or for publishers and manufacturers to consider libraries when they compose their legalese? What risks are libraries taking when they assume that the 100 year-old doctrine applies to any digital content when the terms are unclear?

Until there is a legislative decision on First Sale “everything is just getting murkier and murkier…. Even when we have court decisions, they don’t apply to the entire country, and courts in different areas often contradict each other. So it doesn’t always help clarify things to get a decision in court,” Gretchen McCord, former President of the Texas Library Association and attorney practicing privacy and copyright law, said in a conversation about the Roku program a few weeks after the story published.

In many cases, libraries are in a relatively safe position, she said. Goliath v. David court cases don’t come across well from a public relations standpoint, so a corporation would have to feel sufficiently threatened by a library program to risk public backlash, court costs, and the real possibility that the court might rule against them, setting a legal precedent that negatively affects their licensing agreements. A program loaning out pre-loaded Kindles or Rokus at an individual library probably won’t meet that standard.

“The question is at what point, if any, does the owner think that the stakes are high enough to make it worthwhile?” McCord said.

Future of First Sale

In March, the Supreme Court resolved the Kirtsaeng v. Wiley case, ruling that First Sale doctrine “applies to copies of a copyrighted work lawfully made abroad. Many librarians viewed the ruling as a victory. After that result, some members of the Owners’ Rights Initiative argued that the time may be right to press the digital First Sale issue, noted Carrie Russell Director of the Program on Public Access to Information at the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. They were a minority.

“Most of the members of that coalition—ALA is a member—were not interested in digital First Sale,” Russell said. “They really didn’t think that it was doable in a legislative fashion.” Prevailing opinion was “more along the lines of let’s wait and see what the rights-holders do to try and fix their concerns with Kirtsaeng. We want first sale as we have it to stay the same.”

Pushing for new legislation in this area presents risks. If new laws are created regarding the ownership and licensing of digital content, there’s always the potential that those new laws could put libraries in an even worse position.

“It’s always very risky to consider copyright legislation, unless you have members of the committees that really understand copyright law and are not party to the Motion Picture Association [of America] or whatever. Because it’s very, very political,” Russell said. The current Copyright Act took over 20 years to write, she added. “There’s absolutely no way that [legislators] would say ‘Digital First Sale, great!’ and not give something to the rights holders.”

Russell said that most ALA members seem more interested in having access to a publisher’s entire catalog, and being able to transfer a licensed ebook title to a different vendor’s platform when they need to. Rather than a new, concrete definition of digital ownership, many are content with licensing models, as long as they can perform these types of basic functions that would be a matter of course under first sale.

“We’re probably going to get there in terms of getting everything we want with regard to maintaining the file, but it might not be full-blown digital first sale,” she said.

Any additional clarity with digital rights for libraries would certainly help. For example, a library in Oregon recently sought Russell’s help after lawyers from ASCAP, the music performance royalties organization, contacted the library and said that they would need to purchase a license for the music they were playing during story time.

“You don’t need to sign a license,” she told them. “Clearly this was fair use, and kind of ridiculous. But here’s the rub. Say someone’s playing music for story time that they got from iTunes… There’s a license agreement that says that the music can only be played for personal use… Technically, it’s a contract violation.”

To Rosenblatt’s original point, libraries aren’t doomed by this transition, but the field will likely remain in contract law limbo for quite some time.

Day : World Book Night by
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31403417@N00/6984068458/

Last night I celebrated World Book Night (WBN) by handing out 20 copies of one of my favorite books, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, adjacent to the subway entrance at New York City’s Union Square. (For those who aren’t familiar with World Book Night, volunteers give out one of a select list of free titles, hoping to reach those who don’t regularly read. In 2012, World Book Night saw over 80,000 people, 25,000 of them in the U.S., give out more than 2.5 million books.)

Objectively speaking it didn’t take me long at all to give out my copies—my box was emptied in time for me to attend the World Book Night kickoff party across the park at Barnes & Noble, if I hadn’t needed to get home to dinner. But subjectively speaking, it seemed to take much longer, and presented a capsule case study in reasons for, and methods of, rejection. Here are a few of the things I learned.

• The word “free” actually hurts, especially if said first. As soon as people heard it I could see their body language shutting down and their shoulders squaring to push past. “Would you like a book for World Book Night?” was much more effective, even though people then had to ask “Is it free?”

