Semiprivate Virtual Libraries: A Coming Thing?

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Author: Quint, Barbara bquint@mindspring.com

If you live long enough, you'll see a lot of things that you thought could never happen actually happen. If you live long enough, you might even learn to stop shooting your mouth off about what could never happen (unless, of course, you live so long that you forget what you've learned from living so long).

For example, I used to sneer at the idea that reading books online would ever take off. When all the ballyhoo about e-hooks broke out some years back, I pooh-poohed the publishers' chances of success. After all, who would want to read a whole book with a flashlight shining in his face? But in a world where people watch movies--or movie clips--and read e-mail, text messages, and even full-text search results on screens no larger than their palms, what the heck do I know? In fact, I myself downloaded about 100 books and short stories a few months ago, just in case the UPS guy who delivers my Amazon books broke a leg or something and left me with nothing new to read for a whole 24 hours. (Don't start calling the Copyright Clearance Center's death squads--I downloaded from Project Gutenberg; everything was public domain.)

Speaking of Amazon, I assume you heard that it will be offering pay-per-view options for reading books digitally starting this year. For initial news coverage, you might go to a recap of activities in delivering digital books we did in late November 2005 (Books Online: The Fee versus Free Battle Begins," http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb051121-2.shtml). In the course of working on that story, I discovered that Amazon bad a service I hadn't beard about. And for an Amazon-aholic such as myself, that's almost alarming. When the new book reading services launch, the content for books that customers license will go into their "Digital Lockers." Apparently, these lockers were set up to handle other services already available from Amazon, such as the limited-length publications Amazon has commissioned from popular writers, which it sells as "Amazon Shorts" for 49 cents a pop. The lockers also carry promotional streaming media for audio or video items that customers have preordered.

Individual items of content in a Digital Locker at Amazon can carry different accessibility restrictions. For example, a customer may be allowed to download a "Short," but be or she will probably have to read paid-access digital books online. In both cases, however, Amazon does promise that the content of a client's Digital Locker will remain in perpetuity.

Permanent archiving of digital content? Permanent availability of access tools, like media software and full-text searching? Hey! Look at me! I've got a personal digital library of my very own. To date, personal digital collections have required space on home or office computers. Accessing the content with any sophistication required buying and learning special software, kicking Google Desktop Search in the slats because it bas no way to restrict searching to individual folders, much less files; or trying to breathe life into the brain-dead Windows search feature. And, although most computers have enough storage to absorb almost any amount of text an individual would collect, large multimedia collections, which could include digitized images of book pages, would make managing storage problematic. Amazon could take all that trouble off one's shoulders with a nice, neat digital solution. What then?

But can I trust Amazon? How long will perpetuity last? Probably as long as Amazon. Think about it. If you buy material and store it in an Amazon Digital Locker, you have to keep coming back to read or retrieve that content. Sticky eyeballs, my friend! Stuck customers! While you slip into your online smoking jacket and settle down for a cozy read, Amazon gets a chance to monitor your user behavior, to analyze what else it might sell you, and maybe even to share or sell some user observations (no names, of course, under pure-as-the-driven-snow privacy restrictions) with publisher partners. In any case, it bas captured you as a loyal customer, especially if the licenses for content you have purchased do not allow downloading.

Is this kind of thing likely to take off with other vendors? The Google Book Search (previously Google Print) service currently delivers only out-of-copyright, public domain material in full text and requires that readers access that material while staying connected to Google. However, in the course of settling lawsuits with the authors and publishers, as some gurus expect, Google might offer to handle subscription or pay-per-view access to copyrighted material.

As to whether Google wants to handle its own digital lockers, maybe it already does. Remember how Google blew the lid off limits on the size of e-mail storage when it launched its free e-mail service, Gmail (which allowed each user up to 2 gigabytes of storage)? Converted or expanded, Gmail storage could form the basis for storing other digital content.

Storing one's life's work or life's reading in someone else's hands might make some people nervous. But that resistance may wear off in time. After all, it did for librarians. Who would have thought a decade ago that librarians would be willing to trade in journals and reference books, or even CD-ROMs, for a lengthy licensing document filed in some folder somewhere and an invisible browser cookie opening up access to digital collections that never leave the publisher's machines? If professional librarians can accept digital access as a library collection, why wouldn't patrons for their personal collections?

It's a brave new world.

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with Barbara Quint

Barbara Quint is editor of Searcher magazine. Her e-mail address is bquint@mindspring.com. Send your comments about this column to itletters@infotoday.com.