• Author name recognition was powerful: people who recognized Neil Gaiman’s name and said so almost invariably took the book. (The exception being one guy whose was going to take it until his partner told him they already had a copy.)

• Everyone who said they recognized the title, however, did not take the book because they’d already read it.

• The single most powerful influencer that convinced people to take the book was seeing someone else take the book. If I convinced one person, four or five others who saw it would follow in rapid succession. Otherwise, 10 or 20 in a row might go by without taking an interest. I have a hunch that this is in part because they observe that taking a book is not followed by a sales pitch or request for contact information, but it could just be following the bellwether.

• Standing the book up so that people could look at it without having to interact with me was effective.

• I have an impression that African American women were the most likely to say yes, but I didn’t keep a count and 20 is a small sample.

• I might as well not have bothered offering them to people wearing earbuds; not one person who wore them took the book. Larger, more self-evident signage might have changed that, but I doubt it.

• By far the biggest obstacle was people’s impression that there must be a catch or a problem with anything given away for free. One person stated this explicitly and it was evident in many other people’s responses.

Such people usually found the information that multiple publishers had donated books reassuring; I think because it moved the giveaway into the familiar realm of “commercial sample”, which is a comprehensible motivation and therefore trustworthy. (I didn’t mention the publishers by name, so this isn’t a brand thing, but they may also have felt that large commercial entities are easier to hold accountable and/or less likely to be suffering from extremism or mental imbalance.)

• Only one person asked what the book was about. I think this reflects my choice of location—most of the passersby were entering the subway, and while there was plenty of room for them to step aside and chat without blocking traffic, they were in goal-oriented mode and did not want to do so. On the bus to that location, where there was time for a more leisurely back and forth, someone did ask (and considered and ultimately rejected the book, which was claimed by another rider on the basis of the conversation).

• Not one person indicated that they’d heard of World Book Night. Though interestingly, several people in the bus conversation knew that it was Shakespeare’s birthday and conjectured that that was the reason for the choice of date.

My takeaway for what might increase the number of potential recipients who are willing to take a book in future basically amounts to: build up World Book Night’s visibility as a brand. While some people did reject the book on the grounds that they don’t like books, or didn’t think they would like this book in particular, or were just busy or in a hurry and didn’t want any distraction, their numbers were dwarfed by the number who believed that being offered something came with strings attached—whether that be an attempt to win their vote, their religious conversion, their donation, or something else.

The more World Book Night is established in their minds, it seems to me, the more likely they are to drop that mistrust and simply consider whether they want the book. And, keeping in mind Ned Potter’s recent column about not expecting marketing to yield instant results, it seems to me that since World Book Night givers are the major touch point where members of the public are exposed to the concept, that the givers’ materials—from the editions themselves to the boxes they come in and the signs and promotional materials they come with—should be designed for maximum WBN visibility, not necessarily intended to pay off in a successful hand-off on first viewing, but to stick in the mind so that next year, and the year after, WBN givers are more likely to be recognized.

1. Turning them into New Books
   

   People’s Library Book

   In Richmond, VA, The People’s Library is a collaborative art project to create 100 handmade books of personal history. The Richmond Public Library helped collect discarded books to be recycled into paper, then bound into books with prompts inside them. They’ll be added to the library’s permanent collection, and patrons can check them out and respond to the prompts.

2. Turning them into Art
   In Bath, England, the library found a new use for weeded books that don’t sell. Patrons collect a book and turn it into an art contest entry with the help, if they like, of a series of library workshops. The resulting art projects are exhibited at the central library and online and the public votes for their favorites; the winner in each category receives a free ereader.
3. Fixing Them
   For 40 years, Georgia’s Hall County Library System has partnered with the National Library Bindery to restore old books and Biblesbelonging to library patrons. Repairs take about two months, and patrons are charged for the service.
   

   One of last year’s winners from the Bathnes library book art contest

4. Turning Them Into Furniture
   An oldie but a goodie: a reference desk made of books in a Dutch library.
5. Turning Them into Fundraisers
   Recycled Reads, the Austin Public Library’s used bookstore, upcycles old books and media into crafts and sells the results.

So last week, when I had the opportunity to attend a launch event for what was billed as the first-ever NFC-enabled print book, I was intrigued. (Ed. Note 2/1/2013: Craig Tadlock, founder of NFC hardware and software developer GoToTags wrote to inform me that during November 2011, Simon & Schuster imprint Atria shipped the first 1,000 copies of Gary Schwartz’ The Impulse Economy: Understanding Mobile Shoppers and What Makes Them Buy with NFC-enabled stickers on their front covers.)

“This technology is capable of transforming media,” Patrick Meyer, futurist and author of Steve Jobs and the World of Mobile, and Apps the Inside Scoop (a 2 in 1 book) told the group gathered for the launch. As a marketing consultant, Meyer has worked with major Fortune 500 companies including Coca-Cola, Ford, and Proctor & Gamble, and many of the uses he described for NFC were marketing oriented. Kraft, for example, recently ran a pilot test using “shelf talkers” in front of Nilla Wafers displays at a handful of U.S. supermarkets. Tap your NFC enabled phone on the shelf talker, and an interactive cookie, and then a dessert recipe, would appear on your smartphone screen. According to Meyer, Kraft was impressed with the results. The thousands of people who used the shelf talker spent almost 50 seconds interacting with the ad and the recipe.

Similarly, an NFC chip on the cover of Meyer’s book allows users to access a video interview with Meyer simply by tapping the book with their phone. Although the technology itself is a closer cousin to RFID, in terms of these types of applications, NFC could be described as a much faster, much simpler version of the QR code.

The book itself offers a snapshot of current trends in mobile apps, mobile technology, and social media, using Steve Jobs and the rise of the iPhone and iPad as an anchor. Topics ranging from product design to marketing to trend forecasting to competition between major tech corporations are broken down into single page summaries with lots of graphs, photos, and logos. It could make a good easy reading gift for someone interested in tech trends, and the apps portion of the book holds several interesting surprises. However, the organization of the title won’t make the book useful as a reference text, and in such a fast-moving field, much of the information inside could quickly become dated.

Yet Meyer’s use of NFC in a print book raises interesting possibilities. As he mentioned during his presentation, these chips could quickly take users to updates on the text, or allow them to access multimedia much more quickly than QR codes or even augmented reality apps. Or, as Meyer has already done, they can be used to help market a title, giving users a quick hit of information that will motivate them to open up the cover and read more.

I think we can all agree: First Sale is important.
With important fundamental concepts, it’s often a useful exercise to distill them down to their essence, in order to better understand them and better explain them to others.

Which is why I was excited to see the release yesterday of an excellent primer on First Sale [PDF] from the Library Copyright Alliance, via Brandon Butler of ARL (@ARLPolicy on Twitter and Policy Notes on Tumblr).

It’s an elegant distillation of First Sale, and gets at some of the issues currently being considered by the Supreme Court in the Kirtsaeng v. Wiley case.

Jokingly, I said on Twitter that the one-page document was great and all, but could he do the same thing using Up-Goer Five-speak, which limits your available vocabulary to only the thousand (“ten-hundred” in Up-Goer Five parlance) most commonly used words. The text-editor that makes it all possible was inspired by a wonderful comic from Randall Munroe, which illustrated the Saturn Five Rocket in very basic and frequently beautiful terms (hence “Up-Goer Five,” since Saturn is not even close to one of the most commonly used words).

But then we started playing with it, and had some serious fun.

You can see Brandon’s take on the ARL Policy Tumblr:

If you own books, they are yours. Or so you think! But, and this is sad, police don’t know what “owning” means. It might mean books not from the US can’t really be owned. Maybe you can’t give books to friends, or give books to a store for money, if the books are not from the US. Instead, you would have to ask the people who make the books, and they could ask for money, or say “no.” You would be stuck…

LJ News Editor Meredith Schwartz took a crack at it, and definitely wins the Hemingway award for shortest and most direct average sentence:

You buy a book. You want to give the book to a store and have the store give you money. Then the store can give the book to someone else and get money from them.

You are allowed to do that now. But soon maybe you will not be allowed to do that anymore. You would have to ask the people who made the book if it was okay with them.

If they said yes you might have to give them some of the money. And if they said no you would have to keep the book or throw it out.

You also could not give it for a little while and get it back and give it to someone else. And it is not just books. It would also be movies or even just stuff that anyone wrote anything on the box of.

I decided to go with a little bit of a more narrative treatment, and tried to get at some of the details from the Kirtsaeng Case:

The Story of “First Time Buying” Idea for Book-Sharing Places

The Book-Sharing Places (which for sure have more than just books and have lots of other great things, though today we will call them Book-Places for short) for a long time have spent money on books and then shared those books all around to let other people work to make the world better at thinking and deciding on things. This sharing was an okay thing to do, because there are Important Words That Everyone Follows or Else that say it is okay.

But some people a little while ago said the Important Words (that everyone follows or else) that make the Book-Places able to share the books are not right. They said that if the books are made Over There instead of here, giving money for books does not mean what we think it means — it could mean that Book-Sharing Places can’t share the books the same way. Instead, they might have to pay more, or buy only books that are made right here, which is not very many books at all.

Everyone who thinks this is important went and told The People Who Pick the Important Words how they were feeling. The People Who Pick the Important Words listened a lot to everyone, and have been reading and thinking deep thoughts.

Soon, The People Who Pick the Important Words will decide who was right. The good news would be if the Book-Sharing Places could keep doing the sharing that they are good at doing.

The not-so-good news would be if book-sharing ideas get very hard to understand, and there are no clear new Important Words.

In that case, All the People Picked from All the States would have to decide, and they are not often good at deciding things that are important.

Keep paying attention! Important things are happening!

How would you approach explaining First Sale in Up-Goer Five speak? Give it a shot in the text editor, and paste your version below. (But really, if you need a proper, simple Fair Use explanation, see the original PDF from the Library Copyright Alliance.)

Kno Inc., an education software provider that currently distributes more than 200,000 interactive etextbook titles from 65 leading publishers, today announced the launch of Kno Me—a new analytics tool and “visual dashboard” aimed at helping students measure their study behavior. The dashboard, which will be an included feature in all etextbooks distributed by the company, will allow students to keep their analytics information private, or to opt-in to share their study results with peers and classmates.

Etextbooks are just beginning to showcase their potential for multimedia, interactive content, student collaboration, and analytics. But analytics also pose the thorniest questions about privacy and how these analytics scores may impact a student’s grade. In an earlier LJ Insider post regarding an analytics product from CourseSmart that will allow professors to track how much time their students spend reading assigned etextbooks, LJ News Editor Meredith Schwartz asked “What if [students] read unusually fast—or slowly? What if they prefer handwritten notes? … What if they prefer other sources altogether?” Surely it would be unfair for a professor—consciously or unconsciously—to penalize an otherwise good student just because his or her calculated “engagement score” does not conform.

What’s interesting about Kno’s new analytic tools is that the company claims it will be leaving teachers and professors out of the loop. The student’s metrics and their dashboard information will be private unless they want to share information with friends.

“It’s a personal study dashboard,” Osman Rashid, CEO of Kno, told me. “It helps students measure their engagement with each Kno textbook that they use. So, students can check in to see their stats for time spent reading, notes added, flashcards mastered. This helps them monitor their progress and give them insight into how well they are studying…The more we can help students understand their own study behavior, the more they will be engaged, and the better the outcomes will be. This has everything to do with the student improving themselves, versus being a surveillance platform for everyone else to see what the student is doing.”

If a student is struggling in a particular class, he or she can use the Kno Me dashboard and request to “follow” a peer who is performing well, making an effort to mimic his or her studying habits for that class.

“There’s a social element to it,” Rashid said. “You can begin to see how other people in the class are studying for the final exam, or what else is going on. It gives them a ‘learning GPS’ for how they can better study themselves. The only time information is shared is if a student gives permission. It doesn’t automatically start sharing just because someone requested it.”

This seems like a much better approach for etextbook analytics in higher education. Although professors could, presumably, send students follow requests (which would extend the pressure of that particular power dynamic), plenty of professors would rightly view the tracking of individual students as unnecessary. These tools instead encourage students to collaborate and learn from one another. Privacy concerns are sidestepped by allowing students to choose whom they will share information with, and this social media-style approach could eventually help expose students to a variety of effective study habits, rather than urging them to conform to a specific, standard style.

Everyone does a year-end list, and I don’t like being left out. But I also don’t like lists that are short on context, or worse, short on content. So I channeled my inner Nate Silver and sliced the LJ universe of data in a couple of ways that I hope are more illuminating than just a raw, short list of articles that got a lot of attention in 2012. (For those just interested in the free ebook, see embedded at the bottom an exportable version of the Top 20 Opinion Posts of 2012.)

A couple of notes to get started:

Unless otherwise indicated, these links include only editorial posts penned in 2012 (meaning that things like LJ‘s Best Books of 2011, e.g., published very late in 2011 and maintaining a strong presence throughout the next year, did not qualify, nor did many other lasting pieces from 2011 and previous years).

Likewise, only single articles are being counted. What is not counted: section home pages, landing and event pages (Like materials from our virtual ebook summit), categories, tags, and other non-article things. Just the posts, ma’am.

Now, as I was pulling all these together, I realized that a more useful (and potentially accurate) metric would be to weight the pageviews on a story according to the number of days since the article was published. As noted above, listings like these tend to favor strong posts published in the first half of the year over posts potentially as important, just published toward the end of the year. For now, however, that kind of calculation is beyond the scope of this exercise.

I’ve excluded data on other self-contained subsections as well, including posts reflecting LJ events (Director’s Summit, Design Institute, The Digital Shift Virtual Summit, etc.) as well as the products of LJ‘s in-house research, e.g. Patron Profiles and Academic Patron Profiles.

But enough with what was not covered. Here’s what was big in 2012:

Top LJ Posts of 2012

1. Movers & Shakers 2012
2. A Guide to Publishers in the Library Ebook Market
3. Librarians Feel Sticker Shock as Price for Random House Ebooks Rises as Much as 300 Percent
4. Penguin Group Terminating Its Contract with OverDrive
5. NY Library To Adopt Ad-Supported Toilet Paper
6. Tumblrarian 101: Tumblr for Libraries and Librarians
7. Automation Marketplace 2012: Agents of Change
8. America’s Star Libraries, 2012: Top-Rated Libraries
9. Ebook Strategy and Public Libraries: Slow Just Won’t Work Anymore
10. Princeton Review Student Survey Ranks College Libraries

Beyond the Top 10, I think it’s also revealing to see where the next few stories go for each of the different sections of the LJ universe (for more on what I mean by “LJ universe,” see the post I wrote just over a year ago about giving some of the subsections more prominence).

Top LJ News & Features Posts

First up is the News & Features section, which unsurprisingly tends toward current events and our annual awards and highlights.

1. Jack Blount Appointment as OCLC CEO/President Reversed, Jay Jordan Will Stay On
2. 2012 Gale/LJ Library of the Year: San Diego County Library, Empowering the Public
3. After Furor, Harvard Library Spokesperson Says ‘Inaccurate’ That All Staff Will Have to Reapply
4. Best Small Library in America 2012: The Independence Public Library, KS
5. Random House Says Libraries Own Their Ebooks | LJ Insider

Top Digital Shift Posts

Next up are posts from The Digital Shift which we share with sister publication School Library Journal, publishing technology news and digital trend articles.

1. What Patrons Teach Us—and Publishers Should Learn
2. All Hat, No Cattle: A Call for Libraries to Transform Before It’s Too Late
3. A Primer on Ebooks for Libraries Just Starting With Downloadable Media
4. Top Libraries in U.S. and Canada Issue Statement Demanding Better Ebook Services
5. The State of Mobile in Libraries 2012

Top LJ Reviews Posts

On the LJ Reviews side, I’m listing 10, since these aren’t covered above, and because they highlight some of the fascinating subject areas that were big in 2012 (likely to be just as big in 2013 as well):

1. RA Crossroads: What To Read After Julia Quinn’s A Night Like This
2. RA Crossroads: What To Watch (and Read) After Downton Abbey
3. Summertime, and the Reading Is Easy: Genre Fiction Summer Reads
4. Best Databases 2012
5. First Novels for Spring/Summer 2012: 80 Best Bets
6. Q&A: Rachel Maddow, Author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
7. Genre Spotlight | Christian Fiction: A Born-Again Genre
8. Best Reference 2011: Eclectic Works To Match a Tumultuous Year
9. Stories Beyond Black and White: 25 Graphic Novels for African American History Month
10. Seven Not-To-Miss SF/Fantasy Titles for Fall 2012: Abercrombie, Banks, Gladstone, and More

Top 10 LJ infoDOCKET Posts

The latest addition to the LJ family is infoDOCKET, edited by librarian and newshound Gary Price. I like to think of this as something along the lines of a libraryland “media monitoring service,” or my preferred term, “library media intelligence.” Essentially, Gary pores over thousands of headlines so you don’t have to, and features the essential stories on infodocket.com and @infodocket on Twitter, as well as in our various (free!) enewsletters and syndicated on other LJ sites.

The infoDOCKET site started under the LJ banner in April, but it existed independently before then at the same URL, and the 10 items below cover the popular stories over the entirety of 2012.

1. Updated Database: 2011 Salary Data for About 1.3 Million U.S. Federal Workers Now Online
2. Statistics: Consumer Media Usage Across TV, Online, Mobile and Social
3. OverDrive To Library Customers: Hachette is Raising E-Book Prices an Average of 220% on Over 3500 Titles
4. New Statistics: Online Gaming: Number of US Mobile Gamers Jumps 35% to 100 Million
5. Very Sad News: The Tragic Death of Microsoft’s Lee Dirks
6. Judge’s Ruling a Win for Fair Use in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust Case
7. Lists and Rankings: Silicon Valley 150 (Largest Public Companies Based in SV)
8. Jack Blount Will NOT be Joining OCLC as New Pres/CEO, Jay Jordan Will Postpone Retirement
9. Statistics: U.S. Tablet Usage Reaches ‘Critical Mass’
10. Cook County, IL: New online database lets anyone see who has outstanding warrants

Top Academic Posts

Based largely on the readership of our Academic Newswire enewsletter, here are the top posts specifically tagged for our academic library readership (though obviously nearly everything above has a wider professional impact as well that’s relevant to research, college, and community college libraries, among others).

1. New Landmark Libraries 2012: Academic Library Winners and Honorable Mentions
2. Users Don’t Know What Libraries Are Talking About, Studies Find
3. Chemical Society Pricing Has Librarians Up In Arms
4. Academic Libraries Should Give Up Book-by-Book Collecting, Article Argues
5. Academic eBooks and the User Experience

Top Evergreen Posts

None of the five articles below were written in 2012. In fact, there’s nothing more recent than 2010 on this list. But in compiling the rest of these lists I ran across a number of articles that remain steadily popular, in some cases growing in popularity years after their original publication date. This is largely the Google Traffic Machine at work, especially in the case of the articles of interest to readers seeking out information about how to enter the profession. Though these articles go way back, I’m including them as a look at what abides long-term relative to seemingly short half-life of prevailing concerns.

1. How To Become a Librarian
2. Steampunk: 20 Core Titles
3. Library 2.0
4. Finding a Library Job
5. The Dewey Dilemma

Top Opinion Posts

Saving the longest list for last: There were dozens of thoughtful 2012 opinion pieces illustrating the conversations that buzzed, so I’m going all-out and including the top 20 posts here (inclusive of posts appearing in the lists above). As an added bonus, I’ve added these all to Readlist, which experimentally allows you to export an ebook (.epub, Kindle, etc.) and read them in one sitting. Click “export” in the left-hand sidebar of the Readlist widget below, and choose the format that suits your needs.

Happy reading, and happy 2013!

1. Ebook Strategy and Public Libraries: Slow Just Won’t Work Anymore
2. Random House Says Libraries Own Their Ebooks | LJ Insider
3. What Popular Culture is Telling Us About Libraries and Why We Should Listen | Backtalk
4. All Hat, No Cattle: A Call for Libraries to Transform Before It’s Too Late
5. Library as Platform
6. Assisting Research Versus Research Assistance | Peer to Peer Review
7. Attention Is the New Currency | From the Bell Tower
8. Ebooks Choices and the Soul of Librarianship
9. Here Come the Rules Police | From the Bell Tower
10. Helicopter Librarian: Expect the Unexpected | Backtalk
11. Libraries as Indoctrination Mills | Peer to Peer Review
12. Authentic Librarianship and the Question of Service | Peer to Peer Review
13. My Farewell Editorial
14. Turning “Us” vs. “Them” Into Just “Us” | Not Dead Yet
15. No More Gatekeepers | From the Bell Tower
16. Digital Content Curation Is Career for Librarians | Backtalk
17. Are You Being Watched? | From the Bell Tower
18. The Class of Twentysomething: Degreed and Jobless | Backtalk
19. Nontraditional Students Are the New Majority | From the Bell Tower
20. Why Are Some Publishers So Wrong About Fair Use? | Peer to Peer Review

Photo:10-10-10 by woodleywonderworks ; Attribution-NonCommercial License

Created by Seattle-based software developer Andrew Abrahamowicz, Library Extension is easy to set up and unobtrusive. Users simply navigate to the site using the Google Chrome Browser, click the “Install Library Extension” link, select their state, and add their local library or libraries using a dropdown menu.

“I’ve always loved to read, and to take advantage of the great services offered by libraries,” said Abrahamowicz, describing his inspiration for the program.

Catalogers visiting Amazon might have noticed that the print books section of Amazon’s website is organized by ISBN number. URLs typically begin “amazon.com/gp/product/ISBN.” Similar to bookmarklet programs such as LibraryLookup, this Chrome extension works best when it can capture that ISBN number and use it to check a title’s availability in the OPACs of any libraries that the user has selected. The extension then returns the results in a sidebar above Amazon’s “Add to Cart” button. From there, “Reserve your copy” or “Add yourself to the waitlist” buttons will send users directly to the appropriate section of their library’s website.

“The accuracy of the result may depend on the individual library and what catalog they’re using,” Abrahamowicz said. “Some libraries will have lookups by the ISBN, in which case, I can have it do a direct lookup based on ISBN. If a library doesn’t have that capability, or if it happens to not find the ISBN [on the Amazon site], it will try to do a title match as best as it can.”

If a title is unavailable, the program will also offer suggestions for other titles, or in the case of audiobooks, suggest that the user try searching for the title in a different format. Unfortunately, like most reader-recommendation searches that rely on keywords, this feature is not always effective. For example, a recent search for This Is How You Lose Her, the 2012 short story collection by Junot Diaz, helpfully revealed that the Queens Public Library had 5 of 65 copies available. However, the extension noted that the New York Public Library’s copies were all checked out, and suggested that I might also be interested in several books on dieting, or How to Lose the Civil War, a nonfiction title about military mistakes made during the war between the states.

Also, while several searches in the print books section of Amazon’s website reliably pulled results for library print books and ebooks, no results were returned during several recent searches for ebooks in Amazon’s Kindle store. There, ebook titles are organized by ASIN, or Amazon Standard Identification Numbers. Abrahamowicz said that recent changes in the layout of the Kindle store could be causing problems with title lookup in that area of Amazon’s site, and that he was planning to check the program and possibly implement an update. The Library Extension site includes a support link where he encourages users to send feedback, including comments, suggestions, bug reports, or requests to add support for additional libraries.

The New York Times ran two, Libraries See Opening as Bookstores Close and the accompanying Room for Debate: Do We Still Need Libraries?

(Before the title raises your blood pressure as it did mine, all the debaters agree that we do, though they call out different aspects of what libraries do and one, at least, feels that libraries shouldn’t be bearing the brunt of providing Internet access. Two of the commenters are from within the library world: Luis Herrera, city librarian of San Francisco and LJ’s 2012 Librarian of the Year, and Buffy J. Hamilton, newly appointed learning strategist for the Cleveland Public Library and LJ 2011 Mover & Shaker.)

John Palfrey, head of school at Philips Andover Academy, explains why this question is up for debate at all, and suggests how to make the case for libraries most effectively to those who are asking the question.

Meanwhile, NPR weighed in on the perennial ebooks for libraries quagmire with Libraries And E-Lending: The ‘Wild West’ Of Digital Licensing?, including an interview with former Library Journal and School Library Journal editorial director, Brian Kenney. And in case your holidays started as early as Hannukah this year, on December 11, Forbes visited the same subject with The Wrong War Over eBooks: Publishers Vs. Libraries, positing that pay-per-circ could be just the compromise model publishers and libraries have been searching for.

The Washington Post eschewed controversy and stuck to human interest with a piece on reading to therapy dogs.